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.
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