A MYTHICAL BURGLAR

Pahiatua Herald, Volume XV, Issue 4087, 13 November 1911, Page 2

A MYTHICAL BURGLAR

GAGGED BOY AND CRIMINAL IN ONE. Eifteen-year-okl Ferdinand Arnold, who lives with an aunt in New Yofk, above the rooms of his grandfather, awakened the elder Ferdinand Arnold the other morning about two o’clock by banging on the door of the old man’s room with his head. When the grandfather opened the door the boy was sitting on the floor trussed like a chicken for the. oven. Strips of cloth were tied around his legs, his arms were bound, and a strip of cloth held a gag in his mouth. Grandfather Arnold untied the boy and the youngster blurted out a tale of a tall man who wore a slouch hat and who came out of the night to snatch Ferdinand off his. bed and tie him up after going through the drawers of the bureau. He was a burglar, Ferdinand thought, and tne grandfather telephoned to the police. When Detective Meyer arrived he found that not only had this strange burglar been through the bureau, but he had opened the safe downstairs in the butcher’s shop run by the boy’s grandfather, strewn papers around the floor and taken two dollars from the cash drawer. Despite all this evidence, Meyer couldn’t find how the burglar had entered the house. He noticed that Ferdinand the younger knew a good many details of the robbery that a- boy in bed asleep would not have known, and he took the boy off in a corner for a long talk Then the boy began to cry and said that he was the tall man in the slouch hat and that he had tied himself. A while ago he had stolen 1.25 dols. from his grandfather, and he was afraid that the theft would be discovered, so that night when everybody was asleep he had opened the safe, scattered the papers about the butcher’s shop, taken the money from the cash drawer and then ripped a sheet into strips for the trussing. Then he had hobbled downstairs to hi 9 grandfather’s room and awakened him. In proof of his story he took Meyer out in the yard behind the butcher’s shop and dug up about 2 dollars in change, the missing contents of the cash drawer.