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

Margot but knew how many times and under what circumstances they had met before!

      Mother Margot loosened her shawl, and slumped down in a chair.

      “Everybody knows Smarlinghue,” she grunted.

      “Sure,” said Little Sweeney from the door.

      “Glad to meet you both,” said Smarlinghue cordially.

      There was silence for a moment. Mother Margot folded her hands patiently in her lap. The silence, prolonged, grew embarrassed. Bunty Myers broke it.

      “Beat it!” he suggested uncompromisingly to Jimmie Dale.

      Jimmie Dale, as Smarlinghue, vacant eyed as he looked around the room, rose from his chair. It was a little awkward—a little awkward to carry it off as though it were quite a matter of course. He grinned around the circle.

      “See you all again,” said Smarlinghue pleasantly.

      Little Sweeney opened the door.

      “Damned thick in here, this smoke,” said Little Sweeney, as Smarlinghue shuffled through. “I'll leave it open till the room clears out a bit. 'Night, Smarly!”

      “Good-night!” said Jimmie Dale still pleasantly; but out in the hall, and as he turned and went down the stairs, his lips tightened into a straight line.

      Little Sweeney was no fool! The fire escape, just within reach, just outside the window of the room where the broken pane mended with cardboard had once before supplied him, Jimmie Dale, with a vantage point from which he could both see and hear all that went on within, was barred to him now by the open door; also the open door, with Little Sweeney standing there, offered no alternative to a prompt and unhesitating exit via the stairs from even the building itself!

      Jimmie Dale's lips drew still tighter together as he went on down the stairs. In spite of Smarlinghue's high station in the underworld, he had been treated with scant ceremony! But it was not the hurt of pride in that, as one of the élite of gangland, the honour and deference that was his due had been withheld from him, that brought the grim, set expression to his face now; it was the consciousness of defeat where he had foreseen victory. He had counted too much on the intimacy that he had first cultivated and then believed he had established with Bunty Myers and his fellow gangsters. He had believed and hoped that he was not far from being upon the verge of initiation into their unholy fold, of being invited, in plain words, to become one of them.

      He shrugged his shoulders as he stepped out on the street. Well, he had lost on that score for the time being, at least. He was wrong, that was all. But he had burned no bridges behind him. To-morrow night Smarlinghue could still go back there, and be welcome. And as for to-night—well, he was not yet through with to-night! There was something undoubtedly afoot again. What was it? He crossed to the other side of the street, and just opposite the side door of Wally Kerrigan's “club,” where he could watch that door unseen, he slipped, unnoticed, into the shadows of a high flight of dwelling house steps.

      What was it? He could not, as Smarlinghue, accost Mother Margot when she came out; and by the time he had gone to the Sanctuary and become the man in the evening clothes that she knew as the Gray Seal, she would as likely as not have left Kerrigan's and have disappeared. Queer! Somehow, he was not interested in what was afoot to-night in so far as its specific nature was an essential feature. He was more interested in this sudden appearance of Little Sweeney in conjunction with the fact that Shiftel, too, had broken cover. It was the Phantom that interested him—and Shiftel was the Phantom. Was there any connection between this return of both Little Sweeney and Isaac Shiftel to activity? He meant to see! The two had been very closely allied that night at Mrs. Kinsey's, and particularly later on that same night in Limpy Mack's hang-out under Sen Yat's “tea shop.”

      And so, somehow—he smiled grimly—he was more concerned with Little Sweeney than with Mother Margot to-night. Little Sweeney might lead him to Shiftel; Mother Margot he had already tried too often to have any hopeful expectations raised on that score. To reach the Phantom, in the guise of Shiftel, or any other, was the one thing in life that he sought; to meet the man once again face to face was why he was here now, why night after night, and day after day, he still risked his life playing this precarious rôle of Smarlinghue in the underworld. Even a chance was worth while. It was rather curious that Little Sweeney and Shiftel, both of whom had dropped completely out of sight for so long a time, should both now have made their appearance again! And so, at the present moment, he was exceedingly interested in Little Sweeney!

      Jimmie Dale crouched there in the shadows. Pedestrians passed up and down. Perhaps a quarter of an hour went by. Then the side door of Kerrigan's opened, and a shawled figure stepped out and scurried away. Mother Margot! And then presently the door opened again, and Little Sweeney and Bunty Myers came out together.

      Jimmie Dale slipped out on the street, and, on the opposite side, followed the two men as they went down the block. At the corner they separated, and Jimmie Dale took up Little Sweeney's trail.

      Block after block the man traversed. Jimmie Dale, hugging the shadows of the buildings, kept a position as nearly opposite the man across the street as he dared, wary always of a corner around which the man might turn, and, with too great a distance separating them, disappear into some place—should that be his objective—before he, Jimmie Dale, could round the corner and pick up the trail again.

      Little Sweeney walked fast, obviously unconscious of pursuit, and obviously with some set and fixed destination in view. The chase headed down toward the water front. The quarter now was one of small stores and dwellings, dark for the most part, save for the saloons. Jimmie Dale's face set grimly. It was not an over-inviting neighbourhood.

      And then suddenly Little Sweeney swung around a corner.

      Jimmie Dale quickened his step, and reached the corner himself in time to see the other, after skirting a fence that enclosed either a vacant lot or a store yard of some sort, turn abruptly at the end of the fence and disappear. In an instant, Jimmie Dale, silent in his movements, though he was running now, crossed the street, and in turn was skirting the fence. There was a lane beyond, of course—that was it! Little Sweeney had not entered any house; he had just turned around the far corner of the fence, and—Jimmie Dale stood suddenly stock still. Out from the corner of the fence, flooding the sidewalk, came streaming a powerful ray of light.

      And then Little Sweeney's voice, rasping:

      “Of course, it's me! Shut off them damned lights!”

      The light disappeared as quickly as it had come. Footsteps crunched faintly in the lane, receding. Jimmie Dale edged quickly forward to the corner of the fence, and peered cautiously around it.

      It was quite clear now; there was nothing mysterious about the light that had flung its beams across the sidewalk; it was even commonplace. From a rickety-looking metal garage, which was perhaps twenty-five yards back from the street and in which there stood an automobile, some one had sent the headlights playing along the lane.

      For a moment Jimmie Dale stood there watching. There was a single incandescent light burning in the garage which illuminated the place dimly, and, aside from Little Sweeney who was just stepping inside, he could make out the forms of two men standing beside the car. He dared not enter the lane, of course. It would be the act of a fool! A chance sound, those headlights switched upon him, and——

      The slouching, bent, almost decrepit figure of Smarlinghue drew back; and the next instant, after a swift glance around him to make sure that he was unobserved, with a spring, lithe and agile as a cat, he swung himself over the fence from the sidewalk, and dropped without a sound to the yard on the other side. He began to move noiselessly along the section of the fence which flanked the lane. It ran straight to the edge of the garage, he had observed from the street, and—yes, it ended there! He was in luck! He was crouched now against the wall of the garage itself, which obviously, though it was too dark to see, served to complete the enclosure, in lieu of fence, at this corner of the yard.

      He could hear them talking now as plainly as though he were inside, for he was separated from them only by the thin metal sheeting of the garage;