Presently Jimmie Dale picked up the vial--and dropped it back on the floor again. There was no label on it, but it needed none--the strong, penetrating odor of bitter almonds was telltale evidence enough. It was prussic, or hydrocyanic acid, probably the most deadly poison and the swiftest in its action that was known to science--Carling had provided against that "some day" in his confession!

For a little s.p.a.ce, motionless, Jimmie Dale stood looking down at the silent, outstretched form--then he walked slowly back to the desk, and slowly, deliberately picked up the signed confession and the steamship ticket. He held them an instant, staring at them, then methodically began to tear them into little pieces, a strange, tired smile hovering on his lips. The man was dead now--there would be disgrace enough for some one to bear, a mother perhaps--who knew! And there was another way now--since the man was dead.

Jimmie Dale put the pieces in his pocket, went to the safe, opened it, and took out a parcel, locked the safe carefully, and carried the parcel to the desk. He opened it there. Inside were nearly two dozen little packages of hundred-dollar bills. The other two packages that he had brought with him he added to the rest. From his pocket he took out the thin metal insignia case, and with the tiny tweezers lifted up one of the gray-coloured, diamond-shaped paper seals. He moistened the adhesive side, and, still holding it by the tweezers, dropped it on his handkerchief and pressed the seal down on the face of the topmost package of banknotes. He tied the parcel up then, and, picking up the pen, addressed it in printed characters:

HUDSON-MERCANTILE NATIONAL BANK,

NEW YORK CITY.

"District messenger--some way--in the morning," he murmured.

Jimmie Dale slipped his mask into his pocket, and, with the parcel under his arm, stepped to the door and unlocked it. He paused for an instant on the threshold for a single, quick, comprehensive glance around the room--then pa.s.sed on out into the street.

At the corner he stopped to light a cigarette--and the flame of the match spurting up disclosed a face that was worn and haggard. He threw the match away, smiled a little wearily--and went on.

The Gray Seal had committed another "crime."

CHAPTER VII

THE THIEF

Choosing between the snowy napery, the sparkling gla.s.s and silver, the cozy, shaded table-lamps, the famous French chef of the ultra-exclusive St. James Club, his own home on Riverside Drive where a dinner fit for an epicure and served by Jason, that most perfect of butlers, awaited him, and Marlianne's, Jimmie Dale, driving in alone in his touring car from an afternoon's golf, had chosen--Marlianne's.

Marlianne's, if such a thing as Bohemianism, or, rather, a concrete expression of it exists, was Bohemian. A two-piece string orchestra played valiantly to the accompaniment of a hoa.r.s.e-throated piano; and between courses the diners took up the refrain--and, as it was always between courses with some one, the place was a bedlam of noisy riot.

Nevertheless, it was Marlianne's--and Jimmie Dale liked Marlianne's. He had dined there many times before, as he had just dined in the person of Jimmie Dale, the millionaire, his high-priced imported car at the curb of the shabby street outside--and he had dined there, disreputable in attire, seedy in appearance, with the police yelping at his heels, as Larry the Bat. In either character Marlianne's had welcomed him with equal courtesy to its spotted linen and most excellent table-d'hote with VIN ORDINAIRE--for fifty cents.

And now, in the act of reaching into his pocket for the change to pay his bill, Jimmie Dale seemed suddenly to experience some difficulty in finding what he sought, and his fingers went fumbling from one pocket to another. Two men at the table in front of him were talking--their voices, over a momentary lull in violin squeaks, talk, laughter, singing, and the clatter of dishes, reached him:

"Carling commit suicide! Not on your life! No; of course he didn't! It was that cursed Gray Seal croaked him, just as sure as you sit in that chair!"

The other grunted. "Yes; but what'd the Gray Seal want to pinch a hundred thousand out of the bank for, and then give it back again the next morning?"

"What's he done a hundred other things for to cover up the real object of what he's after?" retorted the first speaker, with a short, vicious laugh; then, with a thump of his fist on the table: "The man's a devil, a fiend, and anywhere else but New York he'd have been caught and sent to the chair where he belongs long ago, and--"

A burst of ragtime drowned out the man's words. Jimmie Dale placed a fifty-cent piece and a tip beside it on his dinner check, pushed back his chair, and rose from the table. There was a half-tolerantly satirical, half-angry glint in his dark, steady eyes. It was not only the police who yelped at his heels, but every man, woman, and child in the city. The man had not voiced his own sentiments--he had voiced the sentiments of New York! And it was quite on the cards that if he, Jimmie Dale, were ever caught his destination would not even be the death cell and the chair at Sing Sing--his fellow citizens had reached a pitch where they would be quite capable of literally tearing him to pieces if they ever got their hands on him!

