“Certainly. I shall leave them intact. We’ll need them again.”
“I could blow them up. It would be foolish. The city they were built to defend is lost for the moment. The submarines are already lying in the harbor and hold the Navy Yard.”
With a quick pressure of hand the men parted. The General embarked his cavalry on a small army transport that lay under the guns of Fort Hamilton, slipped to sea at night and sailed for Galveston.
Vassar reached New York disguised as a Long Island truck farmer. He drove a wagon loaded with vegetables, circled Stuyvesant Square next morning and called his produce for sale.
He looked for an agonized moment at his battered house, snapped the iron weight strop on his horse’s bridle and rushed up the stairs.
The wreck within was complete and appalling.
He hurried across the Square to the Holland house. He was sure that Waldron would give his protection.
He could kill him for it and yet he thanked God Virginia was safe. Waldron loved her. He knew it by an unerring intuition. He would use his wealth and dazzling power again to win her. He knew that too by the same sixth sense.
He couldn’t succeed! If ever a woman loved, Virginia Holland loved him. With her kind it was once for life.
And yet he trembled at the thought of what such a brute might do when every appeal had failed. Would he dare to use his power to force her to his will? Such things had been done by tyrants. A new day was dawning in a world that once was the home of freedom—the day of the jailer, tyrant, sycophant, and soldier who asks no questions.