He knew that the killers had not desired his death; yet he also realized that his position with the police force would not have deterred the slayers in their mad desire to blot out Claude Fellows. Only through his prompt, intuitive action, had Barney Higgins evaded a similar end.
The assistant commissioner bent over the body of the murdered man. He saw in an instant that Fellows had expired. The man’s lips were half open. They seemed on the point of speaking; about to cry their knowledge of gangdom’s crooked ways.
Claude Fellows had been wiped out; and with him, the revelations had been suppressed. He had begun to speak, and the powers of the underworld had silenced him.
“We’ll never know,” muttered Barney Higgins. “We’ll never know what he was going to tell us. We know who this man is — but that is all.”
There was conviction in the commissioner’s tone. He was amazed by this bold stroke of gangdom — the killing of a man who was about to enter police headquarters, accompanied by an assistant commissioner.
Higgins wondered what secrets had perished with this murdered man.
Yet, he connected Claude Fellows only with Horace Prescott. Had he known of the greater secret which Claude Fellows possessed, Higgins would have been completely bewildered.
For Claude Fellows had not mentioned his unknown employer in New York. Barney Higgins had no inkling of the most important factor regarding Claude Fellows.
He did not even begin to suspect that the supposed insurance broker had been the confidential agent of The Shadow — that strange, mysterious being, whose name was a word of terror to the denizens of New York’s underworld!