Was it true, was it reality--this figure that the
underworld knew as Smarlinghue, who sat here, and with dirty fingers
played with a whisky glass on the cheap, liquor-spotted table, and out
of half-closed, well-simulated drug-laden eyes gazed on those dancing
figures out there on the floor to whom the law from cradlehood had been
a natural enemy, and to the door of hardly one of whom but lay crimes
that ranged from the paltry to the hideous!
Reality! Yes, it was real! God knew the abysmal depths of its reality.
Months piled on months there had been of it! Those voices out there that
rose in a jangle of ribald mirth were the same voices that, hushed in
deadlier menace, had whispered that grim slogan, "Death to the Gray
Seal!" through every hidden cranny in the underworld; these men and
women here around him were of the same breed as those who only last
night had struck down and brutally murdered Forrester, and not content
with murder had plotted to rob their victim of his good name as well!
Jimmie Dale's hand clenched suddenly--his mind was off at a tangent,
away for the moment from her. Well, they had failed last night in all
save murder! Failed--and one of them had already paid the price, and
another, in the Tombs awaiting trial, faced the certainty of the death
chair in Sing Sing! But those two, Reddy Mull, and English Dick, had
been little more than tools.
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