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.


“ ‘In God’s name, what regiment’s that?’ ”
“ ‘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............