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.