With the publication of this alleged communication, even more fantastic reports began to reach the police and the parents. One young intimate of the family came in and reported in all seriousness that he had seen a horse and trap standing in Thirty-seventh Street, near the Cudahy home on several occasions in the course of the preceding week. The fact that it looked like any one of a hundred smart rigs then in common use did not seem to detract from its fancied significance. Another neighbor reported that three days before the kidnapping he had seen a covered light wagon standing at the curb in the street, a block to the rear of the Cudahy home. One man on the seat was talking with another, who was standing on the walk, and, as the narrator passed, they had lowered their voices to a whisper. He had not thought the incident suggestive until after the report of the kidnapping. And the police, quite forgetting the instinctive universal habit of lowering the voice when strangers pass, sent out squads of men to find the wagon and the whisperers! In short, the town was excited out of all sanity, and the very forces which should have maintained calmness and acted with all possible self-possession seemed the most headless. All the officials accomplished was the brief detention of several innocent persons, the theatrical raiding of a few gambling houses, and the further excitation of the citizenry, always ready to respond to police histrionism. To add an amusing exhibit to the already heavy store of evidence on this last point, it may be noted with amusement, not to say amazement, that the kidnapping letter, which had so agitated the public, was itself a police fake, and the rider who had thrown it on the lawn was a clumsy invention. Meantime, however, a genuine kidnapping letter had reached the hands of Mr. Cudahy. A little before nine o’clock on the morning of the nineteenth, after he too had been up all night, the family coachman was walking across the front lawn when he saw a piece of red cloth tied to a stout wooden stick about two feet long. He approached it, looked at it suspiciously, and finally picked it up, to find that an envelope was wrapped about the stick and addressed in pencil to Mr. Cudahy. Evidently some one had thrown this curiously prepared missive into the yard in the course of the preceding night, for there had been numbers of policemen, detectives, and neighbors on the lawn and on the walks in front of the property since dawn. The letter, with its staff and red cloth, was immediately carried to the packer, who read with affrighted eyes this remarkable and characteristic communication: “OMAHA, December 19, 1900. “Mr. Cudahy: