Holding this up to the light, he read aloud these words:
“Justice is an arrow of fire. It goes straight to hearts that are evil. It burns as it strikes. No one shall escape.”
The thing was done on white paper with a typewriter.
For a full moment the two men stared at one another in silence. Then they rose abruptly to disappear into the secret booths where one does not telephone.
It is a curious fact that no man ever grows so hard, so stoical, so impervious to emotions that he fails to retain a superstitious fear of that which seems unnatural and uncanny. The flaming arrow, the mysterious note, stirred up within the hearts of these killers a sense of dread such as no display of arms, no great body of police, could ever inspire within them.
This little affair most certainly was not on the program as it had been prepared by the heavy-set, stolid man who presided over the door. Yet, strange to say, neither the man with a hole in his hand, nor his companion, spoke one word to the manager regarding the affair as they left the clubroom above, for the cooling air of night.
The name by which the younger of these two gangsters was known was Jimmie McGowan. Jimmie was not the name his mother had given him at birth. Nor was McGowan the one he had inherited from his father. His face was dark. His parents had come to America from a foreign land.
This gave Jimmie no occasion to be ashamed. That foreign nation has furnished the world many of her bravest warriors, her wisest statesmen, her sweetest singers. Still Jimmie had chosen another name.
On the following night Jimmie and his companion, who was named Mike Volpi, returned to their booth on the lower floor of the Seventy Club. The slender bus boy who hovered about the place did not appear to notice them.
They had ordered dinner and were seated in the shadows talking when, of a sudden, the flaming arrow once more appeared on the wall.