Читать книгу The Crime of the Century; Or, The Assassination of Dr. Patrick Henry Cronin - Henry M. Hunt - Страница 37

Table of Contents

HOPING AGAINST HOPE—THE STENCH IN THE SEWER—"MURDER WILL OUT"—A GHASTLY DISCOVERY—WHERE THE BODY WAS FOUND—THE RECOGNITION BY CAPTAIN WING—ITS HORRIBLE APPEARANCE—EVIDENCES OF A FOUL CRIME—THE CORPSE AT THE MORGUE—PITIABLE SCENES OF GRIEF—THE OFFICIAL AUTOPSY—THE BRUTAL WAY IN WHICH THE PHYSICIAN HAD BEEN DONE TO DEATH.

It is always the unexpected that happens.

Even the closest friends of the missing man, earnest as they apparently were in the declaration of their belief that he had been the victim of foul play, still hoped against hope that their fears would not be realized. As a drowning man clings to a straw, so they clung to the hope that they would again see him alive and in the flesh.

But it was not to be.

Dr. Cronin did not leave Chicago on the night of his disappearance.

He was not seen on a street car apparently en route to the depot.

He was not recognized on Canadian soil; nor did he unbosom himself to reporter Long.

He was not en route to London to betray the cause to which he had devoted so large a portion of his active life; or to re-enforce the spy Le Caron in his work of infamy.

Dr. Cronin was murdered.

THE CATCH-BASIN—SOUTH VIEW.

While these reports and rumors were confounding his friends and making his enemies exultant; his body, hacked and marred and battered, was rapidly decomposing in one of the sewer catch-basins in the town of Lake View.