THE WARNING
For a moment Jimmie Dale stood there hesitant, the long, slim, tapering
fingers curled into the palms of his hands, his fists clenched tightly,
a dull red suffusing his cheeks and burning through the masterly created
pallor of his make-up; and then slowly as though his mind were in
dismay, he walked across the room, turned off the gas, and going to the
cot flung himself down upon it.
What was he to do? What ghastly irony had prompted Clancy to sort _him_
out for a police spy? If he refused, if he attempted to stall on Clancy,
Clancy's threat to stamp him in the eyes of the underworld as a snitch
meant ruin and disaster, absolute and final, for "Smarlinghue" would
then have to disappear; on the other hand, to be allied with the police
increased his present risks a thousandfold--and they were already
hazardous enough! It meant constant surveillance by the police that
would hamper him, rob him of his freedom of movement, adding
difficulties and perils innumerable to the enacting of this new dual
personality of his.
Jimmie Dale's hands clenched more fiercely. It was an impossible
situation--it was untenable. That he could play his role in the
underworld with only the underworld to reckon with--_yes_; but with the
police as well, watching him in his character of a poor, drug-wrecked
artist, constantly in touch with him, likely at any moment to make the
discovery that Smarlinghue and Jimmie Dale, the millionaire clubman, a
leader in New York's most exclusive set, were one and the same--_no_!
And yet what was he to do? With the Gray Seal it had been different.
Then, police and underworld alike were openly allied as common enemies
against him--but none had known who the Gray Seal was until that night
when the Magpie had roused the Bad Lands like a hive of swarming hornets
with the news that the Gray Seal was Larry the Bat; none had known until
that night when it was accepted as a fact that Larry the Bat, and
therefore the Gray Seal, had perished miserably in the tenement fire.
Around the squalid room, lighted now only by the moonrays, Jimmie Dale's
eyes travelled slowly, abstractedly. Yes, in that one particular it was
different; but here was the New Sanctuary, and again he was living the
old life in close, intimate companionship with the underworld--the old
life that only six months ago he had thought to have done with forever!
He turned his face suddenly to the wall, and lay very still--only his
hands still remained tightly clenched, and the hard, set look on his
face grew harder still.
Six months ago, like some mocking illusion, like some phantom of
unreality that jeered at him, it seemed now, he had lived for a few
short weeks in a dreamland of wondrous happiness, a happiness that all
his own great wealth had never been able to bring him, a happiness that
no wealth could ever buy--the joy of her--the glad promise that for
always their lives would be lived together--and then, as though she had
vanished utterly from the face of the earth, she was gone.
The Tocsin! Marie LaSalle to the world, she was always, and always would
be, the Tocsin to him. _Gone_! A hand unclenched and passed heavily
across his eyes and flirted the hair back from his forehead. She had
taken her place in her own world again; her fortune had been restored to
her, its management placed in the hands of a trust company; the interior
of the mansion on Fifth Avenue, with its sliding walls and secret
passages, that had served as headquarters for the Crime Club, was in the
process of reconstruction--and she had disappeared.
It had come suddenly, and yet--as he understood now, though then he had
only attributed it to an exaggerated prudence on her part--not without
warning. In the three weeks that had intervened between the night of the
fire in the old Sanctuary and her disappearance, she had permitted him
to see her only at such times and at such intervals as would be
consistent with the most casual of acquaintanceships. He remembered well
enough now her answer to his constant protests, an answer that was
always the same. "Jimmie," she had said, "a sudden intimacy between us
would undo all that you have done--you know that. It would not only
renew, but would be almost proof positive to those who are left of the
Crime Club that their suspicions of Jimmie Dale were justified, and from
that as a starting point it would not take a very clever brain to
identify Jimmie Dale as Larry the Bat--and the Gray Seal. Don't you see!
You never knew me before all the misery and trouble came--there was
nothing between us then. To see too much of each other now, to have too
much in common now would only be to court disaster. Our intimacy must
appear to come gradually, to come naturally. We must wait--a year at
least--Jimmie."
