Vassar visited Jack’s, Maxim’s, Bustanoby’s, Rector’s, and Churchill’s to watch the orgie at its height. Every seat was filled and surging crowds were waiting their turn at the tables. Hundreds of pretty girls, flushed with wine, were throwing confetti and thrusting feathers into the faces of passing men. The bolder of them were seated on the laps of their sweethearts, shouting the joys of peaceful conquest.
Professional dancers led the revelry with excesses of suggestive step and pose that brought wild rounds of approval from the more reckless observers.
Vassar left the last place at 12:30 with a sense of sickening anger. The fun had only begun. It would not reach the climax before two o’clock. At three the girls who were throwing confetti would be too drunk to sit in their chairs.
He drew a deep breath of fresh air and started up Broadway for a turn in the park.
He paused in front of a vacant cab. The chauffeur tipped his cap.
“Cab, sir? Free for two hours. Take you anywhere you want to go for a song. All mine on the side. Engaged here for the night. They won’t be out till morning. They’ve just set down.”
A sudden impulse seized him to drive past Waldron’s castle and see its illumination. No doubt the place would be a blaze of dazzling electric lights.
He called his order mechanically and stepped into the cab. His mind was not on the glowing lights or pleasure mad crowds. He was dreaming of the woman who had taken him to that house a little more than two years before. Every detail of that ride and interview with Waldron stood out now in his imagination with startling vividness. His mind persisted in picturing the two corseted young men who stepped from the elevator so suddenly. He wondered again what the devil they had been doing there and where they came from—and above all why they were accompanied by Villard.
Before he realized that he had started the river flashed in view from the heights south of Waldron’s castle. He had told the chauffeur to keep off the Drive, stick to Broadway and turn up Fort Washington Avenue which ran through the center of Waldron’s estate.
To his amazement the banker’s house was dark save the light from a single window in the tower that gleamed like the eye of a demon crouching in the shadows of the skies. The tall steel flag staff on the tower had been lengthened to a hundred and fifty feet. Its white line could be distinctly seen against the stars. And from the top of this staff now hung the arm of a wireless station. Waldron had no doubt gone in for wireless experiments as another one of his fads.