it off its hook, and held it to his
ear.

"Hello!" said Jimmie Dale, with a sleepy yawn. "Hello! Hello! Why the
deuce don't you yank a man out of bed at two o'clock in the morning and
have done with it, and--eh? Oh, that you, Carruthers?"

"Yes," came Carruthers' voice excitedly. "Jimmie, listen--listen! The
Gray Seal's come to life! He's just pulled a break on West Broadway!"

"Good Lord!" gasped Jimmie Dale. "You don't say!"

CHAPTER II

BY PROXY

"The most puzzling bewildering, delightful crook in the annals of crime,"
Herman Carruthers, the editor of the MORNING NEWS-ARGUS, had called the
Gray Seal; and Jimmie Dale smiled a little grimly now as he recalled
the occasion of a week ago at the St. James Club over their after-dinner
coffee. That was before his second debut, with Isaac Brolsky's
poverty-stricken premises over on West Broadway as a setting for the
break.

SHE had written: "Things are a little too warm, aren't they, Jimmie?
Let's let them cool for a year." Well, they had cooled for a year, and
Carruthers as a result had been complacently satisfied in his own mind
that the Gray Seal was dead--until that break at Isaac Brolsky's over on
West Broadway!

Jimmie Dale's smile was tinged with whimsicality now. The only effect
of the year's inaction had been to usher in his renewed activity with
a furor compared to which all that had gone before was insignificant.
Where the newspapers had been maudlin, they now raved--raved in
editorials and raved in headlines. It was an impossible, untenable,
unbelievable condition of affairs that this Gray Seal, for all his
incomparable cleverness, should flaunt his crimes in the faces of the
citizens of New York. One could actually see the editors writhing in
their swivel chairs as their fiery denunciations dripped from their
pens! What was the matter with the police? Were the police children;
or, worse still, imbeciles--or, still worse again, was there some one
"higher up" who was profiting by this rogue's work? New York would not
stand for it--New York would most decidedly not--and the sooner the
police realised that fact the better! If the police were helpless, or
tools, the citizens of New York were not, and it was time the citizens
were thoroughly aroused.

There was a way, too, to arouse the citizens, that was both good
business from the newspaper standpoint, and efficacious as a method.
Carruthers, of the MORNING NEWS-ARGUS, had initiated it. The MORNIN