Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 28, 2025
It was a strange eulogy, self-pronounced! But it was none the less true. Then, she had been Rhoda Gray; now, even the Bussard, doubtless, had forgotten her name in the one with which he himself, at that queer baptismal font of crimeland, had christened her the White Moll. It even went further than that.
A "dip" had given it to her, and the underworld, quick and trenchant in its "monikers," had instantly ratified it. There was not a crook or denizen of crimeland, probably, who did not know the White Moll; there was, probably, not one to-day who knew, or cared, that she was Rhoda Gray! She went on, traversing block after block, entering a less deserted, though no less unsavory, neighborhood.
He could not define it, it was intuition perhaps but intuition had never failed him yet. It was an undercurrent of which he had gradually become conscious, the sense of some unseen, guiding power, that moved and swayed and controlled, and was present, dominant, in every den and dive in crimeland.
The Wolf's incentive was not one of philanthropy toward his fellow denizens of crimeland, whose ranks had been thinned by those who, thanks to the Gray Seal, had gone "up the river," some of them, many of them, to that room in Sing Sing's death-house from which none ever returned alive; nor was it, to give the Wolf his due, through a personal fear that his own career might end, as those others' had, at the hands of the Gray Seal; nor, again, was it through any tardy, eleventh-hour conversion, any belated edging toward the way of grace that found expression in a desire to array himself on the side of those representing the forces of law and order.
And this power, supplying a foreknowledge of events through intimacy with those whispered secrets in the innermost circles of the citizenry of crimeland, must have been of immeasurable worth.
It was very quiet even ominously quiet that impression came to him suddenly again. The quarter here was full of dives and gambling hells and resorts frequented by the worst in crimeland but it seemed that the Mole's injunction had been obeyed to the letter! It boded little good for her! Jimmie Dale's face, under the grime of Larry the Bat's make-up, grew white and set, as he approached the window.
A smile that held no mirth hovered for an instant over Jimmie Dale's lips. Yes, he knew Marre, Marre of the underworld, well! The man was brilliant, clever and possessed of a devil's soul! Also Marre, as certainly no other man had ever held it, held the confidence of crimeland and crime-land had supplied the tricky lawyer with his clientele.
How had Laroque come to play a part in the miserable scheme of trickery that was the Private Club Ring's last card. Jimmie Dale shook his head helplessly at the first question and shook it again at the second. He knew Laroque he knew him for one of the most degraded, as well as one of the most dreaded, gang leaders in crimeland.
The only similarity between the two the one thing that must of necessity be the same in order to explain plausibly his intimacy with the dens and lairs of Crimeland, the one thing that would, if nothing more, assure an unsuspicious, tolerant acceptance of his presence there, was that, like Larry the Bat, he would assume the role of a confirmed dope fiend; but as there were many dope fiends, thousands of them in the Bad Lands, that point of similarity, even if Larry the Bat were not believed to be dead, held little, if any, risk.
He had wormed himself again into the inner circle of crimeland; he lay here in Foo Sen's to-night, as he had once lain in one of Foo Sen's competitor's dives as Larry the Bat, months ago, on the night the place had been raided but there was still nothing still no clue only the shuffle of slippered feet, the stertorous breathings, a subdued curse, a blasphemous laugh, a coin ringing upon a table top, the murmur of voices, whisperings!
Word Of The Day
Others Looking