Jimmie Dale glanced sharply around him, slipped into the alleyway, and, crouching against the tenement wall, moved noiselessly along to the side entrance.  A moment more, and he had negotiated the rickety stairs with practiced, soundless tread, was inside the squalid quarters of Larry the Bat, and the door of the Sanctuary was locked and bolted behind him.

Perhaps five minutes passed—­and then, where Jimmie Dale, the millionaire, had entered, there emerged Larry the Bat, of the aristocracy and the elite of the Bad Lands.  But instead of leaving by the side door and the alleyway, as he had entered, he went along the lower hallway to the front entrance.  And here, instinctively, he paused a moment at the top of the steps, as his eyes rested upon the tenement on the opposite side of the street.

It was strange that the crime should have been committed there!  Something again seemed to draw him toward that empty room on the second story.  He had decided once that he would not go, that there was not time; but, after all, it would not take long, and there was at least the possibility of gaining something more valuable even than time from the scene of the crime itself—­there might even be the evidence he wanted there that would disclose the whole of Connie Myers’ game.

He went down the steps, and started across the street; but halfway over, he hesitated uncertainly, as a child’s cry came petulantly from the doorway.  It was dark in the street; and, likewise, it was one of those hot, suffocating evenings when, in the crowded tenements of the poorer class, miserable enough in any case, misery was added to a hundredfold for lack of a single God-given breath of air.  These two facts, apparently irrelevant, caused Jimmie Dale to change his mind again.  He had not noticed the woman with the baby in her arms, sitting on the doorstep; but now, as he reached the curb, he not only saw, but recognised her—­and he swung on down the street toward the Bowery.  He could not very well go in without passing her, without being recognised himself—­and that was a needless risk.

He smiled a little wanly.  Once the crime was discovered, she would not have hesitated long before informing the police that she had seen him enter there!  Mrs. Hagan was no friend of his!  One could not live as he had lived, as Larry the Bat, and not see something in an intimate way of the pitiful little tragedies of the poor around him; for, bad, tough, and dissolute as the quarter was, all were not degraded there, some were simply—­poor.  Mrs. Hagan was poor.  Her husband was a day labourer, often out of a job—­and sometimes he drank.  That was how he, Jimmie Dale, or rather, Larry the Bat, had come to earn Mrs. Hagan’s enmity.  He had found Mike Hagan drunk one night, and in the act of being arrested, and had wheedled the man away from the officer on the promise that he would take Hagan home.  And he was Larry the Bat, a dope fiend, a character known to all the neighbourhood, and Mrs. Hagan had laid her husband’s condition to his influence and companionship!  He had taken Mike Hagan home—­and Mrs. Hagan had driven Larry the Bat from the door of her miserable one-room lodging in that tenement with the bitter words on her tongue that only a woman can use when shame and grief and anger are breaking her heart.