Chapter VI: Part 6

_A._ It evidently must have been a typewriter. I would not be sure now, I think it was a typewriter.

And then the cartoon, clipped from the Philadelphia paper, brought out a very unexpected fact:

_Q._ How many times have you been in Philadelphia?

_A._ No time.

_Q._ You came to New York from Ithaca?

_A._ Yes.

_Q._ Do you mean to truthfully answer my question by saying that you have not been to Philadelphia at any time since you left Ithaca?

_A._ At no time.

_Q._ You have a clipping of a Philadelphia newspaper in your possession. Where did you get that?

_A._ I think I got that out of a Philadelphia paper of course, that I found lying around. I think it was a cartoon.

_Q._ Were you not in Philadelphia when you purchased that paper?

_A._ I did not purchase that. I saw that lying around somewhere, probably in the Mills Hotel.

_Q._ Where did you sleep last night?

_A._ Now, I will tell you. A reporter from the Associated Press asked me about this Washington business, and he was trying to connect me with that. I suppose that is what you are trying to do.

_Q._ I am not trying to connect you with anything. I want truthful answers. I am very frank and honest with you. I will fairly investigate every answer that you make.

_A._ Yes, I thought that over since he was here, and I think it is just as well to say that I wrote that R. Pearce letter. I was in Washington yesterday and came back on the train. I think it is just as well to say.

Here was news! McCahill slipped out of the room, and sent this telegram to Captain Boardman:

“Holt was in Washington Friday. Will wire full particulars later,” and returned for the particulars, which Holt continued to unfold.

He had gone to Washington early Friday, arriving at 2 P. M., hired a furnished room near the Union Station, and two hours later walked over to the Capitol and found the Senate wing deserted. He placed a bomb near the telephone booth, timed so as to explode in eight hours. He idled away the evening, mailed the R. Pearce letters, took a midnight train to New York, stopped at the Mills Hotel for mail, and took an early train to Glen Cove Saturday morning. What his activities had been since then we well knew. But while the confession of his responsibility for the Washington outrage was a really surprising bit, it did not conclude our work, for he had pointed out several new alleys of possibility which we must search.

By seven o’clock we had, first, a sketch of Holt’s recent career as a teacher. This we proceeded to verify by telephone to New York and by telegraph thence to Ithaca, Dallas, Nashville, and Philadelphia. His account of the Washington bombing Mr. Scull telephoned to Washington, and Major Pullman left at once for Long Island to secure a more complete confession. We had the numbers of his revolvers and were already at work upon that clue. We had no information except the trade-mark of where he had got his dynamite, and knowing the strict city restrictions on its sale, I felt confident that he had accomplices who supplied it to him. The chances were, too, that Holt had more dynamite than the three sticks which he said had made up the Capitol bomb, and the three on his person. We knew he had called at the Mills Hotel, and we sent a man to search his room. We had a wholly unsatisfactory statement of his birthplace, which he had already contradicted once, and which lent color to the Germanic origin of his accent. And finally, Holt had given a description of the methods he used in making his bomb which I cannot detail here for obvious reasons, but which from my acquaintance with explosives I knew to be untrue. By no means all the particulars of his acquaintance with dynamite had been explained, and the fact that this remarkable teacher of foreign languages, a man apparently of fair intellect, had committed one major crime and confessed to another all in the same day, made the motive all the more obscure. But we had learned that he talked freely, and that meant that he would give us more information, either consciously or unconsciously.

Holt was moved about half past seven that night to safer keeping in the county jail at Mineola, and we reconvened there an hour later for further examination. Major Pullman joined us in the course of the evening and took part in the questioning. By that time I had word from New York that a telegram had arrived for Holt at the Mills Hotel signed by D. F. Sensabaugh, and inquiring for particulars. Thinking that this was a clue to possible accomplices I tried, taking several different angles of attack, to find out whether Holt had told Sensabaugh (who he said was his father-in-law), what he was going to do, and why he had written that evening to his wife. The result of this questioning was nil. Then we went over his course in Washington, step by step, and brought out nothing of significance; then returned to the topic of his views on the shipment of munitions, and tried to draw out any talks which he might have had with friends on that subject. His answer to this was:

“I have not talked to my friends about it, because my friends, in my position, they are not the kind of people who would talk on such things. Do you suppose that a university professor would undertake that sort of thing? I think that can be easily figured out that I could not have anybody else with me.”

That was the conclusion which we were being forced to accept. But the mystery of the dynamite purchase was still unsolved. Holt said we could not guess the reason why he was withholding the answer to it. I was inclined to agree with him just then. I couldn’t guess. But he betrayed in one of his replies the real factor which was to solve the mystery. Major Pullman asked:

“Why did you decide to go to the Capitol?”

“Merely,” replied the thin figure in the chair, “to get the most prominent place in the country. You see I wanted to call attention to my appeal.”

In this he had succeeded. The whole country was working on the case. If our feeling that Holt had bought more explosives was no more than a theory at first, it was strengthened when he admitted that he had spent nearly $275 in two weeks, had only six sticks of dynamite to show for it, and was able to account for only $50. He denied that he had ever been in the German Club in New York, reiterated that he was born in the United States, dodged the exact city, then suggested Milwaukee, said that the name of the college he had attended in Texas “wouldn’t come,” and sidestepped cleverly any admission which might allow us to trace the dynamite purchase. Thus ended Saturday, July 3, which had started out as a holiday. I left two men to watch Holt, and went home, tired out, and not at all satisfied.

While we had been busy with the prisoner, the wires to Boston and the trains to Chicago had been carrying out their routine tasks of syndicating news. A police officer in Cambridge in reading the description of Holt which had flashed out to the newspapers detected a familiar ring to the natural phrase “shambling walk” which had been used to describe Holt’s gait. Thousands of men whom we encounter in daily life have shambling walks, but to this officer only one man had a shambling walk in which he was interested, and that man was Erich Muenter, a Harvard instructor, whom he had suspected of wife-murder nine years before. Nine years is a long time, and the average person cannot recall offhand the gait of anyone whom he last saw nine years ago, but those two words had evidently typified to the Cambridge officer the murderer who got away. When the news photographs followed the description to Boston and the Cambridge police saw them, they were not so sure, for Muenter had had a beard, and in his Cambridge days his head was not bandaged. But suspicion had been aroused, and that was enough to issue the news throughout the country during the night. Reporters in Ithaca tried to verify it from Holt’s associates at Cornell, and failed, reporters two thousand miles away in Dallas tried to verify it from Holt’s confused father-in-law, and failed. Dallas, however, supplied the particulars of his previous life so far as anyone seemed to know them, and these particulars were again relayed, verified, and amplified in every city in which Holt had ever been known in recent years.

Sunday morning, Independence Day, I went early to Mineola and questioned Holt again, with little result. Meanwhile the Bomb Squad at work in New York had found one of the shops in Jersey City where Holt had purchased a revolver. He gave his name to the proprietor as “Henderson,” and his address as Syosset, Long Island--a little station not far from Glen Cove. I asked him why he gave this fictitious name and address; he replied he had happened to see Syosset on a timetable, and that the name Henderson popped into his head. We then returned to my favorite subject, dynamite, and Holt finally said that he would tell me on the following Wednesday, July 7, where he had bought it. Why Wednesday, July 7? He would not answer, and no amount of questioning served any end except that of further confusion.

The day was not without developments, however. During the afternoon District Attorney Smith of Nassau County paid a visit to the jail, and identified the wretched Holt as a former acquaintance in Cambridge, Erich Muenter. At almost the same hour the Chicago authorities came into possession of the news photograph of the man mailed from New York the day before. They hurried with it to the home of two spinsters, known to be sisters of the missing Muenter, and obtained from them an unqualified identification: it was their lost brother, and “the news would kill their mother.” This Pearce-Lester-Holt-Henderson-Muenter was becoming more interesting every minute. Wife-poisoner, dynamiter, gunman--what next?

