In the last three days, as Smarlinghue, as Jimmie Dale, yes, even
as Larry the Bat again, working with feverish intensity, with almost
sleepless continuity, he had exhausted every means and effort within
his power of running Marre, _alias_ Clarke, to earth. There seemed
nothing now left to do but to wait until Marre should resume his own
identity; nothing left but the promise of a vengeance that--again
Jimmie Dale laughed harshly, and, as the laugh died away, a smile took
its place on the thinned lips that was not good to see. Yes, she was
right in that; he knew Marre--he knew Marre, with his thin, cruel face,
his black, sleepy eyes; his suave, ingratiating manner that hid under
its veneer a devil's treachery! Nor, well as he knew the man, was it
strange that he had not known Clarke as Peter Marre, for he had seen
Clarke only once--that night in the long ago, in Spider Jack's when the
man, with consummate art, a master of disguise, had impersonated
Travers, the dead chauffeur, and had succeeded in fooling even Spider
Jack himself. But he, Jimmie Dale, knew _now_. Yes, she had been
right--a whiteness came and gathered on his lips--in that sense she
could not fail, Marre at least would pay! But perhaps not quite as she
suggested, perhaps not quite by the simple act of a denunciation to the
police, perhaps not quite in so simple a way as that, for, after
all--his hand clenched over the sheets of her letter--though it would
be easy enough to establish Marre's alias now that the alias was known,
there might be another way in which Marre would answer, a more
_intimate_ way, a more personal way! Not murder--the skin was ivory
white across his knuckles--not murder, but--
Jimmie Dale was quietly folding the sheets of paper in his hand.
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