“Smart of Arlene,” decided Phil, with a grim nod. “She faked the stunt the night before. Just a buildup so when the thing happened to me, I’d look back and think she had the same experience. Say - do you think Ames and Older each got a whiff of that stuff?”
“One in a taxi,” stated Harry, “the other in a hansom. Let’s start out and see if we can find them.”
“Where do we begin?”
“At the old Watch Tower, up about the middle of Central Park. That’s where the flashes came from tonight. They thought they had us licked; that we’d go moving all around the park, thinking the glimmer was from one side or the other. But we did some quick triangulation and located the source. Maybe the big shot is there in person tonight.”
Eager to go, Phil followed Harry out through a door that opened on the street, but had no outside knob. He realized then how easily someone had shoved him in a waiting carriage for there were several along this curb.
Phil was thinking too of Thara and how she had tried to help him. Perhaps that was why he didn’t notice the hansom cab that was right now pulling away from the curb. In that hansom was Lamont Cranston, lighting another of those long thin cigars.
Other eyes though must have noted Cranston, for it wasn’t long before signals blinked, away out in the park, in answer to some relayed message.
Meanwhile the hansom was proceeding deep into the park, its driver lounging sleepily in the high box, where he couldn’t see what was going on within. Prowlers among the bushes were following the hansom’s slow curve. Lamont Cranston leaned forward, looked out and blew some clouds of cigar smoke. Then, leaning back into the hansom, he became The Shadow.
Therewith, The Shadow vanished.
Great speculation existed about The Shadow’s vanishing methods. Men of crime had seen him disappear from their very midst. People like Madame Mathilda claimed that The Shadow had the faculty of literally dematerializing himself. Of course there were times and occasions when The Shadow could cloud men’s minds, as was done in Tibet where he had learned hypnotic methods from the Lamas, but in usual practice, The Shadow’s way was to simply blend with blackness.