Mr. McCormick replied that while he was now poor, he had formerly been well to do. He reasoned that the kidnapper might very well have been ignorant of his decline in fortune and taken the boy in the belief that his parent was still wealthy. Others joined the controversy by pointing out in the newspapers that abductions were sometimes motivated by revenge or spite on the part of persons quite unknown or unsuspected by the parents; that children were often stolen by irrational or demented men or women, and that there was at least some basis for faith in the abduction theory, but no evidence to support the idea of a runaway. Meantime events had added their spice of immediate drama. A few nights after the disappearance of Willie McCormick, Doctor D. A. McLeod, a surgeon occupying the next house but one to the McCormick’s, had found a masked man skulking about the rear of his property just after nightfall, and tried to grapple with the intruder. A week later, from a house two blocks away, another neighbor reported that he, too, had found the masked man prowling about his place and had followed him into the woods, where he had been lost. This informant said that the mysterious stranger was a negro. Detectives were posted in hiding throughout the district, but the visitant did not appear again. Next two Gypsy girls visited a photographer in Washington, and one of them showed the camera man a slip of paper with some childish scrawl. Somehow this bit of writing came to be identified as that of one of Willie McCormick’s sisters. It was said the scrap of paper must have been taken from the McCormick house. The two Gypsy children were seized and held in jail, while detectives hurried off to interrogate their elders and search through the Romany camps up and down the Atlantic seaboard. No trace of the missing boy was found, and the girls were quickly released. Finally the expected note from the kidnapper reached William McCormick. It was scrawled awkwardly on a piece of nondescript paper by some illiterate person who was apparently trying to conceal his normal handwriting. It said that Willie was being held for ransom; that he was well; that he would be safe so long as no attempt was made to bring the police into the negotiations, and that disaster would follow if the father played false. The writer then demanded the absurdly small sum of two hundred dollars for the release of the boy and directed that the money be taken at night to the corner of Third Avenue and One Hundred and Thirty-fifth Street, and there placed in an old tin bucket which would be found inside an abandoned steam boiler. The missive bore the signature “Kid.” The police immediately denounced the letter as the work of some mental defective, but instructed the father to go to the rendezvous at the appointed time and deposit a bundle of paper which might look like the demanded sum in bank notes.