Flynn’s Weekly. Vol. 22, No. 3, March 5, 1927

A Figure of Mystery by Louise Rice

Norman Ambler Long had felt the premonition that his life and Rose’s, Since their early childhood, had been “Too happy to last”.

Poe undoubtedly founded one of his most consistent crime stories on a real crime, the murder of a beautiful girl, and it is as true now as at any time in the history of the world that this kind of a murder has provided us with our most baffling problems.

From the time when the lovely Gulielma Sands was found in the old well of the Lispenard Meadows, in the days when the meadows were still near the town of New York — even as near as what is now Ninth Street, to more recent cases, the youth and beauty of a woman who suffers a dreadful death have drawn attention to the story.

Such a crime is usually the most baffling of the various crime stories with which historians and officers of the law have to deal.

Rose Clark Ambler, whose death, manner of death, and story behind the death has remained to puzzle all who consider it, was an especially beautiful woman of twenty-six when she passed from the land of the living, to remain ever a figure of mystery.

At daybreak on Monday, September 8, 1883, Tod Osborne, a colored man, was driving Farmer Bird’s cows to pasture, along the Oronoque Road.

The mists of early fall lay over the fields and over the small town of Stratford, which was about half a mile away, in the rolling Connecticut hills.

Osborne was also the station hackman and handy man about the town and the farming community which lay outside of it, so that he knew everybody and a little about everybody.

He was a good-tempered, honest negro, whose kindly disposition had endeared him to all.

On the field at the right of Osborne the fog had lifted a little, the wind blowing from that direction. One of the cows took it into her head to turn toward the wind. Osborne pursued her.

She swerved sharply with a snort of fear, and the man saw that she had all but stepped on a woman who was lying in the grass. The woman had put her hat beneath her head, and her hands were folded easily. Beside her lay her handkerchief, gloves and parasol.

Osborne was utterly amazed to see that it was Mrs. Ambler, whom he knew by sight very well. She did not stir, and for a long moment he continued to contemplate her, as he himself stated, wondering whether this beautiful woman whom he, as well as many others, had admired for her handsome, imperious but gracious manner and good taste, could possibly be intoxicated.

His fascinated eyes were drawn to her bosom, which seemed to him very still, and at last, allowing the animals that he was escorting to amble away, he approached the woman and knelt beside her.

Up to that moment he had no thought but that some misfortune or disgrace was responsible for her strange bedchamber, but when he gently placed his hand on her cheek he sprang off from her clear into the road, stared a moment to verify what his eyes had already seen, and raced to Stratford, where he stammered out his news and then fainted, both from fright and from the terrific sprint with which he had covered the distance.

This dramatic incident began the story of the finding of what was cruel murder, but by whom and for what purpose has never been solved to this day.

It also brought forward a case which engaged the best detective and police and legal intelligence of the time without any result whatsoever, except the turning up of seeming clews which ended in nothing.

Rose had lived with her father, Captain Clark, at Paradise Grove, a small pleasure park on the outskirts of Stratford, and it was there that she was taken a little later on in the day by the authorities.

Her father, an old man of immense physique, with a wooden leg and the manners of a past generation, who had been a sea captain for most of his life, became for a few hours a maniac, when he saw the body of his only child; for she had been murdered.

There were the marks of deeply sunk fingers on her throat and three deep scratches on her cheek.

Careful investigation of the place where she was found showed that the murder could not have been done there. While the rocky nature of the Connecticut soil would not show footprints, especially as there had been little rain that fall and the ground was very dry, it would have been impossible for any kind of a struggle to have taken place.

Such a struggle as would inevitably occur should a strong young woman like the deceased fight, even momentarily with an assailant, surely would leave marks in the long grass.

There were no marks in the grass except the slight depression caused by the weight of the body. It was not even possible to see any evidence of such marks in the grass as would be made by a man carrying a heavy burden on his way to lay it down.

The village of Stratford, where, it was true, the young woman had a few detractors, nevertheless arose in a fury and made demands for the most rigorous investigation. The State attorney general was at the coroner’s inquest.

