know, though he inclined to the belief that it was the latter; but here,
in either case, the means of knowing, of helping her, the way, the road,
was clearly defined--and the road was the road to the underworld. But
Larry the Bat was dead and the road was barred. And then a half finished
painting standing on an easel at the rear of his den had brought him
inspiration. It was one of his hobbies--and it swung wide again for him
the door of the underworld. None, in a broken-down, disappointed,
drug-shattered artist, would recognise Larry the Bat! The only
similarity between the two--the one thing that must of necessity be the
same in order to explain plausibly his intimacy with the dens and lairs
of Crimeland, the one thing that would, if nothing more, assure an
unsuspicious, tolerant acceptance of his presence there, was that, like
Larry the Bat, he would assume the role of a confirmed dope fiend; but
as there were many dope fiends, thousands of them in the Bad Lands, that
point of similarity, even if Larry the Bat were not believed to be dead,
held little, if any, risk. For the rest, it was easy enough; and so
there had come into being these wretched quarters here, the New
Sanctuary--and Smarlinghue.

But the mere assumption of a new role was not all--it was not there that
the difficulty lay; it was in gaining for Smarlinghue the _confidence_
of the underworld that Larry the Bat had once held. And that had taken
time--was not even yet an accomplished fact. The intimate, personal
acquaintance of Larry the Bat with every crook and dive in Gangland had
aided him, as Smarlinghue, to gain an initial foothold, but his complete
establishment there had necessarily had to be of Smarlinghue's own
making. And it had taken time. Six months had gone now, six months that,
as far as the Tocsin was concerned, had been barren of results mainly,
he encouraged himself to believe, because his efforts had been always
limited and held in check; six months of anxious, careful building, and