Holt was not shot by a German. Holt was not shot at all. An aged guard had been left to watch him that evening, just after Barnitz and I had left, for the prisoner, despairing over the Muenter identification, had already made one attempt with a bit of tin from a lead pencil to cut the arteries of his wrists, and we did not want him to try again. The old bailiff who sat outside the cell cage had not only left the cage door unlocked, but had been careless enough to leave Holt’s cell door ajar. The prisoner seemed quiet enough, and the bailiff fell asleep. He woke to find Holt’s body in a twisted heap in the center of the floor of the cell corridor. Holt had evidently been feigning sleep and while the bailiff dozed had crept out, climbed to the top of the cage, and dived headforemost to the concrete floor.

There we found him. The man’s skull was crushed from the impact of his dive. Rumors that he was shot by a mysterious rifle bullet from outside notwithstanding, Holt bore no wound except the bruise Physick gave him with the lump of coal, and the wound which was the result of his fall. If Holt was a German agent, he died with his secret.

We had no time to analyze the question. We knew that Holt had written his wife he had placed dynamite aboard a ship which was at sea, and that July 7, the date on which he had promised an explosion, was less than two hours away. On the theory that he might have shipped an express parcel containing a bomb overseas from some nearby station, Mr. Scull and I spent the night in an exhaustive canvass by telephone and motor of every station in Nassau County. Many of the station agents were asleep, but we woke them, and searched until dawn. The net result was record of two shipments to Europe since the day Holt received the dynamite: One from Syosset the other from Oyster Bay. Back to New York again we raced, and at the office of the Adams Express Company found the Syosset package, opened it, and found—no dynamite at all. The Oyster Bay package had already been shipped to Europe; we telephoned the consignor, and learned that it contained clothes for a poor relative in England.

Apparently Holt had not shipped a bomb. While we were opening his trunk at the warehouse the night before, the government was issuing from Washington a wireless bulletin to all ships at sea, warning them to search the cargo thoroughly for a bomb. One by one the vessels which had sailed during the past week reported that they had investigated with no result, and as these reports came in we began to rest easier in our minds. Yet he had so persistently refused to tell us of the dynamite “until Wednesday” that we could not ignore the prophecy he had made to his wife—“With God’s help, a ship that sailed from New York July 3 will sink on July 7.” At noon, of Wednesday, July 7, an explosion occurred in the hold of the steamship Minnehaha, in mid-ocean, so strong as to blow out a section of the upper decks. The Minnehaha had left New York on July 3. Happily there was no loss of life, and she reached port safely.

Two and two make four, but we must not add them for a moment. Holt—or Muenter, as he was fully and finally identified—may have placed a bomb in the Minnehaha. His promise may have been valid, but there is another possible origin for that explosion, namely, the activities of Paul Koenig’s little group. He may have placed a bomb on the Minnehaha which was exploded by a bomb placed there by another. He may have placed a bomb on quite another ship—which did not explode, and which may have traveled harmless to its consignee in England. That consignee may have been fictitious, or he may have been an accomplice; if an accomplice he may have been German. We must not add two and two until we have gathered up the loose threads as they were gathered up during those last active days, and begin to sort them out.

If we do, we shall see that the Ithaca police found in Holt’s rooms a scrapbook curiously replete with newspaper reports of crimes, fratricides, patricides and plain murders. But no cases of wife-murder, nor of arsenical poisoning. And no clippings dating back of 1906; for all the evidence of the scrapbook, Holt had never existed before 1907. His wife, who, by a queer coincidence, bore the same maiden name, Leona, as the one whom he had poisoned, apparently knew nothing of Holt’s life before she met him in Texas in 1909, loved him, and married him. She did not know that he was born in Germany, and educated in Germany or that he had fled from Chicago to Mexico in 1906 and had then worked back into Texas as a student. He probably wrote to her from Ithaca in September, 1914, that he had just had the pleasure of meeting Professor Ernest Elster, of Marburg, Germany, who was visiting Cornell, and that Elster had highly commended him for his articles on Goethe—but if he did write to her, what then? Perhaps Herr Professor Elster had commended Holt for some other past or projected service to Kultur. There is a queer development of the story in the fact that on September 4, 1915, Mrs. Frank Holt, writing from Dallas, Texas, to Griffithe’s warehouse, enclosed one dollar to pay for storage on a trunk left there by her husband July 2, and signed her name: “F. H. Henderson.” Perhaps the rumor is true that a woman appeared at the offices of J. P. Morgan and Company in New York on July 2, 1915, and attempted to warn Mr. Morgan of “something that was going to happen the next day” and perhaps she was a friend of von Rintelen’s. Mr. Morgan never saw her. But it is a fact that Rintelen had said to an American with whom he was dealing: “Morgan and Root ought to be put out of the way!”

Probably—not perhaps—speculation has already carried this story too far. The facts are that Mr. Morgan recovered from his wounds, and that two and two make four.

IX
THE NATURE FAKER

Richard Harding Davis could have done justice to this story.