Jimmie Dale shook his head. Better, of the two, to start in at once and
shadow those who were shadowing his house. But that was not the way! He
knew that intuitively. He hated to eliminate it from consideration,
for he had no other move to take its place--but such a move was almost
suicide in itself. Time, and time alone, was the vital factor. They, the
Tocsin and he, must act quickly--and STRIKE that night if they were to
win. His fingers, the grimy fingers, dirty-nailed, of Larry the
Bat, that none now would recognise as the slim tapering, wonderfully
sensitive fingers of Jimmie Dale, the fingers that had made the name of
the Gray Seal famous, whose tips mocked at bars and safes and locks,
and seemed to embody in themselves all the human senses, tightened
spasmodically on the edge of the table. Time! Time! Time! It seemed to
din in his ears. And while he sat there powerless, impotent, the
Crime Club was moving heaven and earth to find what HE must find--that
package--if he was to save this woman here, the woman whom he loved, she
who had been forced, through the machinations of these hell fiends,
to adopt the life of a wretched hag, to exist among the dregs of the
underworld, whose squalour and vice and wantonness none knew better than
he!
Jimmie Dale's face set grimly. Somewhere--somewhere in the past five
years of this life of hers in which she had been fighting the Crime
Club, pitting that clever brain of hers against it, MUST lie a clew.
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