“Some one went in there—”
The officers leaped to the door and yanked it open. To their ears came the last echoes of a strange, weird laugh. Only one man was in the room. That was Gifford Morton, sprawled upon the floor. The leading policeman dashed to the open window.
“He must have gone through here if he—”
The officer stared downward — a sheer drop of a hundred feet to a courtyard below. Amazed, he looked upward and spied a silhouetted form, clinging bat-like to the wall above.
“He’s gone up” — the policeman’s words formed a startled gasp, as he turned back into the room — “up the wall — hanging to the cornice—”
“Get him!” came the cry.
The policeman leaned from the window. He fired upward just as the clinging form disappeared into a window above. A taunting laugh followed the futile shot.
THE captured gangsters were unresisting. All the prisoners were wounded; a few were dying; others — uncaptured — were dead. A dozen policemen, not needed here, dashed through the corridors and up the stairs, to cut off the retreat of the figure which had departed by the window. They did not know the heroic part that he had played tonight. They had mistaken The Shadow for an enemy.
The frantic search covered all the upper stories of the hotel. The police found no one. Guests were questioned; rooms were searched. There was no sign of an unknown person clad in black.
Two officers entered a room on the fourteenth floor. They found a rather surprised guest rising from a chair, laying aside a book as he stared in puzzlement at the sudden invasion.