Shadow 165 - Silver Skull 01-01-39, The by Maxwell Grant

Author:Maxwell Grant [Grant, Maxwell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Street and Smith
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

TURNING to dash along the passage, Geraldine saw a stir of the curtains at the one closed berth. Out from his nest swung the lone passenger, apparently just awake, although he was fully clad except for his coat. He stared at Geraldine as she shouted; she noted the blink of his eyes, the hollowness of his checks.

The stewardess didn’t have to tell what she had seen. The passenger knew it. Like Geraldine, he could hear a crackle from the pilot’s room ahead, see the chunks of metal popping from the passage near the connecting door. The machine-gun hail had already reached the skyliner.

The closeness of his own doom seemed to drive the lone passenger berserk. Flinging his arms wide, he threw himself in Geraldine’s path. Though she knew that a warning could no longer aid the pilots, the stewardess was stubborn in her effort to reach the door ahead. In the struggle, the man started to push her toward the plane’s stern.

Across the man’s shoulders, Geraldine saw the door of the pilot room fling open. One of the flight officers rolled through, a bloody sight. Machine-gun bullets had finished him; and the other, at present handling the controls, was sinking from his seat.

No longer resisting the trapped passenger’s drive, Geraldine flung her arm across her eyes.

The skyliner had begun a nose dive toward a mountain ridge. Flame spurting from its sides, the big ship was beyond the sight of the killer plane that had crippled it. A mass of plunging metal, the Traveler sheared off the tops of trees that snapped like slender saplings. It struck into rock and soil with a force that broke wings from the fuselage, twisting the whole ship into a distorted ruin.

Flames enveloped the thing that was no longer recognizable as an airplane, except for its uptilted tail. The nose had taken the brunt; the wings, as they shattered, had protected the ship’s long stern.

As the flames licked high, a tiny door cracked open. Out pitched the uniformed figure of the stewardess, to land on the ground beside the settling tail.

Then came the passenger, in a grotesque sprawl that carried him beyond the girl. Eyes opening, Geraldine could see the rising figure of the man against the sweep of flame. The thought struck her that he must have realized what was due, the moment that he had seen her excitement.

A killer, like the silver-helmeted murderer in the plane! Probably the man whose life the vengeful attacker had sought, in a duel between crooks.

In that frantic analysis of the lone passenger, Geraldine Murton had summed the very intentions that normally belonged to the crook who styled himself Dr. George Sleed. But in this emergency, the passenger from the plane did not act in the ratlike fashion that Geraldine expected.

Beneath the glare of the flames that were consuming the plane, he stared blankly at the half-stunned stewardess as though wondering who she was. In dazed fashion, he leaned forward, plucked her uniform and dragged her away. Once

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