collection of little steel picklocks--and a jimmy! He would need those.
He felt for them in one of the pockets of the leather girdle,
transferred them to the pocket of his ragged trousers, and slipped the
base-board back into place.

And now he stepped to the gas-jet, and turned out the light. Then the
roller shade was raised, the French window silently opened, silently
closed--and Larry the Bat, hugging close against the wall of the
building, crept to the fence, and, lifting aside a loose board, passed
out into the lane, and from the lane to an empty and drearily-lighted
cross street.

There was no "sanctuary" now. Who in the underworld would fail to
recognise Larry the Bat! He was out in the open, on the fringes of the
Bad Lands, where recognition was to be feared from every passer-by, and
where, if caught, he would do well and wisely to use his own automatic
upon himself! And he must go deeper still, into the heart of gangland,
to reach that room in the basement beneath Poker Joe's gambling hell
where the Magpie lived--or, rather, burrowed himself away in those hours
that were miserly devoted to sleep.

But Jimmie Dale knew his East Side as no other man in New York knew it;
knew it as a man whose life again and again had depended solely upon
that knowledge. By lane and alley, by unfrequented streets, now running,
now crouched motionless in some dark corner waiting for footsteps to die
away along the pavement before he darted across the street in front of
him, Jimmie Dale threaded his way through the East Side, as through the
twistings and turning of some maze, puzzling, grotesque and intricate,
but with whose secrets notwithstanding he was intimately familiar.