The Enemy of All the World

by Jack London

It was Silas Bannerman who finally ran down that scientific wizardand arch-enemy of mankind, Emil Gluck. Gluck's confession, beforehe went to the electric chair, threw much light upon the series ofmysterious events, many apparently unrelated, that so perturbed theworld between the years 1933 and 1941. It was not until thatremarkable document was made public that the world dreamed of therebeing any connection between the assassination of the King andQueen of Portugal and the murders of the New York City policeofficers. While the deeds of Emil Gluck were all that wasabominable, we cannot but feel, to a certain extent, pity for theunfortunate, malformed, and maltreated genius. This side of hisstory has never been told before, and from his confession and fromthe great mass of evidence and the documents and records of thetime we are able to construct a fairly accurate portrait of him,and to discern the factors and pressures that moulded him into thehuman monster he became and that drove him onward and downwardalong the fearful path he trod.Emil Gluck was born in Syracuse, New York, in 1895. His father,Josephus Gluck, was a special policeman and night watchman, who, inthe year 1900, died suddenly of pneumonia. The mother, a pretty,fragile creature, who, before her marriage, had been a milliner,grieved herself to death over the loss of her husband. Thissensitiveness of the mother was the heritage that in the boy becamemorbid and horrible.In 1901, the boy, Emil, then six years of age, went to live withhis aunt, Mrs. Ann Bartell. She was his mother's sister, but inher breast was no kindly feeling for the sensitive, shrinking boy.Ann Bartell was a vain, shallow, and heartless woman. Also, shewas cursed with poverty and burdened with a husband who was a lazy,erratic ne'er-do-well. Young Emil Gluck was not wanted, and AnnBartell could be trusted to impress this fact sufficiently uponhim. As an illustration of the treatment he received in thatearly, formative period, the following instance is given.When he had been living in the Bartell home a little more than ayear, he broke his leg. He sustained the injury through playing onthe forbidden roof - as all boys have done and will continue to doto the end of time. The leg was broken in two places between theknee and thigh. Emil, helped by his frightened playmates, managedto drag himself to the front sidewalk, where he fainted. Thechildren of the neighbourhood were afraid of the hard-featuredshrew who presided over the Bartell house; but, summoning theirresolution, they rang the bell and told Ann Bartell of theaccident. She did not even look at the little lad who lay strickenon the sidewalk, but slammed the door and went back to her wash-tub. The time passed. A drizzle came on, and Emil Gluck, out ofhis faint, lay sobbing in the rain. The leg should have been setimmediately. As it was, the inflammation rose rapidly and made anasty case of it. At the end of two hours, the indignant women ofthe neighbourhood protested to Ann Bartell. This time she came outand looked at the lad. Also she kicked him in the side as he layhelpless at her feet, and she hysterically disowned him. He wasnot her child, she said, and recommended that the ambulance becalled to take him to the city receiving hospital. Then she wentback into the house.It was a woman, Elizabeth Shepstone, who came along, learned thesituation, and had the boy placed on a shutter. It was she whocalled the doctor, and who, brushing aside Ann Bartell, had the boycarried into the house. When the doctor arrived, Ann Bartellpromptly warned him that she would not pay him for his services.For two months the little Emil lay in bed, the first month on hisback without once being turned over; and he lay neglected andalone, save for the occasional visits of the unremunerated andover-worked physician. He had no toys, nothing with which tobeguile the long and tedious hours. No kind word was spoken tohim, no soothing hand laid upon his brow, no single touch or act ofloving tenderness - naught but the reproaches and harshness of AnnBartell, and the continually reiterated information that he was notwanted. And it can well be understood, in such environment, howthere was generated in the lonely, neglected boy much of thebitterness and hostility for his kind that later was to expressitself in deeds so frightful as to terrify the world.It would seem strange that, from the hands of Ann Bartell, EmilGluck should have received a college education; but the explanationis simple. Her ne'er-do-well husband, deserting her, made a strikein the Nevada goldfields, and returned to her a many-timesmillionaire. Ann Bartell hated the boy, and immediately she senthim to the Farristown Academy, a hundred miles away. Shy andsensitive, a lonely and misunderstood little soul, he was