Exactly how he had got there he could not have told; he had only a vague realisation that, following an intuitive sense of direction, he had lost not a second of time in making his way downtown.
And now he found himself hesitating at the corner of a cross street.

Two blocks east was that dark, narrow alleyway, that side door that made the entrance to the Sanctuary.

It would be safer, a hundred times safer, to go there, change his clothes and his personality, and emerge again as Larry the Bat--infinitely safer in that role to explore the dens of the underworld, many of them indeed unknown and undreamed of by the police themselves, than to trust himself there in well-cut, fashionable tweeds--but that would take time.

Time! When, with every second, the one chance he had, desperate as that already was, was slipping away from him.

No; what was apparently the greater risk at least held out the only hope.
He went on again--his brain incessantly at work.