The Wolf laughed.
But Smarlinghue had retreated now, and, crouched upon the cot, was mumbling through twisted lips.
And again the Wolf laughed, and, gathering up the jewels, dropped them into his pocket, and backed to the door. He stood there an instant, his eyes narrowed on Jimmie Dale.
“I got the stuff now”—he was snarling low, viciously—“and mabbe that puts it a little more up to me. But if you ever open your mug about this, I’ll do to you what I did to the Spider to-day—and if you want to know what that is, go and ask the police to let you have a look! D’ye understand?”
Came the brutal, taunting laugh again, and the door closed behind the Wolf, and his step died away along the passage, and rang an instant later on the pavement without.
It was a moment before Jimmie Dale moved—but into Smarlinghue’s distorted features there came a strange smile. He reeled a little from weakness, as he walked to the door, locked it, and, returning, stooped and picked up the cash-box from the floor. In the false bottom, the Tocsin had said. From the leather girdle came a sharp-pointed tool. He pried with it for an instant inside and around the bottom edges, and loosening a sheet of metal that fitted exactly to the edges of the box, lifted out from beneath it several folded sheets of paper. He glanced at the typewritten sheets, a curious, menacing gleam creeping into the dark eyes, then thrust the papers inside his shirt; and, dropping into a chair, unlaced and kicked off his blood-soaked boot.
He was very weak; he had lost, he must have lost, a great deal of blood—but there was something to do yet—still something to do. There was still—the Wolf!
He tore the sheet on the cot into strips, and washed and dressed his wound—a flesh wound, but bad enough, he saw, just above the knee. And then, this done, he took a damp piece of cloth, went to the door again, opened it, and looked out. There was neither any one in sight, nor any sound. The passage was murky; one gas-jet alone lighted it, and that was turned down. There were little spots, dark spots on the floor—but the Wolf had told him that. He passed his hand over his head—he was a little dizzy. Then slowly, laboriously, he removed the spots from the hallway—and one from the doorstep.
Back in his room once more, he locked the door again. A sense of utter exhaustion was stealing upon him—but there was still something yet to be done. Another gulp of brandy steadied him, steadied his head. He took the papers from his pocket and read them now. Here were the details, minute, exact, with the names of those involved, names of those who would squeal quickly enough to save themselves once they were in the clutches of the law, of two of the most famous murder mysteries that New York had known; the details of two, and, unfinished, the partial details of another. It was the evidence the police had long sought. It was the death sentence upon the Wolf—for murder.
Jimmie Dale’s face, very white now, was set and hard. The Spider had been too late—to save himself. Beginning to fear the Wolf, as the Tocsin had explained, he had begun to make a record of those days gone by, meaning to hold it over the Wolf’s head in self-protection, deposit it somewhere where it would come to light if any attack were made upon him—only the Wolf had struck before the Spider had finished all he had meant to write, before he had told any one or had warned the Wolf that the papers were in existence. Too late to save himself—and yet, if the Wolf still paid the penalty for murder, did it matter if he were convicted for the taking of another life than that of Spider Webb! It was like some grim, retributive proxy! The Spider, at least, had not been too late—for that!
For a moment longer, Jimmie Dale sat there, staring at the papers in his hand. They were unsigned, the Spider’s name nowhere appeared—the Spider had been crafty enough to deal only with crimes in which he had had no personal share. There was nothing, not even handwriting, as the papers now stood, to intimate that they had emanated from the Spider; and therefore, in their disclosure, there could be no suspicion in the Wolf’s mind that they bore any relation to this night’s work. Nor would the Wolf, tried for another crime, ever mention this night’s work. It would be the last thing the Wolf would do. The Wolf had double-crossed the underworld, and the underworld, if it found it out, would not easily forgive—and even in a death cell, clinging to the hope of commutation of sentence, the Wolf would never run the risk of his additional guilt of the Spider’s murder leaking out. The rôle of “Smarlinghue” in the underworld was safe.
And now Jimmie Dale’s lips twitched queerly. The papers were unsigned. He took from the leather girdle the thin metal box, the tweezers, and a diamond-shaped, adhesive, gray paper seal—and, holding the seal with the tweezers, he moistened it with his tongue, and pressed it down upon the lower sheet. It was signed now! Signed with a signature that the police—and the Wolf—knew well!
He rose unsteadily, and, taking the empty cash-box, loosened the base-board from the wall near the door, hid the cash-box away, and felt through the pockets of his evening clothes—there was a blank envelope there, he remembered, in which he had placed some memoranda—an envelope, and the little gold pencil in his dress waistcoat pocket. He found them, and, kneeling on the floor, printing the letters, he addressed the envelope to police headquarters, folded and placed the documents inside, and sealed the envelope.
He replaced the base-board, and stood up—but his hand caught at the wall to support himself.
“To-morrow,” said Jimmie Dale weakly—he was groping his way back across the room to the cot “I—I guess I’m all—all in—to-night.”
Chapter XI
The Voices of the Underworld
Futility! And on top of futility, a week of inaction, thanks to that flesh wound in his leg. Futility seemed to haunt, yes, and torture him! Even his rehabilitation of Larry the Bat, with all its attendant risk and danger, had been futile as far as she was concerned. And he had counted so much on that! And that had failed, and nothing was left to him but to pursue again the one possible chance of success, the hope that somewhere in the innermost depths of the Bad Lands he might pick up the clue he sought. And so, to-night, he was listening again to the voices of the underworld—and so far he had heard nothing but ominous mutterings, proof that the sordid denizens of crimeland were more than usually disturbed. The Wolf had gone to join his friend Frenchy Virat in the Tombs! The twisted lips of the underworld whispered the name of the Gray Seal!
Jimmie Dale’s fingers, twitching, simulating even in that little detail the drug-wrecked role of Smarlinghue that he played, clutched with a sort of hideous eagerness at the hypodermic syringe which he held in his hands. How many times, here in Foo Sen’s, or in other lairs that were but the counterpart of Foo Sen’s, had he lain, stretched out, a pretended victim to a vice that robbed his face of colour, that shook his miserably clad body, that clouded his eyes and stole from them the light of reason—while he listened! How many times—and how many times in the days to come would he do it again! Would it never be his, the secret that he sought—the clue that would divulge the identity of those who threatened the Tocsin’s life; those who, like human wolves, like a hell-pack snarling for its prey, had driven her again into hiding and made of her a hunted thing!
The fingers closed convulsively over the hypodermic. Wolves! A hell-pack! A tinge of red dyed the grey-white, hollowed cheeks, as a surge of fury swept upon him. No, it was not futility; no, it was not wasted effort—this haunting of the dens of the underworld! In his soul he knew that some day he would pick up the trail of that hell-pack and those human wolves—and when that some day came it would be a day of reckoning, and the price that he would exact would not be small!
He lay back on the bunk that Foo Sen had ingratiatingly allotted him. The air was close, heavy with the sweet, sickish smell of opium, and full of low, strange sounds and noises. And these sounds, in their composite sense, emanating from unseen