第54章

With an exclamation almost of dismay, Jimmie Dale pulled out his watch.So that was what Burton and Lannigan were up to! And he had actually run into them! Lord, the irony of it! The-- And then Jimmie Dale stared at the dial of his watch incredulously.It was still but barely midnight! It seemed impossible that since leaving the theatre at a few minutes before eleven, he had lived through but a single hour!

Jimmie Dale's fingers began to pluck at the letter, tearing it into pieces, tearing the pieces over and over again into tiny shreds.

The train stopped at station after station, people got on and off--Jimmie Dale's hat was over his eyes, and his eyes were glued again to the window.Had Bookkeeper Bob returned to his flat in Harlem with the detectives at his heels--or were Burton and Lannigan still trailing the man downtown somewhere around the cafe's? If the former, the theft of the letter and its incident loss of time had been an irreparable disaster; if the latter--well, who knew! The risk was the Gray Seal's!

At One Hundred and Twenty-Fifth Street Jimmie Dale left the train;and, at the end of a sharp four minutes' walk, during which he had dodged in and out from street to street, stopped on a corner to survey the block ahead of him.It was a block devoted exclusively to flats and apartment houses, and, apart from a few belated pedestrians, was deserted.Jimmie Dale strolled leisurely down one side, crossed the street at the end of the block, and strolled leisurely back on the other side--there was no sign of either Burton or Lannigan.It was a fairly safe presumption then that Bookkeeper Bob had not returned yet, or one of the detectives at least would have been shadowing the house.

Jimmie Dale, smiling a little grimly, retraced his steps again, and turned deliberately into a doorway--whose number he had noted as he had passed a moment or so before.So, after all, there was time yet! This was the house."Number eighteen," she had said in her letter."A flat--three stories--Moyne lives on ground floor."Jimmie Dale leaned against the vestibule door--there was a faint click--a little steel instrument was withdrawn from the lock--and Jimmie Dale stepped into the hall, where a gas jet, turned down, burned dimly.

The door of the ground-floor apartment was at his right, Jimmie Dale reached up and turned off the light.Again those slim, tapering, wonderfully sensitive fingers worked with the little steel instrument, this time in the lock of the apartment door--again there was that almost inaudible click--and then cautiously, inch by inch, the door opened under his hand.He peered inside--down a hallway lighted, if it could be called lighted at all, by a subdued glow from two open doors that gave upon it--peered intently, listening intently, as he drew a black silk mask from his pocket and slipped it over his face.And then, silent as a shadow in his movements, the door left just ajar behind him, he stole down the carpeted hallway.

Opposite the first of the open doorways Jimmie Dale paused--a curiously hard expression creeping over his face, his lips beginning to droop ominously downward at the corners.It was a little sitting room, cheaply but tastefully furnished, and a young woman, Bookkeeper Bob's wife evidently, and evidently sitting up for her husband, had fallen sound asleep in a chair, her head pillowed on her arms that were outstretched across the table.For a moment Jimmie Dale held there, his eyes on the scene--and the next moment, his hand curved into a clenched fist, he had passed on and entered the adjoining room.

It was a child's bedroom.A night lamp burned on a table beside the bed, and the soft rays seemed to play and linger in caress on the tousled golden hair of a little girl of perhaps two years of age--and something seemed to choke suddenly in Jimmie Dale's throat--the sweet, innocent little face, upturned to his, was smiling at him as she slept.

Jimmie Dale turned away his head--his eyelashes wet under his mask.

"BENEATH THE MATTRESS OF THE CHILD'S BED," the letter had said.His face like stone, his lips a thin line now, Jimmie Dale's hand reached deftly in without disturbing the child and took out a package--and then another.He straightened up, a bundle of crisp new hundred-dollar notes in each hand--and on the top of one, slipped under the elastic band that held the bills together, an unsealed envelope.He drew out the latter, and opened it--it was a second-class steamship passage to Vera Cruz, made out in a fictitious name, of course, to John Davies, the booking for next day's sailing.From the ticket, from the stolen money, Jimmie Dale's eyes lifted to rest again on the little golden head, the smiling lips--and then, dropping the packages into his pockets, his own lips moving queerly, he turned abruptly to the door.

"My God, the shame of it!" he whispered to himself.

He crept down the corridor, past the open door of the room where the young woman still sat fast asleep, and, his mask in his pocket again, stepped softly into the vestibule, and from there to the street.

Jimmie Dale hurried now, spurred on it seemed by a hot, insensate fury that raged within him--there was still one other call to make that night--still those remaining and minute details in the latter part of her letter, grim and ugly in their portent!

It was close upon one o'clock in the morning when Jimmie Dale stopped again--this time before a fashionable dwelling just off Central Park.And here, for perhaps the space of a minute, he surveyed the house from the sidewalk--watching, with a sort of speculative satisfaction, a man's shadow that passed constantly to and fro across the drawn blinds of one of the lower windows.The rest of the house was in darkness.

"Yes," said Jimmie Dale, nodding his head, "I rather thought so.