pool of blood.
Startled, the gang leader stepped over Gouger’s body and entered the reception room. A short gasp came from his evil lips as his eyes viewed the motionless form of King Furzman.
Springing forward, Wolf reached the big shot’s body. He raised King’s head and stared into the big shot’s whitened face.
“King!” panted Wolf. “King! Are you alive?”
Eyelids trembled. King Furzman’s glassy gaze stared directly at Wolf Daggert. The dying big shot did not seem to recognize the face before him.
“Who got you, King?” questioned Wolf anxiously. “Who got you? Not - not The Shadow?”
King Furzman’s head gave a feeble nod. Anxiously, Wolf stared about him as though fearing a sinister presence which still might be within this room of death. Then, to Wolf’s ears, came the gasping tones of dying words.
King Furzman was speaking; his voice was scarcely audible.
“The Shadow,” he said, weakly, as his eyelids closed. “The Shadow. He got me -“
A pause; then came disjointed statements, from lips that scarcely moved:
“Wellerton - gone - Grand Rapids - his mob - Wellerton -“
The head dropped back as Wolf held it. King Furzman’s body stiffened in death. Wolf stared at the gruesome countenance of this man who had been his chief. Scattered thoughts flashed through the gang leader’s brain.
WOLF had come here to damage Graham Wellerton’s connection with the big shot. Predominating in the evil gang leader’s mind was a hatred for Wellerton, whom he had encouraged into crookery and who had outgrown his sponsor.
Wolf had been sure that The Shadow had intervened at the Parkerside Trust holdup. Wolf, therefore, felt that his own failure had been justified, and Graham Wellerton’s success at the Terminal National had made the dose more bitter.
Had The Shadow traced King Furzman through Wolf? Possibly; yet Wolf, proud of his own craftiness, was looking for another explanation.
His eyes gleamed shrewdly; his lips twisted with hatred. He thought of Graham Wellerton, away on the road to Michigan.
A keen suspicion came into Wolf’s mind. The gang leader arose; his fists tightened. His thoughts changed suddenly, as Wolf spied the telephone upon the floor. At that moment, the gang leader’s schemes dwindled as the instinct of self-preservation took hold upon Wolf’s evil brain.
Had King Furzman tried to make a call for aid before encountering The Shadow? King was dead; so was Gouger. Both had been shot in some swift fray. Wolf realized that the telephone might have served as an alarm.
Quickly, the evil-faced gang leader hurried toward the anteroom. Arriving there, he peered into the empty corridor; then skulked forth toward the elevators. He heard a clang at one of the metal doors and made a quick dive for the safety of the stairway.
HE was just in time. The door of the elevator shaft opened and out stepped a swarthy individual whom Wolf recognized as Joe Cardona, ace of New York detectives. Sneaking down the stairway, Wolf thought only of making a getaway.
As he reached a lower floor, the gang leader heard men coming up. Hastily, the gangster tried apartment doors and was fortunate enough to find one that opened.
He discovered that the apartment was empty. He found a window that was some ten feet above the roof of a low, adjoining building. Wolf scrambled through this exit. He beat his way across the roof, broke open a trapdoor and dropped down into the top floor of an old-fashioned apartment building.
From then on, escape was easy.
As Wolf hurried from the vicinity of the apartment house where King Furzman had been slain, his scheming mind again began to function. Thoughts of Graham Wellerton, free and on the road to independent crime, were infuriating to Wolf.
Entering a cigar store, Wolf made a telephone call. He spoke in an eager tone to the man who answered.
“That you, Garry?” Wolf inquired. “Yeah. This is Wolf Daggert… Say - can you get hold of a good fast wagon? Good… I got somethin’ that’ll work out great… Sure - I’m scrammin’ from New York… No - the bulls ain’t on my trail… I’ll put you wise when you show up with the boat. Sure. I can meet you at the garage. Where is it?… Give me the address.”
ONE hour later, Wolf Daggert and his companion, Garry, were whirling along a New Jersey highway. Wolf, his evil face wearing an ugly smile, was pouring out his story while Garry replied with understanding chuckles.
“If we get a break,” Wolf was explaining, “we’ll catch up with them guys before they get to Grand Rapids. They’ll be goin’ straight there -“
“We may pass them on the road,” commented Garry doubtfully.
“Maybe,” agreed Wolf, “but that ain’t goin’ to matter anyway. If we get into Grand Rapids ahead of them, we can make out all right. Say - wait until I get a hold of Wellerton’s mob and spill what I’ve got to say -“
Wolf’s speech ended; the gang leader stuck his head from the side window of the speeding car and looked upward to see a huge monoplane roaring overhead.
The swift metal bird, its searchlight ablaze, was winging past the automobile at tremendous speed. Wolf settled back in the seat and turned to Garry.
“Say,” he commented, “that guy was hummin’ along. Boy - if he was bound for Grand Rapids, he’d get there plenty quick.”
The airplane’s hum was fading far ahead as Wolf Daggert completed his statement. The shrewd gang leader said nothing more. His thoughts were of the chase which he had undertaken, a pursuit that would end when he and Garry had caught up with Graham Wellerton.
Chance had intervened. By a freak of fate, Wolf Daggert had learned facts from the dying lips of King Furzman. The gang leader knew where Graham Wellerton was heading; he was ready to spoil the plans of the man whom he hated.
New territory lay ahead. Graham Wellerton had planned to invade a district where The Shadow would not trouble him. Wolf Daggert now was planning a course that would enable him to profit by Graham’s brains.
Yet in his calculations, Wolf Daggert never dreamed that King Furzman had squealed to The Shadow before the battle in the apartment. Little did Wolf suppose that Graham Wellerton was riding into a trap; that he, Wolf, in seeking Graham, was placing himself in the same predicament.
That swift plane that had sped far ahead! Merely as conjecture had Wolf suggested Grand Rapids in connection with it. Actually, the gang leader would have picked the Michigan city as the least likely destination to which the monoplane might be traveling.
Had Wolf known who was riding in that ship, his thoughts would have changed from eagerness to trepidation. Realization of grim danger would have made the yellow gang leader turn back toward New York.
For the pilot of the silver-winged plane was a being who rode in darkness. His destination was the city of Grand Rapids. Hurling forward through the night, The Shadow was aiming for the place where crime would later fall.
When Graham Wellerton’s mob advanced upon its intended foray, The Shadow, enemy of crime, would be there to shatter the attack!
CHAPTER VIII
MOBSMEN CHOOSE
TWENTY-FOUR hours later, two sedans pulled up beside a filling station at the side of a lonely road. A man in a dark gray overcoat stepped from one automobile and approached the filling station, ordering gasoline for both cars.
The service man noted a frank, well-featured face beneath the visor of a cap. He also saw a dark sweater
