He had meant to set the police by the ears, using his gray-seal device both as an added barb and that no innocent bystander of the underworld, innocent for once, might be involved--he had meant to laugh at them and puzzle them to the verge of madness, for in the last analysis they would find only an abortive attempt at crime--and he had succeeded.And then he had gone too far--and he had been caught--by HER.That string of pearls, which, to study whose effect facetiously, he had so idiotically wrapped around his wrist, and which, so ironically, he had been unable to loosen in time and had been forced to carry with him in his sudden, desperate dash to escape from Marx's the big jeweler's, in Maiden Lane, whose strong room he had toyed with one night, had been the lever which, ATFIRST, she had held over him.
The bus was on Fifth Avenue now, and speeding rapidly down the deserted thoroughfare.Jimmie Dale looked up at the lighted windows of the St.James Club as they went by, smiled whimsically, and shifted in his seat, seeking a more comfortable position.
She had caught him--how he did not know--he had never seen her--did not know who she was, though time and again he had devoted all his energies for months at a stretch to a solution of the mystery.The morning following the Maiden Lane affair, indeed, before he had breakfasted, Jason had brought him the first letter from her.It had started by detailing his every move of the night before--and it had ended with an ultimatum: "The cleverness, the originality of the Gray Seal as a crook lacked but one thing," she had naively written, "and that one thing was that his crookedness required a leading string to guide it into channels that were worthy of his genius."In a word, SHE would plan the coups, and he would act at her dictation and execute them--or else how did twenty years in Sing Sing for that little Maiden Lane affair appeal to him? He was to answer by the next morning, a simple "yes" or "no" in the personal column of the morning NEWS-ARGUS.
A threat to a man like Jimmie Dale was like flaunting a red rag at a bull, and a rage ungovernable had surged upon him.Then cold reason had come.He was caught--there was no question about that--she had taken pains to show him that he need make no mistake there.
Innocent enough in his own conscience, as far as actual theft went, for the pearls would in due course be restored in some way to the possession of their owner, he would have been unable to make even his own father, who was alive then, believe in his innocence, let alone a jury of his peers.Dishonour, shame, ignominy, a long prison sentence, stared him in the face, and there was but one alternative--to link hands with this unseen, mysterious accomplice.
Well, he could at least temporise, he could always "queer" a game in some specious manner, if he were pushed too far.And so, in the next morning's NEWS-ARGUS, Jimmie Dale had answered "yes." And then had followed those years in which there had been NO temporising, in which every plan was carried out to the last detail, those years of curious, unaccountable, bewildering affairs that Carruthers had spoken of, one on top of another, that had shaken the old headquarters on Mulberry Street to its foundations, until the Gray Seal had become a name to conjure with.And, yes, it was quite true, he had entered into it all, gone the limit, with an eagerness that was insatiable.
The bus had reached the lower end of Fifth Avenue, passed through Washington Square, and stopped at the end of its run.Jimmie Dale clambered down from the top, threw a pleasant "good-night" to the conductor, and headed briskly down the street before him.A little later he crossed into West Broadway, and his pace slowed to a leisurely stroll.
Here, at the upper end of the street, was a conglomerate business section of rather inferior class, catering doubtless to the poor, foreign element that congregated west of Broadway proper, and to the south of Washington Square.The street was, at first glance, deserted; it was dark and dreary, with stores and lofts on either side.An elevated train roared by overhead, with a thunderous, deafening clamour.Jimmie Dale, on the right-hand side of the street, glanced interestedly at the dark store windows as he went by.And then, a block ahead, on the other side, his eyes rested on an approaching form.As the other reached the corner and paused, and the light from the street lamp glinted on brass buttons, Jimmie Dale's eyes narrowed a little under his slouch hat.The policeman, although nonchalantly swinging a nightstick, appeared to be watching him.
Jimmie Dale went on half a block farther, stooped to the sidewalk to tie his shoe, glanced back over his shoulder--the policeman was not in sight--and slipped like a shadow into the alleyway beside which he had stopped.
It was another Jimmie Dale now--the professional Jimmie Dale.Quick as a cat, active, lithe, he was over a six foot fence in the rear of a building in a flash, and crouched a black shape, against the back door of an unpretentious, unkempt, dirty, secondhand shop that fronted on West Broadway--the last place certainly in all New York that the managing editor of the NEWS-ARGUS, or any one else, for that matter, would have picked out as the setting for the second debut of the Gray Seal.
From the belt around his waist, Jimmie Dale took the black silk mask, and slipped it on; and from the belt, too, came a little instrument that his deft fingers manipulated in the lock.A curious snipping sound followed.Jimmie Dale put his weight gradually against the door.The door held fast.
"Bolted," said Jimmie Dale to himself.
The sensitive fingers travelled slowly up and down the side of the door, seeming to press and feel for the position of the bolt through an inch of plank--then from the belt came a tiny saw, thin and pointed at the end, that fitted into the little handle drawn from another receptacle in the leather girdle beneath the unbuttoned vest.
