After all, Imperial Germany possessed a lumbering sense of the theatrical. It had realized that the little newborn town of Hopewell, Virginia, sheltered hundreds of men drawn from the laboring classes, uneducated, ignorant save of the work they were paid for, foreign to a large extent, and among these men were those in whose minds ran the superstitious strain which breeds faith in the occult and fortune-tellers. In the hands of a clever fortune-teller these men might be made to talk, without realizing that they were giving away information to the hidden enemy of America. This was the explanation of the presence of Baroness Theresa Verbecht in Hopewell as arbitress of destinies, in the guise of Madam LaVere, Mystic. In one of the myriad clap-boarded shacks of Hopewell she ladled out the mysteries of the future and the well-known facts of the present with lavish hand, and drank in all the information she could glean by clever questioning and suggestion, from the superstitious who passed in never-ending lines through the doors of her emporium of mystery. Hopewell held much of interest for Germany. Little more than a year before its site had been unploughed fields over which the winds blew in broad sweeps bending the green grasses in soft undulations and bobbing the heads of wildflowers that dotted the fields. Soon with war's shadows growing deeper over Europe the call had come from the Allies for explosives. The fields had been cleared and a great guncotton factory spread its broad stretches over the ground where the wildflowers had bobbed. And about the factory sprang up a town, or rather a half a mile from the factory, for guncotton is a thing to be respected whether in the maw of a cannon or in the making. The town was a hit and miss affair, a similitude of western towns which sprang up over night in the days of gold rushes. Its streets, a crowded mass of unpainted shacks, lean-tos, and tents; cheap hotels, _sub rosa_ gambling places, in fact all the attributes of the town of mushroom growth peopled with the polyglot population of a manufacturing town of America, the melting pot of the races. The day that Madam Stephan and Von Lertz, fleeing from Exeter, realized that the plot which they had maneuvered to what seemed unquestionable success, had failed, Franz von Papen received a telegram from Madam LaVere. "Everything O.K. Send me good man for dangerous work." The telegram so tersely worded meant more than words could convey. It meant that after weeks of work Baroness Verbecht had learned as much as possible about the guncotton factory, its orders, its guards, its shipments and its most vulnerable points.