ment, two, of utter stillness; then
softly, from the front end of the shop, a whisper:

"If I were you, Lannigan, I'd take that gun from Whitey's pocket before
he comes round and beats you to it."

And the door had closed silently behind Jimmie Dale.

CHAPTER XI

THE STOOL-PIGEON

In the subway, ten minutes before, a freckled-faced messenger boy had
squeezed himself into a seat beside Jimmie Dale, yanked a dime novel
from a refractory pocket, and, blissfully lost to all the world, had
buried his head in its pages. Jimmie Dale's glance at the youngster had
equally, perforce, embraced the lurid title of the thriller, "Dicing
with Death," so imperturbably thrust under his nose. At the time, he had
smiled indulgently; but now, as he left the subway and headed for his
home on Riverside Drive, the words not only refused to be ignored, but
had resolved themselves into a curiously persistent refrain in his
mind. They were exactly what they purported to be, dime-novelish, of
the deepest hue of yellow, melodramatic in the extreme; but also, to him
now, they were grimly apt and premonitorily appropriate. "Dicing with
Death"--there was not an hour, not a moment in the day, when he was not
literally dicing with death; when, with the underworld and the police
allied against him, a single false move would lose him the throw that
left death the winner!

The risk of the dual life enforced upon him grew daily greater, and in
the end there must be the reckoning. He would have been a madman to have
shut his eyes in the face of what was obvious--but it was worth it all,
and in his soul he knew that he would not have had it otherwise even
now. To-night, to-morrow, the day after, would come another letter
from the Tocsin, and there would be another "crime" of the Gray Seal's
blazoned in the press--would that be the last affair, or would there
be another--or to-night, to-morrow, the day after, would he be trapped
before even one more letter came!

He shrugged his shoulders, as he ran up the steps of his house. Those
were the stakes that he himself had laid on the table to wager upon the
game, he had no quarrel there; but if only, before the end came, or even
with the end itself, he could find--HER!

With his latchkey he let himself into the spacious, richly furnished,
well-lighted reception hall, and, crossing this, went up the broad
staircase, his steps noiseless on the heavy carpet. Below, faintly, he
could hear some of the s