“Next” was Monday. The second revolvershop had been discovered, and again the use of the alias Henderson and the address Syosset. Holt, when I called on him in the morning, repeated only what he had told the day before, and reiterated, “Wednesday I will tell you,” until it became almost a refrain. He denied that he was Muenter, and that he had ever heard the name. I returned to New York to spend the rest of the daylight in investigation among the explosives’ manufacturers. From the records of the Ætna Company, of which the Keystone was a subsidiary, we learned during the afternoon that one Henderson had telephoned an order for 200 sticks of dynamite to be delivered at Syosset. I was just ready to start for Syosset with Commissioner Scull when, as if we had not already had enough to interest us, our friends the anarchists exploded a bomb in Police Headquarters itself. Curiously enough, although it was a delay, this did not prove the disturbing incident which one might believe. We had had anonymous threats of it some weeks before; it was one year and a day after the accidental death of the anarchist Berg, who was killed making a bomb, and it seemed to have no connection whatever with the Holt case. No one was injured, and after steps had been taken to follow the case, I went home to sleep what was left of the night.

Tuesday arrived.

I went to Syosset, and interviewed the station agent, George D. Carnes. Carnes said he knew a man named Henderson. Henderson had seen him first about three weeks before when he came to the little station to claim a new trunk which had been shipped down from New York, apparently empty, as it weighed only thirty-six pounds. Henderson had signed for the trunk, and gone away. He reappeared some days later and asked Carnes whether he had received two boxes of dynamite and two boxes of fuses and detonating caps--he had to blow up some stumps and he expected the explosives. They had not arrived. Henderson made inquiries for several days, and when the boxes came, claimed them, signed the name of Frank Hendrix to the receipt, and drove away in a Ford. At last we seemed to be on the right trail.

He had received the material, we knew, but where was it? In the trunk, perhaps. Had the trunk been shipped out of Syosset? No, Carnes said. We telephoned several stations in the vicinity, and finally at Central Park, a few miles west, we struck the trail again. The baggage records there revealed that a Henderson had checked a trunk to the Pennsylvania station, New York, on July 2--Friday. That was enough to take us to Central Park.

The check number I telephoned to New York for detectives to trace 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.

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!”

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.

The Gentleman from Louisiana addressed the meeting briefly, saying that he had brought to the hearing three distinguished specialists in the matter of wild beasts, Dr. Irwin of the Bureau of Plant Industry, Major Frederic Russell Burnham, a fine old pioneer whom Richard Harding Davis did describe in his “Real Soldiers of Fortune,” and “Captain Fritz Duquesne, formerly in the Boer army, who is lecturing and writing on this subject....” Dr. Irwin spoke earnestly for the introduction of the hippo, Major Burnham made an absorbing address on the habits of wild animals he had known--and a herd of camels he once pursued in Texas--and our bright and voluble Captain Fritz then told the committee extraordinary things of the home of the hippopotamus, the delicacy of its flesh, the amiability of its temperament, and the carelessness of its appetite. “During my boyhood,” he said at one stage of the proceedings, “the French soap manufacturers used to come down there and pay us all sorts of prices, competing with one another, to get the fat of the hippopotamus; and we made a considerable amount of money from saving the fat when we killed a hippo. The Boers were in the habit of going down to the river and killing a hippo and bringing it in and dividing it among the different families in the district. It is pretty hard to get rid of four and a half tons of meat. In the case of the bones of the animal, we would take an ordinary wood saw and saw them in halves, and make a great big pot of soup for a large number of the people, including the Kaffir servants on the ranch, or the farm, as we call it.” Again: “My father was instrumental in sending the camel to Australia from Africa, and also in introducing it into the Kalahari desert. The German Government now uses the camel exclusively for its cavalry in the Kalahari desert, which is practically the counterpart of the deserts in this country. My father had the contract to take them over to Australia for the West Australian Government and I took them over there. To-day camels and ostriches from Africa are being raised in Australia.”

