And they are wise. I do not think
that any man with less experience than myself could sound the depths of
that vortex and come up alive. The noise--the swirl--the sense of being
sucked down--down in ever-increasing fury--but my purpose kept the life
in me. I was determined not to yield, not to faint, till I had seen--and
proved--"
"What's that?"
The cry was from Mr. Ransom. A sudden gust of wind had torn its way
through the room, flinging the door wide, and strewing the floor with
flying papers from the large stand in the window.
"Nothing but wind," answered Harper, half rising to close the door, but
immediately sitting down again with a strange look at Ransom. "Let be,"
he whispered, as the other rose in his turn to restore order. "Keep Hazen
talking. It's important; imperative. I'll see to the door."
But it was the window he closed, not the door.
Ransom, with that obedience natural to a client in presence of his most
trusted adviser, did as he was bid, and turned his full attention back to
Hazen instantly. That gentleman, upon whom the rushing wind and the havoc
it created had made little if any impression, rushed again into words.
"I've led an adventurous life," he declared, "and, in the last few years
especially, passed through many perils and experienced much awful
suffering. I have felt the pang of hunger and the pang of biting despair;
but nothing I have ever endured can equal the horror which beclouded my
mind and rendered powerless my body as I felt myself sliding from the
sight of earth and heaven into the jaws of that rapacious eddy, whose
bottom no man had ever sounded.
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