The Shadow - The Golden Dog Murders Part 15

The Shadow stared toward the bench where Rodney Mason had been lying. His left shoe and his sock were there. But Mason was gone. He was no longer inside the sealed room!

There was a deep bluish haze in the air. It was like a stain of someincredibly blue dye. The sapphire death!

Its color was fading rapidly. But its effects remained. Cardona and Vincent were semiconscious. Only the fact that they had hurled themselves flat beneath the rising puff of blue vapor, had kept them from losing their senses completely.

THE SHADOW began to crawl swiftly toward the wall of the death chamber.

On the floor was a scatter of white powder. The Shadow had spread it with a desperate sweep of his hand at the instant the light had gone out.

He saw at once what he had hoped to see - the prints of a man's feet. One of those feet had been shod, but the other was bare! Rodney Mason!

The prints pointed directly toward the smooth surface of the side wall.

There was no indication of panel or mechanism in that unmarred surface. But The Shadow spent little time on the wall itself. His eyes dropped to the juncture of wall and floor.

Again his white powder provided him with a clue.

Close to the last footprints was a smudged set of marks at the base of the wall. A tiny crack showed between wall and floor. A man - either a guilty Rodney Mason, or the clever abductor of an innocent chemist - had hooked his fingers in that crack.

The Shadow did the same. He jerked fiercely. His eyes were dim and his head was reeling. But he managed to move something.

Not the wall, but the floor. A section of the flooring slid backward from the wall. The tiny crack became a square opening. Mason had fled, not outward but downward!

An instant later, The Shadow's torch explored the depths below him. He lowered himself with a quick twist of his body. As his head vanished, there was a faint thump. The sound indicated that his drop was not a very deep one.

Almost immediately, The Shadow's head reappeared. His hands hooked at the floor edge. He vaulted upward into the death chamber. His long legs carried him swiftly to the dazed figures of Vincent and Cardona.

He dragged them to the trapdoor and dropped them through. The fall was not more than five feet. The Shadow's torch glimmered faintly behind the shield of his black robe as he worked over his two agents.

Both recovered swiftly in the fresher air in which they now found themselves. They rose shakily to their feet.

It was another tunnel, they discovered, as they stared alternately to left and right - a deeper corridor whose existence not even The Shadow had suspected.

But where had Rodney Mason vanished? To the left or to the right along that empty gallery?

THE SHADOW pointed to the left. His action did not depend on a hasty guess. It was the result of accurate observation and keen logic. He had seen a tiny smear, of crimson on the floor of the tunnel in the faint glimmer of his half-hidden torch. A drop of fresh blood!

Another drop was visible farther on. And another - The Shadow remembered the brittle tinkle of shattered gla.s.s in the roomabove, at the instant the light had gone out. One of Mason's feet was bare. He had cut his foot on a fragment of gla.s.s before he had vanished through the secret opening between floor and wall. His own blood was a guide to his present whereabouts.

The Shadow began to glide cautiously forward. Deeper and deeper he penetrated along the dark gallery that cut like a mole's highway through the soundless earth.

Suddenly, The Shadow halted. He waited rigidly, one hand lifted.

"Listen!"

Vincent could hear nothing. Nor could Cardona.

Then, suddenly, the sound that had been too faint to hear, was repeated.

It rose shudderingly, like the wait of a disembodied ghost.

As it deepened, it became more human. It was the shriek of a man - a man in mortal terror!

Cardona and Vincent began to race forward. The Shadow was already in motion. With his gun a bright glint behind the glow of his torch, The Shadow was running swiftly toward unknown, horror at the end of the black tunnel.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE GRAY WALL.

WHEN David Frick followed Sam Baron's trail inside the frame building with the high-peaked roof, he was prepared for instant gunplay. He had figured that the building might be the headquarters for Sam's trigger-men.

The moment he stepped into the warm darkness, he smelled the fetid odor of captive animals. His ears were a.s.sailed by the shrieks and jabberings of dozens of monkeys. He waited, allowing his eyes to become accustomed to the gloom. He could see no sign of Sam Baron or of any other human.

Convinced that Baron had already left the building by some other exit, Frick showed a cautious light. He pa.s.sed between the cages where apes gibbered and leaped frantically up and down their narrow steel bars. He paid no attention to the animals. His gaze was directed to a spot in the center of the worn wooden floor.

A hinged section of the flooring had been lifted. Wooden steps led below to the cellar. It was obvious that this was the route taken by Baron.

