WERNER HORN’S PLAN OF ESCAPE
The pencilled line left from Vanceboro and down to Princeton was Horn’s own mark upon the map of the route by which he hoped to escape after he had blown up the international bridge. He did not know the country and hence did not calculate upon the wilderness he was planning to traverse, unguided, in the dead of a New England winter. The pencilled ring around St. John, N. B., gives the cue to his purpose in blowing up the bridge—St. John was a port from which the war supplies from America to Great Britain could be shipped for use against the Germans
But trust the people in a country town to catalogue a stranger. Horn went directly from the train about his errand; which was reckoning without the Misses Hunter and the twelve-year-old Armstrong boy. They saw him toiling through the snow, marked the unusual weight of his suitcase from the way he carried it, saw him hide it in the woodpile by the siding—and then they talked. Soon Mr. Hunter hurried to the Immigration Station and told an inspector there about the suspicious stranger. The inspector hurried down the railroad track and met Horn returning from the international bridge that spans the St. Croix River a few hundred feet away. He asked where the stranger was going. Horn’s reply was to ask the way to a hotel. When his name was next demanded he gave it as Olaf Hoorn, and said he was a Dane. The inspector then asked what he was in town for, and Horn said he was going to buy a farm. And, finally, the inspector asked him where he came from. When Horn explained in detail that he had come from New York via Boston the inspector, with a true legal mind, decided that he “had no jurisdiction,” and let it go at that. His concern in life was with “immigrants” from Canada—and this man had proved that he had come from “an interior point.” Hence he could do nothing officially, for the moment.
But the Misses Hunter’s sharp eyes saw the stranger, after this interview, recover the suitcase from the woodpile before going on to Tague’s Vanceboro Exchange Hotel for the night. The host at the hotel was not on duty when Horn registered, and never saw his baggage, but his mother, who happened to have occasion to enter Horn’s room in his absence on the following Monday, noticed the suitcase, tried to lift it, and wondered how any one could carry it. Horn was a marked man from the moment he arrived in the town.
Evidently he sensed the suspicions he aroused, for he made no effort to proceed about his business that night, or the next. But shortly before eight o’clock on Monday night Horn gave up his room and said he was going to Boston on the eight o’clock train. He took his suitcase and disappeared. Instead of going to the station, he hid out in the woods until the last train for the night should go by. At eleven he was encountered in the railroad cut above the bridge by an employee of the Maine Central Railroad, who got such unsatisfactory answers to his questions that he talked the matter over with a fellow workman in the roundhouse, though without results. So Werner Horn marched out alone upon the bridge—alone except for his cigar and his suitcase, the spirit of the Fatherland upon him and the lying words of Von Papen in his ears.
He had need of the fire of patriotism to warm his blood and to steel his courageous spirit. It was a black winter night. The mercury was at thirty degrees below zero, the wind was blowing at eighty miles an hour, the ice was thick upon the cross-ties beneath his stumbling feet. The fine snow, like grains of flying sand, cut his skin in the gale.
But Werner Horn was a patriot and a brave man. Von Papen had told him that over these rails flowed a tide of death to Germans—not only guns and shells, but dum-dum bullets that added agony to death. He must do his bit to save his fellow soldiers; must help to stop the tide. Destroy this bridge, and for a time at least the cargoes would be kept from St. John and Halifax. It was a short bridge, but a strategic one, and the most accessible. So Horn stumbled on. He must get beyond the middle. Von Papen had not urged it, but Werner Horn had balked about this business from the first—not through lack of courage (he would go as a soldier upon the enemy’s territory and there fire his single shot at any risk against their millions), but he would not commit a crime for anybody, not even for the Kaiser; nor would he trespass on the soil of hospitable America. Hence on each sleeve he wore the colours of his country: three bands, of red and white and black. Von Papen had beguiled him into thinking these transformed him from a civilian to a soldier. Twice as he struggled through the darkness he slipped and fell, barely saving himself from death on the ice below. Each time he clung doggedly to his suitcase full of dynamite.
Suddenly a whistle shrieked behind him, and in a moment the glaring eyes of an express train’s locomotive shone upon him. Horn clutched with one hand at a steel rod of the bridge and swung out over black nothingness, holding the suitcase safe behind him with the other. The train thundered by, and left him painfully to recover his uncertain footing on the bridge. The second of Von Papen’s lies had been disproven.
He had promised Horn that the last train for the night would have been gone at this hour, for Horn had said he would do nothing that would put human lives in peril. But Horn thought only that Von Papen had misunderstood the schedules.