m. With one wild scream, she jumped, she scrambled, she fell to the
lower deck, colliding with a man leaning out looking at the sinking
figure. Down, with a vain and frantic clutching at the side that only
served to stay his fall so that he slipped silently into the water
under the vessel's counter, went the unfortunate man.

Plump, into the yawl with the rescue crew, went Mrs. Endicott. Far
astern through the dusk could be seen a black silk hat on the still
water. Astern could be heard the voice of Mr. Breckenridge Endicott
crying, "Quick, quick! I can swim a little, but I am almost gone!"

"Turn to the left, to the left," cried Mrs. Endicott.

"But the cries come from the right," said the coxswain.

"That's his hat to the left. I know his hat. I saw him fall. I know
his voice. It's his hat and his voice."

The crew could have sworn that the cries came from the right, but to
the hat they steered and the cries ceased before their arrival. They
lifted the hat. Nothing beneath but eighty fathoms of water.

It was some time thereafter that a fisherman came upon a corpse
floating inshore. Its face was bloated to such an extent as to prevent
recognition. Its clothes were those of a steamboat roustabout. In the
breastpocket was a large pocketbook bearing in gilt letters the
legend, "Mr. Breckenridge Endicott."

"The present I gave him on the morning of our departure!" exclaimed
Miss Almira, "now so strangely found on the dead body of the man who
robbed him and probably murdered him."

Although soaked, the bills were redeemable. The fisherman was a
fisherman who owned a town house on Prairie Avenue and a country house
at Oconomowoc and he would take no reward. The bills amounted to nine
thousand dollars. Taking her fortune, Almira retired to her former
home in Ogle county, Illinois, where once more meeting Mr. Jake Long,
lately made a widower, after a decent period of waiting, they became
man and wife. So it ended happily for all except the person who called
himself Mr. Breckenridge Endicott--though I suspect that was not his
name--and for Mr. Algernon Tibbs. Lest you waste pity on Mr. Algernon
Tibbs, let me say that in his youth, he was accustomed to kill little
girl's cats, and that his fortune was entirely one he beat out of his
brother-in-law, James Wilkinson.

_What Befell Mr. Middleton Because of the Second Gift of the Emir._

"The individual whose sad taking-off I have just narrated," said the
emir of