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Afterward, the foreman decided that was the reason he did it, that and the fact that the dark slinking figure of a man darted out of an alleyway and then darted back again. "Surely," he told himself, "I could never have done it had the gas been lighted." He stood in the hallway thinking. His wife was dead and with her had died her unborn child.
Jimmie Dale went on half a block farther, stooped to the sidewalk to tie his shoe, glanced back over his shoulder the policeman was not in sight and slipped like a shadow into the alleyway beside which he had stopped. It was another Jimmie Dale now the professional Jimmie Dale.
Yet when he entered the starboard alleyway he carried with him a complete catalogue of those who had contributed to the conversation. With all, thanks to seven days' association, he stood on terms of shipboard acquaintance. Not one, in his esteem, was more potentially mischievous than any other not even the Brazilian Velasco, though he had been the first to name the Lone Wolf.
"Seems a bit strange you made no real effort to find out what the scoundrel looked like." "It was dark in that alleyway, monsieur." The captain made an inarticulate noise, apparently meant to convey an effect of ironic incredulity. More intelligible comment was interrupted by a ring of the telephone.
He had rushed up out of the bunker, stumbling in the dark alleyway amongst a lot of bewildered men who, trod upon, asked "What's up, sir?" in awed mutters all round him; down the stokehold ladder, missing many iron rungs in his hurry, down into a place deep as a well, black as Tophet, tipping over back and forth like a see-saw.
Connie Myers had introduced himself one night several years ago with a blackjack that had just missed its mark as the man had jumped out from a dark alleyway on the East Side, and he, Jimmie Dale, had thrashed the other to within an inch of his life. He had reason to know Connie Myers and Connie Myers had reason to remember him! "Yes," he said, with a grim smile; "I know Connie Myers."
He paused here for a moment to listen; then, cautioning Burton to be silent, moved on again across a small back yard and through a gate into a lane that ran at right angles to the alleyway by which both had entered the house and, a minute later, they were crouched against a building, a half block away, where the lane intersected the cross street. Here Jimmie Dale peered out cautiously.
At ten o'clock that night a figure moved silently through the dark shadows of an alleyway in the area of the International Machine Company's plant on West Superior Street. As he moved along he counted the basement windows silently, and at the fifth window he halted.
Let us endeavor to link up the chain a little. You occupy an upper deck berth; so do I. Experience of the Chinaman has formed a habit in both of us; that of sleeping with closed windows. Your port was fastened and so was my own. Karamaneh is quartered on the main deck, and her brother's stateroom opens into the same alleyway.
And yet I couldn't keep his watch. I had to get my sleep if I was to be any good next day. I went back and lifted him, snoring, to his feet. 'Come on, Mister, I said, 'it's your watch. And I heaved him gently through the doorway and along the alleyway. I was nearly carrying him.