Jimmie Dale's eyes closed. He was conscious of great fatigue; not physical—mental. Days of striving, days of utter failure, of futility, nights of unceasing, sleepless effort lay behind him. Reality! The question answered itself. He had but to listen for an instant through these thin, flimsy partitions to know that it was not only reality, but a reality stripped of all glamour, ugly in its nakedness and its menace. It was only his brain voicing its plea for rest, giving warning that it was nearing the breaking point and that the lash could be applied too often to the slave, that had prompted the groping question.
He listened now for a moment almost involuntarily. Here was one of those underground exchanges where the secrets of the underworld passed from mouth to mouth; where the gossip of the Bad Lands circulated; where crimes were born; where he had even heard his own death, the death of the Gray Seal, decreed a score of times.
Whispers reached him. Two yeggs of the lesser breed, whose names he did not know, were in there. Their conversation was snatchy, desultory, due presumably to the fact that the opium was beginning to get in its work. There was a reference to an uptown “job” of a week ago; a dance hall fracas that had ended in a murder; the approval of the sentence passed upon one English Steve by the fellow members of his gang, and the speculation as to how many of the gang English Steve would succeed in “bumping off” before in turn English Steve finally received his own quietus.
Again Jimmie Dale turned noiselessly on his bunk. He was not interested. Ten minutes before he had made a tour of the sub-cellar here; and then, playing his part as Smarlinghue, he had flung himself down on this bunk and given his order. Neither Bunty Myers nor any other of the Phantom's underlings were in evidence. He had not actually expected to find them already here, he did not even expect them later on; but in half an hour, or an hour, luck might change, and they might come. He had simply made Hip Foo's his first stopping place night after night of late because it had once been the rendezvous of the men he wanted, because it was here that some of them had met on the night the place had been raided, and because, since the night that the Phantom had laid the trap for him at Morley's, Bunty Myers and the Kitten and Spud MacGuire and Muller no longer met in the back, upstairs room of Wally Kerrigan's “club.” Perhaps they would again in the future—some of them—perhaps not!
Jimmie Dale's lips tightened. It had gone very badly with the Phantom's plans that night. Apart from Little Sweeney, Spud MacGuire and Muller, in the subsequent fight with the police, had both been killed. Also, it had apparently forced Bunty Myers and the Kitten into hiding. Certainly, since that night, he, Jimmie Dale, had not been able to pick up the slightest trace of either of them.
He swept his hand heavily across his eyes. He was not so sure that he could wholly glory in the outcome of that night. If the Phantom had received a blow, he, Jimmie Dale, had perhaps received one that was even more disastrous. The Phantom was still at large, still free to pursue his heinous activities, but with the abandonment of Wally Kerrigan's back room, even if only temporarily, by Bunty Myers and the rest of his associates who hung on the Phantom's orders, he, Jimmie Dale, had lost touch with everything and every one connected with the Phantom—except Mother Margot!
Mother Margot! His lips twisted in a weary smile. She had been of little service to him! So far as any information he had been able to obtain from her was concerned, she might as well have been non-existent. Not that she had attempted to mislead or lie to him; he was satisfied on that score because, being the sole connecting link with the Phantom that was left to him, he had naturally watched her more carefully than ever before. As the man in the black silk mask, the man she knew as the Gray Seal, he had held her closely to account; but he was convinced that of the Phantom's plans and movements since that night at Morley's, she was as ignorant as he was himself. Where before she had been the mouthpiece of the “Voice,” as she called the Phantom, her office now had apparently become a sinecure. It was as though the Phantom, failing in the supreme effort he had made to find the “leak” among his trusted subordinates, and afraid perhaps to place further trust anywhere, had withdrawn himself completely from every one of those that formerly he had moved as pawns upon his miserable chess-board of crime.
But that did not mean the Tocsin's safety. The Phantom, as she had so well named him, master of impersonation, the Phantom alias Gentleman Laroque, alias Shiftel, alias Limpy Mack, alias heaven alone knew what else, the Phantom with his score of domiciles, if he meant now to play a lone hand, was a far more dangerous antagonist than ever before; one far harder to come at, more elusive, more safely and deeply entrenched behind——
Jimmie Dale's hand reached swiftly out for the opium pipe that lay on the stand beside the bunk. A footstep, one accompanied by a low, soft swish, was coming along the boarded corridor outside. It was probably one of the Chinese attendants, and the swish was the usual swish of the slippered feet; but if there was any one den or dive in the Bad Lands more than another where it meant literally life and death to preserve the character of Smarlinghue from all suspicion, it was here in Hip Foo's where a whisper was alone sufficient to bring down upon him, darting from its every corner and crevice, the drug crazed rat-horde of the underworld that infested the place.
The step came nearer. Jimmie Dale, the pipe apparently at his lips, lay back again upon the bunk. If the Phantom were playing a lone hand now, if he had sloughed off, as dangerous and unfit, the tools he had formerly employed, then he, Jimmie Dale, since the Tocsin was obviously steadfast in her determination to afford him no opportunity of picking up any further clue, was facing a blank wall. If, however, the veil that had shrouded the movements of the Phantom and all those who had been connected with him since that night at Morley's was simply the natural caution inspired by what had so nearly been complete disaster, then certainly, sooner or later, he, Jimmie Dale, would pick up the trail again of those, such as were left of them, who once had congregated at Wally Kerrigan's. That was why he was here in Hip Foo's to-night—on the chance that, either through their appearance in person, or through the mumbled gossip which was the freer in dens like this where the incense burned to the God of Poppy loosened men's and women's tongues, he might find the lost threads again.
He asked no more than that—only to go on to the end while there was yet time. And he was afraid to-night, afraid with a great fear. How did he even know that it was not already too late? How did he know that in her battle of wits with the Phantom which she insisted in waging alone, unaided, with her life at stake, the Tocsin, brave, resourceful, clever though she was, had not already——
Through half-closed eyes Jimmie Dale watched the curtain that hung across the doorway. Yes, undoubtedly, the footstep was no longer in evidence, and undoubtedly the curtain was being drawn stealthily aside. He made no movement. The opening widened, widened still further—and suddenly the blood went whipping through Jimmie Dale's veins in a mad, elated tide, and weariness was gone.
Reward! The light was dim, low, flickering, but he could see well enough. It was not one of the Chinese attendants. It was the shawled head of an old hag that was peering in there. Mother Margot!
Still Jimmie Dale gave no sign that he was aware of the other's presence. It was a reward at last for the days and nights that were gone! Once before she had come here to meet Bunty Myers, once before this had been the rendezvous—what else would she be here for to-night? He had evidently been right then in hoping more from Hip Foo's than from any other place. And it did not mean that she had lied to him as the Gray Seal either. It might very well be, and probably was, that, since last he had communicated with her, the Phantom had suddenly broken silence and through her was issuing his orders again.
She stood there on the threshold now, peering toward the bunk, shading her eyes with her hand as though, even in the dim light, it helped her the better to distinguish objects. And for a moment she hesitated, then she came slowly through the doorway and let the curtain fall behind her.
“Dat's