- atives visited the vicinity shortly after dark. A light did
appear which might have been that of a lantern. It would dim and come on again. The informant stated that sometimes the light would grow as bright as an automobile light, and sometimes it would seem to be red. The next morning the operatives found a farmer plowing near the suspicious house. He admitted that he owned the house. He said he and his wife were American born, of British grandparents. The operatives asked him about the mysterious lights. Smilingly he asked them to go through the house. It then was clearly evident that the light they had seen came from a lamp in the middle of a room. The mysterious intermittent flashes were only due to persons passing between the lamp and the window. The farmer also said he often worked nights bundling up beets, carrots, radishes, etc., which he had pulled during the afternoon and expected to take to early market the next morning. He usually did this work just outside the house on a bench. On inquiry as to what he used, he showed a large carriage lantern with a reflector, in the back of which was a piece of red glass. So the women had been right after all. He would move this lantern from one end of the bench to the other as he worked, and this made the changes in the color of the light. The intermittent flashes were due to his passing back and forth in front of it.
A big chemical poison scare was nipped in the bud by the investigation of a German woman who was found putting up capsules of a white powder in her house. Of course, nothing less than poison for our soldiers and sailors could be predicted. Investigation proved that though the woman was of German descent, she was entirely loyal to this country. She made a little extra money at home filling capsules for a drug house in the city. These capsules contained bicarbonate of soda, tartaric acid, etc., and the woman took a few of them in the presence of the operatives to show that they were harmless. Thus, another case proved to be a "dud."
An alien enemy was wanted at Albany, reported by D. J. to be traveling on a motor-cycle. It was known that he had a girl not far away and called on her or wrote to her occasionally. The mails in this case, as in many others, were used for decoy purposes. A registered special delivery letter, marked for personal delivery only, was mailed to him
