t and
untiring investigation, after following up more than one false clue,
Geyer received a report that there was a house--No. 16 St. Vincent
Street--which had been rented in the previous October by a man answering
to the description of Holmes. The information came from an old Scottish
gentleman living next door. Geyer hastened to see him. The old gentleman
said that the man who had occupied No. 16 in October had told him that
he had taken the house for his widowed sister, and he recognised the
photograph of Alice Pitezel as one of the two girls accompanying
him. The only furniture the man had taken into the house was a bed, a
mattress and a trunk. During his stay at No. 16 this man had called on
his neighbour about four o'clock one afternoon and borrowed a spade,
saying that he wanted to dig a place in the cellar where his widowed
sister could keep potatoes; he had returned the spade the following
morning. The lady to whom the house belonged recognised Holmes' portrait
as that of the man to whom she had let No. 16.

At last Geyer seemed to be on the right track. He hurried back to St.
Vincent Street, borrowed from the old gentleman at No. 18 the very
spade which he had lent to Holmes in the previous October, and got the
permission of the present occupier of No. 16 to make a search. In the
centre of the kitchen Geyer found a trap-door leading down into a small
cellar. In one corner of the cellar he saw that the earth had been
recently dug up. With the help of the spade the loose earth was removed,
and at a depth of some three feet, in a state of advanced decomposition,
lay the remains of what appeared to be two children. A little toy wooden
egg with a snake inside it, belonging to the Pitezel children, had been
found by the tenant who had taken the house after Holmes; a later tenant
had found stuffed into the chimney, but not burnt, some clothing that
answered the description of that worn by Alice and Etta Pitezel; and by
the teeth and hair of the two corpses Mrs. Pitezel was able to identify
them as those of her two daughters. The very day that Alice and Etta had
met their deaths at St. Vincent Street, their mother had been staying
near them at a hotel in the same city, and later on the same day Holmes
had persuaded her to leave Toronto for Ogdensburg. He said that they
were being watched by detectives, and so it would be impossible for her
husband to come to see her there.

But the problem was not yet wholly solved.