The mirror was replaced on the table; and, pushing the heap of clothes
before him with his foot, Jimmie Dale knelt down in the corner of the
room where the oilcloth had been turned up and the loose planking of the
floor removed, and began to pack the articles away in the hole. Jimmie
Dale rolled the trousers of Larry the Bat into a compact little bundle,
and stuffed them under the flooring. The gas jet seemed to blink again
in a sort of confidential approval, as though the secret lay inviolate
between itself and Jimmie Dale. Through the closed window, shade tightly
drawn, came, low and muffled, the sound of distant life from the Bowery,
a few blocks away. The gas jet, suffering from air somewhere within the
pipes, hissed angrily, the yellow flame died to a little blue, forked
spurt--and Jimmie Dale was on his feet, his face suddenly hard and white
as marble.
SOME ONE WAS KNOCKING AT THE DOOR!
For the fraction of a second Jimmie Dale stood motionless. Found as
Jimmie Dale in the den of Larry the Bat, and the consequences required
no effort of the imagination to picture them; police or denizen of the
underworld who was knocking there, it was all the same, the method of
death would be a little different, that was all--one legalised, the
other not. Jimmie Dale, Larry the Bat, the Gray Seal, once uncovered,
could expect as much quarter as would be given to a cornered rat.
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