His lips tightened. Yes; wreck it! His was a single purpose now—that to-night he would strike with all his might; strike without counting the personal cost; and, above all, strike while for once he possessed the certainty that it would not be too late in the sense that even success in the unearthing of the Phantom and in a final reckoning with the man might only hold a bitter emptiness because she, the Tocsin, the woman he loved, would already have been beyond all aid.
There would be no thought of that. He was lighter of heart on that score than he had been for many days. She was alive; yes, and well, and safe. He knew that to-night. The torment, the fear for her safety that, finding no trace of her, he had known yesterday, and for so many yesterdays before, was gone now. She was alive; and, so far, she was safe. His lips moved silently. Thank God for that! And now he asked only that, whatever the outcome to himself in what he was about to do, she might after to-night be safe for always.
He shook his head a little grimly. Suppose, instead of success, he failed? Too often the Phantom had slipped from his grasp; and he was only too well aware that to-night he was almost literally going up against a stacked hand held by the other. Mother Margot had warned him that her rooms were a trap for the Gray Seal; the Tocsin had warned him. He had never doubted this simply because more than once he had ventured into those rooms and emerged unscathed. And, though it might well be, as he had argued with himself on his last visit there, that it was now so long ago since the trap had been baited that the Phantom no longer built any hopes upon it as a means of snaring his prey, that argument, however well founded, did not apply to-night. He could not very well expect to attack the trap itself and proceed to demolish it without inviting the attention of the trapper, which was, indeed, his prime intention.
A fool? Perhaps! But there was no other way of getting to grips with the Phantom. And to-night she was alive and safe; and there might be no to-morrow night. And, besides, if the worst happened, he would not go out alone—the Phantom would go with him. He was somehow sure of that; it was like a deep-seated consciousness, a strange reassuring certainty. And if that were so, he had no quarrel with the price, whatever it might be!
His fingers, fumbling in the pocket of his ragged jacket, found and drew out an envelope. He stared at it for a long time. Hers! The Tocsin's! The first word he had had from her for so many days! His eyes softened. Alive! And he had known so great a fear—a fear that had grown day after day into an almost hopeless agony of dread. She who loved him, and had made no effort to communicate with him after he had been wounded that other night—no effort when he knew that under ordinary conditions she would have moved heaven and earth to do so. That was why, last night, in spite of Jason, in spite of his wound, he had tried to pick up the Phantom's trail again through Bunty Myers—and in a measure had succeeded. He had found Bunty Myers, but Bunty Myers was dead now.
A strange, grim light crept into Jimmie Dale's half-closed eyes. The circle had indeed narrowed. Of the Phantom's satellites, of all those who once had gathered in that back, upstairs room of Wally Kerrigan's “club,” there were left now only two—the Kitten and Mother Margot. Those two—and somewhere in his hidden lair the Phantom. Well, to-night then——
He nodded quickly to himself. He was only waiting until it was a little later. He turned impatiently on the cot. Time seemed to drag interminably. The stage was already set. He had warned Mother Margot to keep away from her rooms to-night; to find an alibi for herself. It was a little quixotic, perhaps, a little of added danger to himself; but again, as it had been last night, her life, if things went wrong, might very well pay part of the forfeit, and even Mother Margot was entitled to her life. What else could he have done? It was true that, at best, he could consider her but an unwilling sort of ally; but nevertheless, even though it might have been but through fear, she had, he was sure, always played straight with him. And so to-night he could have done no less than to have given her her chance again.
Jimmie Dale rose abruptly from the cot, and, with the envelope in his hand, stepped back across the room again to a position under the gas jet. He had found the note here in the usual place behind the movable section of the baseboard when, late that afternoon, after having previously called Mother Margot from her pushcart on Thompson Street to that rather singularly-placed telephone in the rear of Antonio Mezzo's shop and had given her her warning, he had come to the Sanctuary for the purpose of assuming the rôle of Smarlinghue, and of spending at least a portion of the waiting hours in the underworld's inner circles which were always pregnant with the possibility of affording an additional thread or clue that might lend strength to his intended stroke against the Phantom. He read the note again. It was dated that afternoon:
Dear Philanthropic Crook:—What have you been thinking? With you wounded, and believing I would be in a position to know of it, and no word from me, it could only have been one of two things. Either I was heartless, or—or what you had feared so greatly had happened. It could not be the former, and so I know that in your love you must have been, as I would have been, mad with anxiety.
I said I would not write to you or communicate with you until the shadows had all gone out of our lives again, but this afternoon I would indeed be heartless if I did not send you this word. I am well; and I am safe. Through circumstances that I shall not enter into, I did not know that you were wounded until last night, and then, almost coincidently, I also knew that from last night's activities your wound could not have been serious, and so my anxiety was relieved.
Just one word more. Once before, long, long ago, so long ago that it seems now it were in some other age, I wrote you that it was near the end, that I had all but won, that victory was in sight, and—and, Jimmie, only disaster came. And so now I hesitate to say anything but just this: Things are going very well, and it may be, Jimmie—oh, I can not help but say it—only hours before the shadows will have gone forever.
Marie.
Jimmie Dale replaced the note in his pocket. Somehow, he could not bring himself to destroy it, as he had always done before. It had been so long since he had heard from her; it was physical, tangible evidence that she was alive. He swept his hand across his eyes. Those fears of last night—that had driven him, wounded, from his bed! It was as though she had almost read his mind, read the argument he had followed and from which he had deduced the worst. It was strange, though, that she had not known—if things were going so very well! Circumstances! What circumstances?
He began to pace up and down the squalid room; and then, as abruptly as he had left it, he went and flung himself down on the cot again. He was restless. It was not his wound. His wound was all right, and was none the worse for last night's experiences. His side was sore and stiff, of course, and in that sense caused him a certain discomfort, but otherwise he was quite normal.
It was not his wound that caused his restlessness; it was this dragging of time, this waiting for the moment to arrive when he could supplant inaction with activity. Perhaps he would have done better to have remained longer in those various hidden places of the inner circles of the underworld that he had visited after he had received the Tocsin's note? He shrugged his shoulders. No; he was better here. He had learned all that he could have hoped to learn—yes, and more! No; that was not quite true. He had, rather, only substantiated beyond question what he had already decided in his own mind could be the only logical conclusion to the affair of last night when the Kitten and Bunty Myers, playing Steenie Klotz and his companion apaches for dupes, had attempted to secure the stolen funds of the defunct Banco Santos.
His jaws closed with a snap. Whisperings! How many times before had he listened to the voice of the underworld breathing its secrets through the underground exchanges where none save those of the aristocracy might find entrance, and where the peers of that abandoned realm of Crimeland kept their fingers on the pulse of a seething, disturbed and moiling citizenry! And to-night the underworld was in a sort of tense ferment, watching in unholy anticipation a game of life and death that was being played out behind its guarded doors that were so effectually closed to the outer world.
Jimmie Dale smiled suddenly, grimly now. He had found the underworld viciously agog, intent with gluttonous eagerness upon a drama whose dénouement promised to be blood-thirsty