ed
fatally for himself, though it had placed Roessle's murderers behind
the bars. For, the next day, unwilling to court the risk of remaining
in that neighbourhood, he had left Hanson's, the farmer's, house on
Long Island where the Tocsin had carried him in an unconscious state,
telephoned Jason that he had been unexpectedly called out of town for
a few days, and returned to the Sanctuary in New York. And here, to his
grim dismay, he had found the underworld in a state of furious, angry
unrest, like a nest of hornets, stirred up, seeking to wreak vengeance
on an unseen assailant.

For years, as the Gray Seal, Jimmie Dale had lived with the slogan of
the police, "The Gray Seal dead or alive--but the Gray Seal!" sounding
in his ears; with the newspapers screaming their diatribes, arousing
the people against him, nagging the authorities into sleepless, frenzied
efforts to trap him; with a price upon his head that was large enough to
make a man, not too pretentious, rich for life--but in the underworld,
until then, the name of the Gray Seal had been one to conjure with, for
the underworld had sworn by the unknown master criminal, and had
spoken his name with a reverence that was none the less genuine even if
pungently tainted with unholiness. But now it was different. Up and down
through the Bad Lands, in gambling hells, in vicious resorts, in the
hiding places where thugs and crooks burrowed themselves away from
the daylight, through the heart and the outskirts of the underworld
travelled the fiat, whispered out of mouths crooked to one side--DEATH
TO THE GRAY SEAL!

Gangland differences were forgotten in the larger issue of the common
weal. The gang spirit became the spirit of a united whole, and the crime
fraternity buzzed and hummed poisonously, spurred on by hatred, thirst
for revenge, fear, and, perhaps most potent of all, a hideous suspicion
now of each other.

The underworld had received a shock at which it stood aghast, and which,
with its terrifying possibilities, struck consternation into the soul
of every individual of that brotherhood whose bond was crime, who was
already "wanted" for some offence or other, whether it ranged from
murder in the first degree to some petty piece of sneak thievery.
Stangeist, the Indian chief, the lawyer whose cunning brain had stood as
a rampart between the underworld and a prison cell, was himself now in
the Tombs with the certainty of the electric chair before him; and with