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The transformation to Larry the Bat stole an extra minute or two from the priceless store, but it was the only way to risk it as Smarlinghue or Jimmie Dale, to risk recognition, would be the act of a fool, for it would render abortive the initial success, if, by any means, he could succeed even to that extent.
Cowed, Smarlinghue's voice dropped to a mumble, and he let the torn canvas slip from his fingers to the floor. Clancy laughed gruffly, pulled another chair to the opposite side of the table, sat down himself, and eyed Smarlinghue coldly for a moment. "Sold it, eh?" he observed grimly. "How much were you going to get for it?" A cunning gleam flashed in Smarlinghue's eyes and vanished instantly.
She had been here here in this room and within the last few hours sometime since seven o'clock that evening, when, as Jimmie Dale, he had come here to assume the role of Smarlinghue preparatory to his vigil in Foo Sen's!
The ragged outer garments he had been wearing lay discarded in a heap on the floor, close to that section of the wall near the door where the base-board, ingeniously movable, would, in another moment or so, afford them safe hiding until such time as "Smarlinghue" should reappear in person again; from the nostrils, from beneath the lips, from behind the ears, the tiny, cleverly-inserted pieces of wax, distorting the features, had vanished; and now, over the cracked basin on the rickety washstand, the masterly-created pallor was washed rapidly away and the thin, hollow-cheeked, emaciated face of Smarlinghue, the drug fiend, was gone, and in its place, clean-cut, clear-eyed, was the face of Jimmie Dale, clubman and millionaire.
Was it true, was it reality this figure that the underworld knew as Smarlinghue, who sat here, and with dirty fingers played with a whisky glass on the cheap, liquor-spotted table, and out of half-closed, well-simulated drug-laden eyes gazed on those dancing figures out there on the floor to whom the law from cradlehood had been a natural enemy, and to the door of hardly one of whom but lay crimes that ranged from the paltry to the hideous!
Clancy permitted a thin smile to flicker contemptuously across his lips. "You've got a whole lot of friends that I'm interested in. Get the idea? There ain't a crook in New York that's shy of you. You got a 'stand-in' everywhere." He held up the ten-dollar bill. "There's more of these plenty of 'em." Smarlinghue pushed back his chair now in a frightened sort of way.
I was still looking for it when I came out of the lane you remember, Smarlinghue, don't you? you got your memory back, ain't you? that I was a bit ahead of the rest of 'em? It didn't take a second to spot that on the doorstep, and there's some more of it in the hall. Damned queer, ain't it that it led right to Smarlinghue's room!" The laugh was gone. The Wolf began to come forward across the room.
He crossed the room, replaced the make-up box in its hiding place, put back the movable section of the base-board, turned out the light and a minute later, Smarlinghue, unkempt, stoop-shouldered, let himself out, not by the French window through which he had entered stealthily in the evening clothes of Jimmie Dale, but unconcernedly, as was the right of any tenant, by the door that opened on the ground-floor passage of the tenement, and shuffled down the street.
Jimmie Dale took out a make-up box from the opening in the wall, and, carrying it with him to the table, propped up a small mirror against a collection of Smarlinghue's paint tubes. His fingers were working swiftly now with sure, deft touches, supplying to his face, his neck, his hands and wrists, not the unhealthy pallor of Smarlinghue, but the grimy, unwashed, dirty appearance of Larry the Bat.
"Smarlinghue wouldn't have had a chance of getting out from under this break if your plans had worked out! And I didn't know you, of course, because you were a Chicago crook." He took off the dead man's mask, and played his flashlight for a moment over the cold, set features. A queer smile twisted Jimmie Dale's lips. It was "Clancy of Headquarters"!
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