The Shadow - 80 - The Condor by Maxwell Grant

Author:Maxwell Grant
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Street & Smith
Published: 1935-05-31T22:00:00+00:00

“He’s coming now, Hank.”

As the words were spoken, Sheriff Brock appeared from the cabin path. With him were three strangers.

One of the men on the rock whispered to a pal:

“Reporters - up from New York.”

“Any luck, men?” queried the sheriff.

“Nothing much, Howie,” responded Hank, as spokesman. “Luther, here, found what looked like a campfire further up the hill; but it didn’t strike me as meaning nothing.”

“Built recently, was it?”

“Didn’t look that way. I’d have said them logs have been lying there well nigh on to a month.”

“No use looking at it then.”

The sheriff waved for searchers to come down from the rock. They had been searching the terrain individually; Table Rock was their meeting place. Obviously, Brock was going back to town, and the members of his party were glad to do the same.

TEN minutes after the searchers had left the ledge, a figure appeared silently from a lower path. It was The Shadow, in the guise of Henry Arnaud. Up here on the slope, he had found little difficulty in avoiding the spreadout searchers.

Skirting the ledge, The Shadow cut in to the spot that he had examined on the night before, where loose stones had marked progress up the slope. Tracing through scrub, he reached a tiny clearing. There, under the shelter of a dwarfed pine tree, he found the fire that Luther had reported.

Blackened logs were all that remained above gray ashes. But The Shadow, pressing logs aside, found something that brought a soft laugh from his lips. It was the stump of a hand-fashioned cigarette.

To The Shadow’s observation, this fire was of fairly recent building. Chunks from the small logs indicated that someone had been careful to thoroughly extinguish it. That was why Hank had decided the fire was a month old. The Shadow’s estimate limited its age to a week or less.

This tiny clearing was well hidden. A fire, burning here, could not have been seen from the ledge below.

It seemed likely that the person who had built the fire had come up from Table Rock. The Shadow’s task was to find any other direction that the unknown man might have taken.

There was no path from the clearing. Hence there were two indications, among pressed bushes, that showed the camper’s course. One was down to Table Rock. The other, toward the rise of the hill.

Choosing this course, The Shadow began a trail. A dozen yards along, he made a discovery: another cigarette stump trampled on the ground. Like the first, it was handmade. It had been carefully extinguished.

The trail continued. It bore west, skirting the slope. At one spot, broken branches of trees showed a course through blocking boughs. Another wisp of cigarette paper furnished an additional clue.

These traces were not obvious. Only The Shadow, looking for them, could have discovered the path that a prowler had taken. With the skill of a woodsman, he kept to his task, picking new indications that the sheriff’s blunderers had utterly failed to notice.

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