Chapter VII: Part 7

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.

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.