Listening, trying to pierce the darkness, he was as still as the silence around him; then he stooped and groped along the threshold.

His hand closed upon what seemed like a small box wrapped in paper.

He picked it up, closed and locked the door again, and retreated back across the room.

It was strange--unpleasantly strange--a box propped stealthily against the door so that it would fall to the threshold when the door was opened! And why the stealth?
What did it mean?
Had the underworld with its thousand eyes and ears already succeeded in a few days where the police had failed signally for years--had they sent him this, whatever it was, as some grim token that they had run Larry the Bat to earth?
He shook his head.

No; gangland struck more swiftly, with less finesse than that--the "cat-and-mouse" act was never one it favoured, for the mouse had been known to get away.
Jimmie Dale lighted the gas again, and turned the package over in his hands.