A PIECE OF CARPET FOUND.
On the following day, acting under instructions of the Chief of Police, a dozen picked men from the Central detail commenced a thorough search of the Lake View sewers. They were assisted by several experienced sewer men. Long pike poles were secured and the hunt began, but the task was by no means an easy one, many of the sewers being too small for the smallest man to crawl through.
THE SILVER HYPODERMIC SYRINGE CASE.
Starting at Evanston avenue the gang worked slowly to the lake, but for several hours nothing was found to reward their efforts. It was not until late in the day that a find was made by Officer Lorch. Equipped with a rubber suit and one of the pike poles, he had been lowered into the man-hole at the corner of Evanston and Graceland avenues, one block south of the man-hole in which the clothes and surgical instruments had been thrown, and two blocks south of the street where the trunk was found. Worming himself into the twenty inch sewer he went through the filthy main for a distance of twelve or fifteen feet, pushing the pike pole ahead of him. His persistence was finally rewarded by the bringing to light of a muddy, slimy piece of carpet about twenty inches square, and which looked as if it had been hastily torn from a longer strip. When brought to the surface and rinsed under a hydrant it was found to be a cheap quality of an ordinary ingrain of a modest dark pattern, resembling just such a carpet as that which the man Simonds had purchased at Revells.
Its many months of contact with the water and slime of the sewer, however, had destroyed all traces of the color and pattern, and hence it was impossible to positively identify it as a portion of the carpet laid down in the Carlson cottage, but in view of the locality in which it was found, and its proximity to the place where the clothes and trunk were secreted, there was but little doubt but that it was a portion of the blood-stained carpet which the murderers had taken up from the floor of the cottage. The search was continued in the hope that the boots, hose, watch and chain, and purse, which were still missing, might be found in the depths of the sewer, but despite the most energetic efforts it was not rewarded by success.