Mr. Chapman asked: “Do you think animals such as you have mentioned would become acclimated here without difficulty?” Duquesne replied: “Yes, I was over there recently in one place where Colonel Roosevelt passed through, and the frost was that thick (indicating about one inch). That is where he went to get some of his best animals....” In discussing the zebra he said: “There is nothing wrong with the animal. The English in Africa want to get percentage, you know. They put an animal out and they want to break it in right away, and they want to get some money for it right on the spot. That is what they are in Africa for. They want to take on the animals and break them in at once. The Germans are more scientific than the English. In German East Africa they are making a great success of domesticating these animals I have spoken of, and crossing the zebra.... The Germans in Germany, France, and Belgium, not to mention those in the United States, tried scientifically to make the leopard change his spots, too.”

The man really exhibited an unusual acquaintance with wild beasts, and he summed up the picturesque argument for the bill when he said: “If there is vegetation in a river, the hippopotamus will never leave the river. If you had the hippopotamus in Louisiana and it ate up all your water plants you would be quite willing to let the hippo live down there. You see the water plants have to live on a certain amount of air, and the fish live on a certain amount of air. Neither the plant nor the fish can live on air that is not there. As the plant is the stronger, and is able to take the air from above, it will draw it at the bottom and draw it from the top, and the fish is suffocated in the water. Then when a storm comes and blows the water plants, which are floating, all to one side, the fish are netted up against them and kept in one place until they die. These plants exhaust the air in the water that is passing through the fishes’ gills and that destroys the fish.” I wish there were space here to reproduce all the proceedings of that hearing--it is historic vaudeville: a German spy teaching a class of American congressmen about the hippo, and suggesting subtly that when they purchase a fleet of the great beasts for the Louisiana bayous, they let him round them up. He would have done it if there had been American money in it.

2. Duquesne as a Boer Soldier

3. From Duquesne’s Press Notices

4. As a British Prisoner of War

5. A Prisoner’s Bank Note Found in Duquesne’s Effects]

American money appeared from another source, however, in 1911. Duquesne had been working in a desultory way for the moving pictures, and he interested one Hite, a functionary in the Thanhouser Film Company, in a plan to explore Central America with a moving-picture camera. Ashton said he also obtained financial support from Frank Seiberling of the Goodyear Rubber Company of Akron, a great patron of sports, and the financier of the ill-fated balloon “Akron” in which Walter Wellman once tried to cross the Atlantic. He set sail in 1911 for Jamaica, where he enlisted the finances of his father-in-law, Wortley, in the project, and then moved on to Guatemala. There he was suspected of revolutionary activities, and after cabling Washington and receiving a satisfactory report from the state department, he was released, and made his way through Honduras to Nicaragua. There he spent some time, and saw something of O’Connell, the railroad man--enough to receive a pass over all lines of the Nicaraguan railroad.

In 1913 he returned to the United States. Among the papers which we discovered was a record of an insurance policy for a maximum of $80,000 worth of moving picture film at $4 a foot, which Duquesne took out with the Mannheim Insurance Company in New York on December 17. He was setting out on another expedition, and he wished to insure his reels of film on shipboard from

“seas, fires, pirates, rovers, assailing thieves, jettison,
barratry of the master and mariners, and all other perils,
losses and misfortunes that have or shall come to the hurt,
detriment or damage of the said goods and merchandise or any
part thereof.”

By a separate certificate the company also insured Duquesne against further risk, thus:

“It is agreed that this insurance covers only the risk of
capture, seizure or destruction by men-of-war, by letters of
marque, by taking at sea, arrests, restraints, detainments
or acts of kings, princes and people authorized by and in
prosecution of hostilities between belligerent nations....”

and off to the Spanish Main and the pirates and the assailing thieves sailed Fritz Duquesne.