And yet there were a few, a very few, a handful out of five millions, who sometimes remembered perhaps to thank G.o.d that the Gray Seal lived--that was his reward. That--and SHE, whose mysterious letters prompted and impelled his, the Gray Seal's, acts! She--nameless, fascinating in her brilliant resourcefulness, amazing in her power, a woman whose life was bound up with his and yet held apart from him in the most inexplicable, absorbing way; a woman he had never seen, save for her gloved arm in the limousine that night, who at one unexpected moment projected a dazzling, impersonal existence across his path, and the next, leaving him battling for his life where greed and pa.s.sion and crime swirled about him, was gone!

Jimmie Dale threaded the small, crowded rooms--the interior of Marlianne's had never been altered from the days when the place had been a family residence of some pretension--and, reaching the hall, received his hat from the frowsy-looking boy in attendance. He pa.s.sed outside, and, at the top of the steps, paused as he took his cigarette case from his pocket. It was nearly a week since Carling, the cashier of the Hudson-Mercantile National Bank, had been found dead in his home, a bottle that had contained hydrocyanic acid on the floor beside him; nearly a week since Bookkeeper Bob, unaware that he had ever been under temporary suspicion for the robbery of the bank, had, equally unknown to himself, been cleared of any complicity in that affair--and yet, as witness the conversation of a moment ago, it was still the topic of New York, still the vital issue that filled the maw of the newspapers with ravings, threats, and execrations against the Gray Seal, snarling virulently the while at the police for the latter's inept.i.tude, inefficiency, and impotence!

Jimmie Dale closed his cigarette case with a snap that was almost human in its irony, dropped it back into his pocket, and lighted a match--but the flame was arrested halfway to the tip of his cigarette, as his eyes fixed suddenly and curiously on a woman's form hurrying down the street.

She had turned the corner before he took his eyes from her, and the match between his fingers had gone out. Not that there was anything very strange in a woman walking, or even half running, along the street; nor that there was anything particularly attractive or unusual about her, and if there had been the street was too dark for him to have distinguished it. It was not that--it was the fact that she had neither pa.s.sed by the house on whose steps he stood, nor come out of any of the adjoining houses. It was as though she had suddenly and miraculously appeared out of thin air, and taken form on a sidewalk a little way down from Marlianne's.

"That's queer!" commented Jimmie Dale to himself. "However--" He took out another match, lighted his cigarette, jerked the match stub away from him, and, with a lift of his shoulders, went down the steps.

He crossed the pavement, walked around the front of his machine, since the steering wheel was on the side next to the curb, and, with his hand out to open the car door--stopped. Some one had been tampering with it--it was not quite closed. There was no mistake. Jimmie Dale made no mistakes of that kind, a man whose life hung a dozen times a day on little things could not afford to make them. He had closed it firmly, even with a bang, when he had got out.

Instantly suspicious, he wrenched the door wide open, switched on the light under the hood, and, with a sharp exclamation, bent quickly forward. A glove, a woman's glove, a white glove lay on the floor of the car. Jimmie Dale's pulse leaped suddenly into fierce, pounding beats. It was HERS! He KNEW that intuitively--knew it as he knew that he breathed.

And that woman he had so leisurely watched as she had disappeared from sight was, must have been--she!

He sprang from the car with a jump, his first impulse to dash after her--and checked himself, laughing a little bitterly. It was too late for that now--he had already let his chance slip through his fingers.

Around the corner was Sixth Avenue, surface cars, the elevated, taxicabs, a mult.i.tude of people, any one of a hundred ways in which she could, and would, already have discounted pursuit from him--and, besides, he would not even have been able to recognise her if he saw her!

Jimmie Dale's smile was mirthless as he turned back to the car, and picked up the glove. Why had she dropped it there? It could not have been intentional. Why had--he began to tear suddenly at the glove's little finger, and in another second, kneeling on the car's step, his shoulders inside, he was holding a ring close under the little electric bulb.

