And now he found himself hesitating at the corner of a cross street.  Two blocks east was that dark, narrow alleyway, that side door that made the entrance to the Sanctuary.  It would be safer, a hundred times safer, to go there, change his clothes and his personality, and emerge again as Larry the Bat—­infinitely safer in that role to explore the dens of the underworld, many of them indeed unknown and undreamed of by the police themselves, than to trust himself there in well-cut, fashionable tweeds—­but that would take time.  Time!  When, with every second, the one chance he had, desperate as that already was, was slipping away from him.  No; what was apparently the greater risk at least held out the only hope.

He went on again—­his brain incessantly at work.  At the worst, there was one mitigating factor in it all.  He had no need to think of her.  Whatever the ruin and disaster that faced him in the next few hours, she in any case was safe.  There was no clew to her identity in the letter; and where he, for months on end, with even more to work upon, had failed at every turn to trace her, there was little fear that any one else would have any better success.  She was safe.  As for himself—­that was different.  The Gray Seal would be referred to in the letter, there would be the outline, the data for the “crime” she had planned for that night; and the letter, though unaddressed, being found in his pocketbook, where cards and notes and a dozen different things among its contents proclaimed him Jimmie Dale, needed no further evidence as to its ownership nor the identity of the Gray Seal.

Jimmie Dale’s fingers crept inside his vest and fumbled there for a moment—­and a diamond stud, extracted from his shirt front, glistened sportively in the necktie that was now tucked jauntily in at one side of his shirt bosom.  He had reached the Blue Dragon, one of Wowzer’s usual hang outs, and, swerving from the sidewalk, entered the place.  There was wild tumult within—­a constant storm of applause, derision, and hilarity that was hurled from the tables around the room at the turkey-trotting, tango-writhing couples on the somewhat restricted space of polished hardwood flooring in the centre.  Jimmie Dale swaggered down the room, a cigar tilted up at an angle between his teeth, his soft felt hat a little rakishly on one side of his head and well over his nose.

At the end of the room, at the bar, Jimmie Dale leaned toward the barkeeper and talked out of the corner of his mouth.  There were private rooms upstairs, and he jerked his head surreptitiously ceilingward.

“Say, is de Wowzer up dere?” he inquired in a cautious whisper.

The man behind the bar, well known to Jimmie Dale as one of the Wowzer’s particular pals, favoured him with a blank stare.

“Never heard of de guy!” he announced brusquely.  “Wot’s yours?”

“Gimme a mug of suds,” said Jimmie Dale, reaching for a match.  He puffed at his cigar, blew out the match, and, after a moment, flung the charred end away—­but on his hand, as, palm outward, he raised it to take his glass, the match had traced a small black cross.