five o'clock in the morning
`` For a day or so , yes . '' Mac 's reply to this was a violent resume of the ancestry and present lost condition of the Philadelphia police , ending with a request that I jump over , and let them go to the place he had just designated as their abiding-place in eternity . On an officer lounging to the rail and looking down , however , he subsided into a low muttering . The story of how McWhirter happened to be floating on the bosom of the Delaware River before five o'clock in the morning was a long one -- it was months before I got it in full . Briefly , going home from the theater in New York the night before , he had bought an `` extra '' which had contained a brief account of the Ella 's return . He seems to have gone into a frenzy of excitement at once . He borrowed a small car , -- one scornfully designated as a `` road louse , '' -- and assembled in it , in wild confusion , one suit of clothes for me , his own and much too small , one hypodermic case , an armful of newspapers with red scare-heads , a bottle of brandy , a bottle of digitalis , one police card , and one excited young lawyer , of the same vintage in law that Mac and I were in medicine .