"No? Then I should advise you to see that you have by ten o'clock
to-morrow morning!" returned Jimmie Dale curtly. "Make out that check!"

Mittel hesitated. The revolver edged insistently a little farther across
the desk--and Mittel, picking up a pen, wrote feverishly. He tore the
check from its stub, and, with a snarl, pushed it toward Jimmie Dale.

"Fold it!" instructed Jimmie Dale, in the same curt tones. "And fold
that diagram with it. Put them both in this box. Thank you!" He wrapped
the oilskin around the box again, and returned the box to his pocket.
And again with that insolent, contemptuous stare, he surveyed the man at
the desk--then he backed to the French windows. "It might be as well to
remind you, Mittel," he cautioned sternly, "that if for any reason this
check is not honoured, whether through lack of funds or an attempt by
you to stop payment, you'll be in a cell in the Tombs to-morrow for this
night's work--that is quite understood, isn't it?"

Mittel was on his feet--sweat glistened on his forehead.

"My God!" he cried out shrilly. "Who are you?"

And Jimmie Dale smiled and stepped out on the lawn.

"Ask the Weasel," said Jimmie Dale--and the next instant, lost in the
shadows of the house, was running for his car.

CHAPTER X

THE ALIBI

DEATH TO THE GRAY SEAL!"--through the underworld, in dens and dives that
sheltered from the law the vultures that preyed upon society, prompted
by self-fear, by secret dread, by reason of their very inability
to carry out their purpose, the whispered sentence grew daily more
venomous, more insistent. THE GRAY SEAL, DEAD OR ALIVE--BUT THE GRAY
SEAL!" It was the "standing orders" of the police. Railed at by a
populace who angrily demanded at its hands this criminal of criminals,
mocked at and threatened by a virulent press, stung to madness by the
knowledge of its own impotence, flaunted impudently to its face by this
mysterious Gray Seal to whose door the law laid a hundred crimes, for
whom the bars of a death cell in Sing Sing was the certain goal could
he but be caught, the police, to a man, was like an uncaged beast that,
flicked to the raw by some unseen assailant and murderous in its fury,
was crouched to strike. Grim paradox--a common bond that linked the
hands of the law with those that outraged it!

Death to the Gray Seal! Was it, at last, the beginning of the end?
Jimmie Dale, as Larry the Bat, unkempt, disreputable in appearance,
supposed d