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

it would be——

      A door began to open cautiously a few yards along the hall. And then a man's head and shoulders, a man with a clean shaven face and slouch hat showing quite distinctly in the lighted doorway, was thrust out. The man peered around; then from the threshold he whispered back into the room:

      “It's a cinch he thought you beat it straight out through the front door, and went out after you. I'll take a look, and if he's still hanging around outside I'll spot him. You keep under cover, Limpy. You're safe here anyway. I'll be back in ten minutes. Savvy?”

      The man, a broad-shouldered, well set-up fellow, stepped out into the hall, and closed the door behind him. His footsteps echoed back as he walked rapidly toward the front of the tenement; then the front door opened and closed again; the footsteps rang faintly from the pavement without, died away—and Jimmie Dale was standing before the door of the room.

      He had not heard the door being locked. He was sure of that, in spite of the fact that his head was whirling like a top. His fingers closed silently on the doorknob—and with a swift movement, standing in the hall, his automatic thrown forward, he flung the door wide open.

      And then for a moment he stood there like a man stunned. The room was empty. No, not empty! Dangling from the gas-jet hung Limpy Mack's rubber-tipped cane; and stuck upon the cane, flaunting itself in grim, ironical, mocking challenge—was a diamond-shaped gray paper seal.

      A smile of understanding, bitter in its chagrin, flickered across Jimmie Dale's lips. He had stuck a gray seal on the back of Shiftel's hand that night two weeks ago. This one, he was sure, could have come from nowhere else; and, if that were so, then Shiftel, and Gentleman Laroque, and Limpy Mack, and Limpy Mack in still another guise, in the guise of the man who had just tricked him so neatly, were all one. And from that encounter in Shiftel's rooms, and one other encounter long before that at Niccolo Sonnino's place, Gentleman Laroque, alias Isaac Shiftel, in the character of Limpy Mack to-night, had known that he was dealing with the Gray Seal from the moment his room under Sen Yat's had been entered—could not help but have known it. And at the last here, the man, being then disarmed, had had no choice but to resort to his wits as the only means of escape. Yes, he, Jimmie Dale, quite understood!

      He had sought, and found, and lost again—the Phantom.

      VII.

       The Message

       Table of Contents

      Days of searching! Days of futility! Days that had brought no reward! Since the night of Limpy Mack's disappearance there had been only failure. Nowhere had he been able to pick up again a thread or clue that would set him once more upon the Phantom's trail—until to-night. And to-night? Jimmie Dale shook his head. He was at sea, troubled—about to-night.

      Threadbare, gaunt-cheeked, dissolute in appearance, his battered old felt hat pulled down over his eyes, he was slouching now, as Smarlinghue, with apparent aimlessness along the street. Past him, going to and fro, other figures shuffled by—for the most part Chinamen, their crossed hands tucked in the sleeves of their blouses. A slumming party from a “gape-wagon” disembarked its load of candidates for initiation into those most dark, drear, shivery and hidden things of Chinatown, whose storied mysteries in this more enlightened generation were now within the reach of all—for the insignificant sum of one dollar a ticket!

      A twisted smile flickered across Jimmie Dale's lips. This jostling little crowd that was being herded into line now by the stentorian voiced barker would see many things, for the stage was always set. They would see most fearsome opium dens that reeked with the sickly sweetish smell of poppy, where no poppy was; they would see the worshippers at the Shrine of the Thousandth Ancestor; they would see the council chambers where the Tong wars were declared, and most ghastly murders hatched; they would see the Chinamen at their fan-tan; and—Jimmie Dale shrugged his shoulders—they would undeniably get their money's worth. It was quite innocent, and everybody would be satisfied; but into Hip Foo's, for instance, where he was going now, from whose tortuous, bunk-lined, connecting sub-cellars there were two exits separated one from the other by almost a block, and again from the entrance by an entirely different street, their tickets would not take them. Hip Foo made no money from the gape-wagons!

      The scene, though it was still before him, was gone from his consciousness as quickly as the train of thought that had obtruded itself upon him, and his mind was instantly back again now on the note that had been laid beside his plate by one of the attendants at the St. James Club, where he had been dining but little more than half an hour ago. The note had contained a single sentence—in the Tocsin's writing:

      “Watch Mother Margot—at Hip Foo's to-night.”

      His lips closed tightly. Was there anything beneath the surface of that one sentence, anything more than its actual wording, anything of a personal nature? He had been turning it over and over in his mind from the moment he had received it, even while he had hurried to the Sanctuary and from a millionaire clubman had become the drug-wrecked Smarlinghue, even now again as he walked here along this none too well lighted and unsavory street in the heart of New York's Chinatown. The note was like none he had ever received from her before. Here there was no detailed plan laid out, no evident foreknowledge of what was afoot. It seemed almost a call for help where she herself was helpless, and so—it brought the blood pounding in quicker tempo through his veins—it might well be she had realised and was prepared at last to accept as inevitable the fact that, whether she would or no, he meant to force his way if it were humanly within his power into those shadows, as she termed them, with which the Phantom had surrounded her. Well, why not? She must know that he had already been in perhaps closer, more intimate touch than even herself with this master criminal of a score of aliases and a score of domiciles, first as Gentleman Laroque, then as Isaac Shiftel, and again as Limpy Mack. And besides there was her promise that—no! He shook his head a little bitterly. Why should he try to blind his own eyes? Her promise to call upon him for aid had contained the proviso that it would not identify him as an ally of hers in the Phantom's eyes.

      It was a foolish hope fathered only by desire! A hope that out of this watching of Mother Margot to-night at Hip Foo's he and the woman that he loved would come together again, that he would see her, hear her voice, and after that—Yes, she knew that, too! She had said so in the letter she had slipped into the pocket of his coat when she had left him that night on the old East River wharf. She knew that once he found her again no legion of Phantoms, no pleading on her part, could keep him from her side until the end, whatever that end might be. He might shake his head if he chose, he might argue speciously with himself as his love prompted him to do, but in his heart he knew that her note to-night would not bring her and himself together unless—yes, that was it!—to-night saw the end of the Phantom's career.

      The end! That brought still another angle into the Tocsin's message, an angle that was represented by this Mother Margot. His eyes grew grimly thoughtful as he walked along. How far was the old hag to be trusted? How much to be depended upon was the hold he had on her through having caught her in the act of purloining an extra share of the loot from one of her own confederates, who though she evidently did not know it herself, had been the Phantom in the guise of Limpy Mack that night at old Mrs. Kinsey's? His hands had been tied in a measure in respect of Mother Margot. True, since that night he had never lost track of her, but his means of communication had been restricted to the same means that the “Voice,” as she called the Phantom, had employed—of calling her from her pushcart in Thompson Street to that telephone booth she had spoken of in Mezzo's second-hand store, and questioning her. This he had done each day, sometimes more than once; but the result had always been the same. Each time she had sworn that she had heard nothing further from the Voice. And yet to-night she was to be watched at Hip Foo's!

      Was she playing fast and loose? He had not been in personal touch with her—that was where the weakness of his position lay. She knew him to be the Gray Seal, but she knew him only as a man with a mask on his face. He could not stand beside her pushcart on Thompson Street, and, wearing a mask, talk to her. He could not go to her as Smarlinghue and risk even