Page:Frank Packard - The Adventures of Jimmie Dale.djvu/374

368 "Go to bed, Jason."

"Yes, sir; but"—Jason's voice, low, troubled, came through the darkness from the upper end of the room—"Master Jim, sir, I"

"Go to bed, Jason—and not a word of this."

"Yes, sir. Good-night, Master Jim,"

"Good-night, Jason."

Jimmie Dale groped his way to the big lounging chair in which he had found Jason asleep, and flung himself into it They had struck quickly, these ingenious, dress-suited murderers of the Crime Club! The house was already watched, would be watched now untiringly, unceasingly; not a movement of his henceforth but would be under their eyes!

His hands, resting on the arms of the chair, closed slowly until they became tight-clenched, knotted fists. What was he to do? It was not only the Crime Club, it was not only the Tocsin and her peril—there was the underworld snapping and snarling at his heels, there was the police, dogged and sullen, ever on the trail of the Gray Seal! His life, even before this, in his fight against the underworld and the police, had depended upon his freedom of action—and now, at one and the same time, that freedom was cut away from beneath his feet, as it were, and a third foe, equally as deadly as the others, was added to the list!

For months, to preserve and sustain the character of Larry the Bat, he had been forced to assume the rôle almost daily; for, in that sordid empire below the dead line, whose one common bond and aim was the Gray Seal's death, where suspicion, one of the other, was rampant and extravagant, where each might be the one against whom all swore their vengeance, Larry the Bat could not mysteriously disappear from his accustomed haunts without inviting suspicion in an active and practical form—an inquisitorial visit to his squalid lodgings, the Sanctuary—and the end of Larry the Bat!

If, as he had thought only a few hours before, he was