“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been out-of-date), Horn decided that what he was to do must be done at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.