But Mr. Holcombe was wrong, not about kicking Peter,—although I don't believe Mr. Ladley ever did that again,—but in thinking we had him.
I washed that next morning, Monday, but all the time I was rubbing and starching and hanging out, my mind was with Jennie Brice. The sight of Molly Maguire, next door, at the window, rubbing and brushing at the fur coat, only made things worse.
At noon when the Maguire youngsters came home from school, I bribed Tommy, the youngest, into the kitchen, with the promise of a doughnut.
"I see your mother has a new fur coat," I said, with the plate of doughnuts just beyond his reach.
"Yes'm."
"She didn't buy it?"
"She didn't buy it. Say, Mrs. Pitman, gimme that doughnut."
"Oh, so the coat washed in!"
"No'm. Pap found it, down by the Point, on a cake of ice. He thought it was a dog, and rowed out for it."
Well, I hadn't wanted the coat, as far as that goes; I'd managed well enough without furs for twenty years or more. But it was a satisfaction to know that it had not floated into Mrs. Maguire's kitchen and spread itself at her feet, as one may say. However, that was not the question, after all. The real issue was that if it was Jennie Brice's coat, and was found across the river on a cake of ice, then one of two things was certain: either Jennie Brice's body wrapped in the coat had been thrown into the water, out in the current, or she herself, hoping to incriminate her husband, had flung her coat into the river.