A low cry was on Jimmie Dale’s lips. The bed was moved out now, and he was stooping over a man whose head was gruesomely battered above the right temple and back across the skull. The flashlight wavered in his hand, as he held it focussed on the other’s face. It was the Magpie—dead.
CHAPTER VII. THE BOND ROBBERY
It seemed to Jimmie Dale that, in the darkness, the room was full of unseen devils laughing and jeering derisively at him. It seemed that reality did not exist; that only unreality prevailed. The Magpie—dead! It seemed for the moment that he had utterly lost his grip upon himself; that mentally he was being tossed helplessly about, the sport of fate. The Magpie—dead! It meant—what did it mean? He must think now, and think quickly. It meant, first of all, that any hope for the Tocsin which he had built upon the Magpie was shattered, gone forever. And it meant, that gray seal on the sole of the dead man’s boot, that the murder had been committed with even greater cunning and finesse, and an even greater security for the murderer, than he had attributed to the Magpie a moment since, when he had thought the Magpie the instigator, and not the victim, of the crime.
He was examining the wound, searching for the weapon—it must have been a blunt instrument of some sort—with which the blow, or blows, had been struck. There was nothing. The Magpie lay there—dead. That was all.
Mechanically Jimmie Dale replaced the bed in its original position over the murdered man, and stood staring down again at the gray seal on the Magpie’s boot. It was not why the Magpie had been murdered, it was who had murdered him! Once, long, long ago, almost at the outset of the Gray Seal’s career, a spurious gray seal had been used before. But this was a vastly different, and far more significant matter. Then it had been an attempt to foist the identity of the Gray Seal upon a poor, miserable devil in order to secure a reward—here it was a crime, murder, coolly, callously laid to the Gray Seal, that the guilty man might escape without a breath of suspicion. Just another crime credited to the Gray Seal! No one would dispute it; no one would question it; no one would dream that it had been done by any one other than the Gray Seal. There was a brutal possibility about the ingenuity of the man who had struck the blow. It was the Magpie who had put his finger upon Larry the Bat as the Gray Seal; it was the Magpie who had tried to accomplish the Gray Seal’s death. Would it, then, occasion even surprise that the Magpie should be found murdered in his own den at the hands of the Gray Seal? It was even his own argument, the very reason that had led him to assume the role of Larry the Bat, and had brought him here to the Magpie’s to-night!
Jimmie Dale bent down for a closer inspection of the diamond-shaped gray seal on the boot’s sole. It was not one of his own; but it was so similar that it would unquestionably pass muster. The red crept to Jimmie Dale’s cheeks and burned there, as a sudden, merciless anger swept upon him. Who was the man who had done this, who sheltered himself from murder behind the Gray Seal!
He laughed low and bitterly. Only another crime attributed to the Gray Seal! It would not smirch the Gray Seal any—the Gray Seal had been accused of worse than this! But the man who had dared to place that gray seal there would answer for it!
He was still laughing in that low, bitter way, as he knelt now, and took out his pocketknife. The gray seal, at least, would not be found—he was lucky there—he had only to scrape it off, and—No—wait! Would it not be better to leave it there? It would throw the murderer off his guard if he believed that his plan had worked; and it could make little difference to the Gray Seal’s record to be held guilty of another murder—temporarily. Temporarily! Yes, that was it! Here was one crime of which the Gray Seal would be vindicated, and the guilty man be—