The Greatest Crime Novels of Frank L. Packard (14 Titles in One Edition). Frank L. Packard

that now threatened New York with an upheaval that promised to shake many a social structure to its foundations. Yes, they would play their last card, a vile, despicable and hellish card—but how little they knew David Archman! They would break his life; it would, indeed, as the Tocsin had said, be murder—but they would never break David Archman’s unswerving loyalty to principle and duty! They had tried that—by threats of personal violence, by the offer of bribes in sums large enough to have tempted many!

      His face hard, his forehead gathered in puzzled furrows, Jimmie Dale stepped to the door, and locked it; then, drawing aside the portière that hung before the little alcove at the lower end of the room, knelt down before the squat, barrel-shaped safe, and his fingers began to play over the knobs and dials.

      Yes, it was a vitally personal matter now; there was an added incentive to-night spurring the Gray Seal on to act. David Archman had been his father’s closest friend; and he, Jimmie Dale, himself had always looked on David Archman, and with reason, as little less than a second father. His frown grew deeper—he did not understand. But Tocsin did not make mistakes. He had had evidence of that on too many occasions when he had thought otherwise to question it now—but David Archman’s son in this! It seemed incredible! The boy, he was little more than a boy, scarcely twenty, was and always had been, perhaps, a little wild, but a thief, an associate and accomplice of the city’s worst crooks and criminals was something of which he, Jimmie Dale, had never dreamed until this instant, and now, while it staggered him, it brought, too, a sense of merciless fury—a fury against those who would stab like inhuman cowards, pitilessly, at the father through the son. Their last card! The safe swung open. Their last card was—Clarie Archman, the son!

      He reached into the safe, took out an automatic, and placed it in his pocket. There was no necessity to go to the Sanctuary—what he would need was here in duplicate, and it would be Jimmie Dale, not Smarlinghue, who played the rôle of the Gray Seal to-night. A dozen small steel picklocks in graded sizes followed the revolver, and after these a black silk mask and a pocket flashlight—the thin, metal insignia case containing the little diamond-shaped, gray-coloured paper seals, never absent from his person since the night he had lost and recovered it again, was already reposing in an inner pocket of his clothes.

      His face was still hard, as he stood up and closed the safe. The way out, the way to save David Archman was plain, of course. It was even simple—if it was not too late! And the way out was another “crime” committed by the Gray Seal! Instead of Clarie Archman and J. Barca, alias Gentleman Laroque, robbing the safe of one Niccolo Sonnino, dealer in precious stones, it would be the Gray Seal—if it was not already too late to forestall the others!

      If it was not too late! He looked at his watch. It was twenty minutes after eleven. Yes, there should be time; but, if not—what then? And what of that letter? His teeth clamped. Well, he would try it; and he would make every second count now! He was lifting the telephone receiver of the private house installation now, calling the garage. Benson, his chauffeur, answered him almost on the instant.

      “The light touring car, Benson, please, and as quickly as possible,” said Jimmie Dale pleasantly.

      “Yes, sir—at once,” Benson answered.

      Jimmie Dale replaced the receiver on the hook, and, running now across the floor, unlocked the door, crossed the hall, and entered his dressing room. Here, he changed his dinner clothes for a dark tweed suit—the location of Niccolo Sonnino’s place of business was in a neighbourhood where one in evening dress, to say the least of it, would not go unobserved—transferred the metal case and the articles he had taken from the safe to the pockets of the tweed suit, and descended the stairs.

      Standing in the hallway, Jason, that model of efficiency, with an appraising glance at his master’s changed attire, handed Jimmie Dale a soft hat—and opened the door.

      “Benson is outside, Master Jim,” said Jason; but the look in the old man’s eyes was eloquent far beyond the respectful and studied quiet of his words. The old face was pale and grave with anxiety.

      “It’s all right, Jason—all right this time,” Jimmie Dale smiled reassuringly.

      “Thank you, sir,” said Jason, in a low voice. “I hope so, sir. And, begging your pardon, Master Jim, sir, I pray God it is.”

      And for answer Jimmie Dale smiled again, and passed down the steps, and entered the car. But the smile was gone as he leaned back in his seat after giving Benson his directions—speed, and a corner a few blocks away from Chatham Square—he was not so sure that it was all right. It was entirely a question of time. Given the time and the opportunity—Niccolo Sonnino out of the road, for instance—given twenty minutes ahead of Clarie Archman and Gentleman Laroque, it would be simple enough. But otherwise—his lips thinned—otherwise, he did not know. Otherwise, there was promise of strange, grim work before daylight came, work that might lead him out of necessity to the role of Smarlinghue, and as Smarlinghue—anywhere! He did not know; he knew only one thing—that, at any cost, if it lay within any power of his to prevent it, David Archman should not live a broken man.

      The car speeded its way rapidly along in a downtown direction, Benson keeping, wherever possible, to the unfrequented streets. Jimmie Dale, busy with his problem, his mind sifting and turning this way and that the curious, and in some cases apparently conflicting details of the Tocsin’s letter, paid little attention to his surroundings, save to note approvingly from time to time that a request to Benson to hurry was equivalent to something perilously near to a contempt of speed laws. It still seemed incredible that Clarie Archman was a thief, a safe-tapper, even if but an amateur one. The boy must have travelled a pace of late that was fast and furious. How had he ever become intimate enough with Gentleman Laroque to be associated with the other in such a crime as this? How had Laroque come to play a part in the miserable scheme of trickery that was the Private Club Ring’s last card.

      Jimmie Dale shook his head helplessly at the first question—and shook it again at the second. He knew Laroque—he knew him for one of the most degraded, as well as one of the most dreaded, gang leaders in crimeland. Laroque, in unvarnished language, was a devil, and, worse still, a most callous devil. Laroque stood first and all the time for Laroque. If murder would either further or safeguard Laroque’s personal interests, Laroque was the sort of man who would stop only to consider, not whether the murder should be committed, but the method that might best be employed in order to implicate as little as possible one Laroque! Also, to those in the secrets of the underworld, Gentleman Laroque added to his accomplishments, or had done so before he rose to the eminence of gang leader, the profession of “box-worker”—not a very clever exponent of the art, crude perhaps in his methods, but at the same time efficacious, as a dozen breaks and looted safes in the years gone by bore ample witness.

      Grimly whimsical came Jimmie Dale’s smile. Gentleman Laroque would have made a very much better “confidence” man than safe-worker. The man was suave, polished when he wanted to be, educated; he possessed all the requisites, and, in abundance, the prime requisite of all—a cunning that was the cunning of a fox. This might even have explained his acquaintanceship with Clarie Archman, except for the fact that it did not explain Clarie Archman’s co-operation in a premeditated robbery with any one!

      Again Jimmie Dale shook his head—and there came another question, one for which no answer, even of a suggestive nature, had been supplied in the Tocsin’s letter. Why had Niccolo Sonnino’s safe been selected as the one especial and desirable nut to crack? He knew Niccolo Sonnino, too, in a general way, as all who resided near or had any dealings in the neighbourhood where Sonnino lived, knew the man. True, combined with a small trade in jewelry and precious stones, the former cheap and the latter of an inferior grade to fit the purses of his customers, the man was a money-lender—but in an equally small way. Loans of minor amounts, a very few dollars as a maximum, was probably the extent of Sonnino’s ventures along this line. Sonnino himself was a crafty little man, but craftiness, if it did not transgress the law, was not a crime; he was undoubtedly a usurer in his petty way, and he was both feared and disliked, but beyond that no one pretended to know anything about him. Ordinarily, Sonnino’s safe, then, might be expected to be rather a barren affair, hardly a lure for a Gentleman Laroque brand