rapid pace down the street.

Jimmie Dale whistled softly to himself. The second man was even better
known than the first; there was not a crook in New York but would
side-step Lannigan of headquarters, and do it with amazing celerity--if
he could!

"Something up! But it's not my hunt!" muttered Jimmie Dale; then, with
a shrug of his shoulders: "Queer the way those headquarters chaps
fascinate and give me a thrill every time I see them, even if I haven't
a ghost of a reason for imagining that--"

The sentence was never finished. Jimmie Dale's face was gray. The street
seemed to rock about him--and he stared, like a man stricken, white to
the lips, ahead of him. THE LETTER WAS GONE! His hand, wriggling from
his empty pocket, swept away the sweat beads that were bursting from his
forehead. It had come at last--the pitcher had gone once too often to
the well!

Numbed for an instant, his brain cleared now, working with lightning
speed, leaping from premise to conclusion. The crush in the theatre
lobby--the pushing, the jostling, the close contact--the Wowzer, the
slickest, cleverest pickpocket in the United States! For a moment he
could have laughed aloud in a sort of ghastly, defiant mockery--he
himself had predicted an unexpected aftermath, had he not!

Aftermath! It was--the END! An hour, two hours, and New York would be
metamorphosed into a seething caldron of humanity bubbling with the
news. It seemed that he could hear the screams of the newsboys now
shouting their extras; it seemed that he could see the people, roused to
frenzy, swarming in excited crowds, snatching at the papers; he seemed
to hear the mob's shouts swell in execration, in exultation--it seemed
as though all around him had gone mad. The mystery of the Gray Seal was
solved! It was Jimmie Dale, Jimmie Dale, Jimmie, Dale, the millionaire,
the lion of society--and there was ignominy for an honoured name, and
shame and disaster and convict stripes and sullen penitentiary walls--or
death! A felon's death--the chair!

He was running now, his hands clenched at his sides; his mind, working
subconsciously, urging him onward in a blind, as yet unrealised,
objectless way. And then gradually impulse gave way to calmer reason,
and he slowed his pace to a quick, less noticeable walk. The Wowzer!
That was it! There was yet a chance--the Wowzer! A merciless rage,
cold, deadly, settled upon him. It was the Wowzer who had stolen his
pocketbook, and with it the le