“Do you think we shall find him, Will?” asked Amy, with a helpless little look into Will’s self-reliant young face.  “I do want to so much.”

Will looked down at her with an expression that said to any one who would read it:  “I would give you anything in the world you asked for, if I only could.”

But all he really said was:  “That remains to be seen.  He proved himself a rather slippery customer last night, and the chase we put up may only serve to put him on his guard.  Crazy people are tricky, you know.”

“Goodness,” said Grace, looking fearfully over her shoulder.  “There is nothing in the world I am so afraid of as a crazy person.”

“That’s why she has always been so afraid of me, I suppose,” grinned Mollie.

“Afraid of you,” said Grace, her eyebrows raised in mock surprise.  “Little shrimp—­ who are you?”

There followed a characteristic scene that somewhat lifted the oppression they had all been feeling, and it was not till they had nearly reached the river at the head of the falls that they became serious again.

“It was right about here,” said Betty soberly, “that we saw him the night that he started to jump into the river—­ or I suppose it was the same one,” she added.

“Let us hope so,” said Mollie fervently.  “I wouldn’t like to think that there were two lunatics wandering round these woods.  One is quite enough.”

As they came closer to the river they became more and more conscious that they were not alone, that some one, hidden in the bushes, was craftily watching them.

So strong did this feeling finally become that once the boys separated, thrashing the bushes in all directions.  They did not find anything, and finally continued along the path, a little ashamed of what they thought was an attack of nerves.

“Phew, this is getting a little hot for me,” said Frank, running his hand through his shock of fair hair.  “I don’t mind fighting anything in the open—­” He left the sentence unfinished, for at that moment they broke through the bushes at the river’s edge upon a sight that struck them speechless.

Not twenty yards down the bank stood a ragged scarecrow of a man, so unkempt, so wild, so abandoned in its crouching attitude as to appear hardly human.

Before they had time to utter a word or move a muscle, the man threw up his arms in a gesture indescribably terrible, and with a hoarse shout disappeared in the swirling waters.

It all happened so quickly that for the space of a dazed second they wondered if they had really seen it at all.  Then they recovered their powers of motion and rushed to the spot where the man had disappeared.

Though they leaned far out over the water they could see no sign of anything human, and with a creeping feeling of horror they began to speak of what had probably already happened.

“It’s certain death down there,” Roy muttered, as though to himself, gazing into the rushing river.  “The poor old fellow!  He has got his, I guess.”