A coroner’s autopsy revealed that the body had been in the water for a period which could not be fixed with any degree of precision. It might have been two weeks, but the coroner felt unable to state that the body had not been in the creek for six weeks, the full length of time since the disappearance. There was no way to make sure. Again, it was not possible to determine if the boy had been choked to death before being cast into the waters. There was no skull fracture, no breakage of bones, and no discernible wound. There was also no evidence of poison--no abnormal condition of the lungs. The official physicians were inclined to believe that death had been caused by drowning, but they would not make a definite declaration. The police dismissed the case with the assertion that they had been vindicated. It was clear that the boy had played truant from church, wandered away, fallen into the river, probably on the night of his disappearance, and lain under the water for six weeks. But to this conclusion the McCormicks and many others, among them several distinguished private officers, took exception, and it must be said that the police explanation leaves some important questions suspended. Why did the boy turn and go three blocks to the south of his home, when he had last been seen hurrying northward toward church? What could have led this timid and dark-frightened boy to go voluntarily down to the sinister and gloomy river bank on the edge of night? How did it happen that the Kid directed William McCormick to deposit the two-thousand-dollar ransom within a few score yards of the spot where the body was recovered? Who was the mysterious masked man? We shall never know, and neither shall we be able to answer whether accident or foul design lurks in the shadow of this mystery. XI A NUN IN VIVISEPULTURE Whoever is familiar with Central European popular literature has tucked away in his memory some part or parcel of the story of Barbara Ubrik. The romance of her life and parentage has furnished material for countless novels, plays, short stories, tales and poems of the imaginative kind. Bits of her history appear in more serious literature, in religious and social polemics, even in the memoirs of personages. And more than one of the tragic incidents of opera may be, if diligence and intuition are not lacking, traced back to this forgotten Polish woman and her exorbitant adventures. Time and creative interpretation have fashioned her case into one of the classic legends of disappearance.