There was no "sanctuary" now. Who in the underworld would fail to
recognise Larry the Bat! He was out in the open, on the fringes of the
Bad Lands, where recognition was to be feared from every passer-by, and
where, if caught, he would do well and wisely to use his own automatic
upon himself! And he must go deeper still, into the heart of gangland,
to reach that room in the basement beneath Poker Joe's gambling hell
where the Magpie lived--or, rather, burrowed himself away in those hours
that were miserly devoted to sleep.
But Jimmie Dale knew his East Side as no other man in New York knew it;
knew it as a man whose life again and again had depended solely upon
that knowledge. By lane and alley, by unfrequented streets, now running,
now crouched motionless in some dark corner waiting for footsteps to die
away along the pavement before he darted across the street in front of
him, Jimmie Dale threaded his way through the East Side, as through the
twistings and turning of some maze, puzzling, grotesque and intricate,
but with whose secrets notwithstanding he was intimately familiar.
When he paused at last, it was in a backyard, which he had entered by
the simple expedient of climbing the fence from the lane behind.
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