All these things I took, and part of them I stored in the rooms I had taken in an obscure street and house in Harlem. For by this time the boastful, talkative Major von der Goltz was slipping down in the world. He could no longer afford the amenities of the Holland House. It must have been quite obvious to all interested that the money he had brought from Mexico was almost spent. There are certain advantages in looking impecunious, if one knows how to use them. The furtive, secretive poor man who does no work yet has what money he needs is open to suspicion. But the broken spendthrift in his seedy clothes who cannot pay his bills and yet does nothing but talk of his own importance--he is manifestly a fool. So toward the middle of September the fool von der Goltz and four companions--Fritzen, Tucker, Busse and Covani--armed with automatic pistols and carrying suitcases crammed with high explosives, were permitted to leave New York, from the Grand Central Station, and to go to Buffalo, where they took rooms at No. 198 Delaware Avenue and were supplied with funds by wire from New York on Sept. 16, being identified by a Buffalo lawyer, John T. Ryan. After that we went on to Niagara Falls, where, within twelve miles, lay the locks of the Welland Canal, our first and most important objective. While waiting for further orders we fell victims to impatience. For sitting and waiting was all we ever did. While my superiors were hesitating to give the decisive word the first Canadian contingent had left for England, and it had been decided to postpone the attempt till another crucial moment for Canada. So the affair ended tamely, and the authorities of the United States never guessed how close they had come to being plunged into a complication which might have made the Trent affair or the Alabama affair of Civil War days seem small by comparison. I have told you I was obviously in New York with a purpose, and hoped to be unable to escape the attentions of detectives and Federal Secret Service agents. They could have stopped us at any moment, and they did not. Why? Because they thought me an impractical fool, a theatrical plotter, harmless, and wanted to let me thoroughly compromise myself before they stopped me. If the true circumstances had been like the seeming ones, that would have been thoroughly sound policy, in accordance with the best detective tradition. But---- The real circumstances were very different. My men and I were a blind. We had our explosives and meant to use them if we could. But the serious dynamiting was not assigned to us at all, but to men already in Canada, men thoroughly organized, men whose names in no way suggested German sympathies and who were not at all suspected, and never would be as long as we made-to-order German plotters were at hand.