The Complete Jimmie Dale Mysteries (All 4 Novels in One Edition) by Frank L. Packard

Author:Frank L. Packard [Packard, Frank L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9788027221592
Publisher: Musaicum Press
Published: 2017-10-05T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter XVI.

One Chance in Ten

Table of Contents

It was three nights later. Old Jason had placed a tray with after-dinner coffee and a liqueur set on the table at Jimmie Dale’s elbow—that was fully an hour ago, and both coffee and liqueur were untouched. Things were not going well. Apart entirely from all lack of success where the Tocsin was concerned, things were not going well. The fate of Frenchy Virat, the fate of the Wolf, and, added to this, the Gray Seal’s intervention in the plans and purposes of one Gentleman Laroque and certain gentlemen still higher up than Laroque, had not passed unmarked or unnoticed in the underworld. And now in the underworld a strange, ominous and far-reaching disquiet reigned. It was an underworld rampant with suspicion, mad with fury, more dangerous than it had ever been before.

Jimmie Dale’s hand reached abstractedly into the pocket of his dinner jacket for his cigarette case. He lighted a cigarette, leaned back once more in the big, leather-upholstered lounging chair, and his eyes, half closed, strayed introspectively around the luxuriously appointed room, his own particular den in his Riverside Drive residence. Once, a very long while ago, years ago, so long ago now that it seemed as though it must have been in some strange previous incarnation, back in those days when the Tocsin had first come into his life, and when he had known her only as the author of those mysterious letters, those “calls to arms” to the Gray Seal, she had written: “Things are a little too warm, aren’t they, Jimmie? Let’s let them cool for a year.”

A blue thread curled lazily upward from the tip of the cigarette. Jimmie Dale’s eyes fastened mechanically on the twisting, wavering spiral, followed it mechanically as it rose and spread out into filmy, undulating, fantastic shapes—and the strong, square jaw set suddenly hard. It was not so very strange that those words should have come back to him to-night! Things were “warm” now—and he could not let them “cool” for a year!

“Warm!” He smiled a little mirthlessly. The comparison was very slight! Then, at the beginning, at the outset of the Gray Seal’s career, the police, it was true, had shown a certain unpleasant anxiety for a closer acquaintanceship, but that was about all. To-day, lashed on and mocked by a virulent press, goaded to madness by their own past failures to “get” the Gray Seal, to whose door they laid a hundred crimes and for whom the bars of a death cell in Sing Sing was the goal if they could but catch their prey, the police, to a man, were waging a ceaseless and relentless war against him; and to-day, joining hands with the police, the underworld in all its thousand ramifications, prompted by fear, by suspicion of one another, reached out to trap him, and to deal out to him a much more speedy, but none the less certain, fate than that prescribed by the statutes of the law!

He shook his head.

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