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!