It was all the driver could do to restrain the horse by means of the long reins that ran clear over the top and to the driver’s box above and at the back. The hansom seemed to be squirming on its two wheels and next it heeled over to the right as though something had been shoved from it.
Phil wasn’t there to see. He’d dived away to escape the leopard men. His best course seemed a mad race back across the Oval, so he started that way, hoping these jungleers weren’t good knife throwers.
They didn’t have to be.
Amid the rough turf Phil found an old tree root that he didn’t want and took a spill to the heavy sward. His pursuers were after him like rabbits, but were something much more murderous with their knives. Twisting around to ward off stabs, Phil saw blades poised above as if ready to strike in concert.
With the blades were glaring, darkish faces that looked venomous, but however ugly their spite, it was to be postponed.
Into that same dull glow from the heavy sky came the weird creature that Phil had seen before, the thing that swooped like a mammoth bat, only to evaporate. This time however, it turned the trick about.
The thing blotted all else from Phil’s sight as it struck right into the midst of the savage men in leopard skins. Instead of dwindling to nothingness, it had grown to the proportions of a life-sized rescuer.
The Shadow!
On hands and knees Phil saw the men in leopard skins scatter among the willows. Ahead of them went the hansom, jouncing from right to left, as though relieved of its burden. The driver was gone; he couldn’t risk the lacing he would have taken from willow branches.
As for Phil, he would have tried to help his friend The Shadow, if gun-shots hadn’t indicated that The Shadow was doing all right for himself. So Phil waited where he was, feeling both bewildered and shaky until a hand gripped him and hauled him to his feet.