“Is it him? Is it the bhoy?” an Irish neighbor called anxiously. “It’s Johnny Conway!” called the triumphant newspaper sleuth. There was a cheer and then another. Sleeping neighbors came running from their houses in night garb. The Conways came forth from a sleepless vigil and caught the child in their arms. So the mystery of the boy’s fate came to an abrupt end, but another and more lasting enigma immediately succeeded. Hardy, the boy’s conspiring relative, was immediately seized at his home and dragged to the nearest station house. The rumor of his connection with the kidnapping got abroad within a few hours, and the police building was immediately besieged by a crowd which demanded to see the prisoner. The police drove the crowd off, but it returned after an hour, much augmented in numbers and provided with a rope for a lynching. After several exciting hours, the mob was finally cowed and driven away by the mayor of Albany and a platoon of police with drawn revolvers. One of the conspirators was thus safely in jail, but at least two others were known, Blake and the man in the mask. Several posses set out at once and surrounded the woods in which the child had been found. After beating the brush timidly all day and spending a creepy night in the black forest, fighting the mosquitoes, the citizenry lost its pallid enthusiasm and returned to Albany only to find that the police of Schenectady had arrested Blake in that city late the preceding evening and that the man was lodged in another precinct house where he could not communicate with Hardy. Another abortive lynching bee was started. Once more the mayor and the police drove off the howling gangs. The man in the mask, however, was still at large. Both Hardy and Blake at first refused to name him, and the police were at sea. Then a curious thing happened. William N. Loew, a New York attorney, reading of the kidnapping affair at Albany, which appeared in the metropolitan newspapers under black headlines, went to the office of one of the journals and said he believed he could give valuable information.