That was Klanner's window. He did not
know Klanner, the bank's janitor--except that he knew him as an
_innocent_ man, as the proposed victim of as foul and black and
pitiless a conspiracy as had ever been hatched in a human brain! Nor
did he know Hunchback Joe--save by reputation. The man was a
comparative newcomer in the underworld. He had bought out a small
ship-chandler's business, a rickety, out-at-the-heels place on an
equally rickety old wharf on the East River; and it was generally
understood that he was a "fence" of a sort, making a speciality of,
and catering to, a certain extensive and vicious class of thieves, the
wharf rats, who infested the city's shipping--his ostensible business
of a ship-chandler enabling him to handle and dispose of that class of
stolen property with comparative immunity.
Jimmie Dale was crouching at the door, a little steel picklock in his
fingers. It was fairly evident now that the underworld in general had
but an extremely superficial acquaintance with Hunchback Joe; that
Hunchback Joe's minor depredations against the law were but a cloak
to--the mental soliloquy ended abruptly. Jimmie Dale drew suddenly back
from the door, and, retreating along the wall of the building, crouched
down in the darkness beneath the window.
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