第43章

The forward car was almost empty, and Jimmie Dale chose a seat by himself.How did she know? How did she know not only this, but the hundred other affairs that she had outlined in those letters of hers? By what means, superhuman, indeed, it seemed, did she--Jimmie Dale jerked himself erect suddenly.What good did it do to speculate on that now, when every minute was priceless? What was HEto do, how was he to act, what plan could he formulate and carry out, and WIN against odds that, at the outset, were desperate enough even to forecast almost certain failure--and death!

Who would ever have suspected old Tom Ludgate, known for years throughout the squalour of the East Side as old Luddy, the pushcart man, of having a bag of unset diamonds under his pillow--or under the sack, rather, that he probably used for a pillow! What a queer thing to do! But then, old Luddy was a character--apparently always in the most poverty-stricken condition, apparently hardly more than keeping body and soul together, trusting no one, and obsessed by the dread that by depositing in a bank some one would discover that he had money, and attempt to force it from him, he had put his savings, year after year, for twenty years, twenty-five years, perhaps, into unset stone--diamonds.How had she found that out?

Jimmie Dale sank into a deeper reverie.He could steal them all right, and they would be well worth the stealing--old Luddy had done well, and lived and existed on next to nothing--the stones, she said, were worth about fifteen thousand dollars.Not so bad, even for twenty-five years of vegetable selling from a pushcart! He could steal them all right; it would tax the Gray Seal's ingenuity little to do so simple a thing as that, but that was not all, nor, indeed, hardly a factor in it--it was vital that if he were to succeed at all he must steal them PUBLICLY, as it were.

And after that--WHAT? His own chances were pretty slim at best.

Jimmie Dale, staring at the grayness of the subway wall through the window, shook his head slowly--then, with a queer little philosophical shrug of his shoulders, he smiled gravely, seriously.

It was all a part of the game, all a part of the life--of the Gray Seal!

It was half-past twelve, or a little later, as nearly as he could judge, for Larry the Bat carried no such ornate thing in evidence as a watch, as he halted at the corner of a dark, squalid street in the lower East Side.It was a miserable locality--in daylight humming with a cosmopolitan hive of pitiful humans dragging out as best they could an intolerable existence, a locality peopled with every nationality on earth, their community of interest the struggle to maintain life at the lowest possible expenditure, where necessity even was pared and shaved down to a minimum; but now, at night time, or rather in the early-morning hours, the darkness, in very mercy, it seemed, covered it with a veil, as it were, and in the quiet that hung over it now hid the bald, the hideous, aye, and the piteous, too, from view.

It was a narrow street, and the row of tenement houses, each house almost identical with its neighbour, that flanked the pavement on either side, seemed, from where Jimmie Dale stood looking down its length, from the corner, to converge together at a point a little way beyond, giving it an unreal, ominous, cavernlike effect.And, too, there seemed something ominous even in its quiet.It was as though one sensed acutely the crouching of some Thing in its lair--waiting silently, viciously, with sullen patience.

A footstep sounded--another.Jimmie Dale drew quickly back around the corner into an areaway.Two men passed--in helmets--swinging their nightsticks--that beat was always policed in pairs!

They passed on, turned the corner, and went down the narrow cross street that Jimmie Dale had just been inspecting.He started to follow--and drew back again abruptly.A form flitted suddenly across the road and disappeared in the darkness in the officers'

wake--ten yards behind the first another followed--at the same interval of distance still another--and yet still one more--four in all.

The darkness hid all six, the two policemen, the four men behind them--the only sounds were the OFFICERS' footsteps dying away in the distance.

Jimmie Dale's fingers were mechanically testing the mechanism of the automatic in his pocket.

"The Skeeter's gang!" he muttered to himself."Red Mose, the Midget, Harve Thoms--and the Skeeter! The Worst apaches in the city of New York; death contractors--the lowest bidders! Professional assassins, and a man's life any time for twenty-five dollars! Iwonder--I've never done it yet--but I wonder if it would be a crime in God's sight if one shot--to KILL!"Jimmie Dale was at the corner again--again the street before him was black, deserted, empty.He chose the right hand side, and, well in the shadow of the houses, as an extra precaution, stole along silently.He stopped finally before one where, in the doorway, hung a little sign.Jimmie Dale mounted the porch, and with his eyes close to the sign could just make out the larger words in the big printed type:

ROOM TO RENT

TOP FLOOR

Jimmie Dale nodded.That was right.The first house on the right-hand side, with the room-to-rent sign, her letter had said.His fingers were testing the doorknob.The door was not locked.

"Naturally, it wouldn't be locked," Jimmie Dale told himself grimly--and stepped inside.

He stood for an instant without movement, every faculty on the alert.Far up above him a step, guarded though his trained ear made it out to be, creaked faintly upon the stairs--there was no other sound.The creaking, almost inaudible at its loudest, receded farther up--and silence fell.