Jimmie Dale took the watch from his pocket that had not been wound for many days, wound it mechanically, set it by guesswork—­it was not far from eight o’clock—­and replaced it in his pocket.  Carefully then, one at a time, he examined his fingers, long, slim, sensitive, tapering fingers, magical masters of safes and locks and vaults of the most intricate and modern mechanism—­no single trace of grime remained, they were metamorphosed hands from the filthy paws of Larry the Bat.  He nodded in satisfaction; and picked up the mirror for a final inspection of himself, that, this time, did not miss a single line in his face or neck.  Again Jimmie Dale nodded.  As though he had vanished into thin air, as though he had never existed, not a trace of Larry the Bat remained—­except the heap of rags upon the floor, the battered slouch hat, the frayed trousers, the patched boots with their broken laces, the mismated socks, the grimy flannel shirt, and the old coat that he had just discarded.

The mirror was replaced on the table; and, pushing the heap of clothes before him with his foot, Jimmie Dale knelt down in the corner of the room where the oilcloth had been turned up and the loose planking of the floor removed, and began to pack the articles away in the hole.  Jimmie Dale rolled the trousers of Larry the Bat into a compact little bundle, and stuffed them under the flooring.  The gas jet seemed to blink again in a sort of confidential approval, as though the secret lay inviolate between itself and Jimmie Dale.  Through the closed window, shade tightly drawn, came, low and muffled, the sound of distant life from the Bowery, a few blocks away.  The gas jet, suffering from air somewhere within the pipes, hissed angrily, the yellow flame died to a little blue, forked spurt—­and Jimmie Dale was on his feet, his face suddenly hard and white as marble.

Some one was knocking at the door!

For the fraction of a second Jimmie Dale stood motionless.  Found as Jimmie Dale in the den of Larry the Bat, and the consequences required no effort of the imagination to picture them; police or denizen of the underworld who was knocking there, it was all the same, the method of death would be a little different, that was all—­one legalised, the other not.  Jimmie Dale, Larry the Bat, the Gray Seal, once uncovered, could expect as much quarter as would be given to a cornered rat.  His eyes swept the room with a swift, critical glance—­evidences of Larry the Bat, the clothes, were still about, even if he in the person of Jimmie Dale, alone damning enough, were not standing there himself.  And he was even weaponless—­the Tocsin had taken the revolver from his pocket, together with those other telltale articles, the mask, the flashlight, the little blued-steel tools, before she had intrusted him that night, wounded and unconscious, to Hanson’s care.