Page:Frank Packard - The Adventures of Jimmie Dale.djvu/163

Rh "Quick!" he flung at the startled chauffeur. "The nearest subway station—there's a ten-spot in it for you! Quick man—quick! Here they come!"

A crowd of Chinese, pouring like angry hornets from Chang Foo's shop, came yelling down the street—and the taxi took the corner on two wheels—and Jimmie Dale, panting, choking for his breath like a man spent, sank back against the cushions.

But five minutes later it was quite another Jimmie Dale, composed, nonchalant, imperturbable, who entered an uptown subway train, and, choosing a seat alone near the centre of the car, which at that hour of night in the downtown district was almost deserted, took the crushed letter from his pocket. For a moment he made no attempt to read it, his dark eyes, now that he was free from observation, full of troubled retrospect, fixed on the window at his side. It was not a pleasant thought that it had cost a man his life, nor yet that that life was also the price of his own freedom. True, if there were two men in the city of New York whose crimes merited neither sympathy nor mercy, those two men were the Wowzer and Dago Jim—but yet, after all, it was a human life, and, even if his own had been in the balance, thank God it had been through no act of his that Dago Jim had gone out! The Wowzer, cute and cunning, had been quick enough to say so to clear himself, but—Jimmie Dale smiled a little now—neither the Wowzer, nor Chang Foo, nor Chinatown would ever be in a position to recognise their uninvited guest!

Jimmie Dale's eyes shifted to the letter speculatively, gravely. It seemed as though the night had already held a year of happenings, and the night was not over yet—there was the letter! It had already cost one life; was it to cost another—or what?

It began as it always did. He read it through once, in amazement; a second time, with a flush of bitter anger creeping to his cheeks; and a third time, curiously memorising, as it were, snatches of it here and there.