“You Smarly?” the old Italian had said. “Margot go away one, two day—come back.”
Through the darkness Jimmie Dale stared around him, his brows still knitted. The best opportunity he had ever had of searching these rooms had been his to-night, and he had seized it, but was there any use in continuing the search? He had the rest of the night before him, for that matter, if he chose to devote it to that purpose—but was it worth while? He had covered every inch of the floor, every inch of the walls up to a reasonable height, and his search had gone utterly unrewarded. He had been minute, painstaking, exact, thorough to a degree, and he had found nothing. Was there any use in going all over it again?
He half turned away toward the door, but halted again. There was a secret here—even if he had never been able to find it. There was a clue here—even if so far it had proved but a phantom clue. That fact would not down. He hesitated an instant, and then, with a shrug of his shoulders, moved softly halfway across the room. Well, once more, then!
He began to reconstruct again the scene of that first night—here in this room, the inner one of the two that Mother Margot now occupied. It was exactly here he had stood when Isaac Shiftel, stripped of his disguise, had suddenly turned off the light and in the ensuing darkness had vanished, as that trite saying had it, into thin air. The man could not have gone by the door, because there was only one door, and he, Jimmie Dale, had been blocking the doorway; nor could the man have gone by the single window, because at that time the police had been on guard in the alleyway outside. Through the wall or the floor then? Yes. But how? Where? Neither wall nor floor showed any——
Out of the darkness, without warning, there came suddenly a low, ugly laugh.
“The Gray Seal!” said a voice.
In an instant, strained and tense, his automatic whipped from his pocket and outflung before him, Jimmie Dale drew back against the wall. A trap after all! The trap he had so logically proven to have outlived its usefulness! He strained his eyes through the blackness. Nothing! He could see nothing. Nor was there any further sound. A minute passed. Was it a minute—or some vast, immeasurable æon of time? He stood rigid, motionless—waiting.
“Where?” said a voice abruptly.
Jimmie Dale turned his head; his automatic swung swiftly. The voice seemed to have come almost from his elbow. Then his jaws locked hard together. No; it was not from there! They were playing with him, were they? A cat-and-mouse game! Well then, he——
A voice spoke again:
“Worth anywhere from thirty to fifty thousand. Easy money.”
Jimmie Dale pushed back his hat, and above his mask flirted away a bead of sweat from his forehead. He understood now. There wasn't any one in the room save himself. It wasn't a trap. It was only uncanny. He was simply listening to snatches of a conversation that came from the nowhere, out of the darkness.
He leaned forward a little, striving to the utmost to place the direction of the sounds. The voices, he realised now, while quite distinct, had been curiously heavy and uneven. He nodded sharply to himself. A pipe, a hollow space, almost anything might act as a conductor for the sound waves, and bring them here from no little distance at that!
Once more a voice broke through the stillness:
“Easy money, yes; but old Twisty Munn's no fool, and neither is Kid Gregg. The stuff will be pinched by now, but we've plenty of time left—enough to see that there are no mistakes made.”
Again there came the low, ugly laugh.
“There won't be any! One o'clock at Twisty's——”
The voice ended as abruptly as though, if speaking over a telephone, the wire had been suddenly cut. There seemed to Jimmie Dale no other way to describe it. He stared around him in a queer, helpless way. Now the voices had seemed to come from here, now from there. His lips twisted in grim self-mockery. The longer he had listened the more confusing it had become. The voices simply came from everywhere in the room.
Had they ended now?
The tiny glow of the flashlight played for an instant on the crystal of his watch. It was fourteen minutes past twelve.
Noiselessly now Jimmie Dale moved across the room to a chair. The sort of finality with which that last sentence had been broken off held out little hope, he felt intuitively, of his hearing anything more. But there was a chance. He sat down quietly. Strange! Where had the voices come from? From below, above—where? He did not know. He knew only that one of those voices must be the Phantom's. It did not require proof. It was axiomatic. He could not locate the direction from which the voices had come, but the opening through which the Phantom had once vanished from this room was obviously the medium through which the voices entered. How cleverly deduced! He snapped at himself mentally. The only trouble was that after prolonged and laborious search he had not been able to locate that opening either!
His fingers played softly in a curiously caressing way over his automatic. It hadn't been any trap. The allusion to the Gray Seal that had so startled him had been only a snatch of the conversation which had at first, through some cause or other that he was unable to define, reached him only in broken fragments. Or perhaps, after all, it was a trap—the other way around. A trap for the trapper! If he could not locate the voices here, it might not possibly be so difficult to do so at, say, one Twisty Munn's—at one o'clock!
He sat there in the darkness listening, his mind at work. One of the voices had been the Phantom's, that was beyond question or doubt; but which one of the two it was he did not know. He could, he was certain, have recognised Gentleman Laroque's, alias the Phantom's, voice anywhere under ordinary circumstances, but here, due unquestionably to the mysterious way in which the sound waves had been transmitted, all sense of inflexion had been lost. Nor did the conversation itself, as he went over it again in his mind, help to differentiate in that respect one speaker from the other. Either one of the two, from what had been said, might have been the Phantom.
Twisty Munn's at one o'clock! He smiled grimly. One of the two voices at least, possibly both of them, would be at Twisty Munn's at one o'clock. Well, if nothing further eventuated here, he, too, would be at Twisty Munn's at that hour. His search, the hours he had spent here, had perhaps not been so fruitless after all! It was an even chance at least that, in spite of the continued silence in this room now, he would hear the voice again to-night. And if he did——
His face hardened suddenly. Last night he had held the Phantom at his mercy, last night he could have shot to kill before the man had even been aware of his presence; and last night, because he had failed to realise that it was a Thing blood-flecked with murder, a Thing that preyed upon every decency in life, and not a human being, the Phantom had escaped. Last night this had happened. There would be no second time. There was another life at stake—hers—the Tocsin's. Last night he had jeopardised that life because he had not fought the Phantom with the Phantom's own weapons, but all that was now at an end.
And as he sat there listening, and there was still no further sound, he found himself strangely, abnormally calm, strangely callous even, as though this decision were but commonplace and one of everyday occurrence. He asked now only for one more