The Bartlett Mystery. Tracy Louis

there a motor launch on the yacht?” he asked.

      “Yes, sir, but it’ll be all sheeted up on deck.”

      “Have you a megaphone?”

      “Yes.”

      The man ran and grabbed the instrument from its hook, so Clancy bellowed the alarming news to Mr. Van Hofen and the others already on board the Sans Souci that Ronald Tower had been dragged into the river and probably murdered. But what could they do? The speedy rescue of Tower, dead or alive, was simply impossible.

      The gig arrived. Clancy stormed by telephone at a police station-house and at the up-river station of the harbor police, but such vain efforts were the mere necessities of officialdom. None knew better than he that an extraordinary crime had been carried through under his very eyes, yet its daring perpetrators had escaped, and he could supply no description of their appearance to the men who would watch the neighboring ferries and wharves.

      Van Hofen and his friends, startled and grieved, came ashore in the gig, and Clancy was striving to give them some account of the tragedy without revealing its inner significance when his roving glance missed Meiklejohn from the distraught group of men.

      “Where is the Senator?” he cried, turning on the gaping Nolan.

      “Gee, he’s knocked out,” said the policeman. “He axed me to tell you he’d gone down-town. Ye see, some wan has to find Mrs. Tower.”

      Clancy’s black eyes glittered with fury, yet he spoke no word. A blank silence fell on the rest. They had not thought of the bereaved wife, but Meiklejohn had remembered. That was kind of him. The Senator always did the right thing. And how he must be suffering! The Towers were his closest friends!

      CHAPTER III.

      WINIFRED BARTLETT HEARS SOMETHING

      Early next morning a girl attired in a neat but inexpensive costume entered Central Park by the One Hundred and Second Street gate, and walked swiftly by a winding path to the exit on the west side at One Hundredth Street.

      She moved with the easy swing of one to whom walking was a pleasure. Without hurry or apparent effort her even, rapid strides brought her along at a pace of fully four miles an hour. And an hour was exactly the time Winifred Bartlett needed if she would carry out her daily program, which, when conditions permitted, involved a four-mile detour by way of Riverside Drive and Seventy-second Street to the Ninth Avenue “L.” This morning she had actually ten minutes in hand, and promised herself an added treat in making little pauses at her favorite view-points on the Hudson.

      To gain this hour’s freedom Winifred had to practise some harmless duplicity, as shall be seen. She was obliged to rise long before the rest of her fellow-workers in the bookbinding factory of Messrs. Brown, Son & Brown, an establishment located in the least inviting part of Greenwich Village.

      But she went early to bed, and the beams of the morning sun drew her forth as a linnet from its nest. Unless the weather was absolutely prohibitive she took the walk every day, for she revelled in the ever-changing tints of the trees, the music of the songbirds, and the gambols of the squirrels in the park, while the broad highway of the river, leading to and from she hardly knew what enchanted lands, brought vague dreams of some delightful future where daily toil would not claim her and she might be as those other girls of the outer world to whom existence seemed such a joyous thing.

      Winifred was not discontented with her lot – the ichor of youth and good health flowed too strongly in her veins. But at times she was bewildered by a sense of aloofness from the rest of humanity.

      Above all did she suffer from the girls she met in the warehouse. Some were coarse, nearly every one was frivolous. Their talk, their thinly-veiled allusions to a night life in which she bore no part, puzzled and disturbed her. True, the wild revels of which they boasted did not sound either marvelous or attractive when analyzed. A couple of hours at the movies, a frolic in a dance hall, a quarrel about some youthful gallant, violent fluctuations from arm-laced friendship to sparkling-eyed hatred and back again to tears and kisses – these joys and cankers formed the limited gamut of their emotions.

      For all that, Winifred could not help asking herself with ever increasing insistence why she alone, among a crude, noisy sisterhood of a hundred young women of her own age, should be with them yet not of them. She realized that her education fitted her for a higher place in the army of New York workers than a bookbinder’s bench. She could soon have acquired proficiency as a stenographer. Pleasant, well-paid situations abounded in the stores and wholesale houses. There was even some alluring profession called “the stage,” where a girl might actually earn a living by singing and dancing, and Winifred could certainly sing and was certain she could dance if taught.

      What queer trick of fate, then, had brought her to Brown, Son & Brown’s in the spring of that year, and kept her there? She could not tell. She could not even guess why she dwelt so far up-town, while every other girl in the establishment had a home either in or near Greenwich Village.

      Heigho! Life was a riddle. Surely some day she would solve it.

      Her mind ran on this problem more strongly than usual that morning. Still pondering it, she diverged for a moment at the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, and stood on the stone terrace which commands such a magnificent stretch of the silvery Hudson, with the green heights of the New Jersey shore directly opposite, and the Palisades rearing their lofty crests away to the north.

      Suddenly she became aware that a small group of men had gathered there, and were displaying a lively interest in two motor boats on the river. Something out of the common had stirred them; voices were loud and gestures animated.

      “Look!” said one, “they’ve gotten that boat!”

      “You can’t be sure,” doubted another, though his manner showed that he wanted only to be convinced.

      “D’ye think a police launch ’ud be foolin’ around with a tow at this time o’ day if it wasn’t something special?” persisted the first speaker. “Can’t yer see it’s empty? There’s a cop pointin’ now to the clubhouse.”

      “Good for you,” pronounced the doubtful one. The pointing cop had clinched the argument.

      “An’ they’re headin’ that way,” came the cry.

      Off raced the men. Winifred found that people on top of motor-omnibuses scurrying down-town were also watching the two craft. Opposite the end of Eighty-sixth Street such a crowd assembled as though by magic that she could not see over the railings. She could not imagine why people should be so worked up by the mere finding of an empty boat. She heard allusions to names, but they evoked no echo in her mind. At last, approaching a girl among the sightseers, she put a timid question:

      “Can you tell me what is the matter?” she said.

      “They’ve found the boat,” came the ready answer.

      “Yes, but what boat? Why any boat?”

      “Haven’t you read about the murder last night. Mr. Van Hofen, who owns that yacht there, the San Sowsy, had a party of friends on board, an’ one of ’em was dragged into the river an’ drowned. Nice goin’s on. San Sowsy– it’s a good name for the whole bunch, I guess.”

      Winifred did not understand why the girl laughed.

      “What a terrible thing!” she said. “Perhaps it was only an accident; and sad enough at that if some poor man lost his life.”

      “Oh, no. It’s a murder right enough. The papers are full of it. I was walkin’ here at nine o’clock with a fellow. It might ha’ been done under me very nose. What d’ye know about that?”

      “It’s very sad,” repeated Winifred. “Such dreadful things seem to be almost impossible under this blue sky and in bright sunshine. Even the river does not look cruel.”

      She went on, having no time for further dawdling. Her informant glanced after her curiously, for Winifred’s cheap clothing and worn shoes were oddly at variance with her voice and manner.

      At