The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale Part 23

With a mental jerk, Jimmie Dale focused his mind on his immediate surroundings. It was dark; there were no lights in any part of the house, but he needed none, not even his flashlight--he knew the house as well and as intimately as his own. He was in the rear hall now, and now he opened a door, paused cautiously as the dull yellow glow from a dying grate fire illuminated the room faintly, then stepped inside. It was the Archman library, the room where David Archman did a great deal of his work at night A desk stood at the lower end of the room; and in the corner near the portiered windows was the lawyer's safe.

Jimmie Dale closed the door, moved toward the window, drew the portieres aside, released the window catch, silently raised the window itself--it was only a drop a few feet to the yard! And then Jimmie Dale sat down at the desk.

A clock somewhere in the house struck a single note--that would be halfpast one. Time pa.s.sed slowly, interminably. The clock struck again--two o'clock. And then suddenly Jimmie Dale rose from his chair, and slipped into the window recess behind the portieres. The front door closed, a step came along the hall, the library opened, closed again--and Clarie Archman, his face as the flickering firelight played upon it, like a face of death, came forward into the room.

For a moment the boy held motionless beside the desk, his eyes fixed in a sort of horrible fascination upon the safe--and then, slowly, he moved toward it, and dropped on his knees before it, and his fingers began to twirl the k.n.o.b of the dial. His fingers shook, and he was a long time at his task--and then the handle turned, and the safe was unlocked, but Clarie Archman did not open the door. Instead, he drew back suddenly, and rose swaying to his feet, and covered his face with his hands.

"I can't! Oh, my G.o.d, I--I can't!" he moaned. He lowered his hands after a moment, and gazed around him unseeingly, a queer, ghastly look came into his face. "I--I guess--I guess there's only one--one way to--to beat them," he whispered. "One way to beat them, and--"

The package in Jimmie Dale's hand dropped suddenly to the floor, he wrenched the portieres aside, and, with a low, sharp cry, sprang forward. The boy had taken a revolver from his pocket, and was lifting it to his head. Jimmie Dale struck up the other's hand--but in time only to deflect the shot; too late to prevent it being fired. There was a flash in mid-air, the roar of the report went racketing through the silent house, and the revolver, spinning from the other's hands, struck against the wall across the room.

And then Jimmie Dale had the boy by the shoulders, and was shaking him violently. Clarie Archman was like one stunned, numbed, and bereft of his senses.

"It's all right--you're clear! Do you hear--try and understand--you're clear!" Jimmie Dale whispered fiercely. "Here's your letter!" He thrust it into the other's hand. "Destroy it! Those men--Sonnino--Barca--will say nothing. You don't owe anybody any money--that bucket-shop was in the game with the rest, and--" Cries, voices, were coming from above now; and Jimmie Dale, like a flash, turned from the boy, leaped for the safe, wrenched the door open, reached in with both hands, and, s.n.a.t.c.hing up an armful of the contents, spilled books and papers on the floor. He was back beside the boy in an instant. "Listen! You heard some one in here as you entered the house--you came into the room--_you caught me in the act_--you fired--you missed. And now--_fight_! Fight--pull yourself together--fight. They are coming!"

He caught the boy around the waist, and the two, locked together, reeled this way and that about the room. A chair, deliberately kicked over by Jimmie Dale, crashed to the floor. The cries drew nearer. Footsteps came racing madly down the stairs--and then the door of the library burst open, and David Archman, in pajamas, dashed through the doorway, and without a second's hesitation, made for the two struggling forms--and Jimmie Dale, releasing his hold upon the boy, suddenly sent the other staggering backwards full into David Archman, checking David Archman's rush--and, turning, sprang for the window, s.n.a.t.c.hed up his package, hurled himself over the sill, dropped to the ground, and, racing for the fence, climbed it, and made the lane, just as a shot, from David Archman, no doubt, was fired from the window.

A moment more, and Jimmie Dale, his mask in his pocket, had emerged from the lane, and was walking nonchalantly along to the street corner; another, and he had boarded a street car--but under Jimmie Dale's coat was a most suspicious bulge. Conscious of this, he left the street car a few blocks farther along, when he was far enough away to be certain that he would have eluded all pursuit--and walked the rest of the distance to Riverside Drive. If he had escaped unscathed, the package of banknotes had not--it was his coat that shielded them from view, not the wrappers, for the wrappers had been torn almost entirely away in his hasty exit over the fence.

He reached his home, and mounted the steps cautiously. There was Jason to consider--Jason with his lovable pernicious habit of sitting up for his master. Jason must not see those banknotes, that was obvious, and if Jason--yes!--Jimmie Dale was peering now through the monogrammed lace that covered the plate gla.s.s doors in the vestibule--yes, Jason was still sitting up. And then Jimmie Dale smiled that strange whimsical smile of his. Jason was still sitting up--asleep in the hall chair.

Softly, without a sound, Jimmie Dale opened the front door, entered, pa.s.sed the old man, and went up the stairs. In his dressing room, he hid away the package that tomorrow, or at the first opportunity, would enrich some deserving charity, and, as silently as he had come up the stairs, he descended them again, pa.s.sed by the old man again, and went out to the street once more. There was just one reason why Jason, tired out and asleep, sat there--only one--because Jason, old Jason, faithful, big-hearted Jason, loved his Master Jim.

Into Jimmie Dale's eyes there came a mist. Perhaps that was why, because he could not see clearly, that he stumbled on his way up the steps again; perhaps that was why he made so much noise that it was Jason who opened the door and held out his hands for Jimmie Dale's coat and hat.

"What!" said Jimmie Dale severely. "Sitting up again, Jason? Jason, go to bed at once!"

"Yes, sir," said Jason. "Thank you, sir. Thank you, Master Jim, sir--I will."

CHAPTER XVI

ONE CHANCE IN TEN

It was three nights later. Old Jason had placed a tray with after-dinner coffee and a liqueur set on the table at Jimmie Dale's elbow--that was fully an hour ago, and both coffee and liqueur were untouched. Things were not going well. Apart entirely from all lack of success where the Tocsin was concerned, things were not going well. The fate of Frenchy Virat, the fate of the Wolf, and, added to this, the Gray Seal's intervention in the plans and purposes of one Gentleman Laroque and certain gentlemen still higher up than Laroque, had not pa.s.sed unmarked or unnoticed in the underworld. And now in the underworld a strange, ominous and far-reaching disquiet reigned. It was an underworld rampant with suspicion, mad with fury, more dangerous than it had ever been before.

Jimmie Dale's hand reached abstractedly into the pocket of his dinner jacket for his cigarette case. He lighted a cigarette, leaned back once more in the big, leather-upholstered lounging chair, and his eyes, half closed, strayed introspectively around the luxuriously appointed room, his own particular den in his Riverside Drive residence. Once, a very long while ago, years ago, so long ago now that it seemed as though it must have been in some strange previous incarnation, back in those days when the Tocsin had first come into his life, and when he had known her only as the author of those mysterious letters, those "calls to arms"

to the Gray Seal, she had written: "Things are a little too warm, aren't they, Jimmie? Let's let them cool for a year."

A blue thread curled lazily upward from the tip of the cigarette. Jimmie Dale's eyes fastened mechanically on the twisting, wavering spiral, followed it mechanically as it rose and spread out into filmy, undulating, fantastic shapes--and the strong, square jaw set suddenly hard. It was not so very strange that those words should have come back to him to-night! Things were "warm" now--and he could not let them "cool" for a year!

"Warm!" He smiled a little mirthlessly. The comparison was very slight!

Then, at the beginning, at the outset of the Gray Seal's career, the police, it was true, had shown a certain unpleasant anxiety for a closer acquaintanceship, but that was about all. To-day, lashed on and mocked by a virulent press, goaded to madness by their own past failures to "get" the Gray Seal, to whose door they laid a hundred crimes and for whom the bars of a death cell in Sing Sing was the goal if they could but catch their prey, the police, to a man, were waging a ceaseless and relentless war against him; and to-day, joining hands with the police, the underworld in all its thousand ramifications, prompted by fear, by suspicion of one another, reached out to trap him, and to deal out to him a much more speedy, but none the less certain, fate than that prescribed by the statutes of the law!

He shook his head. It could not go on--indefinitely. The role was too hard to play; the dual life, in a sort of grim, ironical self-mockery, brought even in its own successful interpretation added dangers and perils with each succeeding day. As it had been with Larry the Bat, the more he now lived Smarlinghue the more it became difficult to slough off Smarlinghue and live as Jimmie Dale; the more Smarlinghue became trusted and accepted in the inner circles of the underworld, the more he became a figure in those sordid surroundings, and the more dangerous it became to "disappear" at will without exciting suspicion, where suspicion, as it was, was already spread into every nook and corner of the Bad Lands, where each rubbed shoulders with his fellow in the lurking dread that the other was--the Gray Seal!