There it was determined that she had been choked to death, probably with one hand, the left. The scratches on the cheek were on that side, and the imprints showed that the hand had probably been put around her neck from behind. She had not been otherwise attacked.

Four different sets of private detectives were called on the case before the woman had been discovered two days.

She was buried on the fourth day, with practically all of the village attending her funeral in a state of almost hysteria. She had been dressed by the women, many of whom had been slightly contemptuous of her when he was alive, and her beauty had been set off by every art known to those who arrange the dead for burial.

The description of her dress, which appeared in the New York World and in twenty other metropolitan papers was as detailed as if she had been appearing in the production of a new opera. It was “cream flounced lace with satin shoes.” There were tiny roses in her hair and heliotrope in her hands, and her entire body rested on a blanket of white and pink roses.

Her white casket was loaded with silver ornaments, the gifts of the prominent families of the town. Flowers by the armsful were thrown on the coffin before the earth was added. The whole town shut up business for the day. Flags were flown at half mast.

The very next day officials and private detectives set to work. They unearthed an astonishing story and many mysterious figures, but four months after the report of the death the newspaper accounts gradually dwindled away, and a year afterward only an obscure item in a local paper mourned the fact that no light had been thrown on the murder. A number of young women, it stated, had that day heaped the dead girl’s grave with the roses that she loved.

Let us go carefully through the newspaper files of September, October, November, and December of 1883, and then pick up the few scattering notes of the next three months of 1884.

Rose Clark’s mother had died while Captain Clark was off to sea, and when he got back from that voyage he had purchased the pleasure park, which he kept until after his daughter’s death, so that he might remain on land and be with her.

When Rose was twelve years old, a merry and very pretty girl, he had had the park for half a year and she left the school in Stratford, where she had been for several years, and went to a newer one, outside the town and nearer to her father’s place of business, which was also her home.

In the school which she left a boy named Norman Ambler had been her favorite, and, although he was only a year or two older than she, the two children had already declared their intention to marry as soon as they were older.

Captain Clark and Mrs. Ambler, the boy’s widowed mother, saw no harm in this precocious love making. Both the youngsters were healthy and normal; Rose a good scholar, and the boy prominent in sports. In fact, the captain, feeling that the company at the park, where picnic parties from all that section came and where there was sometimes rather rough characters, was none too good a home for his pretty, rather-mature-for-her-age daughter, eventually decided that she should board with Mrs. Ambler.

There the two children grew up together, Rose never “going with” any other boy, and Norman never showing the slightest personal interest in any other girl.

They were such a serious pair of young folks, and the story of their attachment was already so established by the time that they were fifteen or so that they escaped the teasing which is so often the lot of young people in rural communities.

Norman Ambler was not a good scholar, and he left school before Rose did, going in for farming on rather a small scale and continuing to live in his mother’s house.

He was a failure as a farmer, and after several disastrous years he turned to the making of saddle trees, at which he had considerable skill, and while this never paid especially well, there was a little money in the family, and the house and its lands were “free and clear” of mortgages, so at last Rose and Norman were married.

The home was never a luxurious one, and the pretty young woman would have had not so much on which to dress if her doting father had not continually supplied her with little extras. Nevertheless, for several years, Norman stated, and was corroborated by all his neighbors, Rose was perfectly happy.

She had never cared for any other man, and he had never cared for any other woman, at least up to the time that he, with all the other characters, fades out of the public eye.

Norman had always had a cousin, Will Lewis, and the two boys had been more like brothers than more distant relatives. One of the first things that brought Rose and Will Lewis into confidential relations was when she confided to him that Norman had an obsession.

Of course, she did not call it that, for the word had not become popular then. She called it “a notion.” Norman had a notion that his life and hers — their life together, since their very early childhood, had been “too happy to last.”

He feared the future. He feared that he would lose Rose by death — that she might die in childbirth. Will undertook to chase this “notion” away from Norman. He and Rose had a number of consultations about it.

