The Shadow - 125 - The Cup of Confucius by Maxwell Grant

Author:Maxwell Grant
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Street & Smith
Published: 1937-04-30T22:00:00+00:00

Snaper’s legs were broken. The bones in Hooley’s both arms had been snapped. But they had died without revealing the secret of the missing Cup of Confucius. The state of the kerosene-soaked room was proof of that.

It had been torn to pieces. The bed was ripped apart, mattress and pillow slips torn into ribbons. There were even marks where Paul Rodney had tested the

door and walls with a pickax in his mad hunt for the vanished treasure.

The pickax lay on the door, bloody smears on the handle where Rodney had grasped it. Rags showed where he had cleaned his hands before he descended the stairs.

And now consuming flames would burn away all trace of the brutal double murder. Nothing could save the house. The Shadow knew it, as he heard the crackle and roar of flame that was swiftly mushrooming up the wooden staircase.

He knew that only a few seconds remained in which to act, if he expected to leave the doomed house alive.

Yet he stood motionless, while his hand drew a crumpled scrap of paper from his pocket. He read it, his piercing eyes intent. It wasn’t in code. This was a message in which only the dead pair on the floor could read meaning. It was obviously based on facts known only to the murdered Hooley and Snaper. It read as follows:

When the Indian is high follow his nose and reach under There was no period mark to indicate whether the cryptic sentence was finished, or had been interrupted by the arrival of Rodney and his squint-eyed henchman. The Shadow had a strong feeling that the note was complete.

Hooley and Snaper must have written this message for their own guidance.

They must have done it when they had hidden the treasure, before they were surprised by their murderers. Yet the task of understanding it was well nigh hopeless.

REACH under what? And what could the “Indian” mean? To the ordinary intelligence such a scrap of nonsense meant nothing at all. The Shadow, however, immediately divined the circumstances under which such a note might logically be written.

He had no knowledge whatever of where the Indian was. But the fact that it

was to be a “high” Indian and that one must reach down after following his nose,

gave The Shadow all the preliminary information he needed.

He was certain that he could find this tragic Cup of Confucius as soon as he decided it was necessary to bring it to light. In the meantime, it was safe where it was.

The smoke in the bloodstained bedroom was now thick and choking. From the hall door came a scarlet blast of flame.

The Shadow darted toward the front window. Down below he could hear the shouts of men, the throbbing of fire engines. Firemen were visible, flitting across the glare of the grounds. The Shadow’s chance of escaping unseen from the building was practically gone.

Nevertheless, he tested his chance of flight from the heat-seared bedroom window by raising the sash with a quick gesture and thrusting his head out into

the noisy, flame-lighted darkness.

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