I Take The Stand

"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!