"Get him? Huh! I'll get him, watch my smoke!" It was young
ambition speaking in a certain set of rooms in Washington. Three
days later young ambition lay in a New York gutter with a bullet in
his heart and a look of such horror and surprise on his dead face
that even the ambulance-Doctor who found him felt shaken. "We've
lost the most promising man I've had in ten years," said his chief
when the news came in. He swore helplessly, "Damn the luck!"

"Get him--get him--get him--get him!" From a thousand sources
now the clamor arose--press, police, and public alike crying out
for the capture of the master criminal of a century--lost voices
hounding a specter down the alleyways of the wind. And still the
meshes broke and the quarry slipped away before the hounds were
well on the scent--leaving behind a trail of shattered safes and
rifled jewel cases--while ever the clamor rose higher to "Get him
--get him--get--"

Get whom, in God's name--get what? Beast, man, or devil? A
specter--a flying shadow--the shadow of a Bat.

From thieves' hangout to thieves' hangout the word passed along
stirring the underworld like the passage of an electric spark.
"There's a bigger guy than Pete Flynn shooting the works, a guy
that could have Jim Gunderson for breakfast and not notice he'd et."
The underworld heard and waited to be shown; after a little while
the underworld began to whisper to itself in tones of awed respect.
There were bright stars and flashing comets in the sky of the world
of crime--but this new planet rose with the portent of an evil moon.

The Bat--they called him the Bat. Like a bat he chose the night