Chakravarty got bail from a surety company without much trouble. Two or three days after his arrest he called me up on the telephone and said that a man named Gupta had threatened him. “He says I must give him $2,000. And there is another man named Wagel. He is a Hindu. He wants $10,000 from me, otherwise he will do me harm. He already has had $7,000 from the German Government in Mexico. He has demanded $20,000,000 of Count von Bernstorff to finish up the revolution in India.”

“Wait a minute, now,” I suggested. The figures were going to my head. “Where is Wagel?”

“I do not know,” Chakravarty answered.

“Well, where is Gupta?”

“He is a student at Columbia,” replied the little man.

“All right, doctor,” I said, “we’ll not let any harm come to you.”

Detectives Coy and Walsh at once got on the trail of Gupta. They found him in his dormitory room at 73 Livingston Hall, Columbia, and brought him to headquarters. “I saw of Chakravarty’s arrest in the paper,” he said, “and I thought I might be arrested if he implicated me.” Gupta knew full well he would be arrested, for there was jealousy between the two, and he went on to reveal why.

Heramba Lal Gupta was then thirty-two years old. Since his boyhood in Calcutta he had been all over the world, and had studied in the United States. In the spring of 1915 he had several conferences with Captain von Papen in the city in which the military attaché conceived such confidence in the young Hindu that he gave him $15,000 for expense money and sent him to Chicago to confer with Gustav Jacobsen, an ex-German consul. With him went Jodh Singh, another Hindu who had migrated from Brazil to Berlin and thence to Captain von Papen, and an art collector named Albert H. Wehde. They were joined by George Paul Boehm and a German named Sterneck, and two plans were arranged. Gupta, Singh and Wehde were to proceed to Japan to establish connections and obtain assistance for fomenting Indian revolt. Boehm and Sterneck were to go to the Philippines, pick up a third plotter, Chakravarty’s lawyer-friend Chatterji, proceed thence to Java to meet two escaped officers of the destroyed German cruiser Emden, and thence to the Himalayan hills north of India, where Dr. Frederick A. Cook, the Arctic romancer, was on an expedition. There they were to overpower the Cook party, Boehm was to assume the explorer’s identity and travel about the hills spreading sedition among the native tribes. This wild plan failed completely, as the Germans never kept their appointment in Java. (Gupta believed in preparedness to the extent of taking Boehm to several shooting galleries in Chicago and practising pistol firing with him.)

Gupta, Singh and Wehde set sail from San Francisco in the Mongolia and landed in Yokohama, September 16, 1915. Gupta immediately got in touch with various prominent Hindus. Although their conferences were enthusiastic and the prospect of obtaining Japanese arms for the revolution was good, his work was hampered by the discovery on the part of British agents that Gupta was in Japan. He was notified within a week of his arrival that he must leave by the next steamer: the next steamer was bound for Shanghai, a British port; the order was equal to delivery into the hands of the British, and death. A Japanese friend came to his rescue. He took him to his house, followed by the police. By a subterfuge the police were distracted long enough to allow the Hindu to slip out the back door, jump into an automobile, and flee to the interior of the country. There he was hidden for six months, between the flimsy walls of his friend’s house. It was May of 1916 before he could escape, smuggled out in an eastbound vessel, and it was June before he returned to New York. There he found that the following order had been issued from Berlin:

“Berlin, February 4, 1916. To the German Embassy, Washington.

“In future all Indian affairs are to be exclusively handled by the committee to be formed by Dr. Chakravarty. Dhirendra Sarkar and Herambra Lal Gupta, the latter of whom has meanwhile been expelled from Japan, thus cease to be representatives of the Indian Independence Committee existing here.

“(Signed) Zimmermann.”