The first child came and Rose did not die, but Norman had begun to suspect that his premonition was to come true, for Will Lewis was at his cousin’s home every day; he was always appearing and escorting Rose when she went out; he brought little luxuries into the home which Norman could not afford.

The wretched young husband began to suspect that he often slipped money to Rose wherewith to buy things for herself. He went to the old captain about all this, but Captain Clark could only sorrowfully wag his head. He seemed to be one of those fathers who adore their girl children and can do nothing whatever with them.

With the coming of this cloud, which he had feared, although he did not know the form it would take, Norman Ambler took to new habits and worse ones. He got home late at night, the worse for the liquids he had had.

He foreclosed a mortgage that his mother had left him, and with two thousand dollars that he got for it was away from home for ten days, driving a pair of last horses, drinking in road houses, and, when very far gone in liquor, telling the story of his troubles to all who would listen.

When he got back Rose packed up everything, left him and the child, and went to live with Will Lewis’s mother. Lewis went to see his cousin and asked him to give Rose a divorce.

After this visit Norman sent his child to a relative and for several weeks was not seen about his house. Then he opened the shop again, hired a woman to keep his house and look after his child, and became the steady, thrifty person that he had been when he and Rose were first married.

Norman was not a rich man, or even a well to do one. Rose’s father, by this time, was not so very prosperous, for other forms of amusement were creeping in and the amusement park was not paying.

Will Lewis, it was believed by every one, gave the money with which Rose instituted her action for divorce, charging that her husband was a drunkard.

She then went to live with her father again, and became a saleswoman in a large department store in Bridgeport, where her beauty and her popularity and her good style in dressing won her a place as forewoman in the corset department.

Rose never spoke to her former husband, and never tried to see her child. Her companions in the store said that she often looked in the morning as if she had been crying all night.

They said that she did not seem happy at the prospect of waiting for the expiration of the term when the divorce would allow her to marry again, and that Will Lewis on several occasions went into the store and paid a little too much attention to one or two girls whom he knew and who were employed there.

The few in the village who, before her death, had been her detractors, said that she was out late at night, which was the reason that her eyes were red in the morning and that she was the flirt and not Will Lewis, who already regretted that he had allowed himself to be enticed into a promise of marriage.

These rumors, however, were never substantiated in any way whatever, and after her death every one denied that there had been any foundation for them.

No one came forward to say that Rose had ever been seen in any place of entertainment save her father’s, or that she had ever been seen out with other men than her husband, when she was living with him, and his cousin, Will Lewis, afterward.

However, this has an exception.

In the summer of 1883 a man named Curtis Featherstone had come into the village of Stratford and roomed with a man named Benjamin. He seemed to be very well to do, but was exceedingly eccentric in his behavior, and a feeling gradually grew up among those who knew him or knew of him that he was “not quite right in the head.”

From what he said it seemed that he was from Philadelphia and had had some disagreeable experience there, which was thought to have been that of having his wife divorce him.

This man had several times been seen walking with Rose, but as she knew Eva Benjamin, where he lived, and as he had a half bold and half absent-minded way of turning and walking with any one whom he knew at all, until dismissed, nothing much was thought of it. However, in time, it was to be remembered.

This brings us up to the Sunday evening of September 7, 1883. Norman Ambler is in his lonely home, sobered, prosperous, and gradually winning his way back into the good graces of his fellow townspeople; Curtis Featherstone is said to be at church, and Rose is doing what she often does of a Sunday afternoon. She is visiting at the home of her husband to be, having walked there from Paradise Grove.

Mrs. Lewis, the mother of Will, was in the dining room, where the murmur of their voices could reach her, although she could not hear what they said.

She stated that those voices were never raised, and that at ten o’clock her son and the girl went to the garden gate, where they said good night, Rose preparing to walk the distance back to the grove, as she usually did, alone.

This act of discourtesy on the part of the young man was explained by both himself and his mother, and then seemed very natural; the fact being that at two o’clock every morning but Sunday he was up, to load a wagon with vegetables grown on his mother’s farm, which he took into Bridgeport.

Thus it was, they both stated, that Rose went home alone, and that she visited him rather than he her — as he got so little sleep between his duties with the truck produce and his work, as soon as he got back home on the farm.

Anyway, Rose set off from the garden gate, and that is the last account that we get of her. There was not a witness to the fact that she started to return alone, not a person who saw her at the gate.

The night was clouded and the fog was heavy, so heavy that garments exposed to the weather became as wet as though with rain.

This was something over which there was afterward to be a good deal of wrangling.

A good many people had seen the girl walking toward, the Lewis home at about nine o’clock that night, but no creditable witness was ever found who saw her afterward.

That word “creditable” needs emphasizing, for a veritable host of witnesses came forward, off and on, who had seen all sorts of things that Sunday night.

However, little of that developed in the first few days of the inquiry, for attention, of course, was riveted on the two most likely suspects, the man she had discarded and the man who had caused that discarding.

Will Lewis appeared in Bridgeport at his usual time Monday, with his usual load of vegetables, and went from store to store selling them. All who saw him stated that they could remember nothing unusual in his manner.

He returned to his farm about midday, drove his horses in at the barn and went into the house.

His mother, having heard some rumors of the discovery, was at a neighbor’s house, where a number of people had congregated.

Will ate some lunch, stacked the dishes, to call his mother’s attention to the fact that he was home, and went out to the fields to work. It was five o’clock before, as he returned from a distant field, he met a neighbor sent to find him and heard the news.

The man who delivered this news was a singularly unimaginative person and never could give a coherent account of how Will Lewis took the crushing announcement that the woman he was planning to marry had been found strangely murdered in a distant field, except that “he catched his breath like,” which is not very illuminating.

By the time that Lewis got to his home and found neighbors there, he was the silent, grim man that he ever afterward remained. This change in the man who had always been a laughing, whistling, gay sort of a fellow persisted to the very last notice concerning the tragedy which appeared a full year afterward in the newspapers.

When questioned as to the events of the night before, both he and his mother stated that he had left for town, as usual, about half past two. She said that she did not see him go as she was in bed, but that she heard him whistling and heard the horses.

She had not see him come back into the house after leaving Rose at the gate, but she had heard him.

Will said that during the time of Rose’s visit they had discussed nothing more exciting than the kind of a dinner set they would buy when they went to housekeeping in the small cottage across the road which he was then completing in his odd moments, and that, because it was so foggy, he had offered to take the girl home, but that she had refused, knowing how little sleep he got.

In the cottage parlor where he was eventually questioned as to all this, the walls were hung with several pictures of Rose, prettily framed, and a framed bouquet of wild flowers, one of her clever handicrafts.

At the time he was not shown that he was under suspicion, but neither did he seem in the least nervous, although never relaxing the grimness of his face.

The next day, when he was again questioned, the officers and detectives found him under one of his apple trees, smoking a pipe, the traces of a recent fit of prolonged weeping not to be disguised.

He got up and stared for a full minute at the detective whose questioning showed him the suspicion under which he lay, and then said, scornfully:

“Do I look like a bloody desperado? Look through everything here. You’ll find nothing but what speaks of how she was loved here. I would give all I own, I would give my right arm and all my hopes of Heaven to take the murderer of my girl to the gallows.”

The officers and detectives were affected by the sobs which he could not repress. He turned his face against the tree, and they drew away to allow him to calm himself. Nevertheless, they made a search of the whole place, and in the barn, on his driving coat, they found small bloodstains.

He was disdainful of them and of the questioners. “What of it?” he said wearily. “Hardly a day passes but I cut my hand or scrape my finger.”

They found several fresh cuts on his hand. Neighbors said that from a boy he had been careless with his hands. Still — what looked like cuts might be a wound made by the finger nails of a woman desperate with fear.

