The Tocsin! There was a grim smile on Jimmie Dale's lips now. The alarm!
Yes, it was always an alarm, quick, sudden, an emergency to face on the
instant--plans, decisions to be made with no time to ponder them, with
only that one fact to consider, staggering enough in itself, that a
mistake meant disaster and ruin to some one else, and to himself, if
the courts were merciful where he had little hope for mercy, the
penitentiary for life!
And now to-night again, as it almost always was when these mysterious
letters came, every moment of inaction was piling up the odds against
him. And, too, the same problem confronted him. How, in what way, in
what role, must he play the night's game to its end? As Larry the Bat?
The car was speeding forward. He was heading down Broadway now, lower
Broadway, that stretched before him, deserted like some dark, narrow
canyon where, far below, like towering walls, the buildings closed
together and seemed to converge into some black, impassable barrier. The
street lights flashed by him; a patrolman stopped the swinging of his
night-stick, and turned to gaze at the car that rushed by at a rate
perilously near to contempt of speed laws; street cars passed at
indifferent intervals; pedestrians were few and far between--it was the
lower Broadway of night.
Larry the Bat? Jimmie Dale shook his head impatiently over the steering
wheel.
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