“Oh, yes,” he replied.
“Have you made up your mind, then, as to what you wish to say?”
He answered in the affirmative.
“Will you tell me all you know of the Anarchists ever since you became one of them?”
Assent being given, I continued: “Now, you must understand I know a great deal of this work myself.”
Otto said he so understood.
“Well, I don’t want you to lie to me, and I don’t want you to lie about anybody else to benefit yourself. All you tell me must be true, and if I find that you conceal anything, I will consider you a liar and have nothing more to do with you.”
“Oh, yes,” meekly and penitently replied Lehman, “I do agree with you on that point, and you will find me right. I will swear to all I say, and if I lie you can hang me in this station. But, Captain, I want something for telling the truth.”
“Well,” I replied, “I will have the State’s Attorney or his representative here, and if he tells you to speak and promises to reward you, you can depend upon his word.”
In the presence of Assistant State’s Attorney Furthmann, Otto at once unburdened his mind and related his knowledge of Anarchy in Chicago. He also testified to a fact, made apparent in my interviews with other prisoners, that he, like others, had been carried away by “the d——d Anarchist literature,” as he expressed it, and that he now fully realized the utter folly of his past course. He had been told, he said, just as others had been told, by those who had lived in America for a long time, that this was a free country, and there was no law to stop them. “You can see for yourself,” they used to say to him, “they are all afraid of us. Nobody interferes with us. We have everything all our own way.”