Clancy, in all his experience of crime and criminals, had never before encountered such an amazing combination of unforeseen conditions. The boat's motor was already chugging breathlessly, and the small craft was curving out into the gloom. He saw a man hauling in a rope from the stern, and well did he know why the cord seemed to be attached to a heavy weight. Not far away he made out the yacht's gig returning to the stage. "_Sans Souci_ ahoy!" he almost screamed. "Head off that launch! There's murder done!" It was a hopeless effort, of course, though the sailors obeyed instantly, and bent to their oars. Soon they, too, vanished in the murk, but, finding they were completely outpaced, came back seeking for instructions which could not be given. The detective thought he was bewitched when he ran into Senator Meiklejohn, pallid and trembling, standing on the terrace with Nolan. "You?" he shrieked in a shrill falsetto. "Then, in heaven's name, who is the man who has just been pulled into the river?" "Tower!" gasped the Senator. "Mr. Ronald Tower. They mistook him for me." "Faith, an' I did that same," muttered the patrolman, whose slow-moving wits could assimilate only one thing at a time. Clancy, afire with rage and a sense of inexplicable failure, realized that Meiklejohn's admission and its now compulsory explanation could wait a calmer moment. The club attendant, attracted by the hubbub, raced to the lawn, and the detective tackled him. "Isn't there a motor launch on the yacht?" he asked. "Yes, sir, but it'll be all sheeted up on deck." "Have you a megaphone?" "Yes." The man ran and grabbed the instrument from its hook, so Clancy bellowed the alarming news to Mr. Van Hofen and the others already on board the _Sans Souci_ that Ronald Tower had been dragged into the river and probably murdered. But what could they do? The speedy rescue of Tower, dead or alive, was simply impossible. The gig arrived. Clancy stormed by telephone at a police station-house and at the up-river station of the harbor police, but such vain efforts were the mere necessities of officialdom. None knew better than he that an extraordinary crime had been carried through under his very eyes, yet its daring perpetrators had escaped, and he could supply no description of their appearance to the men who would watch the neighboring ferries and wharves. Van Hofen and his friends, startled and grieved, came ashore in the gig, and Clancy was striving to give them some account of the tragedy without revealing its inner significance when his roving glance missed Meiklejohn from the distraught group of men. "Where is the Senator?" he cried, turning on the gaping Nolan. "Gee, he's knocked out," said the policeman. "He axed me to tell you he'd gone down-town. Ye see, some wan has to find Mrs. Tower."