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. [Illustration: “‘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.