Mrs. Holt’s Mysterious Letter 208 The First Word from Texas 208 Fritz Duquesne prepared for a Lecture Tour as Captain Claude Stoughton 224 From Fritz Duquesne’s Past 230 Papers found in Fritz Duquesne’s effects 236 Lieutenant Commander Spencer Eddy 248 Major Fuller Potter, Military Intelligence 252 Lieutenant A. R. Fish, Naval Intelligence 260 Captain John B. Trevor, Military Intelligence 268 THROTTLED! I THE BOMB SQUAD For the past twenty-three years I have been a member of the police department of the City of New York. It is a long time, in any single job. The department is comparable in size to a manufacturing establishment of the first magnitude--it employs more than ten thousand men--and its occupations are varied enough to suit the inclinations and ambitions of any man. And so I went through the mill, graduating from one duty to another until in 1914 I was an acting captain, and had been in charge of various branches of the Detective Bureau in Brooklyn and Manhattan. My duty was the detection of crime, my specialty, meaning by that the special branch of crime with which I had been most often thrown into contact, was bomb-explosions. As far back as 1904 there were a number of mysterious explosions in New York which caused considerable property damage, and there I made the acquaintance of the bomb itself. It was an interesting subject for study, and a wicked weapon in use. I managed to pick up information of bomb-manufacture in several ways: Black-Handers, in prison, told me how they had made their missiles; at the New York office of the Du Pont explosives company I had an opportunity to study blasting; the publications of the Bureau of Mines furnished more information, the practice of the Bureau of Combustibles of our own department proved interesting and instructive, and I found myself before long forced to become something of a student of chemistry. The difference between our work and the work of the laboratory chemist, however, was that in our case there was no time to make an explosive mixture and test it--some criminal usually had done that for us, and we were called to the scene to find out, from such clues as the wreckage afforded, the name and address of the criminal. The laboratory chemist mixes ingredients and counts his work done at the moment of explosion; the detective begins at that moment a stern chase, and a long one, back to the ingredients and the man who mixed them.