The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale

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He came suddenly without a sound to his feet, and pressed back close
against the wall, his body rigid and thrown forward like one poised to
spring. There was a footstep outside the door, the rasp of a key in the
lock, then a faint, murky path of light as the door opened, and a man
stepped forward over the threshold. The key was inserted with another
rasping sound in the inner side of the lock, the door closed, the key
turned and was withdrawn, thrust evidently into its possessor's
pocket--and then Jimmie Dale, silently, in a lightning flash, was upon
the other, his hand at the man's throat, the cold, round muzzle of his
automatic against the other's face. There was a choked cry, the thud as
of something dropping on the floor--and then Jimmie Dale spoke.

"Put your hands up over your head!" he breathed grimly--and, as the
other obeyed, his own hand fell away from the man's throat, and in a
quick, deft sweep over the other's clothing located the bulge of a
revolver, and whipped it from the man's pocket. He pushed the man with
his automatic's muzzle back against the wall, closer to the
electric-light switch. Was it Reddy Mull--or English Dick? And then
Jimmie Dale laughed low, unpleasantly, as he switched on the light. He
was staring into a face that was white and colourless--the face of a man
with a heavy black moustache, and whose slouch hat was jammed far down
over his eyes. The process of elimination made it very simple--it was
English Dick.

The man blinked, and wet his lips with his tongue, and at sight of
Jimmie Dale's mask, perhaps because it suggested a community of
interest, tried to force a smirk.

"What's--what's the game?" he stammered.

"This--to begin with!" said Jimmie Dale grimly--and, stooping, picked up
from the floor a small black satchel, the object that English Dick had
dropped on entering the room. "Go over to that table!" ordered Jimmie
Dale curtly.

The man obeyed.

"Sit down!" Jimmie Dale was clipping off his words in cold menace.

Again the man obeyed.

Jimmie Dale, his back to the door as he faced the other across the
table, snapped open the bag. It was full to the top with banknotes and
securities. Under his mask his lips curled in a hard, forbidding smile.
He took from his pocket the package of the bank's securities he had
found in the drawer of Forrester's desk, and laid it in silence on the
table beside the satchel; beside this again, still in silence, he placed
the bottle that had contained the hydrocyanic acid, and--after an
instant's pause--spread out the sheet of note paper bearing Forrester's
forged signature.

The man's face, white before, had gone a livid gray.

"W-what do you want?" he whispered.

"I want you to write another confession." There was a deadly monotony in
Jimmie Dale's voice, as he tapped the paper with the muzzle of his
automatic. "This one is out of date."

"I don't know what you mean," faltered English Dick. "So help me, honest
to God, I don't!"

"Don't you!" There was a curious drawl in Jimmie Dale's voice--and then
in a flash his free hand swept across the table, jerked away the other's
moustache, and pushed the slouch hat up from the man's eyes. "I mean
that the game is up--_Dryden_."

There was a low cry; and the man, with working lips, shrank back in
his chair.

"You cur!" The words were coming fast and hot from Jimmie Dale's lips
now. "English Dick, alias Dryden, the bank teller! So, you don't know
what I mean! Listen, then, and I'll tell you! Six months ago you got a
position in the bank. Since then you've forged names right and left on
securities, falsified the books, and stolen cash and securities. Day by
day, working in with your gang, you've brought the loot here, coming in
disguise of course, as you've come to-night, for it wouldn't do for
'Dryden' to be seen in this neighbourhood! And you turned the loot over
to Reddy Mull--by leaving it, if he didn't happen to be around, under
that loose board there in the corner."

"My God!" The man's face was ghastly. "Who--who are you?"

