"Sure," said Jimmie Dale. "That's right--that's what I said. Well, so long--Hagan." And Jimmie Dale opened the door and slipped outside. An hour later, in his dressing room in his house on Riverside Drive, Jimmie Dale was removing his coat as the telephone, a hand instrument on the table, rang. Jimmie Dale glanced at it--and leisurely proceeded to remove his vest. Again the telephone rang. Jimmie Dale took off his curious, pocketed leather belt--as the telephone repeated its summons. He picked out the little drill he had used a short while before, and inspected it critically--feeling its point with his thumb, as one might feel a razor's blade. Again the telephone rang insistently. He reached languidly for the receiver, took it off its hook, and held it to his ear. "Hello!" said Jimmie Dale, with a sleepy yawn. "Hello! Hello! Why the deuce don't you yank a man out of bed at two o'clock in the morning and have done with it, and--eh? Oh, that you, Carruthers?" "Yes," came Carruthers' voice excitedly. "Jimmie, listen--listen! The Gray Seal's come to life! He's just pulled a break on West Broadway!" "Good Lord!" gasped Jimmie Dale. "You don't say!" CHAPTER II BY PROXY "The most puzzling bewildering, delightful crook in the annals of crime," Herman Carruthers, the editor of the MORNING NEWS-ARGUS, had called the Gray Seal; and Jimmie Dale smiled a little grimly now as he recalled the occasion of a week ago at the St. James Club over their after-dinner coffee. That was before his second debut, with Isaac Brolsky's poverty-stricken premises over on West Broadway as a setting for the break. SHE had written: "Things are a little too warm, aren't they, Jimmie? Let's let them cool for a year." Well, they had cooled for a year, and Carruthers as a result had been complacently satisfied in his own mind that the Gray Seal was dead--until that break at Isaac Brolsky's over on West Broadway! Jimmie Dale's smile was tinged with whimsicality now. The only effect of the year's inaction had been to usher in his renewed activity with a furor compared to which all that had gone before was insignificant. Where the newspapers had been maudlin, they now raved--raved in editorials and raved in headlines. It was an impossible, untenable, unbelievable condition of affairs that this Gray Seal, for all his incomparable cleverness, should flaunt his crimes in the faces of the citizens of New York. One could actually see the editors writhing in their swivel chairs as their fiery denunciations dripped from their pens! What was the matter with the police? Were the police children; or, worse still, imbeciles--or, still worse again, was there some one "higher up" who was profiting by this rogue's work? New York would not stand for it--New York would most decidedly not--and the sooner the
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