“‘I want you to go with us. Everything is very well planned. There is no fear that we will not get all the help we want after we have started. We are going to move like an army. If we should get whipped at first, or if we should have to run, then we all have places to go to. The Southwest Side group is going to a church on Eighteenth Street, and we will fortify ourselves there until we get help. We will have a lot of dynamite bombs to keep everybody away. We have rifles and revolvers, and no one will dare come near us. We can hold the fort there for a few days, and no one will trouble us. Only throw out a bomb once a day, and that will be sufficient to prevent the enemy from coming near. The North Side group is going to follow our plan. They are going to take charge of St. Michael’s Church. We have things down fine. You had better come along. There is no danger. We expect a lot of people here from Michigan and all the mining towns. They will all come here as soon as we begin the attack.’
“Mende asked me at one time to go with him,—this was during the McCormick strike,—and told me they were going to take with them tin cans, which would be filled with kerosene. These cans would have strong corks in them, and through each a hole had been drilled, for the insertion of a cap and fuse. They would simply light the fuse, throw the can into a lumber yard, and walk off. No one would discover who did it, and then they would see a big fire. ‘In this way we’ll bring these d——d capitalists to time.’ I told Mende that I would have nothing to do with him or his plans.
“Two days after the bomb had been thrown, he said to me:
“‘I know the man who threw the bomb, and, you bet, he is a good friend of mine. He will never be arrested.’
“About eight days after the explosion, he told me that he knew the man who made bombs, and that the man was going to leave the city. This man, he also said, had changed his clothes, and he (Mende) had got the clothes from a man named Sisterer, who lived on Sixteenth Street. I then asked him the name of the man who made the bombs, and he said it was Louis Lingg.”
Mrs. Sauer next related her grievances against her brother.
“This brute,” she began, “not being satisfied with having all the neighbors afraid of him, had to torment the life out of me, telling me that he belonged to those fellows who would kill, give no quarter and take none. In a fight the result would be victory or death. He would tell me that as soon as they had established their government the children of the capitalists would be hunted up and killed, and every trace of a capitalist wiped off the face of the earth. My brother reads all kinds of Anarchist books and papers. I saw him have a big revolver and a lot of cartridges, and he said:
“‘We are going to kill all the police now in a few days. They all must be killed. They stand in our way. We cannot get our rights so long as we let those bloodhounds live. So we have decided to kill them all. We are ready now, and you will not see any more of those fellows hanging around the corners.’
“He also said that the Fire Department was a well-organized body, and they, too, must be destroyed.
“‘Before the battle commences,’ he said, ‘we are going to fix the bridges with dynamite, so that, in case the Fire Department should come to the relief of the police or go to work to extinguish the fires that we start, we will blow the bridges, firemen, horses and all to h—l.’