d pulled on a
disreputable pair of boots. There were only two sources of supply. His
own--and the collection that the police had made, which Carruthers had
referred to.

Jimmie Dale lifted a corner of the oilcloth in a corner of the room,
lifted a piece of the flooring, lifted out a little box which he placed
upon the rickety table, and sat down before a cracked mirror. Who was
it that would have access to the gray seals in the possession of the
police, since, obviously, it was one of those that was on the dead man's
forehead? The answer came quick enough--came with the sudden out-thrust
of Jimmie Dale's lower jaw. ONE OF THE POLICE THEMSELVES--no one else.
Clayton's heavy, cunning face, Clayton's shifty eyes, Clayton's sudden
rush when he had touched the dead man's forehead, pictured themselves
in a red flash of fury before Jimmie Dale. There was no mask now, no
facetiousness, no acted part--only a merciless rage, and the muscles of
Jimmie Dale's face quivered and twitched. MURDER, foisted, shifted upon
another, upon the Gray Seal--making of that name a calumny--ruining
forever the work that she and he might do!

And then Jimmie Dale smiled mirthlessly, with thinning lips. The box
before him was open. His fingers worked quickly--a little wax behind the
ears, in the nostrils, under the upper lip, deftly placed-hands, wrists,
neck, throat, and face received their quota of stain, applied with an
artist's touch--and then the spruce, muscular Jimmie Dale, transformed
into a slouching, vicious-featured denizen of the underworld, replaced
the box under the flooring, pulled a slouch hat over his eyes,
extinguished the gas, and went out.

Jimmie Dale's range of acquaintanceship was wide--from the upper strata
of the St. James Club to the elite of New York's gangland. And, adored
by the one, he was trusted implicitly by the other--not understood,
perhaps, by the latter, for he had never allied himself with any of
their nefarious schemes, but trusted implicitly through long years of
personal contact. It had stood Jimmie Dale in good stead before, this
association, where, in a sort of strange, carefully guarded exchange,
the news of the underworld was common property to those without the law.
To New York in its millions, the murder of Metzer, the stool pigeon,
would be unknown until the city rose in the morning to read the
sensational details over the breakfast table; here, it would already be
the topic of whispered conversatio