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.