from the station if they could. Information of a stranger is freely
offered in a village, and we found shortly that Holt had employed a
small boy with a wheelbarrow to convey his trunk from a shanty in the
woods to the station, and to the shanty we went. Near it lay a charred
dynamite-box, and there were a few wax-paper wrappers from sticks of
dynamite which the weather had left for our information. No explosive
was to be seen, but there was evidence that he had burned some of it
nearby.
[Illustration: Mrs. Holt’s Mysterious Letter
The First Word from Texas]
If he had not burned it all, the balance of those two hundred sticks
were in the trunk. The day was growing old. Carnes and I sped back to
Mineola, and the station agent identified Holt as the dynamite man. I
repeated my questions; Holt replied, “I will tell you Wednesday.”
“Look here,” I said. “I have the number of that check. That dynamite
is in the trunk. It’s liable to go off any minute and kill a lot of
people. I can trace that check, but it will take time, and you
better tell me quick where you left the trunk.”
“All right,” Holt answered, and said that he had sent it to a storage
warehouse whose office was somewhere near 40th Street and Seventh
Avenue. Two minutes later Lieut. Barnitz and I were out of the jail and
in a motor bound for New York.
It took just 28 minutes to cover the 20 miles to Fifty-Ninth Street
and Fifth Avenue, and we turned south to the section around Fortieth
Street. We found the office of the storage company--empty. The
warehouse itself was at 342 West 38th Street, and we hurried over
there, arriving simultaneously with the detectives who had been tracing
the check number from the Pennsylvania station. An old watchman was
in charge who knew nothing whatever of the records of the office, but
who turned bright green when we told him what we were after. While
Detectives Barnitz, Coy, Murphy, Sterett, Walsh and Fenelly went up
into the recesses of the warehouse to hunt for the trunk, I called
headquarters.
“Commissioner Woods just called and wants you to call him at the
Harvard Club,” the office said. I did so, and reported our progress.
“Get that trunk as fast you can and find out exactly what’s in it,”
said the Commissioner. “Washington just called me to say that Governor
Colquitt down in Dallas just wired them. He says Holt’s wife got a
letter from Holt dated July 2 saying that he’s put dynamite on a ship
now at sea, and that it will sink on the seventh!”
On the fifth floor of the great dark barn they discovered the trunk,
with a dozen others on top of it. There were no lights, and it was
necessary to roll it over, haul it out, snake it across other piles,
and carry it down four flights of steep stairs in the dark to the
office. Barnitz picked up an axe and hacked the lock away. He lifted
the cover, and there we found one hundred and thirty-four sticks of
dynamite--one hundred in their original box, and the rest packed in
small spaces between hammers, nails, bolts, and other tools, several
bottles of sulphuric and nitric acid, and 197 detonating caps--a pretty
package to trundle down four flights of dark stairs and open with an
axe!
Fifty sticks of the original 200 were unaccounted for. I telephoned the
report to the Commissioner, and followed it to the Harvard Club, in
44th Street, while Barnitz telephoned for the inspector of combustibles
to come and take possession of the explosives. The Commissioner, with
Guy Scull, were sitting in the lounge, and I was reporting in greater
detail when the Commissioner was called to the telephone. He returned a
moment later, and his first remark was this:
“_Holt is dead at Mineola!_”
And there went our case.
The first wild report from Mineola had it that Holt had been shot by
a German. The international consequences of the case, which had been
hovering just out of reach for the past four days, now seemed certain.
A nation which was still bitterly angry over the recent _Lusitania_
sinking would certainly not brook the violation of its Capitol and the
attempted assassination of one of its chief figures by a German agent,
and if Holt had been shot by a German, it was more than likely that he
had been killed to prevent a further confession which would implicate
the Imperial German Government. These thoughts passed through our minds
as we motored back across the Queensboro Bridge, and retraced the route
Barnitz and I had just traveled.