"To-day," went on Jimmie Dale, as though he had not heard the other,
"you came to the climax of the plan you had been working on for those
six months--the bank was wrecked--and what little there was left you
took"--he jerked his hand toward the open satchel--"replacing it at the
last moment with previously prepared dummy packages. And you took it,
you cur"--Jimmie Dale's voice choked suddenly--"not only at the expense
of a man's life, but of his good name and reputation. You might have
known, I do not know whether you did or not, that Forrester had some
private trouble with a money lender, but I do not imagine that had
anything to do with your having selected Forrester's bank. Your object
was to exploit a small bank where, with only one man from whom to hide
your work, you could loot it thoroughly; and a forged confession clever
enough to deceive any one in its handwriting and signature, and the man
found dead from a dose of prussic acid, the empty bottle on the floor
beside him, needed no other evidence to stamp him as the guilty man."

English Dick was struggling to his feet; his eyes, in a sort of horrible
fascination, on Jimmie Dale.

Jimmie Dale, pushed him savagely back into his seat. "Yes--you cur!" he
said again. "You got your first fright when you found those evidences of
suicide were gone--you even lost your nerve a little in your bluff with
the bank examiners--and you hurried here the moment you could get away
from the preliminary police investigation that followed--I was even
afraid you might get here a little sooner than you did. Shall I give you
the details of this afternoon and to-night? The plant was ready. You had
sent for the bank examiners. You had already prepared the forged
confession, and had a small package of securities ready. Forrester had
gone to New York. You turned over the confession and the package of
securities to your accomplice, or accomplices, to be left in Forrester's
room. I imagine that you telephoned, or sent a message, to New York to
Forrester telling him that the bank examiners were in the bank, that
there was something the matter, and for him to go to his rooms, and,
say, meet you there before going to the bank. Your accomplice, for you
established an alibi by remaining with the bank examiners, stole in
after him, or even in the dark hallway stunned him with a black-jack,
then forced the poison down his throat, laid him on the floor, placed
the empty bottle beside him, and left the confession on the desk. The
plan was very cunningly worked out. The bruise on Forrester's head was
most obviously accounted for--his head had struck, of course, against
the leg of the couch--he was found lying in that position! It is
strange, though, isn't it, how sometimes the most cunning of plans go
astray in the simplest and yet the most perverse of ways? Who, under the
circumstances, would have thought of it! Your accomplice had simply to
place a document already prepared upon the desk. Even you did not think
to warn him yourself. It did not enter his head to see if there were pen
and ink there with which it might have been written, or, failing that, a
fountain pen in Forrester's pocket--and there was neither the one nor
the other. That's all--except the name of the man who killed Forrester."
Jimmie Dale leaned forward sharply. "Who was it?"

English Dick wet his lips again.

"I--they--they'd kill me like--like a dog if I told," he mumbled.

"_They?"_ The monosyllable came curt and hard.

"I don't know," said English Dick. "That's God's truth--I never
knew--there's a big gang--none of us know.".

"But you know who worked with you in this." Jimmie Dale was speaking
through clenched teeth. "You know who killed Forrester."

"Yes." The man's whisper was scarcely audible.

"Who?"

"Reddy--Reddy Mull."

"Yes," said Jimmie Dale in his grim monotone, "I thought so."

He reached into the satchel where a small package of securities were
wrapped up in a sheet of the bank's stationery, removed the sheet of
paper, and spread it out before English Dick. "Write it down!" he
commanded--and the muzzle of his automatic jerked forward to touch the
fountain pen in the other's vest pocket. "Write it--all of it--your own
share--Reddy Mull's--the whole story!"

The man's lips seemed to have gone dry again, and again and again his
tongue circled them.

"I can't!" he said hoarsely. "I daren't--they'd kill me. And--and if
they didn't, it would send me up, and perhaps--perhaps to the chair."

"You take your chances on that"--Jimmie Dale's voice was low and
even--"but you take no chances here--for there are none." The automatic
in Jimmie Dale's hand edged ominously forward. "It's Forrester's
exoneration--or you. Do you understand? And you make your
choice--_now_."

For an instant the man's eyes met Jimmie Dale's, then shifted, as though
drawn in spite of himself, to the muzzle of Jimmie Dale's automatic; and
then his hand reached into his pocket for his pen.

