ope fiend, a figure familiar to every denizen below the dead
line, skulked along the narrow, ill-lighted street of the East Side
that, on the corner ahead, boasted the notorious resort to which Bristol
Bob had paid the doubtful, if appropriate, compliment of giving his
name. From under the rim of his battered hat, Jimmie Dale's eyes, veiled
by half-closed, well-simulated drug-laden lids, missed no detail either
of his surroundings or pertaining to the passers-by. Though already late
in the evening, half-naked children played in the gutters; hawkers of
multitudinous commodities cried their wares under gasoline banjo torches
affixed to their pushcarts; shawled women of half a dozen races, and men
equally cosmopolitan, loitered at the curb, or blocked the pavement,
or brushed by him. Now a man passed him, flinging a greeting from
the corner of his mouth; now another, always without movement of the
lips--and Jimmie Dale answered them--from the corner of his mouth.

But while his eyes were alert, his mind was only subconsciously attune
to his surroundings. Was it indeed the beginning of the end? Some day,
he had told himself often enough, the end must come. Was it coming
now, surely, with a sort of grim implacability--when it was too late to
escape! Slowly, but inexorably, even his personal freedom of action
was narrowing, being limited, and, ironically enough, through the very
conditions he had himself created as an avenue of escape.

It was not only the police now; it was, far more to be feared, the
underworld as well. In the old days, the role of Larry the Bat had been
assumed at intervals, at his own discretion, when, in a corner, he had
no other way of escape; now it was forced upon him almost daily. The
character of Larry the Bat could no longer be discarded at will. He had
flung down the gauntlet to the underworld when, as the Gray Seal, he had
closed the prison doors behind Stangeist, The Mope, Australian Ike, and
Clarie Deane, and the underworld had picked the gauntlet up. Betrayed,
as they believed, by the one who, though unknown to them; they had
counted the greatest among themselves, and each one fearful that his own
betrayal might come next, every crook, every thug in the Bad Lands
now eyed his oldest pal with suspicion and distrust, and each was a
self-constituted sleuth, with the prod of self-preservation behind him,
sworn to the accomplishment of that unhallowed slogan--death to the Gray
Seal. Almost daily no