“All right,” said Jimmie Dale abruptly, as he stood up. “I'll help you if I can. I guess I know a few dumps you don't, but you keep on going yourself. We'll cover more ground that way, and get on quicker. And it wouldn't do either of us any good to be seen hunting together, neither. Beat it!”
Mother Margot caught his hand impulsively.
“I knew youse would, Smarly! I knew youse would!” she whispered in a choked voice. “Gawd bless youse, Smarly, youse're——”
It was Smarlinghue who grinned a little sheepishly, and Smarlinghue who spoke.
“Aw, forget it!” he said. “I thought you said we was losing time.” He brushed past her toward the doorway. “I'll go out by the lane, you go out the other way. See?”
“Yes,” she answered; “but——”
“So long!” said Smarlinghue, alias Jimmie Dale—and vanished through the doorway.
XVI.
English Steve
It was growing late, near midnight. Through the murk of an uninviting, almost ominous-looking basement entrance, whose light, such as it was, seeped upward to the sidewalk, Jimmie Dale emerged, and stood for a moment staring up and down the dirty, shabby street.
A grim smile was playing on his lips. Behind him, down those few dark, rickety steps up which he had just come, and thence through an ill-lighted little cobbler's shop, where a cobbler, who was a cobbler in but little more than name, held an inner door against the invasion of undesirables and the law, was a thug's den than which New York knew no worse. Debauchery and crime, unbridled and unlicensed, held sway there. None entered save the initiated—or those the initiated lured there to fleece and work their will upon. Likewise, it was a refuge from the law, and, as a refuge, was without its peer. Mickey the Cobbler might not be a very good cobbler or a past master of his art, but he was a cheery sort and always paid his bills, and never overcharged the poverty-stricken neighbourhood that innocently believed it supported him with its patronage! So why should it not be safe? Mickey the Cobbler stood high in the estimation of the community, and therefore brought no suspicion upon himself from the police.
Jimmie Dale shrugged his shoulders. What did it matter? There were dozens of places like that—and he had been in and out of dozens of them since he had left Mother Margot at Hip Foo's a few hours ago. What did it matter the degree of pest hole from which he had just come? In so far as he was concerned it had yielded him nothing, and in that respect it was like all the rest. His search to-night had been doubly fruitless because he had had a double errand. He had found no trace of Bunty Myers on his own account, or of English Steve on Mother Margot's.
Again he shrugged his shoulders. He had about given the latter up. As a matter of fact, it had only been secondary in any case. And yet he had kept faith with Mother Margot. He had visited English Steve's lodging house, and he had visited the known haunts of the gang that now held English Steve's life forfeit—and all this before even he had widened his search to embrace the secret pest holes of Crimeland such as the one he had just left. And he had been rewarded only by failure everywhere.
He could go on, of course, and he would go on until dawn broke, prompted by the prime urge to find Bunty Myers; but now, for the moment, the weariness of it all seemed to be creeping back upon him again, and this time not without its physical as well as its mental demands for at least a measure of consideration. His eyes roved down the street. At the corner, drawn up to the curb, there was a lunch wagon. He was tired and hungry. A queer, whimsical little smile touched his lips. What could be better? A lunch wagon and Smarlinghue, unkempt, ragged, dissolute in appearance, went well and in perfect harmony one with the other!
Jimmie Dale turned abruptly, and walked to the corner. Here he climbed the three wooden, abbreviated steps that permitted entrance to the antiquated vehicle, and sidled up to the counter.
The lunch wagon for the moment was without customers. The proprietor, rousing himself from a doze, laid a mug of hot coffee and a sandwich on the counter at Jimmie Dale's mumbled request, slid a pot of mustard in the general direction of the sandwich, and subsided again into semi-unconsciousness upon some amazingly existent resting place in the crowded space behind the counter.
Jimmie Dale stared around him, and, as he ate, a sort of ironic facetiousness settled upon him. A picture of the St. James Club, with its polished silver and its snowy napery, rose before his mind's eye. Here he was Smarlinghue; there he was Jimmie Dale, the millionaire. He was almost beginning to wonder which of the two was his real, actual entity. Jimmie Dale; Smarlinghue—the Gray Seal! If it were ever known! His eyes fastened on the ungraceful proprietor, whose white coat was long overdue at the washtub, and whose white cook's hat was limp and grease spotted. It seemed a far cry to the white-haired, immaculate, perfectly trained Jason, his own butler, who, too, sometimes served him with coffee and sandwiches!
His mind mulled on. He kept staring about him. It was strange! The place somehow seemed familiar. Well, why shouldn't it? He had been in a lunch wagon before. Not this one probably, but there wasn't much difference in the genus lunch wagon, was there? No, that wasn't it! It seemed rather to be striving to revive a memory that somehow had to do with——
Yes, he had it now! English Steve! But that was years ago—back in the days when he, Jimmie Dale, was Larry the Bat in the underworld instead of the Smarlinghue of to-day. It was in a lunch wagon just like this. English Steve had been there, and two or three others of like ilk. They had adjourned to English Steve's room for a game of cards, and he, Jimmie Dale, as Larry the Bat, had accepted the invitation to join them. Well, what of it? That wasn't where English Steve lived now. English Steve had gone up in his profession since he had lived in what was little better than a shed behind old Michael's ship-chandler's shop. And he, Jimmie Dale, had already been to English Steve's more pretentious, if still seedy, quarters of to-day.
Strange, the stirring of that memory! What was it trying to suggest? That English Steve still—It was absurd, of course! That was years ago. It was the last place in all New York that any one would look for English Steve to-day. The last place that any one would——
Jimmie Dale's fingers fumbled in his pockets, and extracted a coin. He laid it on the counter, mumbled again at the proprietor—this time, a good-night—and shuffled his way out to the street.
The last place! The phrase battered at his mind now. If that were so, it was the one place to look! And why was it so absurd? There was more than one man in New York who maintained two establishments, and on a far more extensive scale, without publishing the fact broadcast! English Steve was a crook of no mean order, and such an arrangement might well have stood him in good stead more than once in respect of the police, and, for that matter, with his erstwhile associates—as it perhaps was serving him now at this minute. With his increasing prominence, his rise in the sordid realm of crime, English Steve had publicly moved into a more “exclusive” neighbourhood among the élite of Crimeland; but it might well be that he had continued to pay rent for his former lodging—without any one being the wiser for it save old Michael, his landlord, whose shop was stocked with merchandise which consisted mainly of ships' stores and fittings purloined by the wharf rats along the river front! Birds of a feather!
It was worth putting to