Mr. Holcombe was on the bed, fully dressed.  He had a wet towel tied around his head, and his face looked swollen and puffy.  He opened one eye and looked at me.

“What a night!” he groaned.

“What happened!  What did you find?”

He groaned again.  “Find!” he said.  “Nothing, except that there was something wrong with that whisky.  It poisoned me.  I haven’t been out of the house!”

So for that day, at least, Mr. Ladley became Mr. Holcombe again, and as such accepted ice in quantities, a mustard plaster over his stomach, and considerable nursing.  By evening he was better, but although he clearly intended to stay on, he said nothing about changing his identity again, and I was glad enough.  The very name of Ladley was horrible to me.

The river went down almost entirely that day, although there was still considerable water in the cellars.  It takes time to get rid of that.  The lower floors showed nothing suspicious.  The papers were ruined, of course, the doors warped and sprung, and the floors coated with mud and debris.  Terry came in the afternoon, and together we hung the dining-room rug out to dry in the sun.

As I was coming in, I looked over at the Maguire yard.  Molly Maguire was there, and all her children around her, gaping.  Molly was hanging out to dry a sodden fur coat, that had once been striped, brown and gray.

I went over after breakfast and claimed the coat as belonging to Mrs. Ladley.  But she refused to give it up.  There is a sort of unwritten law concerning the salvage of flood articles, and I had to leave the coat, as I had my kitchen chair.  But it was Mrs. Ladley’s, beyond a doubt.

I shuddered when I thought how it had probably got into the water.  And yet it was curious, too, for if she had had it on, how did it get loose to go floating around Molly Maguire’s yard?  And if she had not worn it, how did it get in the water?

CHAPTER VI

The newspapers were full of the Ladley case, with its curious solution and many surprises.  It was considered unique in many ways.  Mr. Pitman had always read all the murder trials, and used to talk about the corpus delicti and writs of habeas corpus—­corpus being the legal way, I believe, of spelling corpse.  But I came out of the Ladley trial—­for it came to trial ultimately—­with only one point of law that I was sure of:  that was, that it is mighty hard to prove a man a murderer unless you can show what he killed.

And that was the weakness in the Ladley case.  There was a body, but it could not be identified.

The police held Mr. Ladley for a day or two, and then, nothing appearing, they let him go.  Mr. Holcombe, who was still occupying the second floor front, almost wept with rage and despair when he read the news in the papers.  He was still working on the case, in his curious way, wandering along the wharves at night, and writing letters all over the country to learn about Philip Ladley’s previous life, and his wife’s.  But he did not seem to get anywhere.