hours for his work of rapine; like a bat he struck and vanished,
pouncingly, noiselessly; like a bat he never showed himself to the
face of the day. He'd never been in stir, the bulls had never
mugged him, he didn't run with a mob, he played a lone hand, and
fenced his stuff so that even the fence couldn't swear he knew his
face. Most lone wolves had a moll at any rate--women were their
ruin--but if the Bat had a moll, not even the grapevine telegraph
could locate her.

Rat-faced gunmen in the dingy back rooms of saloons muttered over
his exploits with bated breath. In tawdrily gorgeous apartments,
where gathered the larger figures, the proconsuls of the world of
crime, cold, conscienceless brains dissected the work of a colder
and swifter brain than theirs, with suave and bitter envy. Evil's
Four Hundred chattered, discussed, debated--sent out a thousand
invisible tentacles to clutch at a shadow--to turn this shadow and
its distorted genius to their own ends. The tentacles recoiled,
baffled--the Bat worked alone--not even Evil's Four Hundred could
bend him into a willing instrument to execute another's plan.

The men higher up waited. They had dealt with lone wolves before
and broken them. Some day the Bat would slip and falter; then
they would have him. But the weeks passed into months and still
the Bat flew free, solitary, untamed, and deadly. At last even his
own kind turned upon him; the underworld is like the upper in its
fear and distrust of genius that flies alone. But when they turned
against him, they turned against a spook--a shadow. A cold and
bodiless laughter from a pit of darkness answered and mocked at
their bungling gestures of hate--and went on, flouting Law and
Lawless alike.