From the pool room in front came an outburst of hand-clapping and
applause--there was evidently a match of some kind going on. Jimmie
Dale, his eyes on English Dick, as the latter began to write with a sort
of feverish haste as though fear and a miserable desire to have done
with it spurred him on, picked up the articles from the table, and
placed them in the satchel. He waited silently then--and then English
Dick pushed the paper toward him.

Jimmie Dale picked it up, and read it. It was all there, all of it--and
the signature this time was not forged! He placed the paper in the
satchel, and closed the satchel.

English Dick passed his hand across a forehead that beaded with
perspiration.

"What are you going to do?" he asked under his breath.

"I'm going to see that this--and you--reaches the hands of the police,"
said Jimmie Dale tersely. "We'll leave here in a moment--by the window.
There's a patrolman who passes the end of the lane once in a while, and
I expect, with the aid of a piece of cord and a pocket handkerchief as a
gag, that he'll find you there. My method may be a little crude, but I
have reasons of my own for not walking into a police station with you.
but before we go, there's still that matter of--the men higher up. They
needed a clever penman for this job and one who wouldn't be
recognised--and they got the best! Who brought you over from England?"

"A friend over there, one of the 'swell ones,' put it up to me," English
Dick answered heavily.

"Yes--and here?" prodded Jimmie Dale. "Who got you into the bank here?"

"I don't know." English Dick shook his head. "I reported to a man called
Chester. He doped out the story I was to tell, and told me to go to the
bank and apply for the job, and that it was already fixed."

"I'd like to meet 'Chester,'" said Jimmie Dale grimly. "Where
does he live?"

"I don't know," said English Dick again. "I tell you, I don't know!
They're big--my God, they'll get me for this, if the law doesn't! I
don't know where he lives--he always came to me. The only one I know is
Reddy Mull, and--"

His voice was drowned out in a louder and more prolonged burst of
applause from the pool room, which mingled shouts, cries and the
thunderous banging of cue butts on the floor.

"A good shot!" said Jimmie Dale, with a grim smile.

"Yes," said English Dick, "a good shot"--but into his voice had crept a
new note, a note like one of malicious triumph.

Jimmie Dale's lips set suddenly hard and tight. Yes, he _heard_
now--perhaps too late--what the other _saw_. The uproar that had
drowned out all other sounds had subsided--_the door behind him had been
unlocked and was now opening slowly_.

And then Jimmie Dale, quick as thought is quick, his fingers closed on
the satchel, hurled himself around the table and to the floor. There was
the roar of a report, a flash of flame, as Reddy Mull, hand thrust in
through the partially open doorway, fired--a wild scream, as the shot,
meant for him, Jimmie Dale, found another mark directly behind where he
had been standing--and English Dick, reeling to his feet, pitched
forward over the table, carrying the table with him to the floor. It had
taken the time that a watch takes to tick. Came the roar of a report
again, as Jimmie Dale fired in turn--at the electric-light bulb a few
feet away from him on the wall. There was the tinkle of shattering
glass--and darkness. Came shouts, cries, a yell from the door from Reddy
Mull, a fusillade of shots from Reddy Mull's revolver, the rush of many
feet from the pool room--and Jimmie Dale, in the blackness, dropped
silently from the window to the ground.

He gained the street; and, five minutes later, blocks away, he entered
the private stall of a Bowery saloon. Here, Jimmie Dale added another
paper to the contents of the satchel. The characters printed, and badly
formed, the paper looked like this:

WITH THE COMPLIMENTS OF THE
/\
/ \
/ \
/ \
\ /
\ /
\ /
\/

"And I guess," said Jimmie Dale grimly to himself, "that if I slip this
to the police, the police will get--Reddy Mull."

