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

met Jimmie Dale’s, then shifted, as though drawn in spite of himself, to the muzzle of Jimmie Dale’s automatic; and then his hand reached into his pocket for his pen.

      From the pool room in front came an outburst of hand-clapping and applause—there was evidently a match of some kind going on. Jimmie Dale, his eyes on English Dick, as the latter began to write with a sort of feverish haste as though fear and a miserable desire to have done with it spurred him on, picked up the articles from the table, and placed them in the satchel. He waited silently then—and then English Dick pushed the paper toward him.

      Jimmie Dale picked it up, and read it. It was all there, all of it—and the signature this time was not forged! He placed the paper in the satchel, and closed the satchel.

      English Dick passed his hand across a forehead that beaded with perspiration.

      “What are you going to do?” he asked under his breath.

      “I’m going to see that this—and you—reaches the hands of the police,” said Jimmie Dale tersely. “We’ll leave here in a moment—by the window. There’s a patrolman who passes the end of the lane once in a while, and I expect, with the aid of a piece of cord and a pocket handkerchief as a gag, that he’ll find you there. My method may be a little crude, but I have reasons of my own for not walking into a police station with you. but before we go, there’s still that matter of—the men higher up. They needed a clever pen man for this job and one who wouldn’t be recognised—and they got the best! Who brought you over from England?”

      “A friend over there, one of the ‘swell ones,’ put it up to me,” English Dick answered heavily.

      “Yes—and here?” prodded Jimmie Dale. “Who got you into the bank here?”

      “I don’t know.” English Dick shook his head. “I reported to a man called Chester. He doped out the story I was to tell, and told me to go to the bank and apply for the job, and that it was already fixed.”

      “I’d like to meet ‘Chester,’” said Jimmie Dale grimly. “Where does he live?”

      “I don’t know,” said English Dick again. “I tell you, I don’t know! They’re big—my God, they’ll get me for this, if the law doesn’t! I don’t know where he lives—he always came to me. The only one I know is Reddy Mull, and—”

      His voice was drowned out in a louder and more prolonged burst of applause from the pool room, which mingled shouts, cries and the thunderous banging of cue butts on the floor.

      “A good shot!” said Jimmie Dale, with a grim smile.

      “Yes,” said English Dick, “a good shot”—but into his voice had crept a new note, a note like one of malicious triumph.

      Jimmie Dale’s lips set suddenly hard and tight. Yes, he heard now—perhaps too late—what the other saw. The uproar that had drowned out all other sounds had subsided—the door behind him had been unlocked and was now opening slowly.

      And then Jimmie Dale, quick as thought is quick, his fingers closed on the satchel, hurled himself around the table and to the floor. There was the roar of a report, a flash of flame, as Reddy Mull, hand thrust in through the partially open doorway, fired—a wild scream, as the shot, meant for him, Jimmie Dale, found another mark directly behind where he had been standing—and English Dick, reeling to his feet, pitched forward over the table, carrying the table with him to the floor. It had taken the time that a watch takes to tick. Came the roar of a report again, as Jimmie Dale fired in turn—at the electric-light bulb a few feet away from him on the wall. There was the tinkle of shattering glass—and darkness. Came shouts, cries, a yell from the door from Reddy Mull, a fusillade of shots from Reddy Mull’s revolver, the rush of many feet from the pool room—and Jimmie Dale, in the blackness, dropped silently from the window to the ground.

      He gained the street; and, five minutes later, blocks away, he entered the private stall of a Bowery saloon. Here, Jimmie Dale added another paper to the contents of the satchel. The characters printed, and badly formed, the paper looked like this:

      WITH THE COMPLIMENTS OF THE

      “And I guess,” said Jimmie Dale grimly to himself, “that if I slip this to the police, the police will get—Reddy Mull.”

      Chapter XIX.

       The Beginning of the End

       Table of Contents

      How far away last night, with Forrester’s murder and the sordid denouement in Reddy Mull’s room, seemed! How far away even half an hour ago this very night seemed! Just half an hour ago! Then, with no thought but one of dogged perseverance to keep up his quest, with neither hint nor sign that his quest was any nearer the end than it had ever been, he had entered Bristol Bob’s, here, in the role of Smarlinghue; and now, as a rift that had opened in the clouds, there had come sudden and amazing joy. It held him now in thrall. It threatened even to make him forget that he was for the moment Smarlinghue—forget what, as Smarlinghue, Smarlinghue dare not forget—the role he played.

      He leaned forward suddenly and caught up his whisky glass—whose contents had previously and surreptitiously been spilled into the cuspidor on the floor beside his chair. He lifted the glass to his mouth, his head thrown back as though to drain a final, lingering drop, then he thumped the glass down on the table, licked his lips—thin and distorted by “Smarlinghue’s” makeup—and wiped them with the sleeve of his threadbare coat.

      A man at the next table, well known as the Pippin, young, flashily dressed, his almost effeminate features giving an added touch of viciousness, through incongruity, to his general appearance, twisted his head around and grinned with malicious derision.

      Jimmie Dale’s fingers searched hungrily now through first one and then another of his ragged pockets, and finally extricated a dime and a nickel. With these he tapped insistently on the table, until an attendant answered the summons and supplied him with another drink.

      He sat back then for a time; now eyeing the liquor, as though greedy for its taste, yet greedy, too, to prolong the anticipation, since from his actions there was apparently no means of further replenishing the supply; now glancing around the smoke-laden room where, on the polished section of the floor in the centre, a score of laughing, shrieking couples whirled and pranced in the unrestrained throes of the underworld’s latest dance; now permitting his eyes to rest with a sudden scowl on the man at the next table. He had no concern with the Pippin—nor had the Pippin any concern with him. The man, as he imbibed a number of drinks, simply seemed to find a certain: malevolent amusement in a contemptuous appraisal of his, Jimmie Dale’s, person; but the other, in spite of the new, glad exhilaration Jimmie Dale was experiencing, annoyed Jimmie Dale—the blatant expanse of pink shirt cuff, for instance, in order to display the Pippin’s diamond-snake links, famous from One end of the underworld to the other, was eminently typical of the man. The cuff links were undoubtedly an object of envy to the society in which the Pippin moved; they were even beautiful cuff links, it was true, oriental in design, never to be mistaken by any one who had ever seen them, and the stones with which they were set were credited generally in the underworld as being genuine, but—Jimmie Dale was hesitantly lifting his glass again in a queer, miserly sort of way. The Pippin had jerked a cigarette box from his pocket, stuck what was evidently the single cigarette it had contained between his lips; and now, tossing away the box, he pushed back his chair and stood up—but on the floor beneath the table, where it had fluttered unobserved when the cigarette box had been jerked from the pocket, lay a small folded piece of paper.

      “If you hang around long enough, Smarly,” gibed the Pippin, as he passed by on his way toward the door, “maybe some of the rubber-necks off the gape-wagon will take pity on you and buy you another—the slumming parties are just crazy about broken-down artists!”

      “You