Vassar smashed the skylight of the low roof on which he had been hurled,
reached the ground floor and kicked his way through a window. The
half-drunken crowd of revelers were pouring out of restaurants close by.
The electric lights on the four blocks about the gaping hole had been
extinguished and only the gas lamps on the side streets threw their dim
rays over the smoking cavern.
The merrymakers were still in a jovial mood. What was one explosion more
or less? A gas main had merely blown up--that was all. They took
advantage of the darkness to kiss their girls and indulge in coarse
jests.
A fat Johnny emerging from a restaurant shouted:
“Where was Moses when the light went out?”
A wag who was still able to carry his liquor to the street wailed in
maudlin falsetto:
“The question ’fore the house is, ‘Who struck Billy Patterson?’”
A series of terrific explosions shook the earth in rapid succession, and
the crowd began to scramble back into the banquet halls, or run in mad
panic without a plan or purpose.
A company of soldiers in dull brown uniforms with helmets of the pattern
of the ancient Romans swung suddenly into Broadway from a vacant
building on a darkened side street and rushed northward at double quick.
“In God’s name, what regiment’s that?” Vassar asked half to himself.
A gilded youth with battered hat slouched over his flushed face replied:
“Search me, brother--and what’s more I don’t give a damn--just so they
turn on the lights and send me a cab--I’ve just gotter have a cab--I
can’t travel without a cab--What t’ell’s the matter anyhow?”
Vassar left him muttering and followed the troops at a brisk trot.
They turned into Sixty-second Street, into Columbus Avenue, and poured
through the smashed doors at the Twelfth Regiment Armory--they had been
blown open with dynamite.
A sentinel on the corner stopped him.
“Will you tell me what company just entered the Armory?”
The soldier answered in good English with a touch of foreign accent.
[Illustration: “‘In God’s name, what regiment’s that?’”]
“Certainly, mein Herr--Company C, Twelfth Regiment of the Imperial
Confederation, at present on garrison duty in the city of New York--”
“How the devil did you land?”
“We’ve been here for months awaiting orders--”
He saw the terrible truth in a flash. The secret agent of Imperial
Europe had organized a royal army and armed them at his leisure, Villard
acting under Waldron’s guidance. The six months’ delay in the meeting of
the Pan-American Congress was made for this purpose. They were all
trained soldiers. Their officers had landed during the past three
months. The Peace Jubilee was the mask for their movements in every
great center of population.
At a given signal they had blown in the doors of every armory in Greater
New York, disarmed the National Guard and mounted machine guns on their
parapets.
In ten minutes machine guns were bristling from the corners of every
street leading to the captured armories.
It was a master stroke! There were at least a million aliens, trained
soldiers of Northern and Central Europe, living in the United States.
A single master mind could direct this army as one man.
He thanked God that his father and the girls were at Babylon. He had
sent them there to avoid the scenes of the Peace Jubilee. He was too
cautious now to play into the hands of the enemy.
He made his way to a telephone booth and attempted to call the Mayor’s
house.
There was no answer from Central. The telephone system was out of
commission.
He hurried to a Western Union office to wire Washington. Every key was
silent and the operators were standing in terror-stricken groups
discussing the meaning of it all.
He hurried to the Times Building to try and reach the President by
wireless and found the plant a wreck.
It was ten o’clock next day before the extent of the night’s horror was
known to little groups of leading men who had been lucky enough to
escape arrest by the Imperial garrison.
Vassar stood among his friends in the dim back room of Schultz’s store
pale and determined, speaking in subdued tone.
Scrap by scrap the appalling situation had been revealed.
A federation of crowned heads of Northern and Central Europe had decided
in caucus that the United States of America was the one fly in the
ointment of world harmony. They determined to remove it at once, and
extend the system of government by divine right not only into South
America but North America as well. The great war had impoverished their
treasuries. The money had flowed into the vaults of the despised common
herd of the United States. They would first indemnify themselves for the
losses of the world war out of this exhaustless hoard and then organize
the social and industrial chaos of the West into the imperial efficiency
of a real civilization.
The result would make them the masters of the Western World for all
time. Their system once organized would be invincible. The slaves they
had rescued from anarchy would kiss the hand of their conquerors at
last.
This was the whispered message a trusted leader had received from an
officer half drunk with wine and crazed by the victory they had already
achieved for the approaching imperial fleet.
Their business was to arrest and hold as hostages every man of wealth in
New York, guard the vaults and banks to prevent the removal of money,
garrison and control the cities until the fleet had landed the imperial
army.
The completeness with which the uprising of royalist subjects had been
executed was appalling. They had taken the trunk lines of every railroad
in America. Not a train had arrived in New York from any point south of
Newark, New Jersey, and no train from the north had reached the city
beyond Tarrytown on the Hudson or South Norwalk on the New York, New
Haven and Hartford.
A motor-cycle reached New York from Philadelphia bearing to the Mayor
the startling information that the Navy Yard had been captured, the
Quaker City’s transportation system paralyzed and that the Mayor had
surrendered to the commanding general of a full army corps of twenty
thousand foreign soldiers.
An automobile arrived from Boston with the same startling information
from the capital of New England. Not only had the Navy Yard at Boston
fallen into the hands of the enemy but the Yard at Portsmouth, New
Hampshire, as well.
Not a wheel was turning in the great terminal stations of New York. The
telephone and telegraph and cable systems were in the hands of the
enemy. To make the wreck of the means of communication complete every
wireless plant which had not been blown up was in the hands of an
officer of the imperial garrison.
It was impossible to communicate by wire, wireless or by mail with
Baltimore or Washington, to say nothing of the cities further inland.
Hour by hour the startling items of news crept into the stricken
metropolis by automobile and motor-cycle messengers. The motor-cycle
had proven the only reliable means of communication. Pickets were now
commandeering or destroying every automobile that attempted to pass the
main highways. But one had gotten through from Boston. The motor-cycles
had taken narrow paths and side-stepped the pickets.
Not only had the great cities and navy yards been betrayed into the
hands of a foreign foe mobilized in a night, but every manufactory of
arms and ammunition, and every arsenal had been captured with trifling
loss of life. The big gun factory at Troy, the stores of ammunition at
Dover, New Jersey, the Bethlehem Iron Works, the great factories at
Springfield, Bridgeport, Hartford, Ilion, Utica and Syracuse were
defenseless and had fallen. In short, with the remorseless movement of
fate every instrument for the manufacture of arms and ammunition was in
the hands of our foes, locked and barred with bristling machine guns
thrusting their noses from every window and every street corner leading
to their enclosures.
The thing had been done with a thoroughness and lightning rapidity that
stunned the imagination of the men who had dared to think of resistance.
The only problem which confronted their commander was to hold what he
had captured until the arrival of the fleet and transports bearing the
first division of the regular army with its mighty guns, aeroplanes and
submarines.
Unless this fleet and army should arrive and land within a reasonable
time, the overwhelming numbers of the populated centers, the scattered
forces of the regular army of the United States and the National Guard,
with the volunteers who possessed rifles would present a dangerous
problem. The amount of dynamite and other high explosives yet in the
hands of the people could not be estimated.
They had yet to reckon with the regular army. The traitors had already
found foemen worthy of their steel in the police force of New York. Our
little army of ten thousand policemen had given a good account of
themselves before the sun had risen on the fatal morning.
A force of five thousand reserves fought for six bloody hours to
recapture the Armory of the Seventy-first Regiment at Park Avenue and
Thirty-fourth Street. They used their own machine guns with terrible
effect on a regiment that had been rushed to assist the garrison inside.
This regiment had been annihilated as they emerged from the tunnel of
the Fourth Avenue Street car system at Thirty-third Street. The police
had received word that they were in the tunnel, placed their machine
guns to rake its mouth and when the gray helmets emerged, they were met
with a storm of death. Their bodies were piled in a ghastly heap that
blocked the way of retreat. But the men inside were invisible. Their
machine guns and sharpshooters piled our blue coats in dark heaps over
Thirty-fourth Street, Fourth Avenue, Thirty-third Street and Lexington
Avenue. At ten o’clock their commander determined to smash the barricade
of the main entrance where the doors had been dynamited and take the
armory or wipe out his force in the attempt.
In this armory had been stored enough guns for the new National Guard to
equip an army large enough to dispute possession of the city with their
foes. Behind the cases containing these rifles were piled five hundred
machine guns whose value now was beyond estimate.
The Colonel of the regiment quartered inside knew their value even
better than his assailant. The fight at the barricades of the door was
to the death.
When the firing ceased, there was no bluecoat left to give the order to
retreat. Their bodies were piled in a compact mass five feet high.
The police force of the metropolis were not defeated. They were simply
annihilated. In pools of blood they had wiped out the jibes and slurs of
an unhappy past. Not one who wore the blue surrendered. They had died to
a man.
The Brooklyn Navy Yard escaped the fate of the yards at Boston and
Portsmouth by a miracle.
The superdreadnought _Pennsylvania_ had not been assigned to the fleet
which had just been dispatched through the Panama Canal to the Pacific.
She had entered the basin to receive slight repairs. By a curious piece
of luck her Captain had refused shore leave to his men to attend the
festivities of the Jubilee.
A premonition of disaster through some subtle sixth sense had caused him
at the last moment to issue the order for every man to remain on the
ship. The sailors had pleaded in vain. They had turned in cursing their
superior for a fool and a tyrant.
The explosions which wrecked the doors of the armories and paralyzed the
traffic of the city found the Captain of the _Pennsylvania_ awake,
pacing her decks, unable to sleep.
When the division of the Imperial Guard assigned to storm the yard
rushed it they ran squarely into the guns of the big gray monster, whose
searchlights suddenly swept every nook and corner of the inclosure.
In ten minutes from the time they dynamited the gates and rushed the
grounds the shells from the _Pennsylvania_ were tearing them to pieces
and incidentally reducing the Navy Yard to a junk heap.
When the Yard had been cleared, the Captain landed his marines,
searched the ruins and picked up a wounded officer who in sheer bravado,
cocksure of ultimate victory, gave him the information he demanded.
“Who the hell are you anyhow?” the Captain asked.
“Lieutenant Colonel Harden of the Sixty-ninth Imperial Guard of the
American Colonies--”
“Colonies, eh?”
The young officer smiled.
“From tonight, the United States of America disappears from the map of
the world. It will be divided between the kingdoms comprising the
Imperial Federation of Northern Europe. England and France are yet
poisoned with your democratic ideas. They have remained neutral,
following your illustrious example in the world war. We don’t need them.
Our task is so easy it’s a joke. You have my sympathy, Captain. You’re a
brave and capable man. You would do honor to the Imperial Navy. You
surprised me tonight. I was informed--reliably informed--that you and
your men were celebrating the reign of universal peace--”
“Who is your leader?”
“A great man, sir, known in New York as Charles Waldron. The Emperor in
command of the forces of United Europe has been informed already by
wireless that America is in his hands. Tomorrow morning this leader’s
name will be Prince Karl von Waldron, Governor-General of the Imperial
Provinces of North America.”
“So?”
“I advise you, Captain, to make the best terms you can with your new
master.”
“Thank you,” was the dry reply.
The Captain dispatched a launch to Governor’s Island reporting to
General Hood the remarkable information he had received. His guns had
already roused the garrison. The launch met General Hood’s at the mouth
of the basin.
The two men clasped hands in silence on the deck of the _Pennsylvania_.
“The first blow, a thunderbolt from the blue, General--without a
declaration--”
“A blow below the belt too--a slave insurrection is honorable war
compared to the treachery that would thus abuse our hospitality!”
They tried the telephones and telegraph stations in vain. A council of
war was called and through the grim hours from two A. M. until dawn they
sat in solemn session.