“Police headquarters?  I’m Henry LaSalle.  Fifth Avenue.  I—­I’ve been shot.  Take down this statement.  I’ll—­I’ll be dead before you get here—­I’m not the real Henry LaSalle at all.  We murdered Henry LaSalle—­in Australia, and murdered Peter LaSalle here.  We—­we tried to kill the daughter, but she ran away.  This house has been our headquarters for the last five years.  The man who shot me to-night is the leader of the gang.  We quarrelled over the division of a haul.  He’s here on the floor now, wounded.  Get them all, get them all, damn them!—­do you hear?—­get them all!  They’re out of the house now, but lay a trap for them.  They always come in through the garage on the side street.  Oh, God, I’m done for!  Break down the west walls of the rooms upstairs—­if—­you—­want proof of what—­the gang’s been doing.  Hurry!  Hurry!  I’m—­I’m—­done for—­I—­”

Jimmie Dale permitted the telephone to drop with a clash from his hand to the table.

The face of the man on the floor was livid.

“Who are you?  In God’s name, who are you?” he cried out wildly.

“Does it matter?” inquired Jimmie Dale grimly.  “Your game is up.  You’ll go to the chair for the murder of ’Henry LaSalle’—­if it is by proxy!  Those rooms upstairs alone are enough to damn you, to prove every word of that dying ’confession’—­but to-morrow, added to it, will come the story of Marie LaSalle herself.”

For a moment the man hung there swaying on his elbow, his face working in ghastly fashion—­and then suddenly, with a strange laugh, he carried one hand swiftly to his mouth—­and laughed again—­and before Jimmie Dale could reach him was lifeless on the floor.

A tiny vial rolled away upon the carpet.  Jimmie Dale picked it up.  A drop or two of liquid still remained in it—­colourless, clear, like that liquid this same man had dropped into the rabbit’s mouth the night before, like the liquid in the glasses they had carried into that third room, like the liquid that his man had said was from a formula of their own, that was instantaneous in its action, that defied detection by autopsy!

The set, stern features of Jimmie Dale relaxed.  It was justice—­but it was also death.  In a surge of emotion, the events of scarcely more than twenty-four hours, began to crowd upon him—­and then, ominously dominant, above all else, that slogan of the underworld, “Death to the Gray Seal!” came ringing once more in his ears.  It brought him, with a startled movement of his hand across his eyes, to a realisation of his own desperate position.  Yes, yes, he must go!  The way was clear now for the Tocsin—­clear now for her!

He dropped the vial into his pocket, and, running to the safe, quickly scraped the gray seal from the dial’s knob; then he drew the packages of money from his shirt and pockets and tossed them on the floor among the litter of papers already there—­she would get it back again when it had served its purpose, it would be self-evident that it was the proceeds of that day’s sale of the estate’s securities over which the “quarrel” had occurred!