There are, to be sure, some elements which verge upon improbability in this account, but the denials of Forker and Whitla were strongly reinforced by the testimony of Janitor Sloss and the keeper of the livery where the horse and buggy had been hired. Both firmly identified Boyle as the man they had seen and dealt with, thus refuting the latter part of Boyle’s accusative statement.
Mrs. Boyle was released after having served ten years of her long term. Her husband, on the other hand, continued his servitude and died of pneumonia in Riverside Penitentiary on January 23, 1920.
X
THE MYSTERY AT HIGHBRIDGE
A few minutes past seven o’clock, on the evening of March 27, 1901, Willie McCormick, a ten-year-old schoolboy, started to attend vespers in the little Church of the Sacred Heart, in the Highbridge section of New York City. His mother gave him a copper cent for the collection plate, and he ran out of the door, struggling into his short brown overcoat, in great haste to overtake two of his elder sisters who had started ahead of him. Three doors down the street he stopped and blew a toy whistle to attract the attention of a playmate. This boy’s mother called from the porch that her son was to take a music lesson and could not go to church. So Willie McCormick lifted his cap and went his way.
It was a cold spring evening, and cutting winds were piping through the woods and across the open spaces of that then sparsely settled district of the American metropolis. Dusk had fallen, and the thinly planted electric lights along Ogden Avenue threw the shadows of the curbside trees across the walks in moving arabesques. The boy buttoned his coat closely about him, running away into the gloom, while the neighbor woman watched him disappear. In that moment the profounder darkness enveloped him, swallowed him into a void from which he never emerged alive, and made him the chief figure of another of the abiding problems of vanishment.
Highbridge is an outlying section of New York, fringing the eastern bank of the Harlem River and centering about one approach to the old and beautiful stone bridge from which it takes its name. The tracks of the New York Central Railroad skirt the edge of the river on their way up-state. Further back from the stream the ground rises, and along the ridge, paralleling the river, is Ogden Avenue. Near the southern foot of this thoroughfare, at One Hundred and Sixty-first Street, the steel skeleton of the McComb’s Dam bridge thrust itself across the Harlem, with its eastern arch spanning high above the muddy mouth of Cromwell Creek,[9] which empties into the Harlem at this point. At the shore level, under the great bridge approach, a hinged steel platform span, raised and lowered by means of balance weights to permit the passage of minor shipping up and down the creek, carried the tracks across the lesser stream. Three blocks to the north of this confluence, which plays an important part in the mystery, stood the McCormick home, a comfortable brick and frame house of the villa type, set back from the highest point of Ogden Avenue in a lawn.
[9] This creek has since been filled in and a playground marks its site.
Twenty-five and more years ago, when Willie McCormick disappeared, the vicinity bore, as it still bears to a lesser degree, the air of suburbia. Then houses were few and rather far apart. Some of the side streets were unpaved, and all about were patches of unimproved land, where clumps of trees, that once were part of the Bronx Woods, still flourished in dense order. The first apartment houses of the district were building, and gangs of Italian laborers, with a sprinkling of native mechanics, were employed in the excavations and erections.
Kilns and a brick yard disfigured one bank of Cromwell Creek, while a factory, a coal dump, and two lumber yards sprawled along the other. Five squares to the north of the creek’s mouth and two squares to the west is the Highbridge police station. The Church of the Sacred Heart, then in charge of the wealthy and venerable Father J. A. Mullin, stands two blocks to the east of Ogden Avenue and practically on the same cross street with the police building. Neither of these places is more than a third of a mile from the McCormick home.