ipt:

"Look in the cupboard at the rear of the room. The man with the red wig
is--"

For an instant, as mechanically he tore the letter into little shreds,
he held there hesitant--and the next, slamming the door tight, he flung
himself into the seat behind the wheel, and the big, sixty-horse-power,
self-starting machine was roaring down the street.

The Tocsin! There was a grim smile on Jimmie Dale's lips now. The alarm!
Yes, it was always an alarm, quick, sudden, an emergency to face on the
instant--plans, decisions to be made with no time to ponder them, with
only that one fact to consider, staggering enough in itself, that a
mistake meant disaster and ruin to some one else, and to himself, if
the courts were merciful where he had little hope for mercy, the
penitentiary for life!

And now to-night again, as it almost always was when these mysterious
letters came, every moment of inaction was piling up the odds against
him. And, too, the same problem confronted him. How, in what way, in
what role, must he play the night's game to its end? As Larry the Bat?

The car was speeding forward. He was heading down Broadway now, lower
Broadway, that stretched before him, deserted like some dark, narrow
canyon where, far below, like towering walls, the buildings closed
together and seemed to converge into some black, impassable barrier. The
street lights flashed by him; a patrolman stopped the swinging of his
night-stick, and turned to gaze at the car that rushed by at a rate
perilously near to contempt of speed laws; street cars passed at
indifferent intervals; pedestrians were few and far between--it was the
lower Broadway of night.

Larry the Bat? Jimmie Dale shook his head impatiently over the steering
wheel. No; that would not do. It would be well enough for this young
Burton, perhaps, but not for old Isaac, the East Side fence--for Isaac
knew him in the character of Larry the Bat. His quick, keen brain,
weaving, eliminating, devising, scheming, discarded that idea. The final
coup of the night, as yet but sensed in an indefinite, unshaped way, if
enacted in the person of Larry the Bat would therefore stamp Larry the
Bat and the Gray Seal as one--a contretemps but little less fatal, in
view of old Issac, than to bracket the Gray Seal and Jimmie Dale! Larry
the Bat was not a character to be assumed with impunity, nor one to
jeopardize--it was a bulwark of safety, at it were, to which more than
once he owed escape from