Louis Tracy

The Bartlett Mystery Louis Tracy

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.