ad it come again, that thought! Did it mean
that HE must play--the last card! There was a way--there had always been
a way. The way the Crime Club took--MURDER. It was their own weapon!
If the man who posed as Henry LaSalle were killed! If that man--were
killed!

"The Magpie was to be there at three!" he muttered--and started
mechanically back along the street.

CHAPTER XIII

THE ONLY WAY

It was a horrible thing--and it grew upon him. In a blind, mechanical
way, his brain receptive to nothing else, Jimmie Dale walked on along
the street. To kill a man! Death he had faced himself a hundred times,
witnessed it a hundred times in its most violent forms, had seen murder
done before his eyes, had been in straits where, to save his own life,
it had seemed the one last desperate chance--and yet his hands were
still clean! To kill a man in fair fight, in struggle, when the blood
was hot, was terrible enough, a possibility that was always before him,
the one thing from which he shrank, the one thing that, as the Gray
Seal, he had always feared; but to kill a man deliberately, to creep
upon his victim with hideous, cold-blooded premeditation--he shivered a
little, and his hand shook as he drew it nervously across his eyes.

But there was no other way! Again and again, insidiously grappling with
his revulsion, with the horror that the impulse to murder inspired,
came that other thought--there was no other way. If the man who posed
as Henry LaSalle were DEAD! If he were dead! If he were dead! See, now,
what would happen if that man were dead! How clear his brain was on that
point! The whole plot would tumble like a house of cards about the heads
of the Crime Club. The courts would require an auditing of the estate
by a trustee of the courts' own appointing, who would continue to
administer it until the Tocsin's twenty-fifth birthday, or until there
was tangible evidence of her death--but the Tocsin, automatically with
her pseudo uncle's death, could publicly appear again. Her death could
no longer benefit the Crime Club, since it, the Crime Club, with the
supposed uncle dead, could not profit through the false Henry LaSalle
inheriting as next of kin! It was the weak link, the vulnerable point in
the stupendous scheme of murder and crime with which these hell fiends
had played for and won, so far, the stake of eleven millions. Not that
they had overlooked or been blind to this, they were too clever, too
cunning for that