His migrations during the years of 1914 and 1915 are not clear. This much is certain: that on June 16, 1915, Sir C. Mallet, the British minister at Panama, wrote to the foreign office in London the following note, setting forth an observation he had made that day in the Zone:

“Through a Canal Zone detective I learnt confidentially that a passenger named Captain F. Duquesne, travelling with a passport issued by the United States Consul at Mañaos, Brazil, had embarked for Trinidad on the R. M. S. _Panama_ on the 14th instant.

“My informant stated that Captain Duquesne poses as an American officer but in reality is an intelligence officer in the service of the German Government.

“I have warned the Governor of Trinidad by telegraph so that a watch may be kept on Captain Duquesne’s movements.”

The wily captain had been cruising rather busily through the Caribbean, over the Isthmus, and into South America. His passport connected him with Mañaos, the British message established his presence at Panama and Trinidad, a German war communiqué dated “December 20,” and signed by the German consul, Lehmann, in Guatemala, showed that he was an acceptable guest at the outposts of the German Empire. And he had visited Nicaragua before he entered Panama in 1915, for we found in his possession this letter:

“Managua, May 5, 1915.

“Imperial German Consulate
for Nicaragua:

“It is a pleasure for me to recommend to you, my countrymen,
the bearer of this, Mr. Fritz Duquesne, Captain of Engineers to
the Boer army, very warmly.

“The same gentleman has on many occasions given many notable
services to our good German cause.

“The Imperial German Consul,
“UEBERSEXIG.”

Enclosed in the envelope was Uebersexig’s personal card, reinforcing his recommendation of Duquesne as an accredited German agent.

Trinidad is a good jumping-off place into the far tropics, and it is quite possible that as Ashton said Duquesne disappeared into the interior of Brazil, and “explored the unknown regions of Brazil and the Amazon.” It is not hard to find unknown regions of Brazil within a few miles of the coast. He probably did not penetrate far into the interior, for in January of 1916, he showed up in lower Brazil.

He emerged from the interior as a valiant explorer, preceded by native carriers whom he had hired to transport his precious movie-film. As he approached the port of Bahia Duquesne’s personality underwent a perceptible change. Duquesne suddenly became George Fordham. Among his papers we found an application for shipment by a Brazilian broker which read as follows:

“Honorable Superintendent.

“Francisco Figuerado requests a permit to ship for New York
via steamer _Verdi_ to sail on January 28, 1916, a case as
described below:

“Bahia, January 27, 1916.

“Raul E. de Oliveira, Custom House Broker.

“1 case weighing 80 kilos 00$500

“One case of potter’s earth in dust (samples)”

Potter’s earth may have been included in the materials in the case, but that is doubtful, for on October 4, 1916, “Mrs. Alice Duquesne being duly sworn deposes and says that she accompanied her husband, Captain Fritz Duquesne, during his trip through Central America in the Spring and Summer of 1914. That in the baggage was an iron trunk used to carry moving picture films and negatives which she presumes to be the same trunk that was subsequently shipped by Capt. Duquesne per the S. S. _Tennyson_ from Bahia to New York sailing in January, 1916. That the said trunk was about ½ inch thick, and made of iron about 45 inches in length by 30 inches in height by 26 inches in depth ... had a hinged cover that overlapped the sides of same, and fastened down with two thumb screws and a lock. That two iron bands went around the trunk and were riveted to same. That the cover was lined with packing where it overlapped the sides of the trunk. That the said trunk was of very solid construction, painted a dark green, almost black, and that two men were required to lift same.” Hardly a suitable receptacle for potter’s earth. Furthermore, George Fordham, whose handwriting is identical with that of Fritz Duquesne for the simple reason that the two men were the same, on February 11 signed an invoice at the American consulate in Bahia stating that he solemnly and truly declared that the 28,000 feet of moving picture film and the 4100 negatives which he was shipping back to the United States were to the best of his knowledge and belief of the manufacture of the United States and had been exported from the United States in 1913.

