“Watch Mother Margot—at Hip Foo's to-night.”
His lips closed tightly. Was there anything beneath the surface of that one sentence, anything more than its actual wording, anything of a personal nature? He had been turning it over and over in his mind from the moment he had received it, even while he had hurried to the Sanctuary and from a millionaire clubman had become the drug-wrecked Smarlinghue, even now again as he walked here along this none too well lighted and unsavory street in the heart of New York's Chinatown. The note was like none he had ever received from her before. Here there was no detailed plan laid out, no evident foreknowledge of what was afoot. It seemed almost a call for help where she herself was helpless, and so—it brought the blood pounding in quicker tempo through his veins—it might well be she had realised and was prepared at last to accept as inevitable the fact that, whether she would or no, he meant to force his way if it were humanly within his power into those shadows, as she termed them, with which the Phantom had surrounded her. Well, why not? She must know that he had already been in perhaps closer, more intimate touch than even herself with this master criminal of a score of aliases and a score of domiciles, first as Gentleman Laroque, then as Isaac Shiftel, and again as Limpy Mack. And besides there was her promise that—no! He shook his head a little bitterly. Why should he try to blind his own eyes? Her promise to call upon him for aid had contained the proviso that it would not identify him as an ally of hers in the Phantom's eyes.
It was a foolish hope fathered only by desire! A hope that out of this watching of Mother Margot to-night at Hip Foo's he and the woman that he loved would come together again, that he would see her, hear her voice, and after that—Yes, she knew that, too! She had said so in the letter she had slipped into the pocket of his coat when she had left him that night on the old East River wharf. She knew that once he found her again no legion of Phantoms, no pleading on her part, could keep him from her side until the end, whatever that end might be. He might shake his head if he chose, he might argue speciously with himself as his love prompted him to do, but in his heart he knew that her note to-night would not bring her and himself together unless—yes, that was it!—to-night saw the end of the Phantom's career.
The end! That brought still another angle into the Tocsin's message, an angle that was represented by this Mother Margot. His eyes grew grimly thoughtful as he walked along. How far was the old hag to be trusted? How much to be depended upon was the hold he had on her through having caught her in the act of purloining an extra share of the loot from one of her own confederates, who though she evidently did not know it herself, had been the Phantom in the guise of Limpy Mack that night at old Mrs. Kinsey's? His hands had been tied in a measure in respect of Mother Margot. True, since that night he had never lost track of her, but his means of communication had been restricted to the same means that the “Voice,” as she called the Phantom, had employed—of calling her from her pushcart in Thompson Street to that telephone booth she had spoken of in Mezzo's second-hand store, and questioning her. This he had done each day, sometimes more than once; but the result had always been the same. Each time she had sworn that she had heard nothing further from the Voice. And yet to-night she was to be watched at Hip Foo's!
Was she playing fast and loose? He had not been in personal touch with her—that was where the weakness of his position lay. She knew him to be the Gray Seal, but she knew him only as a man with a mask on his face. He could not stand beside her pushcart on Thompson Street, and, wearing a mask, talk to her. He could not go to her as Smarlinghue and risk even the suspicion that Smarlinghue had any connection with the Gray Seal, let alone being the Gray Seal himself! A word from her, if that thought ever entered her mind, or anybody else's for that matter, and underworld and police would join hands in the one cause that could ever be common to both, and fight as only two packs of wolves might fight for the prey that only one could have.
It was not a pleasant thought!
He withdrew his hands suddenly from his ragged pockets, and, stooping down, picked up a crumpled newspaper from the gutter, as the flaring red type of a headline caught his eye. He glanced at it, and pitched it away again almost immediately. He had been interested to know if it were a special edition announcing some new development in the case of one Connie Pfeffer, alias the Mole. It did not. It was just re-hash.
He smiled wryly. The Gray Seal, “that depraved and degenerate glutton who feasted and lived like some ghoul upon his foul notoriety, and who, with inhuman boastfulness, left his diamond-shaped gray seal upon the scene of every one of his fiendish crimes,” the usual stand-by of the sensational headliners, had of late been relegated to obscurity by the newspapers. It was a relief! For the time being the crime that held the public attention was that in which this Connie Pfeffer was involved, but this was more, as a matter of fact, because of the opportunity it afforded for a jeer at the police rather than on account of the actual crime itself. For two days the journals had been full of the Levenson Bank robbery, a private bank in the Wall Street district, where a customer, having just drawn out ten thousand dollars in twenty five-hundred-dollar bills, had been held up almost in front of the teller's wicket at the point of a revolver and relieved of his cash. Connie Pfeffer, alias the Mole, who had answered to the description of the robber, had been apprehended within an hour of the crime by the police, released again for lack of evidence against him—and then had promptly disappeared. New evidence establishing the fact that Connie Pfeffer was the man who had entered the bank had almost immediately come to light, but Connie Pfeffer was no longer to be found, and the police——
Jimmie Dale swung sharply around. Some one was plucking at his sleeve—a tattered and stoop-shouldered old man, who had a tray slung around his neck upon which was displayed a pitiful array of cheap collar buttons.
“Hello, Smarly!” The man spoke low, out of the corner of his mouth. “Say, Smarly, I wanter ask youse somethin'.”
For an instant Jimmie Dale surveyed the other. It was Pedler Joe, and Pedler Joe lived just around the corner from the Sanctuary and was therefore in the category of an old acquaintance and neighbour; but his, Jimmie Dale's, business to-night was at Hip Foo's, and he had no time to waste.
“Hello, Joe!” he returned a little ungraciously. “Didn't know you went in for night work. There's a gape-bus back there, and the bunch have gone into Charlie Wong's lay-out. If you stick around when they come you may get away with something.”
“I ain't out for business—not dat kind,” the man whispered—and still holding Jimmie Dale's coat sleeve, edged out to the curb and halted. “I'm lookin' for some one. Everybody says youse're on de level, Smarly. Youse bats around a lot in places dey won't let me into, so hand it to me straight. Have youse seen Connie anywhere, youse knows who I mean, de Mole?”
Jimmie Dale stared. It was rather curious, rather much of a coincidence! He had been thinking of Connie Pfeffer, alias the Mole, at the moment Pedler Joe had accosted him. And coincidences in the Bad Lands were not always—coincidences!
It was Smarlinghue of the underworld, not Jimmie Dale the millionaire clubman, who spoke.
“What's the lay?” His tones pointed the inquiry with almost exaggerated suspicion.
“Aw, it's straight!” the old man answered. “I'm askin' youse just dat. Have youse seen him, or heard anythin' about him?”
Jimmie Dale still parried the question.
“Sounds like you'd shoved your stake in with the bulls,” he scowled. “Did they give you a badge to pin inside your vest? What have you got to do with Connie?”
The old man's face was haggard; he evidently had not shaved for several days, and the short white bristles seemed to accentuate a general woe-begone aspect and feebleness that age and the thin, stooped shoulders already proclaimed loudly enough.
“I got a lot to do wid him,” the old man said hoarsely. “He's like my own kid, dat's wot he is. I ain't done much