The police!  A raid!  Was it for him?  From rooms, an amazing number of them, more forms rushed out, joined, divided, separated, and dashed, some this way, some that, along branching passageways.  There had been raids before, the police had begun to change their minds about Chang Foo’s, but Chang Foo’s was not an easy place to raid.  House after house in that quarter of Chinese laundries, of tea shops, of chop-suey joints, opened one into the other through secret passages in the cellars.  Larry the Bat plunged down a staircase, and halted in the darkness of a cellar, drawing back against the wall while the flying feet of his fellow fugitives scurried by him.

Was it for him, this raid?  If not, the police had not a hope of getting him if he kept his head; for back in Chang Foo’s proper, which would be quite closed off now, Chang Foo would be blandly submitting to arrest, offering himself as a sort of glorified sacrifice while the police confiscated opium and fan-tan layouts.  If the police had no other purpose than that in mind, Chang Foo would simply pay a fine; the next night the place would be in full blast again; and Chang Foo, higher than ever in the confidence of the underworld’s aristocracy, would reap his reward—­and that would be all there was to it.

But was that all?  The raid had followed significantly close upon the heels of his entry into Chang Foo’s.  Larry the Bat began to move forward again.  He dared not follow the others, and, later on, when quiet was restored, issue out into the street from any one of the various houses in which he might temporarily have taken refuge.  There was a chance in that, a chance that the police might be more zealous than usual, even if he particularly was not their game—­and he could take no chance.  Arrest for Larry the Bat, even on suspicion, could have but one conclusion—­not a pleasant one—­the disclosure that Larry the Bat was not Larry the Bat at all, but Jimmie Dale, the millionaire club-man, and, to complete a fatal triplication, that Larry the Bat and Jimmie Dale was the Gray Seal upon whose head was fixed a price!

All was silence around him now, except that from overhead came occasionally the muffled tread of feet.  He felt his way along into a black, narrow passage, emerged into a second cellar, swept the place with a single, circling gleam from a pocket flashlight, passed a stairway that led upward, reached the opposite wall, and, dropping on hands and knees, crawled into what, innocently enough, appeared to be the opening of a coal bin.

He knew Chang Foo’s well—­as he knew the ins and outs of every den and place he frequented, knew them as a man knows such things when his life at any moment might hang upon his knowledge.