1. A significant clipping found in Duquesne’s effects

2. A German Communique found on Duquesne

3. The United States Customs invoice by which Duquesne, as
“George Fordham,” shipped his “Films”
]

The _Tennyson_ sailed quietly out of the river-mouth into the Atlantic and Duquesne vanished just as quietly. On February 26, when the ship was coasting along the Brazilian forest toward the Equator, a terrific explosion occurred in her hold, and three sailors were killed. The iron trunk never reached New York. The news of the catastrophe set fire to the British in South America and the English press seethed with such paragraphs as this--which we found in Duquesne’s papers, clipped from an Argentine newspaper:

“Rio de Janeiro.

“The confession of the clerk Bauer, arrested in connection
with the _Tennyson_ outrage, which led to the discovery of the
papers and funds of the band of German bombers in an English
safe deposit institution reveals a plot of far-reaching
consequences fraught with danger to the neutrality of a number
of South American republics, as well as peril to the lives of
their citizens.

“Besides a number of important documents, the police seized
$6,740 in American bills, which were in an envelope marked
‘On His Majesty’s Service’ and addressed: ‘Piet Naciud.’
When this name was published it caused quite a shock in the
Allied circles here, as this man always cultivated their
society and even recited at their benefits. He was ever loud
in his denunciations of the Germans, and as he was a Boer,
or pretended to be one, was doubly liked for his seemingly
praiseworthy attitude. Little did the English dream that they
were harbouring a black-hearted spy in their midst whom they
now know as one of the leading plotters whose audacity is
beyond belief. The safe deposit was in his own name, and he
gave his home address as Cape Town. Neither he nor the agent
Niewirth and his fellow conspirators have yet been arrested. It
is believed that they left with Naciud in a powerful motorboat
that he owned.”

How Captain Fritz Duquesne, alias Fordham, alias Naciud, must have chuckled as he sat safely in the neutral Argentine and read this flattering tribute to his audacity. For he did turn up presently in Buenos Aires, and embarked on a new audacity--nothing less than collecting the insurance of $80,000 for the loss of the film which he claimed to have shipped in the iron box!

Let Ashton take up the story:

“... his wife ... tried to collect the insurance, but was advised that she would have better chances ... if he would disappear. He then assumed the name of Fredericks. In 1916 a report was published in the New York _Evening Post_ and the New York _Times_ that he had been assassinated by Indians in the interior of Bolivia, and being interested I called at the office of the N. Y. _Post_ and asked Mr. A. D. H. Smith, editor, to look this report up, and he found that the report came from the Associated Press, the same being signed ‘Fredericks.’ They also had a cablegram signed, ‘Captain Duquesne,’ and it said: ‘I am still alive.’ The report also said that he was the sole survivor of an attack from the Indians and that he was somewhere in Bolivia recovering in a hospital, the location being unknown. He sent the message signed ‘Fredericks’ himself from Buenos Aires.

“He then became connected with the Board of Education of the Argentine, supplying films for the schools, and a certain politician in Buenos Aires claims he gave him $24,000 with which to purchase films (certain educational films). He claims to have come to New York with a man named Williamson and purchased the films, paying $24,000 in cash.”

Mrs. Duquesne was already in New York, having a hard time collecting her claim against the German-owned Mannheim Insurance Company for the “sympathy verdict” for damage to the films. He stored the new films he claims to have purchased in the Fulton and Flatbush Warehouse, 437 Carlton Avenue, Brooklyn--stored them as “statuary,” and used to visit the warehouse frequently. On one occasion he arrived after hours, and tried unsuccessfully to bribe the watchman to admit him. He moved to a small hotel in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and about two weeks after the storage of the cases of “statuary” in the Brooklyn warehouse, the warehouse mysteriously caught fire.