The paper stated that the body of a man found floating in the East River had been positively identified by the police as that of Slippy McGee.  That the noted crook had gotten back into New York through the cunning dragnet so carefully spread for him was another proof of his daring and dexterity.  How he met the dark fate which set him adrift, battered and dreadful, in the East River, was another of those underworld crimes that remain unsolved.  Cunning and dangerous, mysterious in his life, baffling all efforts to get at him, he was as evilly mysterious in his death.  There was only one thing sure—­that this dead wretch with the marks of violence upon him was Slippy McGee; and since his breath had ceased, the authorities could breathe easier.

He read it deliberately; then re-read it, and sat and stared at the paper.  A slow grim smile came to his lips, and he took his chin in his hand, musingly.  The eyes narrowed, the face darkened, the jaw thrust itself forward.

“Dead, huh?” he grunted, and stared about him, with a slow, twisting movement of the head.  “Well—­I might just as well be, as buried alive in a jay-dump at the tail-end of all creation!” Once again the Powers of Darkness swooped down and wrestled with and for him; and knowing what I knew, sick at heart, I trembled for him.

“What am I doing here, anyhow?” he snarled with his lips drawn back from his teeth.  “Piddling with bugs—­Me! Patching up their dinky little wings and stretching out their dam’ little legs and feelers—­me being what I am, and they being what they are!  Say, I’ve got to quit this, once for all I’ve got to quit it.  I’m not a man any more.  I’m a dead one, a he-granny cutting silo for lady-worms and drynursing their interesting little babies.  My God! Me!” And he threw his hands above his head with a gesture of rage and despair.

“Hanging on here like a boob—­no wonder they think I’m dead!  If I could just make a getaway and pull off one more good job and land enough—­”

“You couldn’t keep it, if you did land it—­your sort can’t.  You know how it went before—­the women and the sharks got it.  There’d be always that same incentive to pull off just one more to keep you going—­until you’d pulled yourself behind bars, and stayed there.  And there’s the drug-danger, too.  If you escaped so far, it was because so far you had the strength to let drugs alone.  But the drugs get you, sooner or later, do they not?  Have you not told me over and over again that ‘nearly all dips are dopes’?  That first the dope gets you—­and then the law?  No.  You can’t pull off anything that won’t pull you into hell.  We have gone over this thing often enough, haven’t we?”

“No, we haven’t.  And I haven’t had a chance to pull off anything—­except leaves for bugs. Me! I want to get my hand in once more, I tell you!  I want to pull off a stunt that’ll make the whole bunch of bulls sit up and bellow for fair—­and I can do it, easy as easy.  Think I’ve croaked, do they?  And they can all snooze on their peg-posts, now I’m a stiff?  Well, by cripes, I just want half of a half of a chance, and I’ll show ’em Slippy McGee’s good and plenty alive!”