Holt was not shot by a German. Holt was not shot at all. An aged guard
had been left to watch him that evening, just after Barnitz and I had
left, for the prisoner, despairing over the Muenter identification, had
already made one attempt with a bit of tin from a lead pencil to cut
the arteries of his wrists, and we did not want him to try again. The
old bailiff who sat outside the cell cage had not only left the cage
door unlocked, but had been careless enough to leave Holt’s cell door
ajar. The prisoner seemed quiet enough, and the bailiff fell asleep. He
woke to find Holt’s body in a twisted heap in the center of the floor
of the cell corridor. Holt had evidently been feigning sleep and while
the bailiff dozed had crept out, climbed to the top of the cage, and
dived headforemost to the concrete floor.
There we found him. The man’s skull was crushed from the impact of his
dive. Rumors that he was shot by a mysterious rifle bullet from outside
notwithstanding, Holt bore no wound except the bruise Physick gave him
with the lump of coal, and the wound which was the result of his fall.
If Holt was a German agent, he died with his secret.
We had no time to analyze the question. We knew that Holt had written
his wife he had placed dynamite aboard a ship which was at sea, and
that July 7, the date on which he had promised an explosion, was less
than two hours away. On the theory that he might have shipped an
express parcel containing a bomb overseas from some nearby station, Mr.
Scull and I spent the night in an exhaustive canvass by telephone and
motor of every station in Nassau County. Many of the station agents
were asleep, but we woke them, and searched until dawn. The net result
was record of two shipments to Europe since the day Holt received the
dynamite: One from Syosset the other from Oyster Bay. Back to New York
again we raced, and at the office of the Adams Express Company found
the Syosset package, opened it, and found--no dynamite at all. The
Oyster Bay package had already been shipped to Europe; we telephoned
the consignor, and learned that it contained clothes for a poor
relative in England.
Apparently Holt had not shipped a bomb. While we were opening his trunk
at the warehouse the night before, the government was issuing from
Washington a wireless bulletin to all ships at sea, warning them to
search the cargo thoroughly for a bomb. One by one the vessels which
had sailed during the past week reported that they had investigated
with no result, and as these reports came in we began to rest easier
in our minds. Yet he had so persistently refused to tell us of the
dynamite “until Wednesday” that we could not ignore the prophecy he
had made to his wife--“With God’s help, a ship that sailed from New
York July 3 will sink on July 7.” At noon, of Wednesday, July 7,
an explosion occurred in the hold of the steamship _Minnehaha_, in
mid-ocean, so strong as to blow out a section of the upper decks. The
_Minnehaha_ had left New York on July 3. Happily there was no loss of
life, and she reached port safely.
Two and two make four, but we must not add them for a moment. Holt--or
Muenter, as he was fully and finally identified--may have placed a
bomb in the _Minnehaha_. His promise may have been valid, but there
is another possible origin for that explosion, namely, the activities
of Paul Koenig’s little group. He may have placed a bomb on the
_Minnehaha_ which was exploded by a bomb placed there by another. He
may have placed a bomb on quite another ship--which did not explode,
and which may have traveled harmless to its consignee in England. That
consignee may have been fictitious, or he may have been an accomplice;
if an accomplice he may have been German. We must not add two and two
until we have gathered up the loose threads as they were gathered up
during those last active days, and begin to sort them out.
If we do, we shall see that the Ithaca police found in Holt’s rooms
a scrapbook curiously replete with newspaper reports of crimes,
fratricides, patricides and plain murders. But no cases of wife-murder,
nor of arsenical poisoning. And no clippings dating back of 1906;
for all the evidence of the scrapbook, Holt had never existed before
1907. His wife, who, by a queer coincidence, bore the same maiden
name, Leona, as the one whom he had poisoned, apparently knew nothing
of Holt’s life before she met him in Texas in 1909, loved him, and
married him. She did not know that he was born in Germany, and educated
in Germany or that he had fled from Chicago to Mexico in 1906 and had
then worked back into Texas as a student. He probably wrote to her
from Ithaca in September, 1914, that he had just had the pleasure of
meeting Professor Ernest Elster, of Marburg, Germany, who was visiting
Cornell, and that Elster had highly commended him for his articles on
Goethe--but if he did write to her, what then? Perhaps Herr Professor
Elster had commended Holt for some other past or projected service to
_Kultur_. There is a queer development of the story in the fact that
on September 4, 1915, Mrs. Frank Holt, writing from Dallas, Texas, to
Griffithe’s warehouse, enclosed one dollar to pay for storage on a
trunk left there by her husband July 2, and signed her name: “F. H.
