The Shadow 265 The Black Dragon by Maxwell Grant

Author:Maxwell Grant [Grant, Maxwell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Street & Smith
Published: 1943-02-28T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XI

THE DRAGON’S MESSENGER

THE anguished shriek that started from Ming Dwan’s lips was interrupted on the instant. So suddenly did death jab home that it was done and over before the echoes of the broken cry had faded. The stroke itself was merciless, but the swift result was merciful.

Crumpling forward, Ming Dwan’s frail form sagged across the desktop. Her hand gave a lifeless slither away from the spot where death had struck. There, where a carved, jet dragon had reared itself into a living instrument of murder, lay a plasmic mass of blackness dyed with crimson. From the gel, the redness began to ooze into a slanted furrow that had plowed the teak of Li Huang’s desk.

Strange how the echoes of Ming Dwan’s cry followed the roar that suppressed the scream itself!

Perhaps it was because the shriek was piercing, voiced in a moment of mortal agony; whereas the roar, though louder, had come with the burst of a thunderclap, an appropriate accompaniment for the flash of flame that produced it.

Yes, death had been swift and merciful, to a creature that deserved death yet could not appreciate mercy - the poison lizard!

His gun still smoking in his fist, The Shadow sprang in from the doorway and caught Ming Dwan as her sliding arm carried her body across the far corner of the desk. Brushing the tumbled laundry from the handy chair, he rested the girl there and tilted her chin upward. Ming Dwan’s breath came back with a gasp, as her eyes opened wide.

The opium-tainted air, the lizard’s hissing death jab, the sudden explosion of The Shadow’s gun - any of those could have been enough to throw a person into a faint. Not such a person as Ming Dwan. It had taken all three - and more to

overwhelm this stout-hearted girl.

The more was represented by the bullet from The Shadow’s gun. The lizard’s darting fang, too fast for a hand to escape, could not outmatch the instantaneous action of a single finger pulling a hair-trigger. The Shadow had proven this with a timely shot that blasted the living trip-hammer midway in its errand of doom.

It was The Shadow’s bullet that gave the death jab, reducing the lizard to the gelatin now on the desk. Ming Dwan had felt the quiver of the woodwork as the continuing slug grooved its downward path beneath her frozen hand, forming the channel through which the lizard’s life blood now trickled.

Her eyes meeting The Shadow’s, Ming Dwan stared, unbelieving. Following his gesture toward the desk, the girl looked in that direction. Her lips formed for another startled cry that her throat failed to voice. Knowing that the lizard’s pulp wasn’t enough to so startle Ming Dwan, The Shadow turned.

The thing to which Ming Dwan pointed was Li Huang. His body was showing grotesque signs of life, as its arm slithered sideways, under the pressure of a tilting head that turned a bloated, sightless face toward the persons by the desk.

Having witnessed Ming Dwan’s slide across the polished surface, The Shadow defined Li Huang’s motion properly.

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