But the case had still to be worked up. So far he had no basis for his operations but inference. There was a great deal more to know before an arrest could be made. And he must operate rapidly and shrewdly, otherwise his man might escape. He determined to visit Brown's bridge and obtain whatever clue he might there.
Gen. Cook, accompanied by one of his officers, rode rapidly out the road towards Littleton, feeling quite confident that he would find that O'Neal had been murdered, and hopeful of obtaining some clue as to the identity of the murderers. He was not disappointed, and every step taken confirmed his suspicions previously formed, that Griswold had murdered O'Neal, and that the report of the lynching was a mere pretense. He found the body swinging as it had been left, awaiting the action of the coroner. Some of the country people had begun to gather about the scene of the killing, having heard of the finding of the body. They viewed the ghastly sight with horror and with manifestations so marked as to destroy all idea which the bogus special deputy had sought to convey that the enraged populace had taken the man from them and hanged him.
A few were found by the officers who had seen the two men who had come out to arrest O'Neal, and their descriptions of the men were so accurate as to clear away whatever trace of doubt that might have remained with the detective as to their being Griswold and Patrick.
But still a stronger circumstance remained to aid in completing the theory which Cook was gradually forming. The snide officers had told the newspapers that a large number of men stopped them and took their prisoner from them. Cook found the place at which the buggy had stopped, and where the prisoner had been removed; but instead of the tracks of a hundred men, or of fifty, or twenty, he discovered the footprints of but three of them. Of these, evidently only one had approached the buggy, while three had left it, dragging the prisoner, as the surface of the soil afforded every evidence. Hence Mr. Cook decided that the two men in the buggy with O'Neal had strangled him there while, perhaps, he was under the influence of liquor, and that they had been assisted in taking him out and stringing him up by a confederate who had joined them at Brown's bridge.