There is something in the spectacle of Rintelen serving his sentence at Atlanta--a long sentence, which he tried numerous tricks to evade--that is peculiarly German, and that comes more nearly satisfying our popular desire for retribution than the plight of any of his wretched employees. He came to America arrogant, rich, defiant, cruel, and sly--to wage war upon us. One of his first acts was to sign his check for $10,000 to manufacture bombs to destroy our shipping. When certain Americans crossed his reeking trail he ran away in terror. By great good luck he was captured, discovered, and returned and by considerable persistence and patience on the part of the Bomb Squad one of his trails was laid bare. (He had many others.) He suffered great indignity, as he thought, at being tried with the manual laborers whom he had employed and left in trouble. He was convicted and sent to prison. He pleaded ill-health, though he was a strong man, and he tried to be transferred to a more lenient prison. He invoked the aid of his crumbling government, who informed Washington that unless he were surrendered to Germany that nation would take the lives of American soldiers captured in battle. Every trick failed, and Franz Rintelen, tried not as a prisoner of war for what morally were acts of war against the United States, but by our peace courts, and under our lenient peace laws, must now serve out his term in an American prison, although his nation has given up the war and begged for clemency. Rintelen used to suggest that he was an illegitimate relative of the late Kaiser. It may be true: the two have something in common. The Kaiser has become plain Hohenzollern, and the chief German bomb-plotter in the United States, is, as Wolpert angrily said that day at headquarters, “not _von_ Rintelen, damn him--_Rintelen_!” VIII MR. HOLT’S FOUR DAYS The facts were apparently unrelated to each other. Only a flight of imagination would have connected them, and imagination, though it is often valuable in speculating on what probably happened, is not court evidence of what did happen. In the order of their occurrence, the facts were these: