"Drop that gun, Lannigan!" said Jimmie Dale coolly. "And I'll trouble you not to make a noise; it might attract attention from the street; there's been too much already. DROP THAT GUN!"
The revolver clattered from Lannigan's hand to the floor. A step forward, and Jimmie Dale's toe sent it spinning under a bench. Another step, and, his revolver still covering the other, he had whipped a pair of handcuffs from the officer's side pocket.
Lannigan, as though the thought had never occurred to him, offered no resistance. He was staring in a dazed sort of way back and forth from Jimmie Dale to the man on the floor.
"What's this mean?" he burst out suddenly, "Where's—"
"Your wrist, please!" requested Jimmie Dale pleasantly. "No—the left one. Thank you"—as the handcuff snapped shut. "Now go over there and sit down on the floor beside that fellow. QUICK!" Jimmie Dale's voice rasped suddenly, imperatively.
Still bewildered, but a little sullen now, Lannigan obeyed. Jimmie Dale stooped quickly, and snapped the other link of the handcuff over the unconscious man's right wrist.
Jimmie Dale smiled.
"That's the approved way of taking your man, isn't it? Left wrist to the prisoner's right. He's only stunned; he'll be around in a moment. Know him?"
Lannigan shook his head.
"Take a good look at him," invited Jimmie Dale. "You ought to know most of them in the business."
Lannigan bent over a little closer, and then, with an amazed cry, his free hand shot forward and tore away the other's beard.
IT WAS WHITEY MACK!
"My God!" gasped Lannigan.
"Quite so!" said Jimmie Dale evenly. "You'll find the diamonds in his pockets, and, excuse me"—his fingers were running through Whitey Mack's clothes—"ah, here it is"—the thin metal case was in his hand—"a little article that belongs to me, and whose loss, I am free to admit, caused me considerable concern until I was informed that he had only found it without having the slightest idea as to whom it belonged. It made quite a difference!" He had opened the case carelessly before Lannigan's eyes. "'The Gray Seal!' I'll say it for you," said Jimmie Dale whimsically. "This is what probably put the idea into his head, after first, in some way, having discovered old Max Diestricht's hiding place; and, if I had given him time enough, he would probably have stuck one of these seals, in clumsy imitation of that little eccentricity of mine, on the wall over there to stamp the job as genuine. You begin to get it, don't you Lannigan? Pretty sure-fire as an alibi, eh? And he'd have got away with it, too, as far as you were concerned. He had only to fire that shot, smash the window, tuck his false beard, mustache, and peaked cap into his pocket, put on his own hat that you see there on the floor—and yell that the man had escaped. He'd help you chase the thief, too! Rather neat, don't you think, Lannigan? And worth the risk, too, considering the howl that would go up at the theft of those stones, and that, known as the slickest diamond thief in the country, he would be the first to be suspected—except that the police themselves, in the person of Inspector Lannigan of headquarters, would be prepared to prove a perfectly good alibi for him."
Lannigan's head was thrust forward; his eyes, hard, were riveted on Whitey Mack.
"My God!" he said again under his breath. Then fiercely: "He'll get his for this!"
It was a moment before Jimmie Dale spoke; he was musingly examining the automatic in his hand.
"I am going now, Lannigan," he observed quietly. "I require, say, fifteen minutes in which to effect my escape. It is, of course, obvious that an alarm raised by you might prove extremely awkward, but a piece of canvas from that bench there, together with a bit of string, would make a most effective gag. I prefer, however, not to submit you to that indignity. Instead, I offer you the alternative of giving me your word to remain quietly where you are for—fifteen minutes."
Lannigan hesitated.
Jimmie Dale smiled.
"I agree," said Lannigan shortly.
Jimmie Dale stepped back. The electric-light switch clicked. The place was in darkness. There was a moment, two, of utter stillness; then softly, from the front end of the shop, a whisper:
"If I were you, Lannigan, I'd take that gun from Whitey's pocket before he comes round and beats you to it."
And the door had closed silently behind Jimmie Dale.
Chapter XI.
The Stool-Pigeon
In the subway, ten minutes before, a freckled-faced messenger boy had squeezed himself into a seat beside Jimmie Dale, yanked a dime novel from a refractory pocket, and, blissfully lost to all the world, had buried his head in its pages. Jimmie Dale's glance at the youngster had equally, perforce, embraced the lurid title of the thriller, "Dicing with Death," so imperturbably thrust under his nose. At the time, he had smiled indulgently; but now, as he left the subway and headed for his home on Riverside Drive, the words not only refused to be ignored, but had resolved themselves into a curiously persistent refrain in his mind. They were exactly what they purported to be, dime-novelish, of the deepest hue of yellow, melodramatic in the extreme; but also, to him now, they were grimly apt and premonitorily appropriate. "Dicing with Death"—there was not an hour, not a moment in the day, when he was not literally dicing with death; when, with the underworld and the police allied against him, a single false move would lose him the throw that left death the winner!
The risk of the dual life enforced upon him grew daily greater, and in the end there must be the reckoning. He would have been a madman to have shut his eyes in the face of what was obvious—but it was worth it all, and in his soul he knew that he would not have had it otherwise even now. To-night, to-morrow, the day after, would come another letter from the Tocsin, and there would be another "crime" of the Gray Seal's blazoned in the press—would that be the last affair, or would there be another—or to-night, to-morrow, the day after, would he be trapped before even one more letter came!
He shrugged his shoulders, as he ran up the steps of his house. Those were the stakes that he himself had laid on the table to wager upon the game, he had no quarrel there; but if only, before the end came, or even with the end itself, he could find—HER!
With his latchkey he let himself into the spacious, richly furnished, well-lighted reception hall, and, crossing this, went up the broad staircase, his steps noiseless on the heavy carpet. Below, faintly, he could hear some of the servants—they evidently had not heard him close the door behind him. Discipline was relaxed somewhat, it was quite apparent, with Jason, that peer of butlers, away. Jason, poor chap, was in the hospital. Typhoid, they had thought it at first, though it had turned out to be some milder form of infection. He would be back in a few days now; but meanwhile he missed the old man sorely from the house.
He reached the landing, and, turning, went along the hall to the door of his own particular den, opened the door, closed it behind him—and in an instant the keen, agile brain, trained to the little things that never escaped it, that daily held his life in the balance, was alert. The room was unusually dark, even for night-time. It was as though the window shades had been closely drawn—a thing Jason never did. But then Jason wasn't there! Jimmie Dale, smiling then a little quizzically at himself, reached up for the electric-light switch beside the door, pressed it—and, his finger still on the button, whipped his automatic from his pocket with his other hand. THE ROOM WAS STILL IN DARKNESS.
The smile on Jimmie Dale's lips was gone, for his lips now had closed together in a tight, drawn line. The lights in the rest of the house, as witness the reception hall,