Mysteries of the missing

By Edward H. Smith

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Title: Mysteries of the missing

Author: Edward H. Smith

Release date: May 26, 2024 [eBook #73706]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: The Dial Press, 1927

Credits: Demian Katz and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (Images courtesy of the Digital Library@Villanova University.)


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MYSTERIES OF THE
MISSING




[Illustration: ~~ SCENE OF THE ABDUCTION OF CHARLIE ROSS ~~

The Ross house, Washington Lane, Germantown, Pa.

_From a sketch by W. P. Snyder_]




MYSTERIES OF THE
MISSING

_By_
EDWARD H. SMITH

_Author of “Famous Poison Mysteries,” etc._

[Illustration]


LINCOLN MAC VEAGH
THE DIAL PRESS
NEW YORK · MCMXXVII




  Copyright, 1924, by

  STREET AND SMITH CORPORATION

  Copyright, 1927, by
  THE DIAL PRESS, INC.


  MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
  BY THE VAIL-BALLOU PRESS, INC., BINGHAMTON, N. Y.




  To

  JOSEPH A. FAUROT

  A GREAT FINDER OF WANTED MEN




CONTENTS


  CHAPTER                                               PAGE

  A NOTE ON DISAPPEARING                                  xi

  I. THE CHARLIE ROSS ENIGMA                               1

  II. “SEVERED FROM THE RACE”                             23

  III. THE VANISHED ARCHDUKE                              40

  IV. THE STOLEN CONWAY BOY                               65

  V. THE LOST HEIR OF TICHBORNE                           82

  VI. THE KIDNAPPERS OF CENTRAL PARK                     101

  VII. DOROTHY ARNOLD                                    120

  VIII. EDDIE CUDAHY AND PAT CROWE                       133

  IX. THE WHITLA KIDNAPPING                              153

  X. THE MYSTERY AT HIGHBRIDGE                           171

  XI. A NUN IN VIVISEPULTURE                             187

  XII. THE RETURN OF JIMMIE GLASS                        203

  XIII. THE FATES AND JOE VAROTTA                        219

  XIV. THE LOST MILLIONAIRE                              237

  XV. THE AMBROSE BIERCE IRONY                           257

  XVI. THE ADVENTURE OF THE CENTURY                      273

  XVII. SPECTRAL SHIPS                                   292

  BIBLIOGRAPHY                                           313




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


  SCENE OF THE ABDUCTION OF CHARLIE ROSS      _Frontispiece_

                                                TO FACE PAGE

  CHARLIE ROSS                                            10

  THEODOSIA BURR                                          32

  MILLIE STÜBEL                                           44

  ARCHDUKE JOHANN SALVATOR                                56

  ARTHUR ORTON                                            94

  MARION CLARKE                                          110

  DOROTHY ARNOLD                                         126

  PAT CROWE                                              146

  JIMMIE GLASS                                           204

  JOE VAROTTA                                            220

  AMBROSE J. SMALL                                       240

  AMBROSE BIERCE                                         260

  DOCTOR ANDRÉE                                          280

  _U. S. S. CYCLOPS_                                     304


    _And lo, between the sundawn and the sun,
    His day’s work and his night’s work are undone;
    And lo, between the nightfall and the light,
    He is not, and none knoweth of such an one._

                                      --_Laus Veneris._




A NOTE ON DISAPPEARING

 “... but whosoever of them ate the lotus’ honeyed fruit wished to
 bring tidings back no more and never to leave the place; there with
 the lotus eaters they desired to stay, to feed on lotus and forget the
 homeward way.”

                                           THE ODYSSEY, Book IX.


The Lotophagi are gone from the Libyan strand and the Sirens from their
Campanian isle, but still the sons of men go forth to strangeness and
forgetfulness. What fruit or song it is that calls them out and binds
them in absence, we must try to read from their history, their psyche
and the chemistry of their wandering souls. Some urgent whip of that
divine vice, our curiosity, drives us to the exploration and will
not relent until we discover whether they have been devoured by the
Polyphemus of crime, bestialized by some profane Circe or simply made
drunk with the Lethe of change and remoteness.

The unreturning adventurer--the man whose destiny is hid in doubt--has
tormented the imagination in every century. In life the lost comrade
wakes a more poignant curiosity than the returning Odysseus. What of
the true Smerdis and the false? Was it the great Aeneas the Etruscans
slew, and where does Merlin lie? Did Attila die of apoplexy in the
arms of Hilda or shall we believe the elder Eddas, the Nibelungen
and Volsunga sagas or the Teutonic legends of later times? Was it
the genuine Dmitri who was murdered in the Kremlin, and what of the
two other pseudo-Dmitris? What became of Dandhu Panth after he fled
into Nepal in 1859; did he perish soon or is there truth in the tale
of the finger burial of Nana Sahib? And was it Quantrill who died at
Louisville of his wounds after Captain Terrill’s siege of the barn at
Bloomfield?

These enigmas are more lasting and irritating than any other minor
facet of history, and the patient searching of scholars seems but to
add to the popular confusion and to the charm of our doubts. Even where
research seems to arrive at positive results, the general will cling
to their puzzlement, for a romantic mystery is always sweeter than a
sordid fact.

Even in the modern world, so closely organized, so completely explored
and so prodigiously policed, those enigmas continue to pile up. In
our day it is an axiom that nothing is harder to lose sight of than
a ship at sea or a man on land. This sounds, at first blush, like a
paradox. It ought, surely, to be easy to scrape the name from a vessel,
change her gear and peculiarities a little, paint a fresh word upon
her side and so conceal her. Simpler still, why can’t any man, not too
conspicuous or individual, step out of the crowd, alter the cut of
his hair and clothes, assume another name and immediately be draped
in a fresh ego? Does it not take a huge annual expenditure for ship
registry and all sorts of marine policing on the one side, and an even
greater sum for the land police, on the other, to prevent such things?
Truly enough, and it is the police power of the earth, backed by
certain plain or obscure motivations in mankind, that makes it next to
impossible for a ship or a man to drop out of sight, as the phrase goes.

Leaving aside the ships, which are a small part of our argument, we
may note that, for all the difficulty, thousands of human beings try
to vanish every year. Plainly there are many circumstances, many
crises in the lives of men, women and children, that make a complete
detachment and forgottenness desirable, nay, imperative. Yet, of the
twenty-five thousand persons reported missing to the police of the
City of New York every year, to take an instance, only a few remain
permanently undiscovered. Most are mere stayouts or young runaways
and are returned to their inquiring relatives within a few hours or
days. Others are deserting spouses--husbands who have wearied or wives
who have found new loves. These sometimes lead long chases before
they are reported and identified, at which time the police have no
more to do with the matter unless there is action from the domestic
courts. A number are suicides, whose bodies soon or late rise from the
city-engirdling waters and are, almost without fail, identified by the
marvelously efficient police detectives in charge of the morgues. Some
are pretended amnesics and a few are true ones. But in the end the
police of the cities clear up nearly all these cases. For instance, in
the year 1924, the New York police department had on its books only one
male and one female uncleared case originating in the year of 1918,
or six years earlier. At the same time there were four male and six
female cases dating from 1919, three male and one female cases that
had originated in 1920, no male and three female cases that originated
in 1921, three male and two female cases of the date of 1922, but in
1924 there were still pending, as the police say, twenty-eight male and
sixty-three female cases of the year preceding, 1923.

The point here is that only one man and one woman could stay hid from
the searching eyes of the law as long as six years. Evidently the
business of vanishing presents some formidable difficulties.

However, it is not even these solitary absentees that engage our
interest most sharply, for usually we know why they went and have
some indication that they are alive and merely skulking. There is
another and far rarer genus of the family of the missing, however,
that does strike hard upon that explosive chemical of human curiosity.
Here we have those few and detached inexplicable affairs that neither
astuteness nor diligence, time nor patience, frenzy nor faith can
penetrate--the true romances, the genuine mysteries of vanishment.
A man goes forth to his habitual labor and between hours he is gone
from all that knew him, all that was familiar. There is a gap in the
environment and many lives are affected, nearly or remotely. No one
knows the why or where or how of his going and all the power of men
and materials is hopelessly expended. Years pass and these tales of
puzzlement become legends. They are then things to brood about before
the fire, when the moving mind is touched by the inner mysteriousness
of life.

Again, there are those strange instances of the theft of human beings
by human beings--kidnappings, in the usual term. Nothing except a
natural cataclysm is so excitant of mass terror as the first suggestion
that there are child-stealers abroad. What fevers and rages of the
public temper may result from such crimes will be seen from some of
what follows. The most celebrated instance is, of course, the affair
of Charlie Ross of Philadelphia, which carries us back more than half
a century. We have here the classic American kidnapping case, already
a tradition, rich in all the elements that make the perfect abduction
tale.

This terror of the thief of children is, to be sure, as old as the
races. From the Phoenicians who stole babes to feed to their bloody
divinities, the Minoans who raped the youth of Greece for their
bull-fights, and the priests of many lands who demanded maidens to
satisfy the wrath of their gods and the lust of their flesh, down
to the European Gypsies, who sometimes steal, or are said to steal,
children for bridal gifts, we have this dread vein running through
the body of our history. We need, accordingly, no going back into our
phylogeny or biology, to understand the frenzy of the mother when the
shadow of the kidnapper passes over her cote. The women of Normandy are
said still to whisper with trembling the name of Gilles de Rais (or
Retz), that bold marshal of France and comrade in arms of Jeanne d’Arc,
who seems to have been a stealer and killer of children, instead of
the original of Perrault’s Bluebeard, as many believe. What terror
other kidnappers have sent into the hearts of parents will be seen from
the text.

This volume is not intended as a handbook of mysteries, for such
works exist in numbers. The author has limited himself to problems
of disappearance and cases of kidnapping, thereby excluding many
twice-told wonders--the wandering Ahasuerus, the Flying Dutchman,
Prince Charles Edward, the Dauphin, Gosselin’s _Femme sans nom_, the
changeling of Louis Philippe and the Crown Prince Rudolf and the affair
at Mayerling.

Neither have I attempted any technical exploration of the conduct and
motives of vanishers and kidnappers. It must be sufficiently clear
that a man unpursued who flees and hides is out of tune with his
environment, ill adjusted, nervously unwell. Nor need we accent again
the fact that all criminals, kidnappers included, are creatures of
disease or defect.

A general bibliography will be found at the end of the book. The
information to be had from these volumes has been liberally supported
and amplified from the files of contemporary newspapers in the
countries and cities where these dramas of doubt were played. The
records of legal trials have been consulted in instances where trials
took place and I have talked with the accessible officials having
knowledge of the cases or persons here treated.

                                                        E. H. S.

 New York, August, 1927.




MYSTERIES OF THE
MISSING




I

THE CHARLIE ROSS ENIGMA


Late on the afternoon of the twenty-seventh of June, 1874, two men in
a shabby-covered buggy stopped their horse under the venerable elms
of Washington Lane in Germantown, that sleepy suburb of Philadelphia,
with its grave-faced revolutionary houses and its air of lavendered
maturity. All about these intruders was historic ground. Near at
hand was the Chew House, where Lord Howe repulsed Washington and his
tattered command in their famous encounter. Yonder stood the old Morris
Mansion, where the British commander stood cursing the fog, while his
troops retreated from the surprise attack. Here the impetuous Agnew
fell before a backwoods rifleman, and there Mad Anthony Wayne was
forced to decamp by the fire of his confused left. Not far away the
first American Bible had been printed, and that ruinous house on the
ridge had once been the American Capitol. The whole region was a hive
of memories.

Strangely enough, the men in the buggy gave no sign of interest in all
these things. Instead, they devoted their attention to the two young
sons of a grocer who happened to be playing among the bushes on their
father’s property. The children were gradually attracted to confidence
by the strangers, who offered them sweets and asked them who they were,
where their parents were staying, how old they might be, and how they
might like to go riding.

The older boy, just past his sixth birth anniversary, tried to respond
manfully, as his parents had taught him. He said that he was Walter
Ross, and that his companion was his brother, Charlie, aged four. His
mother, he related, had gone to Atlantic City with her older daughters,
and his father was busy at the store in the business section of the
settlement. Yes, that big, white house on the knoll behind them was
where they lived. All this and a good deal more the little boy prattled
off to his inquisitors, but when it came to getting into their buggy he
demurred. The men got pieces of candy from their pockets, filled the
hands of both children, and drove away.

When the father of the boys came home a little later, he found his
sons busy with their candy, and he was told where they had got it. He
smiled and felt that the two men in the buggy must be very fond of
children. Not the least suspicion crossed his mind. Yet this harmless
incident of that forgotten summer afternoon was the prelude to the most
famous of American abduction cases and the introduction to one of the
abiding mysteries of disappearance. What followed with fatal swiftness
came soon to be a matter of almost worldwide notoriousness--a case of
kidnapping that stands firm in popular memory after the confusions of
fifty-odd years.

On the afternoon of July 1, the strangers came again. This time they
had no difficulty in getting the children into their wagon.[1] Saying
that they were going to buy fire crackers for the approaching Fourth
of July, they carried the little boys to the corner of Palmer and
Richmond Streets, Philadelphia, where Walter Ross was given a silver
quarter and told to go into a shop and buy what he wanted. At the
end of five or ten minutes the boy emerged to find his brother, his
benefactors and their buggy gone.

[1] Walter Ross, then 7 years old, testified at the Westervelt trial,
the following year, that he had seen the men twice before, but this
seems unlikely.

Little Walter Ross, abandoned eight miles from his home in the toils
of a strange city, stood on the curb and gave childish vent to his
feelings. The sight of the boy with his hands full of fireworks and
his eyes full of tears, soon attracted passers-by. A man named Peacock
finally took charge of the youngster and got from him the name and
address of his father. At about eight o’clock that evening he arrived
at the Ross dwelling and delivered the child, to find that the younger
boy had not been brought home, and that the father was out visiting the
police stations in quest of his sons.

In spite of the obvious facts, the idea of kidnapping was not
immediately conceived, and it even got a hostile reception when the
circumstances forced its entertainment. The father of the missing
Charlie was Christian K. Ross, a Philadelphia retail grocer who was
popularly supposed to be wealthy, and was in fact the owner of a
prosperous business at Third and Market streets, and master of a
competence. His flourishing trade, the big house in which he lived
with his wife and seven children, and the fine grounds about his home
naturally caused many to believe that he was a man of large means. In
view of these facts alone the theory of abduction should have been
considered at once. Again, Walter Ross recited the details of his
adventure with the men in a faithful and detailed way, telling enough
about the talk and manner of the men to indicate criminal intent.
Moreover, Mr. Ross was aware of the previous visit of the strangers.
Finally, the manœuver of deserting the older boy and disappearing with
his brother should have been sufficiently suggestive for the most
lethargic policeman. Nevertheless, the Philadelphia officials took the
skeptical position. Their early activities expressed themselves in the
following advertisement, which I take from the _Philadelphia Ledger_ of
July 3:

 “Lost, on July 1st, a small boy, about four years of age, light
 complexion, and light curly hair. A suitable reward will be paid
 on his return to E. L. Joyce, Central Station, corner of Fifth and
 Chestnut streets.”

The advertisement was worded in this fashion to conceal the fact of the
child’s vanishment from his mother, who was not called from her summer
resort until some days later.

The police were, however, not long allowed to rest on their comfortable
assumption that the boy had been lost. On the fifth, Mr. Ross received
a letter which had been dated and posted on the day before in
Philadelphia. It stated that Charlie Ross was in the custody of the
writer, that he was well and safe, that it was useless to look for
him through the police, and that the father would hear more in a few
days. The note was scrawled by some one who was trying to conceal his
natural handwriting and any literate attainments he may have possessed.
Punctuation and capitals were almost absent, and the commonest words
were so crazily misspelled as to betray purposiveness. The unfortunate
father was addressed as “Mr. Ros,” a formal appellation which was
later contracted to “Ros.” This missive and some of those that followed
were signed “John.”

Even this communication did not mean much to the police, though they
had not, at that early stage of the mystery, the troublesome flood of
crank letters to plead as an excuse for their disbelief. As a matter
of fact, this first letter came before there had been anything but the
briefest and most conservative announcements in the newspapers, and it
should have been apparent to any one that there was nothing fraudulent
about it. Yet the police officials dawdled. A second message from the
mysterious John wakened them at last to action.

On the morning of July 7, Mr. Ross received a longer communication,
unquestionably from the writer of the first, in which he was told that
his appeal to the detectives would be vain. He must meet the terms of
the ransom, twenty thousand dollars, or he would be the murderer of
his own child. The writer declared that no power in the universe would
discover the boy, or restore him to his father, without payment of the
money, and he added that if the father sent detectives too near the
hiding place of the boy he would thereby be sealing the doom of his
son. The letter closed with most terrifying threats. The kidnappers
were frankly out to get money, and they would have it, either from
Ross or from others. If he failed to yield, his child would be slain
as an example to others, so that they would act more wisely when their
children were taken. Ross would see his child either alive or dead. If
he paid, the boy would be brought back alive; if not, his father would
behold his corpse. Ross’ willingness to come to terms must be signified
by the insertion of these words into the _Ledger_: “Ros, we be willing
to negotiate.”

Such an epistle blew away all doubts, and the Charlie Ross terror burst
upon Philadelphia and surrounding communities the following morning in
full virulence. The police surrounded the city, guarded every out-going
road, searched the trains and boats, went through all the craft lying
in the rivers, spread the dragnet for all the known criminals in town
and immediately began a house-to-house search, an almost unprecedented
proceeding in a republic. The newspapers grew more inflammatory with
every fresh edition. At once the mad pack of anonymous letter writers
took up the cry, writing to the police and to the unfortunate parents,
who were forced to read with an anxious eye whatever came to their
door, a most insulting and disheartening array of fulminations which
caused the collapse of the already overburdened mother.

In the fever which attacked the city any child was likely to be
seized and dragged, with its nurse or parent, to the nearest police
station, there to answer the suspicion of being Charlie Ross. Mothers
with golden-haired boys of the approximate age of Charlie resorted
to Christian Ross in an unending stream, demanding that he give them
written attestation of the fact that their children were not his, and
the poor beladen man actually wrote hundreds of such testimonials. The
madness of the public went to the absurdest lengths. Children twice the
age and size of the kidnapped boy were dragged before the officials by
unbalanced busybodies. Little boys with black hair were apprehended
by the score at the demand of citizens who pleaded that they might be
the missing boy, with his blond curls dyed. Little girls were brought
before the scornful police, and some of the self-appointed seekers for
the missing boy had to be driven from the station houses with threats
and blows.

Following the command of the child snatchers with literal fidelity,
Mr. Ross had published in the _Ledger_ the words I have quoted. The
result was a third epistle from the robbers. It recognized his reply,
but made no definite proposition and gave no further orders, save the
command that he reply in the _Ledger_, stating whether or not he was
ready to pay the twenty thousand dollars. On the other hand, the letter
continued the ferocious threats of the earlier communication, laughed
at the police efforts as “children’s play,” and asked whether “Ros”
cared more for money or his son. In this letter was the same labored
effort to appear densely unlettered. One new note was added. The writer
asked whether Mr. Ross was “willen to pay the four thousand pounds for
the ransom of yu child.” Either the writer was, or wanted to seem, a
Briton, used to speaking of money in British terms. This pretension was
continued in some of the later letters and led eventually to a search
for the missing boy in England.

In his extremity and natural inexperience, Mr. Ross relied absolutely
on the police and put himself into their hands. He asked how he was
to reply to the third letter and was told that he should pretend to
acquiesce in the demand of the abductors, meantime actually holding
them off and relying on the detectives to find the boy. But this
subterfuge was quickly recognized by the abductors, with the result
that a warning letter came to Mr. Ross at the end of a few days. He was
told that he was pursuing the course of folly, that the detectives
could not help him, and that he must choose at once between his money
and the life of his child.

Ross was advised by some friends and neighbors to yield to the demands
of the extortioners, and several men of means offered him loans or
gifts of such funds as he was not able to raise himself. Accordingly he
signified his intention of arriving at a bargain, and the mysterious
John wrote him two or three well-veiled letters which were intended
to test his good faith. At this point the father and the abductors
seemed about to agree, when the officials again intervened and caused
the grocer to change his mood. He declared in an advertisement that
he would not compound a felony by paying money for the return of his
child. But this stand had hardly been taken when Mrs. Ross’ pitiful
anxiety caused another change of front.

Unquestionably this vacillation had a harmful effect in more than one
direction. Its most serious consequence was that it gave the abductors
the impression that they were dealing with a man who did not know
his own mind, could not be relied upon to keep his promises, and was
obviously in the control of the officers. Accordingly they moved
with supercaution and began to impose impossible conditions. By this
time they had written the parents of their prisoner at least a dozen
letters, each containing more terrifying threats than its antecedents.
To look this correspondence over at this late day is to see the
nervousness of the abductors, slowly mounting to the point of extreme
danger to the child. But Mr. Ross failed to see the peril, or was
overpersuaded by official opinion.

At this crucial point in the negotiations the blunder of all blunders
was made. Philadelphia was tremulous with excitement. The police of
every American city were looking for the apparition of the boy or his
kidnappers. Officials in the chief British and Continental ports were
watching arriving ships for the fugitives, and millions of newspaper
readers were following the case in eager suspense. Naturally the police
and the other officials of Philadelphia felt that the eyes of the world
were upon them. They quite humanly decided on a course calculated to
bring them celebrity in case of success and ample justification in case
of failure. In other words, they made the gesture typical of baffled
officialdom, without respect to the safety of the missing child or the
real interests of its parents. At a meeting presided over by the mayor,
attended by leading citizens and advised by the chiefs of the police,
a reward of twenty thousand dollars, to match the amount of ransom
demanded, was subscribed and advertised. The terms called for “evidence
leading to the capture and conviction of the abductors of Charlie Ross
and the safe return of the child,” conditions which may be cynically
viewed as incongruous. The following day the chief of police announced
that his men, should they participate in the successful coup, would
claim no part of the reward.

All this was intended, to be sure, as an inducement to informers, the
hope being, apparently, that some one inside the kidnapping conspiracy
would be bribed into revelations. But the actual result was quite the
opposite. A sudden hush fell upon the writer of the letters. Also,
there were no more communications in the _Ledger_. A week passed
without further word, and the parents of the boy were thrown into utter
hopelessness. Finally another letter came, this time from New York,
whereas all previous notes had been mailed in Philadelphia. It was
clear that the offer of a high reward had led the abductors to leave
the city, and their letter showed that they had slipped away with their
prisoner, in spite of the vaunted precautions.

The next note from the criminals warned Ross in terms of impressive
finality that he must at once abandon the detectives and come to terms.
He signified his intention of complying by inserting an advertisement
in the _New York Herald_, as directed by the abductors. They wrote him
that they would shortly inform him of the manner in which the money was
to be paid over. Finally the telling note came. It commanded Mr. Ross
to procure twenty thousand dollars in bank notes of small denomination.
These he was to place in a leather traveling bag, which was to be
painted white so that it might be visible at night. With this bag of
money, Ross was to board the midnight train for New York on the night
of July 30-31 and stand on the rear platform, ready to toss the bag to
the track. As soon as he should see a bright light and a white flag
being waved, he was to let go the money, but the train was not to stop
until the next station was reached. In case these conditions were fully
and faithfully met, the child would be restored, safe and sound, within
a few hours.

Ross, after consultation with the police, decided to temporize once
more. He got the white painted bag, as commanded, and took the
midnight train, prepared to change to a Hudson River train in New York
and continue his journey to Albany, as the abductors had further
instructed. But there was no money in the valise. Instead, it contained
a letter in which Ross said that he could not pay until he saw the
child before him. He insisted that the exchange be made simultaneously
and suggested that communication through the newspapers was not
satisfactory, since it was public and betrayed all plans to the police.
Some closer and secret way of communicating must be devised, he wrote.

[Illustration: ~~ CHARLIE ROSS ~~]

So Mr. Ross set out with a police escort. He rode to New York on the
rear platform of one train and to Albany on another. But the agent
of the kidnappers did not appear, and Ross returned to Philadelphia
crestfallen, only to find that a false newspaper report had caused
the plan to miscarry. One of the papers had announced that Ross was
going West to follow up a clew. The kidnappers had seen this and
decided that their man was not going to make the trip to New York and
Albany. Consequently there was no one along the track to receive the
valise. Perhaps it was just as well. The abductors would have laughed
at the empty police dodge of suggesting a closer and secret method of
communication--for the purpose of betraying the malefactors, of course.

From this point on, Ross and the abductors continued to argue, through
the _New York Herald_, the question of simultaneous exchange of the
boy and money. Ross naturally took the position that he could not risk
being imposed on by men who perhaps did not have the child at all. The
robbers, on their side, contended that they could not see any safe way
of making a synchronous exchange. So the negotiations dragged along.

The New York police entered the case on August 2, when Chief Walling
sent to Philadelphia for the letters received by Mr. Ross from the
abductors. They were taken to New York by Captain Heins of the
Philadelphia police, and “Chief Walling’s informant identified the
writing as that of William Mosher, alias Johnson.”

In order to draw the line between fact and fable as clearly as
possible at this point, I quote from official police sources, namely,
“Celebrated Criminal Cases of America,” by Thomas S. Duke, captain
of police, San Francisco, published in 1910. Captain Duke says that
his facts have been “verified with the assistance of police officials
throughout the country.” He continues with respect to the Ross case:

“The informant then stated that in April, 1874--the year in
question--Mosher and Joseph Douglas, alias Clark, endeavored to
persuade him to participate in the kidnapping of one of the Vanderbilt
children, while the child was playing on the lawn surrounding the
family residence at Throgsneck, Long Island. (Evidently a confusion.)
The child was to be held until a ransom of fifty thousand dollars was
obtained, and the informant’s part of the plot would be to take the
child on a small launch and keep it in seclusion until the money was
received, but he declined to enter into the conspiracy.”

With all due respect to the police and to official versions, this
report smells strongly of fabrication after the fact, as we shall
see. It is, however, true that the New York police had some sort of
information early in August, and it may even be true that they had
suspicions of Mosher and were on the lookout for him. A history of
subsequent events will give the surest light on this disputed point.

The negotiations between Ross and the abductors continued in a
desultory fashion, without any attempt to deliver the child or get
the ransom, until toward the middle of November. At this time the
kidnappers arranged a meeting in the Fifth Avenue Hotel, New York. Mr.
Ross’ agents were to be there with the twenty thousand dollars in a
package. A messenger was to call for this some time during the day.
His approach and departure had been carefully planned. In case he was
watched or followed, he would not find the abductors on his return, and
the child would be killed. Only good faith could succeed. Mr. Ross was
to insert in the _New York Herald_ a personal reading, “Saul of Tarsus,
Fifth Avenue Hotel--instant.” This would indicate his decision to pay
the money and signify the day he would be at the hotel.

Accordingly the father of the missing boy had the advertisement
published, saying that he would be at the hotel with the money
“Wednesday, eighteenth, all day.” Ross’ brother and nephew kept the
tryst, but no messenger came for the money, and the last hope of the
family seemed broken.

The Rosses had long since given up the detectives and recognized
the futility of police promises. The father of the boy had, in his
distraction, even voiced some uncomplimentary sentiments pertaining
to the guardians of the law, with the result that the unhappy man was
subjected to taunt and insult and the questioning of his motives.
Resort was, accordingly, had to the Pinkerton detectives, who evidently
counseled Mr. Ross to act in secret. In any event, the appointment
at the Fifth Avenue Hotel was the last of its kind to be made, though
Ross and the abductors seemed to have been in contact at later dates.
Whatever the precise facts may be on this point, five months had soon
gone by without the recovery of the boy, or the apprehension of the
kidnappers, while search was apparently being made in many countries.
If, as claimed, Chief Walling of the New York police had direct
information bearing on the identity of the abductors the first week
in August, he managed a veritable feat of inefficiency, for he and
his men failed, in four months, to find a widely known criminal who
was afterward shown to have been in and about New York all of that
time. Not the police, but a stroke of destiny, intervened to break the
impasse.

On the stormy night of December 14-15, 1874, burglars entered the
summer home of Charles H. Van Brunt, presiding justice of the appellate
division of the New York supreme court. This mansion stood overlooking
New York Bay from the fashionable Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. The
villa was then unoccupied, but in the course of the preceding summer
Justice Van Brunt had installed a burglar alarm system which connected
with a gong in the home of his brother, J. Holmes Van Brunt, about two
hundred yards distant from the jurist’s hot weather residence. Holmes
Van Brunt occupied his house the year around. He was at home on the
night in question, and the sounding of the gong brought him out of bed.
He sent his son out to reconnoiter, and the young man came back with
the report that there was a light moving in his uncle’s place.

Holmes Van Brunt summoned two hired men from their quarters, armed
them with revolvers or shotguns and went out to trap the intruders. The
house of Justice Van Brunt was surrounded by the four men, who waited
for the burglars to emerge. After half an hour two figures were seen
to issue from the cellar door and were challenged. They answered by
opening fire. The first was wounded by Holmes Van Brunt. The second ran
around the house, only to be intercepted by young Van Brunt and shot
down, dying instantly.

When the Van Brunts and their servants gathered about the wounded man,
who was lying on the sodden ground in the agony of death, he signified
that he wished to make a statement. An umbrella was held over him to
keep off the driving rain, and he said, in gasping sentences, that
he was Joseph Douglas, and that his companion was William Mosher. He
understood he was dying and therefore wished to tell the truth. He and
Mosher had stolen Charlie Ross to make money. He did not know where
the child was, but Mosher could tell. Mr. Van Brunt told him that
Mosher was dead, and the body of the other burglar was carried over and
exhibited to the dying man. Douglas then gasped that the child would
be returned safely in a few days. On hearing one of the party express
doubt about his story, Douglas is said to have remarked:

“Chief Walling knows all about us and was after us, and now he has us.”

Douglas died there on the lawn, with the rain drenching his tortured
body. Both he and Mosher were identified from the police records by
officers who had known them and by relatives. Walter Ross and a man
who had seen the kidnappers driving through the streets of Germantown
with the two boys, were taken to New York. The brother of the kidnapped
child, though he was purposely kept in the dark as to his mission,
immediately recognized the dead men in the morgue as the abductors,
saying that Douglas was the one who gave the candy, and that Mosher
had driven the horse. This identification was confirmed by the other
witness.

The return of the stolen boy was, therefore, anxiously and hourly
expected. But he had not arrived at the end of a week, and the police
officials immediately moved in new directions.

Mosher had married the sister of William Westervelt, of New York, a
former police officer, who was later convicted of complicity in the
abduction. Westervelt and Mrs. Mosher were apprehended. The one-time
policeman made a rambling statement containing little information,
but his sister admitted that she had been privy to the matter of the
kidnapping. She had known for several months, she said, that her
husband had kidnapped Charlie Ross, but she had not been consulted in
his planning, and did not know where he had kept the child hidden, and
was unable to give any information.

Mrs. Mosher went on to say that she believed the child to be alive
and stated her reasons. She did not believe her husband, burglar and
kidnapper though he was, capable of injuring a child. He had four of
his own and had always been a good father. The poverty of his family
had driven him to the abduction. Also, Mrs. Mosher related, she had
pleaded with her husband to return the stolen boy to his parents,
saying that it was cruel to hold him longer, that there seemed to be
little chance of collecting the ransom safely, and that the danger to
the abductors was becoming greater every day. This conversation, she
said, had taken place only a few days before the Van Brunt burglary
and Mosher’s death. Accordingly, since Mosher had then agreed that the
child should be sent home, she felt sure it was still living.

But Charlie Ross never came back. The death of his abductors only
intensified the quest for the boy. Detectives were sent to Europe, to
Mexico, to the Pacific coast, and to various other places, whither
false clews pointed. The parents advertised far and wide. Mr. Ross
himself, in the course of the next few years, made hundreds of journeys
to look at suspected children in all parts of the United States. He
spent, according to his own account, more than sixty thousand dollars
on these hopeful, but vain, pilgrimages. Each new search resulted as
had all the others. At last, after more than twenty years of seeking,
Christian K. Ross gave up in despair, saying he felt sure the boy must
be dead.

For some time after the kidnappers had been killed and identified, a
large part of the American public suspected that Westervelt or Mrs.
Mosher, or some one connected with them, was detaining the missing
child for fear of arrest and prosecution in case of its return home.
The theory was that Charlie Ross was old enough to observe, remember
and talk. He might, if released, give information that would lead to
the imprisonment of Mosher’s and Douglas’ confederates. Accordingly,
steps were taken to get the child back at any compromise. The
Pennsylvania legislature passed an act, in February, 1875, which
fixed the penalty for abducting or detaining a child at twenty-five
years’ imprisonment, but the new law contained a proviso that any
person or persons delivering a stolen child to the nearest sheriff
on or before the twenty-fifth day of March, 1875, should be immune
from any punishment. At the same time Mr. Ross offered a cash reward
of five thousand dollars, payable on delivery of the child, and no
questions asked. He named more than half a dozen responsible firms at
whose places of business the child might be left for identification,
announcing that all these business houses were prepared to pay the
reward on the spot, and guaranteeing that those bringing in the boy
would not be detained.

All this was in vain, and the conclusion had at last to be reached that
the boy was beyond human powers of restoration.

To tell what seems to have been the truth--though it was suspected at
the time--the New York police had fairly reliable information on Mosher
and Douglas soon after the crime. Chief Walling appears, though he
never openly said so, to have been informed by a brother of Mosher’s
who was on bad terms with the kidnapper. Not long afterwards he had
Westervelt brought in for questioning. That worthy had been dismissed
from the New York police force a few months earlier for neglect of duty
or shielding a policy room. His sister was Bill Mosher’s (the suspected
man’s) wife and it was known that Westervelt had been in Philadelphia
about the time of the abduction of Charlie Ross. He was trying, by
every device, to get himself reinstated as a policeman, and Walling
held out to him the double bait of renewed employment and the whole of
the twenty thousand dollars of reward offered for the return of the
boy and the capture of the kidnappers.

Here a monumental piece of inefficiency and stupidity seems to have
been committed, for though Westervelt visited the chief of police
no fewer than twenty times, he was never trailed to his scores of
appointments with his brother-in-law and the other abductor. Neither
did the astute guardians of the law get wind of the fact that Mosher
and Douglas were in and about New York most of the time. They failed
to find out that Westervelt and probably one of the others had been
seen with the little Ross boy in their hands. Indeed, they failed
to make the least progress in the case, though they had definite
information concerning the names of the kidnappers, both of them
experienced criminals with long records. It might be hard to discover
a more dreadful piece of police bluffing and blundering. First the
Philadelphia and then the New York forces gave the poorest possible
advice, made the most egregious boasts and promises and then proceeded
to show the most incredible stupidity and lack of organization. A later
prosecutor summed it all up when he said the police had been, at least,
honest.

But, after Mosher and Douglas had been killed at Judge Van Brunt’s
house and Douglas had made his dying statements, it was easy to lure
Westervelt to Philadelphia, arrest him, charge him with aiding the
kidnappers and his wife with having been an accessory. Walter Ross had
identified Mosher and Douglas as the men who had been in the buggy but
had never seen Westervelt. A neighboring merchant appeared, however,
and picked him out as the man who had spent half an hour in his shop a
few weeks after the kidnapping, asking many questions about the Rosses,
especially as to their financial position and the rumor that Christian
K. Ross was bankrupt. Another man had seen him about Bay Ridge the
day before Mosher and Douglas broke into the Van Brunt house and were
killed. A woman appeared who had seen Westervelt riding on a Brooklyn
horse-car with a child like Charlie Ross. In short, it was soon
reasonably clear that the one-time New York policeman had conspired
with his brother-in-law and the other man to seize the boy and get the
ransom. Westervelt’s motives were rancor at being caught at his tricks
and dismissed and financial necessity, for he was almost in want after
his discharge. Apparently, he had assisted in the preparations for the
kidnapping, had the boy in his charge for a time and used his standing
as a former officer to hoodwink the New York police. He had also had to
do with some of the ransom letters.

On August 30, 1875, Westervelt was brought to trial in the Court of
Quarter Sessions, Philadelphia, Judge Elcock presiding. Theodore V.
Burgin and George J. Berger, the two men who had helped the Van Brunts
waylay and kill the two burglars, testified as to Douglas’ dying
story. The witnesses above mentioned told their versions of what they
had heard and observed. A porter in Stromberg’s Tavern, a drinking
resort at 74 Mott Street, then not yet overrun by the Celestial
hordes, testified that Westervelt was often at the Tavern drinking
and consulting with Mosher and Douglas, that he had boasted he could
name the kidnappers and that he had arranged for secret signals to
reveal the presence of the two confederates now dead. Chief Walling
also testified against the man. The jury returned a verdict of guilty
on three counts of the indictment, reaching its decision on September
20, after long deliberation. On October 9, Judge Elcock sentenced the
disgraced policeman to serve seven years in solitary confinement at
labor, in the Eastern Penitentiary.

Westervelt took his medicine. Never did he admit that the decision
against him was just, confess that he had taken any part in the
kidnapping or yield the least hint as to the fate of the unfortunate
little boy.

Nothing can touch the heart more than the fearful vigil of the parents
in such a case. In his book, Christian K. Ross recites, without
improper emotion, that, not counting the cases looked into for him
by the Pinkertons, he personally or through others investigated two
hundred and seventy-three children reported to be the lost Charlie. In
every case there was a mistake or a deception. Some of the lads put
forward were old enough to have been conventional uncles to him.

In the following decades many strange rumors were bruited, many false
trails followed to their empty endings, and many spurious or unbalanced
claimants investigated and exposed. The Charlie Ross fever did not die
down for a full generation, and even to-day mothers in the outlying
States frighten their children into obedience with the name and rumor
of this stolen boy. He has become a fearful tradition, a figure of
pathos and terror for the generations.

As recently as June 5 of the current year, the _Los Angeles Times_,
a journal staid to reaction, printed long and credulous sticks of
type to the effect that John W. Brown, ill in the General Hospital of
Los Angeles, was really the long lost Charlie Ross. The evil rogue
“confessed” that he had remained silent for fifty years in order to
“guard the honor of my mother” and said he had been kidnapped by his
“foster-father, William Henry Brown,” for revenge when Mrs. Ross
“declined to have anything further to do with him.”

Comment upon such caddism can be clinical only. The fact that the
wretch who uttered it was sick and dying alone explains the fevered
hallucination.

As an old newspaper man, I know that any kind of an item suggesting the
discovery of Charlie Ross is always good copy and will be telegraphed
about the country from end to end, and printed at greater or lesser
length. If the thing has the least aura of credibility about it, Sunday
features will follow, remarkable mainly for their inaccuracies. In
other words, that sad little boy of Washington Lane long since became a
classic to the American press.

At the end of more than fifty years the commentator can hazard no
safer opinion on the probable fate of Charlie Ross than did his
contemporaries. The popular theories then were that he had died of
grief and privation, that Mosher had drowned him in New York Bay when
he felt the police were near at hand, or that he had been adopted by
some distant family and taught to forget his home and parents. Of these
hollow guesses, the reader may take his choice now as then.




II

“SEVERED FROM THE RACE”


Headless horsemen and other strange ghostly figures march nightly on
the beach at Nag’s Head. For more than two years these shades and
spectres have been seen and Coast Guardsman Steve Basnight has been
trying vainly to convince his fellows. They have laughed upon him with
sepulchral laughter, as though the dead enjoyed their mirth. They have
chided him as a seer of visions, a mad hallucinant.

But now there are others who have seen and fled. Mrs. Alice Grice,
passing the lonely sands in her motor, had trouble with the engine
and saw or thought she saw a man standing there, brooding across the
waters. She called to him and he, as one shaken from some immortal
reverie, moved slowly off, turning not, nor seeming quite to walk, but
floating into the fog, silent and serene.

Some scoffers have suggested that these be but smugglers or rum
runners, enlarged in the spume by the eyes of terror. But that cannot
be so, for the coast guard is staunch and active. This is no ordinary
visitor, no thing of flesh and blood. This is some grieved and restless
spirit, risen through a transcendence of his grave and come to haunt
this wild and forlorn region.

George Midgett, long a scoffer, has seen this uncharnelled being most
closely and accurately. It is a tall, great man, clad in purest white,
strolling along the beach in the full moonlight, which is no clearer
than the sad and dreaming face.

It is Aaron Burr. And he is seeking his lost daughter, whose wrecked
ship is believed by many to have been driven ashore at this point.

So much for the lasting charm of doubt, since I take my substance here,
and most of my mystery, from the _New York World_ of June 9, 1927,
contained in a dispatch from Manteo, N. C., bearing the date of the
previous day--one hundred and fifteen years after the happening.

But if we see Aaron Burr ghostwalking in the moonlight as once he trod
in the tortured flesh at the Battery, looking out upon those bitter
waters that denied him hope, or if we believe, with many writers, that
he fell upon his knees and cried out, “By this blow I am severed from
the human race!” we are still not much nearer to the pathos or the
mystery of that old incident in 1812, when Theodosia Burr set out for
New York by sea and never reached it.

“By and by,” says Parton in his “The Life and Times of Aaron Burr,”
“some idle tales were started in the newspapers, that the _Patriot_ had
been captured by pirates and all on board murdered except Theodosia,
who was carried on shore as a captive.”

Idle tales they may have been, but their vitality has outlived the
pathetic facts. Indeed, unless probability be false and romance true,
“the most brilliant woman of her day in America” perished at sea a
little more than a hundred and fifteen years ago, caught off the
Virginia Capes in a hurricane that scattered the British war fleet and
crushed the “miserable little pilot boat” that was trying to bear her
to New York. In that more than a century of intervening time, however,
a tradition of doubt has clouded itself about the quietus of Aaron
Burr’s celebrated daughter which puts her story immovably upon the
roster of the great mysteries of disappearance. The various accounts of
piratical atrocities connected with her death may be fanciful or even
studiedly fictive, but even this realization does nothing to dispel the
fog.

Theodosia Burr was born in New York in 1783 and educated under
the unflagging solicitude and careful personal direction of her
distinguished father, who wanted her to be, as he testifies in his
letters, the equal of any woman on earth. To this enlightened training
the precious girl responded with notable spirit and intellectual
acquisitiveness, mastering French as a child and becoming proficient
in Latin and Greek before she was adolescent. At fourteen, her mother
having died some years earlier, she was already mistress of the house
of the New York senator and a figure in the best political society
of the times. As a slip of a girl she played hostess to Volney,
Talleyrand, Jerome Bonaparte and numberless other notables, and bore,
in addition to her repute as a bluestocking, the name of a most
beautiful and charming young woman. Something of her quality may be
read from her numerous extant letters, two of which are quoted below.

In 1801, just after her father had received the famous tied vote for
the Presidency and declined to enter into the conspiracy which aimed to
prefer him to Jefferson, recipient of the popular majority, Theodosia
Burr was married to Joseph Alston, a young Carolina lawyer and planter
who later became governor of his state. Thus, about the time her father
was being installed as Vice-President, his happy and adoring daughter,
his friend and confidante to the end, was making her twenty days’
journey to her new home in South Carolina, where her husband owned a
residence in Charleston and several rice plantations in the northern
part of the state.

At the time of the famous duel with Hamilton, in 1804, Burr was still
Vice-President, still one of the chief political figures and at the
very height of his popularity and fortune, an elevation from which that
unfortunate encounter began his dislodgment. Theodosia was in the South
with her husband at the time and knew nothing either of the challenge
or of the duel itself until weeks after Hamilton was dead.

Of the merits of the Burr-Hamilton controversy or the right and wrong
of either man’s conduct little need be said here. As time goes on it
becomes more and more apparent that Burr in no way exceeded becoming
conduct or violated the gentlemanly code as then practised. Hamilton
had been his persistent and by no means always honorable enemy. He had
attacked and not infrequently belied his opponent, thwarting him where
he could politically and even resorting to the use of his personal
connections for the private humiliation of his foe. The answer in
1804 to such tactics was the challenge. Burr gave it and insisted on
satisfaction. Hamilton met him on the heights at Weehawken, across the
Hudson from New York, and fell mortally wounded at the first exchange,
dying thirty-one hours later.

It is evident from a reading of the newspapers of the time and from
the celebrated sermon on Hamilton’s death delivered by Dr. Nott, later
president of Union College, that duelling was then so common that there
existed “a preponderance of opinion in favor of it,” and that the spot
at which Hamilton fell was so much in use for affairs of honor that
Dr. Nott apostrophized it as “ye tragic shores of Hoboken, crimsoned
with the richest blood, I tremble at the crimes you record against us,
the annual register of murders which you keep and send up to God!”
Nevertheless, the town was shocked by the death of Hamilton, and Burr’s
enemies seized the moment to circulate all manner of absurd calumnies
which gained general credence and served to undo the victorious
antagonist.

It was reported that Hamilton had not fired at all, a story which was
refuted by his powder-stained empty pistol. Next it was charged that
Burr had coldly shot his opponent down after he had fired into the air.
The fact seems to be that Hamilton discharged his weapon a fraction of
a second after Burr, just as he was struck by his adversary’s ball.
Hamilton’s bullet cut a twig over Burr’s head. The many yarns to the
general effect that Burr was a dead shot and had practised secretly
for months before he sent the challenge seem also to belong to the
realm of fiction. Burr was never an expert with fire-arms, but he was
courageous, collected and determined. He had every right to believe,
from Hamilton’s past conduct, that his opponent would show him no mercy
on the field. Both men were soldiers and acquainted with the code and
with the use of weapons.

But Hamilton’s friends were numerous, powerful and bitter. They left
nothing undone that might bring upon Burr the fullest measure of
public and private reprehension. The results of their campaign were
peculiar, inasmuch as Burr lost his influence in the states which
had formerly been the seat of his power and gained a high popularity
in the comparatively weak new western states, where Hamilton and the
Federalist leaders were regarded with hostility. At the expiration of
his term of office Burr found himself politically dead and practically
exiled by the charges of murder which had been lodged against him both
in New York and New Jersey.

The duel and its consequences marked the beginning of the Burr
misfortunes. Undoubtedly the ostracism which greeted him after his
retirement from office was the immediate fact which moved him to
undertake his famous enterprise against the West and Mexico, an
adventure that resulted in his trial for treason. The fact that he was
acquitted, even with the weight of the government and the personal
influence of President Jefferson, his onetime friend, thrown against
him, did not save him from still further popular dislike, and he was at
length forced to leave the country. It was in the course of this exile
in Europe that Theodosia wrote him the well known letter from which I
quote an illuminating extract:

 “I witness your extraordinary fortitude with new wonder at every new
 misfortune. Often, after reflecting on this subject, you appear to me
 so superior, so elevated above other men; I contemplate you with such
 a strange mixture of humility, admiration, reverence, love and pride,
 that very little superstition would be necessary to make me worship
 you as a superior being; such enthusiasm does your character excite
 in me. When I afterwards revert to myself, how insignificant my best
 qualities appear. My vanity would be greater if I had not been placed
 so near you; and yet my pride is our relationship. I had rather not
 live than not be the daughter of such a man.”

Burr remained abroad for four years, trying vainly to interest
the British government and then Napoleon in various schemes of
privateering. The net result of his activities in England was an order
to leave the country. Nor did Burr fare any better in France. Napoleon
simply refused to receive him and the American’s past acquaintance
with and hospitable treatment of the emperor’s brother, once king of
Westphalia, failed to avail him. Consequently, Burr slipped back into
the United States in 1812, quite like a thief in the night, not certain
what reception he might get and even fearful lest Hamilton’s wildest
partisans might actually undertake to throw him into jail and try him
for the shooting of their chief. The reception he got was hostile and
suspicious enough, but there was no attempt to proceed legally.

Theodosia, who had never ceased to work in her father’s interest,
writing to everyone she knew and beseeching all those who had been her
friends in the days of Burr’s ascendancy, in an effort to clear the
way for his return to his native land, was overjoyed at the homecoming
of her parent and expressed her pleasure in various charmingly written
letters, wherein she promised herself the excitement of a trip to New
York as soon as arrangements could be made.

But the Burr cup of misfortune was not yet full. That summer
Theodosia’s only child, Aaron Burr Alston, sickened and died in his
twelfth year, leaving the mother prostrated and the grandfather, who
had doted on the boy, supervised his education and centered all his
hopes upon him, bereft of his composure and optimism, possibly for the
first time in his varied and tempestuous life. Mrs. Alston’s letters at
this time deserve at least quotation:

 “A few miserable days past, my dear father, and your late letters
 would have gladdened my soul; and even now I rejoice in their contents
 as much as it is possible for me to rejoice at anything; but there is
 no more joy for me; the world is a blank. I have lost my boy. My child
 is gone for ever. He expired on the thirtieth of June. My head is not
 sufficiently collected to say any thing further. May Heaven, by other
 blessings, make you some amends for the noble grandson you have lost.”

And again:

 “Whichever way I turn the same anguish still assails me. You talk of
 consolation. Ah! you know not what you have lost. I think Omnipotence
 could give me no equivalent for my boy; no, none--none.”

This was the woman who set out a few months later, sadly emaciated and
very weak, to join her father in New York, hoping that she might gain
strength and hope again from the burdened but undaunted man who never
yet had failed her.

The second war with England was in progress. Theodosia’s husband was
governor of South Carolina, general of the state militia and active in
the field. He could not leave his post. Accordingly, the plan of making
the trip overland in her own coach was abandoned and Mrs. Alston
decided to set sail in the _Patriot_, a small schooner which had put
into Charleston after a privateering enterprise. Parton says that “she
was commanded by an experienced captain and had for a sailing master
an old New York pilot, noted for his skill and courage. The vessel was
famous for her sailing qualities and it was confidently expected she
would perform the voyage to New York in five or six days.” On the other
hand, Burr himself referred to the ship bitterly as “the miserable
little pilot boat.”

