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“Where the devil is that coal passer Mullanphy, I gave a job to?” said the engineer on the lower deck. “Is he aboard?”

“His dunnage is in his bunk, but nobody ain’t seen him,” replied one of the crew.

“Who the devil is that geezer in a Prince Albert and a plug hat that just went in back there, and what the devil is he up to?” said the engineer again, as a black-clothed figure passed toward the stern.

A few moments later, a sturdy man in a jumper and overalls, his face smeared with grime, peered cautiously around a bulkhead, and seeing nobody, stepped quickly to the side of the vessel, bearing a limp and spineless figure in a black frock and silk hat. With a dextrous movement, he cast the thing forth, and as it went flopping through the air and slapped the water, from somewhere arose the voice of Mr. Breckenridge Endicott crying, “Help! help! help!”

Mrs. Endicott, full of dole at the absence of her spouse and oppressed with a nameless disquiet, had paced the upper deck impatiently, and at this moment stood just above where her beloved went leaping to his doom. 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.