第35章

Jimmie Dale, moving without sound, went to the window.There was a shade on it, and it was pulled down.He reached up underneath it, felt for the window fastening, and unlocked it; then cautiously tested the window itself by lifting it an inch or two--it slid easily in its grooves.

He stood then for a moment, hardfaced, a frown gathering his forehead into heavy furrows, as the flashlight's ray again and again darted hither and thither.There was nothing, absolutely nothing in the room but wooden packing cases.He lifted the cover of the one nearest to him and looked inside.It was quite empty, except for some pieces of heavy cord, and a few cardboard shoe boxes that, in turn, were empty, too.

"It's here, of course," said Jimmie Dale thoughtfully to himself.

"Clever work, too! But I can't move half a hundred packing cases without that chap below hearing me; and I can't do it in ten minutes, either, which, I imagine is the outside limit of time.

Fortunately, though, these cases are not without their compensation--a dozen men could hide here."

He began to move about the room.And now he stooped before one pile of boxes and then another, curiously attempting to lift up the entire pile from the bottom.Some he could not move; others, by exerting all his strength, gave a little; and then, finally, over in one corner, he found a pile that appeared to answer his purpose.

"These are certainly empty," he muttered.

There was just room to squeeze through between them and the next stack of cases alongside; but, once through, by the simple expedient of moving the cases out a little to take advantage of the angle made by the corner of the room, he obtained ample space to stand comfortably upright against the wall.But Jimmie Dale was not satisfied yet.Could he see out into the room? He experimented with his flashlight--and carefully shifted the screen of cases before him a little to one side.And yet still he was not satisfied.With a sort of ironical droop at the corners of his lips, as though suddenly there had flashed upon him the inspiration that fathered one of those whimsical ideas and fancies that were so essentially a characteristic of Jimmie Dale, he came out from behind the cases, went across the room to the case he had opened when he first entered, took out the cord and the cover of one of the cardboard shoe boxes, and with these returned to his hiding place once more.

The sounds from the upper stories of the tenement now reached him hardly at all; but from below, directly under his feet almost, he could hear some one, the proprietor of the shoe store probably, walking about.

Tense, every faculty now on the alert, his head turned in a strained, attentive attitude, Jimmie Dale threw on the flashlight's tiny switch, took that intimate and thin metal case from his pocket, extracted a diamond-shaped, gray paper seal with the little tweezers, moistened the adhesive side, and stuck it in the centre of the white cardboard-box cover, then tore the edges of the cardboard down until the whole was just small enough to slip into his pocket.

Through the cardboard he looped a piece of cord, placard fashion, and with his pencil printed the four words--"with the compliments of "--above the gray seal.He surveyed the result with a grim, mirthless chuckle--and put the piece of cardboard in his pocket.

"I'm taking the longest chances I ever took in my life," said Jimmie Dale very seriously to himself, as his fingers twisted, and doubled, and tied the remaining pieces of cord together, and finally fashioned a running noose in one end."I don't--" The cord and the flashlight went into his pocket, the room was in darkness, the black mask was whipped from his breast pocket and adjusted to his face, and his automatic was in his hand.

Came the creak of a footstep, as though on a ladder exactly below him, another, and another, receding curiously in its direction, yet at the same time growing louder in sound as if nearer the floor--then a crack of light showed in the floor in the centre of the room.

This held for an instant, then expanded suddenly into a great luminous square--and through a trapdoor, opened wide now, a man's head appeared.

Jimmie Dale's eyes, fixed through the space between the piles of cases, narrowed--there was, indeed, little doubt but that the shoe-store proprietor below was an accomplice! The store served a most convenient purpose in every respect--as a secret means of entry into the room, as a sort of guarantee of innocence for the room itself.

Why not! To the superficial observer, to the man who might by some chance blunder into the room--it was but an adjunct of the store itself!

The man in the trap-doorway paused with his shoulders above the floor, looked around, listened, then drew himself up, walked across the floor, and shot the heavy bolt on the door that led into the hallway of the house.He returned then to the trapdoor, bent over it, and whistled softly.Two more men, in answer to the summons, came up into the room.

"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.