e doubt but that the shoe-store
proprietor below was an accomplice! The store served a most convenient
purpose in every respect--as a secret means of entry into the room, as
a sort of guarantee of innocence for the room itself. Why not! To the
superficial observer, to the man who might by some chance blunder into
the room--it was but an adjunct of the store itself!

The man in the trap-doorway paused with his shoulders above the floor,
looked around, listened, then drew himself up, walked across the floor,
and shot the heavy bolt on the door that led into the hallway of the
house. He returned then to the trapdoor, bent over it, and whistled
softly. Two more men, in answer to the summons, came up into the room.

"The Cap'll be along in a minute," one of them said. "Turn on the
light."

A switch clicked, flooding the room with sudden brilliancy from half a
dozen electric bulbs.

"Too many!" grunted the same voice again. "We ain't working
to-night--turn out half of 'em."

The sudden transition from the darkness for a moment dazzled Jimmie
Dale's eyes--but the next moment he was searching the faces of the three
men. There were few crooks, few denizens of the crime world below the
now obsolete but still famous dead line that, as Larry the Bat, he did
not know at least by sight.

"Moulton, Whitie Burns, and Marty Dean," confided Jimmie Dale softly
to himself. "And I don't know of any worse, except--the Cap. And gun
fighters, every one of them, too--nice odds, to say nothing of--"

"Here's the Cap now!" announced one of the three. "Hello, Cap, where'd
you raise the mustache?"

Jimmie Dale's eyes shifted to the trapdoor, and into them crept a
contemptuous and sardonic smile--the man who was coming up now and
hoisting himself to the floor was the man who, half an hour before, had
threatened young Sammy Matthews with arrest.

The Cap, alias Bert Malone, alias a score of other names, closed the
trapdoor after him, pulled off his mustache and gray wig, tucked them in
his pocket, and faced his companions brusquely.

"Never mind about the mustache," he said curtly. "Get busy, the lot of
you. Stir around and get the works out!"

"What for?" inquired Whitie Burns, a sharp, ferret-faced little man. "We
got enough of the old stuff on hand now, and that bum break Gregor made
when he pinched the cracked plate put the finish on that. Say, Cap--"

"Close your face, Whitie, and get the works out!" Malone cut in shortly.
"We've