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.