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.