Frick had no hesitancy in descending. He knew that Baron was unaware of his surveillance. Baron's carelessness in leaving the trap tilted upward proved that. Frick didn't close the trap, either. He wanted to leave an open line of retreat in case he ran into a desperate situation below.

But he found nothing in the cellar to alarm him. Quite the reverse! A door was slightly ajar at the end of the dim, white-washed bas.e.m.e.nt. Again Baron had been careless. Or perhaps, like Frick, he was leaving open a route for hasty retreat.

Peering through the crack of the partly open door, Frick saw that he was at the entrance to a long corridor. The corridor was lighted. Every ten feet or so in the ceiling, an electric bulb glowed dimly. Frick counted three of them.

Beyond the last, the corridor turned, giving him no hint of what lay ahead.

But Frick was a bold man. The gun in his hand was a heavy-calibered weapon that could shoot straight and hard. He began to tiptoe down the quiet pa.s.sage.He guessed that it led to some spot deeper underground, for there was a perceptible slant to the floor.

Turning the angle in the wall beyond the glow of the third light, he could see others ahead of him in the empty tunnel. How far it led onward, he had no way of knowing.

He kept his pace slow and noiseless. His eyes watched the walls, the ceiling and the floor. But there was something that entirely escaped his scrutiny. It was so tiny that Frick pa.s.sed it without notice.

IT was a small peephole. It pierced the wall of the pa.s.sage at shoulder level. The moment that Frick had pa.s.sed it, something jetted without sound from that tiny hole.

It was a single puff of bright-blue vapor. It scattered thinly in the air, directly behind Frick's head. The blueness faded so fast that had Frick turned, he would have been unable to see it.

But he didn't turn. He was staggering. The faint haze of that poisonous vapor had already been sucked unconsciously into Frick's nose and mouth by his tense breathing. He fell forward on his hands and knees. Then he rolled stiffly on his side. He was completely unconscious.

A second or two of silence pa.s.sed. Then a small section of the wall nearest the fallen man moved slightly aside. From a narrow opening, a gloved hand emerged. It reached swiftly toward the gun that lay in Frick's loosened grip. The gun vanished through the small opening in the wall.

For a minute or so, it remained out of sight. Then once more it reappeared. The same gun! Apparently nothing had been done to it. It was replaced within the slack fingers of David Frick.

The panel closed. The corridor lapsed into silence. For five minutes longer, Frick remained crumpled where he had fallen.

Suddenly, his eyes opened. He gave a quick exclamation. It was a sound of annoyance and anger, rather than fear. He scrambled quickly to his feet, like a man who has been silly enough to stumble and fall in the midst of an important undertaking.

That was exactly what David Frick thought! So swift was the power of that blue vapor, so potent its results, that Frick imagined only a split-second of time had pa.s.sed since he had staggered to the floor. He was unaware that five minutes had elapsed.

He was still holding his gun. It looked and felt the same. Cursing himself silently for his apparent awkwardness, he continued his slow progress down the winding tunnel.

He came at last to the spot where the tunnel ended. He advanced cautiously on tiptoe, because the faint diffusion of blue light warned him of a hidden chamber beyond a doorway.

The door was open, but Frick was still unable to see. A heavy curtain of thick blue velvet screened the opening. Through that curtain came the growling mutter of men's voices. Listening intently, Frick was able to separate the sounds. Three men were conferring in the room beyond his vision.

Frick grinned coldly as he recognized the voices. One was Otto Muller.

Another was the cultured Senor Ortega. The third was the harsh, rasping snarl of Sam Baron. DRAWING a small knife from his pocket, Frick took hold of one of the folds of the velvet curtain. He held it rigidly, so as not to move the fabric. The point of his knife dug a tiny hole in the material. By pressing his eye to the hole, Frick was able to see into the room beyond.

It seemed to be a large one. It was depressed a few feet below Frick's line of vision. He guessed that steps led downward to it from his curtained doorway. Directly opposite him was a flat wall painted a peculiar gray. There were no decorations or pictures on that wall. Nothing to mar its sleek gray surface except the outline of a door.

Frick liked the looks of that second door. Two exits from a room were better than one for a desperate hijacker.

Otto Muller was sitting at a desk. Ortega and Baron were hunched forward in their chairs, talking grimly with him. The queer light in the room came from an enormous blue-shaded lamp. It gave the faces of the three men an unnatural grave-like pallor.

They were talking about Isabel Pyne, the girl whom they had captured outside the gate of the estate. Ortega wanted to question her. Baron wanted to kill her. Otto Muller was trying to pacify both men.

He shrugged suddenly. Behind him was the door of a closet. Rising, he twisted the k.n.o.b and threw open the door.

