"I went in young--I have come out old. Look at my hands--they shake like
those of a man of ninety. Yet yesterday they could have pulled to the
ground an ox."
"You saw Mrs. Ransom's body down in that pool some fathoms below the
surface," observed the lawyer, after waiting in vain for some word from
the shrinking husband. "Won't you particularize, Mr. Hazen? Tell us just
how she was lying and where. Mr. Ransom cannot but wish to know,
difficult as he evidently finds it to ask you."
"The coroner has the story," Hazen began, with the slow, painful gasp of
the unwilling narrator. "But I will tell it again; it is your right, the
painful duty which we cannot escape. She was lying, not on the bottom,
but in a niche of rock into which she had been thrown and wedged by the
force of the current. One arm was free and was washing about; I tried to
clutch this arm as I went down, but it eluded me. When I arose, the rush
and swirl of the water was against me and I felt my senses going, but
enough instinct was left for me to snatch again at the arm as I passed,
and though it eluded me again, my fingers closed on something, which I
was just conscious enough to hold on to with a frenzied grip. We have
spoken of this thing--a little bag which must have been fastened to her
side, for the end of its connecting strap is torn away by the wrench I
gave it.
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