Whatever the precise facts, the _Patriot_ was made ready and Theodosia
went aboard with her maid and a personal physician, whom Burr had sent
south from New York to attend his daughter on the voyage. The guns
of the _Patriot_ had been dismounted and stored below. To give her
further ballast and to defray the expenses of the trip, Governor Alston
filled the hold with tierces of rice from his plantations. The captain
carried a letter from Governor Alston addressed to the commander of
the British fleet, which was lying off the Capes, explaining the
painful circumstances under which the little schooner was voyaging and
requesting safe passage to New York. Thus occupied, the _Patriot_ put
out from Charleston on the afternoon of December 30th and crossed the
bar on the following morning. Here fact ends and conjecture begins.

When, after the elapse of a week, the _Patriot_ had not reached New
York, Burr began to worry and to make inquiries, but nothing was to
be discovered. He could not even be sure until the arrival of his
son-in-law’s letter, that Theodosia had set sail. Even then, he hoped
there might be some mistake. When a second letter from the South made
it plain that she had gone on the _Patriot_, Burr still did not abandon
hope and we see the picture of this sorely punished man walking every
day from his law office in Nassau street to the fashionable promenade
at the Battery, where he strolled up and down, oblivious to the
hostile or impertinent glances of the vulgar, staring out toward the
Narrows--in vain.

The poor little schooner was never seen again nor did any member of her
crew reach safety and send word of her end. In due time came the report
of the hurricane off Cape Hatteras, three days after the departure of
the _Patriot_. Later still it was found that the storm had been of
sufficient power to scatter the British fleet and send other vessels
to the bottom. In all probability the craft which bore Theodosia had
foundered with all hands.

Naturally, every other possibility came to be considered. It was at
first believed that the _Patriot_ might have been taken by a British
man-of-war and held on account of her previous activities. Before this
could be disproved it was suggested that the schooner might readily
have been attacked by pirates, since her guns were stored below
decks, and Mrs. Alston taken prisoner. Since there were still a few
buccaneers in Southern waters, who sporadically took advantage of the
preoccupation of the maritime powers with their wars, this theory of
Theodosia Alston’s disappearance gained many adherents, chiefly among
the romantics, it is true. But the possibility of such a thing was also
seriously considered by the husband and for a time by the father, who
hoped the unfortunate woman might have been taken to one of the lesser
West Indies by some not unfeeling corsair. Surely, she would soon or
late make her escape and win her way back to her dear ones. In the end
Burr rejected this idea, too.

[Illustration: ~~ THEODOSIA BURR ~~]

“No, no,” he said to a friend who revived the fable of the pirates,
“she is indeed dead. Were she alive all the prisons in the world could
not keep her from her father.”

But the mystery persisted and so the rumors and stories would not
down. For a number of years after 1813 the newspapers contained, from
time to time, reports from various parts of the world, generally to
the effect that a beautiful and cultured woman had been seen aboard
a ship supposed to be manned by pirates, that such a woman had been
found in a colony of sea refugees in some vaguely described West Indian
or South American retreat, or that a woman of English or American
characteristics was being detained in an island prison, whither she
had been consigned along with a captured piratical crew. The woman was
always, by inference at least, Theodosia Burr.

Nor were the persevering Burr calumniators idle, a circumstance which
seems to testify to the fear his enemies must have had of this strange
and greatly mistaken man. Theodosia Burr had been seen in Europe
in company with a British naval officer who was paying her marked
attentions; she had been located on an island off Panama, where she
was living in contentment as the wife of a buccaneer; she was known to
be in Mexico with a new husband who had first been her captor, then
her lover and now was in the southern Republic trying to revive Burr’s
dream of empire.

The death of Governor Alston in 1816 caused a fresh crop of the old
stories to blossom forth and the long deferred demise of Aaron Burr
in 1836 released a still more formidable crop of rumors, fables and
speculations. It was not until Burr had passed into the grave that
there appeared on the American scene a type of romantic who made
the next fifty years delightful. He was the old reformed pirate who
desecrated his exit into eternity with a Theodosia Burr yarn. The great
celebrity of the woman in her lifetime, the tragic fame of her father
and the circumstances of her death naturally conspired to promote this
kind of aberrant activity in many idle or unsettled minds. The result
was that “pirates” who had been present at the capture of the _Patriot_
in the first days of 1813 began to appear in many parts of the country
and even in England, where they told, usually on their deathbeds, the
most engaging and conflicting tales. It took, as I have remarked, half
a century for all of them to die off.

The accounts given by these various confessors differed in details
only. All agreed that the _Patriot_ had been captured by sea rovers
off the Carolina coast and that the entire crew had been forced to
walk the plank or been cut down by the pirates. Thus the fabulists
accounted for the fact that nothing had ever been heard from any of
Mrs. Alston’s shipmates. Nearly all accounts agreed that Theodosia had
been carried captive to an unnamed island where she had first been a
rebellious prisoner but later the docile and devoted mate of the pirate
chief. A few of the relators gave their narratives the spice of novelty
by insisting that she, too, had been made to walk the plank into the
heaving sea, after she had witnessed all her shipmates consigned to
the same fate. The names of the pirate ships and pirate captains
supposed to have caught the _Patriot_ and disposed of Theodosia Burr
Alston ranged through all the lists of shipping. No two dying corsairs
ever agreed on this point.

Forty years after the disappearance of Mrs. Alston this typical yarn
appeared in the _Pennsylvania Enquirer_:

 “An item of news just now going the rounds relates that a sailor, who
 died in Texas, confessed on his death bed that he was one of the crew
 of mutineers who, some forty years ago, took possession of a brig on
 its passage from Charleston to New York and caused all the officers
 and passengers to walk the gang plank. For forty years the wretched
 man had carried about the dreadful secret and died at last in an agony
 of despair.

 “What gives the story additional interest is the fact that the vessel
 referred to is the one in which Mrs. Theodosia Alston, the beloved
 daughter of Aaron Burr, took passage for New York, for the purpose of
 meeting her parent in the darkest days of his existence, and which,
 never having been heard of, was supposed to have been foundered at sea.

 “The dying sailor professed to remember her well and said she was the
 last who perished, and that he never forgot her look of despair as
 she took the last step from the fatal plank. On reading this account,
 I regarded it as fiction; but on conversing with an officer of the
 navy he assured me of its probable truth and stated that on one of his
 passages home several years ago, his vessel brought two pirates in
 irons who were subsequently executed at Norfolk for recent offenses,
 and who, before their execution, confessed that they had been members
 of the same crew and had participated in the murder of Mrs. Alston and
 her companions.

 “Whatever opinion may be entertained of the father, the memory of the
 daughter must be revered as one of the loveliest and most excellent of
 American woman, and the revelation of her untimely fate can only serve
 to invest that memory with a more tender and melancholy interest.”

Despite the crudities of most of those yarns and their obvious conflict
with known facts, the public took the dying confessions seriously
and the editors of Sunday supplements printed them with a gay air
of credence and a sad attempt at seriousness. Whatever else was
accomplished by this complicity with a most unashamed and unregenerate
band of downright liars, the pirate legend came to be disseminated in
every civilized country and there was gradually built up the great
false tradition which hedges the name and fame of Theodosia Burr. She
has even appeared in novels, American, British and Continental, in the
shape of a mysterious queen of freebooters.

The celebrity of her case came to be such that it was in time seized
upon by the art fakers--perhaps an inevitable step toward genuine
famosity. Several authentic likenesses of Theodosia Burr are extant,
notably the painting by John Vanderlyn in the Corcoran Gallery,
Washington. Vanderlyn was the young painter of Kingston, N. Y., whom
Burr discovered, apprenticed to Gilbert Stuart and sent to Paris for
study. He painted the landing of Columbus scene in the rotunda of the
Capitol. But the work of Vanderlyn and others neither restrained nor
satisfied the freebooters of the arts. On the other hand, the pirate
tales inspired them to profitable activity.

In the nineties of the last century the New York newspapers contained
accounts of a painting of Theodosia Burr which had been found in an
old seashore cottage near Kitty Hawk, N. C., the settlement afterwards
made famous by the gliding experiments of the brothers Wright, and the
scene of their first successful airplane flights. The printed accounts
said that this picture had been found on an old schooner which had been
wrecked off the coast many years before and various inconclusive and
roundabout devices were employed for identifying it as a likeness of
the lost mistress of Richmond Hill.

Later, in 1913, a similar story came into most florid publicity in
New York and elsewhere. It was, apparently, given out by one of the
prominent Fifth Avenue art dealers. A woman client, it was said,
had become interested in the traditional picture of Theodosia Burr,
recovered from a wrecked vessel on the coast of North Carolina.
Accordingly, the art dealer had undertaken a search for the missing
work of art and had at length recovered it, together with a most
fascinating history.

In 1869 Dr. W. G. Pool, a physician of Elizabeth City, N. C., spent
the summer at Nag’s Head, a resort on the outer barrier of sand which
protects the North Carolina coast about fifty miles north of Cape
Hatteras. While there he was called to visit an aged woman who lived
in an ancient cabin about two miles out of the town. His ministrations
served to recover her health and she expressed the wish to pay him
in some way other than with money, of which useful commodity she had
none. The good doctor had noticed, with considerable curiosity, a most
beautiful oil painting of a “beautiful, proud and intelligent lady of
high social standing.” He immediately coveted this picture and asked
his patient for it, since she wanted to give him something in return
for his leechcraft. She not only gave him the portrait but she told him
how she had come by it. Many years before, when she was still a girl,
the old woman’s admirer and subsequent first husband had, with some
others, come upon the wreck of a pilot boat, which had stranded with
all sails set, the rudder tied and breakfast served but undisturbed in
the cabin. The pilot boat was empty and several trunks had been broken
open, their contents being scattered about. Among the salvaged goods
was this portrait, which had fallen to the lot of the old woman’s swain
and come through him to her.

From this old woman and Dr. Pool, the picture had passed to others
without ever having left Elizabeth City. There the enterprising dealer
had found it in the possession of a substantial widow, and she had
consented to part with it. The rest of the story--the essentials--was
to be surmised. The wrecked pilot boat was, to be sure, the _Patriot_,
the date of its stranding agreed with the beclouded incidents of
January, 1813, and the “intelligent lady of high social standing” was
none other than Theodosia Burr.

It is unfortunate that the reproductions of this marvelous and romantic
work do not show the least resemblance to the known portrait of
Theodosia, and it is also lamentable to find that the art dealer, in
his sweet account of his find, fell into all the vulgar misconceptions
and blunders as regards his subject and the tales of her demise. But,
while both these portrait yarns may be dismissed without further
attention, they have undoubtedly served to keep the old and enchanting
story before modern eyes.

In the light of analysis the prosaic explanation of the Theodosia Burr
case seems to be the acceptable one. The boat on which she embarked
was small and frail. At the very time it must have been passing the
treacherous region of Cape Hatteras, there was a storm of sufficient
violence to scatter the heavy British frigates and ships of the line.
The fate of a little schooner in such weather is almost a matter for
assurance. Yet of certainty there can be none. The famous daughter
of the traditional American villain--the devil incarnate to all the
melancholy crew of hypocritical pulpiteers and propagandists--went down
to sea in her cockleshell and returned no more. Eleven decades have
lighted no candle in the darkness that engulfed her.




III

THE VANISHED ARCHDUKE


One of the most engrossing of modern mysteries is that which hides
the final destination of Archduke Johann Salvator of Austria, better
known to a generation of newspaper readers as John Orth. In the dawn
of July 13, 1890, the bark _Santa Margarita_,[2] flying the flag of an
Austrian merchantman, though her owner and skipper was none other than
this wandering scion of the imperial Hapsburgs, set sail from Ensenada,
on the southern shore of the great estuary of the Plata, below Buenos
Aires, and forthwith vanished from the earth. With her went Johann
Salvator, his variety-girl wife and a crew of twenty-six. Though
search has been made in every thinkable port, through the distant
archipelagoes of the Pacific, in ten thousand outcast towns, and though
emissaries have visited all the fabled refuges of missing men, from
time to time, over a period of nearly forty years, no sight of any one
connected with the lost ship has ever been got, and no man knows with
certainty what fate befell her and her princely master.

[2] Sometimes written Sainte Marguerite.

The enigma of his passing is not the only circumstance of curious
doubt and romantic coloration that hedges the career of this imperial
adventurer. His story, from the beginning, is one marked with dramatic
incidents. As much of it as bears upon the final episode will have to
be related.

The Archduke Johann Salvator was born at Florence on the twenty-fifth
day of November, 1852, the youngest son of Grand Duke Leopold II of
Tuscany, and Maria Antonia of the Two Sicilies. He was, accordingly,
a second cousin of the late Emperor Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary.
At the baptismal font young Johann received enough names to carry any
man blissfully through life, his full array having been Johann Nepomuk
Salvator Marie Josef Jean Ferdinand Balthazar Louis Gonzaga Peter
Alexander Zenobius Antonin.

Archduke Johann was still a child when the Italian revolutionists
drove out his father and later united Tuscany to the growing kingdom
of Victor Emanuel. So the hero of this account was reared in Austria
and educated for the army. Commissioned as a stripling, he rose rapidly
in rank for reasons quite other than his family connections. The young
prince was endowed with a good mind and notable for independence
of thought. He felt, as he expressed it, that he ought to earn his
pay, an opinion which led to indefatigable military studies and some
well-intentioned, but ill-advised writings. First, the young archduke
discovered what he considered faults in the artillery, and he wrote a
brochure on the subject. The older heads didn’t like it and had him
disciplined. Later on, Johann made a study of military organization and
wrote a well-known pamphlet called “Education or Drill,” wherein he
attacked the old method of training soldiers as automatons and advised
the mental development of the rank and file, in line with policies now
generally adopted. But such advanced ideas struck the military masters
of fifty years ago as bits of heresy and anarchy. Archduke Johann
was disciplined by removal from the army and the withdrawal of his
commission. At thirty-five he had reached next to the highest possible
rank and been cashiered from it. This in 1887.

Johann Salvator had, however, been much more than a progressive soldier
man. He was an accomplished musician, composer of popular waltzes, an
oratorio and the operetta “Les Assassins.” He was an historian and
publicist, of eminent official standing at least, having collaborated
with Crown Prince Rudolf in the widely distributed work, “The
Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in Word and Picture,” which was published in
1886. He was also a distinguished investigator of psychic phenomena,
his library on this subject having been the most complete in Europe--a
fact suggestive of something abnormal.

Personally the man was both handsome and charming. He was, in spite
of imperial rank and military habitude, democratic, simple, friendly,
and unaffected. He liked to live the life of a gentleman, with diverse
interests in life, now playing the gallant in Vienna--to the high world
of the court and the half world of the theater by turns; again retiring
to his library and his studies, sometimes vegetating at his country
estates and working on his farms. Official trammels and the rigid
etiquette of the ancient court seemed to irk him. Still, he seems to
have suffered keen chagrin over his dismissal from the army.

Johann Salvator had, from adolescence, been a close personal friend
of the Austrian crown prince. This intimacy had extended even to
participation in some of the personal and sentimental escapades for
which the ill-starred Rudolf was remarkable. Apparently the two men
hardly held an opinion apart, and it was accepted that, with the death
of the aging emperor and the accession of his son, Johann Salvator
would be a most powerful personage.

Suddenly, in 1889, all these high hopes and promises came to earth.
After some rumblings and rumorings at Schoenbrunn, it was announced
that Johann Salvator had petitioned the emperor for permission to
resign all rank and title, sever his official connection with the royal
house, and even give up his knighthood in the Order of the Golden
Fleece. The petitioner also asked for the right to call himself Johann
Orth, after the estate and castle on the Gmündensee, which was the
favorite abode of the prince and of his aged mother. All these requests
were officially granted and confirmed by the emperor, and so the man
John Orth came into being.

The first of the two Orth mysteries lies concealed behind the official
records of this strange resignation from rank and honor. Even to-day,
after Orth has been missing for a whole generation, after all those who
might have been concerned in keeping secret the motives and measures of
those times have been gathered to the dust, and after the empire itself
has been dissolved into its defeated components, the facts in the
matter cannot be stated with any confidence. There are two principal
versions of the affair, and both will have to be given so that the
reader may make his own choice. The popular or romantic account
deserves to be considered first.

In the eighties the stage of Vienna was graced by several handsome
young women of the name Stübel. One of them, Lori, achieved
considerable operatic distinction. Another sailed to New York with
her brother and appeared in operetta and in musical comedy at the old
Casino. The youngest of these sisters was Ludmilla Stübel, commonly
called Millie, and on that account sometimes, erroneously, Emilie.

This daring and charming girl began her career in a Viennese operetta
chorus and rose to the rank of principal. She was not, so far as I
can gather from the contemporary newspapers, remarkable for voice or
dramatic ability, but her “surpassingly voluptuous beauty and piquant
manners” won her almost limitless attention and gave her a popularity
that reached across the Atlantic. In the middle eighties Fräulein
Stübel appeared at the Thalia Theater in the Bowery, New York, then the
shrine of German comic opera in the United States, creating the rôles
of _Bettina_ in “The Mascot” and _Violette_ in “The Merry War.”

The _New York Herald_, reviewing her American career a few years
later, said: “In New York she became somewhat notorious for her risqué
costumes. On one occasion Fräulein Stübel attended the Arion Ball in
male costume, and created a scene when ejected. This conduct seems to
have ended her career in the United States.”

This beautiful and spirited plebeian swam into the ken of Johann
Salvator, of Austria, in the fall of 1888, when that impetuous prince
had already been dismissed from the army and his other affairs were
gathering to the storm that broke some months afterward. Catastrophic
events followed rapidly.

[Illustration: ~~ MILLIE STÜBEL ~~]

In January, 1889, Prince Rudolf was found dead in the hunting lodge
at Mayerling, with the Baroness Marie Vetsera, to whom the heir of a
hundred kings is said to have been passionately devoted, and with whom
he may have died in a suicide pact, though it has been said the crown
prince and his sweetheart were murdered by persons whose identity
has been sedulously concealed. This mysterious fatality robbed the
dispirited Johann Salvator of his closest and most powerful friend. It
may have had a good deal to do with what followed.

A few months later Johann Salvator married morganatically his stage
beauty. It was now, after the lapse of a few months, that he resigned
all rank, title, and privileges, left Austria with his wife, and
married her civilly in London.

Naturally enough, it has generally been held that the death of the
crown prince and the romance with the singer explained everything. The
archduke, in disgrace with the army, bereft of his truest and most
illustrious friend, and deeply infatuated with a girl whom he could
not fully legitimatize as his wife, so long as he wore the purple of
his birth, had decided to “surrender all for love” and seek solace in
foreign lands with the lady of his choice. This interpretation has all
the elements of color and sweetness needed for conviction in the minds
of the sentimental. Unfortunately, it does not seem to bear skeptical
examination.

Even granting that Archduke Johann Salvator was a man of independent
mind and quixotic temperament, that he was embittered by his demotion
from military rank, and that he must have been greatly depressed by the
death of Rudolf, who was both his bosom friend and his most powerful
intercessor at court, no such extreme proceeding as the renunciation of
all rank and the severing of family ties was called for.

It is true, too, that the loss of his only son through an affair with a
woman of inferior rank, had embittered Franz Josef and probably caused
the monarch to look with uncommon harshness upon similar liaisons among
the members of the Hapsburg family. Undoubtedly the morganatic marriage
of his second cousin with the shining moth of the theater displeased
the monarch and widened the breach between him and his kinsman; but it
must be remembered that Johann Salvator was only a distant cousin; that
he was not even remotely in line for succession to the throne; that he
had already been deprived of military or other official connection with
the government; and that affairs of this kind have been by no means
rare among Hapsburg scions.

Dour and tyrannical as the emperor may have been, he was no
Anglo-Saxon, no moralist. His own life had not been quite free of
sentimental episodes, and he was, after all, the heir to the proudest
tradition in all Europe, head of the world’s oldest reigning house, and
a believer in the sacredness of royal rank. He must have looked upon a
morganatic union as something not uncommon or specially disgraceful,
whereas a renunciation of rank and privilege can only have struck him
as a precedent of the gravest kind.

Thus, Johann Salvator did not need to take any extreme step because
of his histrionic wife. He might have remained in Austria happily
enough, aside from a few snubs and the exclusion from further official
participation in politics. He might have gone to any country in Europe
and become the center of a distinguished society. His children would
probably have been ennobled, and even his wife eventually given the
same sort of recognition that was accorded the consorts of other
princes in similar case, notably the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose
assassination at Sarajevo precipitated the World War. Instead, Johann
Salvator made the most complete and unprecedented severance from all
that seemed most inalienably his. Historians have had to interpret this
action in another light, and their explanation forms the second version
of the incident, probably the true one.

In 1887, as a result of one of the interminable struggles for hegemony
in the Balkans, Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha had been elected Prince
of Bulgaria, but Russia had refused to recognize this sovereign, and
the other powers, out of deference to the Czar, had likewise refrained
from giving their approval. Austria was in a specially delicate
position as regards this matter. She was the natural rival of Russia
for dominance in the Balkans, but her statesmen did not feel strong
enough openly to oppose the Russian course. Besides, they had their
eyes fixed on Bosnia and Herzegovina. Ferdinand had been an officer in
the Austrian army. He was well liked at Franz Josef’s court, and stood
high in the regard of Crown Prince Rudolf. What is most germane to the
present question is that he was the friend of Johann Salvator.

In 1887, and for a number of years following, Russia attempted to
drive the unwelcome German princeling from the Bulgarian throne by
various military cabals, acts of brigandage, diplomatic intrigues,
and the like. Naturally the young ruler’s friends in other countries
rallied to his aid. Among them was Johann Salvator. It is known that he
interceded with Rudolf for Ferdinand, and he may have approached the
emperor. Failing to get action at Vienna, he is said to have formed a
plan of a military character which was calculated to force the hands
of Austria, Germany, and England, bringing them into the field against
Russia, to the end that Ferdinand might be recognized and more firmly
seated. The plot was discovered in time, according to those who hold
this theory of the incident, and Johann Salvator came under the most
severe displeasure of the emperor.

It is asserted by those who have studied the case dispassionately, that
Johann Salvator’s rash course was one that came very near involving
Austria in a Russian war, and that the most emphatic exhibitions of
the emperor’s reprehension and anger were necessary. Accordingly, it
is said, Franz Josef demanded the surrender of all rank and privileges
by his cousin and exiled him from the empire for life. Here, at least,
is a story of a more probable character, inasmuch as it presents
provocation for the unprecedented harshness with which Archduke Johann
Salvator was treated. No doubt his morganatic marriage and his other
conflicts with higher authority were seized upon as disguises under
which to hide the secret diplomatic motive.

Louisa, the runaway crown princess of Saxony, started a tale to the
effect that her cousin, Johann Salvator, had torn the Order of the
Golden Fleece from his breast in a rage and thrown it at the emperor,
which thing can not have happened since the negotiations between the
emperor and his recreant cousin were conducted at a distance through
official emissaries or by mail.

Again, the Countess Marie Larisch, niece of the Empress Elizabeth,
recounts even more fantastic yarns. She says in so many words that
Crown Prince Rudolf was in a conspiracy with Johann Salvator and others
to seize the crown of Hungary away from the emperor and so establish
Rudolf as king before his time. It was fear of discovery in this plot,
she continues, that led to the suicide of Rudolf. A few days after
Mayerling, she recites, she delivered to Johann Salvator a locked box
(apparently containing secret papers) on a promenade in the mist and he
kissed her hand, exclaimed that she had saved his life--and more in the
same strain.

Both these elevated ladies, it will be recalled, wrote or talked in
self-justification and with the usual stupidity of the guilty. We may
dismiss their yarns as mere women’s gabble and return to the solid
fact that Johann Salvator, impetuous, a little mad and smarting under
his military humiliations, tried to mix into Balkan politics with the
result that he found himself in the position of a bungling interloper,
almost a betrayer of his country’s interests.

Less than two years ago some further light was thrown upon the affair
of the missing archduke through what have passed as letters taken
from the Austrian archives after the fall of the Hapsburgs. These
letters were published in various European and American newspapers
and journals and they may be, as asserted, the veritable official
documents. The portions I quote are taken from the Sunday Magazine of
the _New York World_ of January 10 and January 17, 1926. I must remark
that I regard them with suspicion.

The first letter purports to be a report on the violent misconduct of
Johann Salvator at Venice, as follows:

 “Consul General Alexander, Baron Warsberg, to the Minister of Foreign
 Affairs, Count Kalnoky:

 “I regarded it to be my duty to obtain information about the relations
 and meetings of Archduke Johann, and am sorry to have to report
 to Your Excellency that, _in a rather unworthy manner_, he had
 intercourse on board and in public with a _lady lodged on board of
 the yacht_, which intercourse has not remained unobserved and which
 he could not be induced to veil in spite of the remonstrances of (the
 President of the Chamber) Baron de Fin--Baron de Fin was so offended
 that, after much quarrel and trouble which made him ill, he left the
 ship and lodged in a little inn. He, on his part, reported to His
 Majesty the Emperor, and the Archduke is said to have, after five
 months of silence, written for the first time to His Majesty in order
 to complain of his Chamberlain. This unpleasant situation, still more
 troublesome abroad than it would have been at home, has been solved
 last Sunday, the 20th inst, by the sudden advent of Field Marshal
 Lieut. Count Uxküll, who brought the Imperial Order that His Imperial
 Highness immediately return to Orth at the Sea of Gmünden--to which he
 immediately submitted.

 “Baron de Fin, who is still living here and is on friendly terms with
 me, can give to the Archduke no certificate that would be bad enough.
 According to his experience and observation, His Highness does not
 know any other interests in the world than those of his person, and
 even this only in the common sense; that he, for instance, wished to
 ascend the throne of Bulgaria, not out of enthusiasm for the people
 or for the political idea but only in order to lose the throne after
 a short time and in this way to be freed from the influence of His
 Majesty, the Emperor. Baron de Fin pretends that there would be
 no other means to cure that completely undisciplined and immoral
 character but by dismissing him formally from the imperial family and
 by allowing him, as it is his desire, to enjoy under an adopted name,
 that liberty that he pretends to deem as the highest good. He believes
 him (the Archduke) to have such a 'dose’ of pride that he would return
 with a penitent heart, if he then would be treated according to his
 new rank. I also have observed this haughtiness of the Prince despite
 his talks of liberalism.”

Then follows what may well have been the recreant archduke’s letter of
abdication, thus:

 “Your Majesty:

 “My behavior for nearly two years will have convinced Your Majesty
 that, abstaining from all interests that did not concern me, I
 have lived in retirement in the endeavor to remove Your Majesty’s
 displeasure with me.

 “Being too young to rest forever and too proud to live as a paid
 idler, my situation has become painful, even intolerable, to me.
 Checked by a justified pride from asking for re-employment in the
 army, I had the alternative either to continue the unworthy existence
 of a princely idler or--as an ordinary human being, to seek a new
 existence, a new profession. I was finally urged to a decision in the
 latter sense, as my whole nature refused to fit into the frame of my
 position and my personal independence must be compensation for what I
 have lost.

 “I therefore resign voluntarily, and respectfully return the titles
 and rights of an Archduke, as well as my military title into the hands
 of Your Majesty, but request Your Majesty submissively to deign to
 grant me a civil name.

 “Far from my fatherland, I shall seek a purpose in life, and my
 livelihood probably at sea, and try to find a humble but honorable
 position. If, however, Your Majesty should call your subjects to arms,
 Your Highness will permit me to return home and--though only as a
 common soldier--to devote my life to Your Majesty.

 “Your Majesty may deign to believe me that this step was only impeded
 by the thought of giving offense to Your Majesty--Your Majesty to
 whose Highness I am particularly and infinitely indebted and devoted
 from the bottom of my heart. But as I have to pay for this step dearly
 enough--with my entire social existence, with all that means hope and
 future--Your Majesty will pardon

                       “Your Majesty’s Most Loyally Obedient Servant,
                                           “ARCHDUKE JOHANN, FML.”

Whether one cousin would use such a tone to another, even an emperor,
is a question which every reader must consider for himself, quite
as he must decide whether grown sons of kings were capable of such
middle-class sentiment.

There follows the reply of Franz Josef which has the ring of
genuineness:

  “DEAR ARCHDUKE JOHANN:

 “In compliance with your request addressed to me, I feel induced to
 decide the following:

 “1. I sanction your renunciation of the right of being regarded and
 treated as a Prince of the Imperial House, and permit you to adopt a
 civil name, which you are to bring to my notice after you have made
 your choice.

 “2. I consent to your resigning your commission as an officer and
 relieve you at the same time of your responsibility for the Corps
 Artillery Regiment No. 2.

 “3. I decide at the same time that you are to be struck out of the
 'Knights of the Order of the Golden Fleece.’

 “4. In disposing the suspension of your appenage (Civil List) from
 my court donation, I will inform your brother Archduke Ferdinand
 of Tuscany of the suspension of your share out of the family funds
 proceeds.

 “5. Without my express permission you are forbidden to pass the
 frontiers of the monarchy from your residence abroad for a permanent
 or even a temporary stay in Austria. Finally,

 “6. You are to sign the written declaration which the bearer of this,
 my manuscript will submit to you for this purpose and which he is
 charged to return to me after the signature is affixed.

                                                   “FRANZ JOSEF.”

  “Vienna, Oct. 12, 1889.”

Some correspondence followed on the subject of John Orth’s retention of
his Austrian citizenship, which the emperor wished at first to deny him.

In any event, Johann Salvator, Archduke of Austria, and Prince of
Tuscany, became John Orth, left Austria in the winter of 1889,
purchased and refitted the bark _Santa Margarita_, had her taken to
England, and there joined her with his operetta wife. He sailed for
Buenos Aires in the early spring, with a cargo of cement, and reached
the Rio de la Plata in May. His wife went ahead by steamer to join him
at Buenos Aires.

I quote here, from the same source as the preceding, part of a last
letter from John Orth to his mother at Gmünden:

 “The country here is not very beautiful. Vast plains--the grazing
 grounds for flocks of bullocks, horses and ostriches. The towns
 are much more vivid. Everything is to be found here even at the
 smaller places--electric lights, telephone, all comforts of modern
 civilization. The population, however, is not very sympathetic, a
 combination of doubtful elements from all countries, striving to
 become rich as soon as possible; corruption, fraud, theft, are the
 order of the day.

 “I have made the acquaintance of our Consul. The officer is a certain
 Mikulicz, a cultured, most amiable man. The Honorary Consul is
 Mihanovich, a man who--a few years ago was a porter--and now is a
 millionaire. Social obligations have caused much loss of time, which
 could have been better used for business affairs. Imagine that nothing
 can be done in Ensenada, but we have always to go to Buenos Aires. And
 we have to hurry. The unloading of the cargo, negotiations about a new
 cargo, which I could have accepted if my merchant had not prevented
 me, changes of the board staff, purchase of supplies, work on board,
 the collection and despatch of money, &c., &c. The staff-officers have
 all to be changed. I have the command. Capt. Sodich is offended by the
 fact that I have sent away here in Plata a certain 'Sensal,’ toward
 whom he was too indulgent and who was a man of bad reputation. He has
 given me to understand, in the most impolite manner, that he could
 not remain under such circumstances, that he did not permit himself
 to be treated as a mere zero with regard to the business on land, and
 therefore he resigned the command, &c. I, of course, accepted his
 resignation, and also remained firm when he afterward returned to
 excuse himself. The second lieutenant, Lucich, has shown the insolence
 to deceive the consignee and by calculating forty-eight tons more
 in favor of the ship, believing to do me a favor by such an action.
 I have given to the consignee the necessary indemnification--and
 to restore the compromised honor of the ship, have dismissed the
 lieutenant. The third lieutenant, Leva, took fright of the sea and
 quit voluntarily to seek his fortune on land. Also the boatswain
 Giaconi asked for his dismissal, so much the fire had frightened
 him.[3]

 [3] There had been a fire on the _Santa Margarita_ on the way to Buenos
Aires.

 “As present I have First Lieutenant, Jellecich, who acts as Captain
 and has the command--a man of forty-five years, very quiet,
 experienced and practical. Further, a Second Lieutenant, Mayer,
 Austro-German, very fit for accounts and writings; a boatswain,
 Vranich, who is a real jewel. Thus I hope--with the aid of God--to get
 on at least as well as under the command of Sodich.

 “Imagine: Sodich and Lucich were atheists, and Leva has been a
 Spiritualist. I am happy to have made this change of personnel, with
 whom alone I shall have intercourse for months and months.

 “In the first days of July, when everything will be ready, the journey
 will be continued. Now comes the most difficult part of the passage,
 i. e., the sailing around the dreadful Cape Horn, which is always
 exposed to howling storms. If all ends well, we shall be in two months
 at Valparaiso, which has been so beautifully described by Ludwig. God
 willing, we shall return from there in good health.

 “I am very sorry to have received no news or, strictly speaking, no
 letters of yours. Neither in Ensenada nor in La Plata nor in Buenos
 Aires, neither poste restante nor in the Consulate, have I found
 your letters, and still I believe that you have been so good as to
 write me. I have found letters of Luise, that have been despatched
 by a German steamer, and also letters from London, as well as of the
 Swiss Bank, with which I am in communication, but not one letter from
 Austria. Luise informed me that she has been in Rome, and your dear
 telegram advised me that she has passed Salzburg. I was sorry to see
 from the newspapers that Karl has been ill in Baden; I should be
 happy if this were not true. Then I have read the many nonsensical
 articles written about myself, and am glad that the Consul, who has
 remained in communication with me, was able to state the truth. I am
 also glad of the marriage of Franz, the dream of the young woman is
 now likely to come to an end. I know nothing about Vienna and Gmünden.
 But I repeat that I am disappointed at not having received your
 letters. I hope to God you are well and remain in good health.

 “My next stay will be at Valparaiso. I, therefore, ask you to address
 letters: Giovanni Orth, Valparaiso (Chile) poste restante.

 “Requesting you to give my kind remembrances to the whole family and
 asking you for your blessing, I respectfully kiss your hands.

                                    “Your tenderly loving son,
                                                        GIOVANNI.”

The vessel was accordingly made ready at Ensenada, and on July 12,
1890, John Orth wrote what proved to be the last communication ever
sent by him. It was addressed to his attorney in Vienna and said that
he was leaving to join his ship for a trip to Valparaiso, which might
consume fifty or sixty days. His captain, Orth wrote, had been taken
ill, and his first officer had proved incompetent, so that it had been
necessary to discharge him. Accordingly Orth was personally in command
of his vessel, aided by the second officer, who was an experienced
seaman. This is a somewhat altered version, to be sure.

The apparent intention of the renegade archduke at this time was to
follow the sea. He had caused the _Santa Margarita_ to be elaborately
refitted inside, had insured her for two hundred and thirty thousand
marks with the Hamburg Marine Insurance Company, and he had written
his aged mother at Lake Gmünden of his determination to make his living
as a mariner and an honest man, instead of existing like an idler
on his comfortable private means. There is nothing in the record to
indicate that he intended to go into hiding.

[Illustration: ~~ ARCHDUKE JOHANN SALVATOR ~~]

The _Santa Margarita_ accordingly sailed on the thirteenth of July.
With good fortune she should have been in the Straits of Magellan the
first week in August, and her arrival at Valparaiso was to be expected
not later than the first of September. But the ship did not reach port.
The middle of September passed without word of her. When she had still
not been reported by the first week in October the alarm was given.

As the result of diplomatic representations from the Austrian minister,
the Argentine government soon made elaborate arrangements for a
search. On December the second the gunboat _Bermejo_, Captain Don
Mensilla, put out from Buenos Aires and made a four months’ cruise
of the Argentine coast, visiting every conceivable anchorage where
a vessel of the _Santa Margarita’s_ size might possibly have found
refuge. Don Mensilla found that, beginning the night of July 20, and
continuing intermittently for nearly a month, there had been storms of
the greatest violence in the region of Cape Blanco and the southern
extremity of Tierra del Fuego. More than forty vessels which had been
in the vicinity in this period reported that the disturbances had been
of unusual character and duration, more than sufficient to overwhelm a
sailing bark in the tortuous and treacherous Magellan Straits.

Continuing his search, Don Mensilla found that a vessel answering to
the general description of the _Santa Margarita_ had been wrecked off
the little island of Nuevo Ano, in the Beagle Canal, in the course
of a hurricane which lasted from August 3 to August 5, at which
dates the _Santa Margarita_ was very likely in this vicinity. The
Argentine commander could find no trace of the wreck and no clew to any
survivors. He continued his search for more than two months longer and
then returned to base with his melancholy report.

At the same time the Chilean government had sent out the small steamer
_Toro_ to search the Pacific coast from Cape Sunday to Cape Penas. Her
captain returned after several months with no word of the archduke or
any member of his crew.

These investigations, plus the study of logs and reports at the Hamburg
maritime observatory, soon convinced most authorities that John Orth
and his vessel were at the bottom of the Straits. But in this case, as
in that of Roger Tichborne,[4] an old mother’s fond devotion refused
to accept the bitter arbitrament of chance. The Grand Duchess Maria
Antonia could not bring herself to believe that winds and waves had
swallowed up her beloved son. She stormed the court at Vienna with
her entreaties, with the result that Franz Josef finally sent out the
corvette _Saida_, with instructions to make a fresh search, including
the islands of the South Seas, whither, according to a fanciful report,
John Orth had made his way.

[4] See page 82.

At the same time the grand duchess appealed to Pope Leo, and the
pontiff requested Catholic missionaries in South America and all over
the world to search for John Orth and send immediate news of his
presence to the Holy See.

The _Saida_ returned to Fiume at the end of a year without having
been able to accomplish anything beyond confirming the report of Don
Mensilla. And in response to the pope’s letter many reports came back,
but none of them resulted in the finding of John Orth.

Shortly after the return of the _Saida_ the Austrian heirs of John
Orth moved for the payment of his insurance, and the Hamburg Marine
Insurance Company, after going through the formality of a court
proceeding, paid the claim. In 1896 a demand was made on two banks,
one in Freiburg and the other in St. Gallen, Switzerland, for moneys
deposited with them by the archduke after his departure from Austria
in 1889. One of these banks raised the question of the death proof,
claiming that thirty years must elapse in the case of an unproved
death. The courts decided against the bank, thereby tacitly confirming
the contention that the end of the archduke had been sufficiently
demonstrated. About two million crowns were accordingly paid over to
the Austrian custodians.

In 1909 the court marshal in Vienna was asked to hand over the property
of John Orth to his nephew and heir, and this high authority then
declared that the missing archduke had been dead since the hurricane
of August 3-5, 1890. He, however, asked the supreme court of Austria
to pass finally upon the matter, and a decision was handed down on May
9, 1911, in which the archduke was declared dead as of July 21, 1890,
the day on which the heavy storms about the Patagonian coasts began.
His property was ordered distributed, and his goods and chattels were
sold. The books, instruments, art collection and furniture, which had
long been preserved in the various villas and castles of the absent
prince, were accordingly sold at auction in Berlin, during the months
of October and November, 1912.

In spite of the great care that was taken to discover the facts in
this case, and in the face of the various official reports and court
decisions, a great romantic tradition grew up about John Orth and his
mysterious destiny. The episodes of his demotion, his marriage, his
abandonment of rank, and his exile had undoubtedly much to do with the
birth of the legend. Be that as it may, the world has for more than
thirty years been feasted with rumors of the survival of John Orth and
his actress wife. In the course of the Russo-Japanese war the story
was widely printed that Marshal Yamagato was in reality the missing
archduke. The story was credited by many, but there proved to be no
foundation for it beyond the fact that the Japanese were using their
heavy artillery in a manner originally suggested by the archduke in
that old monograph which had got him disciplined.

Ex-Senator Eugenio Garzon of Uruguay is the chief authority for one
of the most plausible and insistent of all the John Orth stories.
According to this politician and man of letters, there was present
at Concordia, in the province of Entre Rios, Argentine Republic, in
the years 1899 to 1900 and again from 1903 to 1905, a distinguished
looking stranger of military habit and bearing, who had few friends,
received few visits, always spoke Italian with a Señor Hirsch, an
Austrian merchant of Buenos Aires, and generally conducted himself in
a secretive and suggestive manner. Señor Hirsch treated the stranger
with marked respect and deference.

Senator Garzon presents the corroborative opinion of the _Jefe de
Policia_ of Concordia, an official who firmly believed the man of
mystery to be John Orth. On the other hand, Señor Nino de Villa Rey,
the closest friend and sometime host of the supposed imperial castaway,
denied the identity of his intimate and scoffed at the whole tale.
At the same time, say Garzon and the chief of police, Señor de Villa
Rey tried to conceal the presence of the man, and it was the activity
of the police authorities, executing the law authorizing them to
investigate and keep records of the identity of all strangers, that
frightened the “archduke” away. He went to Paraguay and worked in a
sawmill belonging to Villa Rey. Shortly before the outbreak of the
Russo-Japanese war he left for Japan.

This is evidently the basis of the Yamagato confusion. Senator Garzon’s
book is full of doubtful corroboration and too subtle reasoning, but
it is rewarding and entertaining for those who like romance and read
Spanish.[5]

[5] See Bibliography.

The missing John Orth has likewise been reported alive from many
other unlikely parts of the world and under the most incredible
circumstances. Austrian, German, British, French, and American
newspapers have been full of such stories every few years. The much
sought man has been “found” mining in Canada, running a pearl fishery
in the Paumotus, working in a factory in Ohio, fighting with the Boers
in South Africa, prospecting in Rhodesia, running a grocery store in
Texas--what not and where not?

One of the most recent apparitions of John Orth happened in New York.
On the last day of March, 1924, a death certificate was filed with the
Department of Health formally attesting that Archduke Johann Salvator
of Austria, the missing archduke, had died early that morning of
heart disease in Columbus Hospital, one of the smaller semi-public
institutions. Doctor John Grimley, chief surgeon of the hospital,
signed the certificate and said he had been convinced of the man’s
identity by his “inside knowledge of European diplomacy.”

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.

Mrs. Conway, a little puzzled at the receipt of a letter by a special
messenger, tore open the envelope, sat down in the big rocking chair in
her front room, and began to read this appalling communication:

 “Mr. Conway: Your little boy John has been kidnaped and when you
 receive this word, he will be a safe distance from Albany and where he
 could not be found in a hundred years. Your child will be returned to
 you on payment of _three thousand dollars_, $3000, _provided_ you pay
 the money _to-day and strictly obey the following directions_:

 “put the money in a package and send it by a man you can depend on to
 the lane going up the hill a few feet south of the _Troy road first
 tollgate_, just off the road on this lane here is a tree with a big
 trunk have the man put the package on the _south_ side of the tree and
 _at once come away and come back to your house_.

 “We want the money left at this spot at _exactly 8:15 o’clock
 to-night_.

 “See that no one is with the man you send and that no one follows him
 or you will _never look upon your little boy again_

 “If you say a word of this to any one outside _your_ family and the
 man you send with the money or if you take any steps to bring it to
 the attention _of the police you will never see your child_ again, for
 if _any one_ knows of it we will not take the risk of returning him,
 but will leave him _to his fate_.

 “If you obey our instructions in every point you will have word
 _within two hours_ after the money has been left where you can go and
 get your boy safe and sound

 “We have been after this thing for a _long time_ we _know our
 business_ and can beat all the police in America

 “we are after the money and if you do what you are _told_, _no harm
 will come to your little boy_. but if you fail to do what we tell you
 or do what we tell you not to do _you will never look upon your child
 again as sure as there is a god in heaven we know you have the money
 in the bank_ and that the bank closes at 2 o’clock and we _must_ have
 it _to-night so get in time_. don’t tell them why you draw it out. You
 can say you are buying property if you wish for this thing must be
 _between you and us_ if you want your boy back alive.

 “_Remember_ the case of _Charley Ross_ of Philadelphia. His father
 _did not do_ as _he was told_ but went to the police and then spent
 five times as much as he could have got him back for but never saw his
 little boy _to the day of his death a word to the wise man is enough_

 “_Now understand us plainly_ get the money from the bank _in time_
 don’t open your lips to any one and send the money by a trusty man to
 the place we say at 8:15 a _quarter past eight to-night_ He wants to
 _be sure that no one else sees him put the package there_, so there is
 no possible danger of any one _else_ getting it, then within two hours
 you shall have word from us where your boy is.

 “Every move you make will be known to us and if you attempt _any
 crooked work_ with us _say good-by to your boy_ and look out for
 _yourself_ for we will _meet you again when you least expect it_ Do as
 we tell you and all will be well and we will deal straight with you if
 you make the _least crooked move_ you will _regret it to the day of
 your death_.

 “If you want to have your little boy back _safe and sound_. Keep your
 lips closed and do _exactly as you are told_

 “If you fail to obey _every direction_ you will have _one child less_.

                                    “Yours truly
                                        “The Captain of the Gang.”

Mrs. Conway threw down the letter before she had got past the first few
sentences and ran into the street, screaming for her boy. He did not
answer. None of the neighbors had seen him since eight o’clock, when he
had been let out to play in the sun. It was true.

The distracted mother, clutching the strange epistle in her hand, ran
to summon her husband. He read the letter, set his jaw, and sent for
the police. No one was going to extort three thousand dollars from him
without a fight.

Two of the Albany detectives were detailed to ask questions in the
neighborhood and see whether there had been any witnesses to the
abduction. The others began an examination of the strange letter in
the hope of recognizing the handwriting. This attempt yielded nothing
and the letter was temporarily cast aside. Here the first blunder was
made, for I have yet to examine a kidnapper’s letter more revealingly
written.

The letter is remarkable in many ways. It is long, prolix, and
anxiously repetitive. It is without punctuation in part, wrongly
punctuated at other points, miscapitalized or not capitalized at all,
strangely underlined, curiously paragraphed, often without even the
use of a capital letter, wholly illiterate in its structure and yet
contradictory on this very point. The facsimile copy which I have
before me shows that in spite of all the solecisms and blunders, there
is not a misspelled word in the long missive, a thing not always to be
said in favor of the writings of educated and even eminent men. Also,
there are several cheap literary echoes in the letter, such as “never
look upon your child again” and “leave him to his fate.”

The following deductions should have been made from the letter:

That it was written or dictated by some one familiar with Albany and
with the affairs of the Conways, since the writer knows Conway has
the money in the bank, knows the closing hour, is familiar with the
surrounding terrain, is precise in all directions, and knows there are
other and older children, since he constantly refers to “your little
boy” and says that Conway will have “one child less.”

That the writer of the letter is not a professional criminal. Otherwise
he would not have written at length.

That the writer is extremely nervous and anxious to have the thing done
at once.

That he is a man without formal education, who has read a good deal,
especially romances and inferior verse.

That, judging from the chirographic fluctuations, he is a man between
thirty-five and forty-five years of age.

That the kidnappers are anxious to have the money intrusted to some
man known to them, to whom they repeatedly refer and whom they believe
likely to be selected by Conway.

That the child is in no danger, since the letter writer doth threaten
too much.

That the search for the kidnappers should begin close at home.

Lest I be accused of deducing with the aid of what the dialect calls
hindsight, it may be well to say that these conclusions were made from
the facsimile of the letter by an associate who is not familiar with
the case and does not know the subsequent developments.

The detective sciences had, however, reached no special developments
in Albany thirty years ago and little of this vital information was
extracted from the tell-tale letter. Instead of making some deductions
from it and going quietly to work upon them, the officers chose the
time-honored methods. They decided to send a man to the big tree with
a package of paper, meantime concealing some members of the force near
by to pounce upon any one who might call for the decoy. The whole
proceeding ended in a bitter comedy. The police went to the place at
night and used lanterns, which must have revealed them to any watchers.
They were not careful about concealing their plan and they even chose
the wrong tree for the deposition of the lure!

So the second day of the kidnapping mystery opened upon prostrated
parents, who were only too willing to believe that their boy had been
done away with, an excited community which locked the doors and feared
to let its children go to school, and a thoroughly discomfited and
abused police department.

The child had been stolen on Monday. Tuesday, the police made a fresh
start. For one thing they searched the country round about the big
tree on the Troy road, which may have been good training for adipose
officers. Otherwise it was an empty gesture, such as police departments
always make when the public is aroused. For another thing, they spread
the dragnet and hauled in all the tramps and vagrants who chanced to
be stopping in Albany. They also searched the known criminal resorts,
chased down a crop of the usual rumors, and wound up the day in
breathless and futile excitement.

Not so, however, with the newspaper reporters. These energetic young
men, whose repeated discomfitures of the police were one of the
interesting facts of American city government in the last generation,
had gone to work on the Conway case themselves. A young man named
John F. Farrell, employed on one of the Albany papers, began his
investigations by interviewing the father of the missing child. One of
the things the reporter wanted to know was whether any one had ever
tried to borrow or to extort money from Conway. The train dispatcher
replied with some reluctance that his brother-in-law, Joseph M. Hardy,
husband of one of Conway’s older sisters, had repeatedly borrowed small
amounts from the railroad man and once made a demand for a thousand
dollars, which he failed to get, though he used threatening tactics.

The reporter said nothing, but set about investigating Hardy. He found
that the man was in Albany, that he was showing no signs of fright, and
that he was indeed going about with much energy, apparently devoting
himself to the quest for the stolen boy and threatening dire vengeance
upon the kidnappers. Reporter Farrell and his associates took this
business under suspicion and investigated Hardy’s connections and
financial situation. They found the latter to be precarious. They also
discovered that Hardy was the bosom friend of a man named H. G. Blake,
who had operated a small furniture store in Albany, but was known
to be an itinerant peddler and merchant, a man of no very definite
social grade, means of livelihood, or character. In the middle of the
afternoon, when this connection was first discovered, Blake could not
be found in Albany, but late in the evening he was discovered, and the
reporters took him in hand.

At the time they had nothing to go upon except Blake’s firm friendship
with Hardy, the relative of the missing child, who had once tried to
extort a thousand dollars and presumably knew the money affairs of
his brother-in-law. The reporters had only one other detail. In the
course of the day they had canvassed all the livery stables in and
about Albany. They found that early on Monday morning a man had rented
a horse and light wagon at a suburban stable and signed for it. This
signature was compared with that of Blake, taken from a hotel register
and some tax declarations. The handwriting seemed to be identical, and
the reporters suspected that Blake had rented the rig under an assumed
name.

