The minutes passed. The tiny flashlight winked again through the darkness and lighted up the dial of Jimmie Dale's watch.
It was twenty-five minutes of one.
Jimmie Dale stood up. There was evidently nothing more to be heard here, or if there was, and he waited any longer, then the chance of hearing anything at Twisty Munn's must go by the board—and as a choice between the two he very much inclined toward Twisty Munn's now. He moved softly through the connecting doorway, and traversed the adjoining room that opened on the hall. Here, the door opened and closed silently behind him, and Jimmie Dale, lost in the darkness of the unlighted hallway, reached the rear door of the tenement, and stepped out into a small back yard. A moment more, and he was over the fence, and, slipping his mask from his face, was running noiselessly along a lane.
Two blocks away he emerged upon a dingy, ill-lighted and uninviting street. He smiled a little whimsically, as he pulled his soft felt hat somewhat rakishly to one side and well down over his eyes, and, hunching the perfectly fitting dinner coat at one of the shoulders, turned up the collar around his neck. True, the costume was hardly de rigueur in the East Side, but he was Jimmie Dale, not Smarlinghue, to-night. He shrugged his shoulders. Well, did it matter? He was not on his way to attend any public function, and as for the streets there were always the shadows of the buildings to hug a little closer, always a loose, slouching gait to assume.
Twisty Munn! Kid Gregg! What was the game these two were playing to-night? He shook his head impatiently. That did not matter either. It mattered only that the Phantom was concerned in their movements. It was common knowledge in the underworld that Twisty Munn was a “buyer” for a certain class of apparently honest establishments, where, if the alibi were good enough, stolen goods, disguised of course, were offered over the counters to the public at prices well in excess of what could be obtained through the underground channels employed by the regular “fences.” It was profitable for all concerned, even taking into account the commission charged by the crafty Twisty Munn, who lived apparently—for the benefit of the police—in a condition approaching almost abject poverty in a squalid, ill-furnished room at the top of a seedy and somewhat questionable tenement over in the direction of the East River. Kid Gregg, less known save by the inner circle of the underworld, which latter had already marked him for preferment, was a young and budding crook, still outside the ken of the police, who showed exceeding promise in the profession he had chosen. In a word, neither of them had ever had any dealings or were in any way connected with Gentleman Laroque's, alias the Phantom's gang.
Jimmie Dale's dark eyes narrowed grimly as he went along. The conclusion was somewhat obvious. The Phantom was by no means averse to plucking the plums ripened by some one else, and it was fairly evident that in some way or another he had got wind of one that had been ripened by Twisty Munn and Kid Gregg. It looked very much therefore as though the night were likely to develop into a three-cornered game, counting in himself, Jimmie Dale, with the added possibility that the trumps perhaps might be in the hand that neither Twisty Munn nor Kid Gregg in the first place, nor the Phantom in the second, suspected!
Jimmie Dale covered block after block at a swinging stride. His mind reverted to Mother Margot's rooms. It was strange where those voices had come from! He could not tear the building down to find out. He had already known there was a secret exit from that room. The voices in that respect had not proved anything further. His mind mulled on. A search of the rooms adjacent to Mother Margot's offered no prospect of help in the solution of the problem. If the room itself, where he knew the secret exit to be, was so apparently search proof, what better chance would any other room offer? Or why, as a matter of fact, should the secret exit even lead into any other room? Well, the cellar then, for the Phantom could not have gone up through the roof! There was no cellar! The ground floor was a sort of basement in itself! Those voices——
Cycles! He was beginning all over again. He shook his head in self-exasperation, and with a mental effort dismissed these thoughts from his mind. He had almost reached his destination, and the immediate present demanded his full attention.
Under a street lamp he looked at his watch. Twelve minutes to one. He nodded. He was well on time. Just ahead of him was the three-story tenement where Twisty Munn made his home.
XIX.
Jackals
The street was deserted. The tenement itself was dark. Not a light showed from any window. But Twisty Munn lived in an upstairs room at the rear, therefore the fact that no light could be seen from the street had no bearing whatever on Twisty Munn.
Jimmie Dale stepped suddenly into the doorway. The door itself, the entrance common to heaven alone knew how many who hived in wretchedness and squalor within, and to whom a latchkey would have been not far removed from mockery, was unlocked as he had expected. He moved noiselessly into the hall. The place was close and dank to the nostrils; also it reeked with the odour of garlic. It was dark, too; but through the murk he could just make out the stairs ahead of him and to the left.
There was a curious tightening of Jimmie Dale's lips as he moved forward and tested the tread of the first stair cautiously. Yes, he knew the breed! Old and in disrepair, the stairs would certainly shriek their protest to high heaven if any liberty were taken with them. But it was Jimmie Dale of the old days, Jimmie Dale of the days of Larry the Bat and the rickety stairs of the old Sanctuary, worse even than these stairs were, where his life had literally depended upon his silence a score of times, as he went upward now.
He gained the first landing. There were doors around him here, and, because they were flimsy doors and flimsy partitions, from behind them the night sounds reached him—the restless movement of a sleeper, the sick, querulous cry of a child, a stertorous snore.
Twelve minutes of one! Ten now, wasn't it?
There were three flights. At the third landing Jimmie Dale paused for an instant to adjust the black silk mask over his face again, then stole forward, feeling out with his hand along the wall, toward a thin, irregular thread of light that seeped out from under the ill-fitting threshold of a door at the rear end of the hall. Twisty Munn, at least, was evidently keeping the rendezvous!
Faintly, no more than a murmur, voices reached Jimmie Dale from the other side of the door now as he stood before it. And now a pick-lock in his hand was silently at work. Perhaps half a minute passed. Then, by the barest fraction of an inch at a time, the doorknob turned without sound under the slim, trained, sensitive fingers, and the door opened by a crack. The murmur from within became distinct, disintegrated itself into words and sentences.
“...Sure, de goods is all right, but wot about de rest of it? De guys I have to slip dese over to ain't takin' chances, not if youse handed 'em de stuff for nothin' an' paid 'em for takin' it.”
The door opened another crack. Twisty Munn and Kid Gregg! Yes, that was what the voice in Mother Margot's room had said. Jimmie Dale could just see the two. They were at a table in the upper corner of the room. His eyes narrowed. There was what looked like a small fortune in the shape of jewellery on the table between them. Twisty Munn! The stoop-shouldered, almost hunch-backed form of the shabby old man was bent forward over the table, while his thin, hooked fingers clawed at the jewels, picking up one after the other to hold it close to short-sighted, squinting eyes. And opposite him Kid Gregg, young, in an over-loud checked suit, a peaked cap pulled so low over his forehead as almost to hide the small, roving black eyes, scowled in evident impatience.
“Aw, it's sewed up—tight!” the latter snapped. “Ain't I told youse dat?”
“Sure, youse told me dat,” agreed the old man sharply. “Two days ago youse told me youse had it all fixed for to-night, an' dat everythin' was safe, an' dat youse'd bring me de sparklers. Well, dat's all right, youse've brought 'em, an' dey're all right; but I ain't heard yet how safe dey are, an' dat's wot puts de deal across wid de crowd I works for. See?”
A cigarette dangled from Kid Gregg's