The two men left the house and entered their coupe. They drove along the street, turned a corner and doubled back to Broadway.
At the same time, a man stepped from the obscurity of a house front across the narrow street. Although he made no apparent effort to conceal himself, he was virtually invisible in the darkness.
He walked rapidly toward Broadway. There he hailed a passing cab and told the driver to travel leisurely up the bright thoroughfare.
This man was wearing a black cloak and a dark, broad-brimmed hat. He seemed to have perfectly anticipated the direction which the coupe would take, for it shot out from a side street before the cab had reached the corner.
The taxi moved behind the coupe as it rolled up Broadway. The smaller car turned eastward a few blocks later. The taxi followed, the driver responding to a quiet order from the man in back.
The coupe reached a garage and entered. The taxi passenger discharged his vehicle half a block farther on.
When Moose Shargin and his bodyguard came from the garage and walked to an apartment hotel not far distant, they were followed by a long, shadowy shape that flitted mysteriously along the sidewalk.
The gangsters went into the hotel building. This was their abode. After they were gone, a soft laugh echoed in the gloom of the street. The shadowy form was again manifest. It moved away.
No one could have traced the course of that mysterious splotch of blackness. It vanished completely, as though it had no destination more real than just thin air.
It was the shadow of a man — a man so shadowlike that he was called The Shadow. It was not until half an hour that this being of the night again manifested himself.