“What taxicab?” demanded Phil.
“The one that was rolling in here ahead of both of us,” the man explained. “The blackness sorta swallowed it up and when we got here to the trees, it was gone. I still don’t believe it, but the thing was spooky.”
Phil still couldn’t swear that it hadn’t been an optical illusion but this testimony, coupled with his own recollection, made him decide the thing was real. Stepping half into the cab, he hopped out again and slammed the door as the driver was backing to the drive.
Then, with his own cab departing by the same route as Shrevvy’s, both far behind the trail that a third cab had taken on the one-way drive, Phil stole back toward the darkness of those thick-clumped trees. He moved rapidly but cautiously for he didn’t want to run into the living figure of blackness that had sprawled him not long before.
Maybe he’d have to fight that invisible foe again, but first Phil wanted to find what he erroneously supposed The Shadow was protecting, namely the thing that Phil had first mistaken for a ghost cab.
For now Phil Harley was confident that the wayward cab was real; that it was actually the one that he had seen leave the Parkside House; that most important of all, a missing man named Winslow Ames had been spirited away in that very vehicle!
CHAPTER IX
MYSTERY cleared itself, at least in part, as Phil Harley reached the trees. There he found a gap among them and realized, as he came into the midst of the clump, that he was following what could have been once a narrow road.
Moreover, the narrow clearing ended in a style that established the fact. It stopped at a broad brick building, which had a large, sliding door. Looking up, Phil distinguished by the trickly moonlight that the building was of brick; from its cupola, he judged it to be an old fashioned stable, now deserted.
Phil tried the door and it rattled freely, but proved to be fastened on the inside. Off to the left and far below, Phil caught a passing glitter of light and decided to learn what it meant. If he’d known Central Park, he wouldn’t have been puzzled.