A year! And within a few hours following the last occasion on which she
had said that, Jason, his butler, had laid the morning mail upon the
breakfast table, and he had found her note.
It seemed as though he were living that moment over again now, as he lay
here on the cot in the darkness--his eagerness as he had recognised the
well-known hand amongst the pile of correspondence, the thrill akin to
tenderness with which he had opened the note; and then the utter misery
of it all, the room swirling about him, the blind agony in which he had
risen from his chair, and, as he had groped his way from the room, the
sudden, pitiful anxiety on the faithful old Jason's face, which, even in
his own distress, he had not failed to note and understand and be
grateful for.
There had been only a few words in the note, and those few carefully
chosen, guarded, like the notes of old, lest they should fall into a
stranger's hand; but he had read only too clearly between the lines. She
had had only far too much more reason for fear than she had admitted to
him; and those fears had crystallised into realities. One sentence in
the note stood out above all others, a sentence that had lived with him
since that morning months ago, the words seeming to visualise her, high
in her courage, brave in the unselfishness of her love: "Jimmie, I must
not, I cannot, I will not bring you into the shadows again; I must fight
this out alone."
He recalled the feverish haste in which he had acted that morning--the
one thought that had possessed him being to reach her if possible before
she could put her designs into execution. Benson, his chauffeur,
reckless of speed laws, had rushed him to the hotel where, pending the
remodelling of the Fifth Avenue mansion, she had taken rooms. Here, he
learned that she had given up her apartments on the previous afternoon,
and that it was understood she had left for an extended travel tour, and
that her baggage had been taken to the Pennsylvania Station. From the
hotel he had gone to the trust company in whose hands she had placed the
management of her estate. With a few additional details, disquieting
rather than otherwise, it was the story of the hotel over again. They
did not know where she was, except that she had told them she was going
away for a long trip, had given them the fullest powers to handle her
affairs, and, on the previous afternoon, had drawn a very large sum of
money before leaving the institution.
He had returned then, like a man dazed, to his home on Riverside Drive,
and had locked himself in his den to think it out. She had covered her
tracks well--and had done it in a masterly way because she had done it
simply. It was possible that she had actually gone away for a trip; but
it was more probable that she had not. He had had, of course, no means
of knowing; but the sort of peril that threatened her, his intuition
told him, was not such as to be diverted by the mere expedient of
absenting herself from New York temporarily; and, besides, she had said
that she would _fight_ it out. She could hardly do that in the _person_
of Marie LaSalle, or away from New York. She was clever, resourceful,
resolute and fearless--and those very traits opened a vista of
possibilities that left his mind staggering blindly as in a maze. She
was gone--and alone in the face of deadly menace. He remembered then
the curious, unnatural calmness underlying the mad whirling of his
brain at the thought that that was not literally true, that she was
not, nor would she ever be alone--while he lived. It was only a
question of _how_ he could help her. It had seemed almost certain that
the danger threatening her came from one of two sources--either from
those who were left of the Crime Club, relentless, savage for vengeance
on account of the ruin and disaster that had overtaken them; or else
from the Magpie, and behind the Magpie, massed like some Satanic
phalanx, every denizen of the underworld, for Silver Mag had
disappeared coincidently with Larry the Bat, coincidently with the
Magpie's attempted robbery of the supposed Henry LaSalle's safe, to
which plot she was held by the underworld to be a party, coincidently
with the dispersion of the Crime Club, _and coincidently with the
reappearance of the heiress Marie LaSalle_--and, further, Silver Mag
stood condemned to death in the Bad Lands as the accomplice of the Gray
Seal. But Silver Mag had disappeared. Had the underworld, prompted by
the Magpie, solved the riddle--did it know, or guess, or suspect that
Silver Mag was Marie LaSalle?
