Page:The facts in the case of the horrible murder of little Myrtle Vance and its fearful expiation at Paris, Texas, February 1st, 1893.pdf/13

Rh casion mentioned in our first chapter. The streets filled with anxious parents, and children were carefully kept at home. Thus the search went on. Not now for the culprit, but to find his innocent baby victim. About five o'clock on January 27th, a courier came madly galloping up to the public square with the announcement that Myrtle Vance had been found. "Dead or alive?" was then the fearful question! "Dead!" was the equally shocking answer. In less than half an hour from the first announcement of her discovery the little corpse was deposited in the court-house, where a post-mortem examination was held by several physicians, whose sickening discoveries served thoroughly to madden the people and cause them to turn their attention to the capture of the incarnate fiend in human shape, who could commit so unspeakably horrible a crime under any provocation.

In the proper connection, later on, we shall give the report of the physicians in full, which will serve, to some extent, to impress upon the reader the full gravity of the horror which was the exciting cause of subsequent events. When the searching party, which found the mangled corpse of the child, came in proximity to the spot, they first found Smith's hat sunken in a heap of leaves where he had laid and slept through part of the night with his victim in his arms: then a portion of her underclothing, smeared with her blood, was discovered and sev-