While Hardy, Conway’s brother-in-law, was lulled into the belief that
he was under no suspicion and allowed to go to his home and to bed,
Blake was taken to the newspaper office by the reporters and there
asked what he knew about the Conway kidnapping. He denied all knowledge
until he was assured that the paper wished to score a “scoop” on the
story and was willing to pay $2,500 cash for information that would
lead to the recovery of the boy.

A large wallet was shown him, containing a wadding of paper with
several bank notes on the outside. Apparently the man was a bit
feeble-minded. At any rate, he fell into the trap, abandoning all
caution and reaching greedily for the money. He said, of course, that
he knew nothing directly about the affair, but that he could find out.
Later, when the money was withdrawn from his sight he began to boast of
what he could do. Under various incitements and provocations he talked
along until it became apparent that he was one of the kidnappers. When
it was too late the man realized that he had talked too much, and then
he tried to retract. When he attempted to leave the office he was met
by two officers who had been quietly summoned by the reporters and
appeared disguised as drivers. The wallet was once more held out to
Blake, and his greed so far overcame him that he agreed to guide the
reporters to the spot where the boy was hidden, hold a conference with
his captain, and see that the child was delivered.

The little party, consisting of two reporters, the two disguised
officers, and Blake set out late at night and arrived at a place on
the Schenectady road, about eight miles from Albany, shortly before
midnight. Blake here demanded the cash, but was told that it would not
be handed over until he produced the boy. He then said that he thought
the purse did not contain the money. A long argument followed. Once
more the glib talking of the reporters prevailed, and Blake went into
the dense woods, accompanied by one of the officers, ostensibly to find
the boy.

After proceeding some distance, Blake told the officer, whom he still
believed to be a driver, to remain behind, and proceeded farther into
the forest. More than an hour passed before he returned, and the party
was about to drive off, thinking the man had played a clever trick.
Blake, however, came back querulous and suspicious. He demanded once
more to see the money, and being refused, said the trick was up. One of
the men, however, persuaded him to take him to the other members of the
gang, promising that the money would be delivered the moment the boy
was seen alive. Apparently Blake was once more befooled, for he allowed
the supposed driver to accompany him and made off again into the heart
of the woods. One of the reporters and the other disguised policeman
followed secretly.

When the two pairs of men had proceeded about three hundred yards, the
second lurking in the van of the first, not daring to strike a light,
slashed by the underbrush and in evident danger of being shot down, the
smoky light of a camp fire appeared suddenly ahead. In another minute a
childish voice could be heard, and the gruff tones of a man trying to
silence it. Blake and his companion made for the fire and were met by
a masked man with a leveled revolver who informed them that they were
surrounded and would be killed if they made a false move. There was a
parley, which lasted till the second pair came up.

Just what happened at this interesting moment is not easy to say.
The witnesses do not agree. Apparently, however, the little boy,
momentarily released by his captor, ran away. The three hunters
thereupon made a rush for him and there was an exchange of shots in
the darkness. One of the officers pounced upon the boy and dragged him
to the road, closely followed by the reporter and the other officer,
leaving Blake, the masked man, and whatever other kidnappers there
might be to flee or pursue. The boy was quickly tossed into the wagon,
the reporter and officers sprang in after him, and the horses were
lashed into a gallop. Apparently, the midnight adventure had been a
little trying on the nerves of the party.

After the rescuers had driven a mile or two at furious speed, it became
apparent that there was no pursuit on part of the kidnappers and
the drive was slowed to a more comfortable pace while the reporters
questioned the child.

Johnny Conway recited in a childish prattle that he had been playing in
the street before his father’s house when a dray wagon came by. He had
run and caught on to the rear of this for a ride down the block. As he
dropped off the wagon, he had been met by a stranger who smiled, patted
his head and offered to buy him candy. The child was readily beguiled
and taken to the light wagon in which he was driven several miles into
the country. Here he was concealed for a time in a vacant cabin. The
next night he and his captors spent in a church until they moved out
into the woods and began to camp. At this spot the rescuers had found
him.

According to the child, the kidnappers had not been cruel or
threatening. They had provided plenty of food. They had even played
games with the little boy and tried to keep him amused. The only
complaint Johnny Conway had to make was against the mosquitoes, which
had cruelly bitten him and tortured him incessantly for the two nights
and one day he and his captors spent in the woods.

Very early on the morning of August 19th, just three days after the
kidnapping, a dusty two-seated wagon turned into Colonia Street and
proceeded slowly up that quiet thoroughfare toward the Conway house. In
spite of the unseasonable hour there was a crowd in the street, some
of whose members had been on watch all night. Albany had been seized
with terror and morbid curiosity. The Conway house was never without a
few straggling watchers, eager for the first news or crumbs of gossip.
Reporters from the New York newspapers were on the scene, and special
officers from the great city were on their way. Everything was being
prepared for another breathless, nation-wide sensation. The two-seated
wagon spoiled it all in the gray light of that early morning.

As the vehicle came close to the Conway house, and some of the
stragglers ran out toward it, possibly sensing something unusual, one
of the reporters rose in the rear and lifted a small and sleepy boy in
his arms.

“Is it him? Is it the bhoy?” an Irish neighbor called anxiously.

“It’s Johnny Conway!” called the triumphant newspaper sleuth.

There was a cheer and then another. Sleeping neighbors came running
from their houses in night garb. The Conways came forth from a
sleepless vigil and caught the child in their arms. So the mystery of
the boy’s fate came to an abrupt end, but another and more lasting
enigma immediately succeeded.

Hardy, the boy’s conspiring relative, was immediately seized at his
home and dragged to the nearest station house. The rumor of his
connection with the kidnapping got abroad within a few hours, and the
police building was immediately besieged by a crowd which demanded
to see the prisoner. The police drove the crowd off, but it returned
after an hour, much augmented in numbers and provided with a rope for a
lynching. After several exciting hours, the mob was finally cowed and
driven away by the mayor of Albany and a platoon of police with drawn
revolvers.

One of the conspirators was thus safely in jail, but at least two
others were known, Blake and the man in the mask. Several posses set
out at once and surrounded the woods in which the child had been found.
After beating the brush timidly all day and spending a creepy night
in the black forest, fighting the mosquitoes, the citizenry lost its
pallid enthusiasm and returned to Albany only to find that the police
of Schenectady had arrested Blake in that city late the preceding
evening and that the man was lodged in another precinct house where he
could not communicate with Hardy. Another abortive lynching bee was
started. Once more the mayor and the police drove off the howling gangs.

The man in the mask, however, was still at large. Both Hardy and Blake
at first refused to name him, and the police were at sea. Then a
curious thing happened.

William N. Loew, a New York attorney, reading of the kidnapping affair
at Albany, which appeared in the metropolitan newspapers under black
headlines, went to the office of one of the journals and said he
believed he could give valuable information.

On July 15th, a little more than a month earlier, Bernard Myers, a
clothing merchant of West Third Street, New York, had flirted on a
Broadway car with a handsome young woman, who had given him her name
and address as Mrs. Albert Warner, 141 West Thirty-fourth Street, and
invited him to write her. Myers, more avid than cautious, wrote the
woman a fervid letter, asking for an appointment. A few days later two
men appeared in the Myers store. One of them, who carried a heavy cane,
said that he was the husband of Mrs. Warner, brandished the guilty
letter in one hand, the cane in the other, and demanded that Myers
give him a check for three hundred dollars on the spot or take the
consequences. Myers, after some argument, gave a check for one hundred
dollars, and then, as soon as the men had left his store, rushed to his
bank and stopped payment. He then visited the district attorney and
caused the arrest of Warner, who was now arraigned and released on bail.

Loew had been summoned to act as attorney for Warner. He now told the
newspapers of disclosures his client had made to him in consultation.
Warner, who was himself an attorney with an office at 1298 Broadway,
had told Loew that he was interested in a plot to organize kidnapping
on a commercial scale, and that the first jobs would be attempted in
up-State New York. He gave Loew many details and talked plausibly
of the ease with which parents could be stripped of considerable
sums. Loew, who considered his client and fellow attorney slightly
demented, had paid little attention to this sinister talk at the time.
Now, however, he felt sure that Warner had told the truth and that he
probably was the man in the mask.

Faced with these revelations, in his cell, the pliant Blake admitted
that he was a friend of Warner’s, that they had indeed been schoolmates
in their youth. He also admitted that he had been in New York a few
days before the abduction of Johnny Conway and had then visited Warner.
So the chase began.

The police discovered that Warner had been at his office a day ahead
of them and slipped out of New York again. They also found that he had
been at Albany the three days that Johnny Conway had been detained.
Their investigations showed also that Warner, though he had the
reputation of being a particularly shrewd and energetic counselor, had
never adhered very closely to the law himself, but had again and again
been implicated in shady or criminal transactions, though he had always
escaped prison, probably through legal acumen.

It was soon apparent that the man had got well away, and an alarm was
sent across the country. The police circulars that went out to all
parts of America and the chief British and continental ports, described
a man between forty and forty-five years old, more than six feet tall,
slender, dark, with hair of iron gray over a very high forehead. That
Warner was a bicycle enthusiast was the only added detail.

The quest for Warner was one of the most exciting in memory. The
first person sought and found was the Mrs. Warner who had given her
name and address to Bernard Myers on the Broadway car and figured in
the subsequent blackmail charges. She was found living quietly at a
boarding house in one of the adjacent New Jersey towns and said that
she had not seen Warner for some weeks, a claim which turned out to
be very near the truth. He had, in fact, visited her just before he
started to Albany, but it is doubtful whether he confided to the girl,
who was not in truth his wife, any of his plans or intentions.

It was then discovered that Attorney Warner was married and had a wife,
from whom he had long been separated, living in a small town in upper
New York. The detectives also visited this woman, but she had not seen
her husband in years and could supply no information.

Then the rumor-starting began. Warner was seen in ten places on the
same day. His presence was reported from every corner of the country.
Clews and reports led weary officers thousands of miles on empty
pursuits. Finally, when no real information as to the man developed,
the public wearied of him, and news of the case dropped out of the
papers.

Meantime Hardy and Blake came up for trial. Blake made an attempt
to mitigate his case by turning State’s evidence, and Hardy pleaded
that he had only been an intermediary, whose motivation was his
brother-in-law’s closeness and reproof. In view of the fact that the
evidence against the two men seemed conclusive, even without the
admissions of either one, the prosecutor decided to reject their
pleas and force them to stand trial. The cases were quickly heard and
verdicts of guilty reached on the spot. The presiding justice at once
sentenced both men to serve fourteen and one half years in the State
prison at Dannemora, and they were shortly removed to that gloomy house
of pain in the Adirondack Mountains.

All this happened before the first of October. The prisoners, having
been sentenced and sent to the penitentiary, and the kidnapped boy
being safely in his parents’ home, the whole affair was quickly
forgotten.

But a little after seven o’clock on the evening of December 12, two men
entered the farm lot of William Goodrich near the little village of
Riley in central Kansas, about two thousand miles from Albany and the
scene of the kidnapping. It was past dusk and the farm hand, one George
Johnson, was milking in the cow stable by lantern light.

As the rustic, clad in overalls, covered with dirt and straw, horny of
hand and tanned by the prairie winds, rose from his stool and started
to leave the stable with his buckets, the two strangers stepped inside
and approached him. One of them laid a rough hand on the farmer’s
shoulder and said soberly:

“Warner, I want you. Come along.”

“Must be some mistake,” said the milker in a curious Western drawl. “My
name is Gawge Johnson.”

“Out here it may be,” said the officer, “but in New York it’s Albert S.
Warner. I have a warrant for your arrest in connection with the Conway
kidnapping. You’ll have to come.”

The farm hand was taken to the house, permitted to change his clothes,
and loaded upon the next eastbound train. When he reached Kansas City
he refused to go farther without extradition formalities. After the
officers had telegraphed to New York, the man changed his mind again
and proceeded voluntarily back to Albany, where he was placed in
jail and soon brought to trial. He was sentenced to fifteen years’
imprisonment, the maximum penalty, as the leader of the kidnappers.

The captor of Warner had been Detective McCann of the Albany police
force. He had trailed the man about five thousand miles, partly on
false scents. In his wanderings he had gone to Georgia, Tennessee,
Minnesota, New Mexico, Missouri, and finally to Kansas, where he had
satisfied himself that Warner was working on the Goodrich farm. McCann
had then called a Pinkerton detective to his aid from the nearest
office and made the arrest as already described.

The truth about the Conway kidnapping case seems to have been that
Hardy, the boy’s uncle by marriage, had been scheming for some time
to get a thousand dollars out of his brother-in-law. He had confided
his ideas to Blake, his chum. Blake had suggested the inclusion of his
friend, Warner, whom he rated a smart lawyer and clever schemer. Warner
had then acted as organizer and leader, with what success the reader
will judge.




V

THE LOST HEIR OF TICHBORNE


On the afternoon of the twentieth of April, 1854, the schooner _Bella_
cast off her moorings at the Gamboa wharves in Rio, worked her way down
the bay, and stood out to sea, bound for her home port, New York. She
was partly in ballast, because of slack commerce, and carried a single
passenger. About the name and fate of this solitary voyager grew up a
strange mystery and a stranger history.

When the last glint of the _Bella’s_ sails was seen from Rio’s island
anchorages, that vessel passed forever out of worldly cognizance. She
never reached any port save the ultimate, and of those that rode in
her, nothing came back but rumor and doubt. Her end and theirs was
veiled in a storm and hidden among unknown waters. The epitaph was
written at Lloyd’s in the familiar syllables: “Foundered with all
hands.”

Of the _Bella’s_ master, or the forty members of her crew, there is
no surviving memory, and only a grimy hunt through the old shipping
records could avail in the discovery of anything concerning them. But
the lone passenger happened to be the son of a British baronet and heir
to a great estate--Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne. The succession and
the inheritance of the Tichborne wealth depended upon the proof of
this young man’s death. There was, accordingly, some formal inquiry
as to the _Bella_ and her wreck. The required months were allowed to
pass; the usual reports from all ports were scanned. On account of the
insistence of the Tichborne family, some additional care was taken. But
in July, 1855, the young aristocrat was formally declared lost at sea,
his insurance paid, and the question of succession taken before the
court in chancery, which determined such matters.

Here, no doubt, the question as to the fate of young Tichborne would
have ended, had it not been for the peculiar insistence of his mother.
Lady Tichborne would not, and probably could not, bring herself to
believe that her beloved elder son had met his end in this dark and
mysterious manner. In the absence of human witnesses to his death
and objective proofs of the end, she clung obstinately to hope and
continued to advertise for the “lost” young man for many years after
the courts had solved the problem--or believed they had.

There had already been the cloud of pathos about the head of Roger
Tichborne, whose detailed story is necessary to an understanding
of subsequent events. Born in Paris on January 5, 1829--his mother
being the natural daughter of Henry Seymour of Knoyle, Wiltshire, and
a beautiful French woman--Roger was the descendant of very ancient
Hampshire stock. His father, the tenth baronet, was Sir James Tichborne
and his grandfather was the once-celebrated Sir Edward of that line.

Because of her antipathy to her husband’s country, Lady Tichborne
decided that her son should be reared as a Frenchman, and the lad spent
the first fourteen years of his life in France, with the result that
he never afterward became quite a Briton. Indeed, his brief English
schooling at Stonyhurst never went far enough to get the young man out
of the habit of thinking in French and translating his Gallic idioms
into English, a fault that appears in his letters to the very end, and
one that caused him considerable suffering as a boy in England.

Roger Tichborne left Stonyhurst in 1849 and joined the Sixth Dragoon
Guards at Dublin, as a subaltern. But in 1852 he sold out his
commission and went home. His peculiarities of manner and appearance,
his accent and strange idioms and a temperamental unfitness for
soldiering had made him miserable in the army. The constant cruel, if
thoughtless, jibes and mimicries of his fellows found him a sensitive
mark.

But the unhappy termination of the young man’s military career
was only a minor factor in an almost desperate state of mind that
possessed him at this time. He had fallen in love with his cousin,
Kate Doughty, afterward Lady Radcliffe, and she had found herself
unable to reciprocate. After many pleadings and storms the young heir
of the Tichbornes set sail from Havre in March, 1853, and reached
Valparaiso, Chile, about three months later, evidently determined to
seek forgetfulness in stranger latitudes. In the course of the southern
summer he crossed the Andes to Brazil and reached Rio in March or
early April. Here he embarked on the _Bella_ for New York, as recited,
his further plans remaining unknown. In letters to his mother he had,
however, spoken vaguely of an intention to go to Australia, a hint upon
which much of the following romance was erected.

When, in the following year, the insurance was paid, and the will
proved, the Tichbornes accepted the death of the traveler as
practically beyond question. But not so his mother. She began, after an
interval, to advertise in many parts of the world for trace of her son.
Such notices appeared in the leading British, American, Continental,
and Australian journals without effect. Only one thing is to be
learned from them, the appearance of the lost heir. He is described
as being rather undersized, delicate, with sharp features, dark eyes,
and straight black hair. These personal specifications will prove of
importance later on.

In 1862 Roger Tichborne’s father died, and a younger son succeeded
to the baronetcy and estates. This event stirred the dowager Lady
Tichborne to fresh activities, and her advertisements began to appear
again in newspapers and shipping journals over half the world. As
a result of these injudicious clamorings for information, many a
seaspawned adventurer was received by the grieving mother at Tichborne
House, and many a common liar imposed on her for money and other
favors. Repeated misadventures of this sort might have been considered
sufficient experience to cause the dowager to desist from her folly,
but nothing seemed to move her from her fixed idea, and the fantastic
reports and rumors brought her by every wandering sharper had the
effect of strengthening her in her fond belief.

Lady Tichborne’s pertinacity, while it had failed to restore her
son, had not been without its collateral effects. Among them was the
wide dissemination of a romantic story and the enlistment of public
sympathy. A large part of the newspaper-reading British populace soon
came to look upon the lady as a high example of motherly devotion,
to sympathize with her point of view, and gradually to conclude that
she was right, and that Roger Tichborne was indeed alive, somewhere
in the antipodes. This belief was not entirely confined to emotional
strangers, as appears from the fact that Kate Doughty, the object of
the young nobleman’s bootless love, refused various offers of marriage
and steadfastly remained single, pending a termination of all doubt as
to the fate of her hapless lover.

Thus, in one way and another, a great legend grew up. The Tichborne
case came to be looked upon in some quarters as another of the great
mysteries of disappearance. In various distant lands volunteer seekers
took up the quest for Roger Tichborne, impelled sometimes by the
fascinating powers of mystery, but more often by the hope of reward.

In 1865 a man named Cubitt started a missing friends’ bureau in Sydney,
New South Wales, a fact which he advertised in the London newspapers.
Lady Tichborne, still far from satisfied of her son’s death, saw the
notice in _The Times_ and communicated with Cubitt. As a result of this
contact, Lady Tichborne was notified, in November, 1865, that a man
had been discovered who answered the description of her missing “boy.”
This fellow had been found keeping a small butcher shop in the town of
Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, and was there known by the name of Thomas
Castro, which he admitted to be assumed.

Lady Tichborne, excited and elated, communicated at once and did not
fail to give the impression that the discovery and return of her eldest
son would be a feat to earn a very high reward, since he was the heir
to a large property, and since she was herself “most anxious to hear.”
Australia was then, to be sure, much farther away than to-day. There
were no cables and only occasional steamers. It often took months for
a letter to pass back and forth. Thus, after painful delays, Lady
Tichborne received a second communication in which she was told that
there could be little doubt about the identification, as the butcher of
Wagga Wagga had owned to several persons that he was indeed not Thomas
Castro, but a British “nobleman” in disguise, and to at least one
person that he was none other than Roger Tichborne.

Not long afterward Lady Tichborne received her first letter from
her missing “son”. He addressed her as “Dear Mama,” misspelled the
Tichborne name by inserting a “t” after the “i,” spelled common
words abominably, and handled the English language with a fine show
of ignorance. Finally he referred to a birthmark and an incident at
Brighton, of which Lady Tichborne had not the slightest recollection.
At first she was considerably damped by these discrepancies and
mistakes of the claimant, as the man in Wagga Wagga came shortly to be
termed. But Lady Tichborne soon rallied from her doubts and asserted
her absolute confidence in the genuineness of the far-away pretender to
the baronetcy.

Her stand in the matter was not inexplicable, even when it is recalled
that subsequent letters from Australia revealed the claimant to be
ignorant of common family traditions and totally confused about
himself, even going so far as to say that he had been a common soldier
in the carabineers, when Roger Tichborne had been an officer, and
referring to his schooling at Winchester, whereas the Roman Catholic
Tichbornes had, of course, sent their son to Stonyhurst. Lady Tichborne
apparently ascribed such lapses to the “terrible ordeal” her boy
had suffered, and she was not the only one to recognize that Roger
Tichborne had himself, because of his early French training and the
meagerness of his subsequent education, misspelled just such words as
appeared incorrectly in the letters, and he had misused his English in
a very similar fashion.

These details are interesting rather than important. Whatever their
final significance, Lady Tichborne sent money to Australia to pay for
the claimant’s passage home. He arrived in England, unannounced, in the
last month of 1866, and visited several localities, among them Wapping,
a London district which played a vital part in what was to come. He
also visited the vicinity of Tichborne Park and made numerous inquiries
there. Only after these preliminaries did he cross to Paris, where he
summoned Lady Tichborne to meet him. When she called at his hotel she
found him in bed complaining of a bad cold. The room was dimly lighted,
and she recounted afterward that he kept his face turned to the wall
most of the time she spent with him.

What were the lady’s feelings on first beholding this man is an
interesting matter for speculation. She had sent away, thirteen
years before, a slight, delicate, poetic aristocrat, whose chief
characteristic was an excessive refinement that made him quite unfit
for the common stresses of life. In his stead there came back a short,
gross, enormously fat plebeian, with the lingual faults and vocal
solecisms of the cockney. In the place of the young man who knew his
French and did not know his English, here was a fellow who could speak
not a word of the Gallic tongue and used his English abominably.

None of these things appeared to make any difference to Lady Tichborne.
She received the claimant without reservation, said publicly that she
had recovered her darling boy, and went so far as to announce her
reasons for accepting him as her son.

The return of Roger Tichborne was, to be sure, an exciting topic
of the newspapers of the time, with the result that the romantic
story of his voyage, the shipwreck of the _Bella_, his rescue, his
wanderings, his final discovery at Wagga Wagga, and his happy return
to his mother’s arms became known to millions of people, many of whom
accepted the legend for its charm and color alone, without reference to
its probability. Indeed, the tale had all the elements that make for
popularity and credibility. The opening incident of unrequited love,
the journey in quest of forgetfulness, the crossing of the Andes, the
ordeal of shipwreck, the adventures in the Australian bush, and the
intervention of the hand of Providence to drag him back to his native
land, his title and his inheritance! Was there lacking any element of
pathetic grace?

For those who saw in his ignorance of Tichborne family affairs
and his sad illiteracy sober objections to the pretensions of the
claimant, there was triple evidence of identification. Not only had
Lady Tichborne recognized this wanderer as her son, but two old
Tichborne servants had preceded her in their approval. It happened
that one Bogle, an old negro servant, who had been intimate with
Roger Tichborne as a boy, was living in New South Wales when the first
claim was put forward by the man at Wagga Wagga. At the request of
the dowager this man went to see the pretender and talked with him at
length, first in the presence of those who were pressing the claim
and later alone. The servant and the claimant reviewed a number of
incidents in Roger Tichborne’s early life, and Bogle reported that he
was satisfied. He became “Sir Roger’s” body servant and subsequently
accompanied him to England. Later a former Tichborne gardener,
Grillefoyle by name, who also had gone out to Australia, was sent
to interview the Wagga Wagga butcher. The result was the same. He
reported favorably to his former mistress, and it seems to have been
mainly on the opinion of these two men that Lady Tichborne based her
decision to disregard the difficulties inherent in the letters and to
finance the return of the man to England. Their testimony, backed by
the enduring hunger of her own heart, no doubt swayed her to credence
when she finally stood face to face with the improbable apparition that
pretended to be her son.

The claimant, though he had arrived in England in December, 1866,
made various claims and went to court once or twice but did not make
the definitive legal move to establish his position or to retrieve
the baronetcy and estates until more than three years later. Suit was
finally entered toward the end of 1870, and the trial came on before
the court of common pleas in London on the eleventh of May, 1871. This
was the beginning of one of the most intricate and remarkable law-trial
dramas to be found in the records of modern nations.

The Tichborne pretender had used the years of delay for the purpose
of gathering evidence and consolidating his case. He had sought out
and won over to his side the trusted servants of the house, the family
solicitor, students at Stonyhurst, officers of the carabineers and many
others. The school, the officers’ mess, the Tichborne seat, and many
other localities connected with the youth and young manhood of Roger
Tichborne had all been visited. In addition, the obese claimant had
further cultivated Lady Tichborne, who came to have more and more faith
in him. Originally she had written:

“He confuses everything as if in a dream, but it will not prevent me
from recognizing him, though his statements differ from mine.”

Before the suit was filed, and the case came to be tried, his memory
improved remarkably; he corrected the many errors in his earlier
statements, and his recollection quickly assimilated itself to that
of Lady Tichborne. After he had been in England for a time even his
handwriting grew to be unmistakably like that revealed in the letters
written by Roger Tichborne before his disappearance.

There was, accordingly, a very palpable stuff of evidence in favor
of the man from Australia. I have already said that the public
accepted the stranger. It needs to be recorded that every new shred
of similarity or circumstance that could be brought out only added to
the conviction of the people. This was unquestionably Roger Tichborne
and none other. Some elements asserted their opinion with a passion
that was not far from violence, and the public generally regarded the
hostile attitude of the Tichborne family as based on selfish motives.
Naturally the other Tichbornes did not want to be dispossessed in favor
of a man who had been confidently and perhaps jubilantly counted among
the dead for more than fifteen years. The man in the street regarded
the family position as natural, but reprehensible. How, it was asked,
could there be any doubt when the boy’s mother was so certain? Was
there anything surer than a mother’s instinct? To doubt seemed almost
monstrous. Accordingly, the butcher of Wagga Wagga became a public
idol, and the Tichborne family an object of aversion.

Nor is this in the least exaggerated. When it became known that the
claimant had no funds with which to prosecute his case, the suggestion
of a public bond issue was made and promptly approved. Bonds, with no
other backing than the promise to refund the advanced money when the
claimant should come into possession of his property, were issued,
and so extreme was the public confidence in the validity of the claim
that they were bought up greedily. In addition, a number of wealthy
individuals became so interested in the affair and so convinced of the
rights of the stranger, that they made him large personal advances. One
man, Mr. Guilford Onslow, M. P., is said to have lent as much as 75,000
pounds, while two ladies of the Onslow family advanced 30,000 pounds
and Earl Rivers is believed to have wasted as much as 150,000 pounds on
the impostor.

Finally the civil trial of the suit took place. The proceedings began
on the eleventh of May, 1871, and were not concluded until March,
1872. Sir John Coleridge, who defended for the Tichborne family and
later became lord chief justice, cross-questioned the claimant for
twenty-two days, and his speech in summing up is said to have been the
longest ever delivered before a court in England. The actual taking
of evidence required more than one hundred court days, and at least a
hundred witnesses identified the claimant as Roger Tichborne. To quote
from Major Arthur Griffiths’ account:

“These witnesses included Lady Tichborne,[6] Roger’s mother, the family
solicitor, one baronet, six magistrates, one general, three colonels,
one major, thirty non-commissioned officers and men, four clergymen,
seven Tichborne tenants, and sixteen servants of the family.”

[6] A mistake, for the dowager Lady Tichborne died on March 12, 1868.
Her damage had been done before the trial.

On the other hand, the defense produced only seventeen witnesses
against the claimant, but it piled up a great deal of dark-looking
evidence, and, in the course of his long and terrible interrogation of
the plaintiff, Coleridge was able to bring out so many contradictions,
such appalling blanks of memory, and such an accumulation of ignorances
and blunders that the jury gave evidence of its inclination. Thereupon
Serjeant Ballantine, the claimant’s leading counsel, abandoned the case.

On the order of the judge the claimant was immediately seized, charged
with three counts of perjury, and remanded for criminal trial. This
case was not called until April, 1873, and it proved a more formidable
legal contest than the unprecedented civil action. The proceedings
lasted more than a year, and it took the judge eighteen days to charge
the jury; this in spite of the usual despatch of British trials. How
long such a case might have hung on in the notoriously slow American
courts is a matter for painful speculation.

This long and dramatic trial, full of emotional scenes and stirring
incidents, moving slowly along to the accompaniment of popular unrest
and violent partisanship in the newspapers, ended as did the civil
action. The claimant was convicted of having impersonated Roger
Tichborne, of having sullied the name of Miss Kate Doughty, and of
having denied his true identity as Arthur Orton, the son of a Wapping
butcher. The infant nephew of the real Roger Tichborne was, by this
verdict, confirmed in his rights, and the claimant was sentenced to
fourteen years imprisonment. Thus ended one of the most magnificent
impostures ever attempted. Lady Tichborne did not live to witness this
collapse of the fraud, or the humiliation of the man she had so freely
accepted as her own son. The poor lady was shown to be a monomaniac,
whose judgment had been unseated by the shipwreck of her beloved eldest
boy.

I have purposely reserved the story, as brought out in the two trials,
for direct narration, since it embraces the major romance connected
with this celebrated case and needs to be told with regard to
chronology and climax.

Arthur Orton, the true name of the claimant, was born to a Wapping
butcher, at 69 High Street, in June, 1834, and was thus nearly five
years younger than Roger Tichborne. He had been afflicted with St.
Vitus’ dance as a boy and had been delinquent. As a result of this, he
had been sent from home when fourteen years old, and he had taken a
sea voyage which landed him, by a strange coincidence, at Valparaiso,
Chile, in 1848, five years before Tichborne reached that port. Orton
remained in Chile for several years, living with a family named Castro,
at the small inland city of Melipillo, until 1851, when he returned to
England and visited his parents at Wapping. In the following year he
sailed for Tasmania and settled at Hobart Town.

[Illustration:

                                               _Copyright, Maull & Fox_

                          ~~ ARTHUR ORTON ~~]

He operated a butcher shop in that place for some years, but made a
failure of business and “disappeared into the brush,” owing every one.
Trace of his movements then grew vague, but it is known that he was
suspected of complicity in several highway robberies, which were staged
in New South Wales a few years afterward, and he was certainly charged
with horse stealing on one occasion. Later he appeared in Wagga Wagga
and opened a small butcher shop under the name of Thomas Castro, which
he had adopted from the family in Chile.

In a confession which Orton wrote and sold to a London newspaper[7]
years after his release from prison in 1884, he gives an account of
the origin of the fraud. He says that some time before Cubitt, of the
missing-friends bureau, found him and induced him to write to Lady
Tichborne, he and his chum at Wagga Wagga, one Slade, had seen some of
the advertisements which the distraught lady was having published in
antipodean newspapers. Orton soon adopted the pose of superior station,
told Slade that he was, in fact, a nobleman incognito, and finally let
his friends understand that he was Roger Tichborne. The whole thing
had been begun in a spirit of innocent acting, for the purpose of
noting the effect of such a revelation upon his friend. In view of
what followed we cannot escape the conclusion that the swinishly fat
butcher undertook this adventure because he was mentally disturbed, in
the sense of being a pathological liar. A talent for impersonation and
imposture is one of the marked characteristics displayed by this common
type of mental defective, and Orton certainly possessed it, almost to
the point of genius.

[7] _The People_, 1898.

Whatever the explanation of Orton’s original motive, the fact remains
that his friend Slade was impressed by the butcher’s tale and thus
encouraged Orton to proceed with the fraud, as did a lawyer to whom
Orton-Castro was in debt. He soon went swaggering about, trying to
talk like a gentleman and giving what must have been a most painful
imitation of the manners of a lord. His rude neighbors can have had no
better discrimination in such matters than the British public and Lady
Tichborne herself, so it was not a difficult feat to play upon local
credulity.

In the last month of 1865, when Cubitt sent an agent to Wagga Wagga,
as a result of his correspondence with Lady Tichborne, the legend of
Orton’s identity as Roger Tichborne was already firmly established in
the minds of his townspeople, and the rumor thus gained its initial
confirmation. The reader is asked to remember that Orton was known as
Castro, and that his identification as Orton was a difficult feat,
which remained unperformed until the final trial, more than eight years
later.

Lady Tichborne herself supplied Castro and his backers in Australia
with their first vital information. In seeking to identify her son
she quite guilelessly wrote to Cubitt and others many details of her
son’s appearance, history, education, and peculiarities. She also
mentioned a number of intimate happenings. All these were seized upon
by the butcher and used in framing his letters to the dowager. In spite
of this fact, he made the many stupid blunders already referred to.
Lady Tichborne saw the discrepancies, as has been remarked, but her
monomania urged her to credence, and she sent the ex-servants, Bogle
and Grillefoyle to investigate. How Orton-Castro managed to win them
over is not easy to determine. For a time it was suspected that perhaps
these men had been corrupted by those interested in having the claimant
recognized; but the facts seem to discountenance any such belief.
One of the outstanding characteristics of Orton was his ability to
make friends and gain their confidence, of which fact there can be no
more eloquent testimony than the long list of witnesses who appeared
for him at his trials. The man who was able to persuade a mother,
a sharp-witted solicitor, half a dozen higher army officers, six
magistrates, and numberless soldiers and tenants who had known Roger
Tichborne well, to accept and support him in his preposterous claim,
did not need money to befool an old gardener and a negro valet.

Indeed, it was this personal gift, backed by the man’s abnormal
histrionic bent and capacity for mimicry, that carried him so far and
won him the support of so many individuals and almost the solid public.
How far he was able to carry things has been suggested, but the details
are so remarkable as to demand recounting.

Orton had almost no schooling. He quite naturally misspelled the
commonest words and was normally guilty of the most appalling
grammatical and rhetorical solecisms. He knew not a word of French,
Latin, or of any other language, save a smattering of Spanish, picked
up from the Castros while at Melipillo. He had never associated with
any one who remotely approached the position of a gentleman, and the
best imitation he can have contrived, must have been patterned after
performances witnessed on the stages of cheap variety houses. Moreover
he knew absolutely nothing about the Tichbornes, not even the fact that
they were Catholics. He did not know where their estates were, nor
where Roger had gone to school; yet he carried his imposture within an
inch of success. Indeed, it was the opinion of disinterested observers
at the trial of his civil action that he must have won the case had he
stayed off the stand himself.

The feat of substitution this man almost succeeded in accomplishing
was palpably an enormous one. He went to England, familiarized himself
with the places Roger Tichborne had visited, studied French without
managing to learn it, practiced the handwriting of the young Tichborne
heir till it deceived even the experts, and likewise learned, in spite
of his own lack of schooling, to imitate the English of Tichborne, and
to misspell just those words on which the original Roger was weak. He
crammed his memory with incidents and details picked up at every hand.
He learned to talk almost like a gentleman. He worked with his voice
until he got out of it most of the earthy harshness that belonged to
it by nature. He cultivated good manners, courtly behavior, gentle
ways, and a certain charming deference which went far toward convincing
those who took him seriously and gave him their support. In short, he
was able to perform an absolute prodigy of adaptiveness, but he could
not, with all his talent, quite project himself into the personality
and mentality of another and very different man. That, perhaps, is a
simulation beyond human capacity.

So Arthur Orton, after all, the hero of this magnificent impersonation,
went to prison for fourteen years, having made quite too grand a
gesture and much too sad a failure. He served nearly eleven years and
was then released in view of good conduct. Thereafter he wrote several
confessions and retracted them all in turn. Finally, toward the end of
his life, he changed his mind once more and prepared a final and fairly
complete account of his life and misdeeds, from which some of the facts
here used have been taken. He died in April, 1898.

The extent to which he had moved the public may be judged from an
incident the year following Orton’s conviction and imprisonment. His
chief counsel at the criminal trial had been Doctor Edward Kenealy,
who was himself scathingly denounced by the court in connection with
a misdirected attempt to have Orton identified as a castaway from the
_Bella_ by a seaman who swore he had performed the rescue, but was
shown to be a perjurer. After the trial Doctor Kenealy was elected to
Parliament, so great was his popularity and that of his client. When
Kenealy, soon after taking his seat, moved that the Tichborne case
be referred to a royal commission, the House of Commons rejected the
motion unanimously. This action inflamed the populace. There were angry
street meetings, inflammatory speeches, and symptoms of a general riot.
The troops had to be called and kept in readiness for instant action.
Fortunately the sight of the soldiers sobered the mob, and the matter
passed off with only minor bloodshed.

But ten years later, when Orton emerged from prison, there was almost
no one to greet him. The fickle public, that had once been ready to
storm the Houses of Parliament for him, had utterly forgotten the man.
Nor was there any sign of public interest, when he died in obscurity
and poverty fourteen years later. A few of his persistent followers
gave him honorable burial as “Sir Roger Tichborne.”

The original enigma of the fate of Roger Tichborne, upon which this
colossal structure of fraud and legal intricacy was founded, received,
to be sure, not the slightest clarification from all the pother and
feverish investigating. If ever there had been any good reason to doubt
that the young Hampshire aristocrat went helplessly down with the
stricken _Bella_ and her fated crew, none remained after the trials and
the stupendous publicity they invoked.




VI

THE KIDNAPPERS OF CENTRAL PARK


On the afternoon of Sunday, May 14, 1899, Mrs. Arthur W. Clarke,
the young wife of a British publisher’s agent residing at 159 East
Sixty-fifth Street, New York, found this advertisement in the _New York
Herald_, under the heading, “Employment Wanted:”

 GIRL (20) as child’s nurse; no experience in city. Nurse, 274
 _Herald_, Twenty-third Street.

The following Tuesday Mrs. Clarke took into her employment, as
attendant for her little daughter, Marion, twenty months old, a pretty
young woman, who gave the name of Carrie Jones and said she had come
only two weeks before from the little town of Deposit, in upper New
York State. The fact explained her lack of references. Mrs. Clarke, far
from being suspicious because of the absence of employment papers, was
impressed with the new child’s maid. She seemed to be a well-schooled,
even-tempered young woman, considerably above her station, devoted
to children, and, what was particularly noted, gentle in voice and
demeanor--a jewel among servants.

Five days later pretty Carrie Jones and Baby Marion Clarke had become
the center of one of the celebrated abduction cases and, for a little
while, the nucleus of a dark and appalling mystery. To-day, after
the lapse of twenty-five years, the effects of this striking affair
are still to be read in the precautions hedging the employment
of nursemaids in American cities and in the timidity of parents
everywhere. It was one of those occasional and impressive crimes which
leave their mark on social habits and public behavior long after the
details or the incidents themselves have been forgotten.

The home of Marion Clarke’s parents in East Sixty-fifth Street is about
two squares from the city’s great playground, Central Park, a veritable
warren of children and their maids on every sunny day. Here Marion
Clarke went almost every afternoon with her new nurse, and here the
first scene of the ensuing drama was played.

At about ten thirty o’clock on the morning of the next Sunday, May 21,
Carrie Jones went to Mrs. Clarke and asked if she might not take the
little girl to the Park then, as the day was warm, and the sunshine
inviting. In the afternoon it might be too hot. Mrs. Clarke and her
husband consented, and the maid set off a little before eleven o’clock
with Baby Marion tucked into a wicker carriage. She was told to return
by one o’clock, so that the child might have her luncheon at the usual
hour.

At twelve o’clock Mr. Clarke set off for a walk in the Park, also
tempted from his home by the enchantments of the day. Mrs. Clarke did
not accompany him, since she had borne a second baby only two or three
months before, and she was still confined to the house.

Mr. Clarke entered the Park at the Sixty-sixth Street entrance and
followed the paths idly along toward the old arsenal. Without
especially seeking his daughter and her nurse, he nevertheless kept
an eye out. A short distance from the arsenal he saw his child’s cart
standing in front of the rest room; he approached, expecting to see the
child. Both baby and nurse were gone, and the attendant explained that
the child’s vehicle had been left in her care, while the nurse bore the
baby to the menagerie.

“She said she’d be back in about an hour. Ought to be here any minute
now,” prattled the public employee.

The father sat down to wait. Then he grew impatient and went off to
wander through the animal gardens. In half an hour he was back at the
rest room to find the attendant about to move the cart indoors and make
her departure, her tour of duty being over.

Beginning to feel alarmed, Mr. Clarke resorted to the nearest
policeman, who smiled, with the confidence of long experience, and
advised him to go home. It was a common thing for a green country
girl to get lost among the winding drives and walks of Central Park.
No doubt the nurse would find her way home with the child in a little
while.

Clarke went back to his house and waited. At two o’clock he went
excitedly back to the Park and consulted the captain of police, with
the same results. The officers were ordered to look for the nurse and
child, but the alarm of the parent was not shared. He was once more
told to go home and wait. At the same time he was rather pointedly
told not to return with his annoying inquiries. Such temporary
disappearances of children happened every day.

The harried father went home and paced the floor. His enervated wife
wept and trembled with apprehension. At four o’clock the doorbell rang,
and the father rushed excitedly to answer.

A bright-eyed, grinning boy stood in the vestibule and asked if Mr.
Clarke lived here. Then he handed over a letter in a plain white
envelope, lingering a moment, as if expecting a tip.

Clarke naturally tore the letter open with quaking fingers and read:

 “MRS CLARK: Do not look for your nurse and baby. They are safe in our
 possession, where they will remain for the present. If the matter is
 kept out of the hands of the police and newspapers, you will get your
 baby back, safe and sound.

 “If, instead, you make a big time about it and publish it all over, we
 will see to it that you never see her alive again. We are driven to
 this by the fact that we cannot get work, and one of us has a child
 dying through want of proper treatment and nourishment.

 “Your baby is safe and in good hands. The nurse girl is still with
 her. If everything is quiet, you will hear from us Monday or Tuesday.

                                                          “THREE.”

The letter was correctly done, properly paragraphed, punctuated,
and printed with a fine pen in a somewhat laborious simulation of
writing-machine type. It also bore several markings characteristic of
the journalist or publisher’s copy reader, especially three parallel
lines drawn under the signature, “Three,” evidently to indicate
capitals. The envelope was the common plain white kind, but the sheet
of paper on which the note had been penned was of the white unglazed
and uncalendared kind known as newsprint and used in all newspaper
offices as copy paper. Accordingly it was at once suspected that the
kidnapper must have been a newspaper man, printer, reader, or some one
connected with a publishing house.

The Clarkes recalled that the nurse had been alone the preceding Friday
evening and had been writing. Evidently she had prepared the note at
that time and had been planning the abduction with foresight and care.
People at once reached the conclusion that she was one of the agents of
a great band of professional kidnappers. Accordingly every child and
every mother in the city stood in peril.

To indicate the nature of the official search, we may as well reproduce
Chief of Police Devery’s proclamation:

 “Arrest for abduction--Carrie Jones, twenty-one years of age, five
 feet two inches tall, dark hair and eyes, pale face, high check bones,
 teeth prominent in lower jaw, American by birth; wore a white straw
 sailor hat with black band, military pin on side, blue-check shirt
 waist, black brilliantine skirt, black lace bicycle boots, white
 collar and black tie.

 “Abducted on Sunday May 21, 1899, Marion Clarke, daughter of Arthur
 W. Clarke, of this city, and described as follows: twenty months
 old, light complexion, blue eyes, light hair, had twelve teeth,
 four in upper jaw, four in lower jaw, and four in back. There is
 a space between two upper front teeth, and red birthmark on back.
 Wore rose-colored dress, white silk cap, black stockings, and black
 buttoned shoes.

 “Make careful inquiry and distribute these circulars in all
 institutions, foundling asylums, and places where children of the
 above age are received.”

A photograph of the missing child accompanied the description.

So the quest began. It was, however, by no means confined to Carrie
Jones and the child. The New York newspaper reporters were early
convinced that some one else stood behind the transaction, and they
sought night and day for a man or woman connected either directly or
distantly with their own profession. It was the day when the reporter
prided himself especially on his superior acumen as a sleuth, with the
result that every effort was made to give a fresh demonstration of
journalistic enterprise and shrewdness.

Several days of the most feverish hunting, accompanied by a sharp rise
in public emotionalism and the incipience of panic among parents,
failed, however, to produce even the most shadowy results. Rumors and
suspicions were, as usual, numerous and fatuous, but there came forth
nothing that had the earmarks of the genuine clew. The arrests of
innocent young women were many, and numerous little girls were dragged
to police stations by the usual crop of fanatics.

Similarly, little Marion Clarke was reported from all parts of the
surrounding country and even from the most distant places. One report
had her on her way to England, another showed her as having sailed for
Sweden, a third report was that she had been taken to Australia by a
childless couple. All the other common hypotheses were, of course,
entertained. A bereaved mother had taken little Marion to fill the void
of her own loss. A childless woman had stolen the little girl and was
using her to present as her own offspring, probably to comply with the
provisions of some freak will.

But the hard fact remained that a letter had come within four hours
after the abduction of the child, and before there had been the
first note of alarm or publicity. Such an epistle could only have
been written by the actual kidnapper, since no one else was privy to
the fact that the girl was gone. In that communication the writer
had stated his or her case very definitely and, while not actually
demanding ransom or naming a sum, had clearly indicated the intention
of making such a subsequent demand.

Theorizing was thus a bit sterile. The police, be it said to their
credit, bothered themselves with no fine-spun hypotheses, but clung to
the main track and sought the kidnappers. The _New York World_ offered
a reward of a thousand dollars and put its most efficient reportorial
workers into the search. The other newspapers also kept their men
going in shifts. Every possible trail was followed to its end, every
promising part of the city searched. Even the most inane reports were
investigated with diligence.

Hundreds of persons had gone to the police with bits of information
which they, no doubt, considered suggestive or important. The
well-known Captain McClusky, then chief of detectives, received these
often wearisome callers, read their mail, directed the investigation of
their reports, and often remained at his desk late into the night.

Among a large number of women who reported to the detective chief was a
Mrs. Cosgriff, a sharp and voluble Irishwoman, who maintained a rooming
house in Twenty-seventh street, Brooklyn. Mrs. Cosgriff asserted that
two women with a little girl of Marion Clarke’s age and general
appearance had rented a room from her on the evening of the eventful
Sunday and spent the night there. The next morning one of them had got
the newspapers, gone to her room, remained secluded with the other
woman and child for a time, and had then come out to announce that
they would not remain another day. Mrs. Cosgriff thought she detected
excitement in the manner of both women, but she had to admit that the
child had made no complaint or outcry. Nevertheless, she felt that
these were the wanted people.

Had she noted anything of special interest about the child, any
peculiarity by which the parents might recognize her? Or had she heard
the women mention any town or place to which they might have gone?

The lodging-house keeper considered a moment, confessed that her
curiosity had led her to do a little spying, and recalled that she had
heard one of the women mention a town. Either she had not heard the
name distinctly, or she had forgotten part of it, but it was a name
ending in berg or burg. She was certain of that. Fitchburg, Pittsburg,
Williamsburg, Plattsburg--something like that. She did not know the
reason for her feeling, but she was sure it was a place not very far
from New York.

As to a peculiarity of the child, she had noted nothing except that
it seemed good-humored, healthy, and clever. She had heard one of the
women say: “Come on, baby! Show us how Mrs. Blank does.” Evidently the
little girl had done some sort of impersonation.

Captain McClusky was inclined to place some credence in Mrs. Cosgriff’s
account, but he saw no special promise in her revelations till he
repeated the details to the agonized parents. At the mention of the
childish impersonation, Mrs. Clarke leaped up in excitement.

“That was Marion!” she cried. “That’s one of her little tricks!”

It developed that the nurse, Carrie Jones, had spent hours playing
with the child, teaching it to walk and pose like a certain affected
woman friend of its mother. Undoubtedly then, Marion Clarke, Carrie
Jones, and another woman had been in South Brooklyn the evening after
the abduction and spent the night and part of the next day at Mrs.
Cosgriff’s, leaving in the afternoon for a town whose name ended in
burg or berg.

Now the chase began in earnest. The detectives made a list of towns
with the burg termination, and one or two men were sent to each, with
instructions to make a quiet, but thorough, search. Information of
a confidential kind was also forwarded to the police departments of
other cities, near and far. As a result a number of suspected young
women were picked up. Indeed, the mystery was believed solved for a
short time when a girl answering to the description of Carrie Jones
was seized in Connecticut and held for the arrival of the New York
detectives, when she began to act mysteriously and failed to give a
clear account of herself. It was found, however, that she had other
substantial reasons for being cryptic, and that she was, moreover,
enjoying her little joke on the officials.

Again, in Pennsylvania a girl was held who would neither affirm nor
deny that she was Carrie Jones, but let the local police have the very
definite impression that they had in hand the much-hunted kidnapper.
She turned out to be an unfortunate pathologue of the self-accusatory
type. Her one real link with the affair was that her name happened
to be Jones, a circumstance which got the members of this large and
popular family of citizens no little discomfort during the pendency of
the Clarke mystery.

Meantime no further communication had been received from the abductors.
They had said, in the single note received from them, that they would
communicate Monday or Tuesday, “if everything is quiet.” Everything,
far from being quiet, had been in a most plangent uproar, which
circumstances alone should have been recognized as the reason for
silence. But, as is usual, the clear and patent explanation seemed not
to contain enough for popular acceptance. More fanciful interpretations
were put forward in the usual variety of forms. The note had been sent
merely to misguide, and one might be sure the abductors did not intend
to return Baby Marion. If the abductors were looking for ransom, why
had no more been heard? Why had they chosen the daughter of a man who
had slender means and from whom no large ransom could be expected? No,
it was something more sinister still. Probably Little Marion was dead.

As the days dragged by, and there were still no conclusive
developments, the public sympathy toward the stricken couple became
expressive and dramatic. Crowds besieged the house in East Sixty-fifth
Street in hope of catching sight of the bereaved mother. The father was
greeted with cheers and sympathetic expressions whenever he came or
went. Many offers of aid were received, and some came forward who
wanted to pay whatever ransom might be demanded.

