The pursuit of Robert Fay unearthed what trial lawyers delight in calling “not one scintilla of evidence” that he had actually set fire to a ship. Fay was punished for what he intended to do and not for any real achievement for the German cause. Yet the thought persisted in our minds that he knew who was making and placing ship bombs. He professed ignorance. “I do know this much,” he said, after a long session of futile questioning, “I do know that a certain man paid another man $10,000 to make those bombs. I won’t tell you who he is, because I think he is now a prisoner in the Tower of London, and he might get into more trouble. You can make what you like out of that.” We made this out of it--that the prisoner then in the Tower to whom Fay referred was probably Franz Rintelen. He was a German of prominent station who had had a vision quite like Fay’s--a vision of interrupting American shipping, and so damming the flood of war supplies. In early 1915 he had come to America equipped with plenty of authority and a bank credit limited only by the resources of the German Empire, and had spent six months here trying to exercise that authority and spend the money in numerous ways. He had tried to buy rifles of the American government, he had fostered peace demonstrations, promoted strikes, lobbied for an embargo on munitions and made himself busily useless in numerous other ways, only to sail for home in the fall of the year--and fall into the hands of the British. But the charges which I have just cited, and which are now fully confirmed against this man, were not then known to us, and Fay’s tip was too ambiguous to help us at the moment. Instead of ceasing after his arrest, the fires continued. The day after we caught Fay in the woods the steamer _Rio Lages_ which had sailed a few days previously took fire out at sea. A week later a blaze started in the hold of the _Euterpe_. The _Rochambeau_, of the French line, caught fire at sea on November 6, and the next day there was an explosion aboard the _Ancona_. The _Tyningham_ suffered two fires on her voyage east during early December. There was a maddening certainty about it all that suggested that every ship that left port must have nothing in her hold except hungry rats, parlor matches, oily waste and free kerosene. Never in the history of the port had so many marine fires occurred in a single year. Marine insurance was away up and our patience was away down.