Henderson.” Perhaps the rumor is true that a woman appeared at the
offices of J. P. Morgan and Company in New York on July 2, 1915, and
attempted to warn Mr. Morgan of “something that was going to happen the
next day” and perhaps she was a friend of von Rintelen’s. Mr. Morgan
never saw her. But it is a fact that Rintelen had said to an American
with whom he was dealing: “Morgan and Root ought to be put out of the
way!”
Probably--not perhaps--speculation has already carried this story too
far. The facts are that Mr. Morgan recovered from his wounds, and that
two and two make four.
IX
THE NATURE FAKER
Richard Harding Davis could have done justice to this story.
In December of 1917 we had been eight months at war. We would be an
innocent and purposely ignorant nation if we did not acknowledge that
even after we had been eight months at war there were German spies
in the United States practising their quiet trade in order to make
our waging of war as difficult as possible, just as for three years
they had practised to keep us out of the war entirely. It would be as
absurd to assume that there are not German spies in America to-day who
have been here throughout our part in the war, and who have done their
utmost to cripple us.
But there is one who will not be here indefinitely....
In December, 1917, I received a complaint that valuable papers had been
stolen from a certain Captain Claude Staughton, who lived at 137 West
75th Street, Manhattan. The Captain himself said that the lives of
thousands of American soldiers were in jeopardy, and that neither they
nor he would rest in conscious security until those papers were found.
So two other Thomases of the Bomb Squad, Sergeant Thomas J. Ford and
Detective Thomas J. Cavanagh, were sent to investigate the theft.
They found that Captain Staughton lived in an apartment on the second
floor of the premises at 137 West 75th Street and that his rooms were
shared by a Captain Horace D. Ashton. Staughton, they learned, was a
captain of West Australia Light Horse--or was supposed to be--and a
photograph they found of the captain in his uniform revealed four gold
wound-stripes on his sleeve, which suggested an interesting and heroic
experience overseas. The detectives’ first assumption was that the
missing papers had had to do with British war work on which the captain
was detailed to the United States. Then they found several photographic
prints in which he was dressed in the uniforms of other nations than
Great Britain, and their second assumption was that he might be another
of the nervy little band of counterfeit officers which had done all its
fighting in the restaurants and sympathetic check-books of New York
during the war.
The detectives learned that Ashton had his mail forwarded to the
“Argus Laboratories” at 220 West 42d Street. They called upon Ashton,
and inquired about his room-mate. Duquesne was all right, Ashton
said--was employed by an engineering company downtown as an inspector
of airplanes, was in Pittsburg at the moment, but was expected shortly
to return. Duquesne returned, and was placed under arrest on the charge
(we had no better one at the moment) of unlawfully masquerading in the
uniform of one of our allies, a uniform to which he had no title. A
thousand questions sprang up in our minds about the man: why was he
in disguise, how long had he been posing, how could he carry out the
bluff without being discovered, especially by the highly reputable firm
which employed him?--those were a few. We began to investigate, and
from Ashton and other sources we pieced together the checkered pattern
of his career. Many of the fragments are missing, and some of them are
probably in the wrong places, but this is the picture we found.
He had applied for work at the J. G. White Engineering Company on
September 18, 1917, and in his rather detailed application for
employment set forth that his name was Fred du Quesne. He stated
further that he was 39 years old, married, and a United States
citizen, though born in a British colony. His nearest relative was
“A. Jocelyn du Quesne,” in Los Angeles, and he had evidently had some
trouble in parting the name in the middle, for it was written over an
erasure. His next nearest relative was set down as “Viscount François
de Rancogne, Prisoner of War, Germany,”--an address safe enough from
prompt investigation. Last of all his relatives was cited Edward
Wortley, “Colonial Secretary, Jamaica, B. W. I.” The three names
were impressive, and with the possible exception of Los Angeles, the
addresses were too remote to enable the J. G. White Company to find out
quickly what sort of man this du Quesne might be.
