It was strange!  His ineffective ruse to the contrary, he was certain that he had not been mistaken.  Was it Whitey Mack?  Was the question answered?  Was the Gray Seal known, too, as Jimmie Dale?  Were they trailing him now, with the climax to come at the club, at his own palatial home, wherever the surroundings would best lend themselves to assuaging that inordinate thirst for the sensational that was so essentially a characteristic of the confirmed criminal?  What a headline in the morning’s papers it would make!

At the corner he loitered by the curb to light a cigarette—­still not a soul in sight on either side of the street behind him, except a couple of Italians who had just passed by.  Strange again!  The intuition, if it were only intuition, was still strong.  He swung abruptly on his heel, mingled with the passers-by on the Bowery, walked a rapid half dozen steps until the building hid the cross street, then ran across the road to the opposite side of the Bowery, and, in a crowd now, came back to the corner.  He crossed from curb to curb slowly, sheltered by a fringe of people that, however, in no way obstructed his view down the side street.  And then Jimmie Dale shrugged his shoulders.  He had evidently been mistaken, after all.  He was overexcited; his nerves were raw—­that, perhaps, was the solution.  Meanwhile, every minute was counting, if Whitey Mack and Lannigan should still be at Bristol Bob’s.

He kept on down the Bowery, hurrying with growing impatience through the crowds that massed in front of various places of amusement.  He had not intended to come along the Bowery, and, except for what had occurred, would have taken a less frequented street.  He would turn off at the next block.

He was in front of that moving-picture theatre again.  “The double life”—­his eyes were attracted involuntarily to the lurid, overdone display.  It seemed to threaten him; it seemed to dangle before him a premonition as it were, of what the morning held in store; but now, too, it seemed to feed into flame that smouldering fury that possessed him.  His life—­or Whitey Mack’s!  Men, women, and the children who turned night into day in that quarter of the city were clustered thick around the signs, hiving like bees to the bald sensationalism.  Almost savagely he began to force his way through the crowd—­and the next instant, like a man stunned, had stopped in his tracks.  His fingers had closed in a fierce, spasmodic clutch over an envelope that had been thrust suddenly into his hand.

“Jimmie!” from somewhere came a low, quick voice.  “Jimmie, it is half-past eleven now—­hurry.”

He whirled, scanning wildly this face, then that.  It was her voice—­her voice!  The Tocsin!  The sensitive fingers were telegraphing to his brain, as they always did, that the texture of the envelope, too, was hers.  Her voice; yes, anywhere, out of a thousand voices, he would distinguish hers—­but her face, he had never seen that.  Which, out of all the crowd around him, was hers?  Surely he could tell her by her dress; she would be different; her personality alone must single her out.  She—­