CRIME: Snatchers on Sourland Mt.

At Niles, Ohio last week, James Dejute Jr., 12, son of a well-to-do contractor, was kidnapped on his way to school by two men in a brown coupe. A minister's wife witnessed the abduction. Next day Contractor Dejute received a note demanding $10,000 unless he wanted his boy back ''in installments." Two days after that a posse of local police found the Dejute boy alive and well in a house not ten miles from his home. The kidnappers were found with him. He had been concealed behind a false wall, said he was well-fed but sleepy.

No notice of the Niles abduction wa taken by the world-at-large. It would scarcely have attracted the little national attention it did had not a fabulous melodrama unfolded the night before in central New Jersey.

The last person known to have seen 20-month-old Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr. was his nurse, a dark-haired, light footed little Scotch girl of 26 named Betty Gow. Nurse Gow immigrated to the U. S in 1928, has been in the Lindberghs' employ over a year. At approximately 8:30 o'clock one evening last week she went to his nursery. It is on the second floor southeast corner, of the home which Col. & Mrs. Lindbergh completed last autum three miles north of Hopewell, ten miles north of Princeton, on a wild, lonely stretch of high ground called Sourland Mt. Nurse Gow tucked Charles Augustus who had been ailing with a cold, into hi crib and went down to the servants' quarters to have a chat with the Lindbergh's butler, Oliver Wheatley and his wife.

At 8:30 Col. Lindbergh returned from New York by motor. He had a speaking engagement in Manhattan that night but neglected it through an oversight. He ate dinner and afterward took a seat in his living room directly under one of the nursery's three windows, all of which were closed but none of which was locked.

At 10 o'clock Nurse Gow went to the nursery. The baby was not in his crib. She hurried downstairs and notified the parents. All three ran back upstairs. The first thing they did was to inspect the floor to see if the child had crawled somewhere. He had not. One more look around the room disclosed muddy footprints, an open windowscreen and a note on the sill below. Exact contents of the note have never been revealed, but if, like most notes of the same kind, it warned against police intervention, Col. Lindbergh brusquely disregarded the warning. He could have had no idea of the overwhelming glare of press and police activity which was shortly to ignite in his remote retreat, providing a possible barrier forever between him and his child, when he summoned officers from Hopewell.

The Hopewell police arrived not later than 10:30, for by 10:50 a teletyped message went humming through the length of the State with the news that the first-born of the nation's No. 1 hero had been kidnapped.