346

THE SILVER HYPODERMIC SYRINGE CASE 347

DR. CRONIN'S SURGICAL INSTRUMENT CASE 348

THE ENGLISH PRESCRIPTION BOOK 349

THE JUDGE HEARS OF THE JURY-BRIBING PLOT 401

THE KNIVES 466

CHAPTER I.

A CRIME THAT SHOCKED THE CIVILIZED WORLD--THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER--A
SUDDEN SUMMONS--THE INSTINCTS OF HUMANITY TRIUMPH OVER PERSONAL
CONSIDERATIONS--LAST MOMENTS AT HOME--PARTING WORDS WITH A FRIEND--
DR. CRONIN'S EVENTFUL LIFE--HOW HE WORKED HIS WAY UPWARD ON THE
LADDER OF HONOR AND FAME.

Little introduction to this volume is needed. It is the story--told in
plain unvarnished words, so that everyone who reads may understand--of a
crime that has shocked the people of the United States, and astounded
the civilized world. Back of that crime was a conspiracy so wide in its
ramifications, so cunningly contrived, so successfully executed, as to
rival the diabolical plots and outgrowing tragedies that have been
placed at the doors of the secret societies of France, Italy and Spain,
by the historians of the Dark Ages. In the United States, as an event of
national importance, the crime may be said to rank with the
assassinations of Presidents Lincoln and Garfield. In the case of the
former, as of the latter, the perpetrator of the crime was a half crazed
enthusiast, who imagined that he had a mission to perform in taking the
life of the Chief Magistrate of the Republic. An effort was made, it is
true, to demonstrate the fact that the assassin of Abraham Lincoln was
but the tool of a band of conspirators, but, despite the fact that five
of his alleged accomplices suffered an ignominious death upon the
scaffold upon conviction for complicity in the appalling crime, the
question as to the actual existence of a conspiracy has remained to this
day a mooted one. In the case of President Garfield there was not even a
suggestion that the assassin acted upon other than his own insane
impulse. So far as concerns the Haymarket horror in Chicago, the point
as to whether the throwing of the bomb that echoed around the world was
the outcome of a conspiracy, or the act of an individual who had inbibed
anarchistic principles and doctrines until reason had been dethroned,
and a desire for vengeance upon the supposed enemies of the proletaire
had