Jimmie Dale's glance at the youngster had
equally, perforce, embraced the lurid title of the thriller, "Dicing
with Death," so imperturbably thrust under his nose. At the time, he had
smiled indulgently; but now, as he left the subway and headed for his
home on Riverside Drive, the words not only refused to be ignored, but
had resolved themselves into a curiously persistent refrain in his
mind. They were exactly what they purported to be, dime-novelish, of
the deepest hue of yellow, melodramatic in the extreme; but also, to him
now, they were grimly apt and premonitorily appropriate. "Dicing with
Death"--there was not an hour, not a moment in the day, when he was not
literally dicing with death; when, with the underworld and the police
allied against him, a single false move would lose him the throw that
left death the winner!
The risk of the dual life enforced upon him grew daily greater, and in
the end there must be the reckoning. He would have been a madman to have
shut his eyes in the face of what was obvious--but it was worth it all,
and in his soul he knew that he would not have had it otherwise even
now. To-night, to-morrow, the day after, would come another letter
from the Tocsin, and there would be another "crime" of the Gray Seal's
blazoned in the press--would that be the last affair, or would there
be another--or to-night, to-morrow, the day after, would he be trapped
before even one more letter came!
He shrugged his shoulders, as he ran up the steps of his house.
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