“Well, if you are, as I said, I half believe I shall forgive the man. We will advertise, if you like, telling him he has nothing to fear if he can give an explanation of his conduct consistent with what he calls his religious belief, absurd as it may be.”
That night fell darker and foggier than the last. The advertisement went into the daily papers, but Reuben Penner never saw it. Late the next day a bargeman passing Old Swan Pier struck some large object with his boat-hook and brought it to the surface. It was the body of a drowned man, and it was afterwards identified as that of Reuben Penner, late greengrocer, of Hammersmith. How he came into the water there was nothing to show. Others have been drowned by accident on those foggy nights; but then there have also been suicides in the river Thames on nights just as foggy. Nobody knew There was no money nor any valuables found on the body, and there was a story of a large, heavy-faced man who had given a poor woman--a perfect stranger--a watch and chain and a handful of money down near Tower Hill on that foggy evening. But this again was only a story, not definitely authenticated. What was certain was that, tied securely round the dead man’s neck with a cord, and gripped and crumpled tightly in his right hand, was a soddened piece of vellum paper, blank, but carrying an old red seal, of which the device was almost entirely rubbed and cracked away. Nobody at the inquest quite understood this.
[Transcriber’s Note: The final paragraph contains an apparent printing error after the words “Nobody knew”, possibly involving a missing line of text.]
The text in this eBook follows the 1896 book edition of the stories, which differs from the earlier versions published in the _Windsor_ magazine, principally in punctuation.
End of Project Gutenberg's Adventures of Martin Hewitt, by Arthur Morrison