[Illustration: ~~ MARION CLARKE ~~]

In these various ways the Marion Clarke case came to be a national and
even an international sensation in the brief course of a week. Sympathy
with the parents was instant and widespread, and passion against the
abductors filled the newspaper correspondence columns with suggestions
in favor of more stringent laws, plans for cruel vengeance on the
kidnappers, complaints against the police, fulminations directed at
quite every one connected with the unfortunate affair--all the usual
expressions of helplessness and bafflement.

On the morning of Thursday, June 1st, eleven days after the
disappearance, a woman with a little girl entered the general store at
the little hamlet of St. John, N. Y., where Mrs. Ada B. Corey presided
as postmistress to the community. The child was a little petulant and
noisy; the woman very annoyed and nervous. Both were strangers. The
woman gave her name as Beauregard and took one or two letters which had
come for her. With these and the little girl she made a quick departure.

Because of the great excitement and wide publicity of the Clarke case,
nothing of the sort could happen so near the city of New York without
one inevitable result. The postmistress immediately notified Deputy
Sheriff William Charleston of Rockland County, who had his office in
St. John. Charleston was able to locate the woman and child before
they could leave town, and he covertly followed them to the farmhouse
of Frank Oakley, in the heart of the Ramapo Mountain region, near
Sloatsburg, about nineteen miles from Haverstraw, on the Hudson River.

The rural officer discovered, by making a few inquiries, that this Mrs.
Beauregard had been known in the vicinity for some months, and she had
been occupying the Oakley house with her husband. Ten days previously,
however, she had appeared with another woman and the little girl.

The dates tallied; the town was Sloatsburg; there were, or had been,
two women; the place was ideal for hiding, and the child was of the
proper age and description. Sheriff Charleston quickly summoned some
other officers, descended on the place, seized the woman, the child,
and the husband, locked them into the nearest jail, and sent word to
Captain McClusky.

New York detectives and reporters arrived by the next train, and Mr.
Clarke came a short time later. As soon as he was on the ground,
the party proceeded to the jail, and the weeping father caught his
wandering girl into happy arms. She was indeed Marion Clarke. Within
ten minutes every available telephone and telegraph wire was humming
the triumphant message back to New York.

But, in the recovery of the child, the inner mystery of the case only
began to unfold itself. The woman seized at Sloatsburg was not Carrie
Jones. Neither had the Clarkes ever seen her before. She gave the name
of Mrs. George Beauregard, and, when questioned about this matter,
later “admitted” that she was really Mrs. Jennie Wilson. Her story
was that a couple had brought the child to her, saying that it needed
to remain in the mountains for the summer. They had paid her for the
little girl’s board and care. She declared she did not know their
address, but they would certainly be on hand in the fall to reclaim
their baby.

The man arrested at the farmhouse said that he was James Wilson; that
he had no employment at the time, except working on the farm, and that
he knew nothing of the baby beyond what his wife had revealed. He
didn’t interfere in such affairs.

Both were returned to New York after some slight delay. The detectives
and the newspapers at once went to work on the problem of discovering
who they were, and what had become of Carrie Jones.

Meantime the abducted child was being brought home to her distracted
mother. A crowd of several thousand persons had gathered in Sixty-fifth
Street, apprised of the little girl’s impending return by the evening
newspapers. She was greeted with cheers, loaded with presents, saluted
by the public officials, and treated as the heroine that circumstance
and good police work had made her. Photographs of her crowded the
journals, and she was altogether the most famous youngster of the day.
Her parents later removed to Boston with her, and they were heard of in
the succeeding years when attempts were made to release the imprisoned
kidnappers, or whenever there was another kidnapping or missing-child
case. In time they passed back into obscurity, and Marion Clarke
disappeared from the glare of notoriety.

The work of identifying the man and woman caught in the Sloatsburg
farmhouse proceeded rapidly. Freddy Lang, the boy who had brought the
note to the Clarke door on that painful Sunday afternoon, immediately
recognized Mrs. Beauregard-Wilson as the woman who had handed him
the missive and a five-cent piece in Second Avenue and asked him to
deliver the note to Mrs. Clarke. Mrs. Cosgriff came from Brooklyn and
said that the prisoner was one of the two women who had stayed at
her house on that Sunday night. It was apparent then that one of the
active kidnappers, and not an innocent tool, had been caught. The woman
and her husband, however, denied everything and refused to give any
information about themselves.

Meantime the newspapers left no stone unturned in an attempt to make
the identification complete, discover just who the prisoners were, and
establish their connections with others believed to have financed the
kidnapping. Something deeper and more sinister than mere abduction for
ransom was suspected, and it seemed to be indicated by certain facts
that will appear presently. Accordingly the reporters and journalistic
investigators were conducting a fresh search on very broad lines.

On the evening of the second of June this hunt came to an abrupt close,
when a reporter traced the mysterious Carrie Jones to the home of an
aunt at White Oak Ridge, near Summit, New Jersey, and got from her the
admission that she was, in fact, Bella Anderson, a country girl who
had been for no long period a waitress in the Mills Hotel, in Bleecker
Street, New York. Bella Anderson readily told who the captive man and
woman were, and how the kidnapping plot had been concocted and carried
out. Her story may be summarized to clear the ground.

Bella Anderson was born in London, the daughter of a retired soldier
who had seen service in India and Africa. At the age of fourteen,
her parents being dead, she and her brother, Samuel, had set out for
America and been received by relatives in the States of New York and
New Jersey. The girl had been recently schooled and aided financially
both by her brother and other relatives. The year before the kidnapping
she had gone to New York to make her own way. At the Mills Hotel, in
the course of her duties, she had met Mr. and Mrs. George Beauregard
Barrow. They had been kind to her and become her intimates, nursing her
through an illness and otherwise befriending a lonely creature.

The Barrows, this being the true name of the arrested pair, had
persuaded her that the work of waiting on table in a hotel was too
arduous and advised her to seek employment in a private family as nurse
to a child. In this way, they told her, she would have an opportunity
to seize some rich man’s darling and exact a heavy ransom for its
return. All this part of the business they would manage for her. All
she needed to do was to seize the child, a very easy matter. For this
she was to receive one half of whatever ransom might be collected.

Accordingly, Bella Anderson had advertised for a place as child’s
nurse. Several parents answered. At the first two homes she was just
too late to procure employment, other applicants having anticipated
her. So it was mere chance that took her to the Clarke home and
determined Marion Clarke to be the victim.

The girl went on to recite that the Barrows had coached her carefully.
They had instructed her in the matter of her lack of references, in the
manner of taking the child, in her conduct at her employers’ home, in
the details of an inoffensive account of her past, and so on through
the list. They had been the mentors and the “master minds.”

After she had been employed at the Clarkes’ a few days and had taken
little Marion to the Park the first time, Mrs. Barrow had consulted
with the nurse and instructed her to be ready for the abduction on the
next excursion. Bella Anderson said she had suffered many qualms and
been unable to bring herself to the deed for several visits. Each time
Mrs. Barrow met her in the Park and was ready to flee with the little
girl. Finally the nurse reached the point of yielding. Sunday noon she
found Mrs. Barrow waiting for her, as usual. They left the baby’s cart
at the rest room, carried the child to a remote place, changed its
coat and cap, and then set out at once for South Brooklyn, where they
took the room from Mrs. Cosgriff. This matter attended to, the women
exchanged clothes, and Mrs. Barrow returned to Manhattan, gave the note
to the boy, and turned back to Brooklyn. The next morning she had seen
the headlines in the newspapers, realized that the game was dangerous,
and set out quickly for Sloatsburg, where the farmhouse had been rented
in advance by Barrow. Two days later Bella Anderson had been sent away
because the Barrows felt she was being too hotly sought and might be
recognized in the neighborhood.

This story was readily confirmed, though the Barrows naturally sought
to shield themselves. It was also discovered that Mrs. Barrow had been
an Addie McNally, born and reared in up-State New York, and that she,
with her husband, had once owned a small printing establishment, thus
explaining the chirographical characteristics of the Clarke abduction
note. She was about twenty-five years old, shrewd, capable and not
unattractive.

Investigation brought out romantic and pathetic facts concerning the
husband. He had apparently had no better employment in New York than
that of motorman in the hire of an electric cab company then operating
in that city. But this derelict was the son of distinguished parents.
His father was Judge John C. Barrow of the superior court of Little
Rock, Arkansas, and the descendant of other persons politically well
known in the South. George Beauregard Barrow--his middle name being
that of the famous Confederate commander at the first battle of Bull
Run or Manassas, to whom distant relationship was claimed--had been
incorrigible from childhood. In early manhood he had been connected
with kidnapping threats and plots in his home city and with assaults on
his enemies, with the result that he was finally sent away, cut off and
told to make his own berth in the world. Judge Barrow tried to aid his
unfortunate son at the trial, but public feeling was too sorely aroused.

George Barrow and Bella Anderson were tried before Judge Fursman and
quickly convicted. Barrow was sentenced to fourteen years and ten
months, and the Anderson girl to four years, both judge and jury
accepting her statement that she had been no more than a pawn in the
hands of shrewder and older conspirators. Mrs. Barrow, sensing the
direction of the wind, took a plea of guilty before Judge Werner,
hoping for clemency. The court, however, said that her crime merited
the gravest reprehension and severest punishment. He fixed her term at
twelve years and ten months.

These trials were had, and the sentences imposed within six weeks of
the kidnapping, the courts having acted with despatch. While the cases
were pending, Barrow, Mrs. Barrow, and the Anderson girl had again and
again been asked to reveal the names of others who had induced them
to their crime or had financed them. All said there had been no other
conspirators, but the feeling persisted that Barrow had acted with the
support of professional criminals, or of some enemy of the Clarkes,
either of whom had supplied him with considerable sums of money.

This belief, which was specially strong with some of the newspapers,
was predicated upon two facts.

On the morning of Thursday, May 25, four days after the abduction
of Marion Clarke, there had appeared in the _New York Herald_ the
following advertisement:

 “M. F. two thousand dollars reward will be O. K. in Baby Clarke case.
 Write again and let me know when and where I can meet you Thursday
 evening. Don’t fail--strictly confidential.”

Neither the Clarkes, the newspapers, nor any persons acting for
them knew anything about a two-thousand-dollar-reward offer or had
communicated with any one who had been promised such a sum. Hence
there were only two possible explanations of the advertisement. Either
it had been inserted by some unbalanced person who wanted to create
a stir--the kind of restless neurotic who projects his unwelcome
apparition into every sensation--or there was really some dark force
moving behind the kidnapping.

A second fact led many to persist in this latter notion. In spite of
the fact that George Barrow had been disowned at home and driven from
his town, and opposed to the circumstances that he had worked at common
and ill-paid jobs, had been unable to pay his rent for eleven months,
had been seen in the shabbiest clothes and was known to be in need--the
only force that might have prompted him to attempt a kidnapping--he was
found to have a considerable sum in his pockets when searched at the
jail; he informed his wife that he would get plenty of cash for their
defense, and he was shown to have expended a fairly large sum on the
planning of the crime, the traveling and other expenses, the rent of
the farmhouse, the needs of Bella Anderson, and for his own amusement.
Where had this come from?

Not only the public and the newspapers, but Detective Chief McClusky
were long occupied with this enigma. Barrow himself gave various
specious explanations and finally refused to say more. Hints and
bruits of all kinds were current. Many said that Arthur Clarke could
furnish the answer if he would, an accusation which the harried father
indignantly rejected.

In the end the guilty trio went to prison, the Clarkes removed to
Boston, the public interest flagged, and the mystery remained unsolved.




VII

DOROTHY ARNOLD


On the afternoon of Monday, December 12, 1910, a young woman of the
upper social world vanished from the pavement of Fifth Avenue. Not
only did she disappear from the center of one of the busiest streets
on earth, at the sunniest hour of a brilliant winter afternoon, with
thousands within sight and reach, with men and women who knew her at
every side, and with officers of the law thickly strewn about her path;
but she went without discernible motives, without preparation, and, so
far as the public has ever been permitted to read, without leaving the
dimmest clew to her possible destination.

These are the peculiarities which mark the Dorothy Arnold case as one
of the most irritating puzzles of modern police history, a true mystery
of the missing.

It is one of the maxims in the administration of absent-persons bureaus
that disappearing men and women, no matter how carefully they may plan,
regardless of all natural astuteness, invariably leave behind some
token of their premeditation. Similarly, it is a truism that, barring
purposeful self-occultation, the departure of an adult human being
from so crowded a thoroughfare can be set down only to abduction or to
mnemonic aberration. Remembering that a crime must have its motivation,
and that cases of amnesia almost always are marked by previous
symptoms and by fairly early recovery, the recondite and baffling
aspects of this affair become manifest; for there was never the least
hint of a ransom demand, and the girl who vanished was conspicuous for
rugged physical and mental health.

Thus, to sum up the affair, a disappearance which had from the
beginning no standing in rationality, being logically both impenetrable
and irreconcilable, remains, at the end of nearly a score of years, as
obstinate and perplexing as ever--publicly a gall to human curiosity,
an impossible problem for reason and analytical power.

Dorothy Arnold was past twenty-five when she walked out of her father’s
house into darkness that shining winter’s day. She was at the summit
of her youth, rich, socially preferred, blessed with prospects, and
to every outer eye, uncloudedly happy. Her father, a wealthy importer
of perfumes, occupied a dignified house on East Seventy-ninth Street,
in the center of one of the best residential districts, with his wife
and four children--two sons and two daughters. Mr. Arnold’s sister was
the wife of Justice Peckham of the United States Supreme Court, and
the entire family was socially well known in Washington, Philadelphia,
and New York. His missing daughter had been educated at Bryn Mawr and
figured prominently in the activities of “the younger set” in all these
cities. All descriptions set her down as having been active, cheerful,
intelligent, and talented.

The accepted story is that Miss Arnold left her father’s home at about
half past eleven on the morning of her disappearance, apparently to go
shopping for an evening gown. She appears to have had an appointment
with a girl friend, which she broke earlier in the morning, saying
that she was to go shopping with her mother. A few minutes before she
left the house, the young woman went to her mother’s room and said she
was going out to look for the dress. Her mother remarked that if her
daughter would wait till she might finish dressing, she would go along.
The girl demurred quietly, saying that it wasn’t worth the bother, and
that she would telephone if she found anything to her liking. So far as
her parent could make out, the girl was not anxious to be alone. She
was no more than casual and seemed especially happy and well.

At noon, half an hour after she had left her home, Miss Arnold went
into a shop at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street, where she bought
a box of candy and had it charged on her father’s account. At about
half past one she was at Brentano’s bookshop, Twenty-seventh Street and
Fifth Avenue. Here she bought a volume of fiction, also charging the
item to her father.

Whether she was recognized again at a later hour is in doubt. She met a
girl chum and her mother in the street some time during the early part
of the afternoon and stopped to gossip for a few moments; but whether
this incident occurred just before or after her visit to the bookstore
could not be made certain. At any rate, she was not seen later than two
o’clock.

When the young woman failed to appear at home for dinner, there was
a little irritation, but no concern. Her family decided that she had
probably come across friends and forgotten to telephone her intention
of dining out. But when midnight came, and there was still no word
from the young woman, her father began to feel uneasy and communicated
by telephone with the homes of various friends, where his daughter
might have been visiting. When he failed to discover her in this way,
Mr. Arnold consulted with his personal attorney, and a search was begun.

The reader is asked to note that there was no public announcement of
the young woman’s absence for more than six weeks. Just why it was
considered wise to proceed discreetly and privately cannot be more
than surmised. This action on the part of her family has always been
considered suggestive of a well-defined suspicion and a determination
to prevent its publication. At any rate, it was not until January 26,
that revelation was made to the newspapers, at the strong urging of W.
J. Flynn, then in charge of the New York detectives.

In those six weeks, however, there had been no idleness. As soon as
it was apparent that the girl could not be merely visiting, private
detectives were summoned, and a formal quest begun. Her room and its
contents revealed nothing of a positive character. She had left the
house in a dark-blue tailored suit, small velvet hat and street shoes,
carrying a silver-fox muff and satin bag, probably containing less
than thirty dollars in money. Her checkbook had been left behind; nor
had there been any recent withdrawals of uncommon amounts. No part of
the girl’s clothing had been packed or taken along; none of her more
valuable jewelry was missing; no letter had been left, and nothing
pointed to preparation of any sort.

A search of her correspondence revealed, however, a packet of letters
from a man of a well-known family in another city. When, somewhat
later, Mr. Arnold was summoned by the district attorney and asked to
produce the letters, he swore that they had been destroyed, but added
that they contained nothing of significance.

It developed, too, that, while her parents were in Maine in the
preceding autumn, Dorothy Arnold had gone to Boston on the pretext of
visiting a school chum, resident in the university suburb of Cambridge;
whereas she had actually stopped at a Boston hotel and had pawned about
five hundred dollars’ worth of personal jewelry with a local lender,
taking no trouble, however to conceal her name or home address. It was
shown that the man of the letters was registered at another Boston
hotel on the day of Dorothy’s visit; but he denied having seen her or
been with her on this occasion, and there was no way of proving to the
contrary. The date of this Boston visit was September 23, about two and
a half months before Miss Arnold’s disappearance. The police were never
able to establish any connection between the Boston visit, the pawning
of the jewels, and the subsequent events, so that the reader must rely
at this point upon his own conjecture.

Before the public was made acquainted with the vanishment of the young
heiress, both her mother and brother and the man of the letters had
returned from Europe, and the latter took part in the search for her.
He disclaimed, from the beginning, all knowledge of Miss Arnold’s
plans, proclaimed that he knew of no reason why she should have left
home, announced that he had considered himself engaged to marry her,
and he pretended, at least, to believe that she would shortly appear.
Needless to say, a close watch was secretly maintained over the young
man and all his movements for many months. In the end, however, the
police seemed satisfied that he knew no more than any one else of
Dorothy Arnold’s possible movements. He dropped out of the case almost
as suddenly as he had entered it.

In the six weeks before the public was acquainted with the facts,
private detectives, and later the public police, had worked
unremittingly on the several possible theories covering the case. There
were naturally a number of possibilities: First, that the girl had
met with a traffic accident and been taken unconscious to a hospital;
second, that she had been run down by some reckless motorist, killed,
and carried off by the frightened driver and secretly buried; third,
that she had been kidnapped; fourth, that she had eloped; fifth, that
she had been seized by an attack of amnesia and was wandering about the
country, unable to give any clew to her identity; sixth, that she had
quarreled with her parents and chosen this method of bringing them to
terms by the pangs of anxiety; seventh, that she had been arrested as a
shoplifter and was concealing her identity for shame.

As the weeks went by, all these ideas were exploded. The hospitals
and morgues were searched in vain; the records of traffic accidents
were scanned with the utmost care; the roadhouses and resorts in
all directions from the city were visited, and their owners closely
questioned. Cemeteries and lonely farms were inspected, the passenger
lists of all departing ships examined, and later sailings observed. The
authorities in European and other ports were notified by cable, and
the captains of ships at sea were informed by wireless, now for the
first time employed in such a quest. The city jails and prisons were
visited and every female prisoner noted. Similar precautions were taken
in other American cities, where the hospitals, infirmaries, and morgues
were also subjected to search. Marriage-license bureaus, offices of
physicians, sanitariums, cloisters, boarding schools, and all manner
of possible and impossible retreats were made the objects of detective
attention--all without result.

The notion that the girl might have been abducted and held for ransom
was discarded at the end of a few weeks, when no word had come from
possible kidnappers. The thought of a disagreement was dismissed, with
the most emphatic denials coming from all the near and distant members
of Miss Arnold’s family. The idea of an elopement also had to be
discarded after a time, and so also the theory of an aphasic or amnesic
attack.

After the police finally insisted on the publication of the facts and
the summoning of public aid, and after the various early hypotheses had
one and all failed to stand the test of scrutiny and time, various more
and more fantastic or improbable conjectures came into currency. One
was that the girl might have been carried off to some distant American
town or foreign port. Another was that some secret enemy, whose name
and grievance her parents were loath to reveal, had made away with
the young woman, or was holding her to satisfy his spite. The public
excitement was nigh boundless, and ingenious fabulations or diseased
imaginings came pouring in upon the harried police and the distracted
parents with every mail.

Rumors and false alarms multiplied enormously. As the story of the
young woman’s disappearance continued to occupy the leading columns
of the daily papers, day upon day, the disordered fancy of the unstable
elements of the population came into vigorous play. Dorothy Arnold was
reported from all parts of the country, and both the members of her
family and numberless detectives were kept on the jump, running down
the most absurd reports on the meager possibility that there might be
a grain of truth in one of them. Soon there appeared the pathological
liars and self-accusers, with whose peculiarities neither the police
nor the public were then sufficiently acquainted. In more than a
hundred cities--judging from a tabulation of the newspaper reports of
that day--women of the most diverse ages and types came forward with
the suggestion that they concealed within themselves the person of the
missing heiress. Girls of fourteen made the claim and women of fifty.
Such absurdities soon had the police in a state of weary skepticism,
but the Arnold family and the newspaper-reading public were still upset
by every fresh report.

[Illustration: ~~ DOROTHY ARNOLD ~~]

Naturally enough, the fact that a prominent young woman, enjoying the
full protection of wealth and social distinction, could apparently be
snatched away from the most populous quarter of a world city, struck
terror to the hearts of many. If a Dorothy Arnold could be ravished
from the familiar sidewalks of her home city, what fate waited for the
obscure stranger? Was it not possible that some new and strange kind of
criminal, equipped with diabolic cunning and actuated by impenetrable
motives, was launched upon a campaign of woman stealing? Who was safe?

One of the popular beliefs of the time was that Miss Arnold might have
gone into some small and obscure shop at a time when there was no other
customer in the place and been there seized, bound, gagged, and made
ready for abduction. The notion was widely accepted for the dual reason
that it provided a set of circumstances under which it was possible
to explain the totally unwitnessed snatching of the young woman and,
at the same time, set a likely locale, since there are thousands of
such little shops in New York. As a result of the currency of this
story, many women hesitated to enter the establishments of cobblers,
bootblacks, stationers, confectioners, tobacconists, and other petty
tradesmen, especially in the more outlying parts of the city. Many
bankruptcies of these minor business people resulted, as one may read
from the court records.

A similar fabulation, to the effect that the girl might have entered a
cruising taxicab, operated by a sinister ex-convict, and been whisked
off to some secret den of crime and vice, was almost as popular,
with the result that cabs did a poor business with women clients for
more than a year afterward. An old hackman, who was arrested in that
feverish time because of the hysteria of a woman passenger, tells me
that even to-day he encounters women who grow suspicious and excited,
if he happens to drive by some unaccustomed route, a thing often done
in these days to avoid the congestion on the main streets.

While all this popular burning and sweating was going on, the police
and many thousands of private investigators, professional and amateur,
were busy with the problem of elucidating some motive to fit the case.
Reducing the facts to their essentials and then trying to reason, the
possibilities became a very general preoccupation. The deductive steps
may be briefly set down. First, there were the alternative propositions
of voluntary or involuntary absence, of hiding or abduction. Second,
if the theory of forced absence was to be entertained, there were only
two general possibilities--abduction for ransom or kidnapping by some
maniac. The ideas of murder, detention for revenge, and the like,
come under the latter head. The notion of a fatal accident had been
eliminated.

The proposition of voluntary absence presented a more complex picture.
Suicide, elopement, amnesia, personal rebellion, an unrevealed family
situation, a forbidden love affair, the desire to hide some social
lapse--any of these might be the basis of a self-willed absence of a
permanent or temporary kind.

The failure, after months of quest, to find any trace of a body, seemed
to have rendered the propositions of murder and of suicide alike
improbable. Elopement and amnesia were likewise rendered untenable
theories by time, nor was it long before the conceit of a disagreement
was relegated to the improbabilities.

Justly or unjustly, a good many practical detectives came after a time
to the opinion that the case demanded a masculinizing of the familiar
adage into _cherchez l’homme_. More seasoned officers inclined to the
idea that there must have been some man, possibly one whose identity
had been successfully concealed by the distraught girl. Again, as is
common in such cases, there was the very general feeling that Miss
Arnold’s family knew a good deal more than had been revealed either to
the police or the public, and there was something about the long delay
in reporting the case and the subsequent guarded attitude of the girl’s
relatives that seemed to confirm this perhaps idle suspicion.

The trouble with a great many of the theories evolved in the first
months following the disappearance of Dorothy Arnold, was that they
fitted only a part of the facts and probabilities. After all, here was
an intricate and baffling situation, involving a person who, because
of position, antecedents, and social situation, might be expected to
act in a conventional manner. Accordingly, any explanation that fitted
the physical facts and was still characterized by extraordinary details
might reasonably be discarded.

It was several years before the girl’s father finally declared his
belief in her death, and it is a fact that a sum of not less than a
hundred thousand dollars was expended, first and last, in running
down all sorts of rumors and clews. The search extended to England,
Italy, France, Switzerland, Canada--even to the Far East and Australia.
But all trails led to vacancy, and all speculations were at length
empty. No dimmest trace of the girl was ever found, and no genuinely
satisfactory explanation of the strange story has ever been put forward.

It is true there have been, at times in the intervening dozen or more
years, rumors of a solution. Persons more or less closely connected
with the official investigation have on several occasions been reported
as voicing the opinion that the Arnold family was in possession of the
facts, but denials have followed every such declaration. On April 8,
1921, for instance, Captain John H. Ayers, in charge of the Missing
Persons Bureau of the New York Police Department, told an audience at
the High School of Commerce that the fate of Miss Arnold had at that
time been known to the police for many months, and that the case was
regarded as closed. This pronouncement received the widest publicity
in the New York and other American newspapers, but Captain Ayers’
statement was immediately and vigorously controverted by John S. Keith,
the personal attorney of the girl’s father, who declared that the
police official had told a “damned lie,” and that the mystery was as
deep as ever it had been. The police chiefs later issued interviews
full of dubiety and qualifications, the general tenor being that
Captain Ayers had spoken without sufficient knowledge of the facts.

Just a year later the father of this woman of mysterious tragedy died,
the last decade of his life beclouded by the sorrowful story and
painful doubt. In his will was this pathetic clause:

 “I make no provision in this will for my beloved daughter, H. C.
 Dorothy Arnold, as I am satisfied that she is dead.”

The death of Miss Arnold’s father once more set the rumor mongers to
work and a variety of tales, bolder than had been uttered before,
were circulated through the demi-world of New York and hinted in the
newspapers. These rumors have not been printed directly and there has
thus been no need of denial on part of the family. It must be said
at once that they are mere bruits, mere attempts on the part of the
cynical town to invent a set of circumstances to fit what few facts and
alleged facts are known.

On the other hand, the newspapers have been only too ready to take
seriously the most absurd fabulations. In 1916, for instance, a thief
arrested at Providence, R. I., for motives best known to himself,
declared that he had helped to bury Dorothy Arnold’s body in the cellar
of a house about ten miles below West Point, near the J. P. Morgan
estate. Commissioner Joseph A. Faurot, Captain Grant Williams and a
number of detectives provided with digging tools set out for the place
in motor cars, closely pursued by other cars containing the newspaper
reporters. The police managed to shake off the newspaper men and
reached the house. There they dug till they ached and found nothing
whatever.

Returning to New York, the detectives left their shovels, some of which
were rusty or covered with a red clay, at a station house and there the
reporters caught a glimpse of them. The result was that a bit of rust
or ferrous earth translated itself into blood and thence into headlines
in the morning papers, declaring that Dorothy Arnold’s body had been
found. Denials followed within hours, to be sure.

So the case rests.

Perhaps, in some year to come, approaching death will open the lips of
one or another who knows the secret and has been sealed to silence by
the fears and needs of life. But it is just as likely that the words of
her dying parent contain as much as can be known of the truth about the
missing Dorothy Arnold.




VIII

EDDIE CUDAHY AND PAT CROWE


At seven o’clock on the bright winter evening of December 18,
1900, Edward A. Cudahy, the multimillionaire meat packer, sent
his fifteen-year-old son to the home of a friend, with a pile of
periodicals. The boy, Edward A., junior, but shortly to be known over
two continents as Eddie Cudahy, left his father’s elaborate house at
No. 518 South Thirty-seventh Street, Omaha, walked three blocks to
the home of Doctor Fred Rustin, also in South Thirty-seventh Street,
delivered the magazines, turned on his heel and disappeared.

Shortly before nine o’clock the rich packer noticed that his son had
not returned, and he observed to his wife that the Rustins must have
invited the boy to stay. Mrs. Cudahy felt a little nervous and urged
her husband to make sure. He telephoned to the Rustin home and was
promptly told that Eddie had been there, left the papers and departed
immediately, almost two hours before.

The Cudahys were instantly alarmed and convinced that something out
of the ordinary had befallen the boy. He had promised to return
immediately to consult with his father over a Christmas list. He was
known to have no more than a few cents in his pockets, and unexplained
absences from home at night were unprecedented with him.

The beef magnate notified the Omaha police without long hesitation, and
the quest for the missing rich boy was on. All that night detectives,
patrolmen, servants, and friends of the family went up and down the
streets and alleys of the overgrown Nebraska packing town, with its
strange snortings from the cattle pens, its grunting railroad engines,
its colonies of white and black laborers from distant lands, its
brawling night life and its pretentious new avenues where the brash and
sudden rich resided. At dawn the searchers congregated, sleepless, at
the police headquarters or the Cudahy mansion, baffled and affrighted.
Not the first clew to the boy had been found, and no one dared to
whisper the clearest suspicions.

By noon all Omaha was in turmoil. The great packing houses had
practically stopped their activity; the police had been called in
from their usual assignments and put to searching the city, district
by district; the resorts and gambling houses were combed by the
detectives; the anxious father had telegraphed to Chicago for twenty
Pinkerton men, and the usual flight of mad rumors was in the air.

One man reported that he had seen two boys, one of them with a broken
arm, leave a street car at the city limits on the preceding night.
The fact that the car line passed near the Cudahy home was enough to
lead people to think one of the boys must have been Eddie Cudahy. As
a result, his known young friends were sought out and questioned; the
schools were gone over for the boy with a broken arm, and all the
street-car crews in town were examined by the police.

By the middle of the afternoon, the newspapers issued special editions,
which bore the news that a letter had been received from kidnappers.
According to this account, a man on horseback had ridden swiftly past
the Cudahy home at nine o’clock that morning and tossed a letter to the
lawn. This had been picked up by one of the servants, and it read as
follows:

 “We have your son. He is safe. We will take good care of him and
 return him for a consideration of twenty-five thousand dollars. We
 mean business.

                                                          “Jack.”

With the publication of this alleged communication, even more fantastic
reports began to reach the police and the parents. One young intimate
of the family came in and reported in all seriousness that he had seen
a horse and trap standing in Thirty-seventh Street, near the Cudahy
home on several occasions in the course of the preceding week. The fact
that it looked like any one of a hundred smart rigs then in common use
did not seem to detract from its fancied significance.

Another neighbor reported that three days before the kidnapping he had
seen a covered light wagon standing at the curb in the street, a block
to the rear of the Cudahy home. One man on the seat was talking with
another, who was standing on the walk, and, as the narrator passed,
they had lowered their voices to a whisper. He had not thought the
incident suggestive until after the report of the kidnapping. And the
police, quite forgetting the instinctive universal habit of lowering
the voice when strangers pass, sent out squads of men to find the wagon
and the whisperers!

In short, the town was excited out of all sanity, and the very
forces which should have maintained calmness and acted with all
possible self-possession seemed the most headless. All the officials
accomplished was the brief detention of several innocent persons, the
theatrical raiding of a few gambling houses, and the further excitation
of the citizenry, always ready to respond to police histrionism.

To add an amusing exhibit to the already heavy store of evidence on
this last point, it may be noted with amusement, not to say amazement,
that the kidnapping letter, which had so agitated the public, was
itself a police fake, and the rider who had thrown it on the lawn was a
clumsy invention.

Meantime, however, a genuine kidnapping letter had reached the hands
of Mr. Cudahy. A little before nine o’clock on the morning of the
nineteenth, after he too had been up all night, the family coachman was
walking across the front lawn when he saw a piece of red cloth tied to
a stout wooden stick about two feet long. He approached it, looked at
it suspiciously, and finally picked it up, to find that an envelope
was wrapped about the stick and addressed in pencil to Mr. Cudahy.
Evidently some one had thrown this curiously prepared missive into the
yard in the course of the preceding night, for there had been numbers
of policemen, detectives, and neighbors on the lawn and on the walks in
front of the property since dawn.

The letter, with its staff and red cloth, was immediately carried
to the packer, who read with affrighted eyes this remarkable and
characteristic communication:

  “OMAHA, December 19, 1900.

  “Mr. Cudahy:

 “We have kidnapped your child and demand twenty-five thousand dollars
 for his safe return. If you give us the money, the child will be
 returned as safe as when you last saw him; but if you refuse, we will
 put acid in his eyes and blind him. Then we will immediately kidnap
 another millionaire’s child that we have spotted, and we will demand
 one hundred thousand dollars, and we will get it, for he will see the
 condition of your child and realize the fact that we mean business and
 will not be monkeyed with or captured.

 “Get the money all in gold--five, ten, and twenty-dollar pieces--put
 it in a grip in a white wheat sack, get in your buggy alone on the
 night of December 19, at seven o’clock p.m., and drive south from your
 house to Center Street; turn west on Center Street and drive back to
 Ruser’s Park and follow the paved road toward Fremont.

 “When you come to a lantern that is lighted by the side of the road,
 place your money by the lantern and immediately turn your horse around
 and return home. You will know our lantern, for it will have two
 ribbons, black and white, tied on the handle. You must place a red
 lantern on your buggy where it can be plainly seen, so we will know
 you a mile away.

 “This letter and every part of it must be returned with the money,
 and any attempt at capture will be the saddest thing you ever done.
 _Caution! For Here Lies Danger._

 “If you remember, some twenty years ago Charley Ross was kidnapped in
 New York City, and twenty thousand dollars ransom asked. Old man Ross
 was willing to give up the money, but Byrnes[8] the great detective,
 with others, persuaded the old man not to give up the money, assuring
 him that the thieves would be captured. Ross died of a broken heart,
 sorry that he allowed the detectives to dictate to him.

 [8] Mr. Crowe had his criminal history somewhat vaguely in mind.

 “This letter must not be seen by any one but you. If the police or
 some stranger knew its contents, they might attempt to capture us,
 although entirely against your wish; or some one might use a lantern
 and represent us, thus the wrong party would secure the money, and
 this would be as fatal to you as if you refused to give up the money.
 So you see the danger if you let the letter be seen.

 “Mr. Cudahy, you are up against it, and there is only one way out.
 Give up the coin. Money we want, and money we will get. If you don’t
 give it up, the next man will, for he will see that we mean business,
 and you can lead your boy around blind the rest of your days, and all
 you will have is the damn copper’s sympathy.

 “Do the right thing by us, and we will do the same by you. If you
 refuse you will soon see the saddest sight you ever seen.

 “Wednesday, December 19th. This night or never. Follow these
 instructions, or harm will befall you or yours.”

There was no signature. I have quoted the letter exactly, with the
lapses in grammar and spelling preserved. It was written in pencil on
five separate pieces of cheap note paper and in a small, but firm,
masculine hand. It was read to the chief police authorities soon after
its receipt. Just why they felt compelled to announce that it had come,
and to invent the absurd draft they issued, remains for every man’s own
intuitions.

In this case, as in other abduction affairs, the police advised the
father not to comply with the demand of the criminals, but to rely upon
their efforts. No doubt their sense of duty to the public is as much
responsible for this invariable position as any confidence in their
own powers. An officer must feel, after all, that he cannot counsel
bargaining with dangerous criminals, and that to pay them is only to
encourage other kidnappers and further kidnappings.

In spite of the menacing terms of the rather garrulous letter, which
betrayed by its very length the fervor of its persuasive threats, and
the darkness of its reminders, the nervousness of its composer, Mr.
Cudahy was minded to listen to the advice of the officers and defy the
abductors of his son. In this frame of mind he delayed action until
toward the close of the afternoon, meantime sitting by the telephone
and hearing reports from police headquarters and his own private
officers every half hour. By four o’clock he and his attorney began to
realize that there was no clew of any kind; that the whole Omaha police
force and all the men his wealth had been able to supply in addition,
had been able to make not even the first promising step, and that the
hour for a decision that might be fatal was fast approaching. Still,
he hesitated to take a step in direct violation of official policy and
counsel.

In this dilemma Mrs. Cudahy came forward with a demand for action to
meet the immediate emergency and protect her only son. She refused to
listen to talk of remoter considerations, declared that the amount of
ransom was a trifle to a man of her husband’s fortune, and weepingly
insisted that she would not sacrifice her boy to any mad plans of
outsiders, who felt no such poignant concern as her own.

Shortly before five o’clock Mr. Cudahy telephoned the First National
Bank, which had, of course, closed for the day, and asked the cashier
to make ready the twenty-five thousand dollars in gold. A little later
the Cudahy attorney called at the bank and received the specie in five
bags and in the denominations asked by the abductors. The money was
taken at once to the Cudahy house and deposited inside, without the
knowledge of the servants or outsiders.

At half past six Mr. Cudahy ordered his driving mare hitched to the
buggy in which he made the rounds of his yards and plants. At seven
o’clock he slipped quietly out of his house, without letting his wife,
the servants, or any one but his attorney know his errand. He carried a
satchel containing the five bags of gold, which weighed more than one
hundred pounds, to the stable, put the precious stuff into the bottom
of his vehicle, took up the reins, and set out on his perilous and
ill-boding adventure.

Mr. Cudahy had not been allowed to leave home without warnings from the
police and his attorney. They had told him that he might readily expect
to find himself trapped by the kidnappers, who would then hold both him
and his son for still higher ransom. So he drove toward the appointed
place along the dim, night-hidden roads, with more than ordinary
misgiving. Once or twice, after he had proceeded six or seven miles
into the blackness of the open prairie, without seeing any signs from
the abductors, he came near turning back; but the danger to his son and
the thought that the criminals could have no object in sending him on a
fruitless expedition, held him to his course.

About ten miles out of town, still jogging anxiously along behind
his horse, Mr. Cudahy saw a passenger train on one of the two
transcontinental lines that converge at that point, coiling away into
the infinite blackness, like some vast phosphorescent serpent. The
beauty and mystery of the spectacle meant nothing to him, but it served
to raise his hopes. No doubt the kidnappers would soon appear now.
They had probably chosen this locality, with the swift trains running
by, for their rendezvous. Once possessed of the gold, they would catch
the next flyer for either coast and be gone out of the reach of local
police. Perhaps they would even have the missing boy with them and
surrender him as soon as they had been paid the ransom.

Thus buoyed and heartened, the father drove on. Suddenly the road
entered a cleft between two abrupt hills or butts. A sense of
impendency oppressed the lonely driver. He took up a revolver beside
him on the seat, clutching it near him, with some protective instinct.
At the same moment he turned higher the flame in his red lantern, which
swung from the whip socket of his buggy, and peered out into the gulch.
Everything was pit-black and grave-silent. He lay back disappointed and
spoke to the horse, debating whether to turn back. Once more he decided
to go on. The cleft between the two eminences grew narrower. The horse
turned a swift sharp corner. Cudahy sat up with startled alertness.

There in the road before him, not ten rods away, was a smoky lantern,
throwing but a pallid radiance about it in the thick darkness, but
lighting a great hope in the father’s heart. He approached directly,
drew up his horse a few yards away, found that the lantern, tied to
a twig by the roadside, was decorated with the specified ribbons of
black and white, returned to his buggy, carried the bags of gold to the
lantern, put them down in the roadside, waited a few moments for any
sign that might be given, turned his horse about, and started for home,
driving slowly and listening intently for any sound from his expected
son.

The ten miles back to Omaha were covered in this slow and tense
way, with eyes and ears open, and a mind fluctuating between hope
and despair. But no lost boy came out of the darkness, and Cudahy
reached his house without the least further encouragement. It was
then past eleven o’clock. His attorney and his wife were still in
the drawing-room, sleepless, tense, and terrified. They greeted the
boy’s father with swift questions and relapsed into hopelessness
when he related what he had done. An hour passed, while Cudahy tried
to keep up the courage of his wife by argument and reasoning. Then
came one o’clock. Now half past one. Surely there was no longer any
need of waiting now. Either the kidnappers had hoaxed the suffering
parents, or that note had not come from kidnappers at all, but from
impostors--or--something far worse. At best, nothing would be heard
till morning.

“It’s no use, Mrs. Cudahy,” said the lawyer. “You’d better get what
sleep you can, and----”

“Hs-s-sh!” said the mother, laying her finger on her lips and listening
like a hunted doe.

In an instant she sprang out of her chair, ran into the hall, out of
the door, down the walk to the street, and out of the gate. The two men
sprang up and followed in time to see her catch the missing boy into
her arms. She had heard his footfall.

The news of the boy’s return was flashed to police headquarters within
a few minutes, and the detective chief went at once to the Cudahy home
to hear the returning boy’s story. It was simple and brief enough.

Eddie Cudahy had left Doctor Rustin’s house the night before, and gone
directly homeward. Three or four doors from his parents’ house Eddie
Cudahy was suddenly confronted by two men who faced him with revolvers,
called him Eddie McGee, declared that he was wanted for theft, that
they were officers, and that he must come to the police station. He
protested that he was not Eddie McGee, and that he could be identified
in the house yonder; but his captors forced him into their buggy and
drove off, warning him to make no outcry. They had gone only a few
blocks when they changed their tone, tied the lad’s arms behind him,
and put a bandage over his eyes and another over his mouth, so that he
could not cry out. He understood that he had been kidnapped.

Thus trussed up and prevented from either seeing where he was being
taken, or making any outcry, the young fellow was driven about for an
hour, and finally delivered to an old house, which he believed to be
unfurnished, judging from the hollow sound of the footsteps, as he
and his captors were going up the stairs. He was taken into a room on
the second floor, seated in a chair, and handcuffed to it. His gag
was removed, but not the bandage on his eyes. He was supplied with
cigarettes and offered food, but he could not eat. One of the two men
stood guard, the other departing at once, but returning later on.

All that night and the next day the boy was unable to sleep. But
he sensed that his captor seemed to be imbibing whisky with great
regularity. Finally, about an hour before he had been set free, Eddie
heard the other man return and hold a whispered conversation with his
guard. The boy was then taken from the house, put back into the same
buggy, driven to within a quarter of a mile of his father’s home, and
released. He ran for home, and his captors drove off.

Eddie Cudahy could not give any working description of the criminals.
He had not got a good look at them in the street when they seized him,
because it was dark, and they had the brims of their large hats pulled
down over their eyes. Immediately afterward he had been bandaged and
deprived of all further chance of observation. One man was tall, and
the other short. The tall man seemed to be in command. The short man
had been his guard. He thought there was a third man who was bringing
in reports.

There were just two dimly promising lines of investigation. First, it
would surely be possible to find the house in which the boy had been
held captive, for Omaha was not so large that there were many empty
houses to suit the description furnished by the boy. Besides, the time
at which any such house had been rented would offer evidence. It might
be possible to get a clew to the identity of the kidnappers through the
description of the person or persons who had done the renting.

Second, the kidnappers must have got the horse and buggy somewhere;
most likely from a local livery stable. If its source could be found,
the liveryman also would be able to describe the persons with whom he
had done business.

So the police set to work, searching the town again for house and for
stable. They found several deserted two-story cottages that fitted the
picture well enough, and in each instance there were circumstances
which seemed to indicate that the kidnappers had been there. Finally,
however, all were eliminated, except a crude two-story cabin at 3604
Grover Street. This turned out to be the place, situated near the
outskirts, on the top of a hill, with the nearest neighbors a block
away. Cigarette ends, burned matches, empty whisky bottles, and windows
covered with newspapers gave silent, but conclusive, testimony.

The matter of the horse proved more difficult. It had not been hired
at any stable in Omaha or in Council Bluffs, across the Missouri
River. Advertising and police calls brought out no private owner who
had rented such a rig. Finally, however, the officers found a farmer
living about twenty miles out of town who had sold a bay pony to a
tall stranger several weeks before. Another man was found who had sold
a second-hand buggy to a man of the same general description. At last
the police began to realize that they were dealing with a criminal of
genuine resourcefulness and foresight. The man had not blundered in any
of the usual ways, and he had made the trail so confused that more than
a week had passed before there were any positive indications as to his
possible identity.

In the end several indications pointed in the same direction. It
seemed highly probable that the kidnapper chieftain had been some one
acquainted with the packing business and probably with the Cudahys.
He was also familiar with the town. He was tall, had a commanding
voice, was accompanied by a shorter man, who seemed to be older, but
was still dominated by his companion. More important still, this chief
of abductors was an experienced and clever criminal. He gave every
evidence of knowing all the ropes. These specifications seemed to fit
just one man whose name now began to be used on all sides--the thrice
perilous and ill-reputed Pat Crowe.

It was recalled that this man had begun life as a butcher, been
a trusted employee of the Cudahys ten years before, and had been
dismissed for dishonesty. Subsequently he had turned his hand to crime,
and achieved a startling reputation in the western United States as
an intrepid bandit, train robber, and jail breaker, a handy man with
a gun, a sure shot, and a desperate fellow in a corner. He had been
in prison more than once, had lately made what seemed an effort at
reform, knew Edward A. Cudahy well, and had sometimes received favors
and gratuities from the rich man. He was, in short, exactly the man
to fit all the requirements, and succeeding weeks and evidence only
strengthened the suspicion against him. Crowe, though he had been seen
in Omaha the day before the kidnapping, was nowhere to be discovered.
Even this fact added to the general belief that he and none other had
done the deed. In a short time the Cudahy kidnapping mystery resolved
itself into a quest for this notorious fellow.

The alarm was spread throughout the United States and Canada, to
the British Isles, and the Continental ports, and to Mexico and the
Central American border and port cities, where it was believed the
fugitive might make his appearance. But Crowe was not apprehended,
and the quest soon settled down to its routine phases, with occasional
lapses back into exciting alarms. Every little while the capture of
Pat Crowe was reported, and on at least a dozen occasions men turned
up with confessions and detailed descriptions of the kidnapping.
These apparitions and alleged captures took place in such diffused
spots as London, Singapore, Manila, Guayaquil, San Francisco, and
various obscure towns in the United States and Canada. The genuine
and authentic Pat Crowe, however, stoutly declined to be one of the
captives or confessors, and so the hunt went on.

[Illustration:

                                                           _Wide World_

                           ~~ PAT CROWE ~~]

Meantime Crowe’s confederate, an ex-brakeman on the Union Pacific
Railroad, had been taken and brought to trial. His name was James
Callahan, and there was then and is now no question about his
connection with the affair. Nevertheless, at the end of his trial on
April 29, 1901, Callahan was acquitted, and Judge Baker, the presiding
tribune, excoriated the jury for neglect of duty, saying that never had
evidence more clearly indicated guilt. Attempts to convict Callahan on
other counts were no better starred, and he had finally to be released.

In the same year, 1901, word was received from Crowe through an
attorney he had employed in an earlier difficulty. Crowe had sent
this barrister a draft from Capetown, South Africa, in payment of
an old debt. The much sought desperado had got through the lines to
the Transvaal, joined the Boer forces, and had been fighting against
the British. He had been twice wounded, decorated for distinguished
courage, and was, according to his own statement, done with crime and
living a different life--adventurous, but honest. So many canards had
been exploded that Omaha refused to believe the story, albeit time
proved it to be true.

At the height of the excitement, rewards of fifty-five thousand dollars
had been offered for the capture and conviction of Pat Crowe, thirty
thousand by Cudahy and twenty-five thousand by the city of Omaha.
This huge price on the head of this wandering bad man had, of course,
contributed to the feverish and half-worldwide interest in the case.
Yet even these fat inducements accomplished nothing.

Finally, in 1906, when Crowe had been hunted in vain for more than five
years, he suddenly opened negotiations with Omaha’s chief of police
through an attorney, offering to come in and surrender, in case all the
rewards were immediately and honestly withdrawn, so that there would be
no money inducement which might cause officers or others to manufacture
a case against him. After some preliminaries, these terms were met, but
not until an attempt to capture the desperado had been made and failed,
with the net result of three badly wounded officers.

In February, 1906, Crowe was at last brought to trial and, to the utter
astoundment and chagrin of the entire country, promptly acquitted,
though he offered no defense and tacitly admitted that he had taken
the boy. One bit of conclusive evidence that had been offered by the
prosecution and admitted by the court, was a letter written by Crowe to
his parish priest in the little Iowa town of his boyhood. In the course
of this letter, which had been written to the priest in the hope that
he might make peace with Cudahy, the desperado admitted that “I am
solely responsible for the Cudahy kidnapping. No one else is to blame.”

No matter. The jury would not consider the evidence and brought in the
verdict already indicated. Crowe, after six years of being hunted with
a price of fifty-five thousand dollars on his head, was a free man.

The acquittals of Crowe and Callahan have furnished material for a good
deal of amused and some angry speculation. The local situation in Omaha
at the time furnishes the key to the puzzle. First of all, there was
the bitter anti-beef trust agitation, founded on the fact that many
small independent butchers had been put out of business by the great
packing-house combination, of which Cudahy was a member; and that meat
prices had everywhere been rapidly advanced to almost double their
earlier prices. Next, there was the circumstance of Cudahy’s abundant
and flaunting wealth. The common man considered that these millions
had been gouged out of his pocket and cut from off his dinner plate.
Cudahy had also begun the introduction of cheap negro labor into Omaha
to break a strike of his packing-house employees, and the city was
bitterly angry at him. Also, Crowe was himself popular and well known.
Many considered him a hero. But there was still another strange cause
of the state of the public mind.

