An investigation of the safe-deposit vaults, where Small was now said to have kept a large total of securities, showed that Doughty had visited this place twice on December 2, the day of Small’s disappearance, and he had on each occasion either put in, or taken away, some bonds. A hasty count of the securities was said to have revealed a shortage of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
Even this discovery did not change the minds of the skeptics, in whose ranks the missing magnate’s wife still remained. It was now believed that Doughty had received a secret summons from Small, and that he had taken the bonds, which had previously been put aside, at Small’s instruction, and gone to join his chief in some hidden retreat. A good part of Toronto believed that Small had gone on a protracted “party,” or that he had seized the opportunity offered by the closing out of his business to quit a wife with whom he had long been in disagreement.
When neither Small nor Doughty reappeared, opinion gradually veered about to the opposite side. After all, it was possible that Small had not gone away voluntarily, that he was the victim of some criminal conspiracy, and that Doughty had fled when he felt suspicion turning its face toward him. The absence of the supposed one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in bonds provided sufficient motivation to fit almost any criminal hypothesis.
As this attitude became general, Toronto came to examine the relationship between Small and Doughty. It was recalled that the secretary had, on more than one occasion when he was in his cups, spoken bitterly of Small’s exaggerated wealth and his cold niggardliness. Doughty had also uttered various radical sentiments, and it was even said that he had once spoken of the possibility of kidnapping Small for ransom; though the man who reported this conversation admitted Doughty had seemed to be joking. The conclusion reached by the police was not clear. Doughty, they found, had been faithful, devoted, and long-suffering. They had to conclude that he was careful and substantial, and they could not discover that he had ever had the slightest connection with the underworld or with suspect characters. At the same time they decided that the man was unstable, emotional, imaginative, and probably not hard to mislead. In short, they came to the definite suspicion that Doughty had figured as the tool of conspirators, in the disappearance of Small. They soon brought Mrs. Small around to this view. Now the hunt began.
A reward of five hundred dollars, which had been perfunctorily offered as payment for information concerning Small’s whereabouts, was withdrawn, and three new rewards were offered by the wife—fifty thousand dollars for the discovery and return of Small; fifteen thousand dollars for his identified body, and five thousand dollars for the capture of Doughty.
The Toronto chief constable immediately assigned a squad of detectives to the case, and Mrs. Small employed a firm of Canadian private detectives to pursue a line of investigation which she outlined. Later on she employed four more widely known investigating firms in the United States to continue the quest. Small’s sisters also summoned American officers to carry out their special inquiries. Thus there were no fewer than seven distinct bodies of police working at the mystery.
Circulars containing pictures of Small and Doughty, with their descriptions, and announcement of the rewards, were circulated throughout Canada and the United States; then from Scotland Yard they were sent to all the police offices in the British Empire, and, finally, from the American, Canadian, and British capitals to every known postmaster and police head on earth. More than half a million copies of the circulars were printed, it is said, and translations into more than twenty languages were distributed. I am told by eminent police authorities that this campaign, supported as it was by advertisements and news items in the press of almost every nation, some of them containing pictures of the missing millionaire, has never been approached in any other absent person case. Mrs. Small and her advisers set out to satisfy themselves that news of the disappearance and the rewards should reach to the most remote places, and they spent a small fortune for printing bills and postage. Even the quest for the lost Archduke John Salvator, to which the Pope contributed a special letter addressed to all priests, missionaries and other representatives of the Roman Catholic Church in every part of the world, seems to have been less far-reaching.
Rumors concerning Small and Doughty began to come in soon after the first alarms. Small and Doughty were reported seen in Paris, on the Italian Riviera, at the Lido, in Florida, in Hawaii, in London, at Calcutta, aboard a boat on the way to India, in Honduras, at Zanzibar, and where not? A skeleton was found in a ravine not far from Toronto, and for a time the fate of Small was believed to be understood. But physicians and anatomists soon determined that the bones could not have been those of the theatrical man for a variety of conclusive reasons. So the hunt began again.
Gradually, as time went on, as expense mounted, and results failed to show themselves, the private detective firms were dismissed, one after the other, and the task of running down rumors in this clewless case was left to the Toronto police. The usual sums of money and of time were wasted in following blind leads. The usual failures and absurdities were recorded. One Canadian officer, however, Detective Austin R. Mitchell, began to develop a theory of the case and was allowed to follow his ideas logically toward their conclusion. Working in silence, when the public had long come to believe that the search had been abandoned as bootless, Mitchell plugged away, month after month, without definite accomplishment. He was not able to get more than an occasional scrap of information which seemed to bear out his theory of the case. He made scores of trips, hundreds of investigations. They were all inconclusive. Nevertheless, the Toronto authorities permitted him to go on with his work, and he is probably still occupied at times with the Small mystery.
Detective Mitchell was actively following his course toward the end of November, 1920, eleven months after the flight of Doughty, when a telegram arrived at police headquarters in Toronto from Edward Fortune, a constable of Oregon City, Oregon, a small town far out near the Pacific. Once more the weary detective took a train West, arriving in Oregon City on the evening of November 22.