The Bartlett Mystery

Author of “The Wings of the Morning,” “Number Seventeen,” etc., etc.
Copyright, 1919, by EDWARD J. CLODE
All rights reserved
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
THE WINGS OF THE MORNING THE CAPTAIN OF THE KANSAS THE WHEEL O’ FORTUNE A SON OF THE IMMORTALS CYNTHIA’S CHAUFFEUR THE MESSAGE THE STOWAWAY THE PILLAR OF LIGHT THE SILENT BARRIER THE “MIND THE PAINT” GIRL ONE WONDERFUL NIGHT THE TERMS OF SURRENDER FLOWER OF THE GORSE THE RED YEAR THE GREAT MOGUL MIRABEL’S ISLAND THE DAY OF WRATH HIS UNKNOWN WIFE THE POSTMASTER’S DAUGHTER THE REVELLERS DIANA OF THE MOORLAND NUMBER SEVENTEEN THE BARTLETT MYSTERY

That story of love and crime which figures in the records of the New York Detective Bureau as “The Yacht Mystery” has little to do with yachts and is no longer a mystery. It is concerned far more intimately with the troubles and trials of pretty Winifred Bartlett than with the vagaries of the restless sea; the alert, well-groomed figure of Winifred’s true lover, Rex Carshaw, fills its pages to the almost total exclusion of the portly millionaire who owned the Sans Souci . Yet, such is the singular dominance exercised by the trivial things of life over the truly important ones, some hundreds of thousands of people in the great city on the three rivers will recall many episodes of the nine days’ wonder known to them as “The Yacht Mystery” though they may never have heard of either Winifred or Rex.
It began simply, as all major events do begin, and, of course, at the outset, neither of these two young people seemed to have the remotest connection with it.
On the evening of October 5, 1913—that is the date when the first entry appears in the diary of Mr. James Steingall, chief of the Bureau—the stream of traffic in Fifth Avenue was interrupted to an unusual degree at a corner near Forty-second Street. The homeward-bound throng going up-town and the equally dense crowd coming down-town to restaurants and theater-land merely chafed at a delay which they did not understand, but the traffic policeman knew exactly what was going on, and kept his head and his temper.