WOMEN AWAKENED BY WAIL OF BABY.
Hour-Old Infant Is Found Between Houses on Benton Boulevard.
A low, quavering wail early yesterday morning awoke Mrs. A. W. Buford, 903 Benton boulevard. She listened and decided that her ears had not deceived her. There was no baby in the apartment house, but still the wail continued. She knocked at the door of Mrs. Anna E. Smith. Mrs. Smith listened, too. There wasn't any question about the wail. It came from a very young baby.
The two women went downstairs. Armed with a lighted candle and a grate poker, they went out on to the front porch. They listened some more. They followed the sound around the corner of the house. Fifty feet back from the street in the 15-foot areaway between the houses at 903 and 906 Benton boulevard they found a new-born infant boy, unclothed, shivering and wailing plaintively.
The women called police headquarters. The call was answered by two big, blue-coated patrolmen, Tom Lewis and A. G. Mitchell. When it came to a matter of caring for an hour-old, undressed, wailing infant they were more at a loss than the infant's original discoverers.
"We ought to give it some milk," Lewis suggested.
"It looks to me like it needs clothes more than anything else," Mitchell said, "but I don't see where we are going to get any at this time of night that will fit it."
Mrs. Buford and Mrs. Smith said baby clothes don't have to fit and provided plenty of nice warm wraps. The policemen decided to take the baby to Mercy hospital, where there are nurses who know just what to do in such cases. The baby has dark h air and blue eyes. At the hospital it quickly gained strength and seemed to be perfectly sound and healthy.
Mrs. Buford reported to the police later that while she and Mrs. Smith were tracing the sound of the wails and were taking the child into the house they noticed a man loitering on the street outside. When they went in the house the man got on a street car and left. They thought he seemed to be watching to see what disposition was made of the child. The man was tall and slender and appeared to be about 30 years old. It is thought that the child must have been born a short distance of the place where it was found, and that the man may have waited to see that it was cared for by someone nearby. There is absolutely no clue upon which the police can work.
