There were some grounds for the Germans apprehension. Smith was arrested and charged with having caused the explosion on the scow. But after a little manœuvring he managed to get free of the charge and, with money wired to him at Tacoma by Crowley, went back to San Francisco where Crowley paid him first $300 and then $600 in currency.
The Germans, however, had been pretty well frightened and they thought it was about time to get both Smith and Crowley away. Smith and his wife were hustled off to Sacramento where they lived at a hotel for a little while and then Mrs. Smith was sent on ahead to New York, while Crowley and Smith arranged to meet in Chicago to carry out a new plan that the Germans had devised.
This plot was to use Detroit as headquarters for operations in Canada and there to blow up the stockyards at St. Thomas, Ontario, and trains carrying horses for shipment to Europe. Crowley and Smith got together in Chicago and visited the stockyards to spot the shipments of horses toward the Atlantic seaboard. They learned that a good many of these shipments were being routed through Canada by way of Detroit. In the meantime, however, the Germans in San Francisco were getting restless. They had expected almost every day that the ships for Vladivostok would be reported blown up or missing. They had heard neither, and they were beginning to suspect that they had been deceived. They had been deceived, but so had Crowley—and this explains the tenor of his replies in the Second Tale Told in Telegrams. The first intimation of trouble he received was a telegram from Mrs. Cornell on June 21st, to which she signed her middle initial:
Saw him noon gave message. He was astonished. Said we’ll suspend judgment for a few days. Queer news this morning. He suspects you were interested in the failure.
W.
Meantime, Crowley had gone on to Detroit and this message was wired to him at the Hotel Statler there. His reply is missing, but he evidently expressed astonishment at the message, giving some instructions for his office and asking for more particulars. To this message Mrs. Cornell replied:
Your instructions will be acted upon. Wired you first arrived.
W.
The second sentence of the message meant that the first boat, the Shinsei Maru, had arrived safely at Vladivostok, despite Crowley’s previous assurances that it had been “fixed.” This was what the Germans could not understand, and what had aroused their suspicions that Crowley had been deceiving them, and that he had possibly even been in somebody else’s pay to “double cross” them. Their suspicions were redoubled, as seems natural enough in the light of Mrs. Cornell’s message of June 29th to Crowley: