It was a long while--so long a while even that what had come to be his prerogative in the newspapers, the front page with three-inch type recounting some new exploit of that mysterious criminal the Gray Seal, was being usurped.

The papers were howling now about what they, for the lack of a better term, were pleased to call a wave of crime that had inundated New York, and of which, for once, the Gray Seal was not the storm centre, but rather, for the moment, forgotten.
He drew back from the window, and, settling himself again in the big leather lounging chair, resumed the perusal of the evening paper.

His eye fell on what was common to every edition now, a crime editorial--and the paper crackled suddenly under the long, slim, tapering fingers, so carefully nurtured, whose sensitive tips a hundred times had made mockery of the human ingenuity squandered on the intricate mechanism of safes and vaults.

No; he was wrong--the Gray Seal had not been forgotten.
"We should not be surprised," wrote the editor virulently, "to discover at the bottom of these abominable atrocities that the guiding spirit, in fact, was the Gray Seal--they are quite worthy even of his diabolical disregard for the laws of God and man." Jimmie Dale's lips straightened ominously, and an angry glint crept into his dark, steady eyes.

There was nothing then, nothing too vile that, in the public's eyes, could not logically be associated with the Gray Seal--even this! A series of the most cold-blooded, callous murders and robberies, the work, on the face of it, of a well-organized band of thugs, brutal, insensate, little better than fiends, though clever enough so far to have evaded capture, clever enough, indeed, to have kept the police still staggering and gasping after a clew for one murder--while another was in the very act of being committed! The Gray Seal! What exquisite irony! And yet, after all, the papers were not wholly to blame for what they said; he had invited much of it.