“I’m leaving you now. Work fast on this.”
Reds Mackin left. For a long time after the visitor had gone, Spotter remained at the table. His face was wrapped in an intense expression of concentration, as if he were trying to pick something out of the back of his brain.
“Reds Mackin!” he exclaimed to himself. “He Looks like Reds Mackin. He talks like Reds Mackin. He acts like Reds Mackin. But he ain’t Reds Mackin!”
The little man scowled grimly.
“The Shadow!” he mumbled. “That’s who he is! He couldn’t be no one else. Well, he’s in for it this time. Tried to cross Spotter, did he?”
A scheme was working in the crafty brain. Spotter’s lips formed a wicked grin. Then, suddenly, Spotter sprang to his feet, shaking with sudden terror.
He had heard a sound — a low, almost inaudible sound — a sound that had reached his brain rather than his ears.
It could not have been an actual noise; it must have been some echo of the past — an echo that was a part of the atmosphere of this room in the Black Ship.
Spotter was alone — not a soul was in the stone-walled room. None of the gangsters in the other room indicated that they had heard anything.
Yet the sound was real in Spotter’s frenzied brain; and he trembled as he caught the dim echoes of that terrible token of disaster. For he seemed to hear a weird, mirthless laugh — a hissing, jeering laugh — the laugh of The Shadow!