A blue thread curled lazily upward from the tip of the cigarette. Jimmie Dale’s eyes fastened mechanically on the twisting, wavering spiral, followed it mechanically as it rose and spread out into filmy, undulating, fantastic shapes—and the strong, square jaw set suddenly hard. It was not so very strange that those words should have come back to him to-night! Things were “warm” now—and he could not let them “cool” for a year!
“Warm!” He smiled a little mirthlessly. The comparison was very slight! Then, at the beginning, at the outset of the Gray Seal’s career, the police, it was true, had shown a certain unpleasant anxiety for a closer acquaintanceship, but that was about all. To-day, lashed on and mocked by a virulent press, goaded to madness by their own past failures to “get” the Gray Seal, to whose door they laid a hundred crimes and for whom the bars of a death cell in Sing Sing was the goal if they could but catch their prey, the police, to a man, were waging a ceaseless and relentless war against him; and to-day, joining hands with the police, the underworld in all its thousand ramifications, prompted by fear, by suspicion of one another, reached out to trap him, and to deal out to him a much more speedy, but none the less certain, fate than that prescribed by the statutes of the law!
He shook his head. It could not go on—indefinitely. The role was too hard to play; the dual life, in a sort of grim, ironical self-mockery, brought even in its own successful interpretation added dangers and perils with each succeeding day. As it had been with Larry the Bat, the more he now lived Smarlinghue the more it became difficult to slough off Smarlinghue and live as Jimmie Dale; the more Smarlinghue became trusted and accepted in the inner circles of the underworld, the more he became a figure in those sordid surroundings, and the more dangerous it became to “disappear” at will without exciting suspicion, where suspicion, as it was, was already spread into every nook and corner of the Bad Lands, where each rubbed shoulders with his fellow in the lurking dread that the other was—the Gray Seal!
The police were no mean antagonists, he made no mistake on that score; but the peril that was the graver menace of the two, and the greater to be feared, was—the underworld. And here in the underworld in the last few days, here where on every twisted, vicious lip was the whisper, “Death to the Gray Seal,” there had come even another menace. He could not define it, it was intuition perhaps—but intuition had never failed him yet. It was an undercurrent of which he had gradually become conscious, the sense of some unseen, guiding power, that moved and swayed and controlled, and was present, dominant, in every den and dive in crimeland. There had been many gang leaders and heads of little coteries of crime, cunning, crafty in their way, and all of them unscrupulous, like the Wolf, for instance, who had sworn openly and boastingly through the Bad Lands, and had been believed for a season, that they would bring the Gray Seal to a last accounting—but it was more than this now. There was a craftier brain and a stronger hand at work than the Wolf’s had ever been! Who was it? He shook his head. He did not know. He had gone far into the innermost circles of the underworld—and he did not know. He sensed a power there; and in a dozen different, intangible ways, still an intuition more than anything else, he had sensed this “some one,” this power, creeping, fumbling, feeling its implacable way through the dark, as it were, toward him.
Yes, it was getting “warm”—perilously warm! And inevitably there must come an end—some day. The warning stared him in the face. But he could not stop, could not heed the warning, could not let things “cool” now for a year, and stand aside until the storm should have subsided! Where was the Tocsin? If his peril was great—what was hers!
He surged suddenly upward from his chair, his hands clenched until the knuckles stood out like ivory knobs. The Tocsin! The woman he loved—where was she? Was she safe to-night? Where was she? He could not stop until that question had been answered, be the consequences what they might! Warnings, the realisation of peril—he laughed shortly, in grim bitterness—counted little in the balance after all, did they not! Where was the Tocsin?
The telephone rang. Jimmie Dale stared at the instrument for a moment, as though it were some singular and uninvited intruder who had broken in without warrant upon his train of thought; and then, leaning forward over the table, he lifted the receiver from the hook.
“Yes? Hello! Yes?” inquired Jimmie Dale. “What is it?”
A man’s voice, hurried, and seemingly somewhat agitated, answered him.
“I would like to speak to Mr. Dale—to Mr. Dale in person.”
“This is Mr. Dale speaking,” said Jimmie Dale a little brusquely. “What is it?”
“Oh, is that you, Mr. Dale?” The voice had quickened perceptibly. “I didn’t recognise your voice—but then I haven’t heard it for a long while, have I? This is Forrester. Are—are you very busy to-night, Mr. Dale?”
“Oh, hello, Forrester!” Jimmie Dale’s voice had grown more affable. “Busy? Well, I don’t know. It depends on what you mean by busy.”
“An hour or two,” the other suggested—the tinge of anxiety in his tones growing more pronounced. “The time to run out here in your car. I haven’t any right to ask it, I know, but the truth is I—I want to talk to some one pretty badly, and I need some financial help, and—and I thought of you. I—I’m afraid there’s a mess here. The bank examiners landed in suddenly late this afternoon.”
“The—what?” demanded Jimmie Dale sharply.
“The bank examiners—I—I can’t talk over the ‘phone. Only, for God’s sake, come—will you? I’ll be in my rooms—you know where they are, don’t you—on the cottier over—”
“Yes, I know,” Jimmie Dale broke in tersely; then, quietly: “All right, Forrester, I’ll come.”
“Thank God!” came Forrester’s voice—and disconnected abruptly.
Jimmie Dale replaced the receiver on the hook, stared at the instrument again in a perplexed way; then, called the garage on the private house wire. There was no answer. He walked quickly then across the room and pushed an electric button.
“Jason,” he said a moment later, as the old butler appeared on the threshold in answer to the summons, “Benson doesn’t answer in the garage. I presume he is downstairs. I wish you would ask him to bring the touring car around at once. And you might have a light overcoat ready for me—Jason.”
“Yes, sir,” said the old man. “Yes, Master Jim, sir, at once.” His eyes sought Jimmie Dale’s, and dropped—but into them had come, not the questioning of familiarity, but the quick, anxious questioning inspired by the affection that had grown up between them from the days when, as the old man was so fond of saying, he had dandled his Master Jim upon his knee. “Yes, sir, Master Jim, at once, sir,” Jason repeated—but he still hesitated upon the threshold.
And then Jimmie Dale shook his head whimsically—and smiled.
“No—not to-night, Jason,” he said reassuringly. “It’s quite all right, Jason—there’s no letter to-night.”
The old man’s face cleared instantly.
“Yes, sir; quite so, sir. Thank you, Master Jim,” he said. “Shall I tell Benson that he is to drive you, sir, or—”
“No; I’ll drive myself, Jason,” decided Jimmie Dale.
“Yes, sir—very good, sir”—the door closed on Jason.
Jimmie Dale turned back into the room, began to pace up and down its length, and for a moment the reverie that the telephone had interrupted was again dominant in his mind. Jason was afraid. Jason—even though he knew so little of the truth—was afraid. Well, what then? He, Jimmie Dale, was not blind himself! It had come almost to the point where his back was against the wall at last; to the point where, unless he found the Tocsin before many more days went by, it would be, as far as he was concerned—too