Isabel Pyne fell helplessly forward in his arms.

She was bound hand and foot. Her face was pale with terror. Sam Baron sprang with an oath to seize her by the throat. But Ortega and Muller stopped his grim rush.

"Let me talk to her," Ortega snarled.

He spat eager questions at the girl. Isabel refused to answer. Her lovely lips were compressed in a stubborn line.

A knife appeared in Ortega's slim, womanish hand. He leaned closer, madness on his swarthy Oriental face. But again Otto Muller avoided bloodshed.

"Wait!" he snapped. "Don't be fools! Torture can come later. In the meantime, I have excellent news about the thing we are all chiefly interested in. I mean - blood sapphires!"

He seized Isabel Pyne with a brutal clutch. He forced her helpless body backward into the closet. The door slammed on her despairing face. Muller's voice became smoother than silk, as he said: "We now possess eleven of the sapphires. Ten are still missing. I have discovered something new about those missing gems. They are not scattered all over New York, as we thought. They are in the possession of one man!"

"What!"

"The h.e.l.l you say!"

Ortega's quick cry and Baron's ugly oath each came like the pop of a machine gun. Muller nodded. He was grinning like a wolf.

"One man has those ten sapphires! And, by G.o.d, we're going to have a of them back. Tonight!"

"Who has them?" Ortega gasped. "What's his name?"

DAVID FRICK'S gun jutted in his right hand. With a sudden gesture of his left, he tore aside the draped velvet that covered the doorway. He sprang down a short flight of wooden steps and bounded murderously into the blue-tinged room.

"Maybe I can answer that last question," he sneered. "Maybe the name of the guy is - Frick!"

His gun spat flame as Sam Baron went for his weapon. There was a yell of pain from Sam. The pistol leaped from his paralyzed grip and skidded halfway across the floor.

"One more stunt like that and I'll shoot to kill!" Frick warned through gray, pinched lips. Ortega and Muller sat staring at the hijacker with rage on their twisted faces. But neither of them made a threatening motion. Staring past them, Frick made another discovery that brought a hard chuckle from him. There was one more man in the room. The angle of the doorway had hidden him from Frick's gaze when he had spied through the doorway drape. But he knew he had nothing to fear from his fourth enemy.

The man was gagged. Cords bound his hands and feet securely in a torturing harness. One of his feet was bare. It was Rodney Mason.

Ortega's voice broke the ugly silence. In his excitement, the Maharajah of Rajk.u.mana forgot his precise English. His voice slurred.

"But, Meestaire Frick! How ee's thees? I do not understand! I 'ave hire you. You are private detective. You promise me that -"

"Private detective, h.e.l.l! I've been foxing you, you d.a.m.ned fool! I've got ten blood sapphires right now. Muller has the other eleven - he just said so!

I'm gonna take those eleven gems, and I'm going out of here with them. When I do, the price for the Necklace of Purity is going sky-high!"

He jeered at Ortega.

"You were willing to pay two million bucks to Muller's lousy outfit to get back the necklace. By G.o.d, I'm the guy who took all the risks! You'll pay me four million - and like it!"

THE maharajah gave a shrill, despairing cry. Muller's question cut through it like the snap of a whiplash: "Where did you get hold of that blue ice, Frick?"

Frick's laughter was vicious, jeering.

"I'm the guy who stole the necklace from the temple in India! Tell that to your blasted Dog G.o.ddess!"

He took a step closer. His eyes blazed at Muller.

"Lay those eleven hunks of ice on the top of your desk!"

"Don't do it!" Ortega screamed.

"If you don't, you'll get a slug - right smack through your forehead!"

Muller cringed.

"Where are they?" Frick spat at him.

"Top drawer."

"Take 'em out with your left hand. And if you make a single funny move, I'll blast all three of you!"

Muller's eyes flicked toward Ortega and Sam Baron. There was a peculiar stare in them, a definite message of warning. He was telling his companions wordlessly not to interfere. But Frick didn't catch that quick by-play.

Muller's left hand slowly opened the top drawer of his desk. He opened it far enough so that Frick could see there was no gun in the drawer. All that was visible was a small chamois bag, which Muller withdrew with tremulous fingers.

"Spill the gems out, so I can see 'em," Frick rasped.

Muller obeyed. On the polished top of the desk, there slid a bewildering array of flashing blue flame. Eleven sapphires! Leaning cautiously closer, his gun ready for instant death, Frick caught a glimpse of a crimson smear in the depths of the nearest stone. He laughed hoa.r.s.ely.