Mrs. Charlotte Fairchild, “a well-known society photographer,” confirmed the story, and said she had discovered the identity of the man the year before and admitted some of her friends to the secret. He had lately been receiving some code cables from Europe which came collect, and his friends had obligingly supplied the money with which to pay for these mysterious messages. The dead man, said Mrs. Fairchild, had been living as O. N. Orlow, a doctor of philosophy, a lecturer in Sanscrit and general scholar.

“He was a marvelous astrologer and even lectured on Sanscrit,” she recounted. “In his delirium he talked Sanscrit, and it was very beautiful.”

According to the same friend of the “missing archduke,” he had furnished her with the true version of his irruption from the Austrian court in 1889. The emperor Franz Josef had applied a vile name to John Salvator’s mother, whereupon the archduke had drawn his sword, broken it, cast it at his ruler’s feet, ripped off his decorations and medals, flung them into the imperial face and finally blacked the emperor’s eye. Striding from the palace to the barracks, the archduke had found his own cavalry regiment turned out to cry “Hoch!” and offer him its loyalty. He could have dethroned the emperor then and there, he said, but he elected to quit the country and have done with the social life which disgusted him.

This is the kind of story to appeal to romantics the world over. Aside from the preposterousness of the yarn as a whole, one needs only to remember that Johann Salvator was an artillery officer and never held either an active or honorary cavalry command; that he was, at the time of his final exit from Austria, long dismissed from the army and without military rank, and that striking the emperor would have been an offense that must have landed him in prison forthwith. Also, it is obvious that the “missing archduke” was pulling the legs of his friends a bit in the matter of the collect cablegrams. Except in cases where special prearrangements have been made, as in the instances of great newspapers, large business houses, banks, and the departments of government, cablegrams are never sent unless prepaid. An imperial government would hardly thus impose on a wandering scion. The imposture is thus apparent.

On the day after the death of the supposed archduke, however, a note of real drama was injected into the case. Mrs. Grace E. Wakefield, who was said to have been the ward, since her fourteenth birthday, of the dead “archduke,” was found dead in her apartment on East Fifty-ninth Street that afternoon. She had drowned her two parrots and her dog. Then she had got into the bath tub, turned on the water, slashed the arteries of both wrists with a razor, and bled to death. Despondency over “John Orth’s” death was given as the explanation.

These tales have all had their charm, much as they have lacked probability. Each and all they rest upon the single fact that the man was never seen dead. There is, of course, no way of being sure that John Orth perished in the hurricane-swept Straits of Magellan, but it is beyond reasonable question that he did not survive. For he would certainly have answered the pitiful appeals of his old mother, to whom he was devoted, and to whom he had written every few days whenever he had been separated from her. He would have been found by the papal missionaries in some part of the world, and the three vessels sent upon his final course must surely have discovered some trace of the man. It should be remembered that, except for letters that were traced back to harmless cranks, nothing that even looked like a communication was ever received from Orth or Ludmilla Stübel, or from any member of the crew of the Santa Margarita.

In the light of cold criticism this great enigma is not profound. All evidence and all reason point to the probability that Johann Salvator and his ship went down to darkness in some wild torment of waters and winds, leaving neither wreck nor flotsam to mark their exit, but only a void in which the idle minds of romantics could spin their fabulations.

IV

THE STOLEN CONWAY BOY

At half past ten o’clock on the morning of August 16, 1897, a small, barefoot boy appeared in Colonia Street, in the somnolent city of Albany, the capital of New York State. He carried a crumpled letter in one grimy hand and stopped at one door after another, inquiring where Mrs. Conway lived. The Albany neighbors paid so little attention to him that several of them later estimated his age at from ten years to seventeen. Finally he rang the bell at No. 99 and handed his note to the woman he sought, the wife of Michael J. Conway, a railroad train dispatcher. With that he was gone.