The Wolf! He knew the Wolf well--as Larry the Bat in the old days he had even known the other personally as Smarlinghue of to-day he had progressed that far into the inner ring of the underworld again as to be on nodding terms with the Wolf. The man was a power in the underworld--and a devil in human guise. In a career extending back over many years, a career in which no single crime in the decalogue had been slighted, the Wolf had successfully managed to evade the clutches of the law until his name had become a synonym for craft and cunning in the Bad Lands, and the man himself the object of the vicious hero-worship of that sordid world where murder cradled and foul things lived. The police had marked the man, marked him a score of times; in their records a hundred unsolved crimes pointed to the Wolf--but they had never "got" him--always the thread of evidence that seemed to lead to that queer house near Chatham Square was broken on the way--and the Wolf, with steadily increasing prestige and authority in gangland, laughed in the faces of the police, and here and there a plain-clothes man, over-zealous perhaps, _died_.
That was the Wolf--but that was not all! Jimmie Dale's face hardened into grim lines, as he lifted out from under the baseboard "Smarlinghue's" frayed and seedy coat, and put it on. Between the Wolf and the Gray Seal there was now a personal feud. Above the reek of those whisperings in the underworld, above that muttered slogan, "_death to the Gray Seal,_" that men flung at each other from the twisted corners of their mouths, the Wolf had snarled, and the underworld had listened, and the underworld was waiting now--the Wolf had pledged himself to rid the Bad Lands of the terror that had crept upon it. He had sworn, and staked his reputation on his pledge, to "get" Larry the Bat, _alias_ the Gray Seal--and in the eyes of the underworld, as the underworld sighed with relief, it was already accomplished, for the Wolf had never failed.
Jimmie Dale stooped down, felt in under the baseboard again, and took out a little make-up box. The Wolf's incentive was not one of philanthropy toward his fellow denizens of crimeland, whose ranks had been thinned by those who, thanks to the Gray Seal, had gone "up the river," some of them, many of them, to that room in Sing Sing's death-house from which none ever returned alive; nor was it, to give the Wolf his due, through a personal fear that his own career might end, as those others' had, at the hands of the Gray Seal; nor, again, was it through any tardy, eleventh-hour conversion, any belated edging toward the way of grace that found expression in a desire to array himself on the side of those representing the forces of law and order. It was none of these things that actuated the Wolf--it was Frenchy Virat, _alias_ one Kenleigh, who was awaiting trial in the Tombs. Frenchy Virat was the Wolf's bosom friend!