mark that he would have to go and put
out the milk-bottles: it was almost morning!

She had been waiting since ten o'clock, she said. A taxicab, with her
maid, was at the door. They were going back to New York in the
morning, and things were terribly wrong.

"Wrong? You need not mind Mr. McWhirter. He is as anxious as I am to
be helpful."

"There are detectives watching Marshall; we saw one to-day at the
hotel. If the jury disagrees--and the lawyers think they will--they
will arrest him."

I thought it probable. There was nothing I could say. McWhirter made
an effort to reassure her.

"It wouldn't be a hanging matter, anyhow," he said. "There's a lot
against him, but hardly a jury in the country would hang a man for
something he did, if he could prove he was delirious the next day." She
paled at this dubious comfort, but it struck her sense of humor, too,
for she threw me a fleeting smile.

"I was to ask you to do something," she said. "None of us can, for we
are being watched. I was probably followed here. The Ella is still in
the river, with only a watchman on board. We want you to go there
to-night, if you can."

"To the Ella?"

She was feeling in her pocketbook, and now she held out to me an
envelope addressed in a sprawling hand to Mr. Turner at his hotel.

"Am I to open it?"

"Please."

I unfolded a sheet of ruled note-paper of the most ordinary variety. It
had been opened and laid flat, and on it, in black ink, was a crude
drawing of the deck of the Ella, as one would look down on it from
aloft. Here and there were small crosses in red ink, and, overlying it
all from bow to stern, a red axe. Around the border, not written, but
printed in childish letters, were the words: "NOT YET. HA, HA." In a
corner was a drawing of a gallows, or what passes in the everyday mind
for a gallows, and in the opposite corner an open book.

"You see," she said, "it was mailed downtown late this afternoon. The
hotel got it at seven o'clock. Marshall wanted to get a detective, but
I thought of you. I knew--you knew the boat, and then--you had said--"

"Anything in all the world that I can do to help you, I will do," I
said, looking at her. And the thing that I could not keep out of my
eyes made her drop hers.

"Sweet little document!" said McWhirter, looking over my shoulder.
"Sent by some one with a nice disposition. What do the crosses mark?"

"The location of the bodies when found," I explaine