DELICATE SCRUPLES

One of Von Papen’s Dynamiters More Conscientious than His Chief

“Porter, boss?” The remark was an entirely facetious one, but the brakeman did not like to have his humor disregarded. Therefore when he got home he told his wife about the rum party he had met in the cut above the Vanceboro railroad bridge—a six-footer, carrying a suitcase. The brakeman would have been rather more than disgruntled, if Werner Horn had closed with his offer—that is, he would have been, had he known that the suitcase contained dynamite, and that its owner was an Oberleutnant in the German army. The man with the suitcase had passed for a Swede in the hotel at Vanceboro, and his appearance warranted it. But his recent experience as manager of a coffee plantation in Moka, Guatemala, had not effaced the imprint of ten years in the service. He marched out upon the bridge, the brakeman having disappeared, as if he were taking a town. He was going into the enemy’s territory and fire his single shot. He was going to blow up the bridge, over whose rails flowed a tide of death to the Germans—cargoes of guns and shells bound for St. John and Halifax.

He would have preferred to join his regiment and fight, but von Papen had been unable to get him passage when he reported, at the time of the outbreak of the war, and told him that this affair was equally his duty. The Kaiser’s agent had likewise informed him, to soothe him, for Horn had refused to endanger innocent human lives—that there were no more passenger trains after eleven. It was now nearly midnight. Suddenly a whistle shrieked behind him, and in a moment the glaring lights of an express train’s locomotive shone upon him. Horn clutched with one hand at a steel rod of the bridge, and swung out over the river, holding the suitcase safe behind him with the other. The train thundered by, and left him to recover his footing on the ice-coated bridge. Once more, this time from the Canadian side, an express thundered past, and again he went through the same painful process.

He might have blown up the bridge comfortably, from the American side, but this he had refused to do. America was a neutral country. Germany was not at war with America, therefore to blow up the American side of the bridge was an outrage, a crime. He struggled on, the biting wind in his face. Past the middle now—a spy, liable to the penalty of death.

There was a fifty-minute fuse with his dynamite, but when he saw that the passenger-trains continued to run (von Papen’s schedules must have been out-of-date), Horn decided that what he was to do must be done at once, before another train started across. Feeling with his benumbed fingers in his pocket for a knife, he cut off the fuse and with it the long half-hour that was his chance of escape from capture. A very slim chance, if you like, through the Maine woods knee-deep in snow, but still a chance.

THE EXPLOSION

He fixed the dynamite against a girder of the bridge above the Canadian bank of the river, adjusted the explosive cap, and touched his cigar to the end of the three-minute fuse. Then he stumbled back across the gale-swept icy bridge, and back into the hotel at Vanceboro, just as the dynamite exploded with a report that broke half the windows in the town, and twisted rods and girders on the bridge. Everybody in Vanceboro was aroused, but Horn, after a futile attempt to rub his hands and feet with snow, turned in and went to sleep. He had seen all he wanted to of dynamite. In a town turned out of doors with excitement, sleeping was in itself an act to arouse suspicion.

People remembered the tall Swede who had been hanging around Vanceboro for a couple of days, and the suitcase which he had been seen to hide in a wood-pile near the tracks. After some delay, during which Horn slept peacefully, the sheriff and a couple of Canadian constables were got on the job, and they took him at about noon in Teague’s Hotel. He was wearing German colors on both sleeves, for he had been told that they would be regarded, were he caught, in the light of a uniform. He offered little resistance, but in telling his story, he interpolated an innocent lie that caused the Canadian officials a good deal of anxiety. He had not brought the dynamite in his suitcase, he said, but had carried the empty suitcase to the bridge, where an Irishman from Canada, in response to the pass-word “Tommy,” had given him the dynamite. This detail he afterwards cleared up, when asked to set his name to a paper concluding, “I certify on my honor as a German officer that the foregoing statements are true.” He would not sign a lie and set his name to it as the truth.

“Too scrupulous for a spy,” one of the newspapers called him, in the perplexities awakened by this early manifestation of the afterwards famous bomb-plot, “and too thickheaded for an honest man.” Werner Horn was extradited to Canada, and everybody joined in congratulating the man, whoever he might have been, who slept in the lower berth the night Horn took an upper for Vanceboro. It had developed during the trial that the big German, to disencumber himself, had chucked the suitcase under the lower berth, against the shoes and the hot-water pipes, then had climbed into the upper, to sleep peacefully through the night as was his wont. The evil effects of dynamite were comparatively novel at that time, even to bomb-plotters.