an automatic.
A muscular heave threw The Shadow to the soft grass. He rolled over and over, trying to squirm out of the clutch of his powerful assailant.
Dazed, The Shadow fought for his life. He saw a gun come whizzing down toward his skull. He managed to duck away and avoid the bone-crushing blow, but
at the cost of a sharp, tearing pain in his side.
The wound he had suffered two nights ago from the explosion on Varick Street was beginning to bleed again. He could feel the sticky warmth. Strength seemed to ooze out of his body with the flowing blood.
His assailant caught him by the throat. The eyes of The Shadow were bulging now. His tortured mouth gaped wide. He could see the grim face of his enemy glaring close to his. It was a man The Shadow had never seen before.
Tiny, pin-point eyes under a curiously white forehead and brown, tousled hair.
A pointed brown beard. Teeth as even and white as a woman's.
The Shadow's head lunged downward. He clamped his teeth on the flesh of the man's wrist. He heard a shrill, animal-like scream and the pressure on his throat relaxed for an instant. As The Shadow took a staggering step, 'Brown Beard' was on him again like a flash.
But an interruption came from an unexpected quarter. The library window flew wide open. Framed in the opening were the tense faces of Snaper and Hooley. They came leaping out to the soft turf, guns glittering in their hands.
Brown Beard whirled to meet this new threat. His gun flamed. The bullet missed Snaper by an inch and sent him diving headlong to the ground. Hooley had
leaped aside as he saw the flash. His gun jerked level as Brown Beard hurdled the fallen Snaper and jumped at him. The gun in Hooley's hand exploded once -
twice - but the bullets screamed harmlessly upward toward the dark sky.
Both men had a double grip on the swaying gun and were wrestling fiercely for its possession. Snaper started to rise from the ground to come to his partner's assistance. A back-heel kick of the brown-bearded man caught him full
in the throat and tumbled him flat again.
The Shadow waited to see no more of the death struggle. He began to run in
an erratic line through the dense shrubbery. He was desperately weak from his reopened wound and knew he was on the verge of collapsing.
The cold air on his face revived him. Already, he could see the dark roughness of the stone wall, when he heard a warning cry.
'Halt, or I'll shoot!'
Bruce Dixon was almost directly in The Shadow's path, rising ghostlike from a patch of weedy darkness. The gun in his hand was rigid, pointed like an ominous steel finger.
THE SHADOW'S movement was purely instinctive. He bent, and his hand closed
over a pebble as large as a walnut. He threw the round, hard stone with all his
strength.
His aim was good. The missile flew toward Bruce in a straight line and struck him squarely on the forehead.
Bruce was stunned by the numbing blow. The gun slipped from his fingers and he slid to his knees. He was not unconscious, but he was too dazed for the moment to do more than grope feebly for the weapon that lay in the grass at his
feet.
The Shadow resumed his flight toward the wall. The rough stones helped him
to gain a hasty foothold and to swarm upward to the broad top. He rolled across
and dropped headlong to the road outside.
He could hear the thud of Bruce's pursuing feet. Sprinting into the bushes
across the road, The Shadow reached the sheltered spot where he had left his speedy coupe. A wrench of his black-gloved hand and the door flew open.
An instant later, the motor was pulsing. The car backed out of concealment
onto the road. The Shadow's foot jammed hard on the gas pedal. The powerful car
responded. It was racing down the road when the face of Bruce Dixon appeared above the top of the wall.
His gun flamed again and again. The noise of the shots was inaudible to The Shadow. The roar of the pulsing engine was like a blanket covering the barks of the pistol.
The Shadow's eyes veered briefly backward, as a turn in the road hid him from sight of his enemy. Faint laughter came from his pain-tightened lips.
Two facts became clear in his mind as he left the estate of Arnold Dixon far behind. Bruce Dixon was not as innocent as he had seemed at first. He was part of some vicious conspiracy against his father. And the conspiracy itself was a double one.
Two forces of evil were fighting each other back in the darkness of that lonely and secluded estate on Pelham Bay. Hooley and Snaper were on one side, perhaps with the aid of Bruce. Brown Beard was on the other.
To-morrow the newspapers would carry another brief 'burglary' item. Or perhaps no news at all. The two rival gangs would flee to cover. Arnold Dixon would attempt to hush up the whole affair.
Only The Shadow knew!
His goal was his secret sanctum, where a private telephone wire linked him
with trained agents who were eager to do his bidding. At the other end of that wire, night and day, was the calm voice of Burbank, The Shadow's trusted contact man.
The coupe roared onward through the night.
CHAPTER V
THE SULPHUR CANDLE
LATE afternoon sunshine was staining the windows of Manhattan with a ruddy
blaze when Clyde Burke sauntered into the lobby of the Brentwood Hotel. He went
straight to the desk, smiling as he noted that the clerk on duty was a man who had good reason to be grateful to Clyde for past newspaper favors.
Clyde Burke, of the Classic, was a reporter, one of the smartest in the city. He was more than that. Unknown to his editor, he was a loyal agent of The
Shadow. The night before, he had received from the quiet lips of Burbank an order, which he had faithfully carried out. That, order was to pick up the trail of Joe Snaper and Bert Hooley. He had succeeded.
He was entering the Brentwood Hotel for purposes connected with a camera that was jammed in the side pocket of his overcoat. He did not tell the clerk at the desk what his real purpose was. He lied smoothly and efficiently.
The fact that Clyde was a well-known reporter made the yarn easy to put across. He told the friendly clerk that he was after an exclusive financial story for his paper.
Two Western business men, Bert Hooley and Joe Snaper, were secretly in town to meet an Eastern executive and sign a huge mining contract without the knowledge of the financial houses in Wall Street. Clyde wanted a photographic scoop for his newspaper. He asked the desk clerk to telephone upstairs and tell
Snaper and Hooley they were wanted in the lobby.
'Why can't you follow them and photograph them on the street?' the clerk protested, uneasily.
'That's impossible,' Clyde said.
He didn't explain why. The truth of the matter was that he was not interested in the faces of Snaper and Hooley. He wanted an opportunity to get clear pictures of their hands, the fingers - particularly the tips of the fingers.
The orders of The Shadow had explicit on this point. Faces of criminals change with the passing years. The Shadow had been unable to identify Snaper and Hooley from pictures in his private files. He wanted finger prints and his efforts had been balked so far by a strange and significant fact.
