“I can reach it in another way,” Scudder said desperately. “Let me ask Captain Hanson a few more questions.”
“Very well,” Judge Romley said. “Go ahead.”
“What happened on that ship, so far as you know, of your own knowledge, shortly after nine o’clock in the evening of the sixth?” Scudder asked.
“The operator telephoned the bridge that a man was overboard. I immediately took necessary steps to do everything in my power to find this man, and, if possible, rescue him. I swung the ship in a sharp turn back onto the course which we had been following. I threw over light flares and life buoys with light flares attached. I continued to search the water for more than an hour and a half, and then proceeded into San Francisco.”
“Did you take steps to ascertain the identity of any person who might have been missing from the ship?”
Captain Hanson scratched his head and said, “Well, we did and we didn’t.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Well, we started to call the roll,” Captain Hanson said. “We ordered all the passengers to their staterooms. Then this Miss Fell came to me and told me that it was...”
“Never mind what someone told you, Captain,” Judge Romley interrupted, “just state what you did.”
“Well,” Captain Hanson said, “before we’d checked all of the staterooms, we started checking on Mr. Newberry, or Moar, I suppose his real name is. We couldn’t find him, and we did find evidence that his wife...”