unfortunately drowned. It was even told how, on one occasion, when
hotly followed, young Raegen had dived off Wakeman's Slip, at East
Thirty-third Street, and had then swum back under water to the
landing-steps, while the policeman and a crowd of stevedores stood
watching for him to reappear where he had sunk. It is further related
that he had then, in a spirit of recklessness, and in the possibility
of the policeman's failing to recognize him, pushed his way through
the crowd from the rear and plunged in to rescue the supposedly
drowned man. And that after two or three futile attempts to find his
own corpse, he had climbed up on the dock and told the officer that he
had touched the body sticking in the mud. And, as a result of this
fiction, the river-police dragged the river-bed around Wakeman's Slip
with grappling irons for four hours, while Rags sat on the wharf and
directed their movements.

But on this present occasion the police were standing between him and
the river, and so cut off his escape in that direction, and as they
had seen him strike McGonegal and had seen McGonegal fall, he had to
run for it and seek refuge on the roofs. What made it worse was that
he was not in his own hunting-grounds, but in McGonegal's, and while
any tenement on Cherry Street would have given him shelter, either for
love of him or fear of him, these of Thirty-third Street were against
him and "all that Cherry Street gang," while "Pike" McGonegal was
their darling and their hero. And, if Rags had known it, any tenement
on the block was better than Case's, into which he first turned, for
Case's was empty and untenanted, save in one or two rooms, and the
opportunities for dodging from one to another were in consequence very
few. But he could not know this, and so he plunged into the dark hall-
way and sprang up the first four flights of stairs, three steps at a
jump, with one arm stretched out in front of him, for it was very dark