“Between three and four last Sunday night—­or Monday morning.  He said he couldn’t sleep and went out in a boat, meaning to keep in close to shore.  But he got drawn out in the current.”

“Where did you see him first?”

“By the Ninth Street bridge.”

“Did you hail him?”

“He saw my light and hailed me.  I was making fast to a coal barge after one of my ropes had busted.”

“You threw the line to him there?”

“No, sir.  He tried to work in to shore.  I ran along River Avenue to below the Sixth Street bridge.  He got pretty close in there and I threw him a rope.  He was about done up.”

“Would you know him again?”

“Yes, sir.  He gave me five dollars, and said to say nothing about it.  He didn’t want anybody to know he had been such a fool.”

They took him quietly up stairs then and let him look through the periscope. He identified Mr. Ladley absolutely.

When Tim and Mr. Graves had gone, Mr. Holcombe and I were left alone in the kitchen.  Mr. Holcombe leaned over and patted Peter as he lay in his basket.

“We’ve got him, old boy,” he said.  “The chain is just about complete.  He’ll never kick you again.”

But Mr. Holcombe was wrong, not about kicking Peter,—­although I don’t believe Mr. Ladley ever did that again,—­but in thinking we had him.

I washed that next morning, Monday, but all the time I was rubbing and starching and hanging out, my mind was with Jennie Brice.  The sight of Molly Maguire, next door, at the window, rubbing and brushing at the fur coat, only made things worse.

At noon when the Maguire youngsters came home from school, I bribed Tommy, the youngest, into the kitchen, with the promise of a doughnut.

“I see your mother has a new fur coat,” I said, with the plate of doughnuts just beyond his reach.

“Yes’m.”

“She didn’t buy it?”

“She didn’t buy it.  Say, Mrs. Pitman, gimme that doughnut.”

“Oh, so the coat washed in!”

“No’m.  Pap found it, down by the Point, on a cake of ice.  He thought it was a dog, and rowed out for it.”

Well, I hadn’t wanted the coat, as far as that goes; I’d managed well enough without furs for twenty years or more.  But it was a satisfaction to know that it had not floated into Mrs. Maguire’s kitchen and spread itself at her feet, as one may say.  However, that was not the question, after all.  The real issue was that if it was Jennie Brice’s coat, and was found across the river on a cake of ice, then one of two things was certain:  either Jennie Brice’s body wrapped in the coat had been thrown into the water, out in the current, or she herself, hoping to incriminate her husband, had flung her coat into the river.

I told Mr. Holcombe, and he interviewed Joe Maguire that afternoon.  The upshot of it was that Tommy had been correctly informed.  Joe had witnesses who had lined up to see him rescue a dog, and had beheld his return in triumph with a wet and soggy fur coat.  At three o’clock Mrs. Maguire, instructed by Mr. Graves, brought the coat to me for identification, turning it about for my inspection, but refusing to take her hands off it.