Which was it? The Crime Club, or the Magpie? Here again he could not
know, though he inclined to the belief that it was the latter; but here,
in either case, the means of knowing, of helping her, the way, the road,
was clearly defined--and the road was the road to the underworld. But
Larry the Bat was dead and the road was barred. And then a half finished
painting standing on an easel at the rear of his den had brought him
inspiration. It was one of his hobbies--and it swung wide again for him
the door of the underworld. None, in a broken-down, disappointed,
drug-shattered artist, would recognise Larry the Bat! The only
similarity between the two--the one thing that must of necessity be the
same in order to explain plausibly his intimacy with the dens and lairs
of Crimeland, the one thing that would, if nothing more, assure an
unsuspicious, tolerant acceptance of his presence there, was that, like
Larry the Bat, he would assume the rôle of a confirmed dope fiend; but
as there were many dope fiends, thousands of them in the Bad Lands, that
point of similarity, even if Larry the Bat were not believed to be dead,
held little, if any, risk. For the rest, it was easy enough; and so
there had come into being these wretched quarters here, the New
Sanctuary--and Smarlinghue.
But the mere assumption of a new rôle was not all--it was not there that
the difficulty lay; it was in gaining for Smarlinghue the _confidence_
of the underworld that Larry the Bat had once held. And that had taken
time--was not even yet an accomplished fact. The intimate, personal
acquaintance of Larry the Bat with every crook and dive in Gangland had
aided him, as Smarlinghue, to gain an initial foothold, but his complete
establishment there had necessarily had to be of Smarlinghue's own
making. And it had taken time. Six months had gone now, six months that,
as far as the Tocsin was concerned, had been barren of results mainly,
he encouraged himself to believe, because his efforts had been always
limited and held in check; six months of anxious, careful building, and
now, just as he was regaining the old-time confidence that Larry the Bat
had enjoyed, just as he was reaching that point where the whispered
secrets of the underworld once more reached his ears and there was a
promise of success if, indeed, she were still alive, had come this thing
to-night that spelt ruin to his hopes and ultimate disaster to himself.
If she were still alive! The thought came flashing back; and with a low,
involuntary moan, mingling anguish of mind with a bitter, merciless
fury, he turned restlessly upon the cot. If she were still alive! No
sign, no word had come from her; he had found no clue, no trace of her
as yet through the channels of the underworld; his surveillance of the
Magpie, whose friendship he had begun to cultivate, had, so far, proved
fruitless.
It came upon him now again, the fear, the dread, which he had known so
often in the past few months, that seemed to try to undermine his
resolution to go forward, that whispered speciously that it was
useless--that she was dead. And misery came. And he lay there staring
unseeingly into the moonrays as they streamed in through the top-light.
Time passed. Then a smile played over Jimmie Dale's lips, half grim,
half wistful; and the strong, square jaw was suddenly out-flung. If she
was alive, he would find her; if she was dead--his clenched hand lifted
above his head as though to register a vow--the man or men, her murderer
or murderers, whether to-morrow or in the years to come, would know a
day of reckoning when they should pay the debt!
But that was for the future. To-night there was this vital, imminent
danger that he had to face, this decision to make whose pros and cons
seemed each to hold an equal measure of dismay. What was he to do?
He laughed shortly, ironically after a moment. It was as though some
malignant ingenuity had conspired to trap him. He was caught either way.
What was he to do? The question kept pounding at his brain, growing more
sinister with each repetition. What was he to do? Defy the police--and
be branded as a stool-pigeon, a snitch, an informer in every nook and
cranny of the underworld! He could not do that. Everything, all that
meant anything in life to him now would be swept from his reach at even
the first breath of suspicion. Nor was it an idle threat that his
unwelcome visitor had made. He was not fool enough to blind himself on
that score--it could be only too easily accomplished. And on the other
hand--but what was the use of torturing his brain with a never-ending
rehearsal of details? Was there a middle course? That was his only
chance. Was there a way to safeguard Smarlinghue and, yes, this
miserable hovel of a place, priceless now as his new Sanctuary.
