Meanwhile, four of the agents from the Department—the minute they received the signal that Ruroede was under arrest—hastened to the Barge Office dock and boarded the revenue cutter Manhattan, on which they overtook the Norwegian Line steamship Bergensfjord at four o’clock, about one half hour after it had set sail. They were accompanied by several customs inspectors and ordered the Bergensfjord to heave to. All the male passengers on board were lined up. Strange as it may seem, they discovered four Germans, of such unmistakable names as Sachse, Meyer, Wegener, and Muller, travelling under such palpably English and Norwegian names as Wright, Hansen, Martin, and Wilson. Stranger still, they all turned out to be reserve officers in the German army. Sache proved to be travelling as none other than our friend “Howard Paul Wright,” for whom Aucher had supplied Ruroede with the passport—as, indeed, he had for the three others.
Meanwhile, Ruroede was the centre of another little drama that lasted until well toward midnight. He was being urged by the United States Assistant District Attorney to “come across” with the facts about his activities in the passport frauds, and he had stood up pretty well against the persuasions and hints of the attorney and the doubts and fears of his own mind. About eleven o’clock at night, as he was for the many’th time protesting his ignorance and his innocence, another agent of the Bureau of Investigation walked across the far end of the dimly lit room—in one door and out another—accompanied by a fair-haired lad of nineteen.
“My God!” exclaimed Ruroede, “have they got my son, too? The boy knows nothing at all about this.”
This little ghost-walking scene, borrowed from “Hamlet,” broke down Ruroede’s reserve, and he came out with pretty much all the story, ending the melancholy exclamation with which this story began: “I thought I was going to get an Iron Cross; but what they ought to do is to pin a little tin stove on me.”
Ruroede admitted that he had met Captain Von Papen in New York frequently and that Von Papen had given him money at different times, but he denied that this money was given him for use in furnishing passports. On this point he stood fast, and to this day he has not directly implicated Von Papen in these frauds, though it cost him a sentence of three years in the Federal penitentiary at Atlanta, imposed just two months later.
One thing Ruroede did confess, however, and in doing so he was the Hand of Fate for the timorous Von Wedell. Ruroede confessed that his assertion to Aucher, that Wedell was then in Barcelona, was a lie, and that the truth was that Wedell had recently returned from Cuba and was aboard the Bergensfjord! This confession came too late to serve that day, for the agents of the Bureau had by that time left the ship with their four prisoners and the Bergensfjord was out to sea. But Fate had nevertheless played Wedell a harsh trick, for the processes of extradition were instantly put in motion with what strange results will in a few moments be made clear.
VON PAPEN AND ALBERT APPEAR AS UNNEUTRAL PLOTTERS