gave the signal and the police arrested the dynamiters--all of
them, including Guthrie, who was placed with the rest in a cell in
the Tombs and continued to report to the district attorney all the
information which he thus secured from his unsuspecting associates.
Indeed, it was hard to convince the authorities that Guthrie was a spy
and not a mere accomplice who had turned State's evidence, a distinction
of far-reaching legal significance so far as his evidence was concerned.

The final episode in the drama was the unearthing by the police of
Hoboken of the secret cache of the dynamiters, containing a large
quantity of the explosive. Guthrie's instructions as to how they should
find it read like a page from Poe's "Gold Bug." You had to go at night
to a place where a lonely road crossed the Erie Railroad tracks in the
Hackensack meadows, and mark the spot where the shadow of a telegraph
pole (cast by an arc light) fell on a stone wall. This you must climb
and walk so many paces north, turn and go so many feet west, and then
north again. You then came to a white stone, from which you laid your
course through more latitude and longitude until you were right over the
spot. The police of Hoboken did as directed, and after tacking round and
round the field, found the dynamite. Of course, the union said the whole
thing was a plant, and that Guthrie had put the dynamite in the field
himself at the instigation of his employers, but before the case came to
trial both dynamiters pleaded guilty and went to Sing Sing. One of them
turned out to be an ex-convict, a burglar. I often wonder where Guthrie
is now. He certainly cared little for his life. Perhaps he is down in
Venezuela or Mexico. He could never be aught than a soldier of fortune.
But for a long time the employers thought that Guthrie was a detective
sent by the unions to compromise THEM in the very dynamiting they were
trying to stop!

I once had a particularly dangerous and unfortunate case where a private
client was being blackmailed by a half-crazy ruffian who had never seen
him, but had selected him arbitrarily as a person likely to give
up money. The blackmailer was a German Socialist, who was out of
employment--a man of desperate character. He had made up his mind that
the world owed him a living, and he had decided that the easiest way
to get it was to make some more prosperous person give him a thousand
dollars under threat of being exposed as an enemy of society.