CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE 



MRS. STANFORD'S sudden death in Honolulu on Feb- 

 ruary 28, 1905, at the age of seventy-seven, came as 

 a great shock to her co-workers and numberless 

 Distress friends. Our distress, moreover, was at first intensi- 

 fi e( j j^y t j ie f a j se rumor that she had been poisoned. 

 This had its origin in the fact that she herself, waking 

 in the night in great agony, believed such to be the 

 case, and thus misled the attending physician, appar- 

 ently inexperienced in those matters. For the unques- 

 tionable cause of death, as ascertained afterward by 

 a committee of surgeons of the Cooper Medical 

 College in San Francisco, to whom the heart was sent 

 for examination, was rupture of the coronary artery, 

 which supplies the heart (itself) with blood. 



Informed of the sad event, Mr. Hopkins and I left 

 at once, accompanied by two capable and honorable 

 detectives, the late Captain Jules J. Callundan in 

 private service, and Harry C. Reynolds representing 

 San Francisco. In Honolulu we immediately sought 

 out Dr. E. C. Waterhouse, a well-informed physician, 

 who stated that the symptoms in Mrs. Stanford's case 

 were totally different from those of strychnine poi- 

 soning, and that some form of angina pectoris must 

 have caused her death. He also gave it as his opinion 

 that the coronary artery had been ruptured. 



Meanwhile Callundan and Reynolds, working in- 

 dependently, came to the conclusion that the theory 

 of poisoning was wholly intenable. And certain 

 matters which had seemed to involve circumstantial 



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