The Argosy, Vol. XXV, No. 1 — page 126: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

126 AN AMATEUR IN DYNAMITE. stead of furnishing a home for Ottilie, were steadily and rapidly undergoing conversion into beer, for allaying the unslakable thirst of the agitator, whose diatribes against ‘‘ Capital, Church, and State, the Satanic Trinity in Unity,” made his throat dry all the time. | Herr Boldtner, the piano maker, a stolid, elderly German, not much given to talking, shook his head gravely when he heard Gottlieb repeat, parrot- like, the evil and violent talk of his friend, but wasted no words in argument. Only, when he was gone, the old man would say to Ottilie, ‘‘Some day he does a big foolishness and comes by Sing Sing, sure.’’ The girl, whose apprehensions were already awakened by the too pain- fully evident change in her lover’s formerly abstemious habits, was not a little alarmed by her father’s prophecy, and set herself to watch for and, if possible, arrest before it went too far, the ‘‘ foolishness’’ that would lead to such a bad end. Gottlieb, she well knew, was not naturally an Anarchist, but Max’s influence upon his impressionable nature was fast making him one. ‘‘ And,’’ she said to herself, ‘‘he will put Gottlieb up to do something awful that will land him in jail, while he sits safe in the dark.” A prognostication much more correct and nearer to realization than she imagined, She tried reasoning with him, against his reflection of Max’ specious sophistries, but with little or no effect. He loved her, but said to himself, “‘ Of course a woman could not see what necessity demands men shall do against the capitalistic tyrants. ‘The thought of fire and blood would frighten her, and she would faint at sight of a spoonful of dynamite.” One very hot night Ottilie’s six year old brother, Hugo, was feverish and slept badly. About midnight he cried for water and Ottilie, who was as a mother to him, got up to supply his want. ‘To do so, she had to enter the kitchen, the rear room of the flat, and was momentarily startled by finding it alight with the reflected glare of gas from a window facing her, in the next extension of the building. That window was Gottlieb’s, as she well knew, having often talked with him across the eight feet wide air space. In front of each window—his and hers—was a fire escape balcony, rather rickety, as such structures are apt to be on old houses, and lumbered with miscellaneous utensils and débris. . Fearing her lover might be ill, she looked across. He was fully dressed, as if he had just come in, and in the act of taking from a coat pocket a small package, that he laid very gingerly upon the table before which he stood. Then he began taking something else from another pocket, but stopped suddenly to look at the gas flame, as if it suggested an apprehension, under the impulse of which he cautiously moved the package to the end of the table farthest from the light and covered it with his hat. The something else he next produced was simply a cylinder of metal, four or five inches long and probably two in diameter. With his strong fingers he unscrewed a plug that fitted one end of it and peered inside. It was empty and he laid it down. The last thing he put on the table was what looked to Ottilie like a coil of thick black string, with a bit of bright metal at one end. Before these objects he stood motionless several minutes, regarding them gloomily, as if Eomichook (S@)