A few days later Crowley told Smith to go to Tacoma and register at the Donnelly Hotel, and that he would join him there, going by another train. There they would manufacture bombs of a type which Smith had devised, and Smith was to place these bombs on the ships that would carry the powder to Russia.
Smith took his wife to Tacoma. They registered at the Donnelly Hotel, but as they soon discovered they would have to spend some time in the city, they took an apartment. Smith and Crowley were constantly meeting and between them surveyed all the shipping in the harbour and found out when the boats would sail and what they were carrying. The barge load of powder from California was towed into the harbour while they were there, and anchored in midstream to await the lightering of its cargo to the trans-Pacific ships. These ships proved to be the Kifuku Maru and the Shinsei Maru (Japanese), the Hazel Dollar, an American boat flying the British flag, and the Talthybius, a British ship. Smith undertook to place bombs on all of them.
What Smith actually did was to visit small stores in Tacoma and near Seattle and buy regular commercial 40 per cent. dynamite in sticks, telling the storekeepers that he was clearing a farm and wanted the dynamite for use in blowing up stumps. He loaded a lot of it into an old suitcase and left Crowley one afternoon, telling him he was going to place this on one of the ships that night. Instead, he went out into the woods with it, cached it under a log, the position of which he fixed in memory by a big stump and a tree that had a big rock in its fork, then walked on down to the railroad track, carrying his suitcase, and later threw the suitcase away down an embankment. He reported to Crowley that he had not been able to get anything on the Kifuku Maru, which was the first to sail, but that he had “fixed” the Hazel Dollar, the Shinsei Maru, and the Talthybius.
“WHEN THE WATER GETS TO THE BOILERS”
The explosion of the boilers of one of the neutral merchant steamers sunk by the Eitel Friedrich
Crowley, in the meantime, had been keeping in touch with the Germans in San Francisco. It had been arranged that all dealings with them were to be through Von Brincken. Crowley, on his part, kept in touch with his secretary, Mrs. Cornell, she communicating in person, or by telephone, with Von Brincken, and Von Brincken reporting to Bopp and getting further orders.
A great deal of the story from this point on is A Tale Told in Telegrams. The first of these telegrams, which figured in the subsequent trial, was dated Tacoma, May 13, 1915. It was addressed to Crowley who had not yet joined Smith. The message was: