It was a dangerous, almost desperate chance; but he, too, was desperate
now. To be caught, even to be seen as Larry the Bat meant flinging every
stake he had in life into the game. More rabid than ever was the cry of
the populace for vengeance upon the Gray Seal; more active than ever,
combing den and dive, their dragnet spreading from end to end of the
city, were the efforts of the police to effect the Gray Seal's capture;
more like snarling wolves than ever, the blood lust upon them, mad to
sink their fangs into the Gray Seal, were the denizens of the
underworld--and populace and police and underworld alike knew Larry the
Bat as the Gray Seal! If he were seen--if he were caught! They had
thought that Larry the Bat had perished in the Sanctuary fire that
night, and that in Larry the Bat had perished the Gray Seal. But the
Gray Seal had been at work again since then; and, logically enough,
there had followed the deduction that, after all, Larry the Bat had in
some way escaped.

Jimmie Dale began to remove his expensively tailored dress suit. It had
made it much easier for him, easier to play the role of Smarlinghue,
easier for the Gray Seal to work, that they, the populace, police and
underworld, had of late searched only for a _character_, a character
that, in truth, until to-night had literally vanished from the face of
the earth--a character known as Larry the Bat. But now Larry the Bat was
to assume tangible form again, to accept the risk of recognition, to go
out amongst those whose one ambition was his destruction, to court his
own death, his ruin, the disclosure that Larry the Bat was Jimmie Dale,
that Jimmie Dale, the millionaire clubman, a leader in New York's
society, was therefore the Gray Seal, and with this disclosure drag an
honoured name in the mire, be execrated as a felon. It seemed almost the
act of a fool--worse than that, indeed! Even a fool would not invite the