He was close now--only another five yards to go. Yes--he
was weak. His teeth set. Four yards--three! If only there were not that
glimmer of light, faint as it was, seeping down the lane from the street
lamp across the road from the Sanctuary! Two yards--now! No! The Wolf's
yell, as the man tore around the corner of the two lanes, rang out like
a knell of doom.
Drawn, white-faced, Jimmie Dale, stumbling now, lurched past that loose
board he had counted upon for what was literally his life--lurched past,
and stumbled on. He could not run much farther. There was one chance
left--just one--that there should be no one to see him enter the _front_
door of the Sanctuary, no one lounging about, no one in the tenement
doorway. If that chance failed--well, then it was the end--_the_ end of
Smarlinghue, the end of Jimmie Dale, the end of Larry the Bat, the end
of the Gray Seal--and the Wolf would have kept his pledge to gangland.
But it would be an end that gangland would long remember, and an end
that the Wolf would share!
The street was just before him now. He turned into it--and there came a
little cry, a moan almost, of relief. The doorway of the tenement was
_clear_.
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