Maxwell Grant - The Shadow 245 by The Northdale Mystery

Author:The Northdale Mystery
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-11-15T00:49:34+00:00

"His servants started it tonight. If anyone heard those shotguns, there will be more inquiries. You bungled badly, Sleeper, and that is something I cannot tolerate. Let us forget Mordant until something new develops."

Mayberry's note was a final one, and it assured Cranston that he would gain nothing more by staying around the cabin. With an easy tread that fitted his other personality, that of The Shadow, Cranston stepped from the porch and strode rapidly, but silently, out toward the road.

Up ahead, he saw Bracy. The chunky man had stopped a few hundred yards away, and his figure was plain against a dirt slope. Bracy bundled something, and The Shadow saw him fling it into bushes at the side of the road.

Thereupon,

Bracy strode angrily away.

In Bracy's car, Cranston waited. He heard Sleeper come out to put his own car away. When its motor started, Cranston started his own, under cover of the noise. On the dirt road, he turned on the lights, focusing them on the spot where Bracy had stopped. The lights picked out The Shadow's cloak and hat; they

were the bundle that Bracy had chocked into the bushes.

Reclaiming the black garments, Cranston put them on and drove into Northdale, passing Bracy on the way. As The Shadow, he parked the car in back of the hotel and glided indoors, up to Bracy's room. He saw Bracy enter; heard dull thunks as the fellow placed two automatics on the dresser.

Very shortly, Bracy popped from the room and started down a rear stairway that The Shadow had used, coming up.

Bracy had seen his car parked under a light behind the hotel, and was dashing down to have a closer look at it. Entering the room, The Shadow picked up his automatics and left Bracy's revolver in their place. He wasn't going to let Mayberry outdo him in a matter of courtesy.

The Shadow's own room, which he occupied as Cranston, was in the front of the hotel. He had just reached it, and was glancing from the window, when he saw something that intrigued him more than any of the earlier happenings, startling though they had been.

A man was coming from a spot just beyond the court house - a man familiar because of his heavy overcoat, high-wrapped muffler, and derby hat.

The man was Arthur Mordant. He was carrying another item that signified him: his heavy cane, but he wasn't using it. Mordant was in too much hurry to be bothered. Some personal matter had evidently brought him into Northdale; something that he couldn't entrust to his servants.

In fact, he couldn't trust his servants very much, for he went into his slow hobble as he turned a corner to a spot where his car was parked. The Shadow saw a servant assist Mordant into the car, which promptly drove away.

Since it was after nine, the hour when Northdale went dead, Mordant must have felt it safe to risk a quick, spry trip across the main street, on the basis that speed would surely enable him to escape observation.

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