They thought that the finger nails of his left hand were darkened a little. Had blood from a woman’s cheek been under them?

An old woman who lived near, not so very much respected and always “a little crazy,” swore that Will Lewis, coming by her house on Monday afternoon, walking, had stopped to say: “I suppose you heard that my girl was killed last night?”

Will swore that he said it on Tuesday afternoon!

Norman Ambler was at home and in bed from nine o’clock on Sunday night, his housekeeper said, but she did not see him. She knew that his door was closed. She sat until after nine where she could see the stairs.

He had not gone down them, after telling her good night. She retired then. He was awake and at work when she came down on Monday morning.

The one thing which Ambler never explained, the one thing which he absolutely refused to talk about, was the most confusing of all the “clews” with which the befuddled authorities struggled, and it was this:

On Sunday afternoon he and another man, a stranger, who was never identified, called at a local livery stable and engaged a “team,” as a two-horsed vehicle was called.

This team was never returned, was never heard of — never accounted for. Ambler paid the livery stable for it, and simply sat tight on the statement that the other man was some one whom he had known when on drinking bouts, while he and Rose were having “our trouble,” that the man had come to say that he was in trouble and wanted to get out of that part of the country, and had offered to leave money for the team did he not return.

Repeated questioning failed to shake Ambler’s avowed intention not to tell who the other man was, and the attendant who rented the team had not seen more of him than a side view, Ambler negotiating for the rental and picking up the other man outside the stable.

Curtis Featherstone, who had been out all day Monday listening to the gossip in the town about the murder, returned to the Benjamin house that night, talking to himself.

He was heard to be weeping in his room, and soon after began shouting: “Save me, save me; they are after me — here they come—” and was subdued only with the help of several neighbors, who were called in by the frightened Benjamins.

This brought Featherstone under suspicion, and while he lay all night in a sort of delirium, muttering that detectives were watching him and every once in awhile starting up in a fresh paroxysm of terror, his room was searched and some very peculiar discoveries were made.

There was a satchel which contained two handkerchiefs, one of which was heavily perfumed. There was no other perfume on any other article belonging to Featherstone.

The handkerchief was black with mud. The other handkerchief was clean, but had three minute specks of blood on it. There were three soiled shirts in another part of the room, quite damp, one of which had the starched attached cuffs extraordinarily rumpled, “as if,” said the newspapers, “those cuffs had scraped along the sides of something as he was lowering the dead girl over something or carrying her body a distance.”

Benjamin and his daughter were home all of Sunday evening, and declared that Featherstone had gone to church. They had not heard him come in, but at ten thirty Miss Benjamin “smelled his pipe.” Benjamin did not smoke.

Both he and his daughter thought that Featherstone was “a little crazy,” and that he had had these delusions of persecution often.

While debate was being held the next week Featherstone departed for Philadelphia, declaring that he would return to sue all concerned for slander, and that he was going home to place the matter in the hands of his family lawyer.

He was never heard from again, and a belated effort to find him in the town which he had given as his residence failed to bring him to light.

He simply vanished off the face of the earth.

Ambler, brought to make statements to the detectives, stated that while it was true that he had made threats against the lives of Rose and Will Lewis, if they married, these were only when he had been drinking and that when Rose actually left and he saw that it was really all over and that the sorrow which he had always felt “in his bones” would cloud his life, had come, then he settled down to make the best of it — that he loved Rose far too well to hurt “a hair of her head.”

Will Lewis as stoutly maintained that not only did he not kill his sweetheart, but that he had not a suspicion as to who did; that he did not believe that his cousin Norman would have hurt Rose, even if he had cherished resentment against himself.

Asked about a vague “girl” in Bridgeport who had fallen in love with him, unknowing that he was engaged to be married, he just impatiently shook his head and said that he had never paid any woman attention except Rose.

Indeed, this seemed true of both Will and Norman, the two men whom the dead girl had loved.