CHAPTER XIX

THE BEGINNING OF THE END

How far away last night, with Forrester's murder and the sordid
denouement in Reddy Mull's room, seemed! How far away even half an hour
ago this very night seemed! Just half an hour ago! Then, with no thought
but one of dogged perseverance to keep up his quest, with neither hint
nor sign that his quest was any nearer the end than it had ever been, he
had entered Bristol Bob's, here, in the role of Smarlinghue; and now, as
a rift that had opened in the clouds, there had come sudden and amazing
joy. It held him now in thrall. It threatened even to make him _forget_
that he was for the moment Smarlinghue--forget what, as Smarlinghue,
Smarlinghue dare not forget--the role he played.

He leaned forward suddenly and caught up his whisky glass--whose
contents had previously and surreptitiously been spilled into the
cuspidor on the floor beside his chair. He lifted the glass to his
mouth, his head thrown back as though to drain a final, lingering drop,
then he thumped the glass down on the table, licked his lips--thin and
distorted by "Smarlinghue's" makeup--and wiped them with the sleeve of
his threadbare coat.

A man at the next table, well known as the Pippin, young, flashily
dressed, his almost effeminate features giving an added touch of
viciousness, through incongruity, to his general appearance, twisted
his head around and grinned with malicious derision.

Jimmie Dale's fingers searched hungrily now through first one and then
another of his ragged pockets, and finally extricated a dime and a
nickel. With these he tapped insistently on the table, until an
attendant answered the summons and supplied him with another drink.

He sat back then for a time; now eyeing the liquor, as though greedy
for its taste, yet greedy, too, to prolong the anticipation, since from
his actions there was apparently no means of further replenishing the
supply; now glancing around the smoke-laden room where, on the polished
section of the floor in the centre, a score of laughing, shrieking
couples whirled and pranced in the unrestrained throes of the
underworld's latest dance; now permitting his eyes to rest with a
sudden scowl on the man at the next table. He had no concern with the
Pippin--nor had the Pippin any concern with him. The man, as he imbibed
a number of drinks, simply seemed to find a certain: malevolent
amusement in a contemptuous appraisal of his, Jimmie Dale's, person;
but the other, in spite of the new, glad exhilaration Jimmie Dale was
experiencing, annoyed Jimmie Dale--the blatant expanse of pink shirt
cuff, for instance, in order to display the Pippin's diamond-snake
links, famous from One end of the underworld to the other, was
eminently typical of the man. The cuff links were undoubtedly an object
of envy to the society in which the Pippin moved; they were even
beautiful cuff links, it was true, oriental in design, never to be
mistaken by any one who had ever seen them, and the stones with which
they were set were credited generally in the underworld as being
genuine, but--Jimmie Dale was hesitantly lifting his glass again in a
queer, miserly sort of way. The Pippin had jerked a cigarette box from
his pocket, stuck what was evidently the single cigarette it had
contained between his lips; and now, tossing away the box, he pushed
back his chair and stood up--but on the floor beneath the table, where
it had fluttered unobserved when the cigarette box had been jerked from
the pocket, lay a small folded piece of paper.

"If you hang around long enough, Smarly," gibed the Pippin, as he passed
by on his way toward the door, "maybe some of the rubber-necks off the
gape-wagon will take pity on you and buy you another--the slumming
parties are just crazy about broken-down artists!"

"You go chase yourself!" said Smarlinghue politely, through one corner
of his twisted mouth.

Jimmie Dale's eyes followed the other. The Pippin, threading his way
amongst the tables, gained the door, and passed out into the street.
And then Jimmie Dale's eyes reverted to the piece of paper under the
adjacent table. It was not at all likely that it was of the slightest
importance or significance, and yet--Jimmie Dale stretched out his
foot, drew the paper toward him, and, stooping over, picked it up. He
unfolded it, and found it to contain several typewritten lines. He
frowned in a puzzled way as he read them; then read them over again,
and his frown deepened.

Melinoff has the goods. Go the limit if he squeals. Not later than
ten-thirty to-night.

