A coroner’s autopsy revealed that the body had been in the water for a period which could not be fixed with any degree of precision. It might have been two weeks, but the coroner felt unable to state that the body had not been in the creek for six weeks, the full length of time since the disappearance. There was no way to make sure. Again, it was not possible to determine if the boy had been choked to death before being cast into the waters. There was no skull fracture, no breakage of bones, and no discernible wound. There was also no evidence of poison—no abnormal condition of the lungs. The official physicians were inclined to believe that death had been caused by drowning, but they would not make a definite declaration.
The police dismissed the case with the assertion that they had been vindicated. It was clear that the boy had played truant from church, wandered away, fallen into the river, probably on the night of his disappearance, and lain under the water for six weeks.
But to this conclusion the McCormicks and many others, among them several distinguished private officers, took exception, and it must be said that the police explanation leaves some important questions suspended. Why did the boy turn and go three blocks to the south of his home, when he had last been seen hurrying northward toward church? What could have led this timid and dark-frightened boy to go voluntarily down to the sinister and gloomy river bank on the edge of night? How did it happen that the Kid directed William McCormick to deposit the two-thousand-dollar ransom within a few score yards of the spot where the body was recovered? Who was the mysterious masked man?
We shall never know, and neither shall we be able to answer whether accident or foul design lurks in the shadow of this mystery.
XI
A NUN IN VIVISEPULTURE
Whoever is familiar with Central European popular literature has tucked away in his memory some part or parcel of the story of Barbara Ubrik. The romance of her life and parentage has furnished material for countless novels, plays, short stories, tales and poems of the imaginative kind. Bits of her history appear in more serious literature, in religious and social polemics, even in the memoirs of personages. And more than one of the tragic incidents of opera may be, if diligence and intuition are not lacking, traced back to this forgotten Polish woman and her exorbitant adventures. Time and creative interpretation have fashioned her case into one of the classic legends of disappearance.
In the Polish insurrection of 1830-31, a certain Alexander Ubrik played a part sufficiently noteworthy to get himself exiled to Siberia for life, leaving behind him a wife and four young daughters, the third of whom, Barbara, was the chief figure of the subsequent affair. But the Ubrik family had already known the feel of the romantic fabric and there had already been a remarkable disappearance mystery involving a relative no more remote than the mother of Barbara and wife of the banished Alexander. It is with this part of the family history that much of the literary offspring deals.
About the year 1800, according to the account of the celebrated Polish detective Masilewski, extensively quoted by his American friend and compeer, the late George S. McWatters of the United States Secret Service, the first of the series of astonishing scenes involving the Ubrik family was played in Warsaw. There was then resident in the Polish capital one Jaromir Ubrik, the profligate son of an old and noble Polish house who had wasted his substance in gambling and roistering. Ubrik, though fallen into disrepute among his former friends, was still intimate with a few of the aristocratic families, among them that of Count Michael Satorin.
The Countess Satorin had borne her lord several daughters but no son to succeed to the title. When, in the year mentioned, Mme. Satorin yielded still another daughter, her husband being then absent in Russia, she sought to forestall the wrath and disappointment of her spouse by substituting a male child. It happened that the wife of Jaromir Ubrik had borne a son only two days earlier and died in childbirth. For the consideration of ten thousand florins, Ubrik consented to exchange children with the countess, who said she was additionally persuaded to the arrangement by the fact that the Ubrik blood was as good as her own and the boy thus fit to wear a title. The little Ubrik boy was, accordingly, delivered to the countess and her little daughter turned over to Jaromir Ubrik, nestled in a down lined basket with a fine gold chain and cross about her neck.