The Bartlett Mystery

Clancy, on receiving his cue, followed Tower. An attendant challenged him at the iron gate, but Nolan certified that this diminutive stranger was “all right.”

It was on the tip of the detective’s tongue to ask if Mr. Meiklejohn had gone into the clubhouse when he saw, as he imagined, the Senator’s tall form silhouetted against the vague carpet of the river; so he passed on, and this minor incident contributed its quota to a tragic occurrence. He heard some one behind him on the bridge, but paid no heed, his wits being bent on noting anything that took place in the semi-obscurity of the river’s edge.

Meanwhile, the patrolman, encountering a double of Senator Meiklejohn, was dumbfounded momentarily. He sought enlightenment from the attendant.

“An’, for the love of Mike, who was the first wan?” he demanded, when assured that the latest arrival was really the Senator.

“Mr. Ronald Tower,” said the man. “They’re like as two peas in a pod, ain’t they?”

Nolan muttered something. He, too, crossed the bridge, meaning to find Clancy and explain his error. Thus, the four men were not widely separated, but Tower led by half a minute – long enough, in fact, to be at the north end of the terrace before Meiklejohn passed the gate.

There, greatly to his surprise, he looked down into a small motor-boat, with two occupants, keeping close to the sloping wall. The craft and its crew could have no reasonable business there. They suggested something sinister and furtive. The engine was stopped, and one of the men, huddled up in the bows, was holding the boat against the pull of the tide by using a boathook as a punting pole.

Tower, though good-natured and unsuspicious, was naturally puzzled by this apparition. He bent forward to examine it more definitely, and rested his hands on a low railing. Then he was seen by those below.

“That you?” growled the second man, standing up suddenly.

“It is,” said Tower, speaking with strict accuracy, and marveling now who on earth could have arranged a meeting at such a place and in such bizarre conditions.

“Well, here I am,” came the gruff announcement. “The cops are after me. Some one must have tipped them off. If it was you I’ll get to know and even things up, P. D. Q. Chew on that during the night’s festivities, I advise you. Brought that wad?”

Tower was the last man breathing to handle this queer situation discreetly. He ought to have temporized, but he loathed anything in the nature of vulgar or criminal intrigue. Being quick-tempered withal, if deliberately insulted, he resented this fellow’s crude speech.

“No,” he cried hotly. “What you really want is a policeman, and there’s one close at hand – Hi! Officer!” he shouted: “Come here at once. There are two rascals in a boat – ”

Something swirled through the darkness, and his next word was choked in a cry of mortal fear, for a lasso had fallen on his shoulders and was drawn taut. Before he could as much as lift his hands he was dragged bodily over the railing and headlong into the river.

Clancy, forced by circumstances to remain at a distance, could only overhear Tower’s share in the brief conversation. The tones in the voice perplexed him, but the preconcerted element in the affair seemed to offer proof positive that Senator Meiklejohn had kept his appointment. He was just in time to see Tower’s legs disappearing, and a loud splash told what had happened. He was not armed. He never carried a revolver unless the quest of the hour threatened danger or called for a display of force. In a word, he was utterly powerless.

Senator Meiklejohn, alive to the vital fact that some one on the terrace had discovered the boat, hung back dismayed. He was joined by Nolan, who could not understand the sudden commotion.

“What’s up?” Nolan asked. “Didn’t some wan shout?”

Clancy, in all his experience of crime and criminals, had never before encountered such an amazing combination of unforeseen conditions. The boat’s motor was already chugging breathlessly, and the small craft was curving out into the gloom. He saw a man hauling in a rope from the stern, and well did he know why the cord seemed to be attached to a heavy weight. Not far away he made out the yacht’s gig returning to the stage.

“Sans Souci ahoy!” he almost screamed. “Head off that launch! There’s murder done!”

It was a hopeless effort, of course, though the sailors obeyed instantly, and bent to their oars. Soon they, too, vanished in the murk, but, finding they were completely outpaced, came back seeking for instructions which could not be given. The detective thought he was bewitched when he ran into Senator Meiklejohn, pallid and trembling, standing on the terrace with Nolan.

“You?” he shrieked in a shrill falsetto. “Then, in heaven’s name, who is the man who has just been pulled into the river?”

“Tower!” gasped the Senator. “Mr. Ronald Tower. They mistook him for me.”

“Faith, an’ I did that same,” muttered the patrolman, whose slow-moving wits could assimilate only one thing at a time.

Clancy, afire with rage and a sense of inexplicable failure, realized that Meiklejohn’s admission and its now compulsory explanation could wait a calmer moment. The club attendant, attracted by the hubbub, raced to the lawn, and the detective tackled him.

“Isn’t 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.”