He followed the moonpath's slant with his eyes to where it touched the
floor and disclosed the greasy, threadbare, pitiful carpet. A grim
whimsicality fell upon him. It would be too bad to lose it! It was
luxury to what Larry the Bat had known! There had not even been a carpet
in the old Sanctuary, and--he sat suddenly bolt upright on the cot, his
eyes, that had mechanically travelled on along the moonpath, strained
now upon where the light fell upon the threshold of the door. There was
a little white patch there, a most curious little white patch--that had
not been there when he had thrown himself on the cot. Came a sudden,
incredulous thought that sent the blood whipping fiercely through his
veins; and with a low cry, in mad, feverish haste now, he leaped from
the cot and across the room.
It was an envelope that had been thrust in under the door. In an instant
he had snatched it up from the floor, and in another, acting
instinctively, even while he realised the futility of what he did, he
wrenched the door open, stared out into a dark and empty
passageway--and, with a strange, almost hysterical laugh, closed and
locked the door again.
There was no writing on the envelope; there was not light enough to have
deciphered it if there had been--but he had need for neither writing
nor light. Those long, slim, tapering fingers, those wonderful fingers
of Jimmie Dale, that seemed to combine all human faculties in their
sensitive tips, had already telegraphed their message to his brain--it
was the same texture of paper that she always used--it was from
_her_--it was from the Tocsin.
Joy, gladness, a relief so terrific as it surged upon him as to leave
him for the moment physically weak, held him in thrall, and he
stumbled back across the room, and slipped down into a chair before
the table, and dropped his head forward into his arms, the note
tightly clasped in his hand. She was _alive_. The Tocsin was
alive--and well--and here in New York--and free--and they had not
caught her. It meant all those things, the coming and the manner of
the coming of this note. A deep thankfulness filled his heart; it
seemed that it was only now he realised the full measure of the fear
and anxiety, the strain under which he had been labouring for so many
months. She was alive--the Tocsin was alive. It was like some
wonderful song that filled his soul, excluding all else. How little
the contents of the note itself mattered--the one great, glorious fact
for the moment was that she was alive!
It was a long time before Jimmie Dale raised his head, and then he got
up suddenly from his chair, and lit the gas. But even then he hesitated
as he turned the note over, speculatively now, in his fingers. So she
knew him as Smarlinghue! In some way she had found that out! His brows
gathered abstractedly, then cleared again. Well, at any rate, it was
added proof that so far her cleverness had completely outwitted those
who had pitted themselves against her--so much so that even her freedom
of action, in whatever role she had assumed, was still left open to her.
He tore the envelope open. There was no preface to the note, no "Dear
Philanthropic Crook" as there had always been in the old days--instead,
the single, closely-written sheet began abruptly, the writing itself
indicating that it had been composed in desperate haste. He glanced
quickly over the first few lines.
"You should not have done this. You should never have come into the
underworld again. I begged, I implored you not to do so. And now you are
in danger to-night. I can only hope and pray that this will reach you in
time, and--" He read on, in a startled way now, to the end; then read
the note over again more slowly, this time muttering snatches of it
aloud: "... Chicago ... Slimmy Jack and Malay ... Birdie Lee ...
released from Sing Sing to-day ... triangular scar on forehead over
right eye...."
And then, for a little while, Jimmie Dale stood there staring about the
room, motionless, rigid as stone, save that his fingers moved in an
automatic, mechanical way as they began to tear the note into little
shreds. But presently into his face there crept a menacing look, and an
angry red began to tinge his cheeks, and his jaws clamped ominously.
So that was the game at Malay John's, was it? Birdie Lee was out again!
