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Updated: June 12, 2025
Smarlinghue rose from his chair, shuffled across the room, closed the door and locked it, then shuffled back again to the roller shade over the little French window, and, taking a pin from the lapel of his coat, fastened the rent together.
The door was flung violently open from without, a heavy-built, clean-shaven, sharp-featured man stepped into the room, slammed the door shut behind him, re-locked it, and swept a shrewd, inquisitive, suspicious glance about the place. "It took you a damned long time to open that door, Mister Smarlinghue!" he said sharply.
It was still early; there were too many people about, to say nothing of the group of half-naked children playing in the gutter under the street lamp in front of the courtyard entrance, and "Smarlinghue" was far too well known a character in that section of the Bad Lands to warrant him in taking any chances.
Jimmie Dale's fingers, twitching, simulating even in that little detail the drug-wrecked role of Smarlinghue that he played, clutched with a sort of hideous eagerness at the hypodermic syringe which he held in his hands.
I I won't!" Clancy thrust head and shoulders aggressively across the table. "You will if you know what's good for you!" he said evenly. "And, what's more, there's a little job you're going to break your hand in on to-night." "No! No, no! I can't! I can't!" Smarlinghue flung out his arms imploringly. Clancy lowered his voice. "Cut that out!" he snapped viciously. "What's the matter with you!
Smarlinghue, in a sort of stupefied amazement, stared around the room as though he expected to see a gleaming heap of diamonds leap into sight somewhere before him. He shook his head helplessly. "I don't know what you're talking about," he mumbled. "I I heard a row outside there a little while ago. Maybe that's it." "Yes mabbe it is!" sneered the Wolf viciously.
In the last three days, as Smarlinghue, as Jimmie Dale, yes, even as Larry the Bat again, working with feverish intensity, with almost sleepless continuity, he had exhausted every means and effort within his power of running Marre, alias Clarke, to earth.
Malay himself is away this evening and won't be back before midnight; and the door won't be locked, as otherwise the others couldn't get in. Everything's clear for you. Savvy? Once you're in the room, there's plenty of places to hide and that's all you've got to do, except keep your ears and eyes open. Get the lay?" Again Smarlinghue nodded unhappily this time. "All right!" said Clancy crisply.
One might hear many things here if one listened, and he had heard many things in his frequent visits to these hidden dens of this lower world that shunned the daylight many things, but never the one thing that he risked his life to hear many things, from these friends of his who, if in Smarlinghue they but suspected for an instant the presence of Larry the Bat, would literally have torn him limb from limb many things, but never the one thing, never a word of her many things, the hatching of crime, as now, for instance, those muttering voices were hatching it from the other side of the partition next to his bunk.
Spider Webb's old antique shop, but a few blocks away, nestled in a squalid little courtyard just west of the Bowery, and on the same side of the Bowery as the Sanctuary. Some one, out of the shadows of the street, flung him a good-night. Smarlinghue mumbled his acknowledgment from the corner of his mouth, and hurried along. His thoughts were still on the Wolf.
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