He had known that the reappearance of the Gray Seal would
arouse the community to a wild pitch of excitement, but he had far
underestimated the effect. He could gauge it better now, though--he had
only to look out of the windows at the passers-by. And this was only the
respectable element of the city whose head and front was the police, and
dangerous enough for all the bitter taunts, gibes and recriminations
with which the police was maligned! There was still the far more
dangerous element of the underworld! He had not been in that quarter
since he had left Malay John's the night before, but he could picture it
now well enough. God help him if he ever fell into those hands! In dens
and dives, in the dark corners of that sordid world, they would be
whispering blasphemous vows of vengeance against him one to
another--and, relative to the hate and fear that welded them into a
single unit, the police sank into insignificance. More than one of their
elite had gone to the electric chair through the instrumentality of the
Gray Seal; more than one was serving at that moment a long term behind
penitentiary walls. Whose turn was it to be next? They needed no
editorial prod in the underworld to run Larry the Bat to earth--there
was the deeper spur of self-preservation! They knew who the Gray Seal
was now, and the first blow that he had aimed upon his reappearance had
apparently been at one of themselves.
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