very moment when she, perhaps alone of all the world, could have pointed
the way out, when life, liberty, everything that was common to them both
was at stake, in deadly peril--and she had gone, ignorant of it all,
leaving him staggered by the very possibility of the succour that was
held up before his eyes only to be snatched away without power of his to
grasp it. His intuition had not been at fault--he had made no mistake
in that shadow across the street from the Sanctuary. It had been the
Tocsin. He had been followed; and it was she who had followed him,
until, in a crowd, she had seized the opportunity of a moment ago.
Though ultimately, perhaps, it changed nothing, it was a relief in a way
to know that it was she, not Whitey Mack, who had been lurking there;
but her persistent, incomprehensible determination to preserve the
mystery with which she surrounded herself was like now to cost them both
a ghastly price. If he could only have had one word with her--just one
word!

The letter in his hand crackled under his clenched fist. He stared at
it in a half-blind, half-bitter way. The call of the Gray Seal to arms!
Another coup, with its incident danger and peril, that she had planned
for him to execute! He could have laughed aloud at the inhuman mockery
of it. The call of the Gray Seal to arms--NOW! When with every faculty
drained to its last resource, cornered, trapped, he was fighting for his
very existence!

"Jimmie, it is half-past eleven now--HURRY!" The words were jangling
discordantly in his brain.

And now he laughed outright, mirthlessly. A young girl hanging on her
escort's arm, passing, glanced at him and giggled. It was a different
Jimmie Dale for the moment. For once his immobility had forsaken him. He
laughed again--a sort of unnatural, desperate indifference to everything
falling upon him. What did it matter, the moment or two it would take to
read the letter? He looked around him. He was on the corner in front
of the Palace Saloon, and, turning abruptly, he stepped in through the
swinging doors. As Larry the Bat, he knew the place well. At the rear of
the barroom and along the side of the wall were some half dozen
little stalls, partitioned off from each other. Several of these were
unoccupied, and he chose the one farthest from the entrance. It was
private enough; no one would disturb him.

From the aproned individual who presented himself he ordered a drink.
The man returned in a moment, and Jim