Mike Hagan did not speak—­his lips were twitching, and there was horror creeping into his eyes.

“D’ye get me!” sneered Connie Myers.  “Tell your story—­who’d believe it!  I got you cinched.  Twice I tried to get this old dub’s coin out here, and couldn’t find it.  But the second time I found something else—­a piece of paper with a drawing of the fireplace on it, and a place in the drawing marked with an X. That was good enough, wasn’t it?  That’s the paper I stuck under your table this afternoon when your wife was out—­see?  Somebody’s got to stand for the job, and if it’s somebody else it won’t be me—­get me!  When I had a look at that fireplace I knew I couldn’t do the job alone in a week, and I didn’t dare blast it with ‘soup’ for fear of spoiling what was inside.  And since I had to have somebody to help me, I thought I might as well let him help me all the way through—­and stand for it.  I picked you, Mike—­that’s why I croaked old Doyle in your tenement to-night.  I wrote this letter while I was waiting for you to show up at the station to come out here with me, and I’m going to see that the police get it in the next hour.  When they find Doyle in the room below yours, and that paper in your room, and the busted fireplace here—­I guess they won’t look any farther for who did it.  And say”—­he leaned forward with an ugly grin—­“mabbe you think I’m soft to be telling you all this?  But don’t you fool yourself.  You don’t know me—­you don’t know who I am.  So tell ’em the truth!  They won’t believe you anyway with evidence like that against you—­and the neater the story the more they’ll think it shows brains enough on your part to have pulled a job like this!”

“My God!” Hagan was rocking on his knees, beads of sweat were starting out on his forehead.  “You wouldn’t plant a man like that!” he cried brokenly.  “You wouldn’t do it, would you?  My God—­you wouldn’t do that!”

Jimmie Dale’s face under his mask was white and rigid.  There was something primal, elemental in the savagery that was sweeping upon him.  He had it all now—­all!  She had been right—­there was need to-night for the Gray Seal.  So that was the game, inhuman, hellish, the whole of it, to the last filthy dregs—­Connie Myers, to protect himself, was railroading an innocent man to death for the crime that he himself had committed!  There was a cold smile on Jimmie Dale’s lips now, as he took his automatic from his pocket.  No, it wasn’t quite all the game—­there was still his hand to play!  He edged forward a little nearer to the door—­and halted abruptly, listening.  An automobile had stopped outside on the road.  Hagan was still pleading in a frenzied way; Connie Myers was callously folding his letter, while he watched the other warily—­neither of the men had heard the sound.