It was a gold seal ring, a small, dainty thing that bore a crest: a bell, surmounted by a bishop's mitre--the bell, quaint in design, harking the imagination back to some old-time belfry tower. And underneath, in the scroll--a motto. It was a full minute before Jimmie Dale could decipher it, for the lettering was minute and the words, of course, reversed. It was in French: SONNEZ LE TOCSIN.

He straightened up, the glove and ring in his hand, a puzzled expression on his face. It was strange! Had she, after all, dropped the glove there intentionally; had she at last let down the barriers just a little between them, and given him this little intimate sign that she--

And then Jimmie Dale laughed abruptly, self-mockingly. He was only trying to deceive himself, to argue himself into believing what, with heart and soul, he wanted to believe. It was not like her--and neither was it so! His eyes had fixed on the seat beside the wheel. He had not used the lap rug all that day, he couldn't use a rug and drive, he had left it folded and hanging on the rack in the tonneau--it was now neatly folded and reposing on the front seat!

"Yes," said Jimmie Dale, a sort of self-pity in his tones, "I might have known."

He lifted the rug. Beneath it on the leather seat lay a white envelope.

Her letter! The letter that never came save with the plan of some grim, desperate work outlined ahead--the call to arms for the Gray Seal.

SONNEZ LE TOCSIN! Ring the Tocsin! Sound the alarm! The Tocsin!

The words were running through his brain. A strange motto on that crest--that seemed so strangely apt! The Tocsin! Never once in all the times that he had heard from her, never once in the years that had gone since that initial letter of hers had struck its first warning note, had any communication from her been but to sound again a new alarm--the Toscin! The Tocsin--the word seemed to visualise her, to give her a concrete form and being, to breathe her very personality.

"The Tocsin!"--Jimmie Dale whispered the word softly, a little wistfully. "Yes; I shall call you that--the Tocsin!"

He folded the glove very carefully, placed it with the ring in his pocketbook, picked up the letter--and, with a sharp exclamation, turned it quickly over in his fingers, then bent hurriedly with it to the light.

Strange things were happening that night! For the first time, the letter was not even SEALED! That was not like her, either! What did it mean?

Quick, alert now, anxious even, he pulled the double, folded sheets from the envelope, glanced rapidly through them--and, after a moment, a smile, whimsical, came slowly to his lips.

It was quite plain now--all of it. The glove, the ring, and the unsealed letter--and the postscript held the secret; or, rather, what had been intended for a postscript did, for it comprised only a few words, ending abruptly, unfinished: "Look in the cupboard at the rear of the room. The man with the red wig is--" That was all, and the words, written in ink, were badly blurred, as though the paper had been hastily folded before the ink was dry.

It was quite plain; and, in view of the real explanation of it all, eminently characteristic of her. With the letter already written, she had come there, meaning to place it on the seat and cover it with the rug, as, indeed, she had done; then, deciding to add the postscript, and because she would attract less attention that way than in any other, she had climbed into the car as though it belonged to her, and had seated herself there to write it. She would have been hurried in her movements, of course, and in pulling off her glove to use the fountain pen the ring had come with it. The rest was obvious. She had but just begun to write when he had appeared on the steps. She had slipped instantly down to the floor of the car, probably dropping the glove from her lap, hastily inclosed the letter in the envelope which she had no time to seal, thrust the envelope under the rug, and, forgetting her glove and fearful of risking his attention by attempting to close the door firmly, had stolen along the body of the car, only to be noticed by him too late--when she was well down the street!

And at that latter thought, once more chagrin seized Jimmie Dale--then he turned impulsively to the letter. All this was extraneous, apart--for another time, when every moment was not a priceless a.s.set as it very probably was now.

"Dear Philanthropic Crook"--it always began that way, never any other way. He read on more and more intently, crouched there close to the light on the floor of his car, lips thinning as he proceeded--read it to the end, absorbing, memorising it--and then the abortive postscript:

"Look in the cupboard at the rear of the room. The man with the red wig is--"

For an instant, as mechanically he tore the letter into little shreds, he held there hesitant--and the next, slamming the door tight, he flung himself into the seat behind the wheel, and the big, sixty-horse-power, self-starting machine was roaring down the street.

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, impa.s.sable 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 pa.s.sed at indifferent intervals; pedestrians were few and far between--it was the lower Broadway of night.