The Bartlett Mystery

“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 Seventy-second Street Winifred bought a newspaper, which she read instead of the tiny volume of Browning’s poems carried in her hand-bag. She always contrived to have a book or periodical for the train journeys, since men had a way of catching her eye when she glanced around thoughtlessly, and such incidents were annoying. She soon learned the main details of “The Yacht Mystery.” The account of Ronald Tower’s dramatic end was substantially accurate. It contained, of course, no allusion to Senator Meiklejohn’s singular connection with the affair, but Clancy had taken care that a disturbing paragraph should appear with the rest of a lurid write-up.

“Sinister rumors are current in clubland,” read Winifred. “These warrant the belief that others beside the thugs in the boat are implicated in the tragedy. Indeed, it is whispered that a man high in the political world can, if he chooses, throw light on what is, at this writing, an inexplicable crime, a crime which would be incredible if it had not actually taken place.”

The reporter did not know, and Clancy did not tell him, just what this innuendo meant. The detective was anxious that Senator Meiklejohn should realize the folly of refusing all information to the authorities, and this thinly-veiled threat of publicity was one way of bringing him to his senses.

Winifred had never before come into touch, so to speak, with any deed of criminal violence. She was so absorbed in the story of the junketing at a fashionable club, with its astounding sequel in a locality familiar to her eyes, that she hardly noticed a delay on the line.

She did not even know that she would be ten minutes late until she saw a clock at Fourteenth Street. Then she raced to the door of a big, many-storied building. A timekeeper shook his head at her, but, punctual as a rule, on wet mornings she was invariably the first to arrive, so the watch-dog compromised on the give-and-take principle. When she emerged from the elevator at the ninth floor her cheeks were still suffused with color, her eyes were alight, her lips parted under the spell of excitement and haste. In a word, she looked positively bewitching.

Two people evidently took this view of her as she advanced into the workroom after hanging up her hat and coat.

“You’re late again, Bartlett,” snapped Miss Agatha Sugg, a forewoman, whose initials suggested an obvious nickname among the set of flippant girls she ruled with a severity that was also ungracious. “I’ll not speak to you any more on the matter. Next time you’ll be fired. See?”

Winifred’s high color fled before this dire threat. Even the few dollars a week she earned by binding books was essential to the up-keep of her home. At any rate this fact was dinned into her ears constantly, and formed a ready argument against any change of employment.

“I’m sorry, Miss Sugg,” she stammered. “I didn’t think I had lost any time. Indeed, I started out earlier than usual.”

“Rubbish!” snorted Miss Sugg. “What’re givin’ me? It’s a fine day.”

“Yes,” said Winifred timidly, “but unfortunately I stopped a while on Riverside Drive to watch the police bringing in the boat from which Mr. Tower was mur – pulled into the river last night.”

“Riverside Drive!” snapped the forewoman. “Your address is East One Hundred and Twelfth Street, ain’t it? What were you doing on Riverside Drive?”

“I walk that way every morning unless it is raining.”

Miss Sugg looked incredulous, but felt that she was traveling outside her own territory.

“Anyhow,” she said, “that’s your affair, not mine, an’ it’s no excuse for bein’ late.”

“Oh, come now,” intervened a man’s voice, “this young lady is not so far behind time as to cause such a row. She can pull out a bit and make up for it.”

Miss Sugg wheeled wrathfully to find Mr. Fowle, manager on that floor, gazing at Winifred with marked approval. Fowle, a shifty-eyed man of thirty, compactly built, and somewhat of a dandy, seldom gave heed to any of the girls employed by Brown, Son & Brown. His benevolent attitude toward Winifred was a new departure.

“Young lady!” gasped the forewoman. She was in such a temper that other words failed.

“Yes, she isn’t an old one,” smirked Fowle. “That’s all right, Miss Bartlett, get on with your work. Miss Sugg’s bark is worse than her bite.”

Though he had poured oil on the troubled waters his air was not altogether reassuring. Winifred went to her bench in a flurry of trepidation. She dreaded the vixenish Miss Sugg less than the too complaisant manager. Somehow, she fancied that he would soon speak to her again; when, a few minutes later, he drew near, and she felt rather than saw that he was staring at her boldly, she flushed to the nape of her graceful neck.

Yet he put a quite orthodox question.

“Did I get your story right when you came in?” he said. “I think you told Miss Sugg that the harbor police had picked up the motor-boat in that yacht case.”

“So I heard,” said Winifred. She was in charge of a wire-stitching machine, and her deft fingers were busy. Moreover, she was resolved not to give Fowle any pretext for prolonging the conversation.

“Who told you?”

The manager’s tone grew a trifle less cordial. He was not accustomed to being held at arm’s length by any young woman in the establishment whom he condescended to notice.

“I really don’t know,” and Winifred began placing her array of work in sorted piles. “Indeed, I spoke carelessly. No one told me. I saw a commotion on Riverside Drive, and heard a man arguing with others that a boat then being towed by a police launch must be the missing one.”

Fowle’s whiff of annoyance had passed. He had jumped to the conclusion that such an extremely pretty girl would surely own a sweetheart who escorted her to and from work each day. He did not suspect that every junior clerk downstairs had in turn offered his services in this regard, but with such lack of success that each would-be suitor deemed Winifred conceited.

“I wish I had been there,” he said. “Do you go home the same way?”

“No.”

Winifred was aware that the other girls were watching her furtively and exchanging meaning looks.

“You take the Third Avenue L, I suppose?” persisted Fowle. Then Winifred faced him squarely. For some reason her temper got the better of her.

“It is a house rule, Mr. Fowle,” she said, “that the girls are forbidden to talk during working hours.”

“Nonsense,” laughed Fowle. “I’m in charge here, an’ what I say goes.”

He left her, however, and busied himself elsewhere. Apparently, he was even forgiving enough to call Miss Sugg out of the room and detain her all the rest of the morning.

Winifred was promptly rallied by some of her companions.

“I must say this for you, Winnie Bartlett, you don’t think you’re the whole shootin’ match,” said a stout, red-faced creature, who would have been more at home on a farm than in a New York warehouse, “but it gets my goat when you hand the mustard to Fowle in that way. If he made goo-goo eyes at me, I’d play, too.”

“I wish little Carlotta was a blue-eyed, golden-haired queen,” sighed another, a squat Neapolitan with the complexion of a Moor. “She’s give Fowle a chance to dig into his pocketbook, believe me.”

The youthful philosopher won a chorus of approval. All the girls liked Winifred. They even tacitly admitted that she belonged to a different order, and seldom teased her. Fowle’s obvious admiration, however, imposed too severe a strain, and their tongues ran freely.