THE gentleman left the dining room and walked slowly across the spacious lobby of the St. Thomas Hotel. He stopped at the desk, and spoke to the clerk. He received a key that bore the number 1216.
“No messages, Mr. Arnaud,” said the clerk.
Henry Arnaud nodded pleasantly and went to the elevator. He rode upstairs in silence. His face was inscrutable — as calm as it had been the night when its owner had first arrived in San Francisco.
Henry Arnaud’s shadow moved along the twelfth floor beside the man who cast it. Cleve Branch had noted that shadow in the dining room. A difficult thing to recognize — a person’s shadow. No wonder that Cleve had failed to identify the shadow with the one that had flitted through Chinatown.
Calm, deliberate, Henry Arnaud was not the type of person whom one might expect to see garbed in a black cloak and slouch hat, with smoking automatics looming in his hands. The Shadow, as Cleve had seen him, was a personage who had answered the last named description.
Yet Henry Arnaud was The Shadow!
The artifices of Moy Chen — the dabs whereby the Chinese merchant had transformed the visage of Cleve Branch into that of Hugo Barnes — these were childlike when compared to the craft of The Shadow.
As a master of disguise, The Shadow had no equal. His personality of Henry Arnaud was assumed. So were a hundred others — each as effective as this one. The Shadow was a man of changing countenance, and he alone in all the world knew his true identity.
The only guise to which he constantly resorted was that of a figure clad in black — a sinister, menacing figure, that brooked no opposition. Many had seen the man in black, but the countenance beneath the brimmed hat had remained unviewed by them.
The flash of piercing eyes — that was all that ever showed, between the turned-down brim and the upraised collar of the long black cloak.