That was the physical part of the task, which he could set others to do; but there was another part, and that he took with him to his room in the hotel and spent much of the night with it. All the evening he turned and re-turned it, looking at every side and phase, and then went to bed and to sleep, with the knowledge that more than once that which the most earnest thought fails to unravel becomes by some strange alchemy clear under the magic of sleep. Would it be so with this? To that query, which came involuntarily, he answered with a doubt. “I’m fighting my conviction,” he said, almost plaintively, “instead of giving myself up to its free course. I can’t expect to be helped as long as I do that; but I can’t, I won’t believe. A man in my mood can’t solve anything!” So it came to pass that the night brought him no help, and he rose in the morning without that sense of rest which a single hour’s sleep brings under the stimulus of success. About noon, a country lad on horseback brought a message from a point some six miles below the village. Obeying the message, he started at once with the coroner and physician. On a tiny meadow that lay as a crescent of green along the border of cove where the current of the river sweeps in as an eddy, something was drawn up from the water and lay covered in an unrecognizable mass, which none the less had a strange repulsiveness about it. Back of the meadow great trees rose toward the early June sky; before it the river flashed in the June sunshine, and across its waters, the brown earth, dotted with the young corn, stretched away in the beauty of early summer. A few men and boys stood about the covered thing in strange silence, that seemed almost of fear; yet all pressed nearer when, by order of the coroner, the covering cloth was removed. Trafford and the doctor stooped and made a close examination of the hideous thing. No one spoke above his breath as they waited the report, yet by some strange magic the story of the finding went from man to man. At last the two men rose and went down to the river to wash their soiled hands. The coroner followed them: “What do you make of it?” he asked. Trafford waited until the doctor was forced to speak: “Plainly a Canuck, and I should say a log-driver. Certainly a working man. Been drowned a week and has come from above the Falls. You can see that by the way he’s battered up. That’s when he was whirled round under the Falls. Several bones broken, probably by the rocks, but that smashing of the collar bone came from a blow from above and before he was dead. It may have been that that knocked him into the water. Unless you find some particular mark on him, you won’t be able to identify him, he’s so smashed up. Better send up the river and see if any driver has been missing about a week. Beg pardon, Mr. Trafford, I fear I’m taking the words out of your mouth.”