WANGANUI SENSATION.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 1603, 26 August 1916, Page 4

WANGANUI SENSATION.

SOLUTION OF A MYSTERY

Wild-eyed and dishevelled, a man groped his way into Wanganui police station on Friday afternoon, gasped “I’m stubbed,” and deposited himself in a slate of semi-col-lapse into a chair.

Slowly the visitor unfolded his story. He had come into the town and after what he described as a few drinks, he got as far as the Masonic Hotel. Whether his thirst was assuaged at this geographical point he did not remember, hut ho went and sat down on the river bank near the Dublin street bridge. It was here that liis adventures commenced.

He said that a man —a short, thick-set sort of man, of decidedly foreign appearance, with a black moiislache and an accent which suggested the plain' of his nativity wa.s cither Germany or Austria came on the scene. They talked of the war, and their views were diametrically opposed their conversation became somewhat healed. This was the prelude of approaching tragedy. “Then he slabbed me

with a knife," said the narrator. The police- found that the man w.-m bleeding from a clean cut, deep wound, and as he had evidcnlly lost a good deal of blood, he was hastily dispatched to the district hospital.

The affair seemed to be shrouded in mystery. The man’s wound indicated that the wouhl-lic assassin had not sought a particularly vulnerable part of the victim’s anatomy. The foreign-looking man with the black moiista.che proved elusive, although the police' we're' immediately on the epii vive', and possibly many an innoce'nt e-itizen whet bad the 1 misfortune to answer in some way to the eleseriplion given came under (hear pieme-ing gaze-. Ami it was decidedly annoying that a salubrious and pie-lim'squc re'sieh'iilia 1 a rent shoiilel be l the' scene of a crime.

On Saturday morning l Chief DoU;Hivo Siddells visited the hospital, and tlie victim gave a more detailed and sensational account of his adventure. It was a nurse who solved the mystery. On prolan" the man’s wound she extracted a fairly la rue piece of "lass. The man had been unfortunate. He had sat down on a broken hottU. —Chronicle.