Читать книгу The Bartlett Mystery - Louis Tracy - Страница 8

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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 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.

The luncheon-hour came, and Winifred hurried out with the others. They patronized a restaurant in Fourteenth Street. At a news-stand she purchased an evening paper, a rare event, since she had to account for every cent of expenditure. Though allowed books, she was absolutely forbidden newspapers!

But this forlorn girl, who knew so little of the great city in whose life she was such an insignificant item, felt oddly concerned in “The Yacht Mystery.” It was the first noteworthy event of which she had even a remote first-hand knowledge. That empty launch, its very abandonment suggesting eeriness and fatality, was a tangible thing. Was she not one of the few who had literally seen it? So she invested her penny, and after reading of the discovery of the boat—it was found moored to a wharf at the foot of Fort Lee—breathlessly read: