It had come—the war he had vainly fought to prevent! And he knew with unerring certainty the hand and brain directing the first treacherous assault.
CHAPTER XXII
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.