Their chiefs were elusive. Captain von Papen sauntered out of the Ritz-Carlton into Madison Avenue, New York, one afternoon. He idled down to Forty-second Street, and paused, as if undecided where to promenade. He turned east, walked a block, and turned again down the ramp into the Grand Central Station. Quickening his pace--he had only a minute more--he crossed the great waiting-room, presented a ticket at the train gate, and a moment later was in the Twentieth Century Limited, the last passenger aboard. He was seen next day in Chicago. And for a month thereafter he was completely lost to the authorities, while, as they found out later, he made a grand tour of the country, going first to Yellowstone Park, then down the Pacific Coast to Mexico, where he joined Boy-Ed, and finally returning to New York through San Francisco. He had ample opportunity to confer with his consular deputies, and his destroying agents. In August a train loaded with 7,000 pounds of dynamite from the du Pont works at Pinole, California, was destroyed; in the evidence against von Papen is this letter concerning the price to be paid for the Pinole job: "Dear S.: Your last letter with clipping today, and note what you have to say. I have taken it up with them and 'B'" (who was Franz Bopp) "is awaiting decision of 'P'" (who was von Papen) "in New York, so cannot advise you yet, and will do so as soon as I get word from you. You might size up the situation in the meantime." Glancing back over the record of 1915--which was hardly mitigated in the succeeding years of war--one is inclined to marvel at the hardy perennial pose of the deported attaché, who said as he left the United States: "I leave my post without any feeling of bitterness, because I know that when history is once written, it will establish our clean record despite all the misrepresentations and calumnies spread broadcast at present." FOOTNOTE: [2] Franz Schulenberg was a deserter from the German army who advertised in the Spokane newspapers in February, 1915, for land on which to colonize a number of Spanish families. These families turned out to be Hindus, whom he proposed to employ in obtaining information of Canadian shipping, to be relayed by secret wireless to German raiders in the Pacific. Schulenberg was captured on December 5, 1917, in an automobile on the road from Santa Cruz to San Francisco, two days after he had left a woman spy who was associated with von Papen's office, and who directed Schulenberg's movements in the United States. He admitted having bought, in 1915, a ton of dynamite, fifty Maxim silencers, fifty rifles, and a quantity of fuse for shipment to Hindus near the Canadian border, between Victoria and Vancouver. CHAPTER IX MORE BOMB PLOTS