Shortly before nine o’clock the rich packer noticed that his son had not returned, and he observed to his wife that the Rustins must have invited the boy to stay. Mrs. Cudahy felt a little nervous and urged her husband to make sure. He telephoned to the Rustin home and was promptly told that Eddie had been there, left the papers and departed immediately, almost two hours before. The Cudahys were instantly alarmed and convinced that something out of the ordinary had befallen the boy. He had promised to return immediately to consult with his father over a Christmas list. He was known to have no more than a few cents in his pockets, and unexplained absences from home at night were unprecedented with him. The beef magnate notified the Omaha police without long hesitation, and the quest for the missing rich boy was on. All that night detectives, patrolmen, servants, and friends of the family went up and down the streets and alleys of the overgrown Nebraska packing town, with its strange snortings from the cattle pens, its grunting railroad engines, its colonies of white and black laborers from distant lands, its brawling night life and its pretentious new avenues where the brash and sudden rich resided. At dawn the searchers congregated, sleepless, at the police headquarters or the Cudahy mansion, baffled and affrighted. Not the first clew to the boy had been found, and no one dared to whisper the clearest suspicions. By noon all Omaha was in turmoil. The great packing houses had practically stopped their activity; the police had been called in from their usual assignments and put to searching the city, district by district; the resorts and gambling houses were combed by the detectives; the anxious father had telegraphed to Chicago for twenty Pinkerton men, and the usual flight of mad rumors was in the air. One man reported that he had seen two boys, one of them with a broken arm, leave a street car at the city limits on the preceding night. The fact that the car line passed near the Cudahy home was enough to lead people to think one of the boys must have been Eddie Cudahy. As a result, his known young friends were sought out and questioned; the schools were gone over for the boy with a broken arm, and all the street-car crews in town were examined by the police. By the middle of the afternoon, the newspapers issued special editions, which bore the news that a letter had been received from kidnappers. According to this account, a man on horseback had ridden swiftly past the Cudahy home at nine o’clock that morning and tossed a letter to the lawn. This had been picked up by one of the servants, and it read as follows: “We have your son. He is safe. We will take good care of him and return him for a consideration of twenty-five thousand dollars. We mean business. “Jack.”