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. Far up in the sky he caught the hum of an aeroplane motor. He leaped from the cab and listened. The sound was unmistakable. He had been on the Congressional committees and witnessed a hundred experiments by the Army Aviation Corps. “What the devil can that mean at one o’clock at night?” he muttered. He leaped into the cab, calling to his driver: “Go back to Times Square and drop me at the Times Building--quick.” He made up his mind to report this extraordinary discovery to the night editor and try by his wireless plant to get in touch with Waldron’s tower. The cab was just sweeping down Broadway between two famous restaurants and the orgies inside were at their height. The shouts and songs and drunken calls, the clash of dishes, the pop of champagne corks and twang of music poured through the open windows. The cab suddenly lurched, and rose into the air, lifted on a floor of asphalt. An explosion shook the earth and ripped the sky with a sword of flame. The cab crashed downward and lit squarely on the flat roof of a low-pitched building right side up. Vassar leaped out in time to hear the dull roar of the second explosion. The first had blown up and blocked the subway and elevated systems. The second had destroyed the power plants of the surface lines. 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