“I repeat—How old are you, Cribbs?”
“Oh, I guess I'm old enough to shoot a gun, or pull a rope or carry a bucket of tar,” retorted the young man.
“I'll put it the other way. How young are you?”
“I'm twenty-nine.”
“I see. And how did you escape the draft?”
“They haven't reached my number yet,” said Mr. Cribbs, with dignity.
“Well, that's good. There's still hope,” said the Judge, grimly. “They need just such fire-eaters as you over there in France with Pershing.”
Carstairs turned to Zimmerlein, who was being helped into his fur-coat by one of the attendants.
“Can't we take you to the city, Zimmerlein? There is plenty of room in the car.”
“No, thank you, Carstairs. I'm going in by train. Mr. and Mrs. Prior will drop me at the station. Good night. Oh, here's Peter. What did you hear?”
“I could get no answer, Mr. Zimmerlein,” said the steward steadily. “Wires may be down, sir.”
“Good night, Mrs. Carstairs.” Zimmerlein held out his hand. She hesitated an instant, and then took it. Her gaze was fixed, as if fascinated, on his dark, steady eyes.
CHAPTER II
HOARSE, raucous-voiced newsboys were crying the “extras” soon after midnight. They were doing a thriving business. The destruction of the great Reynolds plant, more spectacular and more appalling than any previous deed perpetrated by the secret enemies of the American people, was to drive even the most sanguine and indifferent citizen to a full realizaton of the peril that stalked him and his fellow-man throughout the land. Complacent security was at last to sustain a shock it could not afford to scorn. Up there in the hills of Jersey a bombardment had taken place that rivalled in violence, if not in human toll, the most vivid descriptions of shell-carnage on the dripping fronts of France.
Huge but vague headlines screamed into the faces of quick-breathing men and wide-eyed women the first details of the great disaster across the River.
Night-farers, threading the streets, paused in their round of pleasure to gulp down the bitter thing that came up into their throats—a sick thing called Fear. From nearly every doorway in the city, some one issued forth, bleak-eyed and anxious, to hail the scurrying newsboys. The distant roar of the shells had roused the millions in Manhattan; windows rattled, the frailer dwellings rocked on thin foundations. It was not until the clash of heavy artillery swept up to the city on the wind from the west that the serene, contemptuous denizens of the greatest city in the world cast off their mask of indifference and rose as one person to ask the vital question: Are the U-Boats in the Harbour at last?
An elderly man, two women, and a sallow-faced man of thirty sat by the windows at the top of a lofty apartment building on the Upper West Side. For an hour they had been sitting there, listening, and looking always to the west, out over the dark and sombre Hudson. Father, mother, daughter and son. The first explosion jarred the great building in which they were securely housed.
“Ah!” sighed the old man, and it was a sigh of relief, of satisfaction. The others turned to him and smiled for the first time in hours. The tension was over.
Farther down-town two men in one of the big hotels silently shook hands, bade each other a friendly good-night for the benefit of chance observers, and went off to bed. The waiting was over.
Two night watchmen met in front of one of the biggest office buildings in New York, within hearing of the bells of Trinity and almost within sound of the sobbing waters of the Bay. Their faces, rendered almost invisible behind the great collars that protected them from the shrill winds coming up the canyons from the sea, were tense and drawn and white, but their eyes glittered brightly, fiercely, in the darkness. They too had been waiting.
In a dingy apartment in Harlem, three shifty-eyed, nervous men, and a pallid, tired, frightened woman rose suddenly from the lethargy of suspense and grinned evilly, not at each other but at the rattling, dilapidated window looking westward across the sagging roofs of the squalid district. One of the men stretched forth a quivering hand and, with a hoarse laugh of exultation, seized in his fingers a strange, crudely shaped metallic object that stood on the table nearby. He lifted it to his lips and kissed it! Then he put it down, carefully, gingerly,—with something like fear in his eyes. Scraps of tin, pieces of iron and steel, strands of wire, wads of cotton and waste, and an odd assortment of tools littered the table. Harmless appearing cans, and bottles, and dirty packages, with a mortar and pestle, a small chemist's scales, funnels and graduates stood in innocent array along a shelf attached to the wall, guarded,—so it seemed,—by sinister looking tubes and retorts.
The woman, her eyes gleaming with a malevolent joy that contrasted strangely with the dread that had been in them a moment before, lifted her clenched hands and hissed out a single word:
“Christ!”
They, too, had been waiting.
Thousands there were in the great city whose eyes glistened that night,—thousands who had not been waiting, for they knew nothing of the secret that lay secure and safe in the breasts of the few who were allowed to strike. Thousands who rejoiced, for they knew that a great and glorious deed had been done! They only knew that devastation had fallen somewhere with appalling force,—it mattered not to them where, so long as it had fallen in its appointed place!
Many a glass, many a stein, was raised in stealthy tribute to the hand that had rocked the city of New York! And in the darkness of the night they hid their gloating faces, and whispered a song without melody.
Rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief! In spirit, at least, they touched hands and thrilled with a common exaltation!
It was after one o'clock when the Carstairs' motor crept out of the ferry-house at 130th Street, and whirled up the hill toward the Drive. A rough-looking individual who loitered unmolested in the lee of the ferry-house, peered intently at the number of the car as it passed, and jotted it down in a little book. He noted in the same way the license numbers of other automobiles. When he was relieved hours afterward, he had in his little book the number of every car that came in from Jersey between half past eleven at night and seven o'clock in the morning. It was not his duty to stop or question the occupants of these cars. He was merely exercising the function of the mysterious Secret Eyes of the United States Government.
Mr. and Mrs. Carstairs were admitted to their Park Avenue apartment by a tall, beautiful girl, who threw open the door the instant the elevator stopped at the floor.
“Thank goodness!” she cried, a vibrant note of relief in her voice “We were so dreadfully—”
“What are you doing up, Louise?” cried Mrs. Carstairs quickly. Her husband frowned, as with annoyance.
“Where is Hodges?” he demanded. He stood stock-still for a moment before following his wife into the foyer.
“He went out some time ago to get an 'extra.' The boys were in the street calling new ones. He asked if he might go out. How—how terrible it is, Uncle Dawy. And it was so near the Club, I—I—oh, I was dreadfully worried. The papers say the shells fell miles away—Why, I couldn't go to bed, Aunt Frieda. We have been trying for hours to get the Club on the telephone.” She was assisting Mrs. Carstairs in removing her rich chinchilla coat. Carstairs studied the girl's white face with considerable anxiety as he threw off his own fur coat. The worried frown deepened.
“Could you hear the explosions over here, Louise?” he asked.
“Hear them? Why, Uncle dear, we all thought the city was being bombarded