Rugged Water by Joseph C. Lincoln

The news of the Crooked Hill disaster reached the Boston papers the moment that telegraphic communication was reopened. It was but one fatal incident of the great storm, but, coming so closely on the heels of a somewhat similar happening at Orham a few years before, it attracted wide notice. The editors, sensing its dramatic qualities, sent their reporters down to investigate. The reporters interviewed the townspeople at Trumet, the fishermen at the little settlement near Crooked Hill, and any one else who seemed likely to furnish details and help to fill space. Bartlett, the sole survivor, was besieged. He was in a state of complete nervous collapse and the doctors permitted him to see no one, but the newspaper men saw the doctors, the longshoremen and the townspeople generally, and made the most of everything they were told.

The first batch of papers brought to Setuckit displayed photographs of the Crooked Hill Station, of the crew--a snapshot taken two years before--of the beach opposite the shoal, of the men who helped Bartlett ashore, of the house where he was being taken care of, of Bartlett himself--another ancient snapshot--and one enterprising sheet exhibited a smudgy and libelous likeness of Miss Norma Bartlett, his daughter. This last was a vague cross-hatching of inky lines, through which one caught glimpses of a young woman apparently not more than sixteen, and as a recognizable likeness was of about as much value as a portrait of a rooster taken through the wires of his coop at twilight on a foggy afternoon.