He described himself as a graduate of St. Cyr, the French West Point,
as master of French and English (not German or Portuguese or Spanish),
and as having lived in England, France, Africa, Australia, Central
America, Brazil, Argentine, and the United States (but not Germany).
Present position he had none, but he would like one as “Inspector
of military devices, purchasing agent for same, or army supplies
transportation.” You or I, were we working for the Kaiser, would
have liked just such a position. He gave as references the name of
Thomas O’Connell, a relative employed by the J. G. White Company in
Nicaragua; Ashton, Senator Robert Broussard of Washington, and the
Marquis (not “viscount” this time) de Rancogne, “Lieutenant General of
Cavalry, France.”
He then set forth his previous experience, which I may quote direct in
the light of later events:
“1898 to 1899. Secretary to board of selection on military devices
and contracts. South Africa reporting Genr. de Villiers. (salary) £10
weekly.
“1899 to 1902. South African War. Was inspector of military
communication and reported secretary of war.” (_He does not state which
secretary of war_) £12.2.6 weekly.
“1902 to 1903. Lived in United States to start residence. Had an
experience job in the subway looking on. $25.00.
“1903 to 1904. Went on tour of Congo Free State in the interests of
making favorable publicity in this country for King Leopold. Gerard
Harry in charge of campaign for the King. Received $10,000 for the job,
with expenses.
“1904–5–6. Headed Eldu expedition and industrial research party in
Australia. Sir Arthur Jones financed me. Received £2,000 yearly.
“1907–8. Toured Russia for _Petit Bleu_. Publicity. 1,000 florins
weekly.
“1908–9–10. Organized and built string of theatres in British West
Indies. Financed and erected hydro-electric plant for S. S. Wortley &
Co., Kingston, Jamaica. Made percentages.
“1911–12. Lived in Nicaragua and Guatemala. Was with Mr. Thomas
O’Connell in Nicaragua for one year. Made industrial and investment
investigations, especially ore, fibre, rubber. $5,000 and expenses
yearly. Mr. Hite financed. Address New Rochelle.
“1913–14–15–16. Explored and travelled in South America, Brazil,
Argentine, Peru, and Bolivia, on own account. Also conducted special
expedition for Horace Ashton of 220 W. 42d St., New York.”
An eventful record, certainly. We asked Ashton to cast a little light
on it. Captain Fritz Joubert Duquesne, he said, was a scout in the Boer
war--“the leading scout” were his exact words--but not for the British,
but the Boers. There may have been a touch of irony in Duquesne’s
description of himself as “inspector of military communications” for
he had been captured eight or nine times in his migrations through the
British lines and had escaped each time--until the last, when he was
made a prisoner of war at Cape Town, and according to an entry in the
records of Scotland Yard, “was sent to Bermuda, whence he escaped after
the declaration of Peace.” The same records say: “The man Duquesne
was acting as correspondent for a Belgian paper, the _Petit Bleu_; he
was however in reality working for the Boers....” Duquesne fancied
photographs of himself, as he made up rather dashingly, and an old
print which the Bomb Squad men found in his effects bore out the fact
of his imprisonment, for there he stood in his Bermuda jail with the
shackles on his ankles and a grim, martyred expression on his face.
The lure of Africa called to him, evidently, and he went back. We
need not take too seriously his statement that he made a junket for
King Leopold through the Belgian Congo, but anyone who remembers the
uproar over the slavery by which the depraved old monarch was turning
his colony into gold to pay for his excesses will also recall the
international complications which the Congo threatened. It was a likely
spot for an international spy. During his survey of the publicity
possibilities of the jungle Duquesne conceived a few publicity
possibilities for himself, and he came to America as a mighty hunter of
big game.
