Unhappy Wedell! “The Cruiser ——” was a ship that never made port. Wedell’s high connections in the German Foreign Office could not save him from the activities of the high officials of the German Admiralty. A U-boat fired a torpedo into “the Cruiser ——” and sent her to the bottom with Rosato Sprio, alias H. A. Wedell, aboard.
Exeunt Wedell and Ruroede.
Enter Werner Horn.
[CHAPTER II]
The Inside Story of Werner Horn
and
The First Glimpse of the Ship Bombs
The real mystery in the case of Werner Horn is this: Who was the man in Lower 3? (If he had only known——!) Because, except for this one missing fact, the story of Werner Horn is as clear as day. It is the story of a brave man, too honest to lie with a straight face, who was used by the villainous Von Bernstorff and Von Papen only after they had lied without a quiver, on at least three vital points, to him. He meant to fight the enemy of his country as a soldier fights, and they cynically sent him on an errand which they meant should be an errand of miscellaneous crime, including murder. He was to go to a felon’s death for this one of the many devilish plots they were concocting against American lives, while they lived in luxury in Washington and lied with smiling faces to the representatives of the people whose hospitality they were betraying. There have been few more despicably outrageous, more cold-blooded crimes than this—except that other one (also of their devising) in the ship bombs case; but that is another story, to be told later.
The story of Werner Horn begins in Guatemala. Horn was the manager of a coffee plantation at Moka. He had seen ten years of service in the German Army when, in 1909, he got a furlough from the authorities in Cologne permitting him to go to Central America for two years. This furlough writes him down as an “Oberleutnant on inactive service.” That means, roughly, that he was a first lieutenant of the German Army, out of uniform but subject to call ahead of all other classes of men liable for military duty. Then came the war.
Two hours after word of “The Day” reached Moka, Werner Horn was packed and on his way to Germany. From Belize he sailed to Galveston, where he spent two weeks looking in vain for passage. Then on to New York, where he tried for a month to sail. Finding that impossible, he went to Mexico City and there learned that another man in Guatemala had his job. He had just found another one, on an American coffee plantation at Salto de Aguas, in Chiapas, and was about to go there by launch from Frontera, when he got a card telling him to try again to get to Germany. By December 26th he was back in New Orleans, and a few days later he was lodging in the Arietta Hotel on Staten Island.