tter. There could be no doubt of that.
Well, there would be a reckoning at least before the end!

He was in a downtown subway train now--the roar in his ears in
consonance, it seemed, with the turmoil in his brain. But now, too, he
was Jimmie Dale again; and, apart from the slightly outthrust jaw, the
tight-closed lips, impassive, debonair, composed.

There was yet a chance. As Larry the Bat he knew every den and lair
below the dead line, and he knew, too, the Wowzer's favourite haunts.
There was yet a chance, only one in a thousand, it was true, almost too
pitiful to be depended upon--but yet a chance. The Wowzer had probably
not worked alone, and he and his pal, or pals, would certainly not
remain uptown either to examine or divide their spoils--they would wait
until they were safe somewhere in one of their hell holes on the East
Side. If he could find the Wowzer, reach the man BEFORE THE LETTER WAS
OPENED--Jimmie Dale's lips grew tighter. THAT was the chance! It he
failed in that--Jimmie Dale's lips drooped downward in grim curves at
the corners. A chance! Already the Wowzer had at least a half hour's
lead, and, worse still, there was no telling which one of a dozen places
the man might have chosen to retreat to with his loot.

Time passed. His mind obsessed, Jimmie Dale's physical acts were
almost wholly mechanical. It was perhaps fifteen minutes since he had
discovered the loss of the letter, and he was walking now through the
heart of the Bowery. Exactly how he had got there he could not have
told; he had only a vague realisation that, following an intuitive
sense of direction, he had lost not a second of time in making his way
downtown.

And now he found himself hesitating at the corner of a cross street. Two
blocks east was that dark, narrow alleyway, that side door that made the
entrance to the Sanctuary. It would be safer, a hundred times safer, to
go there, change his clothes and his personality, and emerge again as
Larry the Bat--infinitely safer in that role to explore the dens of the
underworld, many of them indeed unknown and undreamed of by the police
themselves, than to trust himself there in well-cut, fashionable
tweeds--but that would take time. Time! When, with every second, the
one chance he had, desperate as that already was, was slipping away from
him. No; what was apparently the greater risk at least held out the only
hope.

He went on again--his brain incessantly at work. At the worst, ther