The door swung open, and the big German sat back on his bed. Then he saw the Canadian uniforms and jumped for his coat. Doe shoved him back, and one of the constables got the coat, and the revolver in it. When Doe told Horn he was an American officer, Horn stopped resisting and said:
“That’s all right, then. I thought you were all Canadians. I wouldn’t harm any one from here.”
Doe handcuffed Horn to his own arm and took him to the Immigration Station to make an inquiry. Here Horn told a straightforward story, but with one embellishment that caused more excitement than all the rest, and that ultimately revealed his own character in its clearest light. This story was that he had not brought the dynamite in his suitcase, but that, by prearrangement, he had carried the empty suitcase to the bridge and there met an Irishman from Canada, to whom he gave the password “Tommy,” and that this Irishman had given him the explosive and then disappeared.
“Tommy” immediately became a sensation who overshadowed Horn himself. Canadian officers scoured the Canadian shore for days, looking for this dangerous renegade, and Americans were as zealous on our side of the river.
But Horn himself was in a dangerous position. Lynching bees were discussed on both sides of the river, and probably only prompt action by the local authorities prevented one. Both to hold Horn for more serious prosecution and to get him out of peril, he was charged in the local police court with malicious mischief in breaking the window glass in one of the houses in Vanceboro; he pleaded guilty and was at once removed to Machias, the county seat, to serve thirty days in jail. Five days after the explosion, the Department of Justice had Horn’s signed confession, taken in person by the Chief of the Bureau of Investigation.
It was in the giving of this confession that Werner Horn revealed himself most fully as a patriot and a gentleman, and, all unconsciously, revealed that the cynical Von Papen was a liar, a cold-blooded criminal, and, for the second time in the first months of the war, the secret hand behind the violations of American neutrality instigated through him and Bernstorff at the behest of the Imperial German Government.
When the government agent saw Horn in jail at Machias, and warned him that what he said would be used against him in proceedings for his extradition into Canada, or prosecution here, Horn told the same straightforward story, with the same embellishment about “Tommy.” “I met a white man,” so Horn said, “whom I had never seen before, but who was about 35 or 40 years of age clean shaven—‘Tommy’—I was told to say ‘Tommy’ when I met him—I cannot say anything that would involve the consulate or the embassy—Germany is at war—I received, however, an order which was from one who had a right to give it, a verbal order only—received it two or three days before leaving New York for Vanceboro.”
Later he said: “I cannot speak of the rank of the man who gave the orders—I cannot even say that he was an officer. No one was present when the orders were given me in New York City. I cannot tell more because it was a matter for the Fatherland. I would rather go to Canada [where he knew they wanted to lynch him] than to tell more about my orders—this would be impossible—at least until after the war is over.”
Horn admitted he had met Von Papen several times at the German Club in New York City, but no art could compel him to admit that he had got his orders from him. But, as the agent noticed, his manner gave his words the lie; and whenever he tried to tell anything that was inaccurate he did so with great difficulty and embarrassment. But finding him determined, at whatever risk, to withhold this information, and determined, too, to stick to the absurd story about “Tommy,” the agent wrote out by typewriter a statement of the facts as he had given them for Horn to sign.
Horn read the statement over and said that he would sign it. Then the agent took out his pen, added a few items of new information, and wrote these words: