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.
Pages:
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178