In the very beginning a not inconsiderable part of Omaha’s people had
somehow come to the curious conclusion that there had been no Cudahy
kidnapping. One story said that Eddie Cudahy was a wild youth, and that
he himself had conspired with Crowe and Callahan to abduct him and get
the ransom, since he needed a share of it for his own purpose, and
he saw in this plan an easy method to mulct his unsuspecting father.
A later version denied the boy’s guilt, but still insisted that the
whole story, as told by the father and confirmed by the police, was a
piece of fiction. What motive the rich packer could have had for such
a fraud, no one could say. The best explanation given was that he saw
in it a plan to get worldwide advertising for the Cudahy name. How
this could have sold any additional hams or beeves, is a bit hard to
imagine, but the story was so generally believed that two jurors at
one of the trials voiced it in the jury room and scoffed at all the
evidence. All this rumor is, of course, absurd.

Crowe, after his acquittal, went straight, as the word goes. He has
committed no more crimes, unless one wants to rate under this heading
a book of highly romantic confessions, which he had published the
following year. In this book he set forth the circumstances of the
crime in great, but unreliable, detail. He made it very plain, however,
that he and Callahan alone planned the crime and carried it out.

Crowe personally conceived the whole plan and took Callahan into the
conspiracy only because he needed help. The two held up the boy, as
already related. As soon as they had him safe in the old house, Crowe
drove back to the Cudahy home in his buggy and threw the note, wrapped
about the stick and decorated with the red cloth, upon the lawn, where
it was found the next morning by the coachman. Of the twenty-five
thousand dollars in gold, Crowe gave his assistant only three thousand
dollars, used one thousand for expenses, and buried the rest,
recovering it later when the coast was clear. He selected Cudahy for a
victim because he knew that the packer was a fond father, had a nervous
wife, and would be strong enough to resist any mad police advice.

A few years later I first encountered Crowe in New York, when he came
to see me with a petty favor to ask and an article of his reminiscences
to sell. He had meantime become a kind of peregrine reformer, lecturer,
pamphlet seller and semi-mendicant, now blessed with a little
evanescent prosperity, again sleeping in Bowery flops and eking out
a miserable living by any device short of lawbreaking. And he has
called upon me or crossed my wanderings repeatedly in the intervening
years, always voluble, plausible and a trifle pathetic. Now he is off
to call upon the President, to memorialize a governor or to address a
provincial legislature. He is bent on abolishing prisons, has a florid
set-speech, which he delivers in a big sententious voice, and perhaps
he impresses his rural hearers, though the tongue in the cheek and the
twinkle in the eye never escape those who know him of old.

This grand rascal is no longer young--rising sixty, I should say--and
life has treated him shabbily in the last twenty years. Yet neither
poverty nor age has quite taken from him a certain leonine robustness,
a kind of ruined strength and power that shines a little sadly through
his charlatanry.

Only once or twice, when he has lost himself in the excited recounting
of his adventures, of his hardy old crimes, of the Cudahy kidnapping,
have I ever caught in him the quality that must once have been
his--the force, the fire that made his name shudder around the world.
Convention has beaten him as it beats them all, these brave and baneful
men. It has made a sidling apologist of a great rogue in Crowe’s
case--and what a sad declension!




IX

THE WHITLA KIDNAPPING


Abduction is always a puzzling crime. The risks are so great, the
punishment, of late years, so severe, and the chances of profit so
slight that logic seems to demand some special and extraordinary motive
on the part of the criminal. It is true that kidnapping is one of the
easiest crimes to commit. It is also a fact that it seems to offer
a quick and promising way of extorting large sums of money without
physical risk. But every offender must know that the chances of success
are of the most meager.

A study of past cases shows that child stealing arouses the public
as nothing else can, not even murder. This state of general alarm,
indignation, and alertness is the first peril of the kidnapper.
Again, the problem of getting the ransom from even the most willing
victim without exposing the criminal to capture, is a most intricate
and unpromising one. It is well known that child snatchers almost
never succeed with this part of the business. The cases in which the
kidnapper has actually got the ransom and made off without being
caught and punished are so thinly strewn upon the long record that any
criminal who ever takes the trouble to peruse it must shrink with fear
from such offenses. Finally, it is familiar knowledge among police
officers that professional criminals usually are aware of this fact
and consequently both dread and abhor abductions.

The fact that kidnapping persists in spite of these recognized
discouragements probably accounts for the proneness of policemen and
citizens to interpret into every abduction case some moving force other
than mere hope of gain. Obscurer impulsions and springs of action,
whether real or surmised, are often the inner penetralia of child
stealing mysteries. So with the famous Whitla case.

At half past nine on the morning of March 18, 1909, a short, stocky
man drove up to the East Ward Schoolhouse, in the little steel town of
Sharon, in western Pennsylvania, in an old covered buggy and beckoned
to Wesley Sloss, the janitor.

“Mr. Whitla wants Willie to come to his office right away,” said the
stranger.

It may have been more than irregular for a pupil to be summoned from
his classes in this way, but in Sharon no one questioned vagaries
having to do with this particular child. Willie Whitla was the
eight-year-old son of the chief lawyer of the place, James P. Whitla,
who was wealthy and politically influential. The boy was also, and
more spectacularly, the nephew by marriage of Frank M. Buhl, the
multimillionaire iron master and industrial overlord of the region.

Janitor Sloss bandied no compliments. He hurried inside to Room 2,
told the teacher, Mrs. Anna Lewis, that the boy was wanted, helped
bundle him into his coat, and led him out to the buggy. The man in the
conveyance tucked the boy under the lap robe, muttered his thanks, and
drove off in the direction of the town’s center, where the father’s
office was situated.

When Willie Whitla failed to appear at home for luncheon at the noon
recess, there was no special apprehension. Probably he had gone to a
chum’s house and would be along at the close of the afternoon session.
His mother was vexed, but not worried.

At four o’clock the postman stopped on the Whitla veranda, blew his
whistle, and left a note which had been posted in the town some hours
before. It was addressed to the lawyer’s wife in the childish scrawl of
the little boy. Its contents, written by another hand, read:

 “We have your boy, and no harm will come to him if you comply with our
 instructions. If you give this letter to the newspapers, or divulge
 any of its contents, you will never see your boy again. We demand
 ten thousand dollars in twenty-dollar, ten-dollar, and five-dollar
 bills. If you attempt to mark the money, or place counterfeit money,
 you will be sorry. Dead men tell no tales. Neither do dead boys. You
 may answer at the following addresses: _Cleveland Press_, _Youngstown
 Vindicator_, _Indianapolis News_, and _Pittsburgh Dispatch_ in the
 personal columns. Answer: 'A. A. Will do as you requested. J. P. W.’”

A few minutes later the whole town was searching, and the alarm had
been broadcast by telegraph and telephone. Before nightfall a hundred
thousand officers were on the lookout in a thousand cities and towns
through the eastern United States.

At four thirty o’clock, when Sharon first heard of the abduction, a
boy named Morris was found, who had seen Willie Whitla get out of a
buggy at the edge of the town, drop a letter into the mail box, and get
back into the vehicle, which was driven away.

This discovery had hardly been made when it was also learned that a
stranger had rented a horse and buggy, fitting the description of those
used by the kidnapper, in South Sharon early in the morning. At five
o’clock, the jaded horse, still hitched to the rented buggy, was found
tied to a post in Warren, Ohio, twenty-five miles from Sharon.

The search immediately began in the northern or lake cities and towns
of Ohio, the trend of the search running strongly toward Cleveland,
where it was believed the abductor or abductors would try the hiding
properties of urban crowds.

The Whitla and Buhl families acted with sense and caution. They were
sufficiently well informed to know that the police are doubtful
agencies for the safe recovery of snatched children. They were rich to
the point of embarrassment. Ten thousand dollars meant nothing. The
safety and speedy return of the child were the only considerations that
could have swayed them. Accordingly, they did not reveal the contents
of the note, as I have quoted it. Neither did they confide to the
police any other details, or the direction of their intentions. The
fact of the kidnapping could, of course, not be concealed, but all else
was guarded from official or public intrusion.

On the advice of friends the parents did employ private detectives,
but even their advice was disregarded, and Mr. Whitla without delay
signified his willingness to capitulate by inserting the dictated
notice into all the four mentioned newspapers.

The answer of the abductors came very promptly through the mails,
reaching Whitla on the morning of the twentieth, less than forty-eight
hours after the boy had been taken.

Again following instructions, Whitla did not communicate to the police
the contents of this note or his plans. Instead, he set off quietly
for Cleveland, evidently to mislead the public officers, who seemed to
take delight in their efforts to seize control of the case. At eight
o’clock in the night Whitla left Cleveland, accompanied by one private
detective, and went to the neighboring city of Ashtabula. Here the
detective was left at the White Hotel, and the father of the missing
boy set out to meet the demands of the kidnappers.

They, it appears, had written him that he must go at ten o’clock at
night to Flatiron Park, a lonely strip of land on the outskirts of
Ashtabula, and there deposit under a certain stone the package of
bills. He was told what route to follow, commanded to go alone, and
warned not to communicate with the police. Having left the money as
commanded, Whitla was to return to the hotel and wait there for the
coming of his son, who would be restored as soon as the abductors were
safely in possession of the money.

So the father set out in the dark of the night, followed the route
given him by the abductors, deposited the money in the park, and
returned forthwith to the hotel, reaching it before eleven o’clock.
Here he sat with his bodyguard, waiting for the all-desired apparition
of his little son. The hours went wearily by, while the father’s
nervousness mounted. Finally, at three o’clock in the morning, some
local officers appeared and notified the frenzied lawyer that they had
been watching the park all night, and that no one had appeared to claim
the package of money.

Police interference had ruined the plan.

The local officers naturally assumed that, as the kidnappers were
to call for the money in the park, they must be in Ashtabula. They
accordingly set out, searched all night, invaded the houses of sleeping
citizens, turned the hotels and rooming houses inside out, prowled
their way through cars in the railroad yards and boats in the harbor,
watched the roads leading in and out of the city, searched the street
cars and generally played the devil. But all in vain. There were no
suspicious strangers to be found in or about the community.

The following morning the father of the boy visited the mayor and
requested that the police cease their activities. He pointed out that
there were no clews of definite promise, and the peril in which the
child stood ought to command official coöperation instead of dangerous
interference. Whitla finally managed to convince the officers that they
stood no worse chance of catching the criminals after the recovery of
the boy, and the Ashtabula officers were immediately called off.

The disappointed and harried father was forced to return to Sharon in
defeat and bring the disappointing news to his prostrated wife. The
little steel town had got the definite impression that news of the
child had been got, and preparations for the boy’s return had been
made. Many citizens were up all night, ready to receive the little
wanderer with rockets, bands, and jubilation. Crowds besieged the
Whitla home, and policemen had to be kept on guard to turn away a
stream of well-meaning friends and curious persons, who would have kept
the breaking mother from such little sleep as was possible under the
circumstances.

The excitement of the vicinity had by this time spread to all the
country. As is always the case, arrests on suspicion were made of the
most unlikely persons in the most impossible situations. Men, women,
and children were stopped in the streets, dragged from their rooms,
questioned, harried, taken to police stations, and even locked into
jails for investigation, while the missing boy and his abductors
succeeded in eluding completely the large army of pursuers now in the
field.

Nothing further was heard from the kidnappers on the twenty-first,
and the hearts of the bewildered parents and relatives sank with
apprehension, but the morning mail of the twenty-second again contained
a note which, properly interpreted, seems to indicate that the business
of leaving the money in the park at Ashtabula may have been a test
maneuver, to find out whether Whitla would keep the faith and act
without the police. This note read:

 “A mistake was made at Ashtabula Saturday night. You come to Cleveland
 on the Erie train leaving Youngstown at 11:10 a. m. Leave the train at
 Wilson Avenue. Take a car to Wilson and St. Clair. At Dunbar’s drug
 store you will find a letter addressed to William Williams.

 “We will not write you again in this matter. If you attempt to catch
 us you will never see your boy again.”

This time Whitla decided to be rid of the police. He accordingly had
his representatives announce that all activities would cease for
the time being, in the hope that the kidnappers would regain their
confidence and reopen communications. At the same time he told the
Ashtabula police to resume their activities. With these two false leads
given out, Whitla slipped away from his home, caught the train, and
went straight to Cleveland.

Late that afternoon, having satisfied himself that he had eluded the
overzealous officers, Whitla went to Dunbar’s drug store and found the
note waiting, as promised. It contained nothing but further directions.
He was to proceed to a confectionery conducted by a Mrs. Hendricks at
1386 East Fifty-third Street, deliver the ransom, carefully done into a
package, to the woman in charge. He was to tell her the package should
be held for Mr. Hayes, who would call.

Whitla went at once to the candy store, turned over the package of ten
thousand dollars to Mrs. Hendricks, and was given a note in return.
This missive instructed him to go forthwith to the Hollenden Hotel,
where he was to wait for his boy. The promise was made that the child
would be returned within three hours.

It was about five o’clock when this exchange was made. The tortured
father turned and went immediately to the Hollenden, one of the chief
hostelries of Cleveland, engaged a room and waited. An hour passed.
His anxiety became intolerable. He went down to the lobby and began
walking back and forth, in and out of the doors, up and down the walk,
back into the hotel, up to his room and back to the office. Several
noticed his nervousness and preoccupation, but only a lone newspaper
man identified him and kept him under watch.

Seven o’clock came and passed. At half past seven the worn lawyer’s
agitation increased to the point of frenzy. He could do no more than
retire to a quiet corner of the lobby, huddle himself into a big chair,
and sink into the half stupor of exhaustion.

A few minutes before eight o’clock the motorman of a Payne Avenue
street car saw a man and a small boy come out of the gloom at a street
corner in East Cleveland and motion him to stop. The man put the child
aboard and gave the conductor some instructions, paying its fare, and
immediately vanished in the darkness. The little boy, wearing a pair of
dark goggles and a large yellow cap that was pulled far down over his
ears, sat quietly in the back seat and made not a sound.

A few squares further along the line two boys of seventeen or eighteen
years boarded the car and were immediately intrigued by the glum little
figure. The newcomers, whose names were Edward Mahoney and Thomas W.
Ramsey, spoke to the child, vaguely suspicious that this might be the
much-sought Willie Whitla. When they asked his name the lad said he was
Willie Jones. In response to other questions he told that he was on his
way to meet his father at the Hollenden.

The two young men said no more till the hotel was reached. Here they
insisted on leaving the car with the boy and at once called a policeman
to whom they voiced their suspicions. The officer, the two youths, and
the child thus entered the hotel and approached the desk. In response
to further interrogation, the little fellow still insisted that he
was Jones, but, being deprived of his big cap and goggles and called
Willie Whitla, he asked:

“How did you know me? Where is my daddy?”

The gloomy man in the corner chair got one tinkle of the childish
voice, ran across the big room, caught up the child and rushed
hysterically to his own apartment, where he telephoned at once to the
boy’s mother. By the time the attorney could be persuaded to come
back down stairs, a crowd was gathered, and the father and child were
welcomed with cheers.

The boy shortly gave his father and the police his story. The man who
had taken him from school in the buggy had told him that he was being
taken out of town to the country at his father’s request, because
there was an epidemic of smallpox, and it was feared the doctors would
lock him up in a dirty pest house. He had accordingly gone willingly
to Cleveland, where he had been taken to what he believed to be a
hospital. A man and woman had taken care of him and treated him well.
They were Mr. and Mrs. Jones. They had not abused him in any way. In
fact, he liked them, except for the fact that they made him hide under
the kitchen sink when any one knocked at the door, and they gave him
candy which made him sleepy. Mr. Jones himself, the boy said, had put
him aboard the street car, paid his fare, instructed him to tell any
inquirers that his name was Jones, and warned him to go immediately to
the hotel and join his father. The only additional information got from
the boy, besides fairly valuable descriptions of the abductors, was to
the effect that he had been taken to the “hospital” the night following
his abduction and had not left the place till he was led out to be sent
to the hotel.

The child returned to Sharon in triumph, was welcomed with music and a
salute from the local militia company, displayed before the serenading
citizens, and photographed for the American and foreign press.

Meantime the search for the kidnappers was under way. The private
detectives in the employ of the Whitlas were immediately withdrawn when
the boy was recovered, but the police of Cleveland and other cities
plunged in with notable energy. The druggist, with whom the note had
been left, and the woman confectioner, who had received the package
of ransom money, were immediately questioned. Neither knew that the
transaction they had aided was concerned with the Whitla case, and both
were frightened and astonished. They could give little information that
has not already been indicated. Mrs. Hendricks, the keeper of the candy
store, however, was able to particularize the description of the man
who had come to her place, left the note for Mr. Whitla, and returned
later for the package of money. He was, she said, about thirty years
old, with dark hair, a smoothly shaved, but pock-marked face, weighed
about one hundred and sixty pounds, and seemed to be Irish.

Considering the car line which had brought the boy to the Hollenden
Hotel, the point at which he had boarded the car, and the description
he gave of the place he termed a hospital, the Cleveland police were
certain Willie had been detained in an apartment house somewhere in the
southeast quarter of the city, and detectives were accordingly sent to
comb that part of the city in quest of a furnished suite in which the
kidnappers might still be hiding.

Willie Whitla had returned to his father on Monday night. Tuesday
evening, about twenty-two hours after the boy had made his dramatic
entry into the Hollenden, the detectives went through a three-story
flat building at 2022 Prospect Avenue and found that a couple answering
the general descriptions furnished by Willie Whitla and Mrs. Hendricks
had rented a furnished apartment there on the night following the
kidnapping and had departed only a few hours ahead of the detectives.
They had conducted themselves very quietly while in the place, and the
woman who had sublet the rooms to them was not even sure there had been
a child with them. Willie Whitla afterward identified this place as the
scene of his captivity.

The discovery of this apartment might have been less significant for
the moment, had the building not been but a few squares from the point
at which Willie had been put aboard the street car for his trip to join
his father. As it was, the detectives felt they were hot on the trail.
Reserves were rushed to that part of town, patrolmen were not relieved
at the end of their tours of duty, and the extra men were stationed at
the exits from the city, with instructions to stop and question all
suspicious persons. The pack was in full cry, but the quarry was by no
means in sight.

At this tense and climactic moment of the drama far broader forces than
the police were thrown upon the stage. The governor of Pennsylvania
signed a proclamation in the course of the afternoon, offering to
continue the reward of fifteen thousand dollars which had been posted
by the State for the recovery of the boy and the arrest and conviction
of his abductors. Since the boy had been returned, the money was to
go to those who brought his kidnappers to justice. Accordingly, the
people of several States were watching with no perfunctory alertness.
High hopes of immediate capture were thus based on more than one
consideration; but the night was aging without result.

At a few minutes past nine o’clock a man and woman of the most
inconspicuous kind entered the saloon of Patrick O’Reilly on Ontario
Street, Cleveland, sat down at a table in the rear room, and ordered
drink. The liquor was served, and the man offered a new five-dollar
bill in payment. He immediately reordered, telling the proprietor
to include the other patrons then in the place. Again he offered a
new bill of the same denomination, and once again he commanded that
all present accept his hospitality. Both the man and the woman drank
rapidly and heavily, quickly showing the effects of the liquor and
becoming more and more loquacious, spendthrift and effusive.

There was, of course, nothing extraordinary in such conduct. Men came
in often enough who drank heavily, spent freely, and insisted on
“buying for the house.” But it was a little unusual for a man to let go
of thirty dollars in little more than an hour, and it was still more
unusual for a customer to peel off one new five-dollar note after the
other.

O’Reilly had been reading the newspapers. He knew that there had been
a kidnapping; that there was a reward of fifteen thousand dollars
outstanding; that a man and woman were supposed to have held the boy
captive in Cleveland, and not too far from the saloon. Also he had read
about the package of five, ten, and twenty dollar bills. His brows
lifted. O’Reilly waited for an opportune moment and went to his cash
drawer. The bills this pair of strangers had given him were all new;
that was certain. Perhaps they would prove to be all of the same issue,
even of the same series and in consequent numbers. If so----

The saloonkeeper had to move with caution. When his suspect callers had
their attention on something else, he slipped the money from the till
and moved to the end of the bar near the window, where he was out of
their visional range. He laid the bills out on the cigar case, adjusted
his glasses, and stared.

In that moment the visitors got up to go. O’Reilly urged them to stay,
insisted on supplying them with a free drink, did what he could,
without arousing suspicion, to detain them, hoping that an officer
would saunter in. At last they could be held no longer. With an
exchange of unsteady compliments, they were out of the door and gone
into the night, whose shadows had yielded them up an hour before.

O’Reilly noted the direction they took and flew to a telephone. In
response to his urgings, Captain Shattuck and Detective Woods were
hurried to the place and set out with O’Reilly’s instructions and
description. They had no more than moved from the saloon when the
rollicking pair was seen returning.

The officers hailed these sinister celebrants with a remark about the
weather and the lateness of the hour. Instantly the man took to his
heels, with Captain Shattuck in pursuit. As they turned a corner, the
officer drew and fired high.

The fleeing man collapsed in a heap, and the policeman ran to him,
marveling that his aim had been so unintentionally good. He found,
however, that the fugitive had merely stumbled in his sodden attempt at
flight.

Both prisoners were taken forthwith to the nearest police station
and subjected to questioning. They were inarticulately drunk, or
determinedly reticent and pretending. Tiring of the maneuvers and half
assured that he was probably face to face with the kidnappers, Captain
Shattuck ordered them searched.

At various places in the linings of the woman’s clothing, still in
the neat packages in which it had been taken from the bank, were nine
thousand, seven hundred and ninety dollars.

The prisoners turned out to be James H. Boyle and Helen McDermott
Boyle--he a floating adventurer known to the cities of Pennsylvania and
Ohio, she the daughter of respectable Chicago parents, whom she had
quit several years before to go venturing on her own account.

From the beginning both the police and the public held the opinion that
these two people had not been alone in the kidnapping. When exhaustive
investigation failed to reveal the presence of others at any stage of
the abduction, flight, hiding and attempted removal in Cleveland, it
was concluded that the prisoners had possibly been the sole active
agents, but the opinion was retained that some one else must have
plotted the crime.

Why had these strangers singled out Sharon, an obscure little town? Why
had they chosen Willie Whitla, when there were tens of thousands of
boys with wealthier parents and many with even richer relatives? Who
had acquainted them with the particularities of the Whitlas’ lives,
the probable attitude at the school, the child’s fear of smallpox and
pest houses? Was it not obvious that some one close to the family had
supplied the information and laid the plans?

James H. Boyle was led into court on the sixth of May, faced with his
accusers, and swiftly encircled with the accusing evidence, which was
complete and unequivocal. He accepted it without display of emotion and
offered no defense. After brief argument the case went to the jury,
which reached an affirmative verdict within a few minutes.

Mrs. Boyle was placed on trial immediately afterward and also presented
no defense. A verdict was found against her with equal expedition on
May 10, and she was remanded for sentence.

On the following day both defendants were called before the court. The
judge imposed the life sentence on Boyle and a term of twenty-five
years on his wife. A few hours afterward Boyle called the newspaper
reporters to his cell in the jail at Mercer and handed them a written
statement.

Boyle’s writing went back fourteen years to 1895, when the body of
Dan Reeble, Jr., had been found lying on the sidewalk on East Federal
Street, Youngstown, Ohio, before the house where Reeble lived. There
had been some mysterious circumstances or rumors attached to Reeble’s
end.

Boyle did not attempt to explain the death of Reeble, but he said in
his statement that he and one Daniel Shay, a Youngstown saloonkeeper,
who had died in 1907, had caught Harry Forker, the brother of Mrs.
James P. Whitla and uncle of the kidnapped boy, taking a number of
letters from the pockets of the dead man, as his body lay on the walk.
Boyle recited that not only had he and Shay found Forker in this
compromising position, but they had picked up two envelopes overlooked
by Forker, in which were found four letters from women, two from a
girl in New York State and the other two from a Cleveland woman. The
contents were intimate, he said, and they proved beyond peradventure
that Forker had been present at Reeble’s death.

Boyle’s statement went on to recite that he had subsequently written
Forker, told him about the letters, and suggested that they were
for sale. Forker had immediately replied and made various efforts
to recover the incriminating missives, but Boyle had held them and
continued to extort money from Forker for years, threatening to reveal
the letters unless paid.

Finally, in March, 1908, Boyle’s statement went on to recite, a demand
for five thousand dollars had been made on Forker, who said he could
not raise the money, but would come into an inheritance later and would
then pay and recover the dangerous evidence. When Forker failed in
this undertaking, fresh threats were made, with the result that Forker
suggested the kidnapping of his nephew, the demand for ten thousand
dollars’ ransom, and the division of this spoil as a way to get the
five thousand dollars Boyle was demanding.

Boyle also recited that Forker had planned the kidnapping and attended
to the matter of having the boy taken from the school. He said that
some one else had done this work and delivered the child to him, Boyle,
in Warren, Ohio, where the exhausted horse was found.

This statement, filling the gap in the motive reasoning as it did,
created a turmoil. Forker and Whitla immediately and indignantly
denied the accusation and brought to their support a Youngstown police
officer, Michael Donnelly, who said he had found the body of Dan
Reeble. Donnelly recited that he had been talking to Reeble on the walk
before the building in which Reeble resided, early in the morning of
June 8, 1895. Reeble had gone upstairs, and Donnelly was walking slowly
down the street when he heard a thump and groans behind him. Returning
to the spot where he had left Reeble, he found his companion of a few
minutes before, dying on the walk.

Donnelly said that Reeble had had the habit of sitting on his window
sill, and that the man had apparently fallen out to his death. He swore
that neither Forker, Boyle, nor Daniel Shay had been present when
Reeble died.

There are, to be sure, some elements which verge upon improbability
in this account, but the denials of Forker and Whitla were strongly
reinforced by the testimony of Janitor Sloss and the keeper of the
livery where the horse and buggy had been hired. Both firmly identified
Boyle as the man they had seen and dealt with, thus refuting the latter
part of Boyle’s accusative statement.

Mrs. Boyle was released after having served ten years of her long term.
Her husband, on the other hand, continued his servitude and died of
pneumonia in Riverside Penitentiary on January 23, 1920.




X

THE MYSTERY AT HIGHBRIDGE


A few minutes past seven o’clock, on the evening of March 27, 1901,
Willie McCormick, a ten-year-old schoolboy, started to attend vespers
in the little Church of the Sacred Heart, in the Highbridge section of
New York City. His mother gave him a copper cent for the collection
plate, and he ran out of the door, struggling into his short brown
overcoat, in great haste to overtake two of his elder sisters who had
started ahead of him. Three doors down the street he stopped and blew a
toy whistle to attract the attention of a playmate. This boy’s mother
called from the porch that her son was to take a music lesson and could
not go to church. So Willie McCormick lifted his cap and went his way.

It was a cold spring evening, and cutting winds were piping through the
woods and across the open spaces of that then sparsely settled district
of the American metropolis. Dusk had fallen, and the thinly planted
electric lights along Ogden Avenue threw the shadows of the curbside
trees across the walks in moving arabesques. The boy buttoned his coat
closely about him, running away into the gloom, while the neighbor
woman watched him disappear. In that moment the profounder darkness
enveloped him, swallowed him into a void from which he never emerged
alive, and made him the chief figure of another of the abiding problems
of vanishment.

Highbridge is an outlying section of New York, fringing the eastern
bank of the Harlem River and centering about one approach to the old
and beautiful stone bridge from which it takes its name. The tracks of
the New York Central Railroad skirt the edge of the river on their way
up-state. Further back from the stream the ground rises, and along the
ridge, paralleling the river, is Ogden Avenue. Near the southern foot
of this thoroughfare, at One Hundred and Sixty-first Street, the steel
skeleton of the McComb’s Dam bridge thrust itself across the Harlem,
with its eastern arch spanning high above the muddy mouth of Cromwell
Creek,[9] which empties into the Harlem at this point. At the shore
level, under the great bridge approach, a hinged steel platform span,
raised and lowered by means of balance weights to permit the passage
of minor shipping up and down the creek, carried the tracks across the
lesser stream. Three blocks to the north of this confluence, which
plays an important part in the mystery, stood the McCormick home, a
comfortable brick and frame house of the villa type, set back from the
highest point of Ogden Avenue in a lawn.

[9] This creek has since been filled in and a playground marks its site.

Twenty-five and more years ago, when Willie McCormick disappeared,
the vicinity bore, as it still bears to a lesser degree, the air of
suburbia. Then houses were few and rather far apart. Some of the side
streets were unpaved, and all about were patches of unimproved land,
where clumps of trees, that once were part of the Bronx Woods, still
flourished in dense order. The first apartment houses of the district
were building, and gangs of Italian laborers, with a sprinkling of
native mechanics, were employed in the excavations and erections.

Kilns and a brick yard disfigured one bank of Cromwell Creek, while a
factory, a coal dump, and two lumber yards sprawled along the other.
Five squares to the north of the creek’s mouth and two squares to the
west is the Highbridge police station. The Church of the Sacred Heart,
then in charge of the wealthy and venerable Father J. A. Mullin, stands
two blocks to the east of Ogden Avenue and practically on the same
cross street with the police building. Neither of these places is more
than a third of a mile from the McCormick home.

Shortly after nine o’clock on the important evening already noted, the
two young daughters of William McCormick returned from church without
their brother. He had not overtaken them on the way, or joined them at
the services. They had not seen him and supposed he had either remained
at home, or played truant from church and gone to romp with other boys.
The father was immediately alarmed. It was not like Willie to stay out
in the dark. He was the eleventh of twelve children, all the others
being girls, and he was accordingly petted, overindulged, and feminine.
He had an especially strong dread of the dark and had never been known
to venture out in the night without his older sisters or other boys.
Besides, there had been kidnapping rumors in the neighborhood. It was
not long after the notorious abduction of Eddie Cudahy, and parents in
all parts of the United States were still nervous and watchful.

Whether because of threats, local suspicions, or because of the
general alarm, the richest man in the neighborhood had gone to almost
ludicrous extremes in his precautions. This man, a cloak manufacturer
named Oscar Willgerodt, occupied a large house about a hundred yards
from that of the McCormicks. He had a young son, also ten years old.
His apprehensions for the safety of this lad, who was a playmate of
Willie McCormick, resulted in a ten-foot stone wall across the front of
his property, with an ornamental iron gate that was kept padlocked at
night, though this step invalidated the fire insurance, an eight-foot
iron fence about the sides and rear of the property, topped with
strands of barbed wire, and several formidable dogs that ran at large
day and night.

The fears of the neighborhood rich man had naturally communicated
themselves to other parents, and they seethed in William McCormick’s
mind, as he hurried from his home to seek the absent boy. Willie was
not to be found at the home of any of his chums; he was not playing at
a near-by street corner, where some older boys were congregated, and
apparently no one had seen him since the neighbor woman, Mrs. Tierney,
had told him that her son could not go to church. The father, growing
more and more excited, stormed about the Highbridge district half the
night and then set out to visit relatives, to whose homes the boy might
have gone. But Willie McCormick was not to be traced anywhere. On the
following morning, when he did not appear, his father summoned the
police.

What followed provides an excellent exposition of the phenomenon
of public unconcern being gradually rallied to excitement and
finally driven to hysteria. The police listened to the statements
of the missing boy’s parents and sisters, made some perfunctory
investigations, and said that Willie McCormick had evidently run away
from home. Many boys did that. Moreover, it was spring, and such
vagaries were to be expected in youngsters. The newspapers noted the
case with short routine paragraphs. A street-car conductor brought
in the information that he had carried a boy, whom he was willing
to identify as Willie McCormick, judging from nothing better than
photographs, to a site in South Brooklyn, where Buffalo Bill’s Wild
West Show was encamped. Another conductor reported that he had taken a
boy answering the description of Willie McCormick to the Gravesend race
course, where the horses were tuning up for the spring meeting. But the
police found no trace of the wanderer at either place, nor at several
others that were suggested.

The McCormicks took the attitude at once that their son had not gone
away voluntarily. He was, they said, far too timid for adventuring,
much too beloved and pampered at home to seek other environment, and
too young to be troubled with the dromomania that attacks adolescents.
To these objections one of the police officials responded with the
charge that the McCormicks were not telling all they knew, and that he
was satisfied they had an idea what had happened to the runaway, as he
insisted on terming him.

At this point two interventions brought the McCormick case out of
obscurity. Father Mullin, having been appealed to by the McCormicks,
pointed out to the police in an interview that Willie McCormick had
vanished with one cent in his pocket, that he could have taken a sum
which must have seemed sufficient for long wanderings to a childish
mind from his mother’s purse, which lay at hand; that he had started
to church with his sisters and returned for his overcoat, and that
the departure was wholly unprepared and assuredly unpremeditated. The
astute priest said that every runaway made preparations for flight, and
that, no matter how carefully the plans might be laid, there always
remained behind the evidence of intent to disappear. A child, he said,
could not have planned more cunningly than many clever men, and he
insisted that there must be another explanation for the absence of the
boy.

Naturally the newspapers paid more attention to the priest, and they
began printing pictures of the boy, with scare headlines. Father Mullin
had just taken in hand the affair when Oscar Willgerodt, the man of the
stone wall and iron fences, came forward with an offer of a thousand
dollars’ reward for information leading to the discovery of the missing
boy. He said that he felt sure kidnappers had been at work, and that
they had taken the McCormick boy in mistake for his own son. He added
that he had received threats of abduction at intervals for more than a
year.

A few days later, the boy’s uncle appeared in the press with an offer
of five thousand dollars for the safe return of the child and the
production of his abductors. By this time the newspapers were flaming
with accounts of the disappearance in every edition. Their reporters
and detectives swarmed over Highbridge, and that quiet district was
immediately thrown into the wildest excitement, which rose as the days
succeeded.

Father Mullin next offered ten thousand dollars for the apprehension
of the kidnappers and return of the boy. Then a restaurant keeper
of the neighborhood, whose nephew had been threatened by anonymous
letter writers, offered two thousand dollars more for the return of
the McCormick boy, and he said he would pay an additional thousand
for evidence against kidnappers. Thus the total of fees offered was
nineteen thousand dollars. Still no word came from the absent lad, and
the efforts of a thousand officers failed to disclose any abductors.

The constant appearance of these articles in the newspapers and the
offers of such high rewards succeeded, however, in throwing a city of
five or six million people into general hysteria. Parents refused to
allow their children out of doors without escort; rich men called up
at all hours of the day and night, demanding special police to protect
their homes; excited women throughout the city and later throughout the
State and surrounding communities proceeded to interpret the apparition
of every stranger as evidence of kidnappers and to bombard the police
of a hundred towns and cities with frantic appeals. The absence of this
obscure child had become a public catastrophe.

Developments in the investigation came not at all. The police, the
reporters, and numberless private officers, who were attracted to the
case by the possibility of achieving celebrity and rich reward, all
bogged down precisely where they started. Willie McCormick had vanished
within a hundred feet of his father’s door. The night had simply
swallowed him up, and all efforts failed to penetrate a step into the
gloom.

Only two suggestive bits of information could be got from the
McCormicks and the missing boy’s friends. The father, being closely
interrogated as to possible enemies, could recall only one person
who might have had a grievance. This was a mechanic, who lived a few
squares away, and with whom there had been a disagreement as to pay.
But this man was at home and going steadily about his work; he was
vouched for by neighbors and his employers, and he came out of a police
grilling completely absolved.

Launcelot Tierney, the playmate for whom Willie McCormick had blown his
whistle a minute or two before he vanished, supplied the information
that Willie had tormented an Italian laborer on the morning before
the disappearance, and that this man had nursed his grudge until
the afternoon, when the boys were returning home from school. Then,
said the Tierney boy, this workman had lain in wait behind a pile of
lumber and dashed out after Willie, as the children passed. Willie had
run for safety and proved fleeter than his pursuer, who gave up the
attempt after running a few rods. Investigation showed that none of the
laborers employed at the indicated building was absent. However the
Tierney boy was unable to identify the man he had accused, when the
workmen were lined up for his inspection. A good deal was made of this
circumstance.

The public police, however, always came back to their original
attitude. Kidnappers were actuated by the hope of extorting money, they
said. Since William McCormick was a poor man, there could have been no
motive for the abduction of his son. Consequently it was almost certain
that the boy had gone away.

Mr. McCormick replied that while he was now poor, he had formerly been
well to do. He reasoned that the kidnapper might very well have been
ignorant of his decline in fortune and taken the boy in the belief that
his parent was still wealthy. Others joined the controversy by pointing
out in the newspapers that abductions were sometimes motivated by
revenge or spite on the part of persons quite unknown or unsuspected by
the parents; that children were often stolen by irrational or demented
men or women, and that there was at least some basis for faith in the
abduction theory, but no evidence to support the idea of a runaway.

Meantime events had added their spice of immediate drama. A few nights
after the disappearance of Willie McCormick, Doctor D. A. McLeod,
a surgeon occupying the next house but one to the McCormick’s, had
found a masked man skulking about the rear of his property just after
nightfall, and tried to grapple with the intruder. A week later, from
a house two blocks away, another neighbor reported that he, too, had
found the masked man prowling about his place and had followed him
into the woods, where he had been lost. This informant said that the
mysterious stranger was a negro. Detectives were posted in hiding
throughout the district, but the visitant did not appear again.

Next two Gypsy girls visited a photographer in Washington, and one of
them showed the camera man a slip of paper with some childish scrawl.
Somehow this bit of writing came to be identified as that of one of
Willie McCormick’s sisters. It was said the scrap of paper must have
been taken from the McCormick house. The two Gypsy children were seized
and held in jail, while detectives hurried off to interrogate their
elders and search through the Romany camps up and down the Atlantic
seaboard. No trace of the missing boy was found, and the girls were
quickly released.

Finally the expected note from the kidnapper reached William McCormick.
It was scrawled awkwardly on a piece of nondescript paper by some
illiterate person who was apparently trying to conceal his normal
handwriting. It said that Willie was being held for ransom; that he was
well; that he would be safe so long as no attempt was made to bring the
police into the negotiations, and that disaster would follow if the
father played false. The writer then demanded the absurdly small sum of
two hundred dollars for the release of the boy and directed that the
money be taken at night to the corner of Third Avenue and One Hundred
and Thirty-fifth Street, and there placed in an old tin bucket which
would be found inside an abandoned steam boiler. The missive bore the
signature “Kid.”

The police immediately denounced the letter as the work of some mental
defective, but instructed the father to go to the rendezvous at the
appointed time and deposit a bundle of paper which might look like the
demanded sum in bank notes.

McCormick did as commanded. He found the corner of Third Avenue and One
Hundred and Thirty-fifth Street to be a half-abandoned spot near the
east bank of the Harlem, at its juncture with the East River. A low
barroom, a disused manufacturing plant, and some rookeries of dubious
tenantry ornamented the place, while coarsely dressed men, the dregs
of the river quarter, lounged about and robbed the stranger of any
gathered reassurance. The old boiler was there, standing in the center
of open, flat ground that sloped down to the railroad tracks and the
river under the Third Avenue bridge. Plainly the writer of the letter
had chosen a likely spot, which might be kept under observation from a
considerable distance and could not be surrounded or approached without
the certain knowledge of a watcher posted in any one of a hundred
windows commanding the view. McCormick deposited the package and went
his way, while disguised detectives lay in various vantages and watched
the boiler for days. No one went near it, and the game was abandoned.

But, at the end of ten days, McCormick received a second letter from
Kid, in which he was reproached for having enlisted the police; he
was told that such crude tactics would not work, and he was ordered
to place two thousand dollars in cash under a certain stone, which he
was directed to find under the approach of the McComb’s Dam bridge, a
few rods from the mouth of Cromwell Creek. He was told that the amount
of the ransom had been increased because of his association with the
police, and the letter closed with the solemn warning that the demand
must be met if McCormick hoped to see his son again. A postscript said
that if the police appeared again the boy’s ears would be thrown upon
his father’s porch.

Relatives, friends, and neighbors were at hand to furnish the demanded
money, and the father was more than willing to deposit it according to
the stipulation, but the police again intervened and had McCormick
leave another dummy packet. Once more he saw, and the police should
have noted, that the spot selected by the letter writer was most suited
to the purpose. Once more it was an open area in the formidable shadow
of a great bridge, freely observable from all sides and impossible to
surround effectively.

No one was baited to the trap, but McCormick got a third letter from
Kid, in which he was told that his silly tactics would avail him
nothing; that his boy had been taken out to sea, and that he would not
hear again until he reached England. He was told to blame his own folly
if he never beheld his child alive.

It must be said in favor of the police point of view that these were
not the only letters from supposed kidnappers which reached the
distraught parents. Indeed, there was a steady accumulation of all
sorts of missives of this type, most of them quite obviously the work
of lunatics. These were easily distinguishable, however. An experienced
officer ought to be able to choose between such vaporings of disjointed
intelligences and letters which bore some evidence of reason, some mark
of plausibility. The police who handled this case committed the common
blunder of lumping them all together. They had determined that the boy
was a runaway and were naturally inhospitable to contrary evidences.

But others were as firmly convinced on the other side. The father now
became genuinely alarmed and feared that further activity by the police
might indeed lead to the murder of the child. Accordingly Father Mullin
withdrew his ten-thousand-dollar offer for the apprehension of the
criminals, and Michael McCormick, the lost boy’s uncle, moved swiftly
to change the terms of his five-thousand-dollar reward. In seeking
for a way to make an appeal directly to the abductors and assure them
of their personal safety, he brought into the case at this point the
redoubtable Pat Sheedy.

Sheedy had just achieved worldwide notoriety by recovering from the
thieves’ fence, Adam Worth, the famous Gainsborough painting of
Elizabeth, Duchess of Devonshire, which had been stolen from Agnew’s
Art Rooms in London in 1876, and which had been hunted over half the
earth for twenty-five years. This successful intermediacy between
the police and the underworld gave the New York and Buffalo “honest
gambler” a tremendous reputation for confidential dealing, and the
McCormicks counted on Sheedy’s trusted position among criminals to
convince the kidnappers that they could deliver the boy, collect five
thousand dollars, and be safe from arrest or betrayal. So Sheedy came
forward, announced that he was prepared to pay over the money on
the spot and without question, the moment the boy was delivered and
identified.

The public, hysterical with sympathy and apprehension, disgusted by the
police failures and thrilled by Sheedy’s performance in the matter of
the stolen painting, received the news of his intervention in the case
with signs of thanksgiving. Willie McCormick’s return was breathlessly
expected, and many believed the feat as good as accomplished. But this
time the task was beyond the powers of even the man who enjoyed the
confidence of the foremost professional criminals of the day, counted
the Moroccan freebooter and rebel, Raisuli, as an intimate, forced the
celebrated international fence and generalissimo of thieves, Adam
Worth, to leave London and follow him across the ocean after the lost
Gainsborough, rescued Eddie Guerin, the burglar of the American Express
office in Paris, from Devil’s Island,[10] and seemed able to compel the
most abandoned lawbreakers to his wishes. Days and weeks passed, but
Sheedy got no word and could find no trace.

[10] Or so says one of the most persistent of underworld legends.

On the rain-drenched afternoon of May 10, John Garfield, bridge tender
for the New York Central Railroad at Cromwell Creek, worked the levers
and lifted the steel span to allow the passage of a steam lighter bound
up the muddy estuary for a load of bricks. After he had lowered the
platform again he observed that a large floating object had worked its
way to the shore and threatened to get caught in the machinery which
operated his bridge. He crawled out on the bulkhead with a boat hook,
intending to dislodge it. At the extreme end he leaned over and bent
down, prodding the object with his pole. The thing turned in the stream
and swam into better view. It was the body of a boy.

Garfield drew back in surprise and horror, crawled back to the bridge,
called to two boys and a man, who were angling near by, and soon
put out with them in a rowboat. In five minutes the body had been
brought to shore and tied. Before the end of half an hour it had been
identified as that of Willie McCormick. While detectives had been
seeking him thousands of miles away, and European port authorities had
been watching the in-coming ships for the lad or his abductors, he had
lain dead in the ooze of the creek bottom, three squares from his
home. The churning propeller of the steam lighter had brought the body
to the surface.

A coroner’s autopsy revealed that the body had been in the water for
a period which could not be fixed with any degree of precision. It
might have been two weeks, but the coroner felt unable to state that
the body had not been in the creek for six weeks, the full length of
time since the disappearance. There was no way to make sure. Again,
it was not possible to determine if the boy had been choked to death
before being cast into the waters. There was no skull fracture, no
breakage of bones, and no discernible wound. There was also no evidence
of poison--no abnormal condition of the lungs. The official physicians
were inclined to believe that death had been caused by drowning, but
they would not make a definite declaration.

The police dismissed the case with the assertion that they had been
vindicated. It was clear that the boy had played truant from church,
wandered away, fallen into the river, probably on the night of his
disappearance, and lain under the water for six weeks.

But to this conclusion the McCormicks and many others, among them
several distinguished private officers, took exception, and it must
be said that the police explanation leaves some important questions
suspended. Why did the boy turn and go three blocks to the south of his
home, when he had last been seen hurrying northward toward church? What
could have led this timid and dark-frightened boy to go voluntarily
down to the sinister and gloomy river bank on the edge of night? How
did it happen that the Kid directed William McCormick to deposit the
two-thousand-dollar ransom within a few score yards of the spot where
the body was recovered? Who was the mysterious masked man?

We shall never know, and neither shall we be able to answer whether
accident or foul design lurks in the shadow of this mystery.




XI

A NUN IN VIVISEPULTURE


Whoever is familiar with Central European popular literature has
tucked away in his memory some part or parcel of the story of Barbara
Ubrik. The romance of her life and parentage has furnished material
for countless novels, plays, short stories, tales and poems of
the imaginative kind. Bits of her history appear in more serious
literature, in religious and social polemics, even in the memoirs of
personages. And more than one of the tragic incidents of opera may
be, if diligence and intuition are not lacking, traced back to this
forgotten Polish woman and her exorbitant adventures. Time and creative
interpretation have fashioned her case into one of the classic legends
of disappearance.

In the Polish insurrection of 1830-31, a certain Alexander Ubrik played
a part sufficiently noteworthy to get himself exiled to Siberia for
life, leaving behind him a wife and four young daughters, the third
of whom, Barbara, was the chief figure of the subsequent affair. But
the Ubrik family had already known the feel of the romantic fabric and
there had already been a remarkable disappearance mystery involving
a relative no more remote than the mother of Barbara and wife of the
banished Alexander. It is with this part of the family history that
much of the literary offspring deals.

About the year 1800, according to the account of the celebrated Polish
detective Masilewski, extensively quoted by his American friend and
compeer, the late George S. McWatters of the United States Secret
Service, the first of the series of astonishing scenes involving
the Ubrik family was played in Warsaw. There was then resident in
the Polish capital one Jaromir Ubrik, the profligate son of an old
and noble Polish house who had wasted his substance in gambling and
roistering. Ubrik, though fallen into disrepute among his former
friends, was still intimate with a few of the aristocratic families,
among them that of Count Michael Satorin.

The Countess Satorin had borne her lord several daughters but no son to
succeed to the title. When, in the year mentioned, Mme. Satorin yielded
still another daughter, her husband being then absent in Russia, she
sought to forestall the wrath and disappointment of her spouse by
substituting a male child. It happened that the wife of Jaromir Ubrik
had borne a son only two days earlier and died in childbirth. For the
consideration of ten thousand florins, Ubrik consented to exchange
children with the countess, who said she was additionally persuaded to
the arrangement by the fact that the Ubrik blood was as good as her
own and the boy thus fit to wear a title. The little Ubrik boy was,
accordingly, delivered to the countess and her little daughter turned
over to Jaromir Ubrik, nestled in a down lined basket with a fine gold
chain and cross about her neck.

The elements of a thousand plots will be apparent even at this early
stage of the story. But far more fabulous-seeming things followed
immediately.

Ubrik took the basket containing the little girl and started home. On
the way, following his unhappy weakness, he entered a tavern and began
to spend some of the money he had been paid. He got drunk, staggered
home without the little girl in her basket and returned the following
day to find that a nameless Jew had claimed this strange parcel and
disappeared.

Not long afterwards, it seems, Countess Satorin, plagued by her
natural feelings, came to see her daughter and had to be told the
story. The outraged mother finally exacted an oath that he devote his
worthless life to the quest for the stolen child. Ubrik began his work,
apparently sobered by the death of his wife, the theft of the little
girl and the charge her mother had laid upon him. After several years
he rose in the ranks of the Russian intelligence service and was made
captain of the Warsaw police.

About this time the keeper of the inn where Ubrik had lost the little
girl was seized with a mortal disease and called the police captain to
his bedside, confessing that he had turned the little girl over to a
Jewish adventurer named Aaron Koenigsberger, whose address in Germany
the dying man supplied. Captain Ubrik proceeded to Germany, confronted
Koenigsberger with the confession of his accomplice and dragged the
abductor back to Poland to face the courts. Koenigsberger, to avoid
punishment, assisted in the search for the little girl and guided
Captain Ubrik to Kiev, where he had sold the child to another Jew
named Gerson. The Gersons appeared to be respectable people, who had
taken the little girl to console them in their own childlessness. They
deplored that she had been stolen several years earlier by a band of
Gypsies. Captain Ubrik, at length satisfied that this story was true,
set out on an Odyssean journey in quest of the child. For more than
eleven years he followed Gypsy bands through all parts of western and
southern Russia and into Austria and Germany. At last, in a village not
an hour’s journey from Warsaw, he discovered the missing daughter of
the Countess Satorin and returned her to her mother, as a grown woman
who believed herself to be a Jewess and could now at last explain why
her supposed people had always said she looked like a “Goy.”

The woman recovered as Judith Gerson seems to have been satisfactorily
documented as the missing daughter of the countess. At any rate, she
was taken into the Satorin family and christened Elka Satorin. Her
father had meantime died, leaving the bulk of his fortune and the title
to his supposed son, Alexander. Elka Satorin, however, inherited her
mother’s property and, a few years later, married the boy who had been
substituted for her in the cradle.

This was the strange match from which Barbara Ubrik was spawned into a
life that was to be darkened with more sinister adventures. The year
of her birth is given as 1828, so that she was a tot of three when her
father was dragged away to the marshes and mines of Russia in Asia.

