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"You tell the boys," said Stangeist abruptly, "to fade away after this for a while. Things are getting too hot. And you tell The Mope I dock him five hundred for that extra crunch on Roessle's skull. That sort of thing isn't necessary. That's the kind of stunt that gets the public sore the man was dead enough as it was. See?" "Sure!" Clarie Deane's ejaculation was a grunt.
Jimmie Dale laughed again still unpleasantly. So Stangeist had taken the plunge at last and branched out into a wider field, had he? Well, there was nothing surprising in that except that he had not done it before! The irony of it lay in the fact that at last he had been TOO clever, overstepped himself in his own cleverness, that was all.
It was getting late TOO late! Stangeist was likely to be back at any moment. The flashlight, in Jimmie Dale's hand now, circled the room with its little round white ray, lingering an instant in a queer, inquisitive sort of way here and there on this object and that and went out.
One by one, at separate times, covering the other with a revolver, Stangeist had permitted them to read a document that was addressed to the district attorney. It was a confession, complete in every detail, of every crime the four together had committed, implicating Stangeist as fully and unreservedly as it did the other three. It required no commentary!
The Mope glared from one to the other; then shook his fist at Stangeist on the floor. "Youse two make me sick!" he sneered. "Wot's the use of waitin' all night? We was to bump him off, anyway, wasn't we? Dat's wot youse said yerselves, 'cause wot was ter stop him writin' out another paper if we didn't fix him fer keeps?"
The Mope heard you tell the girl in yer office that if anything happened to you she was ter wise up the district attorney that there was a paper in your safe at home fer him that was important. Now then, you beat it over ter that safe, an' open it up we'll give you a minute ter do it in." "The paper's not there, I tell you," said Stangeist once more.
He knew Stangeist not personally; not by the reputation Stangeist held, low even as that was, among his brother members of the profession; but as the man was known for what he really was among the crooks and criminals of the underworld, where, in that strange underground exchange, whispered confidences passed between those whose common enemy was the law, where Larry the Bat himself was trusted in the innermost circles.
Stangeist opened the bag, and dumped the contents on the desk pile after pile of banknotes, the pay roll of the Martindale-Kensington Mills. "Some haul!" observed Clarie Deane, with a hoarse chuckle. "The papers said over twenty thousand." "You can't always believe what the papers say," returned Stangeist curtly; and, taking a scribbling pad from the desk, began to check up the packages.
He had flung down the gauntlet to the underworld when, as the Gray Seal, he had closed the prison doors behind Stangeist, The Mope, Australian Ike, and Clarie Deane, and the underworld had picked the gauntlet up.
"We ain't goin' ter run away from them. If they comes before we goes, we'll fix 'em. That minute's up!" Stangeist licked his lips with his tongue. "Suppose suppose I refuse?" he said hoarsely. "You can suit yerself," said Clarie Deane, with a vicious grin. "We know the paper's there, an' we gets it before we leaves here see? You can take yer choice.
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