for fear some German will kill him for turning state's evidence and revealing the whole secret German spy system in the United States. This man is the most interesting of all the known spies.
In brief, Scheele came over to this country quietly, a man quite unknown, just twenty-five years ago. For twenty-one years, up to the outbreak of the war, he received regularly $125 a month as his "honorarium" from the German Government. He was one of the fixed location spies—one of very many. He went into business, opening a drug store in a New York suburb, and he prospered there. He was not alone. There were many of his people about. He met more than one prominent German living in New York City—most of whom now live in Fort Oglethorpe. In these influential circles, in continuous close touch with Berlin, supplied all the time with money from Berlin, Scheele was appraised at his true worth as a possible agent of destruction.
Came to him, therefore, one day, a captain in the service of the North German Lloyd Steamship Company. This man carried a card. From whom? No less than von Papen, a man accepted as bearing the credentials of a foreign government, entitling him to courtesy in our own country—von Papen, one of the master plotters located on this side of the sea. Scheele was asked to invent some sort of infernal machine by which ships could be set on fire after they had left port and were on the high seas. That was all. If innocent persons died, what matter? It must be a secret sort of thing, this machine, which could be distributed without creating a suspicion. It must be efficient. It must be small. It must work without much mechanism. And it must be deadly sure. This was the sort of warfare—allied to bestiality in France and Belgium, and red ruthlessness on the high seas—that was to make Germany loved and revered in the whole world, as now, amazingly enough, she asks us to be—we, her American brothers "with whom she has no quarrel."
Very well, the order was accepted by Scheele. It was simple for this man, a mechanical and chemical genius. Of course, he needed some materials. Where should he get them except among fellow Germans? And were not
