He had blackness in plenty, here within the hansom, and now being fully cloaked, The Shadow was capable of using it. But that brought up another moot point. If Cranston became The Shadow and then vanished as such, would anything that typified Cranston vanish with him?
Of course it would, when enveloped within the cloak that merged so fully with the dark, but the rule could hardly apply to one of those very fine panatella cigars that were Cranston’s favorite smoke, even when he was The Shadow.
To the question of whether the cigar would vanish with him, the answer was it didn’t.
Like a tiny beacon, the tell-tale cigar showed its glows from within the hansom. As the hack went between the two halves of a low embankment, moving figures saw the light which told them that The Shadow was still there. Four of them, two abreast from each flank, came headlong through the air, like leaping leopards, which they indeed resembled, thanks to the spotted costumes that they wore.
The cigar glowed a greeting as they arrived in a cluster that shook the hansom deep down to its springs. A moment later they were clawing, knifing for the man at the end of the cigar, only to find the end of a curved metal pipe instead!
The Shadow was gone and completely, but from behind the cab came the sharp outside click of a bolt closing a special trap door, which the carriage shop had built into the seat. Up on the high box, Burbank, his face hidden beneath a hack driver’s plug hat, gave a tug at what looked like a brake lever.
Down from the top of the hansom’s open front rolled a blind that looked like a rain curtain, but wasn’t. This was a steel curtain that locked solidly when it hit the bottom. At the same time, Burbank removed a pipe stem from his mouth, along with the length of rubber hose that he had been drawing through, to complete the illusion of a smoker inside the hansom.
Burbank simply plugged the pipe stem into a little tank resting in the driver’s box and turned the knob that released a hissing flow of compressed gas. Four tight-packed leopard men took the full benefit of that knock-out vapor, inside what was now an airtight cell.
A weird laugh stirred the darkness from behind the hansom. From where he had dropped through the self-acting trap, The Shadow came erect and moved into the moonlight, packing away the automatics that he hadn’t needed.
Burbank would take that leopard crew into some port where the police would duly find them. Having extracted four fangs from the very jaws of crime, The Shadow was bound elsewhere, with other work to do!