The man was a power in the
underworld--and a devil in human guise. In a career extending back over
many years, a career in which no single crime in the decalogue had been
slighted, the Wolf had successfully managed to evade the clutches of the
law until his name had become a synonym for craft and cunning in the Bad
Lands, and the man himself the object of the vicious hero-worship of
that sordid world where murder cradled and foul things lived. The
police had marked the man, marked him a score of times; in their records
a hundred unsolved crimes pointed to the Wolf--but they had never "got"
him--always the thread of evidence that seemed to lead to that queer
house near Chatham Square was broken on the way--and the Wolf, with
steadily increasing prestige and authority in gangland, laughed in the
faces of the police, and here and there a plain-clothes man,
over-zealous perhaps, _died_.
That was the Wolf--but that was not all! Jimmie Dale's face hardened
into grim lines, as he lifted out from under the baseboard
"Smarlinghue's" frayed and seedy coat, and put it on. Between the Wolf
and the Gray Seal there was now a personal feud. Above the reek of those
whisperings in the underworld, above that muttered slogan, "_death to
the Gray Seal,_" that men flung at each other from the twisted corners
of their mouths, the Wolf had snarled, and the underworld had listened,
and the underworld was waiting now--the Wolf had pledged himself to rid
the Bad Lands of the terror that had crept upon it.
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