Here,
after all, was home and a friend.
He looked up at the rail, and motioned to a rope that hung there.
"Get your stuff and come with us for breakfast," he said. "You look
as if you hadn't eaten since you left."
"I'm afraid I can't, Mac."
"They're not going to hold you, are 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.
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