It seemed to Jimmie Dale that, in the darkness, the room was full of
unseen devils laughing and jeering derisively at him. It seemed that
reality did not exist; that only unreality prevailed. The Magpie--dead!
It seemed for the moment that he had utterly lost his grip upon himself;
that mentally he was being tossed helplessly about, the sport of fate.
The Magpie--_dead_! It meant--what did it mean? He must think now, and
think quickly. It meant, first of all, that any hope for the Tocsin
which he had built upon the Magpie was shattered, gone forever. And it
meant, that gray seal on the sole of the dead man's boot, that the
murder had been committed with even greater cunning and finesse, and an
even greater security for the murderer, than he had attributed to the
Magpie a moment since, when he had thought the Magpie the instigator,
and not the victim, of the crime.

He was examining the wound, searching for the weapon--it must have been
a blunt instrument of some sort--with which the blow, or blows, had been
struck. There was nothing. The Magpie lay there--dead. That was all.

Mechanically Jimmie Dale replaced the bed in its original position over
the murdered man, and stood staring down again at the gray seal on the
Magpie's boot. It was not _why_ the Magpie had been murdered, it was
_who_ had murdered him! Once, long, long ago, almost at the outset of
the Gray Seal's career, a spurious gray seal had been used before. But
this was a vastly different, and far more significant matter. Then it
had been an attempt to foist the identity of the Gray Seal upon a poor,
miserable devil in order to secure a reward--here it was a crime,
_murder_, coolly, callously laid to the Gray Seal, that the guilty man
might escape without a breath of suspicion. Just another crime credited
to the Gray Seal! No one would dispute it; no one would question it; no