HORN’S APPLICATION FOR A FURLOUGH
Issued by the military authorities of Cologne, on the Rhine near the Dutch border, permitting him to leave Germany for two years. The furlough was later extended, as Horn was gone nearly five years before the war broke out
Now began a series of conferences with Von Papen. Horn was afire with honest zeal to serve the Fatherland, and Von Papen was unscrupulous as to how he did it. When he could not get passage for him back to Germany, Von Papen determined to use this blond giant (Horn is six feet two) for another purpose. He then unpacked his kit of lies.
A little after the midnight of Saturday, December 29, 1914, a big German in rough clothes and cloth cap entered the Grand Central Station carrying a cheap brown suitcase. A porter seized it from him with an expansive smile. The smile faded long before they reached Car 34 of the one o’clock New Haven train to Boston. “Boss, yoh sho’ has got a load o’ lead in theah,” was his puffing comment as he got his tip. The German grinned, and a few minutes later swung the suitcase carelessly against the steam-pipes under Lower 3, and clambered to the upper. A suitcase full of dynamite—and the man in Lower 3 slept on.
Several people on the Maine Central train that left North Station, Boston, at eight o’clock the next morning, afterward identified the big blond German who left it at Vanceboro, Maine, at six forty-five that evening. None of them recalled his baggage.
