"
A blue thread curled lazily upward from the tip of the cigarette. Jimmie
Dale's eyes fastened mechanically on the twisting, wavering spiral,
followed it mechanically as it rose and spread out into filmy,
undulating, fantastic shapes--and the strong, square jaw set suddenly
hard. It was not so very strange that those words should have come back
to him to-night! Things were "warm" now--and he could not let them
"cool" for a year!
"Warm!" He smiled a little mirthlessly. The comparison was very slight!
Then, at the beginning, at the outset of the Gray Seal's career, the
police, it was true, had shown a certain unpleasant anxiety for a closer
acquaintanceship, but that was about all. To-day, lashed on and mocked
by a virulent press, goaded to madness by their own past failures to
"get" the Gray Seal, to whose door they laid a hundred crimes and for
whom the bars of a death cell in Sing Sing was the goal if they could
but catch their prey, the police, to a man, were waging a ceaseless and
relentless war against him; and to-day, joining hands with the police,
the underworld in all its thousand ramifications, prompted by fear, by
suspicion of one another, reached out to trap him, and to deal out to
him a much more speedy, but none the less certain, fate than that
prescribed by the statutes of the law!
He shook his head.
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