morelonely than ever at Farristown. He never came home, at vacation,and holidays, as the other boys did. Instead, he wandered aboutthe deserted buildings and grounds, befriended and misunderstood bythe servants and gardeners, reading much, it is remembered,spending his days in the fields or before the fire-place with hisnose poked always in the pages of some book. It was at this timethat he over-used his eyes and was compelled to take up the wearingof glasses, which same were so prominent in the photographs of himpublished in the newspapers in 1941.He was a remarkable student. Application such as his would havetaken him far; but he did not need application. A glance at a textmeant mastery for him. The result was that he did an immenseamount of collateral reading and acquired more in half a year thandid the average student in half-a-dozen years. In 1909, barelyfourteen years of age, he was ready - "more than ready" theheadmaster of the academy said - to enter Yale or Harvard. Hisjuvenility prevented him from entering those universities, and so,in 1909, we find him a freshman at historic Bowdoin College. In1913 he graduated with highest honours, and immediately afterwardfollowed Professor Bradlough to Berkeley, California. The onefriend that Emil Gluck discovered in all his life was ProfessorBradlough. The latter's weak lungs had led him to exchange Mainefor California, the removal being facilitated by the offer of aprofessorship in the State University. Throughout the year 1914,Emil Gluck resided in Berkeley and took special scientific courses.Toward the end of that year two deaths changed his prospects andhis relations with life. The death of Professor Bradlough tookfrom him the one friend he was ever to know, and the death of AnnBartell left him penniless. Hating the unfortunate lad to thelast, she cut him off with one hundred dollars.The following year, at twenty years of age, Emil Gluck was enrolledas an instructor of chemistry in the University of California.Here the years passed quietly; he faithfully performed the drudgerythat brought him his salary, and, a student always, he took half-a-dozen degrees. He was, among other things, a Doctor of Sociology,of Philosophy, and of Science, though he was known to the world, inlater days, only as Professor Gluck.He was twenty-seven years old when he first sprang into prominencein the newspapers through the publication of his book, SEX ANDPROGRESS. The book remains to-day a milestone in the history andphilosophy of marriage. It is a heavy tome of over seven hundredpages, painfully careful and accurate, and startlingly original.It was a book for scientists, and not one calculated to make astir. But Gluck, in the last chapter, using barely three lines forit, mentioned the hypothetical desirability of trial marriages. Atonce the newspapers seized these three lines, "played them upyellow," as the slang was in those days, and set the whole worldlaughing at Emil Gluck, the bespectacled young professor of twenty-seven. Photographers snapped him, he was besieged by reporters,women's clubs throughout the land passed resolutions condemning himand his immoral theories; and on the floor of the CaliforniaAssembly, while discussing the state appropriation to theUniversity, a motion demanding the expulsion of Gluck was madeunder threat of withholding the appropriation - of course, none ofhis persecutors had read the book; the twisted newspaper version ofonly three lines of it was enough for them. Here began EmilGluck's hatred for newspaper men. By them his serious andintrinsically valuable work of six years had been made a laughing-stock and a notoriety. To his dying day, and to their everlastingregret, he never forgave them.It was the newspapers that were responsible for the next disasterthat befell him. For the five years following the publication ofhis book he had remained silent, and silence for a lonely man isnot good. One can conjecture sympathetically the awful solitude ofEmil Gluck in that populous University; for he was without friendsand without sympathy. His only recourse was books, and he went onreading and studying enormously. But in 1927 he accepted aninvitation to appear before the Human Interest Society ofEmeryville. He did not trust himself to speak, and as we write wehave before us a copy of his learned paper. It is sober,scholarly, and scientific, and, it must also be added,conservative. But in one place he dealt with, and I quote hiswords, "the industrial and social revolution that is taking placein society." A reporter present seized upon the word "revolution,"divorced it from the text, and wrote a garbled account that madeEmil Gluck appear an anarchist. At once, "Professor Gluck,anarchist," flamed over the wires and was appropriately "featured"in all the newspapers in the land.He had attempted to reply to the previous newspaper attack, but nowhe remained silent. Bitterness had already corroded his soul. TheUniversity faculty appealed to him to defend himself, but hesullenly declined, even refusing to enter in defence a copy of hispaper to save himself from expulsion. He refused to resign, andwas discharged from the University faculty. It must be added thatpolitical pressure had been put upon the University Regents and thePresident.Persecuted, maligned, and misunderstood, the forlorn and lonely manmade no attempt at retaliation. All his life he had been sinnedagainst, and all his life he had sinned against no one. But hiscup of bitterness was not yet full to overflowing. Having lost hisposition, and being without any income, he had to find work. Hisfirst place was at the Union Iron Works, in San Francisco, where heproved a most able draughtsman. It was here that he obtained hisfirsthand knowledge of battleships and their construction. But thereporters discovered him and featured him in his new vocation. Heimmediately resigned and found another place; but after thereporters had driven him away from half-a-dozen positions, hesteeled himself to brazen out the newspaper persecution. Thisoccurred when he started his electroplating establishment - inOakland, on Telegraph Avenue. It was a small shop, employing threemen and two boys. Gluck himself worked long hours. Night afternight, as Policeman Carew testified on the stand, he did not leavethe shop till one and two in the morning. It was during thisperiod that he perfected the improved ignition device for gas-engines, the royalties from which ultimately made him wealthy.He started his electroplating establishment early in the spring of1928, and it was in the same year that he formed the disastrouslove attachment for Irene Tackley. Now it is not to be imaginedthat an extraordinary creature such as Emil Gluck could be anyother than an extraordinary lover. In addition to his genius, hisloneliness, and his morbidness, it must be taken into considerationthat he knew nothing about women. Whatever tides of desire floodedhis being, he was unschooled in the conventional expression ofthem; while his excessive timidity was bound to make his love-making unusual. Irene Tackley was a rather pretty young woman, butshallow and light-headed. At the time she worked in a small candystore across the street from Gluck's shop. He used to come in anddrink ice-cream sodas and lemon-squashes, and stare at her. Itseems the girl did not care for him, and merely played with him.He was "queer," she said; and at another time she called him acrank when describing how he sat at the counter and peered at herthrough his spectacles, blushing and stammering when she tooknotice of him, and often leaving the shop in precipitate confusion.Gluck made her the most amazing presents - a silver tea-service, adiamond ring, a set of furs, opera-glasses, a ponderous HISTORY OFTHE WORLD in many volumes, and a motor-cycle all silver-plated inhis own shop. Enters now the girl's lover, putting his foot down,showing great anger, compelling her to return Gluck's strangeassortment of presents. This man, William Sherbourne, was a grossand stolid creature, a heavy-jawed man of the working class who hadbecome a successful building-contractor in a small way. Gluck didnot understand. He tried to get an explanation, attempting tospeak with the girl when she went home from work in the evening.She complained to Sherbourne, and one night he gave Gluck abeating. It was a very severe beating, for it is on the records ofthe Red Cross Emergency Hospital that Gluck was treated there thatnight and was unable to leave the hospital for a week.Still Gluck did not understand. He continued to seek anexplanation from the girl. In fear of Sherbourne, he applied tothe Chief of Police for permission to carry a revolver, whichpermission was refused, the newspapers as usual playing it upsensationally. Then came the murder of Irene Tackley, six daysbefore her contemplated marriage with Sherbourne. It was on aSaturday night. She had worked late in the candy store, departingafter eleven o'clock with her week's wages in her purse. She rodeon a San Pablo Avenue surface car to Thirty-fourth Street, whereshe alighted and started to walk the three blocks to her home.That was the last seen of her alive. Next morning she was found,strangled, in a vacant lot.Emil Gluck was immediately arrested. Nothing that he could docould save him. He was convicted, not merely on circumstantialevidence, but on evidence "cooked up" by the Oakland police. Thereis no discussion but that a large portion of the evidence wasmanufactured. The testimony of Captain Shehan was the sheerestperjury, it being proved long afterward that on the night inquestion he had not only not been in the vicinity of the murder,but that he had been out of the city in a resort on the San LeandroRoad. The unfortunate Gluck received life imprisonment in SanQuentin, while the newspapers and the public held that it was amiscarriage of justice - that the death penalty should have beenvisited upon him.Gluck entered San Quentin prison on April 17, 1929. He was thenthirty-four years of age. And for three years and a half, much ofthe time in solitary confinement, he was left to meditate upon theinjustice of man. It was during that period that his bitternesscorroded home and he became a hater of all his kind. Three otherthings he did during the same period: he wrote his famoustreatise, HUMAN MORALS, his remarkable brochure, THE CRIMINAL SANE,and he worked out his awful and monstrous scheme of revenge. Itwas an episode that had occurred in his electroplatingestablishment that suggested to him his unique weapon of revenge.As stated in his confession, he worked every detail outtheoretically during his imprisonment, and was able, on hisrelease, immediately to embark on his career of vengeance.His release was sensational. Also it was miserably and criminallydelayed by the soulless legal red tape then in vogue. On the nightof February 1, 1932, Tim Haswell, a hold-up man, was shot during anattempted robbery by a citizen of Piedmont Heights. Tim Haswelllingered three days, during which time he not only confessed to themurder of Irene Tackley, but furnished conclusive proofs of thesame. Bert Danniker, a convict dying of consumption in FolsomPrison, was implicated as accessory, and his confession followed.It is inconceivable to us of to-day - the bungling, dilatoryprocesses of justice a generation ago. Emil Gluck was proved inFebruary to be an innocent man, yet he was not released until thefollowing October. For eight months, a greatly wronged man, he wascompelled to undergo his unmerited punishment. This was notconducive to sweetness and light, and we can well imagine how heate his soul with bitterness during those dreary eight months.He came back to the world in the fall of 1932, as usual a "feature"topic in all the newspapers. The papers, instead of expressingheartfelt regret, continued their old sensational persecution. Onepaper did more - the SAN FRANCISCO INTELLIGENCER. John Hartwell,its editor, elaborated an ingenious theory that got around theconfessions of the two criminals and went to show that Gluck wasresponsible, after all, for the murder of Irene Tackley. Hartwelldied. And Sherbourne died too, while Policeman Phillipps was shotin the leg and discharged from the Oakland police force.The murder of Hartwell was long a mystery. He was alone in hiseditorial office at the time. The reports of the revolver wereheard by the office boy, who rushed in to find Hartwell expiring inhis chair. What puzzled the police was the fact, not merely thathe had been shot with his own revolver, but that the revolver hadbeen exploded in the drawer of his desk. The bullets had tornthrough the front of the drawer and entered his body. The policescouted the theory of suicide, murder was dismissed as absurd, andthe blame was thrown upon the Eureka Smokeless Cartridge Company.Spontaneous explosion was the police explanation, and the chemistsof the cartridge company were well bullied at the inquest. Butwhat the police did not know was that across the street, in theMercer Building, Room 633, rented by Emil Gluck, had been occupiedby Emil Gluck at the very moment Hartwell's revolver somysteriously exploded.At the time, no connection was made between Hartwell's death andthe death of William Sherbourne. Sherbourne had continued to livein the home he had built for Irene Tackley, and one morning inJanuary, 1933, he was found dead. Suicide was the verdict of thecoroner's inquest, for he had been shot by his own revolver. Thecurious thing that happened that night was the shooting ofPoliceman Phillipps on the sidewalk in front of Sherbourne's house.The policeman crawled to a police telephone on the corner and rangup for an ambulance. He claimed that some one had shot him frombehind in the leg. The leg in question was so badly shattered bythree '38 calibre bullets that amputation was necessary. But whenthe police discovered that the damage had been done by his ownrevolver, a great laugh went up, and he was charged with havingbeen drunk. In spite of his denial of having touched a drop, andof his persistent assertion that the revolver had been in his hippocket and that he had not laid a finger to it, he was dischargedfrom the force. Emil Gluck's confession, six years later, clearedthe unfortunate policeman of disgrace, and he is alive to-day andin good health, the recipient of a handsome pension from the city.Emil Gluck, having disposed of his immediate enemies, now sought awider field, though his enmity for newspaper men and for the policeremained always active. The royalties on his ignition device forgasolene-engines had mounted up while he lay in prison, and year byyear the earning power of his invention increased. He wasindependent, able to travel wherever he willed over the earth andto glut his monstrous appetite for revenge. He had become amonomaniac and an anarchist - not a philosophic anarchist, merely,but a violent anarchist. Perhaps the word is misused, and he isbetter described as a nihilist, or an annihilist. It is known thathe affiliated with none of the groups of terrorists. He operatedwholly alone, but he created a thousandfold more terror andachieved a thousandfold more destruction than all the terroristgroups added together.He signalized his departure from California by blowing up FortMason. In his confession he spoke of it as a little experiment -he was merely trying his hand. For eight years he wandered overthe earth, a mysterious terror, destroying property to the tune ofhundreds of millions of dollars, and destroying countless lives.One good result of his awful deeds was the destruction he wroughtamong the terrorists themselves. Every time he did anything theterrorists in the vicinity were gathered in by the police dragnet,and many of them were executed. Seventeen were executed at Romealone, following the assassination of the Italian King.Perhaps the most world-amazing achievement of his was theassassination of the King and Queen of Portugal. It was theirwedding day. All possible precautions had been taken against theterrorists, and the way from the cathedral, through Lisbon'sstreets, was double-banked with troops, while a squad of twohundred mounted troopers surrounded the carriage. Suddenly theamazing thing happened. The automatic rifles of the troopers beganto go off, as well as the rifles, in the immediate vicinity, of thedouble-banked infantry. In the excitement the muzzles of theexploding rifles were turned in all directions. The slaughter wasterrible - horses, troops, spectators, and the King and Queen, wereriddled with bullets. To complicate the affair, in different partsof the crowd behind the foot-soldiers, two terrorists had bombsexplode on their persons. These bombs they had intended to throwif they got the opportunity. But who was to know this? Thefrightful havoc wrought by the bursting bombs but added to theconfusion; it was considered part of the general attack.One puzzling thing that could not be explained away was the conductof the troopers with their exploding rifles. It seemed impossiblethat they should be in the plot, yet there were the hundreds theirflying bullets had slain, including the King and Queen. On theother hand, more baffling than ever was the fact that seventy percent. of the troopers themselves had been killed or wounded. Someexplained this on the ground that the loyal foot-soldiers,witnessing the attack on the royal carriage, had opened fire on thetraitors. Yet not one bit of evidence to verify this could bedrawn from the survivors, though many were put to the torture.They contended stubbornly that they had not discharged their riflesat all, but that their rifles had discharged themselves. They werelaughed at by the chemists, who held that, while it was just barelyprobable that a single cartridge, charged with the new smokelesspowder, might spontaneously explode, it was beyond all probabilityand possibility for all the cartridges in a given area, so charged,spontaneously to explode. And so, in the end, no explanation ofthe amazing occurrence was reached. The general opinion of therest of the world was that the whole affair was a blind panic ofthe feverish Latins, precipitated, it was true, by the bursting oftwo terrorist bombs; and in this connection was recalled thelaughable encounter of long years before between the Russian fleetand the English fishing boats.And Emil Gluck chuckled and went his way. He knew. But how wasthe world to know? He had stumbled upon the secret in his oldelectroplating shop on Telegraph Avenue in the city of Oakland. Ithappened, at that time, that a wireless telegraph station wasestablished by the Thurston Power Company close to his shop. In ashort time his electroplating vat was put out of order. The vat-wiring had many bad joints, and, on investigation, Gluck discoveredminute welds at the joints in the wiring. These, by lowering theresistance, had caused an excessive current to pass through thesolution, "boiling" it and spoiling the work. But what had causedthe welds? was the question in Gluck's mind. His reasoning wassimple. Before the establishment of the wireless station, the vathad worked well. Not until after the establishment of the wirelessstation had the vat been ruined. Therefore the wireless stationhad been the cause. But how? He quickly answered the question.If an electric discharge was capable of operating a coherer acrossthree thousand miles of ocean, then, certainly, the electricdischarges from the wireless station four hundred feet away couldproduce coherer effects on the bad joints in the vat-wiring.Gluck thought no more about it at the time. He merely re-wired hisvat and went on electroplating. But afterwards, in prison, heremembered the incident, and like a flash there came into his mindthe full significance of it. He saw in it the silent, secretweapon with which to revenge himself on the world. His greatdiscovery, which died with him, was control over the direction andscope of the electric discharge. At the time, this was theunsolved problem of wireless telegraphy - as it still is to-day -but Emil Gluck, in his prison cell, mastered it. And, when he wasreleased, he applied it. It was fairly simple, given the directingpower that was his, to introduce a spark into the powder-magazinesof a fort, a battleship, or a revolver. And not alone could hethus explode powder at a distance, but he could igniteconflagrations. The great Boston fire was started by him - quiteby accident, however, as he stated in his confession, adding thatit was a pleasing accident and that he had never had any reason toregret it.It was Emil Gluck that caused the terrible German-American War,with the loss of 800,000 lives and the consumption of almostincalculable treasure. It will be remembered that in 1939, becauseof the Pickard incident, strained relations existed between the twocountries. Germany, though aggrieved, was not anxious for war,and, as a peace token, sent the Crown Prince and seven battleshipson a friendly visit to the United States. On the night of February15, the seven warships lay at anchor in the Hudson opposite NewYork City. And on that night Emil Gluck, alone, with all hisapparatus on board, was out in a launch. This launch, it wasafterwards proved, was bought by him from the Ross Turner Company,while much of the apparatus he used that night had been purchasedfrom the Columbia Electric Works. But this was not known at thetime. All that was known was that the seven battleships blew up,one after another, at regular four-minute intervals. Ninety percent. of the crews and officers, along with the Crown Prince,perished. Many years before, the American battleship Maine hadbeen blown up in the harbour of Havana, and war with Spain hadimmediately followed - though there has always existed a reasonabledoubt as to whether the explosion was due to conspiracy oraccident. But accident could not explain the blowing up of theseven battleships on the Hudson at four-minute intervals. Germanybelieved that it had been done by a submarine, and immediatelydeclared war. It was six months after Gluck's confession that shereturned the Philippines and Hawaii to the United States.In the meanwhile Emil Gluck, the malevolent wizard and arch-hater,travelled his whirlwind path of destruction. He left no traces.Scientifically thorough, he always cleaned up after himself. Hismethod was to rent a room or a house, and secretly to install hisapparatus - which apparatus, by the way, he so perfected andsimplified that it occupied little space. After he hadaccomplished his purpose he carefully removed the apparatus. Hebade fair to live out a long life of horrible crime.The epidemic of shooting of New York City policemen was aremarkable affair. It became one of the horror mysteries of thetime. In two short weeks over a hundred policemen were shot in thelegs by their own revolvers. Inspector Jones did not solve themystery, but it was his idea that finally outwitted Gluck. On hisrecommendation the policemen ceased carrying revolvers, and no moreaccidental shootings occurred.It was in the early spring of 1940 that Gluck destroyed the MareIsland navy-yard. From a room in Vallejo he sent his electricdischarges across the Vallejo Straits to Mare Island. He firstplayed his flashes on the battleship Maryland. She lay at the dockof one of the mine-magazines. On her forward deck, on a hugetemporary platform of timbers, were disposed over a hundred mines.These mines were for the defence of the Golden Gate. Any one ofthese mines was capable of destroying a dozen battleships, andthere were over a hundred mines. The destruction was terrific, butit was only Gluck's overture. He played his flashes down the MareIsland shore, blowing up five torpedo boats, the torpedo station,and the great magazine at the eastern end of the island. Returningwestward again, and scooping in occasional isolated magazines onthe high ground back from the shore, he blew up three cruisers andthe battleships Oregon, Delaware, New Hampshire, and Florida - thelatter had just gone into dry-dock, and the magnificent dry-dockwas destroyed along with her.It was a frightful catastrophe, and a shiver of horror passedthrough the land. But it was nothing to what was to follow. Inthe late fall of that year Emil Gluck made a clean sweep of theAtlantic seaboard from Maine to Florida. Nothing escaped. Forts,mines, coast defences of all sorts, torpedo stations, magazines -everything went up. Three months afterward, in midwinter, he smotethe north shore of the Mediterranean from Gibraltar to Greece inthe same stupefying manner. A wail went up from the nations. Itwas clear that human agency was behind all this destruction, and itwas equally clear, through Emil Gluck's impartiality, that thedestruction was not the work of any particular nation. One thingwas patent, namely, that whoever was the human behind it all, thathuman was a menace to the world. No nation was safe. There was nodefence against this unknown and all-powerful foe. Warfare wasfutile - nay, not merely futile but itself the very essence of theperil. For a twelve-month the manufacture of powder ceased, andall soldiers and sailors were withdrawn from all fortifications andwar vessels. And even a world-disarmament was seriously consideredat the Convention of the Powers, held at The Hague at that time.And then Silas Bannerman, a secret service agent of the UnitedStates, leaped into world-fame by arresting Emil Gluck. At firstBannerman was laughed at, but he had prepared his case well, and ina few weeks the most sceptical were convinced of Emil Gluck'sguilt. The one thing, however, that Silas Bannerman neversucceeded in explaining, even to his own satisfaction, was howfirst he came to connect Gluck with the atrocious crimes. It istrue, Bannerman was in Vallejo, on secret government business, atthe time of the destruction of Mare Island; and it is true that onthe streets of Vallejo Emil Gluck was pointed out to him as a queercrank; but no impression was made at the time. It was not untilafterward, when on a vacation in the Rocky Mountains and whenreading the first published reports of the destruction along theAtlantic Coast, that suddenly Bannerman thought of Emil Gluck. Andon the instant there flashed into his mind the connection betweenGluck and the destruction. It was only an hypothesis, but it wassufficient. The great thing was the conception of the hypothesis,in itself an act of unconscious cerebration - a thing asunaccountable as the flashing, for instance, into Newton's mind ofthe principle of gravitation.The rest was easy. Where was Gluck at the time of the destructionalong the Atlantic sea-board? was the question that formed inBannerman's mind. By his own request he was put upon the case. Inno time he ascertained that Gluck had himself been up and down theAtlantic Coast in the late fall of 1940. Also he ascertained thatGluck had been in New York City during the epidemic of the shootingof police officers. Where was Gluck now? was Bannerman's nextquery. And, as if in answer, came the wholesale destruction alongthe Mediterranean. Gluck had sailed for Europe a month before -Bannerman knew that. It was not necessary for Bannerman to go toEurope. By means of cable messages and the co-operation of theEuropean secret services, he traced Gluck's course along theMediterranean and found that in every instance it coincided withthe blowing up of coast defences and ships. Also, he learned thatGluck had just sailed on the Green Star liner Plutonic for theUnited States.The case was complete in Bannerman's mind, though in the intervalof waiting he worked up the details. In this he was ably assistedby George Brown, an operator employed by the Wood's System ofWireless Telegraphy. When the Plutonic arrived off Sandy Hook shewas boarded by Bannerman from a Government tug, and Emil Gluck wasmade a prisoner. The trial and the confession followed. In theconfession Gluck professed regret only for one thing, namely, thathe had taken his time. As he said, had he dreamed that he was everto be discovered he would have worked more rapidly and accomplisheda thousand times the destruction he did. His secret died with him,though it is now known that the French Government managed to getaccess to him and offered him a billion francs for his inventionwherewith he was able to direct and closely to confine electricdischarges. "What!" was Gluck's reply - "to sell to you that whichwould enable you to enslave and maltreat suffering Humanity?" Andthough the war departments of the nations have continued toexperiment in their secret laboratories, they have so far failed tolight upon the slightest trace of the secret. Emil Gluck wasexecuted on December 4, 1941, and so died, at the age of forty-six,one of the world's most unfortunate geniuses, a man of tremendousintellect, but whose mighty powers, instead of making toward good,were so twisted and warped that he became the most amazing ofcriminals.- Culled from Mr. A. G. Burnside's "Eccentricitics of Crime," bykind permission of the publishers, Messrs. Holiday and Whitsund.

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