The day was not without developments, however. During the afternoon District Attorney Smith of Nassau County paid a visit to the jail, and identified the wretched Holt as a former acquaintance in Cambridge, Erich Muenter. At almost the same hour the Chicago authorities came into possession of the news photograph of the man mailed from New York the day before. They hurried with it to the home of two spinsters, known to be sisters of the missing Muenter, and obtained from them an unqualified identification: it was their lost brother, and “the news would kill their mother.” This Pearce-Lester-Holt-Henderson-Muenter was becoming more interesting every minute. Wife-poisoner, dynamiter, gunman—what next?

“Next” was Monday. The second revolvershop had been discovered, and again the use of the alias Henderson and the address Syosset. Holt, when I called on him in the morning, repeated only what he had told the day before, and reiterated, “Wednesday I will tell you,” until it became almost a refrain. He denied that he was Muenter, and that he had ever heard the name. I returned to New York to spend the rest of the daylight in investigation among the explosives’ manufacturers. From the records of the Ætna Company, of which the Keystone was a subsidiary, we learned during the afternoon that one Henderson had telephoned an order for 200 sticks of dynamite to be delivered at Syosset. I was just ready to start for Syosset with Commissioner Scull when, as if we had not already had enough to interest us, our friends the anarchists exploded a bomb in Police Headquarters itself. Curiously enough, although it was a delay, this did not prove the disturbing incident which one might believe. We had had anonymous threats of it some weeks before; it was one year and a day after the accidental death of the anarchist Berg, who was killed making a bomb, and it seemed to have no connection whatever with the Holt case. No one was injured, and after steps had been taken to follow the case, I went home to sleep what was left of the night.

Tuesday arrived.

I went to Syosset, and interviewed the station agent, George D. Carnes. Carnes said he knew a man named Henderson. Henderson had seen him first about three weeks before when he came to the little station to claim a new trunk which had been shipped down from New York, apparently empty, as it weighed only thirty-six pounds. Henderson had signed for the trunk, and gone away. He reappeared some days later and asked Carnes whether he had received two boxes of dynamite and two boxes of fuses and detonating caps—he had to blow up some stumps and he expected the explosives. They had not arrived. Henderson made inquiries for several days, and when the boxes came, claimed them, signed the name of Frank Hendrix to the receipt, and drove away in a Ford. At last we seemed to be on the right trail.

He had received the material, we knew, but where was it? In the trunk, perhaps. Had the trunk been shipped out of Syosset? No, Carnes said. We telephoned several stations in the vicinity, and finally at Central Park, a few miles west, we struck the trail again. The baggage records there revealed that a Henderson had checked a trunk to the Pennsylvania station, New York, on July 2—Friday. That was enough to take us to Central Park.

The check number I telephoned to New York for detectives to trace from the station if they could. Information of a stranger is freely offered in a village, and we found shortly that Holt had employed a small boy with a wheelbarrow to convey his trunk from a shanty in the woods to the station, and to the shanty we went. Near it lay a charred dynamite-box, and there were a few wax-paper wrappers from sticks of dynamite which the weather had left for our information. No explosive was to be seen, but there was evidence that he had burned some of it nearby.

Mrs. Holt’s Mysterious Letter The First Word from Texas

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If he had not burned it all, the balance of those two hundred sticks were in the trunk. The day was growing old. Carnes and I sped back to Mineola, and the station agent identified Holt as the dynamite man. I repeated my questions; Holt replied, “I will tell you Wednesday.”