Outside of the detectives hired by Captain Clark, by Will Lewis, by Norman Ambler, by the store where Rose had worked, and outside of a dozen newspaper reporters who used every wile and ruse that they knew in order to get statements out of somebody, was a Detective Arnold. He certainly turned up a surprising number of clews, the only difficulty being that none of them fitted the others. For instance:

Two weeks after the murder, Arnold appeared in company with Charles Mallory, the village ne’er-do-well, who had a very small, tumble down cottage not far from the Lewis home.

He seemed to have been on a prolonged spree, but could not be brought to tell where he had been, having been totally lost to view from the Sunday on which the murder had occurred.

He made this statement: “On the night of the murder I was on the Old Farms Road about eleven thirty. I was getting some corn for myself from a field that was there. I heard a team being drove hard and I got down behind the stone wall.

“It was a black wagon and dark horses. I saw them plain and knew them, for they belonged to Will Lewis’s mother and I had seen them many’s the time. The man that drove was Will Lewis. I swear it. The team went by and disappeared.”

Arnold had met the man outside the village, and, attracted by the wildness of his hair and the dilapidation of his clothes, had soon got him to talking.

However, he would do nothing more than recite his piece, and the detectives soon began to believe that it was one which he had been taught. By whom? By some one who either knew that Will Lewis was guilty or who wished to make it appear that he was.

Norman Ambler repudiated with horror the suggestion that he might have instigated the accusation, but Mallory still insisted that he had actually seen Lewis drive by, when his mother swore that he was in bed at home, and when he swore the same thing.

Arnold never ceased to believe that Lewis was the murderer. His theory was that he had been trying to evade the marriage, his ardor cooling after he had won the girl away from his cousin, and that she had gone that night to his house to demand that he fulfill his promise.

They talked and he pretended that he wanted to be married right away. He pretended unusual ardor, took her to the gate, said that he hated to allow her to go home alone, let her start, then ran after her and said that he’d be out in a few minutes, but to let him go back and make his mother think him going to bed, as usual — she’d worry if she thought that he was up late.

Rose consented, Arnold contended. She waited in the dark of the road while Will Lewis went into the house and made his mother think that he had gone to his room; then he slipped downstairs the back way, went out to the stable, got his horses and hitched up, without a light, led the team silently to the lane and he and the girl got in and drove away.

Using his powers of magnetism, which had always fascinated her, he made her so interested that she did not notice that she was being driven out of the way to Davy Lane: besides the fog, now heavy, served to confuse her.

The fog got heavier and she put up her umbrella which kept her hat dry, but her skirts from the knees down were saturated, which accounted for them still being wet in the morning, when her upper garments were comparatively dry.

In Davy Lane, with no house for half a mile, holding the reins in the right hand. Lewis, who had had his arm around his sweetheart in the approved manner of swains, had suddenly slid his powerful hand up to the throat and applied pressure.

As the body sagged, as death took her, his hand had slid across her cheek and his nails had scratched her.

As soon as he is sure that she is dead he steps out of the carriage, takes her in his arms, steps gingerly into the field and lays her down. What impulse prompts him to lay her head gently on her hat, to fold her hands, to lay her possessions by her? Or — does he?

A detective employed by Captain Clark thought that he had evidence that a man on foot was seen following a carriage along Davy Lane on that fateful night — a man whose walk was not that of a countryman, but of a mincing, dawdling, stumbling gait which closely resembled the odd mannerisms of Featherstone, that mystery man.

Did Featherstone, lurking after Rose, for purposes of his own, come on her after the deed? Did that queer crack in his mind which made him the eccentric that he was, cause him to compose the possibly huddled figure of the girl his distorted brain had admired?

Did he then go back to town and slip upstairs? If so, it must have been a great deal later than ten thirty that his pipe was smelled downstairs. Or — was it?

Featherstone had a great deal of money, in comparison with the standards of Stratford. Did he buy silence?

And then, his nervous system wrecked by the vision of the dead girl he had come upon in the fog, did he fall into a delirium? Could it have been his money that paid old Mallory for the tale which accused where he could not, without throwing suspicion on himself?

