GHASTLY DISCOVERY--WHERE THE BODY WAS FOUND--THE RECOGNITION BY CAPTAIN
WING--ITS HORRIBLE APPEARANCE--EVIDENCES OF A FOUL CRIME--THE CORPSE AT
THE MORGUE--PITIABLE SCENES OF GRIEF--THE OFFICIAL AUTOPSY--THE BRUTAL
WAY IN WHICH THE PHYSICIAN HAD BEEN DONE TO DEATH.

It is always the unexpected that happens.

Even the closest friends of the missing man, earnest as they apparently
were in the declaration of their belief that he had been the victim of
foul play, still hoped against hope that their fears would not be
realized. As a drowning man clings to a straw, so they clung to the hope
that they would again see him alive and in the flesh.

But it was not to be.

Dr. Cronin did _not_ leave Chicago on the night of his disappearance.

He was _not_ seen on a street car apparently en route to the depot.

He was _not_ recognized on Canadian soil; nor did he unbosom himself to
reporter Long.

He was _not_ en route to London to betray the cause to which he had
devoted so large a portion of his active life; or to re-enforce the spy
Le Caron in his work of infamy.

Dr. Cronin was murdered.

While these reports and rumors were confounding his friends and making
his enemies exultant; his body, hacked and marred and battered, was
rapidly decomposing in one of the sewer catch-basins in the town of Lake
View.

[Illustration: THE CATCH-BASIN--SOUTH VIEW.]

WHERE THE BODY WAS FOUND.

Ten days after the physician's disappearance the board of public works
of Lake View received a complaint that the sewer at the corner of
Evanston Avenue and North Fifty-Ninth Street was apparently choked up,
and that the foul air in the neighborhood was beginning to be a
nuisance. No immediate action was taken. Another complaint came in, and
another, and very soon they were counted by the score.

Finally, realizing that the complaints demanded attention, Otto
Failmerzger, chief clerk of the department, hung on the hook an order to
the foreman of the gang charged with the care of gutters and sewers, to
remove the supposed obstruction in the sewer without delay. On the
following morning--Tuesday, May 22nd--the foreman in question, Nicholas
Rosch, accompanied by two of his assistants, John Finegan and William
Michaels, went to the locality indicated. They found that the ditch on
the east side of Evanston Avenue was partially filled with water, which
was constantly creeping from a damaged fire plug. The fall of water here
was to the n