It was during a great strike, and outrages were being committed all over the city of New York by dynamiters supposed to be in the employ of the unions.  Young Guthrie, who was a reckless daredevil, offered his services to the employers, and agreed to join one of the local unions and try to find out who were the men blowing up office buildings in process of construction and otherwise terrorizing the inhabitants of the city.  Accordingly he applied for membership in the organization, and by giving evidence of his courage and fiber managed to secure a place as a volunteer in the dynamiting squad.  So cleverly did he pass himself off as a bitter enemy of capital that he was entrusted with secrets of the utmost value and took part in making the plans and procuring the dynamite to execute them.  The quality of his nerve (as well as his foolhardiness) is shown by the fact that he once carried a dress-suit case full of the explosive around the city, jumping on and off street cars, and dodging vehicles.  When the proper moment came and the dynamite had been placed in an uncompleted building on Twenty-second Street, Guthrie 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!