She had written:  “Things are a little too warm, aren’t they, Jimmie?  Let’s let them cool for a year.”  Well, they had cooled for a year, and Carruthers as a result had been complacently satisfied in his own mind that the Gray Seal was dead—­until that break at Isaac Brolsky’s over on West Broadway!

Jimmie Dale’s smile was tinged with whimsicality now.  The only effect of the year’s inaction had been to usher in his renewed activity with a furor compared to which all that had gone before was insignificant.  Where the newspapers had been maudlin, they now raved—­raved in editorials and raved in headlines.  It was an impossible, untenable, unbelievable condition of affairs that this Gray Seal, for all his incomparable cleverness, should flaunt his crimes in the faces of the citizens of New York.  One could actually see the editors writhing in their swivel chairs as their fiery denunciations dripped from their pens!  What was the matter with the police?  Were the police children; or, worse still, imbeciles—­or, still worse again, was there some one “higher up” who was profiting by this rogue’s work?  New York would not stand for it—­New York would most decidedly not—­and the sooner the police realised that fact the better!  If the police were helpless, or tools, the citizens of New York were not, and it was time the citizens were thoroughly aroused.

There was a way, too, to arouse the citizens, that was both good business from the newspaper standpoint, and efficacious as a method.  Carruthers, of the morning news-Argus, had initiated it.  The morning news-Argus offered twenty-five thousand dollars’ reward for the capture of the Gray Seal!  Other papers immediately followed suit in varying amounts.  The authorities, State and municipal, goaded to desperation, did likewise, and the five million men, women, and children of New York were automatically metamorphosed into embryonic sleuths.  New York was aroused.

Jimmie Dale, alias the Gray Seal, member of the ultra-exclusive St. James Club, the latter fact sufficient in itself to guarantee his social standing, graduate of Harvard, inheritor of his deceased father’s immense wealth amassed in the manufacture of burglar-proof safes, some of the most ingenious patents on which were due to Jimmie Dale himself, figured with a pencil on the margin of the newspaper he had been reading, using the arm of the big, luxurious, leather-upholstered lounging chair as a support for the paper.  The result of his calculations was eighty-five thousand dollars.

He brushed the paper onto the Turkish rug, dove into the pocket of his dinner jacket for his cigarettes, and began to smoke as his eyes strayed around the room, his own particular den in his fashionable Riverside Drive residence.

Eighty-five thousand dollars’ reward!  Jimmie Dale blew meditative rings of cigarette smoke at the fireplace.  What would she say to that?  Would she decide it was “too hot” again, and call it off?  It added quite a little hazard to the game—­quite a little!  If he only knew who “she” was!  It was a strange partnership—­the strangest partnership that had ever existed between two human beings.