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

reached him; indistinct forms clustered around the door of Miser Scroff's room—and then the door opened and closed again, and the hall was empty. Empty! Where was she? Still here—still within touch perhaps? A bitter smile curved his lips. He was beaten—beaten by a worthless, broken hulk that had drifted on the reefs—a human wreck!

      He was crouched outside the door again, and now silently, quickly, with the little steel pick-lock, he locked the men inside. If she were still in the hall here, she too would have her chance, enough time to get away before they discovered that gray seal in there and came pouring out of the room again!

      And then he went down the stairs, and in another instant, the mask removed from his face, was outside the tenement, and racing madly through the night. And as he went he looked about him. He had hoped for a passing taxi or a vehicle of some sort, but there was only the torrential rain. And so he could but run. Time! It would take him all of twenty minutes, and it must be later than twenty minutes of ten now, and—he paused for a second under a street lamp to consult his watch—yes, it was a quarter to ten. At ten the Phantom would notify the police—in some anonymous way, of course. But there was still a little leeway. Perhaps ten minutes. The time it would take the police to get to Beggar Pete's after ten o'clock.

      He ran on and on. Still no taxis, no vehicles—only deserted streets. It seemed as though he had run for hours. He did not stop to look at his watch again. He heard a clock from somewhere boom out the hour.

      Was he in time? He glanced up and down the street now, as he halted finally before a small, tumble-down, shabby dwelling house. He did not know. At least there was no one in sight.

      Harry the Dip's door was never locked! His lodgers kept hours too uncertain and varied! Jimmie Dale smiled grimly, as slipping suddenly into the shadows of the doorway, he stepped silently inside the place. Another item, this choice of lodging, even if it were the choice of necessity, that would not help Beggar Pete's reputation in a jury's eyes!

      The cellar entrance! Where was it? It was dark in here—but not silent. From upstairs he could hear talking and the sound of movement. And then his ear caught another sound—the sound of loud, heavy, stertorous breathing that seemed to come from a direction ahead of him. He risked his flashlight. He was in a short and narrow hall. And now he advanced cautiously. Yes, here it was; and here, too, was the explanation of those laboured, stertorous sounds. Under the stairs at the back of the hall, a door stood half open.

      The flashlight's ray played down a flight of bare, ladder-like steps—and coincidentally Jimmie Dale's face set in hard, bitter lines. At the bottom of the steps, a little to one side, in a filthy cellar, sprawled on a torn and filthy mattress from which wisps of mildewed straw protruded blatantly, Beggar Pete lay in a drunken stupor. The man had already been pretty well along at Gypsy Dan's, and in the hour since then it was obvious that he had lost no time!

      Jimmie Dale's hand clenched. The sight seemed to fan a latent fury, a merciless passion into flame. It was for this, to save this, a vagrant, a bum, a drunken sot, a beast, that he had lost all that was most dear to him in life to-night; it was for this that he had done what he had never thought to do under any circumstances, under any pressure, while life remained to him—lose the Tocsin again if once he ever found her! It seemed to plumb the depths of irony; it seemed as though he could wish for nothing better than that this besotted beast should experience exactly what the Phantom had prepared for him!

      And yet, mechanically, Jimmie Dale went down the cellar stairs. He stooped over the man. There was no danger of disturbingBeggar Pete! He pulled the man aside, and overturned the mattress. A little bundle of stock certificates, held together by a rubber band, lay there. He picked them up. They were made out in the name of Heinrich Scroff.

      For an instant he stood staring from the certificates in his hand to the sprawled form upon the floor—and slowly, gradually, the hard, embittered look on Jimmie Dale's face softened. Was he so sure after all that he had paid too much? In his hand he held the death warrant of an innocent man, a fellow creature, sunken, low, it was true, but a human being with hopes and fears like his own perhaps, though one, unlike himself, who had had only the rougher road to travel, where plenty was unknown and life's sunshine meagre.

      He stooped again, and replaced the mattress, and laid Beggar Pete upon it. He was smiling now softly, as sometimes a woman smiles when her lips mirror her heart. And somehow he was glad.

      And then Jimmie Dale turned away and went out into the storm again. To-morrow the city would awake to find that the Gray Seal had committed another crime!

      XII.

       Little Sweeney

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      The air was heavy with drifting layers of smoke, as it always was in this back, upstairs room of Wally Kerrigan's “club,” that was the hang-out of Gentleman Laroque's, alias the Phantom's, gang. Four men sat at the table playing stud, and Jimmie Dale, as Smarlinghue, seated a little apart, watched them now as he fumbled with the dirty, frayed sleeves and wristbands of his coat and shirt, and, fumbling then in his pocket, drew out a hypodermic syringe, its nickel-plating worn and brassy, its general appearance as disreputable as himself.

      How many nights had he come to this room, as he had come to-night, playing a game, that was not a game of cards, with Bunty Myers here, and the Kitten, and Muller, and Spud MacGuire! How many nights? He had almost lost track of time. The wound in his cheek had healed. He had even resumed, in so far as an occasional appearance at the St. James Club, and here and there a social function went, his normal life as Jimmie Dale. He must have been coming here for many nights!

      Through half closed, apparently drug-drowsed eyes, he watched the players at the table. Yes, it must have been for many nights. It was over a week since—his fingers tightened involuntarily in a fierce, spasmodic grip upon the hypodermic—since that night when he had held the Tocsin once again in his arms in old Miser Scroff's room, and had lost her again. Since then he had continued to cultivate these men. They were only pawns, they moved only at the will of that unseen yet ever present spirit of evil, the Phantom; but to be one of them opened the Avenue of a Thousand Chances that might lead to the Phantom himself. He had had no other clue to follow.

      But so far nothing had come of it. They did not distrust him—who in the underworld would distrust Smarlinghue, who had the entrée everywhere!—but they had made no advances toward offering him full membership in that unhallowed fraternity to which he knew they belonged. At times he had believed they had been on the verge of doing so, and that applied especially to Bunty Myers, who was the Phantom's apparent chief of staff; but there had been nothing definite, nothing concrete, nothing tangible.

      And yet, even in a negative sense, the nights he had spent here of late had not been futile. He was in possession of the fact that there had been inactivity. And that meant that the Phantom, whatever might be germinating in that master mind of crime, had for the time being been quiescent; and, as a corollary to that, the almost certain deduction that no further blow had been struck at the Tocsin—that she was still safe. And this had been borne out by Mother Margot, who, so far, had always been the Phantom's mouthpiece. As the Gray Seal, and through the hold that, as the Gray Seal, he had upon her, he had continued to call her daily from her pushcart to the telephone and question her. But she had still protested vehemently each time that she had had no further word of any move, and he was satisfied that she was telling the truth for the simple reason that he did not believe she would dare do anything else. But, even so, unknown to her, he had still maintained, in so far as he could, a personal surveillance over her movements, and there had been nothing to disprove her statements. She still tended her pushcart in Thompson Street; she still lived in those rooms from which the Phantom, in the dual guise of Shiftel, the fence, and Gentleman Laroque, who once had openly led this very gang here, had so mysteriously disappeared.

      Smarlinghue's face was vapid, but into the dark eyes behind the creeping eyelids there came a troubled gleam. Those rooms where the Voice, as Mother Margot called the Phantom, had installed the old hag! What was the secret that they