Page:Frank Packard - The Adventures of Jimmie Dale.djvu/113

Rh "The Cap'll be along in a minute," one of them said. "Turn on the light."

A switch clicked, flooding the room with sudden brilliancy from half a dozen electric bulbs.

"Too many!" grunted the same voice again. "We ain't working to-night—turn out half of 'em."

The sudden transition from the darkness for a moment dazzled Jimmie Dale's eyes—but the next moment he was searching the faces of the three men. There were few crooks, few denizens of the crime world below the now obsolete but still famous dead line that, as Larry the Bat, he did not know at least by sight.

"Moulton, Whitie Burns, and Marty Dean," confided Jimmie Dale softly to himself. "And I don't know of any worse, except—the Cap. And gun fighters, every one of them, too—nice odds, to say nothing of"

"Here's the Cap now!" announced one of the three. "Hello, Cap, where'd you raise the mustache?"

Jimmie Dale's eyes shifted to the trapdoor, and into them crept a contemptuous and sardonic smile—the man who was coming up now and hoisting himself to the floor was the man who, half an hour before, had threatened young Sammy Matthews with arrest.

The Cap, alias Bert Malone, alias a score of other names, closed the trapdoor after him, pulled off his mustache and gray wig, tucked them in his pocket, and faced his companions brusquely.

"Never mind about the mustache," he said curtly. "Get busy, the lot of you. Stir around and get the works out!"

"What for?" inquired Whitie Burns, a sharp, ferret-faced little man. "We got enough of the old stuff on hand now, and that bum break Gregor made when he pinched the cracked plate put the finish on that. Say, Cap"

"Close your face, Whitie, and get the works out!" Malone cut in shortly. "We've only got the whole night ahead of us—but we'll need it all. We're going to run the queer off that cracked plate."

One of the others, Marty Dean this time, a certain brutal