Jimmie Dale's eyes lifted and strayed around the noisy, riotous dance
hall. Just what exactly did the message mean? The Pippin was a bad
actor--literally, as well as metaphorically. The Pippin, if asked,
would probably still have styled himself an actor; but, though still
young, his career on the stage had ended several years ago rather
abruptly--with a year's imprisonment! Jimmie Dale did not recall the
details of the particular offence of which the Pippin had been found
guilty, save that it had been for theft. It did not, however, matter
very much. The Pippin of to-day as he was known to the underworld, to
which strata of society he had immediately gravitated on his release
from prison, was all that was of immediate interest. He had associated
himself with a gang run by one Steve Barlow, commonly known as the Mole,
and under this august patronage and protection had already more than one
"job" of the first magnitude to his credit. The Pippin, in a word, was
both an ugly and an unpleasant customer.

Jimmie Dale's eyes continued to circuit the seedy dance hall. What was
it that the Pippin was to procure from Melinoff, and for which, if
necessary, the Pippin was to go "the limit"? Melinoff himself was not
without reproach, either! What was the game? Melinoff was an old-clothes
and junk dealer, and, as a side line, at times a very profitable side
line, had been known to act as a "fence" for stolen goods. He had
skirted for years on the ragged edge with the police, and then, caught
red-handed at last, had changed his occupation for a more useful one
during a somewhat prolonged sojourn in Sing Sing. Affairs after that had
not prospered with Melinoff. His wife, honest if her husband was not,
and already an old woman, had been hard put to it with the shabby shop
and the meagre business she was able to transact; so hard put to it,
indeed, that the wonder had been that she had managed to keep the roof
over her head. She had died a few months after her husband's release.
Melinoff, if he had had no other virtue, had at least loved his wife,
and the Melinoff of old, then a sprightly enough man for his years, was
no more, and it was a decrepit, stoop-shouldered, dirty and
grey-bearded figure that shuffled now around the old-clothes shop,
apathetic of "bargains," where before it had been a man whose keenness
was matched only by the sort of eager craft and low cunning with which
he had conducted his business.

A smile, half grim, half whimsical, flickered across Jimmie Dale's lips.
There were strange lives, strange undercurrents, always, ceaselessly, at
work here in the underworld, here where the grist from the human mill
found its place. Melinoff, the Pippin, each of those whirling figures
out there on the floor, each of those men and women whose laughter rose
raucously from the tables, or whose whisperings, as heads were lowered
and held close together, seemed an unsavoury, vicious thing, had known a
strange and tortuous path; yet strangest, most tortuous of them all,
was--his own!

His fingers, as he thrust the Pippin's note into the side pocket of his
coat, touched the torn fragments of another note, tiny little particles
of paper, torn over and over again into fine and minute shreds--the
Tocsin's note--the note that seemed suddenly to have changed all his
life. It had come as her communications had always come--without
bridging the way that lay between them, without furnishing him with a
clue through the method employed for their transmission that would avail
him anything, or supply him with any means of reaching her. It had been
thrust into his hand by a street urchin, as he had entered the door of
Bristol Bob's that half an hour before. He had not even questioned the
urchin--it would have been useless, futile, barren of results. A hundred
previous experiences had at least taught him that! He could surmise
about it, though, if he would; and, in view of the contents of the note
itself, surmise, in all probability, with fair accuracy. The Tocsin had
satisfied herself that he was neither at home nor at the club, and had,
therefore, chosen an inconspicuous messenger to search for "Smarlinghue"
through the underworld. And there would have been no risk. For the first
time in all the years that her letters had been the motive force, the
underlying basis of the Gray Seal's acts, it would not, as far as
dangerous consequences were concerned, have mattered if the note had
gone astray, or had even been read by others. He need not even have torn
it up, as he had done through force of habit, for there was no "plan"
to-night, no coup to carry through. The note, for the first time, was
not a "call to arms;" it was what he had been longing for, always hoping
for, yet never permitting himself to build too strongly upon lest he
should lay up for himself a store of disappointment too bitter for
endurance--it was a note of _hope_. There were just a few lines, a few
sentences; and it had contained neither form of address nor signature.
To any one save himself it meant nothing, it had no significance.
Snatches of it ran through his mind again:

"... It is the beginning of the end.... The way is clearing ... I am very
happy to-night, and I wanted to tell you so...."

