re they?"

"For a day or so, yes."

Mac's reply to this was a violent resume of the ancestry and present
lost condition of the Philadelphia police, ending with a request that I
jump over, and let them go to the place he had just designated as their
abiding-place in eternity. On an officer lounging to the rail and
looking down, however, he subsided into a low muttering.

The story of how McWhirter happened to be floating on the bosom of the
Delaware River before five o'clock in the morning was a long one--it
was months before I got it in full. Briefly, going home from the
theater in New York the night before, he had bought an "extra" which
had contained a brief account of the Ella's return. He seems to have
gone into a frenzy of excitement at once. He borrowed a small
car,--one scornfully designated as a "road louse,"--and assembled in
it, in wild confusion, one suit of clothes for me, his own and much too
small, one hypodermic case, an armful of newspapers with red
scare-heads, a bottle of brandy, a bottle of digitalis, one police
card, and one excited young lawyer, of the same vintage in law that Mac
and I were in medicine. At the last moment, fearful that the police
might not know who I was, he had flung in a scrapbook in which he had
pasted--with a glue that was to make his fortune--records of my
exploits on the football field!

A dozen miles from Philadelphia the little machine had turned over on a
curve, knocking all the law and most of the enthusiasm out of Walters,
the legal gentleman, and smashing the brandy-bottle. McWhirter had
picked himself up, kicked viciously at the car, and, gathering up his
impedimenta, had made the rest of the journey by foot and street-car.

His wrath at finding me a prisoner was unbounded; his scorn at Walters,
the attorney, for not confounding the police with law enough to free
me, was furious and contemptuous. He picked up the oars in sullen
silence, and, leaning on them, called a loud and defiant farewell for
the benefit of the officer.

"All right," he said. "An hour or so won't make much difference. But
you'll be free today, all right, all right. And don't let them bluff
you, boy. If the police get funny, tackle them and throw 'em
overboard, one by one. You can do it."

He made an insulting gesture at the police, picked up his oars, and
rowed away into the mist.

But I was not free, that day, nor for many days. As I had expected,
Turner, his family, Mrs. John