The police were no mean antagonists, he made no mistake on that score; but the peril that was the graver menace of the two, and the greater to be feared, was--the underworld. And here in the underworld in the last few days, here where on every twisted, vicious lip was the whisper, "Death to the Gray Seal," there had come even another menace. He could not define it, it was intuition perhaps--but intuition had never failed him yet. It was an undercurrent of which he had gradually become conscious, the sense of some unseen, guiding power, that moved and swayed and controlled, and was present, dominant, in every den and dive in crimeland. There had been many gang leaders and heads of little coteries of crime, cunning, crafty in their way, and all of them unscrupulous, like the Wolf, for instance, who had sworn openly and boastingly through the Bad Lands, and had been believed for a season, that they would bring the Gray Seal to a last accounting--but it was more than this now. There was a craftier brain and a stronger hand at work than the Wolf's had ever been! Who was it? He shook his head. He did not know. He had gone far into the innermost circles of the underworld--and he did not know. He sensed a power there; and in a dozen different, intangible ways, still an intuition more than anything else, he had sensed this "some one," this power, creeping, fumbling, feeling its implacable way through the dark, as it were, toward _him_.

Yes, it was getting "warm"--perilously warm! And inevitably there must come an end--some day. The warning stared him in the face. But he could not stop, could not heed the warning, could not let things "cool" now for a year, and stand aside until the storm should have subsided! Where was the Tocsin? If his peril was great--what was hers!

He surged suddenly upward from his chair, his hands clenched until the knuckles stood out like ivory k.n.o.bs. The Tocsin! The woman he loved--where was she? Was she safe _to-night?_ Where was she? He could not stop until that question had been answered, be the consequences what they might! Warnings, the realisation of peril--he laughed shortly, in grim bitterness--counted little in the balance after all, did they not!

Where was the Tocsin?

The telephone rang. Jimmie Dale stared at the instrument for a moment, as though it were some singular and uninvited intruder who had broken in without warrant upon his train of thought; and then, leaning forward over the table, he lifted the receiver from the hook.

"Yes? h.e.l.lo! Yes?" inquired Jimmie Dale. "What is it?"

A man's voice, hurried, and seemingly somewhat agitated, answered him.

"I would like to speak to Mr. Dale--to Mr. Dale in person."

"This is Mr. Dale speaking," said Jimmie Dale a little brusquely.

"What is it?"

"Oh, is that you, Mr. Dale?" The voice had quickened perceptibly. "I didn't recognise your voice--but then I haven't heard it for a long while, have I? This is Forrester. Are--are you very busy to-night, Mr. Dale?"

"Oh, h.e.l.lo, Forrester!" Jimmie Dale's voice had grown more affable.

"Busy? Well, I don't know. It depends on what you mean by busy."

"An hour or two," the other suggested--the tinge of anxiety in his tones growing more p.r.o.nounced. "The time to run out here in your car. I haven't any right to ask it, I know, but the truth is I--I want to talk to some one pretty badly, and I need some financial help, and--and I thought of you. I--I'm afraid there's a mess here. The bank examiners landed in suddenly late this afternoon."

"The--_what_?" demanded Jimmie Dale sharply.

"The bank examiners--I--I can't talk over the 'phone. Only, for G.o.d's sake, come--will you? I'll be in my rooms--you know where they are, don't you--on the cottier over--"

"Yes, I know," Jimmie Dale broke in tersely; then, quietly: "All right, Forrester, I'll come."

"Thank G.o.d!" came Forrester's voice--and disconnected abruptly.

Jimmie Dale replaced the receiver on the hook, stared at the instrument again in a perplexed way; then, called the garage on the private house wire. There was no answer. He walked quickly then across the room and pushed an electric b.u.t.ton.

"Jason," he said a moment later, as the old butler appeared on the threshold in answer to the summons, "Benson doesn't answer in the garage. I presume he is downstairs. I wish you would ask him to bring the touring car around at once. And you might have a light overcoat ready for me--Jason."

"Yes, sir," said the old man. "Yes, Master Jim, sir, at once." His eyes sought Jimmie Dale's, and dropped--but into them had come, not the questioning of familiarity, but the quick, anxious questioning inspired by the affection that had grown up between them from the days when, as the old man was so fond of saying, he had dandled his Master Jim upon his knee. "Yes, sir, Master Jim, at once, sir," Jason repeated--but he still hesitated upon the threshold.

And then Jimmie Dale shook his head whimsically--and smiled.

"No--not to-night, Jason," he said rea.s.suringly. "It's quite all right, Jason--there's no letter to-night."

The old man's face cleared instantly.

"Yes, sir; quite so, sir. Thank you, Master Jim," he said. "Shall I tell Benson that he is to drive you, sir, or--"

"No; I'll drive myself, Jason," decided Jimmie Dale.

"Yes, sir--very good, sir"--the door closed on Jason.