"My God!" he cried out shrilly. "Who are you?"
And Jimmie Dale smiled and stepped out on the lawn.
"Ask the Weasel," said Jimmie Dale--and the next instant, lost in the
shadows of the house, was running for his car.
CHAPTER X
THE ALIBI
DEATH TO THE GRAY SEAL!"--through the underworld, in dens and dives that
sheltered from the law the vultures that preyed upon society, prompted
by self-fear, by secret dread, by reason of their very inability
to carry out their purpose, the whispered sentence grew daily more
venomous, more insistent. THE GRAY SEAL, DEAD OR ALIVE--BUT THE GRAY
SEAL!" It was the "standing orders" of the police. Railed at by a
populace who angrily demanded at its hands this criminal of criminals,
mocked at and threatened by a virulent press, stung to madness by the
knowledge of its own impotence, flaunted impudently to its face by this
mysterious Gray Seal to whose door the law laid a hundred crimes, for
whom the bars of a death cell in Sing Sing was the certain goal could
he but be caught, the police, to a man, was like an uncaged beast that,
flicked to the raw by some unseen assailant and murderous in its fury,
was crouched to strike. Grim paradox--a common bond that linked the
hands of the law with those that outraged it!
Death to the Gray Seal! Was it, at last, the beginning of the end?
Jimmie Dale, as Larry the Bat, unkempt, disreputable in appearance,
supposed dope fiend, a figure familiar to every denizen below the dead
line, skulked along the narrow, ill-lighted street of the East Side
that, on the corner ahead, boasted the notorious resort to which Bristol
Bob had paid the doubtful, if appropriate, compliment of giving his
name.
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