“I ran across him first,” said Ashton, “in 1909.--At that time he was
writing an article for _Hampton’s Magazine_ called ‘Hunting Big Game
in Africa.’ In publishing his articles he needed photographs, and he
came to me. I was interested in his conversation and I said to him:
‘Why don’t you lecture?’ So he went down to the Pond Lyceum Bureau. He
went on a lecture tour for the Lyceum and later on a tour of the Keith
circuit....”
We found in his effects a program of the lectures he gave, its cover
decorated with a small round photograph of Colonel Roosevelt in hunting
costume and a large studio photograph of Duquesne in khaki, wearing
boots and a revolver, and looking sternly out of the picture as
tradition says a lion-hunter should look. Page two carried a synopsis
of his lecture, of which one topic was “Hunting with Roosevelt,” and
a reproduction of a number of newspapers which were then publishing
his “Hunting Ahead of Roosevelt,” an article written for _Hampton’s
Magazine_. On page three Captain Duquesne figured again in effigy, this
time standing beside the prostrate form of “A Rare Specimen--the ‘White
Rhinoceros,’” and we are to believe that he killed the beast. Page four
(and last), reproduced a cartoon from the _Washington Star_ of January
26, 1909, which portrayed President Roosevelt pointing to a picture
of an elephant, and enthusiastically inquiring of a hairy hunter
labelled “Duquesne”: “I want to know his vital spot!”
[Illustration: Fritz Duquesne prepared for a Lecture Tour as Captain
Claude Stoughton]
A quotation from _Hampton’s Magazine_, also printed in this program,
gives a new vision of the man’s life from 1900 to 1909. It is probably
as truthful as any--here it is:
“When the British succeeded in cutting cable communications between the
Boer Republic and the rest of the world, Duquesne carried the news of
the Boer victories over the Mozambique border, and from there he wrote
his despatches to the _Petit Bleu_, the official European organ of the
Boer Government. He was once captured by the Portuguese and thrown into
prison at Lorenzo Marques. Later he was taken a prisoner to Europe at
the request of the British Government. When the ship that conveyed him
and his guard touched at Naples, he was suffering from a fever and in
consequence was placed in an Italian hospital. On his recovery he was
allowed to go free. He went to Brussels and was sent back to the front
by Doctor Leyds, with plans for the seizure of Cape Town by the Boer
commandos then mobilized in Cape Colony.
“Everything was ready for the taking of the city when, a traitor
having revealed the plot, Duquesne and a number of others were captured
in Cape Town inside the British defenses. This was the climax of what
has come to be known as the ‘Cape Town Plot.’ Some of the prisoners
were shot and some sentenced to death who later had their sentences
changed to life imprisonment. Captain Duquesne was among the latter.
Ten months later he escaped from the Bermuda prisons, got aboard the
American yacht _Margaret_ of New York while she was coaling at the
dock, and was conveyed to Baltimore.
“Back to Europe he went again, as war correspondent and military writer
on the _Petit Bleu_; thence to Africa, where he took a commission on
the Congo. In East Africa he hunted big game for sport and profit, and
finally he came to New York to do newspaper and magazine work.”
He cut a figure in America as a hunter. Back in 1910, when Congress
amused itself with light diversions, when President Taft was in the
White House and when President Roosevelt was in Africa, the eyes of the
nation were turned perforce toward that great preserve of wild game. On
March 24, 1910, the House of Representatives’ Committee on Agriculture
went into session with the Honorable Charles F. Scott in the chair.
Late March in Washington has a hint of spring, and that Thursday was
probably an off-day, with nothing much to do, for the committee’s
business was the consideration of H. R. 23261--a bill “to import into
the United States wild and domestic animals whose habitat is similar to
government reservations and lands at present unoccupied and unused....
_Provided_, that such animals will thrive and propagate and prove
useful either as food or as beasts of burden, and that two hundred
and fifty thousand dollars ... be appropriated for this purpose.” The
bill was Representative Broussard’s, of Louisiana; he had in mind the
re-population of the unyielding backwaters of his constituency with
happy families of--what? Foreign sheep, or parrots, or egrets, or fish?
Not at all. Families of hippopotamuses.