I must confess that I set down so fantastic a tale only after
hesitation and skeptical misgiving. It, and what is to follow, reads
like a piece of motion picture fustian, an old wives’ tale. The meter
of reasonableness and probability is not there. The whole yarn is too
crudely colored. It is sensation; it is melodrama. But it seems also
to be the truth. My sources are old books by reputable chroniclers,
containing long quotations from the story of Masilewski, the detective,
from the testimony of Wolcech Zarski, the lover who appeared in
Barbara Ubrik’s life at a disastrous moment, from the proceedings of
an ecclesiastical trial. Indeed, the whole thing seems to be a matter
of court record in Warsaw and in Cracow, the old Polish capital. This
being so, we must conclude that fiction has been once more detected in
the act of going to life even for its ultimate extravagances.

The years following the great revolt of 1831 were full of torment
for Poland. Nicholas I, weary of what he termed the obstinacy of the
people, began a series of the most dire repressions, including the
closing of the Polish universities, the revocation of the constitution,
the persecution of the Roman priests and a general effort to abolish
the Polish language and national culture. The old nobility, made up of
devout Roman Catholics and chauvinistic patriots, was especially sought
out for the reactionary discipline of the czar, and a family like that
of Barbara Ubrik, whose chief had been sent to Siberia for treason, was
naturally among the worst afflicted.

The attempt from St. Petersburg to uproot the church of Rome was the
cause of an intense devotionalism among the Poles, with the result
that many men and women of distinguished families gave themselves up
to the religious life and entered the monasteries and convents. This
passion touched the Ubriks as well as others and Barbara, naturally of
a passionate and enthusiastic nature, decided as a girl that she would
retire from the world and devote herself to her forbidden faith. Her
mother, Elka Satorin-Ubrik, once a ward of the Jewish family in Kiev
and later the prisoner of the Gypsies, strongly opposed such a course,
but in 1844, when she was 16 years old, the girl could no longer be
restrained. She presented herself to the Carmelite cloister of St.
Theresa in Warsaw in the spring of that year and was admitted to the
novitiate.

From the beginning, however, the spirited young noblewoman seems to
have been most ill-adapted to the stern regulations hedging life in
a monastery of the unshod cenobite Carmelites. She had brought into
the austere atmosphere of the nunnery something that has played havoc
with rules and good intentions under far happier environments than
that of the cloister; namely, young beauty. The older and less favored
nuns saw it first with misgiving and soon with envy, a sin which seems
not altogether foreign to the holiest places. What was more directly
in line with evil consequences, Father Gratian, the still youthful
confessor of the cloister, also saw and appraised the charms of the
youthful sister and was quite humanly moved.

The official story is silent as to details but it appears that in 1846
Sister Jovita, as Barbara Ubrik had been named in the convent, bore a
child. Very naturally, she was called before the abbess, who appears
in the accounts as Zitta, confronted with her sin and sentenced to
the usual and doubtless severe punishments. In the progress of her
chastisement she seems to have declared that Father Gratian was the
guilty man.

This was the beginning of the young man’s troubles. Detective
Masilewski, in his report on the investigation of the case, says that
the motivation of the nun’s subsequent mistreatment was complex. Father
Gratian naturally wanted to defend himself from the serious charge. The
abbess, Zitta, was quite as anxious both to discipline the nun and to
prevent the airing of a scandal, especially in times of suspicion and
persecution, when the imperial attitude toward the holy orders was far
from friendly and any pretext might have been seized for the closing of
a nunnery and the expropriation of church property. Masilewski says,
also, that Sister Jovita possessed a considerable property which was
to belong to the cloister and that there was, thus, a further material
motive.

But, whatever else may have actuated either the priest or the abbess,
Sister Jovita aggravated matters by her own conduct. The severity of
her punishment led her to desire liberty and she sought to renounce her
vows and return to her family. Such a course would probably have been
followed by a public repetition of the charges made by the young nun,
and every effort was accordingly made to prevent her from leaving the
order. She was locked into her cell, loaded with penances and almost
unbelievably severe punishments and prevented from communicating with
her mother and sisters.

Not long afterwards love again intruded itself into the story of
Sister Jovita and further complicated the situation. This was in the
last months of 1847. It appears that a young lay brother whose worldly
name was Wolcech Zarski happened about this time to meet the beautiful
young nun, while occupied at the convent with some official duties, and
straightway fell in love with her. She told him of her experiences and
sufferings and he, a spirited young man and not yet a monk, immediately
laid plans to elope. Owing to the stringent discipline and the careful
watch kept over the offending sister, this departure was not quickly
or easily accomplished. Finally, however, on the night of May 25th,
1848, Zarski managed to pull his beloved to the top of the convent wall
by means of a rope. In trying to descend outside, she fell and was
injured, with the result that flight was impeded.

Zarski seems, however, to have had the strength to carry his precious
burden to the nearest inn. Here friends and human nature failed
him. The friends did not appear with a coach and change of feminine
clothing, as they had promised, and the superstitious dread of the
innkeeper’s wife led her to send immediate word to the convent. Before
he could move from the neighborhood, Zarski was overcome by a bevy of
stout friars and Sister Jovita carried back to the nunnery.

The monasteries and nunneries of Poland had still their own judicial
jurisdiction, so Zarski could not enter St. Theresa’s by legal means.
He tried again and again to communicate with his beloved by stealth,
but the Abbess Zitta was now fully awake to the danger and every effort
was defeated. The young lover tried one measure after another, appealed
to ecclesiastical authorities, consulted lawyers, besieged officials.
At length he was told that the object of all this devotion was no
longer in St. Theresa’s but had been removed to another Carmelite seat,
the name of which was, of course, refused.

Here political events intervened. Nicholas I had grown slowly but
surely relentless in his attitude toward the Roman clergy in Poland,
whom he considered to be the chief fomenters and supporters of the
continued Polish resistance. Nicholas simply closed the monasteries
and cloisters and drove the clergy out of Poland. It was the kind
of drastic step always taken in the past in response to religious
interference in political matters.

Now the unfortunate Zarski was at his dark hour. The nuns were
scattered into foreign lands where he, as a foreigner, could have
little chance of either legal or official aid, where he knew nothing of
the ways, was acquainted with no one, could count on no encouragement.
Worse yet, he was not rich. He had to stop for months and even years at
a time and earn more money with which to press his quest. His tenacity
seems to have been heroic; his faith tragic.

One evening in the summer of 1868, twenty years after Sister Jovita
had last been seen, Detective Masilewski was driving homeward toward
Warsaw, after a day’s hunt, when an old peasant stepped before the
horse, doffed his hat and asked:

“Are you the secret detective, Mr. Masilewski?”

On being answered affirmatively he handed the investigator a letter,
explaining that an unknown man had handed it to him with a tip to pay
for its delivery. The note said simply:

 “Dear Sir: In the convent of St. Mary of the Carmelites at Cracow, a
 nun by the name of Jovita, her real name being Barbara Ubrik, has been
 held a captive for twenty years, which imprisonment has made her a
 lunatic. I do not care to mention my name but vouch for the truth of
 my assertion. Seek and you will find.

                                             “Your correspondent.”

Masilewski drove on in silence, puzzled and not a little incredulous.
True, he had heard of this nun and her disappearance, but she had
vanished long ago and surely death had sealed the lid of this mystery,
as of others. No doubt this was another of those romantic reappearances
of the famous missing. Still--what if there were truth in it. But no,
it must be a figment, else why had the informant hidden himself? It was
an attempt to make a fool of an honest detective.

So Masilewski hesitated and waited, but the remote possibility of
something grotesque and extraordinary plagued him and drove him at
last to action. Even when he had determined to move, however, he knew
that he must act with caution. If he were to go to the bishop of the
diocese, for instance, and ask for permission to search the nunnery
of St. Mary’s, the very possible result might be the transfer of the
unfortunate nun to some new hiding place and the infliction of worse
penalties and tortures.

If he appealed to the Austrian civil authorities (Austria having
annexed the province of Cracow in 1846), he might enter the convent and
find himself the victim of a hoax, which is, after all, the ultimate
humiliation for a detective. There was no possible course except
cautious investigation.

So Masilewski went to work. Carefully and slowly he traced back the
stories of Barbara Ubrik’s mother, the exchanged babies, the theft
by the old Jew and the captivity with the Gypsies. He discovered the
record of Barbara’s parents’ marriage, got the young nun’s birth
certificate, learned about her admittance to the convent, the part
played in her life by Father Gratian and the early chastisement. How
he did these things one needs hardly to recount, but unrelenting care
and watchful judgment were necessary. He must never let the enemies of
the nun know that a detective was at work. All he did had to be handled
through intermediaries. Probably it would even be a thankless job, but
it was an enigma, a temptation. He went ahead.

Finally Masilewski stumbled upon the fact that the convent of St.
Mary’s contained a celebrated ecclesiastical library. The inspiration
came to him at once. He or someone else must play the part of a
learned student of religious and local ecclesiastical matters and
get permission to use the library in St. Mary’s. After some seeking,
Masilewski came upon a renegade theological student and sent this man
first to the bishop and then to the Abbess Zitta. Since the head of the
diocese apparently approved the student, he was permitted to enter and
use the rare old books and records.

Under instructions from Masilewski, the man worked with caution. The
detective invented a subject with which the man busied himself for
days before a chance question, skillfully introduced into his research
problem, called for an inspection of the old church law records of the
convent. There was a moment of suspense and the investigator feared
that he had been suspected or that the abbess would rule against any
such liberty. But no suspicion had been aroused and the abbess decided
that so holy and studious a young man might well be permitted to see
the secret papers.

Once the records were in his hands, the mock student turned immediately
to the date of the nun’s escape and found under date of June 3, 1848,
this remarkable record:

 “Barbara Ubrik, known under the name of Jovita, is accused of
 immoral actions, continued disturbances in the convent, manifold
 irregularities and trespasses of the rules of the convent, even
 of theft and cunningly plotted crime; she has refused the mercy
 of baptism and given her soul to the devil, for which cause she
 was unworthy of the holy Lord’s Supper, and by this act she has
 calumniated God; she has clandestinely broken the vows of purity, in
 so far that she held a love correspondence with the novice, Zarski,
 and allowed herself to elope with him; at last she has offended
 against the law of obedience of poverty and seclusion, and on the 25th
 of May, 1848, she has accomplished an escape from the convent.”

Trial was held before the abbess and judgment was thus rendered:

 “The criminal has to do three days’ expiation of sins in the church,
 afterwards she will be lashed by all the sisters of the order and be
 forfeited of her clerical dignity; she herself will be considered as
 dead and her name will be taken from the list of the order. At last,
 she has forfeited the right to the holy Mass and the Lord’s Supper,
 and is condemned to perpetual imprisonment.”

The reader is warned not to take this as a sample of monastic life
or justice as it might be discovered to-day or even as it generally
existed then. Sister Jovita had simply got herself involved in one of
those sad tangles of scandal which had to be kept hid at any and every
price. She was the victim not of monasticism or of any form of religion
but of a political situation and of her relations with other men and
women, some of whom have been hard and evil from the beginning of the
world, respectless of vows or trust.

In one particular, however, her treatment was a definite result of
certain religious beliefs then prevalent in all strict churches. She
was accused of being devil ridden or possessed by the fiend and many
of her cries of anguish, screams of madness and acts of defiance were
attributed to such a possession. It was then customary in certain parts
of Europe to drive the devil out by means of torture. This was in no
sense a belief peculiar to Catholics. Martin Luther held it, and so did
John Wesley, as any historian must tell you. Therefore many of Jovita’s
sufferings were the result of beliefs general in those days except
among the exceptionally enlightened.

With this record copied and safely in his hand, Masilewski moved
immediately and directly. One morning he and a squad of Gallician
gendarmes appeared before the convent of St. Mary’s and demanded
admittance in the name of the emperor. The abbess, certain what was
about to happen, tried to temporize, but Masilewski entered, arrested
the abbess with an imperial warrant and commanded a search of the
place. The mother superior, seeing that there was nothing to be gained
by resistance led the company down to the lowest cellars of the
building and turned over to Masilewski a key to a damp cell.

The detective opened the door, felt rats run across his shoes as he
stepped inside and found, crouched in a corner on a pile of wet straw,
the shrunken form of what had been the beautiful Barbara Ubrik. She was
brought forth to the light of day, to see the sheen upon the autumn
trees once more and the clouds sailing in the skies. Alas, she was no
Bonnivard. Life had lost its colors and symmetries for her. She had
long been hopelessly mad.

There is still a detail of this famous case of mystery and detection
to be told. Father Gratian had disappeared when Russia drove out the
clergy. Masilewski was determined to complete his work and bring the
malefactor back to answer for his crimes. After the ruin of Barbara
Ubrik had been lodged in an asylum, Masilewski set out to find the
priest. After seven months of wandering through Austria, Prussia and
Poland, the detective was rewarded with the information that Father
Gratian had gone to Hamburg. He went immediately to the great German
seaboard town, searched there for months and found that the man he
sought had gone to London years before.

The quest began anew in the British capital. It was like seeking a flea
in a hayloft, but success came at last. Masilewski was passing through
one of the obscure streets when he noticed a man with the peculiar gait
and bearing of priests, which seems to mark them apart to the expert
eye, no matter what their physique or dress, going into a bookstall
where foreign books were sold.

The detective, who was, of course, totally unknown to Father Gratian,
followed into the shop and found to his delight that the priestly
person was the owner of the shop. Many of the books dealt in were
German or Polish. Masilewski rummaged for a long time, made a few
purchases and ingratiated himself with the bibliophile. When he left he
went directly to the first book expert he could find, stuffed himself
with the terms and general knowledge of the book dealer and soon
returned to the little shop.

On his second visit he let drop a few Polish terms which made the
shopkeeper prick up his ears. As Masilewski learned more and more of
the new rôle he was to play he gradually revealed that he was himself
a great continental expert. Later he informed the shopkeeper of a huge
sale of famous libraries that was about to be held in Hamburg and
invited the London dealer to accompany him. The priestly man was too
much interested and beguiled to refuse a man who could speak his own
language and loved his own subject.

On the trip to Hamburg the London bookseller told, after skillful
questioning, that he had once been a priest, that he had lived in
Warsaw, that a love affair had driven him from the church--in short,
that he was Father Gratian.

Masilewski waited until he got his man safely on the continent and
then, knowing the extradition agreements in force between Austria and
the various German states, placed his man under arrest, not without
a feeling of pain and regret. Father Gratian, like one relieved of a
strange weight, immediately accompanied Masilewski to Cracow and faced
his accusers without denying the facts. He could offer no extenuation
save that nature had not ordained him to be a priest and “the devil
had been too strong for his weak flesh.” He confessed his part in the
whole transaction and even added that he had given the unfortunate nun
drugs to bereave her of her reason. He made every attempt to shield the
abbess, but she, too, face to face with the authority of the empire and
the church, refused to deny or extenuate.

For once the courts were more merciful than their victims. Mother Zitta
was sentenced to expulsion from the order, imprisonment for five years
and exile from the empire. Father Gratian was likewise expelled from
the church, which he had long deserted, put to prison for ten years and
exiled.




XII

THE RETURN OF JIMMIE GLASS


In the early spring of 1915, Charles L. Glass, long employed as an
auditor by the Erie Railroad and living in Jersey City, was grievously
ill. In May, when he had recovered to the point of convalescence, it
was decided he should go to the country to recuperate. For several
years he and his family had been spending their vacations in the
little hamlet of Greeley, five miles from Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania, in
the pleasant hill country. So Glass bundled his wife and three small
children to a train and shortly arrived at Greeley and the Frazer farm,
where he had arranged for rooms and board. This on May eleventh.

The Frazer farmhouse was one of those country establishments which
take boarders for the season. Before it ran the main road leading to
the larger towns along the line. Beside and behind it were fields, and
beyond the road began the tangle of wild woods and hilly ground rising
up to the wrinkle of mountains.

Breakfast done, the children were dressed for play, and Mrs. Glass
started for the post office, about two hundred yards up the road, to
mail some post cards to her parents, noting the safe arrival of the
family. She called to her eldest child, Jimmie, but he shook his head
and went out into the field beside the house, interested in a hired man
who was plowing in the far corner. The elder girl went with her up
the road. The baby was romping indoors. Glass himself sat on the porch
watching his son. The little boy, just past four years old, was running
about in the young green of the field.

Charles Glass got up from the porch and went inside for a glass of
water. He stayed there a minute or two. When he came out he saw his
wife and little girl coming back down the road from the post office.
They had been gone from the house not more than ten minutes.

Mrs. Glass came up to the porch, took one look about, and asked:
“Where’s Jimmie?”

Glass looked out into the field, saw its vacancy, and surmised: “Maybe
he went up the road after you.”

The road was scanned and then the field. Then the farm hand was called
and questioned. He had seen the youngster crawling through a break in
the fence a few minutes before, but had paid no attention.

One of the strangest of all hunts for the strangely missing of recent
history had begun. This hunt, which extended over years and covered a
continent, taking advantage of several modern inventions never before
employed in the quest of a human being, started off with alarmed calls
on neighbors and visits to the more adjacent woods, gullies, and
thickets. In the course of the evening, however, the organized quest
began. It is interesting to note some of the confusion that overcame
the people most concerned and the little town of a hundred souls. The
suspicion of abduction was not slow in forming, and the question as
to who might have done the deed immediately followed. Mrs. Glass was
sure that no vehicle of any sort had passed on the road going to
or coming from the post office. William Losky, the farm hand who was
plowing in the field, and Fred Lindloff, who was working on the road,
felt sure they had seen a one-seated motor car pass down the road,
occupied by one man and one woman who had a plush lap robe pulled up
about their knees to protect them from the May breezes.

[Illustration: ~~ JIMMIE GLASS ~~]

Going a little farther, to the village of Bohemia, three miles down the
road, a Mrs. Quick, whose house stands all of seven hundred feet back,
saw a one-seated car stop, heard a child screaming, and thought she
might be of assistance to some sick travelers. But the people in the
car saw her approaching and at once drove off.

Still farther on, at the town of Rowlands, a Mrs. Konwickie noted a
one-seated motor car with a sobbing child, a woman and two men inside,
the child crouching on the floor against the woman’s knees and being
covered with the same black plush lap robe.

All these testimonies came to naught, as we shall see, and I cite them
only to show how unreliable is the human mind and how quickly panic
and forensic imagination get hold of people and cause them to see the
unseen.

On the afternoon of the twelfth a bloodhound was brought from near
by--just what kind of bloodhound the record does not show. The dog was
given a scent of the child’s clothing. It trailed across the field, out
through the break in the fence to the far side of the road, passed a
little distance into the woods, and there stopped still, whined, and
quit.

The following morning word of the disappearance or kidnapping had
been flashed to surrounding towns and many came to aid in the search.
A committee was formed of forty men familiar with the surrounding
terrain. These men labored all the thirteenth and all the fourteenth.
On the fifteenth of May a much larger committee undertook the work and
the surrounding mountains were searched foot after foot. This work took
several days. Then a cordon was thrown all about, whose members worked
slowly inward, covering all the ground as they came to a center at
Greeley. This maneuver also failed to yield hail or trail of the child.
At last the weary and foot-sore hunters gave it up.

The search was now begun in a more methodical way. The State
constabulary took charge of a systematic review of the ground. Ponds
were drained, culverts blown up, wells cleaned out, the dead leaves
of the preceding autumn raked out of hollows or from the depths of
quarries--all in vain.

Meantime, the mayor and director of public safety in Jersey City,
appealed to by the distracted parents, began the official quest.
Descriptions of the boy were broadcast. He was four years old, blond,
with blue eyes, had good teeth, a double crown or cowlick in his hair,
weighed about thirty-five pounds, and wore new shoes, tan overalls
with a pink trimming, but no hat. Every town and hamlet in the United
States, Canada, and the West Indies was sooner or later placarded with
the picture and description of the boy. The film distributors were
prevailed upon to assist in the search and, for the first notable
occasion, at least, the movies were used to search for a missing
person, more than ten thousand theaters having shown Jimmie Glass’
lineaments and flashed his description.

A few years later the radio broadcasting stations spread through
the air the story of his disappearance and the particulars of his
description.

To understand the drama of the hunt for Jimmie Glass, one must,
however, begin with events closely following his vanishment and try to
trace their succession through more than eight years. When once the
idea of kidnapping had been formed the neighbors whose interest in the
affair was partly sympathetic but more morbid, sat about shaking their
heads and sagely talking of Charlie Ross. No doubt there would be a
demand for ransom in a few days. When the few days had passed without
the receipt of any request for money, the wiseacres shook their heads
more gravely and opined that the kidnappers had taken the boy to some
safe and distant place, whence word would be slow in coming. But time
gave the soft quietus to all these speculations. Except for an obvious
extortion letter received the following year, no ransom demand ever
came to the Glasses or any one connected with the case.

Therefore, since neither the living boy nor his dead body could be
found, and since there seemed to be no sustenance for the idea of
kidnapping for ransom, the theorists were forced into another position,
one full of the ripe color of centuries.

On the day Jimmie Glass had vanished, a traveling carnival show had
been at Lackawaxen, and with it had toured a band of Gypsy fortune
tellers. Later on, Mr. John Bentley, the director of public safety in
Jersey City, and Captain Rooney of the Jersey City police, found that
these Gypsies, two or three men and one woman, known sometimes as Cruze
and sometimes as Costello, had suddenly left the carnival show. It
could be traced, but not they. But the mere fact that there had been
Gypsies in the neighborhood was enough to give fresh life to the old
fable. Gypsies stole children to bring luck to the tribe. Ergo, they
had taken Jimmie Glass, and the way to find him was to run these nomads
to earth and force them to give up the child.

Besides, a woman promptly appeared who told Captain Rooney that she
had seen a swart man and woman in an automobile on the day of the
kidnapping, not far from Greeley, struggling with a fair-haired boy.

Now the Gypsy baiting was on. Captain Rooney and many other officers
engaged in a systematic investigation of Gypsy camps wherever they
were found, following the nomads south in the winter and north again
with the sun. Again and again fair-haired children were found about
the smoky fires of these mysterious caravaners, with the result that
Mrs. Glass, now fairly set out upon her travels in quest for her son,
visited one tribe after another, but without finding the much-sought
Jimmie.

The discovery of blond or blondish children in Tzigane encampments
always stirred the finders and the public to the same emotions,
to the indignant belief that such children must have been stolen.
All this is part of the befuddlement concerning the Romany people
and the American Gypsies in especial. No one knows just what the
original Gypsies were or whence they came. The only hint is contained
in the fact that their language contains strong Aryan and Sanscrit
connections and suggestions. They appeared in Eastern Europe, probably
in the thirteenth century and in France somewhat later, being there
mistaken for Egyptians, whence the name Gypsy. The original stocks
were certainly dark skinned, black haired, and black or brown eyed.
But several Gypsy clans appeared in England all of five hundred years
ago and there soon began to mix and marry with other vagabonds not of
Tzigane blood. In the course of the generations the English Gypsy came
to be anything but a swart Asiatic. Tall, straight, dark men, with
piercing eyes and the more or less typical Gypsy facial characteristics
appeared among them, but these usually occur in cases where there
has been marriage with strains from the Continent, from Hungary
and Roumania. For instance, Richard Burton, the great traveler and
anthropologist, was half Gypsy, and one of the first scholars of the
last century.

The Gypsies in America to-day are mostly of English origin, though
there are a good many from Eastern Europe. Among both kinds there is
frequent intermarriage with American girls from the mountain countries
of the southern and central regions. With these Gypsies pure blond
children are of frequent occurrence and one often sees the charming
contradiction of light hair and dark, emotive eyes.

Now I do not say that Gypsies do not steal children. Nomads have very
little sense of the property rights of others and may take anything,
animal, mineral or vegetable, that strikes their fancy. But so much for
the facts on which rests what must be termed a popular superstition.

Nevertheless, these light children in the Gypsy camps kept the police
and Mrs. Glass herself constantly on the move. The Cruze party gave
them especial trouble and contributed one of the high dramatic moments
of the eight years of search and suspense.

When Captain Rooney found that the Gypsy woman called Rose Cruze had
been near Greeley on the day the child vanished, he set out to trace
her down with her male companions. The Gypsies were moving south at
the time, separating sometimes and meeting once more, a most puzzling
matter to one who does not understand the motives and habits of
nomads. Rose Cruze and the blond boy she was supposed to have with
her kept just a little ahead of the authorities. She crossed into
Mexico and continued southward with her band, having meantime married
Lister Costello, the head of another clan. Later she was heard of in
Venezuela, then in Brazil.

One morning in the summer of 1922, a cablegram was brought to Director
Bentley in Jersey City. It came from Porto Rico, was signed with the
mysterious name Ismael Calderon, and said that Jimmy Glass or a boy
answering his description was in the possession of Gypsies encamped
near the town of Aguadilla. The cablegram also gave the information
that the men were Nicholas Cruze and Miguel, or Ristel, Costello, and
the woman was Costello’s wife.

Mr. Bentley acted at once, but the Porto Rican authorities, probably
a good deal more skeptical about Gypsy stories than are Americans,
questioned whether the thing was not a canard and moved cautiously.
By the time they finally got to Aguadilla, spurred too late by the
American officials on the island, the band had moved on into the
mountains.

Ismael Calderon turned out to be a young man of no special standing,
and he was severely questioned. But this time there was no foolery. He
stuck to his story very closely, produced witnesses to substantiate
practically everything he said, and firmly established the fact that
among the Gypsies were the much-sought Costello-Cruze family.

The pursuit began at once. It failed. The report went out that the
hunted nomads had crossed to Cuba. In Jersey City, Captain Rooney made
ready to sail. Further reports came from Porto Rico which caused him
to delay a little. Then came fresh news that set him to packing his
bags. He was almost ready to embark when the thing dropped with sudden
and sad deflation. The Costello-Cruzes had been found. The boy was not
Jimmie Glass.

This pricking of a hope bubble strikes the keynote of the eight years
of quest. Ever and again, not ten times but ten hundred, came reports
that Jimmy Glass had been found. Many of them came from irresponsible
enthusiasts and emotional sufferers. Others were honest but mistaken. A
few were cruel hoaxes, like that of the marked egg.

One morning an egg was found in a Jersey City grocery store with the
following scrawled on the shell:

 “Help. James Glass held captive in Richmond, Va.”

The police chased themselves in excited circles. One of them was off to
Richmond at once. The eggs were carefully traced back to the nests of
their origin. It was found that they came from a place much nearer than
Richmond, and that the inscription was the work of a fifteen-year-old
boy.

Long before the Gypsy excitement had been abated by the final running
down of the much-sought band, another form of thrill had played its
fullest ravages with the unhappy parents and given the public its
crooked satisfactions. The constant advertising for the boy, the
showing of his picture on the screens and the repeated newspaper
summations of the strange case, all had the effect of putting idle
brains and fevered imaginations to work. From almost every part of the
country came reports of missing children who looked as though they
might be Jimmie Glass.

The distracted mother, suffering like any other woman in a similar
predicament from the idea that her child could not fail to be restored,
traveled from one part of the country to the other under the lash of
these reports and the spur of undying hope. I believe the newspapers
have estimated that she traveled more than forty thousand miles in all,
seeking what she never found.

As happens in many excitements of this kind, the hunt for James Glass
resulted in the finding of many other strayed or stolen children,
from San Diego to Eastport. In one case a pretty child was found in
the possession of a yeggman and his moll. They were able to show that
the child had been left with them, and they readily gave it up to the
authorities for lodgment in an institution. But, alas, none of these
was Jimmie Glass.

The affair of the one demand for money came near ending in a tragedy.
The blackmail note demanded that five thousand dollars be placed in
a milk bottle near a shoe-shining stand in West Hoboken. The Glasses
filled the milk bottle with stage money and placed it at the agreed
spot, after the police had taken up watch near by. The bottle stayed
where it had been placed for hours. Finally the proprietor of the
stand saw the thing. His curiosity got the better of him; he broke the
bottle, and was promptly pounced upon and taken to police headquarters,
protesting that he did not mean to steal anything. It developed that
this honest workman knew nothing about the whole affair. The real
extortioners had, of course, been much too alert for the police.

One other piece of dramatic failure must be recited before the end. The
quest for Jimmy Glass was at its height when news came from the little
town of Norman, Oklahoma, that the boy had been left there in a shoe
store. The Glasses, not wishing to make the long trip in vain, asked
that photographs be sent, and they were received at the end of the
week. What they thought of the matter is attested by the fact that they
caught the first train West, alighted in Oklahoma City, and motored to
Norman.

Their coming had been heralded in advance, and the town had suspended
business and hung the streets and houses with flags in their honor.

Mrs. Glass and her husband were taken immediately to one of the houses
of the town, where the child was being kept, and ushered into the
parlor, while a large crowd gathered on the lawn or stood out in the
streets, giving vent to its emotion by repeated cheers.

Mr. and Mrs. Glass being seated, a little blond boy was brought in.
Mrs. Glass saw her son in the flesh and held out her arms. The child
rushed to her and was showered with kisses. Asked its name, the child
promptly responded: “Jimmy Glass.” The mother, choking with sobs,
clasped the little fellow closely to her. He struggled, and she
released him. He ran to sit on Mr. Glass’ lap.

“It was then,” said Mrs. Glass afterward, “that I was convinced. Surely
this boy was Mr. Glass’ son. He had his every feature. For the time
there was no doubt in either of our minds. We were too happy for words.”

But then the examination of the child began and the discrepancies
appeared. The child was Jimmie’s size and age. His hair and eyes were
of the same color and the facial characteristics were remarkably alike.
This child even had the mole on the ear that was one of Jimmie’s
peculiar marks. But the toes were not those of Mr. Glass’ son;
there was an old scar on one foot that was unlike anything that had
disfigured Jimmie, and there were other slight differences.

Even so, it was more than two hours before Mrs. Glass could make up
her mind, and the crowd stood outside crying for news and being told
to wait, that the child was still being examined. Finally the negative
word was given, and the disappointed townsmen went sorrowfully away.
Even then the Glasses stayed two days longer in the town, eager to find
other evidence that might yet change their minds.

A few weeks afterward the true mother of the child was found. She
confessed that her husband had abandoned and would not support her,
that she had been unable to feed and rear the little boy properly, and
that in a desperate situation she had left the boy in the shoe store,
hoping that some one would adopt him. The little boy had learned to say
he was Jimmie Glass through the overenthusiasm of the storekeeper and
other local emotionals.

So the years went by in turmoil for the poor nervous man who had gone
to the country to recover and been struck with this fatality, and for
the sorrowing mother who would not resign her hope. The Glasses seemed
about to be engulfed in the slow quagmire of doubt and grief that took
in the Rosses years before.

One morning on the first days of December of 1923, Otto Winckler, of
Lackawaxen, went hunting rabbits not far from Greeley, where Jimmie
Glass had disappeared. There had been a very dry autumn and the marshy
ground about two miles from the Frazer farmhouse, ordinarily not to
be crossed afoot, was caked and firm. A light snow had powdered the
accumulations of brown leaves, enough to hold the rabbit footprints for
a few hours till the sun might heat and melt it away.

Over this unvisited ground Winckler strode, hunter fashion, his shotgun
ready in his hands, his eyes fixed ahead, covering the ground for some
sudden flurry of a furred body. His foot kicked what looked like a
round stone. It was light and rolled away. He stepped after it; picked
it up. A child’s skull! Instantly the man’s memory fled back over the
eight and one half years to the hunt for Jimmie Glass in which he, too,
had taken part. Could this be---- He did not stop to ponder much, but
looked about. Very near the spot from which he had kicked the skull
were a pair of child’s shoes. He picked them up carefully and found
them to contain the foot bones. The rest of the skeleton was missing,
carried away in those long seasons by beasts and birds, no doubt.

Winckler immediately went back to Lackawaxen and telegraphed to Charles
Glass. The father responded at once and went over the ground with the
hunter and with Captain Rooney. They found, judging from the relative
positions of the shoes and the skull, that the little boy must have
lain down on his side and wakened no more.

Little was found in addition to the shoes and the skull, except a few
bone buttons, the metal clasps from a child’s garters and such like.
The skull and shoes furnished the evidence needed. The former, examined
by experts, revealed the double crown which had caused the upstanding
of the missing boy’s back hair. The shoes, washed free of the encasing
mud, showed the maker’s name still sharply cut into the instep sole.
All the facts fitted. Only a new pair of shoes would have retained the
mark so remarkably, and Jimmie had worn a brand new pair the morning he
strayed out.

Charles Glass was satisfied that his son had wandered away that
seductive May morning, gone on and on, as children sometimes do, got
into the boggy ground and been unable to get out. Exhaustion had
overtaken him, and he had lain down and never risen. Perhaps, again,
this place had been the edge of a little pool in the spring of 1915,
and Jimmie, venturing too close, had fallen in and been drowned, only
to have his bones cast up again by the droughty fall eight years later.

With these views Mrs. Glass agreed, but Captain Rooney refused
absolutely to entertain them. He had been over the ground many times.
It was of the most difficult character, loose and swampy, and literally
strewn with jagged stones that cut a man to pieces if he tried to do
more than creep among them, absolutely impassable to a child. Again,
there was the matter of distance. How could a child of four years,
none too firm a walker on easy ground, as many a childish bruise and
scar will testify, have made its way for more than two miles over this
hellish terrain into a morass? Must it not have fallen exhausted long
before and rested till the voices of the searchers in that first night
had wakened it?

And how about those little shoes? Captain Rooney asks us. Of what
leather were they made to have lain for eight and one half years in
that impassable bog and yet to have been so well preserved as to retain
the maker’s imprint?

“No, sir,” the gallant captain concludes, “those may be the bones of
Jimmie Glass, but if they are, some one must have taken him there.”

Perhaps--and then again? How far a lost and desperate child will stray
is not too simple a question. If, as Captain Rooney suggests, Jimmie
Glass probably would have tired and lain down to rest, would he not
also have risen again and blundered on? As for the durability of the
leather, any one may go to any well-stocked museum and find hides of
the sixteenth century still tolerably preserved. And if some one took
the pitiful body of the child and tossed it into that morass, who was
it?

It is much easier to believe with the parents. The enchantment of
spring and sunshine, the allure of unvisited and undreamed places
unfolding before a child’s eyes, and straying from flower to flower,
wonder to wonder, depth to depth. And at the end of the adventure,
disaster; at the wane of the sunshine, that darkness that clouds all
living. It is more pleasant to think of the matter so, to believe that
Jimmy Glass, four years in the world, was but a forthfarer into the
mysteries, who lay down at the end of mighty explorations and went to
sleep--a Babe in the Woods.




XIII

THE FATES AND JOE VAROTTA


On an afternoon in the autumn of 1920, Salvatore Varotta took his
eldest son for a ride on Long Island. Perhaps it was not quite the
right thing to do. The big motor truck did not belong to him. His
employers might not like the idea of a child being carted about the
countryside in their delivery van. Still, what did it matter? The day
had been hot. Little Adolfo had begged to go. No one would ever know
the difference, and the boy would be happy. So this simple-hearted
Italian motor driver set out from the reeks and throngs of New York’s
lower East Side on what was to be a pilgrimage of pleasure.

There was a cool wind in the country and the landscape was still green.
The truck chauffeur enjoyed his drive as he rolled by fields where
farmers were at their late plowing. The nine-year-old Adolfo sat beside
him, chattering with curiosity or musing in pure delight. After all, it
was a bright and perfect world, for all men’s groans and growls.

Presently, Salvatore came to a crossing. Another truck lurched
drunkenly across his path. There was a horrid shriek of collision,
the shattering tinkle of glass, the crunch of riven steel. Salvatore
Varotta was tossed aside like a cork and landed in the ditch. He picked
himself up and staggered instinctively toward the wreck and little
Adolfo. There was a volcanic spout of flame as one of the tanks blew
up. The undaunted father plunged into the smoke and managed to draw
out the boy, cut and crushed and burned to pitiful distortions, but
breathing and alive.

Adolfo was carried to Bellevue Hospital suffering from a frightfully
cut and burned face and a crushed leg. The surgeons looked at the
mangled child and shook their heads. There was a chance of putting that
wretched leg into some kind of shape again, and it might be possible
to restore that ruined face to human semblance, but the work would
take many months. It would cost a good deal of money, in spite of free
hospital accommodations and the gratuitous services of the doctors.

The Varottas were shabbily poor. They lived in a rookery on East
Thirteenth Street, the father, the mother and five children, of whom
the injured boy was, as already noted, the eldest. Varotta’s pay as
truck driver was thirty dollars a week. In the history of such a family
an accident like that which had overtaken Adolfo means about what a
broken leg does to a horse: Death is the greatest mercy. In this case,
however, some one with connections got interested either in the boy or
in the surgical experiment and appealed to a rich and charitable woman
for aid. This lady came down from her apartment on Park Avenue and
stood by the bedside of the wrecked Adolfo. She gave instructions that
he was to be restored at any cost. She grew interested not only in the
boy but his family.

One day the neighbors in East Thirteenth Street were appalled to see
the limousine of the Varotta’s benefactress drive up to their
tenement. They watched her enter the humble home, pat the children,
talk with the burdened mother, and then drive away perilously through
the swarms of children screaming and pranking in the street. The “great
lady” came again and again. It was understood that she had paid much
money to help little Adolfo. Also, she was helping the Varotta family.
That Varotta was a lucky dog, for the injury of his son had brought him
the patronage of the rich. Surely, he would know how to make something
of his good fortune. To certain ranks of men and women, kindness is
no more than weakness and must be taken advantage of accordingly. The
neighbors of Salvatore Varotta were such men and women.

[Illustration:

                                            _Pacific & Atlantic Photo._

                          ~~ JOE VAROTTA ~~]

Little Adolfo was still in the hospital, being patched and mended, when
his father sued the owner of the colliding truck for fifty thousand
dollars, alleging carelessness, permanent injury to the child, and so
on. The neighbors heard of this, too. By San Rocco, that Salvatore
_was_ a lucky dog! Fifty thousand dollars! And he would get it, too.
Did he not have a rich and powerful patroness?

Thus, through the intervention of a charitable woman and a lawsuit,
Varotta became a dignitary in his block, a person of special and
consuming interest. He had or would soon have money. In that case he
would be profitable.... But how? Well, he was a simple and guileless
fellow. A way would be found.

In April, 1921, when Adolfo was discharged from the hospital with his
leg partly restored but with his face still in need of skin grafting
and other treatments, Salvatore Varotta decided to buy a cheap,
second-hand automobile. He could make money with it and also use it to
give his family an airing once in a while. The car, for which only one
hundred and fifty dollars had been paid, attracted the attention of the
East Thirteenth Street neighbors again. What? Salvatore had bought an
automobile? Then there must have been a settlement in the damage suit
over little Adolfo’s injuries. Salvatore had money, then. So, so!

One of the neighbor women happened to pass when the rickety car was
standing at the curb, and Mrs. Varotta was on the stoop, her youngest
child in her arms.

“Ha! Salvatore can’t have much money when he buys you a
hundred-and-fifty-dollar car,” mocked the woman.

“He could have bought a thousand-dollar one if he wanted to,” said the
wife with a surge of false pride.

That was enough. That was confirmation. The damage suit had been
settled. Salvatore Varotta had the money. He could have bought an
expensive car, but he had spent only a hundred and fifty. The niggardly
old rascal! He meant to hold on to his wealth, eh? So the word fled up
and down the street, to the amusement of some and the closer interest
of others.

As a matter of fact, the damage suit had not been settled. It was even
doubtful whether Salvatore would ever get a cent for all his son’s
injuries and suffering. The man whose car had collided with Salvatore’s
had no means and could not be made to give what he did not possess. So
it was an entirely false rumor of prosperity and a word of bragging
from a sensitive wife that brought about many things.

At about two o’clock on the afternoon of May 24, 1921, Giuseppe
Varotta, five years old, the younger brother of the wounded Adolfo,
put on his clean sailor suit and his new shoes and went out into East
Thirteenth Street to wait for the homecoming of his father and the
automobile. Giuseppe, familiarly called Joe, did not know or care
whether the car had cost a hundred or a thousand dollars. It was a car,
it belonged to his father, and Joe intended to have a ride in it.

For some minutes Joe played about the doorstep. Then his childish
patience forsook him, and he ran down the block to spend a penny
which a passer-by had given him. Other children playing in the street
observed him by the doorstep, saw him get the penny, and watched him
go down the walk to the confectioner’s. They did not mark his further
progress.

At half past three, Salvatore Varotta came home in his car. He ran
up the steps into the house to his wife. She greeted him and asked
immediately:

“Where’s Joe?”

Varotta had not seen his little son. No doubt he was playing in the
street and would be in soon.

The father sat down to rest and smoke. When Joe did not appear, and
twenty minutes had passed, his mother went out to the stoop to call
him. She could not find him in the street, and he did not respond to
her voice. There was another wait for half an hour and another looking
up and down the street. Then Salvatore Varotta was forced to yield to
his wife’s anxious entreaties and set out after the lad.

He visited the stores and houses, inquired of friends and neighbors,
questioned the children, circled the blocks, looked into cellars
and areaways, visited the kindergarten where the child was a pupil,
implored the aid of the policemen on the beats, and finally, late at
night, went to the East Fifth Street police station and told his story
to the captain, who was sympathetic but busy and inclined to take the
matter lightly. The child would turn up. Lots of children strayed away
in New York every day. They were almost always found again. It was very
seldom that anything happened.

So Salvatore Varotta went wearily back to his wife and told her what
the “big chief policeman” had said. No doubt, the officer spoke from
experience. They had better try to get a little sleep. Joe would turn
up in the morning.

On the afternoon of the following day the postman brought a letter to
Salvatore Varotta. The truck driver read it and trembled with fear
and apprehension. His wife glanced at it and moaned. She lighted a
candle before the tinseled St. Anthony in her bedroom and began endless
prayers and protestations.

The letter was written in Italian, evidently by one habited to the
Sicilian dialect. It said that the writer was a member of a powerful
society, too secret and too strong to be afraid of the police. The
society had taken little Joe. He was being held for ransom. The price
of his life and restoration was twenty-five hundred dollars. Varotta
was to get the money at once in cash and have it ready in his home, so
that he could hand it over to a messenger who would call for it. If the
money were promptly and quietly paid the boy would be restored safe and
sound, but if the police were notified and any attempt were made to
catch the kidnappers, the powerful society would destroy the child and
take further vengeance upon the family.

There was a black hand drawn at the bottom of this forbidding missive
with a dripping dagger at its side.

Varotta and his wife conferred all day in despair. They did not know
whom they might trust, or whether they dared speak of the matter at
all. But necessity finally decided their course for them. Varotta did
not have twenty-five hundred dollars. He could not have it ready when
the fateful footfall of the messenger would sound on the stairs. In his
extremity he had to seek aid. He went to the police again and showed
the letter to Captain Archibald McNeill.

The same evening the case was placed in the hands of the veteran head
of the New York Italian Squad, Sergeant Michael Fiaschetti, successor
of the murdered Petrosino and the agent who has sent more Latin
killers to the chair and the prison house than any other officer in
the country. Fiaschetti saw with immediate and clear vision that this
job was probably not the work of any organized or powerful society.
He knew that professional criminals act with more caution and better
information. They would never have made the blunder of assuming that
Varotta had money when he had none. The detective also saw that the
plan of sending a messenger to the house for the ransom was the plan
of resourceless amateurs. He reasoned that the work had been done by
relatives or neighbors, who knew something but not enough of Varotta’s
affairs, and he also concluded that the child was not far from its home.

Fiaschetti quickly elaborated a plan of action in accordance with
these conclusions. His first work was to get a detective into the
Varotta house unobserved or unsuspected. For this work he chose a woman
officer, Mrs. Rae Nicoletti, who was of Italian parentage and could
speak the Sicilian dialect.

The next day, Mrs. Varotta, between weeping and inquiring after her
child, let it be known that she had telegraphed to her cousin in
Detroit, who had a little money. The cousin was coming to aid her in
her difficulties.

That night the cousin came. She drove up to the house in a station
taxicab with two heavy suit cases for baggage. After inquiring the
correct address from a bystander, the visiting cousin made her way into
the Varotta home. So the detective, Mrs. Nicoletti, introduced herself
to her assignment.

The young woman was not long in the house before things began to
happen. First of all, she observed that the Varotta tenement was being
constantly watched from the windows across the street. Next she noted
that she was followed when she went out, ostensibly to do a little
shopping for the house, but really to telephone to Fiaschetti. Finally
came visitors.

The first of these was Santo Cusamano, a baker’s assistant, who dwelt
across the street from the Varottas and knew Salvatore and the whole
family well.

Cusamano was very sympathetic. It was too bad. Undoubtedly the best
thing to do was to pay the money. The Black Handers were terrible
people, not to be trifled with. What? Varotta had no money? He could
raise only five hundred dollars? Sergeant Fiaschetti had instructed
Varotta to mention this sum. The Black Handers would laugh at such
an amount. Varotta must get more. He must meet the terms of the
kidnappers. As for the safety of the boy, the Varottas could rest easy
on that point, but they must get the money quickly.

The following day there were other callers from across the street.
Antonio Marino came with his wife and his stepdaughter, Mrs. Mary
Pogano, née Ruggieri. The Marinos, too, were full of tender human
kindness and advice. When Antonio found out that Varotta had reported
the kidnapping to the police he shook his head in alarm. That was bad;
very bad. The police could do nothing against a powerful society of
Black Handers. It was folly. If the police were really to interfere,
the Black Handers would surely kill the boy. Antonio had known of other
cases. There was but one thing to do--pay the money. Another man he had
known had done so promptly and without making any fuss. He had got his
son back safely. Yes, the money must be raised.

Then Cusamano came again. He inquired for news and said that perhaps
the Black Handers would take five hundred dollars if that was really
all Varotta could raise. He did not know, but Varotta had better have
that sum ready for the messenger when he came. As he left the house,
Cusamano accidentally made what seemed a suggestive statement.

“You will hear from me soon,” he remarked to Varotta.

While these conversations were being held, Mrs. Nicoletti, the
detective, was bustling about the house, listening to every word she
could catch. She had taken up the rôle of visiting cousin, was busy
preparing meals, working about the house, and generally assisting the
sorrowing mother. Whatever suspicion of her might have existed was
soon allayed. She even sat in on the council with Cusamano and told him
she had saved about six hundred dollars and would advance Varotta five
hundred of it if that would save the child.

Mrs. Nicoletti and her chief were by this time almost certain that
their original theory of the crime was correct. The neighbors were
certainly a party to the matter, and it seemed that a capture of the
whole band and the quick recovery of the child were to be expected.
Plans were accordingly laid to trap the messenger coming for the money
and any one who might be with him or near the place when he came.

On June first, a man whom Varotta had never seen before came to the
house late at night and asked in hushed accents for the father of the
missing boy. The caller was, of course, admitted by Mrs. Nicoletti, who
thus had every opportunity to look at him and hear his voice. He was
led upstairs to a room where Varotta was waiting.

When the dark and midnight emissary of the terrible Black Hand strode
across the threshold, the tortured father could hold back his emotion
no longer. He threw himself on his knees before the visitor, lifted his
clenched hands to him, and kissed his dusty boots, begging that his
child be sent safely home and pleading that he had only five hundred
dollars to pay. It was not true that he had received any money. It was
impossible for him to ask his rich patroness who had befriended Adolfo
for anything. All he had was the little money his wife’s good cousin
was willing to lend him for the sake of little Joe’s safety. Would
the Black Hand not take the five hundred dollars and send back the
child, who was so innocent and so pretty that his teacher had taken his
picture in the kindergarten?

The grim caller had very little to say. He would report to the society
what Varotta had told him and he would return later with the answer.
Meantime, Varotta had better get ready all the money he could raise.
The messenger might come again the next night.

The detectives were ready when the time came. In the course of the next
day Varotta went to the bank as if to get the money. While there he was
handed five hundred dollars in bills which had previously been marked
by Sergeant Fiaschetti. Later on it was decided that Mrs. Nicoletti
would need help in dealing with the kidnappers’ messenger, who might
not come alone. Varotta himself was shaken and helpless. Accordingly,
Detective John Pellegrino was dressed as a plumber, supplied with kit
and tools, and sent to the Varotta house to mend a leaking faucet and
repair some broken pipes. He came and went several times, bringing
with him some new tools or part when he returned. In this way he hoped
to confuse the watchers as to his final position. The trick was again
successful. Pellegrino remained in the house at last, and the lookouts
for the kidnappers evidently thought him gone.

A little after ten o’clock on the night of June second there was a
knocking at the Varotta door. Two men were there, one of them the
emissary of the Black Hand who had called the night before. This man
curtly announced the purpose of his visit and sent his companion up to
get the money from Varotta, remaining downstairs himself.

Varotta received the stranger in the same room where he had kissed the
boots of the first messenger the night before, talked over the details
with him, inquired anxiously as to the safety of Joe, and was told that
he need not worry. Joe had been playing happily with other children and
would be home about midnight if the money were paid. This time Varotta
managed to retain some composure. He counted out the five hundred
dollars to the messenger, asked this man to count the money again, saw
that the bills were stuffed into the blackmailer’s pocket and then gave
the agreed signal.

Pellegrino, who had lain concealed behind the drapery, sprang into the
room with drawn revolver, covered the intruder, handcuffed him and
immediately communicated with the street by signal from a window. Other
detectives broke into the hallway, seized the first emissary who was
waiting there. On the near-by corner, Sergeant Fiaschetti and others of
his staff clapped the wristlets on the arm of Antonio Marino and James
Ruggieri, his stepson. A few moments later Santo Cusamano was dragged
from the bakeshop where he worked. Five of the gang were in the toils
and five more were seized before the night was over.

Cusamano and the first messenger, who turned out to be Roberto
Raffaelo, made admissions which were later shown in court as
confessions. All the prisoners were locked into separate and distant
cells in the Tombs, and the search for Joe Varotta was begun. Sergeant
Fiaschetti, amply fortified by the correctness of his surmises, took
the position that the child was not far away and would be released
within a few hours now that the members of the gang were in custody.

