thick, apoplectic neck--a huge, round face, with rat's eyes.

Clayton dropped Jimmie Dale's hand, and waved his own in the air. Jimmie
Dale remained modestly on the outside of the circle as the reporters
gathered around the police inspector.

"Now, then," said Clayton coarsely, "the guy that's croaked there is
Metzer, Jake Metzer. Get that?"

Jimmie Dale, scribbling hurriedly in his notebook like all the rest,
turned a little toward the bed, and his lower jaw crept out the fraction
of an inch. Both gas jets in the room were turned on full, giving ample
light. A man fully dressed, a man of perhaps forty, lay upon his back on
the bed, one arm outflung across the bedspread, the other dangling,
with fingers just touching the floor, the head at an angle and off the
pillow. It was as though he had been carried to the bed and flung upon
it after the deed had been committed. Jimmie Dale's eyes shifted and
swept the room. Yes, everything was in disorder, as though there had
been a struggle--a chair upturned, a table canted against the wall,
broken pieces of crockery from the washstand on the carpet, and--

"Metzer was a stool pigeon, see?" went on Clayton, "and he lived here.
Moriarty wasn't on to him. Metzer stood in thick with a wider circle of
crooks than any other snitch in New York."

Jimmie Dale, still scribbling as Clayton talked, stepped to the bed and
leaned over the murdered man. The murder had been done with a blackjack
evidently--a couple of blows. The left side of the temple was crushed
in. Right in the middle of the forehead, pasted there, a gray-colored,
diamond shaped paper seal flaunted itself--the device of the Gray Seal.