Detectives on the case professed to “dig up” records of the night life of Rose Clark Ambler, which were not savory, but not one shred of evidence was ever brought forward to substantiate these claims.

Not one girl who knew her, and whose claims to beauty might have been thrown into the shade and whose jealousy might have been aroused, ever came forward to accuse the dead girl of evil.

Not even the little town of Stratford, considerably shocked by the parting of Rose from her husband and her very obvious intent to marry her husband’s cousin as soon as she was free, ever really cast a slur on her. Yet there were some very, very odd things happened about the time that she was murdered.

James Pierce, occupation unknown and generally bearing the marks of the “flash” gentry, was taken off a freight car two miles from Davy Lane about twelve o’clock on that Sunday night suffering from a broken arm, which seemed to have the marks of teeth on it.

He refused to say how he was hurt, was found because he groaned. He never did say anything and eventually was let go.

A porter in the Bridgeport store where Rose worked, said he had seen the man hanging around the employees’ entrance. Pierce, or whatever his name might have been, denied that he had ever even seen Rose, and declared that he had got his arm hurt when running away from a dog which had attacked him as he was stealing into the freight car, as it lay out on a siding near where he was found. This was before the days of finger-prints.

Isaac Booth, an itinerant peddler, said that on the night of the murder about ten o’clock, he was, leaning on a bridge rail, over a little stream near the place where the girl was found, and was passed in the darkness by a well dressed man in a hurry, his coat under his arm and his sleeves rolled up.

Conductor White, of the Boston Limited, stopped the train on signal at the Housatonic Drawbridge at Birmingham three miles from Stratford, at eleven o’clock, Sunday night, September 7, to let on a man whom he had never seen before, who showed a commutation ticket.

As he knew almost every commuter by name, he was surprised and suspected that the stranger was using a ticket other than his own, but something occurring to divert his attention, Conductor White did not notice where the man got off.

Mrs. Mary Dibble was sitting at the window of her cottage on the Oronoque Road at ten o’clock on that same Sunday evening, looking out anxiously for some of the members of her family who had not come home from church services.

She saw a team and wagon dash by at a very high rate of speed and thought that she knew the figure driving, but was not certain.

The vehicle turned into Davy Lane. She remarked it because she knew the people who lived along that route and none of them were apt to drive in that way.

Boston White, a negro employed at Paradise Grove, said that early Monday morning he saw two men changing their clothes in some bushes back of a boat landing on the place. They went up to Boston and said that they had been “butchering” for a local farmer and had got their clothes dirty.

They showed Boston the rolled up bundle and said they wanted a boat so they could go out in the stream and wash the clothes and take a bath themselves, where they would not be seen.

Boston suggested that they go “around the bend” which was quite secluded. They took a flat-bottomed boat and went. When they came back they did not have the bundle and one said to the other:

“Frank, how could you lose my good working clothes like that.” The other replied, and from the conversation it seemed that the man addressed as Frank had lost the bundle overboard!

They paid Boston a quarter for the use of the boat and immediately went off toward the road.

Well — there we are. That’s all there is!

After a time even Detective Arnold gave up. The reporters gave up. The police gave up.

Will Lewis, at the last reports, was the grim, unsmiling and taciturn man, living with his mother, the small house across the way where he was to have taken his bride, still unfinished.

Norman Ambler was going right on with his business, more prosperous and more orderly in conduct every day.

Mallory was back at his shack, never spoken to or looked at by the Lewis family. The Lewis family and the Ambler household speak, and that’s all.

Featherstone has utterly disappeared.

Captain Clark, having sold the park, sits all day in a little grocery store opposite the Benjamin’s and scrutinizes every woman who passes as if he hopes to see his pretty daughter in one of them.

The village of Stratford puts flowers on the grave of the beautiful Rose. Lovers walk out to see her grave.

Forty-four years ago Rose died. There’s no hope, now, of knowing what hand struck her down, but the strange problem of her death is something which no criminologist can avoid.