Here, however, the shrewd detective counted without a full
consideration of the desperateness and deadliness of the amateur
criminal, characteristics that have repeatedly upset and baffled those
who know crime professionally and are conversant with the habits
and conduct of experienced offenders. There can be no doubt that
professionals would, in this situation, have released the boy and sent
him home, though the Ross case furnishes a fearful exception. The whole
logic of the situation was on this side of the scale. Once the boy
was safely at home, his parents would probably have lost interest in
the prosecution, and the police, busy with many graver matters, would
probably have been content with convicting the actual messengers, the
only ones against whom there was direct evidence. These men might have
expected moderate terms of imprisonment and the whole affair would have
been soon forgotten.

But Little Joe was not released. The days dragged by, while the men in
the Tombs were questioned, threatened, cajoled and besought. One and
all they pretended to know nothing of the whereabouts of Joe Varotta.
More than a week went by while the parents of the child grew more and
more hysterical and finally gave up all but their prayers, convinced
that only divine intervention could avail them. Was little Joe alive or
dead? They did not know. They had asked the good St. Anthony’s aid and
probably he would give them his answer soon.

At seven o’clock on the morning of July eleventh, John Derahica, a
Polish laborer, went down to the beach near Piermont, a settlement just
below Nyack, in quest of driftwood. The tide was low in the Hudson,
and Derahica had no trouble reaching the end of a small pier which
extended out into the stream at this point. Just beyond, in about three
feet of water, he found the body of a little boy, caught hold of the
loose clothing with a stick, and brought it out.

Derahica made haste to Piermont and summoned the local police chief,
E. H. Stebbins. The body was carried to a local undertaker’s and was
at once suspected of being that of the missing Italian child. The next
night Sergeant Fiaschetti and Salvatore Varotta arrived at Piermont and
went to see the body, which had meantime been buried and then exhumed
when the coming of the New York officer was announced.

The remains were already sorely decomposed and the face past
recognition, but Salvatore Varotta looked at the swollen little hands
and feet and the blue sailor suit. He knelt by the slab where this
childish wreck lay prone and sobbed his recognition and his grief.

A coroner’s autopsy showed that the child had been thrown alive into
the stream and drowned. Calculating the probable results of the
reaction of tides and currents, it was decided that Giuseppe had been
cast to his death somewhere above the point at which the recovery of
the corpse was made.

Long and tedious investigations followed. When had the child been
killed and by whom? Was the little boy still alive when the two
messengers arrived at the Varotta home for the ransom and the trap was
sprung which gathered in five chief conspirators and five supposed
accessories? If so, who was the confederate who had committed the final
deed of murderous desperation? Who had done the actual kidnapping?
Where had the child been concealed while the negotiations were
proceeding?

Some of these questions have never been answered, but it is now
possible, from the confession of one of the men, from the evidence
presented at four ensuing murder trials, and from the subsequent drift
of police information, to reconstruct the story of the crime in greater
part.

On the afternoon of May twenty-fourth, when little Joe Varotta went
into the candy store with his penny, he was engaged in talk by one
of the men from across the street, whom Joe knew well as a friend of
his father’s. The child was enticed into a back room, seized, gagged,
stuffed into a barrel and then loaded into a delivery wagon. Thus
effectively concealed, the little prisoner was driven through the
streets to another part of town and there held in a house by some
member of the conspiracy. The men engaged in the plot up to this point
were all either neighbors or their relatives and friends.

On the afternoon of May twenty-ninth, Roberto Raffaelo was sitting
despondently on a bench in Union Square when a stranger sat down
beside him and accosted him in his own Sicilian dialect. This chance
acquaintance, it developed later, was James Ruggieri. Raffaelo was
down on his luck and had found work hard to get. He was, as a matter
of fact, washing dishes in a Bowery lunch room for five dollars a week
and meals. Ruggieri asked how things were going, and being informed
that they might be better, he told Raffaelo of a chance to make some
real money, explaining the facts about the kidnapping, saying that a
powerful society was back of the thing, and representing that Varotta
was a craven and an easy mark. All that was required of Raffaelo was
that he go to the Varotta house and get the money. For his pains he was
to have five hundred dollars.

Raffaelo was subsequently introduced to Cusamano and Marino. The next
night he went to visit Varotta with the result already described.

After Raffaelo had made one visit it was held to be better tactics
to send some one else to do the actual taking of the money. This man
had to be a stranger, so Raffaelo looked up John Melchione, an old
acquaintance. Melchione, promised an equal reward and paid fifty
dollars in advance as earnest money, went with Raffaelo to the Varotta
home on the night of June second, to get the money. Melchione went
upstairs and took the marked bills while Raffaelo waited below in the
vestibule. It was the former whom Detective Pellegrino caught in the
act. Neither he nor Raffaelo had ever seen little Joe and both so
maintained to the end, nor is there much doubt on this point.

On June second, the night when Raffaelo, Melchione, Cusamano, Marino
and Ruggieri were caught and the others arrested a little later,
Raffaelo made some statements to Detective Fiaschetti which sent the
officers off the right track for the time being. This prevarication,
which was done to shield himself and his confederates, he came to
regret most bitterly later on.

On June third, as soon as the word got abroad that the five men and
their five friends had been arrested and lodged in jail, another
confederate, perhaps more than one, took Joe Varotta up the Hudson and
threw him in, having first strangled the little fellow so that he might
not scream. The boy was destroyed because the confederates who had him
in charge were frightened into panic by the sudden collapse of their
scheme and feared they would either be caught with the boy in their
possession or that the arrested men might “squeal” and be supported by
the identification from the little victim’s lips were he allowed to
live.

Raffaelo was brought to trial in August and quickly convicted of
murder in the first degree. He was committed to the death house at
Sing Sing and there waited to be joined by his fellows. When the hour
for his execution had almost come upon him, Raffaelo was seized with
remorse and declared that he was willing to tell all he knew. He was
reprieved and appeared at the trials of the others, where he told
his story substantially as recited above. Largely as a result of his
testimony, Cusamano, Marino and Ruggieri were convicted and sentenced
to electrocution while Melchione went mad in the Tombs and was sent to
Matteawan to end his life among the criminal insane. Governor Smith
finally granted commutations to life imprisonment in each of these
cases, because it was fairly well established that all the convicted
men had been in the Tombs at the time Joe Varotta was drowned and had
probably nothing to do with his actual murder. They are still in prison
and will very likely stay there a great many years before there can be
any question of pardon.

In spite of every effort on the part of the police and every inducement
held out to the convicted men, no information could ever be got as
to the identity of the man or men who threw the little boy into
the river. The arrested and convicted men, except for Raffaelo, who
evidently did not know any more than he told, absolutely refused to
talk, saying it would be certain death if they did so. They tried all
along to create the impression that they were only the minor tools of
some great and mysterious organization, but this claim may be dismissed
as fiction and romance.




XIV

THE LOST MILLIONAIRE


Some time before three o’clock on the afternoon of December 2, 1919,
Ambrose Joseph Small deposited in the Dominion Bank, of Toronto, a
check for one million dollars. At seven fifteen o’clock that evening
the lean, swart, saturnine master of Canadian playhouses bought his
habitual newspapers from the familiar boy under the lamps of Adelaide
Street, before his own Grand Theater, turned on his heel, and strode
off into the night, to return no more.

In the intervening years men have ferreted in all corners of the world
for the missing rich man; rewards up to fifty thousand dollars have
been offered for his return, or the discovery of his body; reports
of his presence have chased detectives into distant latitudes, and
the alarm for him has been spread to all the trails and tides without
result. By official action of the Canadian courts, Amby Small, as he
was known, is dead, and his fortune has been distributed to his heirs.
To the romantic speculation he must still exist, however. And whatever
the fact, his case presents one of the strangest stories of mysterious
absenteeism to be found upon the books.

Men disappear every day. The police records of any great city and of
many smaller places bear almost interminable lists of fellows who have
suddenly and curiously dropped out of their grooves and placements.
Some are washed up as dead bodies--the slain and self-slain. Some
return after long wanderings, to make needless excuses to their friends
and families. And others pass from their regular haunts into new
fields. These latter are usually poor and fameless gentry, weary of
life’s routine.

Ambrose Small, however, was a person of different kidney. He was rich,
for one thing. Thirty-five years earlier, Sir Henry Irving, on one of
his tours to Canada had found the youthful Small taking tickets in a
Toronto theater. Attracted by some unusual quality in the youngster,
Irving shrewdly advised him to quit the study of law and devote himself
to the theatrical business. Following this counsel, Small had risen
slowly and surely until he controlled theaters in all parts of the
Dominion and was rated at several millions. On the afternoon before his
disappearance he had consummated a deal with the Trans-Canada Theaters,
Limited, by which he was to receive nearly two millions in money and
a share of the profits, in return for his theatrical holdings. The
million-dollar check he deposited had been the first payment.

Again, Small was a familiar figure throughout Canada and almost as well
acquainted in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and other cities of the
United States. Figuratively, at least, everybody knew him--thousands of
actors, traveling press agents, managers, real estate men, promoters,
newspaper folk, advance agents; indeed, all the Wandering Jews and
Gentiles of the profession of make-believe, with which he had been
connected so long and profitably. With such a list of acquaintances,
whose rovings took them to the ends of the earth, how almost
impossible it seemed for Small to drop completely out of sight.

Finally, Amby Small was a man with a wife and most deeply interested
relatives. Entirely aside from the questions of inheritance and the
division of his estate, which netted about two millions, as was
determined later on, Mrs. Small would certainly want to know whether
she was a wife or widow, and the magnate’s sisters would certainly
suspect everything and everybody, leaving nothing undone that would
bring the man back to his home, or punish those who might have been
responsible for any evil termination of his life.

Thus the Small case presents very different factors from those
governing the ordinary disappearance case. It is full of the elements
which make for mystery and bafflement, and it may be set down at once
as an enigma of the most arresting and irritating type, upon whose
darknesses not the slightest light has ever been shed.

So far as can be learned, Small had no enemies and felt no
apprehensions. He was totally immersed for some months before his
disappearance in the negotiations for the sale of his interests to the
Trans-Canada Company, and apparently he devoted all his energies to
this project. He had anticipated a favorable conclusion for some time
and looked upon the signing of the agreements and writing of the check
on December 2 as nothing more than a formality.

Late in the morning of the day in question, Small met his attorney
and the representatives of the Trans-Canada Company in his offices,
and the formalities were concluded. Some time after noon he deposited
the check in the Dominion Bank and then took Mrs. Small to luncheon.
Afterward he visited a Catholic children’s institution with her and
left her at about three o’clock to return to his desk in the Grand
Theater, where he had sat for many years, spinning his plans and piling
up his fortune.

There seems to be not the slightest question that Small went directly
to his office and spent the remainder of the afternoon there. Not only
his secretary, John Doughty, who had been Small’s confidential man for
nineteen years, and later played a dramatic and mysterious part in the
disappearance drama, but several other employees of the Grand Theater
saw their retiring master at his usual post that afternoon. Small not
only talked with these workers, but he called business associates on
the telephone and made at least two appointments for the following day.
He also was in conference with his solicitor as late as five o’clock.

According to Doughty, his employer left the Grand Theater at about five
thirty o’clock and this time of departure coincided perfectly with what
is known of Small’s engagements. He had promised his wife to be at home
for dinner at six thirty o’clock.

There is also confirmation at this point. For years Small had been in
the habit of dropping into Lamb’s Hotel, next door to his theater,
before going home in the evening. He was intimately acquainted there,
often met his friends in the hotel lobby or bar, and generally chatted
a few minutes before leaving for his residence. The proprietor of the
hotel came forward after Small’s disappearance and recalled that he had
seen the theater man in his hotel a little after five thirty o’clock.
He was also under the impression that Small had stayed for some
time, but he could not be sure.

[Illustration: ~~ AMBROSE J. SMALL ~~]

The next and final point of time that can be fixed is seven fifteen
o’clock. At that time Small approached the newsboy in Adelaide Street,
who knew the magnate well, and bought his usual evening papers. The
boy believed that Small had come from the theater, but was not sure he
had not stepped out of the hotel adjoining. Small said nothing but the
usual things, seemed in no way different from his ordinary mood, and
tarried only long enough to glance at the headlines under the arc lamps.

Probably there is something significant about the fact that Small did
not leave the vicinity of his office until seven fifteen o’clock, when
he was due at home by half past six. What happened to him after he had
left his theater in plenty of time to keep the appointment with his
wife? That something turned up to change his plan is obvious. Whether
he merely encountered some one and talked longer than he realized,
or whether something arrested him that had a definite bearing on
his disappearance is not to be said; but the latter seems to be the
reasonable assumption. Small was not the kind of man lightly to neglect
his agreements, particularly those of a domestic kind.

Mrs. Small, waiting at home, did not get excited when her husband
failed to appear at the fixed time. She knew he had been going through
a busy day, and she reasoned that probably something pressing had come
up to detain him. At half past seven, however, she got impatient and
telephoned his office, getting no response. She waited two hours longer
before she telephoned to the home of John Doughty’s sister. She found
her husband’s secretary there and was assured that Doughty had been
there all evening, which seems to have been the fact. Doughty said his
employer had left the theater at five thirty o’clock, and that he knew
no more. He could not explain Small’s absence from home, but took the
matter lightly. No doubt Small would be along when he got ready.

At midnight Mrs. Small sent telegrams to Small’s various theaters in
eastern Canada, asking for her husband. In the course of the next
twenty-four hours she got responses from all of them. No one had seen
Small or knew anything about his movements.

Now there followed two weeks of silence and waiting. Mrs. Small did
not go to the police; neither did she employ private detectives until
later. For two weeks she evidently waited, believing that her husband
had gone off on a trip, and that he would return soon. Those of his
intimates in Toronto who could not be kept out of the secret of his
absence took the same attitude. It was explained later that there was
nothing unprecedented about Small’s having simply gone off on a jaunt
for some days or even several weeks. He was a moody and self-centered
individual. He had gone off before in this way and come back when he
got ready. He might have gone to New York suddenly on some business.
Probably he had not been alone. Mrs. Small evidently shared this view,
and her reasons for so doing developed a good deal later. In fact, she
refused for months to believe that anything had befallen her husband,
and it was only when there was no remaining alternative that she
changed her position.

Finally, a little more than two weeks after Small’s disappearance,
his wife and attorneys went to the Dominion police and laid the case
before them. Even then the quest was undertaken in a cautious and
skeptical way. This attitude was natural. The police could find not
the least hint of any attack on Small. The idea that such a man had
been kidnapped seemed preposterous. Besides, what could have been
the object? There had been no demand for his ransom. No doubt Small
had gone away for reasons sufficient unto himself. Probably his wife
understood these impulsions better than she would say. There were
rumors of infelicity in the Small home, and these proved later to be
well grounded. The police simply felt that they would not be made
ridiculous. Neither did they want to stir up a sensation, only to have
Small return and spill his wrath upon their innocent heads.

But the days spun out, and still there was no news of the missing man.
Many began to turn from their original attitude of knowing skepticism.
Other rumors began to fly about. Gradually the conviction gained ground
that something sinister had befallen the master of theaters. Could it
not be possible that Small had been entrapped in some blackmailing plot
and perhaps killed when he resisted? It seemed almost incredible, but
such things did happen. How about his finances? Was his money intact
in the bank? Had he drawn any checks against his account? It was soon
discovered that no funds had been withdrawn either on December 2 or
subsequently, and it seemed likely that Small had only a few dollars
in his pockets when he vanished, unless, as was suggested, he kept a
secret cache of ready money.

Attention was now directed toward every one who had been close to the
theater owner. One of the most obvious marks for this kind of inquiry
was John Doughty, the veteran secretary. Doughty had, as already
remarked, been Small’s right-hand man for nearly two decades. He knew
his employer’s secrets, was close to all his business affairs, and
was even known to have been Small’s companion on occasional drinking
bouts. At the same time Small had treated Doughty in a niggardly way
as regards pay. The secretary had been receiving forty-five dollars a
week for years, never more. At the same time, probably through other
bits of income which his position brought him, Doughty had saved some
money, bought property in Toronto, and established himself with a small
competence.

That Small regarded this faithful servant kindly and was careful to
provide for him, is shown by the fact that Small had got Doughty a new
and better place as manager of one of the Small theaters in Montreal,
which had been taken over by the syndicate. In his new job Doughty
received seventy-five dollars a week. He had left to assume his new
duties a day or two after the consolidation of the interests, which is
to say a day or two after Small vanished.

Doughty had, of course, been questioned, but it seemed obvious that
this time he knew nothing of his old employer’s movements. He had
accordingly stayed on in Montreal, attending to his new duties and
paying very little attention to Small’s absence. Less than three weeks
after Small had gone, and one week after the case had been taken to the
police, however, new attention began to be paid to Doughty, and there
were some unpleasant whisperings.

On Monday morning, December 23, just three weeks after Small had walked
off into the void, came the dramatic break. Doughty, as was his habit,
left Montreal the preceding Saturday evening to spend Sunday in Toronto
with his relatives and friends. On Monday morning, instead of appearing
at his desk, he telephoned from Toronto that he was ill and might not
be at work for some days. His employers took him at his word and paid
no further attention until, three days having elapsed, they telephoned
to the home of Doughty’s sister. She had not seen him since Monday. The
man was gone!

If the Small disappearance case had heretofore been considered a
somewhat dubious jest, it now became a genuine sensation. For the first
time the Canadian and American newspapers began to treat the matter
under scare headlines, and now at last the Dominion police began to
move with force and alacrity.

An investigation of the safe-deposit vaults, where Small was now
said to have kept a large total of securities, showed that Doughty
had visited this place twice on December 2, the day of Small’s
disappearance, and he had on each occasion either put in, or taken
away, some bonds. A hasty count of the securities was said to have
revealed a shortage of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

Even this discovery did not change the minds of the skeptics, in whose
ranks the missing magnate’s wife still remained. It was now believed
that Doughty had received a secret summons from Small, and that he
had taken the bonds, which had previously been put aside, at Small’s
instruction, and gone to join his chief in some hidden retreat. A good
part of Toronto believed that Small had gone on a protracted “party,”
or that he had seized the opportunity offered by the closing out of his
business to quit a wife with whom he had long been in disagreement.

When neither Small nor Doughty reappeared, opinion gradually veered
about to the opposite side. After all, it was possible that Small had
not gone away voluntarily, that he was the victim of some criminal
conspiracy, and that Doughty had fled when he felt suspicion turning
its face toward him. The absence of the supposed one hundred and fifty
thousand dollars in bonds provided sufficient motivation to fit almost
any criminal hypothesis.

As this attitude became general, Toronto came to examine the
relationship between Small and Doughty. It was recalled that
the secretary had, on more than one occasion when he was in his
cups, spoken bitterly of Small’s exaggerated wealth and his cold
niggardliness. Doughty had also uttered various radical sentiments,
and it was even said that he had once spoken of the possibility
of kidnapping Small for ransom; though the man who reported this
conversation admitted Doughty had seemed to be joking. The conclusion
reached by the police was not clear. Doughty, they found, had been
faithful, devoted, and long-suffering. They had to conclude that he
was careful and substantial, and they could not discover that he had
ever had the slightest connection with the underworld or with suspect
characters. At the same time they decided that the man was unstable,
emotional, imaginative, and probably not hard to mislead. In short,
they came to the definite suspicion that Doughty had figured as the
tool of conspirators, in the disappearance of Small. They soon brought
Mrs. Small around to this view. Now the hunt began.

A reward of five hundred dollars, which had been perfunctorily
offered as payment for information concerning Small’s whereabouts,
was withdrawn, and three new rewards were offered by the wife--fifty
thousand dollars for the discovery and return of Small; fifteen
thousand dollars for his identified body, and five thousand dollars for
the capture of Doughty.

The Toronto chief constable immediately assigned a squad of detectives
to the case, and Mrs. Small employed a firm of Canadian private
detectives to pursue a line of investigation which she outlined. Later
on she employed four more widely known investigating firms in the
United States to continue the quest. Small’s sisters also summoned
American officers to carry out their special inquiries. Thus there were
no fewer than seven distinct bodies of police working at the mystery.

Circulars containing pictures of Small and Doughty, with their
descriptions, and announcement of the rewards, were circulated
throughout Canada and the United States; then from Scotland Yard
they were sent to all the police offices in the British Empire, and,
finally, from the American, Canadian, and British capitals to every
known postmaster and police head on earth. More than half a million
copies of the circulars were printed, it is said, and translations
into more than twenty languages were distributed. I am told by
eminent police authorities that this campaign, supported as it was by
advertisements and news items in the press of almost every nation,
some of them containing pictures of the missing millionaire, has never
been approached in any other absent person case. Mrs. Small and her
advisers set out to satisfy themselves that news of the disappearance
and the rewards should reach to the most remote places, and they spent
a small fortune for printing bills and postage. Even the quest for the
lost Archduke John Salvator, to which the Pope contributed a special
letter addressed to all priests, missionaries and other representatives
of the Roman Catholic Church in every part of the world, seems to have
been less far-reaching.

Rumors concerning Small and Doughty began to come in soon after the
first alarms. Small and Doughty were reported seen in Paris, on the
Italian Riviera, at the Lido, in Florida, in Hawaii, in London, at
Calcutta, aboard a boat on the way to India, in Honduras, at Zanzibar,
and where not? A skeleton was found in a ravine not far from Toronto,
and for a time the fate of Small was believed to be understood. But
physicians and anatomists soon determined that the bones could not have
been those of the theatrical man for a variety of conclusive reasons.
So the hunt began again.

Gradually, as time went on, as expense mounted, and results failed
to show themselves, the private detective firms were dismissed, one
after the other, and the task of running down rumors in this clewless
case was left to the Toronto police. The usual sums of money and of
time were wasted in following blind leads. The usual failures and
absurdities were recorded. One Canadian officer, however, Detective
Austin R. Mitchell, began to develop a theory of the case and was
allowed to follow his ideas logically toward their conclusion.
Working in silence, when the public had long come to believe that
the search had been abandoned as bootless, Mitchell plugged away,
month after month, without definite accomplishment. He was not able
to get more than an occasional scrap of information which seemed to
bear out his theory of the case. He made scores of trips, hundreds of
investigations. They were all inconclusive. Nevertheless, the Toronto
authorities permitted him to go on with his work, and he is probably
still occupied at times with the Small mystery.

Detective Mitchell was actively following his course toward the end
of November, 1920, eleven months after the flight of Doughty, when a
telegram arrived at police headquarters in Toronto from Edward Fortune,
a constable of Oregon City, Oregon, a small town far out near the
Pacific. Once more the weary detective took a train West, arriving in
Oregon City on the evening of November 22.

Constable Fortune met the Canadian officer at the train and told him
his story. He had seen one of the circulars a few months earlier and
had carried the images of Small and Doughty in his mind. One day he had
observed a strange laborer working in a local paper mill, and he had
been struck by his likeness to Doughty. The man had been there for some
time and risen from the meanest work to the position of foreman in one
of the shops. Fortune dared not approach the suspect even indirectly,
and he failed on various occasions to get a view of the worker without
his hat on. Because the picture on the circular showed Doughty
bare-headed, the constable had been forced to wait until the suspected
man inadvertently removed his hat. Then Fortune had sent his telegram.

Detective Mitchell listened patiently and dubiously. He had made a
hundred trips of the same sort, he said. Probably there was another
mistake. But Constable Fortune seemed certain of his game, and he was
right.

Shortly after dusk the local officer led the detective to a modest
house, where some of the mill workers boarded. They entered, and
Mitchell was immediately confronted with Doughty, whom he had known
intimately in Toronto.

“Jack!” said the officer, almost as much surprised as the fugitive.
“How could you do it?”

In this undramatic fashion one part of the great quest came to an end.

Doughty submitted quietly to arrest and gave the officer a voluntary
statement. He admitted without reservation that he had taken Canadian
Victory bonds to a total of one hundred and five thousand dollars
from Small’s vault, but insisted that this had been done after the
millionaire had disappeared. He denied absolutely and firmly any
knowledge of Small’s whereabouts; pleaded that he had never had any
knowledge of or part in a kidnapping plot, and he insisted that he
had not seen Small nor heard from him since half past five on the
evening of the disappearance. To this account he adhered doggedly and
unswervingly. Doughty was returned to Toronto on November 29, and the
next day he retrieved the stolen bonds from the attic of his sister’s
house, where he had made his home with his two small sons, since the
death of his wife several years before.

In April of the following year Doughty was brought to trial on a charge
of having stolen the bonds, a second indictment for complicity in the
kidnapping remaining for future disposal. The trial was a formal and,
in some ways, a peculiar affair. All mention of kidnapping and all
hints which might have indicated the direction of Doughty’s ideas on
the central mystery were rigorously avoided. Only one new fact and
one correction of accepted statements came out. It was revealed that
Small had given his wife a hundred thousand dollars in bonds to be
used for charitable purposes on the day before his disappearance. This
fact had not been hinted before, and some interpreted the testimony as
a concealed way of stating the fact that Small had made some kind of
settlement with his wife on the first of December.

Doughty in his testimony corrected the statement that he had taken
the bonds after Small’s disappearance. He testified that he had been
sent to the vault on the second of December, and that he had then
extracted the hundred and five thousand dollars’ worth of bonds. He
had not, he swore, intended to steal them, and he had no notion that
Small would disappear. He explained his act by saying that Small had
long promised him some reward for his many years of service, and had
repeatedly stated that he would arrange the matter when the deal with
the Trans-Canada Company had been concluded. Knowing that the papers
had been signed that morning, and the million-dollar check turned over,
Doughty had planned to go to his chief with the bonds in his hands and
suggest that these might serve as a fitting reward for his contribution
to the success of the Small enterprises. He later saw the folly of this
action and fled.

The prosecution naturally attacked this story on the ground that it
was incredible, but nothing was brought out to show what opposing
theory might fit the facts. Doughty was convicted of larceny and
sentenced to serve six years in prison. The kidnapping charge was
never brought to trial. Instead, the police let it be known that they
believed Doughty had not played any part in the “actual murder” of
Amby Small, and that he had revealed all he knew. Incidentally, it was
admitted that the police believed Small to be dead. That was the only
point on which any information was given, and even here not the first
detail was supplied. Obviously the hunt for nameless persons suspected
of having kidnapped and killed Small was in progress, and the officials
were being careful to reveal nothing of their information or intentions.

Doughty took an appeal from the verdict against him, but abandoned
the fight later in the spring of 1921, and was sent to prison. Here
the unravelling of the Small mystery came to an abrupt end. A year
passed, then two years. Still nothing more developed. Doughty was in
prison, the police were silent and seemed inactive. Perhaps they had
abandoned the hunt. Possibly they knew what had befallen the theater
owner and were refraining from making revelations for reasons of public
policy. Perhaps, as was hinted in the newspapers, there were persons
of influence involved in the mess, persons powerful enough to hush the
officials.

But the matter of Small’s fortune was still in abeyance, and there
were indications of a bitter contest between the wife and Small’s two
sisters, who had apparently been hostile for years. This struggle
promised to bring out further facts and perhaps to reveal to the
public what the family and the officials knew or suspected.

Soon after Small had vanished, Mrs. Small had moved formally to
protect his property by having a measure introduced into the Dominion
Parliament declaring Small an absentee and placing herself and a bank
in control of the estate. This measure was soon taken, with the result
that the Small fortune, amounting to about two million dollars, net,
continued to be profitably administered.

Early in 1923, after Doughty had been two years in prison, and all
rumor of the kidnapping or disappearance mystery had died down, Mrs.
Small appeared in court with a petition to have her husband declared
dead, so that she might offer for probate an informal will made on
September 6, 1903. This document was written on a single small sheet of
paper and devised to Mrs. Small her husband’s entire estate, which was
of modest proportions at the time the will was drawn.

The court refused to declare the missing magnate dead, saying that
insufficient evidence had been presented, and that the police were
apparently not satisfied. Mrs. Small next appealed her case, and the
reviewing court reversed the decision and declared Small legally dead.
Thereupon the widow filed the will of 1903 and was immediately attacked
by Small’s sisters, who declared that they had in their possession a
will made in 1917, which revoked the earlier testament and disinherited
Mrs. Small. This will, if it existed, was never produced.

There followed a series of hearings. At one of these, opposing counsel
began a line of cross-questioning which suggested that Mrs. Small
had been guilty of a liaison with a Canadian officer who appeared in
the records merely as Mr. X. The widow, rising dramatically in court,
indignantly denied these imputations as well as the induced theory
that her misbehavior had led to an estrangement from her husband and,
perhaps, to his disappearance. The widow declared that this suspicion
was diametrically opposed to the truth, and that if Small were in
court he would be the first to reject it. As a matter of fact, she
testified, it was Small who had been guilty. He had confessed his fault
to her, promised to be done with the woman in the matter, and had been
forgiven. There had been a complete reconciliation, she said, and Small
had agreed that one half of the million-dollar check which he received
on the day of his disappearance should be hers.

To bear out her statements in this matter, Mrs. Small soon after
obtained permission of the court to file certain letters which had been
found among Small’s effects after his disappearance. In this manner
the secret love affair in the theater magnate’s last years came to be
spread upon the books. The letters presented by the wife had all come
from a certain married woman who, according to the testimony of her own
writings and of others who knew of the connection, had been associated
with Amby Small since 1915. It appears that Mrs. Small discovered the
attachment in 1918 and forced her husband to cause his inamorata to
leave Toronto. The letters, which need not be reprinted here, contained
only one significant strain.

A letter, which reached Small two or three days before he disappeared,
concluded thus: “Write me often, dear heart, for I just live for your
letters. God bless you, dearest.”

Three weeks earlier, evidently with reference to the impending close
of his big deal and his retirement from active business, the same lady
wrote: “I am the most unhappy girl in the world. I want you. Can’t
you suggest something after the first of December? You will be free,
practically. Let’s beat it away from our troubles.”

And five days later she amended this in another note: “Some day,
perhaps, if you want me, we can be together all the time. Let’s pray
for that time to come, when we can have each other legitimately.”

Mrs. Small declared that she had found these letters immediately after
her husband’s departure, and that they had kept her from turning the
case over to the police until two weeks after the disappearance.
Meantime the other woman had been summoned, interrogated by the police,
and released. She had not seen Small nor had she heard from him either
directly or indirectly. It was apparent that, while she had been
corresponding with Small up to the very week of his last appearance, he
had not gone to see her.

Finally the will contest was settled out of court, Small’s sisters
receiving four hundred thousand dollars, and the widow retaining the
balance.

And here the darkness closes in again. Even in the progress of the will
controversy no hint was given of the official or family beliefs as to
the mystery. There are only two tenable conclusions. Either there is
a further skeleton to be guarded, or the police have some kind of
information which promises the eventual solution of the case and the
apprehension of suspected criminals. How slender this promise must be,
every reader will judge for himself, remembering the years of fruitless
attack on this extraordinary and complex enigma.




XV

THE AMBROSE BIERCE IRONY


Some time in his middle career, Ambrose Bierce wrote three short tales
of vanishment--weird and supernatural things in one of his favorite
veins. The three sketches--for they are no more--he classed under the
heading, “Mysterious Disappearances,” a subject which occupied his
speculations from time to time. Herein lies a complete irony. Bierce
himself was later to disappear as mysteriously as any of his heroes.

No one will understand his story, with its many implications, or get
from it the full flavor of romance and sardonics without some brief
glance at the man and his history. Nor need one make apology for
intruding a short account of him in a story of mystery, for Bierce
alive was almost as strange and enigmatic a creature as Bierce dead.

Ambrose Bierce, whom a good many critics have regarded as the foremost
master of the American short story after Poe, was born in Ohio in
1841. He joined the Union armies as a private in 1861, when he was in
his twenty-first year, rose quickly through the ranks to the grade
of lieutenant, fought and was wounded at Chickamauga as a captain of
engineers under Thomas, and retired with the brevet rank of major.
After the war he took up writing for a living, and soon went to London,
where his early short stories, sketches and criticisms attracted
attention. His cutting wit and ironic spirit soon won him the popular
name “Bitter Bierce.”

After 1870, the banished Empress Eugénie of France, alarmed at the
escape of her implacable journalistic enemy, Henri Rochette, and the
impending revival in London of his paper, _La Lanterne_, in which she
had been intolerably lampooned, sought to forestall the French writer
by establishing an English paper called _The Lantern_, thus taking
advantage of the law which forbade a duplication of titles. For this
purpose she employed Bierce, purely on his polemical reputation, and
Bierce straightway began the publication of _The Lantern_, and devoted
his most vitriolic explosions to the baffled Rochette, who saw that he
could not succeed in England without the name which he had made famous
at the head of his paper and could not return to France, whence he was
a political exile.

In this employment Bierce exhibited one of his peculiarities. His
assaults on her old enemy greatly pleased the banished empress, and she
finally sent for Bierce. Following the imperial etiquette, which she
still sought to maintain, she “commanded” his presence. Bierce, who
understood and obeyed military commands, did not like that manner of
wording an invitation from a dethroned empress. He did not attend and
_The Lantern_ soon disappeared from the scene of politics and letters.

Bierce returned to America and went to San Francisco, where he in time
became the “dean of Western writers.” His journalistic work in San
Francisco and later in Washington set him apart as a satirist of the
bitterest strain. His literary productions marked him as a man of the
most independent thought and distinctive taste. Most of his tales are
Poe plus sulphur. He reveled in the mysterious, the dark, the terrible
and the bizarre.

Between intervals of writing his tales, criticisms and epigrams, Bierce
found time to manage ranches and mining properties, to fight bad men
and frontier highwaymen, to grill politicians, and to write verse.

Bierce went through life seeking combat, weathering storm after storm,
by some regarded as the foremost American literary man of his time,
by others denounced as a brute, a pedant, even as a scoundrel. In the
West he was generally lionized, in the East neglected. One man called
him the last of the satirists, another considered him a strutting
dunce. Bierce contributed to the confusion by making something of a
riddle of himself. He loved mystery and indirection. He liked the
fabulous stories which grew up about him and encouraged them by his
own silence and air of concealment. In the essentials, however, he was
no more than an intelligent and perspicacious man of high talent, who
hated sentiment, reveled in the assault on popular prejudices, liked
nothing so much as to throw himself upon the clay idols of the day with
ferocious claws, and yet had a tender and humble heart.

Toward the end of 1913, Mexico was in another of its torments. The
visionary Madero had been assassinated. Huerta was in the dictator’s
chair, Wilson had inaugurated his “watchful waiting,” and the new
rebels were moving in the north--Carranza and Villa. At the time
Ambrose Bierce was living, more or less retired, in Washington,
probably convinced that he had had his last fling, for he was already
past seventy-two and “not so spry as he once had been.” But along came
the order for the mobilization along the border. General Funston and
his little army took up the patrol along the Rio Grande, the newspapers
began to hint at a possible invasion of Mexico, and there was a stir of
martial blood among the many.

Some say that when age comes on, a man’s youth is born again.
Everything that belonged to the dawn becomes hallowed in the sunset of
manhood. It must have been so with Bierce. Old and probably more infirm
than he fancied, long written out, ready for sleep, the trumpets of
Shiloh and Chickamauga, rusty and silent for fifty years, called him
out again and he set out for Mexico, saying little to any one about
his plans or intentions. Some believed that he was going down to the
Rio Grande as a correspondent. Others said he planned to join the
Constitutionalists as a military adviser. Either might have been true,
for Bierce was as good an officer as a writer. He knew both games from
the roots up.

Even the preliminary movements of the man are a little hazy, but
apparently he went first to his old home in California and then down
to the border. He did not stop there, for in the fall of 1913 he was
reported to have crossed into Mexico, and in January his secretary
in Washington, Miss Carrie Christianson, received a letter from him
postmarked in Chihuahua.

Then followed a long silence. Miss Christianson expected to hear
again within a month. When no letter came, she wondered, but was not
alarmed. Bierce was a man of irregular habits. He was down there in a
war-torn country, moving about in the wilderness with armies and bands
of insurgents; he might not be able to get a letter through the
lines. There was no reason to feel special apprehension. In September,
1914, however, Bierce’s daughter, Mrs. H. D. Cowden of Bloomington,
Illinois, decided that something must be amiss, no word having come
from her father in eight months. She appealed to the State Department
at Washington, saying that she feared for his life.

[Illustration: ~~ AMBROSE BIERCE ~~]

The Department quickly notified the American chargé d’affaires in
Mexico to make inquiries and the War Department shortly afterwards
instructed General Funston to send word along his lines and to
communicate with the Mexican commanders opposite him, asking for
Bierce. The Washington officials soon notified Mrs. Cowden that a
search was being made. General Funston also answered that he was
proceeding with an inquiry. Again some months elapsed. Finally both the
diplomatic and the military forces reported that they had been unable
to find Bierce or any trace of him. Probably, it was added, he was with
one of the independent rebel commands in the mountains and out of touch
with the border or the main forces of the Constitutionalists.

Now the rumoring began. First came the report that Bierce had really
gone to Mexico to join Villa, whose reputation as a guerrilla fighter
had attracted the veteran, and whose emissaries were said to have
asked Bierce to join the so-called bandit as a military aide. Bierce,
it was reported, had joined Villa and had been with that commander in
Chihuahua just before the battle there, in which the rebel forces were
unsuccessful. Possibly Bierce had fallen in action. This story was soon
discarded on the ground that Villa, had Bierce been on his staff,
would certainly have reported the death of so widely-known a man and
one so close to himself.

A little later came a second report, this time backed by what seemed
to be more credible evidence. It was said that Bierce had been at the
later battle of Torreon in command of the Villista artillery, that he
had taken part in the running campaign through the province of Sonora
and that he had probably died of hardships and exposure in those trying
days.

A California friend now came forward with the report of a talk with
Bierce, said to have been held just before the author set out for
Mexico. The old satirist was reported to have said that he had grown
weary of the stodgy life of literature and journalism, that he wanted
to wind up his career with some more glorious end than death in bed and
that he had decided to go down into Mexico and find a “soldier’s grave
or crawl off into some cave and die like a free beast.”

It sounded very rebellious and Byronic, but Bierce’s other friends
immediately declared that it was entirely out of character. Bierce had
gone to Mexico to fight and see another war. He had not gone to die. He
was a fatalist. He would take whatever came, but he would not go out
and seek a conclusion.

So the talk went on and the months went by. There were no scare
headlines in the papers. After all, Bierce was only a distinguished man
of letters.

But there was a still better reason for the lack of attention. The
absence of Bierce had not yet been reported officially when the vast
black cloud of war rolled up in Europe. All men’s eyes were turned to
the Atlantic and the fields of Flanders. The American adventure along
the Mexican border seemed trivial and grotesque. The little puff of
wind in the South was forgotten before the menacing tornado in the
East. What did a poet matter when the armies of the great powers were
caught in their bloody embrace?

Yet Bierce was not altogether forgotten. In April, 1915, more than a
year after his last letter from Chihuahua, another note, supposedly
from him, was received by his daughter. It said that Major Bierce was
in England on Lord Kitchener’s staff and that he was taking a prominent
part in the recruiting movement in Britain. This sensation lasted ten
days. Then, inquiry having been made of the British War Office, the
sober report was issued that Bierce’s name did not appear on the rolls
and that he certainly was not attached to Lord Kitchener’s staff.

Now, at last, the missing writer’s secretary put the touch of disaster
to the fable. Miss Christianson announced in Washington that careful
investigation abroad showed that Major Bierce was not fighting with the
Allies, and that she and his family had been forced to the melancholy
conclusion that he was dead.

But how and where? The State Department continued its inquiries in
Mexico, but many private individuals also began to investigate.
Journalists at the southern front tried to get trace or rumor of the
man. Old friends went into the troubled region to seek what they could
find. The literary world was touched both with curiosity and grief and
with a romantic interest in the man’s fate. Bierce became a later
Byron, and it was held he had gone forth to fight for the oppressed and
found himself another Missolonghi.

Out of all this grew a vast curiosity. Probably Bierce was dead, though
even this was by no means certain. There was no evidence save the fact
that he had not written for more than a year, which, in view of the
man’s character and the situation in which he was caught, might be
no evidence at all. But, granting that he was dead, how had his end
come? Where was his body? It was impossible to escape the impression
that one whose life had been touched with such extraordinary color
should have died without a flame. The men and women who knew and loved
Bierce--and they were a considerable number--kept saying over and over
to themselves that this heroic fellow could not have passed out without
some signal. Surely some one had seen him die and could tell of his end
and place of repose. So the quest began again.

For years, there was no fruit. Northern Mexico, where Bierce had
certainly met his end, if indeed, he was dead, was no place for a
hunter after bits of literary history to go wandering in. First there
was the constant fighting between Huerta and the Constitutionalists.
Then Huerta was eliminated and Carranza became president. There
followed the various campaigns of pacification. Next Villa rebelled
against his old ally, leading to a fresh going to and fro of armies.
Finally the whole region was infested by marauding bands of irregular
and rebellious militia, part soldiers and part bandits. To cap the
climax came the invasion of Mexico by the expedition under Pershing.

In 1918 was heard the first report on Bierce which seemed to have some
basis in fact. A traveler had heard in Mexico City and at several
points along the railroad that an aged American, who was supposed to
have been fighting with either Villa or Carranza, had been executed by
order of a field commander. From descriptions, this man was supposed
to have been Bierce. At any rate, he might have been Bierce as well as
another, and, since Bierce was both conspicuous and missing, there was
some reason for credence. But no one could get any details or give the
scene of the execution. The report was finally discarded as no more
reliable than several others.

Another year went by. In February, 1919, however, came a report which
carries some of the marks of credibility.

One of the several persons who set out to clear up the Bierce enigma
was Mr. George F. Weeks, an old friend and close associate of the old
writer’s, who went to Mexico City and later visited the various towns
in northern Mexico where Bierce was supposed to have been seen shortly
before his death. Weeks went up and down and across northern Mexico
without finding anything definite. Then he returned to Mexico City and
by chance encountered a Mexican officer who had been with Villa in his
campaigns and had known Bierce well. Weeks mentioned Bierce to this
soldier and was told this story:

Bierce actually did join the Villista forces soon after January, 1914,
when he wrote his last letter from Chihuahua. He said to those who were
not supposed to know his affairs too intimately that he, like other
American journalists and writers, had gone to Mexico to get material
for a book on conditions in that unhappy country. In reality, however,
he was acting as adviser and military observer with Villa, though not
attached to the eminent guerilla in person. The Mexican officer related
that Bierce could speak hardly any Spanish and Villa’s staff hardly any
English. On the other hand, this particular man spoke English fluently.
Naturally, he and Bierce had been thrown together a great deal and had
held numerous conversations. So much for showing that he had known
Bierce well, and how and why.

After Chihuahua, the officer continued, he and Bierce had parted
company, due to the exigencies of military affairs, and he had never
seen the American alive again. He had often wondered about him and had
made inquiries from time to time as he encountered various commandos
of the Constitutionalist army. Finally, about a year later, which is
to say some time toward the end of 1915, the relating officer met a
Mexican army surgeon, who also had been with Villa, and this surgeon
had told him a tale.

Soon after the breach between Villa and Carranza in 1915, a small
detachment of Carranza troops occupied the village of Icamole, east of
Chihuahua State in the direction of Monterey and Saltillo. The Villista
forces in that quarter, commanded by General Tomas Urbina, one of the
most ruthless of all the Villa subcommanders, who was himself later put
to death, were encamped not far from Icamole, attempting to beleaguer
the town or, at least, to cut the Carranza garrison off from its base
of supplies and the main command. Neither side was strong enough to
risk an engagement and the whole thing settled down into a waiting and
sniping campaign.

In the gray of one oppressive morning toward the end of 1915, according
to the surgeon who was with Urbina, one of that commander’s scouts
gave an alarm, having seen four mules and two men on the horizon,
making toward Icamole. A mounted detachment was at once sent out and
the strangers were brought in. They turned out to be an American of
advanced years but military bearing, a nondescript Mexican, and four
mules laden with the parts of a machine gun and a large quantity of its
ammunition.

Both men were immediately taken before General Urbina, according to the
surgeon’s story, and subjected to questioning. The Mexican said that
he had been employed by another Mexican, whose name he did not know,
to conduct the American and his convoy to Icamole and the Carranza
commander. Urbina turned to the American and started to question him,
but found that the man could speak hardly any Spanish and was therefore
unable to explain his actions or to defend himself.

It may be as well to note the first objections to the credibility of
the story here. Bierce had been in Mexico almost two years, according
to these dates. He was a man of the keenest intelligence and the
quickest perceptions. He had also lived in California for many years,
where Spanish names are common and Spanish is spoken by many. It
seems hard to believe that such a man could have survived to the end
of 1915 in such ignorance of the speech of the Mexican people as to
be unable to explain what he was doing or to tell his name and who
he was. It seems hard to believe, also, that Bierce would have been
doing any gun-running or that he could have been alive twenty months
after the Chihuahua letter without communicating with some one in the
United States, without being found or heard of by the military and
diplomatic agents who had then already been seeking him for more than
a year. Also, it is necessary to explain how the man who went down to
fight with Villa happened suddenly to be taking a gun and ammunition
to Villa’s enemies, though this might be reconciled on the theory that
Bierce had gone to fight with the Constitutionalists and had remained
with them when Villa rebelled. But we may disregard these minor
discrepancies as possibly capable of reconciliation or correction, and
proceed further with the surgeon’s story.

Urbina, after questioning the captives for a little while, lost
patience, concluded that they must be enemies at best and took no half
measures. Life was cheap in northern Mexico in those days, judgments
were swift and harsh, and Urbina was savage by nature. He took away the
lives of these two with a wave of the hand. Immediate execution was
their fate.

Ambrose Bierce and the unknown Mexican were led out and placed against
the wall of a building, in this case a stable. Faced with the terrible
sight, the Mexican fell to his knees and began to pray, refusing to
rise and face his executioners. Bierce, following the example of his
companion, also knelt but did not pray. Instead, he refused the cloth
over his eyes and asked the soldiers not to mutilate his face. And so
he died.

“I was much interested in the whole affair,” the nameless Mexican
officer told Mr. Weeks, “and I asked my surgeon friend many questions.
He did not know Bierce at all and did not know he was describing the
death of some one in whom I was deeply concerned. But I had known
Bierce well and asked the surgeon for detail after detail of the
murdered American’s appearance, age, bearing, and manner. From what he
told me, I have not the slightest doubt that this was Ambrose Bierce
and that he died in this manner at the hands of the butcher, Urbina.”

Following the reports of Mr. Weeks, the San Francisco _Bulletin_ sent
one of its special writers, Mr. U. H. Wilkins, down into Mexico, to
further examine and confirm or discredit the report of the Mexican
officer. Mr. Wilkins reported in March, 1920, confirming the Weeks
report and adding what seems to be direct testimony. Mr. Wilkins says
that he found a Mexican soldier who had been in Urbina’s command at
Icamole and who was a member of the firing squad. This man showed Mr.
Wilkins a picture of Bierce which, he said, he had taken from the
pocket of the dead man just after the execution had taken place.

Still the doubt perseveres. No one has been able to find the grave of
Bierce. The picture which the soldier said he took from the pocket of
the dead man was not produced and has never, so far as I can discover,
been shown.

Personally, I find in this material more elements for skepticism than
for belief. Would Ambrose Bierce have been carrying a picture of
himself about the wastes of Mexico? Perhaps, if it was on a passport or
other credentials. In that case General Urbina must have known whom
he was shooting. And would a guerilla leader, with much more of the
brigand about him than the soldier, have shot a man like Bierce, who
certainly was worth a fortune living and nothing dead? I must beg to
doubt.

Nor do the other details ring true. If the captured Americano was
Ambrose Bierce, one of two things must have happened. Either he would
have resorted, to save his life, to invective and persuasiveness, for
which he was remarkable, or he must have shrugged and been resigned.
This Bierce was too old, too cynical, too tired of living and
pretending for valedictory heroics. And he was too much of a soldier to
wince. For this and another reason the story of his execution will not
go down.

Unhappily, the tale of a distinguished victim of the firing squad
asking that his face be not disfigured is a piece of standard Mexican
romance. According to the tradition of that country, the Emperor
Maximilian, when he faced his executioners at Queretaro, begged that
he be shot through the body, so that his mother might look upon his
face again. Hence, I suspect the soldierly Mexican _raconteur_ of
having been guilty of a romantic anachronism, perhaps an unconscious
substitution. If the man whom Urbina shot had been Ambrose Bierce, he
would neither have knelt, nor made the pitiful gesture of asking the
inviolateness of his face.

Adolphe de Castro, who won a lawsuit in 1926 compelling the publishers
of a collected edition of Bierce’s writings to recognize him as the
co-author of “The Monk and the Hangman’s Daughter,” has within the
year published a version of Bierce’s end[11] that has some of the same
elements in it. Bierce, says de Castro, was shot by Villa’s soldiers at
the guerilla leader’s command. Here is the story condensed:

[11] “Ambrose Bierce as He Really Was,” _The American Parade_, October,
1926.

Bierce was with Villa at the taking of Chihuahua in 1913. After this
fight there was nothing for the novelist-soldier to do and he took
to drinking _tequila_, a liquor which causes those who drink it any
length of time to turn blue. (Sic!) Bierce had with him a peon who
understood a little English and acted as valet and cup companion. When
he was in his mugs Bierce talked too much, complained of inactivity and
criticised Villa. One drunken night he suggested to the peon that they
desert to Carranza. Someone overheard this prattle and carried it to
Villa, who had the peon tortured till he confessed the truth. He was
released and instructed to carry out the plan with the Gringo. That
night, as they started to leave Chihuahua, the writer and his peon were
overtaken by a squad, shot down “and left for the vultures.”

Though Vincent Starrett[12] records that Villa flew into a rage
when questioned about Bierce, a reaction looked upon by some as
confirming Villa’s guilt, others have pointed out objections that seem
insuperable. The break between Carranza and Villa did not follow until
a long time after the battle of Chihuahua, they point out, and Bierce
must have been alive all the while without writing a letter or sending
a word of news to anyone. Possible but improbable, is the verdict of
those who knew him most intimately.

