The Explosion
He fixed the dynamite against a girder of the bridge above the Canadian bank of the river, adjusted the explosive cap, and touched his cigar to the end of the three-minute fuse. Then he stumbled back across the gale-swept icy bridge, and back into the hotel at Vanceboro, just as the dynamite exploded with a report that broke half the windows in the town, and twisted rods and girders on the bridge. Everybody in Vanceboro was aroused, but Horn, after a futile attempt to rub his hands and feet with snow, turned in and went to sleep. He had seen all he wanted to of dynamite. In a town turned out of doors with excitement, sleeping was in itself an act to arouse suspicion.
People remembered the tall Swede who had been hanging around Vanceboro for a couple of days, and the suitcase which he had been seen to hide in a wood-pile near the tracks. After some delay, during which Horn slept peacefully, the sheriff and a couple of Canadian constables were got on the job, and they took him at about noon in Teague’s Hotel. He was wearing German colors on both sleeves, for he had been told that they would be regarded, were he caught, in the light of a uniform. He offered little resistance, but in telling his story, he interpolated an innocent lie that caused the Canadian officials a good deal of anxiety. He had not brought the dynamite in his suitcase, he said, but had carried the empty suitcase to the bridge, where an Irishman from Canada, in response to the pass-word “Tommy,” had given him the dynamite. This detail he afterwards cleared up, when asked to set his name to a paper concluding, “I certify on my honor as a German officer that the foregoing statements are true.” He would not sign a lie and set his name to it as the truth.
“Too scrupulous for a spy,” one of the newspapers called him, in the perplexities awakened by this early manifestation of the afterwards famous bomb-plot, “and too thickheaded for an honest man.” Werner Horn was extradited to Canada, and everybody joined in congratulating the man, whoever he might have been, who slept in the lower berth the night Horn took an upper for Vanceboro. It had developed during the trial that the big German, to disencumber himself, had chucked the suitcase under the lower berth, against the shoes and the hot-water pipes, then had climbed into the upper, to sleep peacefully through the night as was his wont. The evil effects of dynamite were comparatively novel at that time, even to bomb-plotters.