Siebs had some difficulty in doing this, because Fay and Scholz, being
unfamiliar with the use of the explosive, were unable to explode a
sample of it and decided that it was no good. They had come home in the
evening and found the keg on their dresser and had opened it. Inside
they found the explosive in the form of loose white flakes. To keep it
more safely, they poured it out into several small cloth bags. They
then took a sample of it and tried by every means they could think of
to explode it. They even laid some of it on an anvil and broke two or
three hammers pounding on it, but could get no result. They then told
Siebs that the stuff he had delivered was useless. Siebs repeated their
complaint to Wettig, and Wettig volunteered to show them how it should
be handled. Accordingly, he joined them the following day at their
room in Weehawken and went with them out into the woods behind Fort
Lee, taking along a small sample of the powder in a paper bag. In the
woods the men picked up the top of a small tin can, built a fire in
the stump of a tree, and melted some of the flake TNT in it. Before it
cooled, Wettig embedded in it a mercury cap. When cooled after being
melted, TNT forms a solid mass resembling resin in appearance, and is
now more powerful because more compact.
However, before the experiment could be concluded, one of the swarm of
detectives who had followed them into the woods stepped on a dry twig,
and when the men started at its crackling, the detectives concluded
they had better make their arrests before the men might get away; and
so all were taken into custody. A quick search of their boarding house,
the garage, a storage warehouse in which Fay had stored some trunks,
and the boathouse where the motor boat was stored resulted in rounding
up the entire paraphernalia that had been used in working out the
whole plot. All the people connected with every phase of it were soon
arrested.
Out of the stories these men told upon examination emerged not only
the hideous perfection of the bomb itself, but the direct hand that
the German government and its agents in this country had in the scheme
of putting it to its fiendish purpose. First of all appeared Fay’s
admission that he had left Germany with money and a passport supplied
by a man in the German Secret Service. Later, on the witness stand,
when Fay had had time enough carefully to think out the most plausible
story, he attempted to get away from this admission by claiming to have
deserted from the German Army. He said that he had been financed in
his exit from the German Empire by a group of business men who had put
up a lot of money to back an automobile invention of his, which he had
worked on before the war began. These men, so he claimed, were afraid
they would lose all their money if he should happen to be killed before
the invention was perfected. This tale, ingenious though it was, was
too fantastic to be swallowed when taken in connection with all the
things found in Fay’s possession when he was arrested. Beyond all doubt
his scheme to destroy ships was studied and approved by his military
superiors in Germany before he left, and that scheme alone was his
errand to this country.