[12] “Ambrose Bierce,” by V. Starrett.

So, applying the critical acid to the whole affair, there is still the
mystery, as dark as in the beginning. We may have our delight with the
dramatic or poetic accounts of his end if that be our taste, but really
we are no closer to any satisfactory solution than we were in 1914.

Bierce is dead, past doubt. That much needs no additional proof.
His fierce spirit has traveled. His bitter pen will scrawl no more
denunciations across the page; neither will he sit in his study weaving
mysteries and ironies for the delectation of those who love abstraction
as beauty, and doubt as something better than truth.

My own guess is that he started out to fight battles and shoulder
hardships as he had done when a boy, somehow believing that a tough
spirit would carry him through. Wounded or stricken with disease, he
probably lay down in some pesthouse of a hospital, some troop train
filled with other stricken men; or he may have crawled off to some
water hole and died, with nothing more articulate than the winds and
stars for witness.




XVI

THE ADVENTURE OF THE CENTURY


No account of disappearances under curious and romantic circumstances,
or of the enigmatic fates of forthfaring men in our times, would
approach completeness without some narration of one of the boldest and
maddest projects ever undertaken by human beings, in many ways the
crowning adventure of the nineteenth century. Particularly now, when
a circumnavigation of the earth by airplane has been accomplished,
when the Atlantic has been bridged by a dirigible flight, and men have
flown over the North Pole in plane and airship, the heroic and pathetic
story of Doctor Andrée and his attempt to reach the top of the world by
balloon is of fresh and abiding interest.

No one who was not alive in the late nineties of the last century
and of age to read and be thrilled, can have any conception of the
wonder and excitement this man and his voyage caused, of the cloud of
doubt and mystery which hung about his still unexplained end, of the
rumors and tales that came out of the North year after year, of the
expeditions that started out to solve the riddle, of the whole decade
of slowly abating preoccupation with the terrible romance of this
singular man and his undiscoverable end.

In the summer of 1895, at the International Geographical Congress in
London, Doctor Salomon August Andrée, a noted engineer, and chief
examiner of the Royal Swedish Patent Office in Stockholm, let it be
known that he was planning for a flight to the pole in a balloon, and
that active preparations were under way. At first the public regarded
the whole thing with an interested incredulity, though geographers,
meteorologists, geodesists, and some students of aëronautics had been
discussing the possibilities of such a voyage for much longer than a
generation, and many had expressed the belief in its feasibility. Sivel
and Silbermann, of the University of Paris, had declared as early as
1870 that this was the practical way of attaining the pole.

Even so, they had not by long anticipated Doctor Andrée. His first
inquiries into the possibility of such a flight had been made in the
course of a voyage to the United States in 1876 to visit the Centennial
Exposition at Philadelphia. On shipboard he had made numerous
observations of the winds and air currents, which led him to the belief
that there was a general suction or drift of air toward the pole
from the direction of the northern coast of Europe and from the pole
southward along the Siberian or Alaskan coasts.

With this belief in mind, Andrée had gone back to Sweden and begun a
series of experiments in ballooning. He built various gas bags and
made a considerable number of voyages in them, on several occasions
with nearly fatal results. Mishaps, however, did not daunt him, and
he became, in the course of the following twenty years, perhaps the
best versed aëronaut on earth. He was not, of course, an ordinary
balloonist, but a scientific experimenter, busy with an attempt to work
out a serious, and to him a practical, problem. In the early nineties
Andrée succeeded in making a flight of four hundred kilometers in a
comparatively small balloon, and it was on the observations taken in
the course of this voyage that he based mathematical calculations which
formed his guide in the polar undertaking.

If, as I have said, the first public announcement of the Andrée
project was received by the rank and file of men as an entertaining,
but impossible, speculation, there was a rapid change of mind in the
course of the following months. News came that Andrée had opened a
subscription for funds, and that the hundred thousand dollars he
believed necessary had been quickly provided by the enthusiastic
members of the Swedish Academy of Science, by King Oscar from his
private purse, and by Alfred Nobel, the inventor of nitroglycerin and
provider of the prizes which bear his name. Evidently this fellow meant
business.

In the late spring of 1896 Andrée and a party of scientists and
workmen, including two friends who had decided to make the desperate
essay with him, sailed from Gothenburg in the little steamer _Virgo_
for Spitzbergen. They had on board a balloon made by Lachambre of
Paris, the foremost designer of that day, with a gas capacity of
more than six thousand cubic meters, the largest bag which had been
constructed at that time. The gas container was of triple varnished
silk, and there was a specially designed gondola, whose details are of
surviving interest.

This compartment, in which three men hoped to live through such
temperatures as might be expected in the air currents fanning the North
Pole, was made of wicker, covered outside with a rubberized canvas and
inside with oiled silk, these two substances being considered capable
of making the big basket practically air and weather proof. The gondola
was about six and one half feet long inside and about five feet wide.
It contained a sleeping mattress for one, with provision for a second
bed, though the plan was to keep two of the three men constantly on
deck, while the third took two hours of sleep at a time. This basket
was covered, to be sure, the top having a trapdoor or hatch, through
which the voyagers could come up to the deck. Inside and outside the
gondola, in various pockets and bags, were fixed the provisions and
supplies, while the various nautical instruments, cameras, surveyors’
paraphernalia, and a patent cookstove hung among the ropes, or were
fixed to the gondola by specially invented devices. Everything had been
thought out in great detail, most of the apparatus had been designed
for the occasion, and Andrée had enjoyed the benefit of advice from
all the foremost flyers and scientific theorists in Europe. His was
anything but a haphazard or ill-prepared expedition.

Toward the end of June, Andrée and his party landed on the obscure
Danes Island in the Spitzbergen group, where he found a log cottage
built some years before by Pike, the British bear and walrus hunter.
Here a large octagonal building was thrown up to shelter the balloon
from the fierce winds, while it was being inflated. Finally all was
ready, the chemicals were put to work, and the great bag slowly filled
with hydrogen. Everything was in shape for flying by the middle of
July, but now various mishaps and delays came to foil the eager
adventurer, the worst of all being the fact that the wind steadily
refused to blow from the south, as Andrée had anticipated. He waited
until the middle of August, and then returned somewhat crestfallen
to Sweden, where he was received with that ready and heartbreaking
ridicule which often greets a brave man set out upon some undertaking
whose difficulties and perils the fickle and callous public little
understands.

Andrée himself was nothing damped by his reverses, and even felt that
he had learned something that would be of benefit. For one thing, he
had the gas bag of his balloon enlarged to contain about two hundred
thousand cubic feet, and made some changes in its coating, which was
expected to prevent the seepage of the hydrogen, a problem which much
more modern aircraft builders have had difficulty in meeting.

If the delay in Andrée’s sailing had lost him a little of the
public’s confidence and alienated a few lay admirers, his prestige
with scientific bodies had not suffered, and his popularity with the
subscribers of his fund was undiminished. King Oscar again met the
additional expenses with a subscription from his own funds, and Andrée
was accordingly able to set out for the second essay in June of 1897.
His goods and the reconstructed balloon were sent as far as Tromsoe
by rail, and there loaded into the _Virgo_ and taken to Danes Island,
accompanied by a small group of friends and interested scientists.

Almost at the last moment came a desertion, a happening that is looked
upon by all explorers and adventurers as something of most evil omen.
Doctor Ekholm, who had made the first trip to Danes Island and intended
to be one of the three making the flight, had married in the course
of the delay, the lady of his choice being fully aware of his perilous
project. When it came time for him to start north in 1897, however, she
had a not unnatural change of heart, and finally forced her husband to
quit the expedition. Another man stepped into the gap without a day’s
delay, and so the party started north.

The enlarged bag was attached to the gondola and its fittings, and the
process of inflation began anew in that strange eight-sided building
on that barren arctic island. The bag was fully distended at the end
of the first week in July, and Andrée impatiently waited for just the
right currents of air before casting off.

In those last few days of waiting a good deal of foreboding advice
was given the daring aëronauts by the group of admirers who had made
the voyage to Danes Island with them. It is even said that one of the
leading scientists with the expedition took Andrée aside, spent a
night with him, and tried to convince the man that his theories and
calculations were mistaken; that the air currents were inconstant, and
could not be depended on to sweep the balloon across the pole and down
on the other side of the earthly ball; that very low temperatures at
the pole might readily cause the hydrogen to shrink and thus bring the
balloon to earth; and that the whole region was full of such doubts and
surprises as to forbid the adventure.

To all this Andrée is said to have answered simply that he had made his
decision and must stand by it.

Indeed, the balloonist’s plan seems to have been most thoroughly
matured in his own mind. In twenty years of aëronautics he had worked
out his ideas and theories in the greatest detail. He had not been
blind to the problem of steering his machine, once it was in the air,
but the plan of air rudders, or a type of construction that might lend
itself to guidance through the air, had evidently not struck him as
feasible, and was not brought to any kind of success until several
years later under Santos Dumont. Yet Andrée was prepared to steer his
balloon after a fashion. His gondola was, as already said, oblong, with
a front and back. The front was provided with two portholes fitted with
heavy glass, through which the explorer hoped to make observations in
the course of his flight. As a practical balloonist, he knew that,
once his car was in the air, the great bag was almost certain to begin
spinning and to travel through the air at various speeds, increasing
the rate of its giddy rotations as its rate of travel grew greater.
That being so, the idea of front portholes and a prow for the gondola
seemed something of a vanity, but Andrée had his own ideas as to this.

The balloonist explorer did not intend to ascend to any great heights,
or to subject himself to the rotating action which is one of the
unpleasantnesses and perils of ballooning. He had fixed to the stern
of his gondola three heavy ropes, each about one hundred yards long,
which descended from his craft, like elongated flaxen pigtails. In the
center of each hundred-yard length of rope was a thinner spot or safety
escapement, by means of which the lower half of any one of the ropes
could be let go. And near the gondola was a second catch for releasing
all of the rope or ropes.

These singular contrivances constituted Andrée’s steering gear and
antiwhirling apparatus. His intention was to fly at an elevation of
somewhat less than one hundred yards, thus leaving the ends of his
three ropes trailing out behind him on the ice, or in the water of any
open sea he might cross. The tail of his craft was expected to keep
his gondola pointed forward by means of its dragging effect. Realizing
that one or all of the ropes might become entangled in some manner with
objects on the ice surface, and that such a mishap might wreck the
gondola, Andrée had provided the escapements to let go the lower half
or all the ropes.

Just what the man expected to do, may be read from his own articles
in the New York and European papers. He hoped to fly low over a great
part of the arctic regions, make photographs and maps, study the land
and water conformations, pick up whatever meteorological, geological,
geographical, and other information that came his way, cross the pole,
if he could, and find his way back on the other side of the earth
to some point within reach of inhabited places. Andrée said that he
might be carried the seven hundred-odd miles from Danes Island to the
pole in anywhere from two days to two weeks, depending on the force
and direction of the surface wind. He did not expect to consume more
than three weeks to a month for the entire trip, but his ship carried
condensed emergency provisions for three years.

While a widely known French balloonist, who had planned a rival
expedition and then abandoned it, had intended to take along a
team of dogs, Andrée’s balloon had not sufficient lifting power or
accommodations for anything of this kind, and he was content to carry
two light collapsible sleds on which he expected to carry the
provisions for his homeward trek after the landing.

[Illustration: ~~ DOCTOR ANDRÉE ~~]

When a correspondent asked Andrée, just before he set out, what
provisions he had made for a mishap, and just what he would do if his
balloon were to come down in open water, the explorer showed his spirit
in the tersest of responses: “Drown.”

Yet, for all his cold courage and dauntless determination, it is not
quite certain in what spirit Andrée set forth. It has often been said
that he was a stubborn, self-willed, and self-esteeming enthusiast,
who had worked up a vast confidence in himself and an overweening
passion for his project through his flying and experimenting. Others
have pictured him as an infatuated scientific theorist, bound to prove
himself right, or die in the attempt. And there is still the other
possibility that the man was goaded into his terrifying attempt, in
spite of his own late misgivings, by the ridicule of the public and the
skepticism of some critics. He felt that he would be a laughingstock
before the world and a discredit to his eminent backers if he failed to
set out, it is said. But of this there is no evidence, and it remains
a fact that Andrée’s conclusions were sufficiently plausible to engage
the attention and credence of a considerable number of scientists, and
his enthusiasm bright enough to attach two others to him in his great
emprise.

In the middle of the afternoon of July 11, 1897, Andrée got into
the gondola of his car, tested the ropes and other apparatus, and
was quickly joined by his two assistants, Nils Strindberg and K. H.
F. Frankel, the latter having been chosen to take the place of the
defected Ekholm.

At a little before four o’clock the cables were cast off, after Andrée
had sent his farewell message, “a greeting to friends and countrymen at
home.” The great bag hesitated and careened a few moments. Then it shot
up to a height of several hundred feet, turned slowly about, with its
three ropes dragging first on the ice and then in the water of the sea,
and set out majestically for the northwest, carried by a steady slow
breeze.

The little group of men on the desolate arctic island stood late
through the afternoon, with eyes straining into the distance, where the
balloon hung, an ever-diminishing ball against the northern horizon.
What doubts and terrors assailed that watching and speculating crowd,
what burnings of the heart and moistenings of the eyes overcame
its members, as they watched the intrepid trio put off upon their
unprecedented adventure, the subsequent accounts reveal. But the
imagination of the reader will need no promptings on this score. A
little more than an hour the ship of the air remained in sight. Then,
at last, it floated off into the mist, and the doubt from which it
never emerged.

Doctor Andrée had devised two methods of sending back word of his
situation and progress. For early communication he carried a coop of
homing pigeons. In addition, he had provided himself with a series of
specially designed buoys, lined with copper and coated with cork. They
were hollow inside and so fashioned as to contain a written message and
preserve it indefinitely from the sea water, like a manuscript in a
bottle. To the top of each of these buoys was fixed a small staff, with
a little metal Swedish flag. The plan was to release one of the small
buoys, as each succeeding degree of latitude was crossed, thus marking
out, by the longitude observations as well, the precise route taken by
the balloon in its drift toward or away from the pole.

About a week after Andrée’s departure one of the carrier pigeons
returned to Danes Island, with this message in the little cylinder
attached to its legs:

 “July 13, 10.30 P. M.--82.20 north latitude; 15.5 east longitude. Good
 progress toward north. All goes well on board. This message is the
 third by carrier pigeon.

                                                          “ANDRÉE.”

The earlier birds and any the balloonists may have released after the
night of the thirteenth, about fifty-five hours out from Danes Island,
must have been overcome by the distance and the excruciating cold. None
except the one mentioned ever reached either Danes Island or any cotes
in the civilized world.

All over the earth, men stirred by the vivid newspaper accounts of
Andrée’s daring undertaking, waited with something like bated breath
for further news of the adventuring three. It was not expected that the
brave Swedes could reach civilization again, even with every turn of
luck in their favor, in less than two months. Even six months or a year
were elapsed periods not considered too long, for the chances were that
the balloon would land in some far northern and difficult spot, out of
which the three men would not be able to make their way before winter.
That being so, they would be forced to camp and wait for spring. Then,
very likely, they could find their way to some outpost and bring back
the tidings of their monumental feat.

Meantime the world got to work on its preparations. The Czar,
foreseeing the possibility that Andrée and his two companions might
alight somewhere in upper Siberia, sent a communication by various
agencies to the wild inhabitants of his farthest northern domains,
explaining what a balloon was, who and what Andrée and his men were,
and admonishing the natives to treat any such wayfarers with kindness
and respect, aiding them in every way and sending them south as
speedily as possible, the special guests of the imperial government
and the great white father. In other northern countries similar
precautions were taken, with the result that the news of Andrée and his
expedition was circulated far up beyond the circle, among the Indians
and adventurers of Alaska, the trappers and hunters of Labrador and
interior Canada, the Greenland Eskimos, and scores of other tribes and
peoples.

But the fall of 1897 passed without any further sign from Andrée, and
1898 died into its winter, with the pole voyagers still unreported. By
this time there was a feeling of general uneasiness, but silvered among
the optimistic with some shine of hope. It was strange that no further
messages of any kind had been received. Another significant thing was
that one of the copper-and-cork buoys had been picked up in the arctic
current--empty. Still, it might have been dropped by accident, and it
was yet possible that Andrée had reached a safe, if distant, anchorage
somewhere, and he might turn up the following summer.

Alas, the open season of 1899 brought nothing except one or two more
of the empty buoys, and the definite feeling of despair. Expeditions
began to organize for the purpose of starting north in search of the
balloonists, and Walter Wellman began talking of a pole flight in a
dirigible balloon, but such projects were slow in getting under way,
and the summer of 1900 came along with nothing accomplished.

On the thirty-first of August of this latter year, however, another, if
not very satisfactory, bit of news was picked up. It was, once more,
one of the buoys from the balloon. This time, to the delight of the
finders, there was a message inclosed, which read, in translation:

 “Buoy No. 4. The first to be thrown out. July 11, 10 P. M., Greenwich
 mean time.

 “All well up to now. We are pursuing our course at an altitude of
 about two hundred and fifty meters. Direction at first northerly, ten
 degrees east; later northerly, forty-five degrees east. Four carrier
 pigeons were dispatched at 5.40 P.M. They flew westward. We are
 now above the ice, which is very cut up in all directions. Weather
 splendid. In excellent spirits.

                                   “ANDRÉE, STRINDBERG, FRANKEL.”

  “Above the clouds, 7.45 Greenwich mean time.”

It will be noted at once that the body of this communication was
written the night after the departure from Danes Island, and the
postscript probably at seven forty-five o’clock the next morning, so
that it must have been put overboard nearly thirty-nine hours before
the single returning pigeon was released. No light of hope in such a
communication.

The North was by this time resonant with rumors and fables. Almost
every traveler who came down from the boreal regions brought some
fancy or report, sometimes supporting the product of his or another’s
imagination with scraps of what purported to be evidence. A prospector
came down from the upper Alaskan gold claims with a bit of tarred and
oiled cloth which had been given him by the chief of some remote Indian
tribe. Was it not a part of the covering of the Andrée balloon? For a
time there was a thrill of credulity. Then the thing turned out to be
hide, instead of varnished silk, and so the tale came to an evil end.

In the spring of 1900 a report reached Berlin that Andrée and his party
had been killed by Eskimos in upper Canada, when they descended from
the clouds and started to shoot caribou. But why go into details? Month
after month came other reports of all kinds, most of them of similar
import. They came from all points, beginning at Kamtchatka and running
around the world to the Alaskan side of Bering Strait, and they were
all more or less fiction.

Finally, in the spring of 1902, came the masterpiece. A long dispatch
from Winnipeg announced that C. C. Chipman, head commissioner of
the Hudson’s Bay Company, had received from Fort Churchill, the
northernmost outpost of the company, several letters from the local
factor, Ashtond Alston, in which the sad fate of Doctor Andrée and his
comrades was contained. The news had been received at Fort Churchill
from wandering Eskimos. It was to the effect that a tribe of outlaw
mushers, up beyond the Barren Islands, had seen a great ship descend
from the sky and had followed it many miles till it settled on the ice.
Three men had got out and displayed arms. The savage hunters, totally
unacquainted with white men, and far less with balloons, believed the
intentions of the trio to be hostile and attacked them, eventually
killing all with their bows and arrows, though the white men were armed
with repeating rifles and put up a good fight. There were many other
confirmatory details in the report. The mushers were found with modern
Swedish rifles and with cooking and other utensils salvaged from the
wrecked balloon.

These reports led the late William Ziegler to write to the commissioner
of the Hudson’s Bay Company for confirmation, with the result that the
story was at once exploded in these words:

“There is no probability of there being any truth in the report
regarding the supposed finding of Andrée’s balloon. The chief
officer of the company on the west coast of Hudson’s Bay who himself
interviewed the natives on the matter, has reported as his firm
conviction that the natives who are said to have seen the balloon
imposed upon the clerk at Churchill, to whom the story was given.
The sketches of the balloon which the company has been careful to
distribute throughout northern Canada naturally gave occasion for much
talk among these isolated people, and it is not greatly to be wondered
at that some such tale might be given out by natives peculiarly cunning
and prone to practice upon the credulity of those not familiar with
them, or easily imposed upon.”

But the imagination of the world was nothing daunted by such cold
douches of fact, and more reports of Andrée’s death, of his survival
in the igloos of detached tribes, of the finding of his camps, of his
balloon, of parts of his equipment, of the skeletons of his party,
and of many fancies came down from the northern sectors of the
world, season after season. There was a great revival of these yarns
in 1905, once more due to some imaginative Eskimo tale spinners, and
in 1909, twelve years after Andrée’s flight, there was an even more
belated group of rumors, all centering about the fact that one Father
Turquotille, a Roman Catholic missionary residing at Reindeer Lake,
and often making long treks farther into the arctic, had found a party
of nomadic natives in possession of a revolver and some rope, which
fact they explained to him by telling the story of the Andrée balloon,
which was supposed to have landed somewhere in their territory. The
good priest reported what he had been told to Bishop Pascal, of Prince
Albert, and that worthy ecclesiastic transmitted the report to Ottawa,
whence it was spread broadcast. But Father Turquotille, after having
made a special journey to confirm the rumors, was obliged to discredit
them. And so another end to gossip.

Thus it happens that there is to-day, more than thirty years after
that heroic launching out from Danes Island, after the pole has long
been attained, and all the regions of the Far North traversed back and
forth by countless expeditions and hunting parties, no sure knowledge
of Andrée’s fate. All that is absolute is that he never returned, and
all that can be asserted as beyond reasonable doubt is that he and his
companions perished somewhere in the North. The probabilities are more
interesting, though they cannot be termed more than inductions from the
scattered bits of fact.

The chief matters of evidence are the buoys, which were picked up from
time to time between the spring of 1899 and the late summer of 1912,
when the Norwegian steamer _Beta_, outward bound on September 1st,
from Foreland Sound, Spitzbergen, put into Tromsoe on the fourteenth,
with Andrée’s buoy No. 10, which had been picked up on the eighth in
the open ocean. This buoy, like all the others, except the one already
described, was empty and had its top unsecured. It rests with the
others in the royal museum at Stockholm. When Andrée flew from Danes
Island he took twelve of these buoys, eleven small ones, which he
expected to drop as each succeeding degree of latitude was crossed, and
one larger float, which was to be dropped in triumph at the North Pole.
This biggest buoy was picked up in the closing months of 1899, and
identified by experts at Stockholm, who had witnessed the preparation
for the flight. In all, seven of these floats have been retrieved from
the northern seas.

We know that Andrée dropped one buoy on the morning of July 12, 1897,
less than sixteen hours from his base, and that he liberated a pigeon
on the following night, after an elapsed time of about fifty-five
hours. At that time he had attained 82.20 degrees northern latitude
and 15.5 degrees eastern longitude. Since Danes Island lies above the
seventy-ninth parallel, and in about 12 degrees of eastern longitude,
the balloon had drifted about three degrees north and three east in
fifty-five hours, a distance of roughly three hundred and fifty miles,
as the crow flies. His net rate of progress toward the pole was thus
no better than seven to eight miles an hour, and he was being carried
northeast instead of northwest, as he had calculated. Evidently he was
disillusioned as to the correctness of his theories before he was far
from his starting point.

The recovered buoys offer mute testimony to what must have happened
thereafter. When the big North Pole buoy was brought back to Sweden,
the great explorer Nansen shook his head in dismay and said the
emptiness of the receptacle was a sign portentous of disaster. Andrée
would never have cast his largest and best buoy adrift, except in an
emergency, or until he had reached the pole, in which case it would
surely have contained a message. Nansen felt that the buoy had been
thrown overboard as ballast, when the ship seemed about to settle into
the sea. But even then, it would seem, Andrée would have scribbled some
message and put it into the float, had there been time.

The fact that this main buoy and five others were picked up, with their
tops unfastened and barren of the least scrap of writing, seems to
argue that some sudden disaster overtook the balloon and its horrified
passengers. Either it sprang a leak and dropped so rapidly toward the
sea or an ice floe, that everything was thrown out in an attempt to
arrest its fall, or there was an explosion, and the whole great air
vessel, with all its human and mechanical freight, was dropped into the
icy seas. In that case the unused buoys would have floated off and been
found scattered about the northern ocean, while the explorer and his
men must have met the fate he had so briefly described--“drowned.”

The fact that no buoy has ever been recovered bearing any message later
than that carried by the solitary homing pigeon would seem also to
indicate that death overcame the party soon after the night of July
13th, with the goal of the pole still far beyond the fogs and ice packs
of the North.

In some such desolation and bleak disaster one of the most splendid and
mad adventures of any time came to its dark and mysterious conclusion,
leaving the world an enigma and a legend.




XVII

SPECTRAL SHIPS


We have not yet lost that sense of terror before the vast power and
wrath of the waters that wrought strange gods and monsters from the
fancy of our ancestors. It is this fright and helplessness in us
that gives disappearances at sea their special quality. In spite of
all progress, all inventiveness, all the power of man’s engines,
every putting forth to sea is still an adventure. The same fate that
overcomes the little catboat caught in a squall may overtake the
greatest liner--the Titanic to note a trite example.

As a matter of fact, never a year passes without the loss of some ship
somewhere in the wild expanse of the world’s waters. Boats go down,
leaving usually at least some indirect evidence of their fate. Now
and again, as in the case of the Archduke Johann Salvator’s _Santa
Margarita_ and Roger Tichborne’s schooner _Bella_, not a survivor lives
to tell the tale nor is any bit of wreckage found to give indication.
Here we have the genuine marine mystery. The marvel lies in the number
of such completely vanished ships. A most casual survey of the records
turns up this generous list, from the American naval records alone:

The brig _Reprisal_, 1777; the _General Gates_, 1777; the _Saratoga_,
1781; the _Insurgent_, 1800; the _Pickering_, 1800; the _Hamilton_,
1813; the _Wasp III_, 1814; the _Epervier_, 1815; the _Lynx_, 1821; the
_Wildcat_, 1829; the _Hornet_, 1829; the _Sylph II_ and the _Seagull_,
both in 1839; the _Grampus_, in 1843; the _Jefferson_, 1850; the
_Albany_, with two hundred and ten men, in 1854; and _Levant II_, with
exactly the same number aboard, in 1860. In 1910 the tug _Nina_ steamed
out of Norfolk and was never again heard from, and in 1921 the seagoing
tug _Conestoga_ put out from Mare Island, Cal., bound for Pearl Harbor,
Hawaii, with four officers and fifty-two men aboard, and was never
again reported. These are not mere marine disasters[13] but complete
mysteries. No one knows precisely what happened to any of these ships
and their people.

[13] For a handy list of these see The World Almanac, 1927 Edition,
pages 691-95.

No account of sea riddles would be complete without mention of the
American brigantine _Marie Celeste_, of New York, Captain Briggs, which
was found floating abandoned and in perfect order in the vicinity of
Gibraltar on the morning of December 5th, 1872. She had sailed from New
York late in October with a cargo of alcohol, bound for Genoa. On the
morning mentioned the British bark _Dei Gratia_, Captain Boyce, found
the _Marie Celeste_ in Lat. 38.20 N., Long. 17.15 W. with sails set
but acting queerly, yawing and falling up into the wind. Captain Boyce
ran up the urgent hoist but got no answer from the brigantine. The day
being almost windless and the sea beautifully calm, Captain Boyce put
off in a boat with his mate, Mr. Adams, and two sailors, reached the
_Marie Celeste_ and managed to board her. There was not a soul to be
seen, not the least sign of violence or struggle, no indication of any
preparations for abandonment, not a boat gone from the davits.

Captain Boyce and his mate, naturally amazed, made a careful inspection
of the ship and wrote full reports of what they had found. In the cabin
a breakfast had been laid for four persons and only partly eaten. One
of these four was a child, whose half empty bowl of porridge stood on
the table. A hard boiled egg, peeled and cut in two but not bitten
into, lay near one of the other places. There were biscuits and other
food on the table.

Investigation showed that the cargo had not shifted and was completely
intact. None of the food, water or other supplies had been carried
off, the captain’s funds, of considerable amount, were safe and his
gold watch hung in his bunk, as did the watches of two of the seamen.
There was no evidence whatever of any struggle, and a report published
by irresponsible papers, to the effect that a bloody sword had been
found was officially denied. Neither was there any leak or any defect,
except that there were two square cuts at the bow on the outside. They
had been made with an axe or similar tool and might have been there for
some time.

The _Dei Gratia_ towed her prize into Gibraltar and notified the
American consul, who again examined the brigantine with all care and
reported to Washington. It was found that the _Marie Celeste_ had set
sail with a crew of ten men, the mate, the captain, his wife and their
eight-year-old daughter. She was a vessel of six hundred tons.

Inquiries made by the American consuls in all the region near the
finding place of the abandoned vessel resulted in nothing and a
general quest throughout the world brought no better results. The
British ship _Highlander_ reported that she had passed the _Marie
Celeste_ and spoken her just south of the Azores, on December 4th, the
day before she was picked up, and that the brigantine had answered “All
well.” This is obviously a mistake, for the most easterly of the Azores
lies about five hundred miles from the place where the ship was found
or about twice as far as she was likely to have sailed in twenty-four
hours.

There are conflicting statements as to the actual state of affairs on
the _Marie Celeste_ when found. One report says the ship’s clock was
still ticking. On the other hand the log, which was found, had not
been brought up beyond ten days prior to the discovery. One statement
says that the ship’s papers and some instruments were gone, another
that everything was intact. All indications are, however, that the
crew had not been long away. A bottle of cough medicine stood upright
and uncorked on the table next to the child’s plate. Any bit of rough
weather or continued yawing and twisting before the wind with a loose
rudder would have upset it. Again, on a sewing machine, which stood
near the table in the cabin, lay a thimble, that must have rolled off
to the floor if there had been any specially active dipping or lurching
of the brigantine.

Many theories have been propounded to explain the disappearance of the
crew, not the least fantastic of which is the giant cuttlefish yarn.
Those who spin this tale affect to believe that there are squidlike
monsters in the deeper waters of midocean, large enough and bold
enough to reach aboard a six hundred ton ship and snatch off fourteen
persons one after the other. Personally, I like much better the idea
that Sinbad’s roc had come back to life and carried the crew off to the
Valley of Diamonds on his back.

As in other mysteries, men have turned up from time to time who
asserted that they knew the fate of the crew of the _Marie Celeste_,
that they were the one and only survivor, that murder and foul crime
had been committed on the brigantine and more in the same strain.

In 1913, the _Strand Magazine_ (London) printed a tale which has about
it some elements of credibility. The article was written by A. Howard
Linford, head master of Peterborough Lodge, one of the considerable
British preparatory schools. Mr. Linford specifically disowned
responsibility for what he narrated, saying that he had no first hand
knowledge. His story was, he said, based on some papers left him in
three boxes by an old servant, Abel Fosdyk.

This Fosdyk appears in the Linford narrative as one of the ten members
of the crew--the steward in fact. He recounts that the carpenter had
built a little platform in the bows, where the child of the captain
might play in safety. The thing was referred to as baby’s quarterdeck,
and upon this structure the child played daily in the sun, while its
mother sat beside it, reading or sewing. The good woman had been ill
the first part of the trip and was now greatly worried because of the
nervous health of her husband, who had suffered a breakdown.

One morning, according to the supposed Fosdyk papers, the captain
determined to swim about the ship in his clothes, possibly as the
result of a challenge from the mate. Mrs. Briggs tried to dissuade her
husband but he was obdurate and she prompted the mate to swim with
him. They plunged in and the whole crew, with the commander’s wife and
child, crowded on the little platform to watch the swimmers. Suddenly
there was a collapse and the platform, with all on it fell into the
sea. Just then the breeze freshened and the brigantine, with sail set,
rapidly ran away from the swimmers and the hopeless strugglers in the
water. Fosdyk alone managed to cling to the platform and was washed to
the African shore, where he was restored to health by some friendly
blacks. He reached Algiers and in 1874 Marseilles. Later on he got to
London and was employed by Mr. Linford’s father.

Here is a tale that is on its face within the realm of possibility. We
may believe it if we like, without risking the suspicious glances of
our better balanced brothers, but----

Would an experienced mariner, even in a nervous state, have gone
swimming hundreds of miles from land, leaving his vessel with sail
set and expecting, even in a calm, to keep pace with her? Would the
helmsman have left his post under such circumstances to stand on the
baby’s quarterdeck and gape? Would the captain and mate have got up
without finishing their breakfast to engage in such folly? Finally, why
did this Abel Fosdyk not immediately report the story on his return to
Algiers or at least at Marseilles, when there was a great hue and cry
still in the air and sure information would have been rewarded? Or why
did he not tell the story in the succeeding years, when the newspapers
again and again revived the mystery and sought to solve it? Why did he
leave papers to be published by another after his death?

My answer is that the mystery of the _Marie Celeste_ is no nearer
solution since the so-called Fosdyk papers were published. Moreover, I
cannot find that worthy’s name on the list of the mystery ship’s crew.

A more credible explanation has recently been put forth by a writer
in the New York _Times_, who says that the whole case rested upon a
conspiracy. The captain and crew of the _Marie Celeste_ had agreed
with the personnel of another ship, that the brigantine be deserted in
the region where she was found, her men to put off in a longboat which
had previously been supplied by the conspirators in order that none of
the _Marie Celeste’s_ boats should be missing. The other vessel was to
come along presently, pick up the derelict and collect the prize money,
while the owners were to profit by the insurance. The deserting crew
was to get its share of the proceeds and then disappear.

There are objections to this explanation also. Would a set of sailors
and a captain, the latter with his wife and little girl, venture
upon the sea in an open boat some hundreds of miles from land? Would
the captain have taken his wife and child on the voyage with him if
such a trick had been planned? And why was no member of the crew
ever discovered in the course of the feverish search or through the
persistent curiosity that followed? On the other hand, such tricks
have been worked by mariners, and men who set out to commit crimes
often attempt and accomplish the perilous and seemingly impossible. The
doubts are by no means dispelled by this theory but here is at least a
rational version of the affair.

       *       *       *       *       *

The World War added two mysteries of the sea to the long roster that
stand out with a special and tormenting character. The war had hardly
opened when the British navy set out to destroy a small number of
German cruisers that lay at various stations in the Atlantic and
Pacific. There was von Spee’s squadron which sent Admiral Cradock and
his ships to the bottom at the battle of Coronel and was subsequently
destroyed by a force of British off the Falkland Islands. There was the
_Emden_, that made the Pacific and Indian oceans a torment for Allied
shipping for month after month, until she was overtaken, beaten and
beached. Finally, there was the _Karlsruhe_.

This modern light cruiser, completed only the year before the war
began, did exactly what she was designed for--commerce raiding.
With her light armament of twelve 4.1 inch guns and her great speed
(25.5 knots official, 27.6 according to the British reckoning) she
was a scout vessel and destroyer of merchantmen. Since there was no
considerable German fleet at sea to scout for, she became, within a few
hot weeks, the terror of Allied shipping in the Atlantic. One vessel
after another fell to her hunting pouch, while crews taken off the
captured or sunken merchantmen began to arrive at American, West Indian
and South American ports.

These refugees told, one and all, the same story. There would be a
smudge of smoke on the horizon and within minutes the long slender
German cruiser would come churning up out of the distance with the
speed of an express train, firing a shot across the bows and signalling
for the surrender of the trader. The prize crew came aboard, always
acting with the most punctilious politeness and treating crew and
passengers with apologetic kindness. If the vessel was old and slow,
her coal was taken, the useful parts of her cargo transferred, her
crew and passengers removed to safety and the craft sent to the bottom
with bombs or by opening the sea cocks. If, on the other hand, the
captured ship was modern and swift, she was manned from the cruiser,
loaded with coal and other needed supplies, crowded with the captives
and made to form an escort. At one time the cruiser is said to have had
six such vessels in her train, at another four. When there got to be
too many passengers and other captives, the least worthy of the vessels
was detached and ordered to steam to a given port, being allowed just
enough coal to get there.

As early as October 4, 1914, two months after the opening of
hostilities, it was announced that the _Karlsruhe_ had captured
thirteen British merchantmen in the Atlantic, including four hundred
prisoners. She did much better than that before she was through and
the chances are she had then already put about twenty ships out of
business, for this was a conservative announcement from the British
Admiralty, which let it be known soon afterwards that all of seventy
British war vessels were hunting the _Karlsruhe_ and her sister raider,
the _Emden_.

Shipping in the Atlantic was in a perilous way and excitement was high
among newspaper readers ashore, who watched the game of hide and seek
with all the interest of spectators at some magnificent sporting event.
Nor was the sympathy all against the German, for the odds were too
heavy. The wildest rumors were floating in by every craft that reached
port from the Southern Atlantic, by radio and by cable. On October
27, a Ward Line boat came into New York with the report that she had
observed a night battle off the Virginia Capes between the German
raider and British men-of-war. On November 3 came the report that the
_Karlsruhe_ had captured a big Lamport and Holt liner off the coast of
Brazil as late as October 26. On November 10 an officer of a British
freighter captured by the raider reached Edinburgh and told the story
that the _Karlsruhe_ was using Bocas Reef, off the north Brazilian
coast, as a base.

Then, as suddenly as they had begun, the forays of the modern corsair
ceased. The first belief was, of course, that the pursuing British had
found her and sent her to Davy Jones. But as the weeks went by without
any announcement to that effect, doubts crept in. Soon the British
government, without making a formal declaration, revealed the untruth
of this report by keeping its searching vessels at sea. It was the
theory that the _Karlsruhe_ had run up the Amazon or the Orinoco for
repairs and rest. The expectation was that she would soon be at her old
tricks again.

The battle and sinking story persisted in the British press, the
wish being evidently father to the thought. On January, 12, 1915,
for instance, the Montreal _Gazette_ published an unverified (and
afterwards disproved) report from a correspondent at Grenada, British
West Indies, giving a detailed description of a four hour battle in
which the raider was destroyed. This story was allegedly verified by
the washing ashore of wreckage and the finding of sailors’ corpses. All
moonshine.

On January 21, an American steamer captain announced having sighted the
_Karlsruhe_ off Porto Rico. On other dates in January and February she
was also falsely reported off La Guayra, the Canary Islands, Port au
Prince and other places. On March 17, the Brooklyn _Eagle_ published a
tale to the effect that the hulk of the raider lay off the Grenadines,
a little string of islets that stretch north from Grenada in the
Windwards. This report said there had been no battle. The cruiser had
been self-wrecked or broken up in a storm. Again wreckage was said to
have been found, but here once more was falsehood.

On March 18, the _Stifts-Tidende_ of Copenhagen reported that the
_Karlsruhe_ had been blown up by an internal explosion one evening
as the officers and men were having tea. One half of the wreck sank
immediately, the report went on to say, while the other floated for
some time, enabling between 150 and 200 of the crew to be rescued by
one of the accompanying auxiliaries. The survivors, it was added, had
been sworn to secrecy before reaching port--why this, no one can guess.

The following day, the _National Tidende_ published corroboration from
a German merchant captain then in Denmark, to the effect that the “crew
of the Karlsruhe had been brought home early in December, 1914, by the
German liner, Rio Negro, one of the Karlsruhe’s escort ships.”

Somewhat later, a Brooklyn man, wintering at Nassau, in the Bahamas,
reported finding the raider’s motor pinnace on the shore of Abaco
Island, north of Nassau.

To this there is little to add. Admiral von Tirpitz, then the head of
the German navy, says in his memoirs just this and no more:

 “The commander of the _Karlsruhe_, Captain Köhler, never dreamt of
 taking advantage of the permission to make his way homeward; working
 with the auxiliary vessels in the Atlantic, surrounded by the English
 cruisers, but relying on his superior speed, he sought ever further
 successes, until he was destroyed with his ship by an explosion, the
 probable cause of which was some unstable explosive brought aboard.”

It is obvious from this that the _Karlsruhe_ was given the option of
returning home, having gained enough glory and sunk enough ships to
satisfy a dozen admirals. But the main fact to be gleaned from Tirpit’s
statement is that an internal explosion was the thing officially
accepted by the head of the German admiralty as the cause of her
disappearance. And this is the most likely of all the theories that
have been or can be proposed. But, that said, we are still a long way
from any satisfaction of our deeper curiosity. Where and when did the
explosion take place? Under what circumstances? Did any escape and
return to Germany to tell the tale?

To these queries there are no positive answers. If the _Karlsruhe_
was, as so often stated, accompanied by one or more auxiliaries or
coaling ships, it seems incredible that all the crew can have been
lost and quite beyond imagination that there was not even a distant
witnessing of the accident. Yet this seems to have been the case. In
spite of the report that a large part of the famous raider’s crew got
safely home after the supposed explosion, I have searched and scouted
through the German press and the German book lists for an account of
the affair--all in vain. Not only that, but I am assured by reliable
correspondents of the American press in Germany that nothing credible
or authoritative has appeared. We have von Mücke’s book “The Emden,”
published in the United States as early as 1917, and previously in
Germany. We have the exploits of the _Moewe_, and we have the lesser
adventures of the popular von Luckner and his craft. But of the famous
_Karlsruhe_ we have nothing at all, save rumors and gossip.

The conclusion must be that the ship did break up somewhere in the
deepest ocean, as the result of an explosion, while she was altogether
unattended. She must have gone down with all her men, for not even the
reports of finding bits of her wreckage have ever been verified. The
mystery of her end is still much discussed among seafaring men and
William McFee, in one of his tales, suggests that she lay hid up one of
the South American rivers and came to grief there.

       *       *       *       *       *

Even more fantastic than this, however, is the story of the great
United States collier _Cyclops_. This vessel, of nineteen thousand tons
displacement, five hundred and eighteen feet long, of sixty-five foot
beam and twenty-seven foot draught, with a cargo capacity of twelve
thousand five hundred tons, was built by the Cramps in Philadelphia
in 1910. She was designed to coal the first-line fighting ships of our
fleet while at sea and under way, by means of traveling cables from her
arm-like booms. She had frequently accompanied our battleships abroad,
had transported the marines to Cuba and the refugees from Vera Cruz to
Galveston in April 1914. On a trip to Kiel in 1911, she was wonderingly
examined by the German naval critics and builders, who declared her to
be a marvel of design and structure.

[Illustration:

                                                          _Wide World._

                       ~~ _U. S. S. CYCLOPS_ ~~]

On March 4, 1918, the _Cyclops_ sailed from Barbados for an unnamed
Atlantic port (Norfolk, as it proved), with a crew of 221 and 57
passengers, including Alfred L. Moreau Gottschalk, United States Consul
General at Rio de Janeiro. She was due to arrive on March 13. When that
date had come and nothing had been heard from her, it was announced
that one of her two engines had been injured and she was proceeding
slowly with the other engine compounded. But on April 14 the news came
out in the press that the great ship was a month overdue and totally
unaccounted for.

For a whole month the story had been veiled under the censorship while
the Navy Department had been making every conceivable effort to find
the ship or some evidence of her fate. There had been no news through
her radio equipment since her departure from Barbados. There had
been no heavy weather in that vicinity. She had been steaming in the
well-traveled lane of ships passing between North and South America,
yet not a vessel had spoken her, heard her radio call or seen her at
any distance. Destroyers had been searching the whole Gulf, Caribbean,
North and South Atlantic regions for three frantic weeks. They had not
found so much as a life preserver belonging to the missing ship.

The public mind immediately jumped to the conclusion that a German
submarine had done this dirty piece of business, if an attack on an
enemy naval vessel in time of war may be so listed. Alas, there were
no German submarines so far from their home bases at that time or
any proximate period. None had been reported by other vessels and
the German admiralty has long since confirmed the understood fact
that there was none abroad. A floating mine was next suspected, but
the lower West Indies are a long distance from any mine field then
in existence and a ship of the size of the _Cyclops_, even if mined,
probably would have had time to use her radio, lower some boats and
put some of her people afloat. At the very least, she must have left
some flotsam to reach the beaches of the archipelago with its tragic
meanings.

The mystery was soon complicated. On May 6 a British steamer from
Brazil brought news that two weeks after the due date of the _Cyclops_
but still two weeks before her disappearance was announced, an
advertisement had been published in a Portuguese newspaper at Rio
announcing requiem mass for the repose of the soul of A. L. M.
Gottschalk “lost when the _Cyclops_ was sunk at sea.” Efforts were
made by the secret agents of the American and Brazilian governments to
discover the identity of the persons responsible for the advertisement,
but nothing of worth was ever discovered. The notice was signed with
the names of several prominent Brazilians, all of whom denied that they
had the least knowledge of the matter. The rector of the church denied
that any arrangement had been made for the mass and said he had not
known Gottschalk. Some chose to believe that the advertisement had been
inserted by German secret agents for the purpose of notifying the large
number of Germans in Brazil that the Fatherland was still active in
American waters.

A rumor having no substance whatever was to the effect that the crew
of the ship had revolted, overcome the officers and converted the ship
into a German raider. A companion tale said the ship had sailed for
Germany to deliver her cargo of manganese to the enemy, by whom this
valuable metal was sorely needed. The only foundation for this rumor
was the fact that the _Cyclops_ was indeed carrying a load of manganese
ore to the United States.

It was not until August 30, 1918, that Secretary of the Navy Josephus
Daniels announced that the ship was officially recorded as lost.
At that time he notified the relatives of the officers, crew and
passengers. More than three months later, on December 9th, Mr. Daniels
supplemented this official notice with the statement, given to the
newspaper correspondents, that “no reasonable explanation” of the
_Cyclops_ case could be given. And here the official news ends. At this
writing, inquiry at the official source in Washington brings the answer
that nothing has since been learned to alter the then issued statement.

The _Cyclops_ case naturally excited and disturbed the public mind,
with the result of an unusual crop of fancies, lies, false alarms and
hoaxes. On May 8, 1923, for instance, Miss Dorothy Walker of Pittsburgh
reported that she had found a bottle at Atlantic City containing the
message “_Cyclops_ wrecked at Sea.--H.” This note was written on a
piece of note paper torn from a memorandum book and was yellowed with
age. The bottle was tightly corked and closed with sealing wax--a
substance which shipwrecked sailors do not have in their pockets at the
moment of peril.

Other such messages were found from time to time. One floated ashore at
Velasco, Tex., also in a bottle. It read:

 “U. S. S. _Cyclops_, torpedoed April 7, 1918, Lat. 46.25, Long. 35.11.
 All on board when German submarine fired on us. Lifeboats going to
 pieces. No one to be left to tell the tale.”

The position indicated is midway between Hatteras and the Azores, where
the _Cyclops_ had no business and probably never was. It was found
after the war, as already suggested, that no German submarine had been
in any so distant region at the time. We may accordingly look upon this
bottle as another flagon of disordered fancy, another press from the
old “_spurlos versenkt_” madness.

Finally, in their search for something that might explain this dark and
baffling affair, the hunters came upon a suggestive fact. The commander
of the _Cyclops_ was Lieutenant-Commander George W. Worley. It now came
to light--and it struck many persons like a revelation--that this man
was really G. W. Wichtman, that he was born a German; ergo, that he
was the man responsible for this disaster to our navy. It proved true
that Wichtman-Worley was a German by birth, but he had been brought
to the United States as a child and had spent twenty-six years in
the American navy. No one in official position suspected him, but the
professional Hun _strafers_ insisted that this was the typical act of a
German, no matter how long separated from his native land, how little
acquainted with it or how long and faithfully attached to the service
of his adopted country. It is only fair to the memory of a blameless
officer to say that Lieutenant-Commander Worley could not have done
such a complete job had he wished to and that his record is officially
without the least blemish.

We are left then, to look for more satisfactory explanations of
the fate of the big collier. One possibility is that the manganese
developed dangerous gases in the hold and caused a terrific explosion,
which blew the ship out of the water without warning, killed almost all
on board and so wrecked the boats that none could reach land. The only
trouble with this is that a nineteen thousand ton ship, when destroyed
by an explosion, is certain to leave a great mass of surface wreckage,
which will drift ashore sooner or later or be observed by passing
vessels in any travelled lane. It happens that vessels sent out by the
Navy Department visited every ness and cove and bay along the coast
from Brazil to Hatteras, every island in the West Indies and every
quarter of the circling seas without ever finding so much as a splinter
belonging to the collier. Fishermen and boatmen in all the great region
were questioned, encouraged with promises of reward and sent seeking,
but they, too, found never a spar or scrap of all that great ship.

This also seems to dispose of the possibility of a disaster at the
hands of a German raider or submarine. Besides, to emphasize the
matter once more, the German records show that there is no possibility
of anything of this sort. The suspicion has been officially and
categorically denied and there is no reason for concealment now.

There remains one further possibility, which probably conceals the
truth. The _Cyclops_, like her sister ships, the _Neptune_ and
_Jupiter_, was topheavy. She carried, like them, six big steel derricks
on a superstructure fifty feet from her main deck. This great weight
aloft made it dangerous for the ship to roll. Indeed she could not
roll, like other heavy vessels, very far without capsizing. We have
but to suppose that with her one crippled engine she ran into heavy
weather or perhaps a tidal wave, that she heeled over suddenly, her
cargo shifted and her heavy top turned her upside down, all in a few
seconds. In that event there would have been no time for using the
wireless, no chance to launch any boats. Also, with everything battened
and tied down, ship-shape for a naval vessel travelling in time of
war, especially if the weather was a little heavy, there is the strong
possibility that nothing could have been loose to float free. In this
manner the whole big ship with all her parts and all who rode upon her
may have been dumped into the sea and carried to the depths. One of the
floating mines dropped off our Southern Coast in the previous year by
the U 121 may have done the fatal rocking, it is true.

There is no better explanation, and I have reason to know that an
upset of this sort is the theory held by naval builders and naval
officials generally. But certainly there is none and a satisfying
answer is not likely to come from the graveyard of the deep.




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Transcriber’s Notes:


Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.

Some questionable spellings (e.g. Monterey instead of Monterrey) are
retained from the original.





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