Page:The web (1919).djvu/122

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on their guard. To begin with, his cigar bombs did not work infallibly—perhaps the motion of the ship would slop the acid away from the tin partition so it would not cut through quite on schedule. One or two bombs were found on shipboard. One or two were found unexploded in the coal when ships were unloading at Bordeaux. The bombs were traced back to New York. Dock laborers had been bribed to put them aboard ships sometimes—and sometimes were ashamed to do so and dropped them into the water instead. Men who can decipher code can run a trail like this. Scheele soon was located.

But Scheele had fled long before. Why? Whither? The Imperial German Government knew Scheele was going to be caught. The large spies of the German embassy promised to pick Scheele up at Cuba—where he had taken temporary residence under the practically German custody of a Spaniard who kept him in a castle which also was a prison. And so it came to pass that when the embassadorial train of the Imperial German Government was kicked out of America and all these big spies were named openly, and all the news of that big spy system began to break, von Bernstorff, von Papen and company sailed for Germany—but they did not take any chances. They did not stop at Cuba.

Scheele was abandoned by his people—he was an actual prisoner in Cuba. He was bitter. He might talk under a third degree. An A. P. L. man of New York Division, Richmond Levering, now Major Levering, U. S. A., went to Cuba, got access to Scheele, took him to Key West, took him back again to Cuba—but took him back to an actual prison. Then, finding he had no place in the world, and no friend whose protection he could not buy, he sold his "honor of a German officer" to the United States, and in return, he is still alive, having paid as the price of life the full story, so far as he knows it, of the German Imperial spy system from Wilhelmstrasse to Brooklyn Bridge.

And there you have a spy, a real one, a man who planned murder and arson on the high seas, death to unknown hundreds of men, women and children; the man who invented the mustard gas that tortured and killed our boys