The end at last! The end of the years of peril; the end of that fear
gnawing always at his heart that she might never live to come out into
the sunlight again; the end of this dual life he led; the return to a
normal existence where surroundings like the present, where the dens and
dives of the underworld, the secret rookeries nursing their hell-hatched
crimes, the taint and smell of evil, and the reek of soul-filth would be
hereafter no more than a memory! To be through with it all, through
with it all, and to know her love instead--because she was safe!

He stared about him, and stared with queer incredulity at his own
miserable clothing. Was it true, was it reality--this figure that the
underworld knew as Smarlinghue, who sat here, and with dirty fingers
played with a whisky glass on the cheap, liquor-spotted table, and out
of half-closed, well-simulated drug-laden eyes gazed on those dancing
figures out there on the floor to whom the law from cradlehood had been
a natural enemy, and to the door of hardly one of whom but lay crimes
that ranged from the paltry to the hideous!

Reality! Yes, it was real! God knew the abysmal depths of its reality.
Months piled on months there had been of it! Those voices out there that
rose in a jangle of ribald mirth were the same voices that, hushed in
deadlier menace, had whispered that grim slogan, "Death to the Gray
Seal!" through every hidden cranny in the underworld; these men and
women here around him were of the same breed as those who only last
night had struck down and brutally murdered Forrester, and not content
with murder had plotted to rob their victim of his good name as well!

Jimmie Dale's hand clenched suddenly--his mind was off at a tangent,
away for the moment from her. Well, they had failed last night in all
save murder! Failed--and one of them had already paid the price, and
another, in the Tombs awaiting trial, faced the certainty of the death
chair in Sing Sing! But those two, Reddy Mull, and English Dick, had
been little more than tools. Whose was the hidden master brain behind
them, controlling this evil power that struck in the dark; that lately,
though unseen, was permeating the underworld with its presence; that
intuitively he had felt was reaching out, feeling its way, to grapple
with and, if it could, to strangle him the Gray Seal! He had felt the
menace, known that it existed, and the slogan ringing always in his
ears, the Whispered "Death to the Gray Seal" had taken on a deeper
significance, had brought him a more acute and imminent sense of peril
than ever before; but it was only last night, for the first time, that
he had equally _felt_ that he had had any concrete knowledge of, or
contact with this new antagonist. And last night, if there had been a
challenge he had accepted it, and if there had been no challenge he had
at least thrown down the gauntlet himself! If this was actually the
criminal organisation that was arrayed against him, the master brain at
the head of it would now have a greater incentive than ever to trap and
exterminate the Gray Seal, for English Dick lay dead, and Reddy Mull was
behind the bars, and twenty thousand dollars in cash that they had
schemed for was in the hands of the police--thanks to the Gray Seal!
Added incentive! They would move heaven and earth to reach him now! All
the trickery, all the hell-born ingenuity that they possessed would be
launched against him now, and--Jimmie Dale's face, that had been set and
hard, relaxed suddenly. Well, granted all that! What did it matter now?
They would but hunt a myth! Between them and himself now there stood the
Tocsin's note. "The way is clearing.... I am very happy to-night." She
would not have written that unless she were very sure. To-morrow,
perhaps, and Smarlinghue, and the Gray Seal, and Larry the Bat would
have passed forever out of existence, and there would be only Jimmie
Dale, and _she,_ and love--and a phantom left behind in the underworld
against whom the underworld and this evil genius of crime might pit
their wits to their hearts' content!

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