THE ST. PAUL POLICE
and the five Northfield scouts came in about 9:30 o'clock Saturday night, and to the surprise of numbers of people waiting for news, reported that they had no news to tell. They knew nothing of the dispatch which had awakened such lively interest.
The party had been out all day, having left Janesville at 8 o'clock with four wagons and some on horseback. They proceeded first to Elysian and passing round the lake then proceeded on to Marysburg, within four miles of which they fell in with Hoy and
THE MINNEAPOLIS POLICE,
when all started by different routes to Eagle Lake, from thence they came to Janesville after spending twelve long hours on the road, but throughout their whole course they saw and heard nothing of the robbers.
Subsequent developments proved that the news brought in by the mounted messenger was a canard founded on the fact that some of the robber hunters had been amusing themselves by “playing robbers.” The false alarm, however, did no harm, and only stirred men to double diligence, and the writer who spent the whole night of Sunday in visiting the outposts and guards along the Winona & St. Peter railroad found them all on the qui vive, and he is confident if the bandits had shown themselves that night, they would have fared badly.
The alarm telegraphed to St. Paul brought out again Chief King and another body of police and citizens among whom was Hazen, of Cincinnati, who thought he recognized in photographs of the two dead bandits, Bill Chadwell and Charles Pitts.
FINDING THE HORSES.
Monday night, a party, headed by Sheriff Dill and Brissette, and including the St. Paul police, and several determined men from Northfield, after a tedious hunt arrived at the house of John Dehn about a mile from the place where Brisette had lost the trail on Friday night.
The detective was in a quandary not understanding how the horses at least could have got through the line of pickets that had been maintained. One of these animals was of a dun color, or as the country people called it “a yaller hoss,” and would have been noticed among a cavalry regiment.