Maxwell Grant - The Shadow - 163 by Maxwel l Grant

Author:Maxwel,l Grant
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf

CHAPTER XVII.

HIGH TIDE,

A SEAPLANE skimmed the waters of Puget Sound and taxied into the shelter

of a cove flanked by high cliffs. Ahead, its occupants saw a stretch of steep beach. They landed.

Looking upward, they saw a path that wormed its way among the rocks.

"We'd better take it," suggested the observer. "That shack we saw on the cliff is located about where the direction finders showed."

The pilot agreed. The two men started to scale the cliff. Halfway up the path, they paused. Plain against the rocks, they signaled to a small boat a mile away. Men in the boat had already seen the plane; they started chugging a course toward the cove.

Resuming their climb, the aviators failed to glance below. They were too eager to investigate the shack at the top. They expected results, and they were due to find them. That shack was the entrance to Zanigew's deserted stronghold.

There was a sight below that might have interested the climbers. Out from a crevice in the rock crawled a slow-moving figure. Painfully, the tall creeper drew himself across a ledge. His foot struck a loose stone, sent it bouncing down the route that he had used.

Clatter faded; finally, the stone gave a faint splash.

The man from the crevice was The Shadow. He blinked at sight of daylight, then looked toward the water's edge. It was high tide again, which meant that he had lain in darkness many hours.

For it had been high tide when The Shadow took his dive into the abyss.

He had heard that fact mentioned; it was why he had made a move which Zanigew had regarded as suicide.

The pit, as The Shadow had hoped, was a tidal basin. Elthar's plunge had been at low tide, The Shadow's at high. His dive had ended in water deep enough to prevent a crush upon the submerged rocks.

Long hours of waiting; then, when the tide had lowered, The Shadow had sought an outlet with it. That had been his greatest ordeal. He had been sucked beneath rocks; had swum under water, through low-arched channels. At times, unruly currents had battered him against jagged surfaces.

Lost in a labyrinth worse than Zanigew's underground passages, The Shadow had been long delayed. The finish of his trip had been a battle against the incoming tide, until he had crawled up into a slanted fissure clear of the water.

There, his strength entirely spent, he had taken needed rest. After that, an upward crawl had brought sight of daylight; with it, a hum that The Shadow had recognized as coming from a plane.

He was looking now at that plane, silent in the cove. Yet he could still hear a chugging beyond a low-sloping point just past the cliff. It meant an approaching boat, summoned by a signal from the aviator.

Would that boat mean rescue?

The Shadow wasn't certain. It could mean rescue for the aviators, if they were marooned among the cliffs, for they had already signaled the boat. But it might mean otherwise to The Shadow, if these were persons who served Zanigew.

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