AT THE TORONTO END OF THE CONSPIRACY--INVESTIGATING LONG'S CIRCUMSTANTIAL STORIES, AND HIS INTERVIEWS WITH DR. CRONIN--A CHICAGO FUGITIVE CONCERNED--HIS SUSPICIOUS MOVEMENTS--A CHAPTER OF STARTLING COINCIDENTS--LONG ON THE RACK--MAKES DAMAGING ADMISSIONS AND BREAKS DOWN--THE OBJECT TO DISTRACT ATTENTION FROM THE SCENE OF THE CRIME-- ANOTHER CONFESSION FROM WOODRUFF.
With the recovery of the body of the murdered physician, and the developments that followed in such rapid succession, attention was attracted anew to the reports that had emanated from Toronto during the week following the disappearance. The circumstantial stories and interviews that had been scattered broadcast from that city over the signature of Charles Long, the ex-Chicago reporter, not only had a tendency to give the case an international aspect, but also to confirm the suspicions of the dead man's friends, that he had fallen a victim to a conspiracy wide in its ramifications, and planned, moreover, by a master mind. The dispatches were false, for the finding of Cronin's body in the Lake View catch-basin admitted of no possible argument to the contrary. It was equally certain that it could not have been a case of mistaken identity--not merely because Long's acquaintance with Dr. Cronin had been of a nature to render a mistake of that kind improbable, but because the detailed character of their conversation, as reported by Long, had been such that Cronin's part in it could not have been taken by any but Cronin himself, or some one of a few men familiar with the inner workings of the Clan-na-Gael or United Brotherhood. For example, a week after the disappearance, and before the finding of the body, Long had concocted in Toronto the story of the troubles in the Clan-na-Gael, with Cronin's charge that nearly $100,000 of its funds had been misappropriated, while papers elsewhere were still confusing the organization with the Irish Land League and its Detroit treasurer. "No one not a member of the Clan-na-Gael could have gotten up these interviews," Irishmen had said; and they were right. To the general public also, unacquainted with these facts, it seemed incredible that a presumably reputable journalist, with an utter absence of malicious motive, would, of his own free will, and simply for the advantage of the small pecuniary recompense that his labors might bring, so deceive and mislead the numerous and prominent newspapers to which his dispatches were addressed. It was a prostitution of the liberty and license of a correspondent such, perhaps, as had never been parallelled in the newspaper history of the country, while, moreover, it was of a character calculated to wreck, for all time, the journalistic reputation of the man most directly concerned.