"The common garden variety sort. I have hardly a dollar in the world. As to my identity,—if it interests you at all, I graduated in medicine last June. I spent the last of the money that was to educate me in purchasing a dress suit to graduate in, and a supper by way of celebration. The dress suit helped me to my diploma. The supper gave me typhoid."
"So that was it!"
"Not jail, you see."
"And what are you going to do now?"
I glanced around to where a police officer stood behind us watchfully.
"Now? Why, now I go to jail in earnest."
"You have been very good to us," she said wistfully. "We have all been strained and nervous. Maybe you have not thought I noticed or—or appreciated what you were doing; but I have, always. You have given all of yourself for us. You have not slept or eaten. And now you are going to be imprisoned. It isn't just!"
I tried to speak lightly, to reassure her.
"Don't be unhappy about that," I said. "A nice, safe jail, where one may sleep and eat, and eat and sleep—oh, I shall be very comfortable! And if you wish to make me exceedingly happy, you will see that they let me have a razor."
But, to my surprise, she buried her face in her arms. I could not believe at first that she was crying. The policeman had wandered across to the other rail, and stood looking out at the city lights, his back to us. I put my hand out to touch her soft hair, then drew it back. I could not take advantage of her sympathy, of the hysterical excitement of that last night on the Ella. I put my hands in my pockets, and held them there, clenched, lest, in spite of my will, I reach out to take her in my arms.
CHAPTER XIX
I TAKE THE STAND
And now I come, with some hesitation, to the trial. Hesitation, because I relied on McWhirter to keep a record. And McWhirter, from his notes, appears to have been carried away at times by excitement, and either jotted down rows of unintelligible words, or waited until evening and made up his notes, like a woman's expense account, from a memory never noticeable for accuracy.
At dawn, the morning after we anchored, Charlie Jones roused me, grinning.
"Friend of yours over the rail, Leslie," he said. "Wants to take you ashore!"
I knew no one in Philadelphia except the chap who had taken me yachting once, and I felt pretty certain that he would not associate Leslie the football player with Leslie the sailor on the Ella. I went reluctantly to the rail, and looked down. Below me, just visible in the river mist of the early morning, was a small boat from which two men were looking up. One was McWhirter!
"Hello, old top," he cried. "Or is it you behind that beard?"
"It's I, all right, Mac," I said, somewhat huskily. What with seeing him again, his kindly face behind its glasses, the cheerful faith in me which was his contribution to our friendship,—even the way he shook his own hand in default of mine,—my throat tightened. 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. 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. Johns, and the stewardess were released, after examination. The rest of us were taken to jail. Singleton as a suspect, the others to make sure of their presence at the trial.
The murders took place on the morning of August 12. The Grand jury met late in September, and found an indictment against Singleton. The trial began on the 16th of November.
The confinement was terrible. Accustomed to regular exercise as I was, I suffered mentally and physically. I heard nothing from Elsa Lee, and I missed McWhirter, who had got his hospital appointment, and who wrote me cheering letters on pages torn from order-books or on prescription-blanks. He was in Boston.
He got leave of absence for the trial, and, as I explained, the following notes are his, not mine. The case was tried in the United States Court, before Circuit Judge Willard and District Judge McDowell. The United States was represented by a district attorney and two assistant attorneys. Singleton had retained a lawyer named Goldstein, a clever young Jew.
I was called first, as having found the bodies.
"Your name?"
"Ralph Leslie."
"Your age?"
"Twenty-four."
"When and where were you born?"
"November 18, 1887, in Columbus, Ohio."