She had not needed to mention any scar to enable him to identify Birdie
Lee. He knew the man of old. The slickest of them all, the cleverest of
them all, before he had been caught and sent to Sing Sing for a
five-years' term, was Birdie Lee--the one man of them all that he,
Jimmie Dale, might regard as a rival, so to speak, where the mastery of
the intricate mechanism of a vaunted and much advertised "guaranteed
burglar-proof safe" was concerned! And Birdie Lee was out again!
There was danger if he went to Malay John's, she had said--and it was
true. But what if he did _not_ go! What, for instance, if Birdie Lee
went through with this night's work!
Jimmie Dale walked slowly across the room, halted before the wall near
the door, stood for an instant hesitant there--and then, as though in a
sudden, final decision, dropped down on his knees, and, working swiftly,
removed the section of the base-board from the wall for the second time
that night.
Out came the neatly folded clothes of Jimmie Dale; and with them,
serving him so well in the days gone by, the leather girdle, or
undervest, with its stout-sewn, upright pockets in which nestled, in an
array of fine, blue-steel, highly tempered instruments, a compact
powerful burglar's kit. It was the one thing that he had saved from the
fire in the old Sanctuary--and that more by accident than design. He had
been wearing the girdle that night when he had stolen into the Crime
Club, and afterwards had returned to the Sanctuary with the intention of
destroying forever all traces of Larry the Bat; and then, only half
dressed, as he was changing into the clothes of Jimmie Dale, the alarm
had come before he had taken off the girdle, and, without thought of it
again at the time, he had still been wearing it when he had made his
escape. He looked at it now for a moment grimly--and smiled in a
mirthless way. He had not used it since that night, and that night he
had never meant or thought to use it again--only to destroy it!
He reached into the aperture in the wall once more, drew out a pocket
flashlight and an automatic pistol, and laid them down beside the
clothes and the leather girdle; then, pulling off his coat and shirt, he
ran noiselessly across the room to the washstand. A few drops from a
tiny phial poured into the water, and the pallor, the sickly hue from
his face was gone. It was to be Jimmie Dale--not Smarlinghue--who would
keep the rendezvous at Malay John's!
And now he was back across the room once more, turning out the light as
he passed the gas-jet. The leather girdle, that went on much after the
fashion of a life-preserver, was fastened over his shoulders and secured
around his waist. The remainder of his clothes were stripped off with
lightning speed, and in their place were donned the fashionably
tailored, immaculate tweeds of Jimmie Dale. It was like some
quick-moving, shadowy pantomime in the moonlight. He gathered up the
discarded garments, tucked them into the opening in the wall, replaced
the baseboard, slipped the automatic and flashlight into the side
pockets of his coat--and stood up, his fingers feeling swiftly over his
vest and under the back of his coat to guard against the possibility of
any tell-tale bulge from the leather girdle underneath.
An instant he stood glancing critically about him; then the roller shade
over the window was lifted aside, the window itself, on carefully oiled
hinges, was opened noiselessly, closed again--and, hugged close against
the wall of the building, hidden in the black shadows, Jimmie Dale, so
silent as to be almost uncanny in his movements, crept along the few
intervening feet to the fence that enclosed the courtyard. Here, next to
the wall, a loosened plank swung outward at a touch, and he was standing
in a narrow, black areaway beyond. There was only the depth of the house
between himself and the street, and he paused now, crouched motionless
against the wall, listening. He heard no footfalls from the
pavement--only, like a distant murmur, the night sounds from the Bowery,
a block away--only the muffled roar of an elevated train. The way was
presumably clear, and he moved forward again--cautiously. He reached the
front of the building, which, like the old Sanctuary, was a tenement of
the poorer class, paused once more, this time to peer quickly up and
down the dark, ill-lighted cross street--and, satisfied that he was safe
from observation, stepped out on the sidewalk, and began to walk
nonchalantly along to the Bowery.
And here, at the corner, under a street lamp he consulted his watch. It
was ten o'clock! He smiled a little ironically. Certainly, they would
hardly expect him as early as that! Well, he would be a little ahead of
time, that was all!