|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.