This is April.  The flood of 1907 was earlier, in March.  It had been a long hard winter, with ice gorges in all the upper valley.  Then, in early March, there came a thaw.  The gorges broke up and began to come down, filling the rivers with crushing grinding ice.

There are three rivers at Pittsburgh, the Allegheny and the Monongahela uniting there at the Point to form the Ohio.  And all three were covered with broken ice, logs, and all sorts of debris from the upper valleys.

A warning was sent out from the weather bureau, and I got my carpets ready to lift that morning.  That was on the fourth of March, a Sunday.  Mr. Ladley and his wife, Jennie Brice, had the parlor bedroom and the room behind it.  Mrs. Ladley, or Miss Brice, as she preferred to be known, had a small part at a local theater that kept a permanent company.  Her husband was in that business, too, but he had nothing to do.  It was the wife who paid the bills, and a lot of quarreling they did about it.

I knocked at the door at ten o’clock, and Mr. Ladley opened it.  He was a short man, rather stout and getting bald, and he always had a cigarette.  Even yet, the parlor carpet smells of them.

“What do you want?” he asked sharply, holding the door open about an inch.

“The water’s coming up very fast, Mr. Ladley,” I said.  “It’s up to the swinging-shelf in the cellar now.  I’d like to take up the carpet and move the piano.”

“Come back in an hour or so,” he snapped, and tried to close the door.  But I had got my toe in the crack.

“I’ll have to have the piano moved, Mr. Ladley,” I said.  “You’d better put off what you are doing.”

I thought he was probably writing.  He spent most of the day writing, using the wash-stand as a desk, and it kept me busy with oxalic acid taking ink-spots out of the splasher and the towels.  He was writing a play, and talked a lot about the Shuberts having promised to star him in it when it was finished.

“Hell!” he said, and turning, spoke to somebody in the room.

“We can go into the back room,” I heard him say, and he closed the door.  When he opened it again, the room was empty.  I called in Terry, the Irishman who does odd jobs for me now and then, and we both got to work at the tacks in the carpet, Terry working by the window, and I by the door into the back parlor, which the Ladleys used as a bedroom.

That was how I happened to hear what I afterward told the police.

Some one—­a man, but not Mr. Ladley—­was talking.  Mrs. Ladley broke in:  “I won’t do it!” she said flatly.  “Why should I help him?  He doesn’t help me.  He loafs here all day, smoking and sleeping, and sits up all night, drinking and keeping me awake.”

The voice went on again, as if in reply to this, and I heard a rattle of glasses, as if they were pouring drinks.  They always had whisky, even when they were behind with their board.