The Cup of Confucious s-125 Page 7

  That sound from the stairs puzzled him; it was not only the slow thump-thump of descending feet, but a fainter sound - almost exactly like the careless drip of water.

  His eyes gleamed with comprehension when he saw the figure of Squint suddenly appear on the lower steps of the stairs. The rat-faced little killer was carrying a gallon tin of kerosene. He was spilling the stuff everywhere, sloshing it over the floor wherever he walked. And grinning like a chalky mask of death!

  The Shadow was preparing to make a silent rush, when he changed his mind.

  Squint had turned his face toward the staircase.

  "What do you say, Paul?" the shouted, irritably. "Hurry it up! If we're gonna burn this dump down, we gotta get goin'!"

  "Shut up and spill that kerosene! Do as you're told, damn you!"

  It was Rodney's voice, vicious with some unexplained rage. His feet came clumping down the kerosene-soaked stairs a moment later.

  The Shadow watched the ugly pair through the crack of the cellar door.

  There was a crumpled scrap of paper in Paul Rodney's hand and he waved it angrily. This paper seemed to be the cause of his rage.

  "Why do you bother with that?" Squint snapped. "It don't mean a thing.

  They were tryin' to kid us. It's a fake!"

  "The hell it's a fake," Rodney replied. "It means something, if only I could figure out what. I've searched the house from top to bottom. The cup isn't here! Those two jailbirds were wise. They've got the thing buried somewhere. But where? - that's what I'd like to know."

  "That stuff about Indians is the bunk," Squint insisted. "They didn't fight much to keep hold of that paper, did they? That's because it's a bluff.

  They wanted us to waste time huntin' for Indians while they scrammed with the cup!"

  RODNEY opened his mouth to make an angry rejoinder, when an unfortunate thing happened on which The Shadow had not counted. Through the tiny opening of

  the cellar door darted a shall, furry shape. It was a mouse from the rodent-filled cellar. It brushed past The Shadow's leg and ran squeaking across

  the door of the living room.

  Squint jumped nervously and almost dropped the tin of kerosene. Then he laughed with profane relief.

  "Just a blasted mouse! The joint is alive with them. It had me scared for a minute!"

  "Shut up!" Rodney's voice was very quiet. "Where did that mouse come from?"

  "Why, I guess the cellar door - Hey!" Squint's voice shrilled with understanding of what his bearded boss was driving at. "How did the mouse get out here? That cellar door was closed!"

  "Exactly," Rodney cried. "And now it's open!"

  The Shadow had tried to shut it as tightly as he dared, but he had been unable to do so completely because the click of the catch would have betrayed him.

  He sprang from concealment as both crooks darted toward the door.

  His gun crashed at almost the same instant Rodney's did. The Shadow was thrown violently backward as his finger pressed the trigger. Rodney had shoved Squint spinning forward into The Shadow. The impact sent both men reeling, but it saved The Shadow's body from the rip of the brown-bearded man's bullet.

  Squint squealed with terror. The kerosene from the fallen container splashed in a puddle on the floor.

  Rodney tossed a lighted match into the heart of that glassy pool.

  Instantly, flame roared upward like an exploding pillar of heat. The Shadow reeled away, beating fire from his cloak. Rodney and Squint fled. The flames were mounting almost to the ceiling, leaping from puddle to puddle with swift fury. So fast had the flames spread across the soaked floor that one half

  of the room was now impassable. Squint and Rodney were beyond that wall of scarlet.

  THE SHADOW threw himself to the floor as lead whizzed at him from the other side of the room. The crooks emptied their guns in final departure. The Shadow could not pursue them. To pierce that pillar of licking scarlet and orange would have been to commit suicide.

  Suddenly, The Shadow saw a crumpled square of white on the floor. It lay barely an inch away from the advancing flames and The Shadow grabbed it before it could burst into fire. It was the paper that Paul Rodney had been waving in his angry hand. When he drew his gun, the paper had fluttered unnoticed from his grasp.

  The Shadow ran up the stairs with the paper thrust into a pocket. There was no other place to go, now that the flames hemmed him in on all sides. But he had another grim reason for electing to remain a few minutes more in the doomed house. He wanted to find Hooley and Snaper.

  He found them on the top floor. Both were lying stark dead in the front bedroom. Their clothing was soaked with kerosene. So was every part of the room.

  The Shadow's eyes blazed with fury. Both men's throats had been slashed to

  a red smear. They must have suffered torture that was hideous, before the final

  merciful knife slashes had ended their lives.

  Snaper's legs were broken. The bones in Hooley's both arms had been snapped. But they had died without revealing the secret of the missing Cup of Confucius. The state of the kerosene-soaked room was proof of that.

  It had been torn to pieces. The bed was ripped apart, mattress and pillow slips torn into ribbons. There were even marks where Paul Rodney had tested the

  door and walls with a pickax in his mad hunt for the vanished treasure.

  The pickax lay on the door, bloody smears on the handle where Rodney had grasped it. Rags showed where he had cleaned his hands before he descended the stairs.

  And now consuming flames would burn away all trace of the brutal double murder. Nothing could save the house. The Shadow knew it, as he heard the crackle and roar of flame that was swiftly mushrooming up the wooden staircase.

  He knew that only a few seconds remained in which to act, if he expected to leave the doomed house alive.

  Yet he stood motionless, while his hand drew a crumpled scrap of paper from his pocket. He read it, his piercing eyes intent. It wasn't in code. This was a message in which only the dead pair on the floor could read meaning. It was obviously based on facts known only to the murdered Hooley and Snaper. It read as follows:

  When the Indian is high follow his nose and reach under There was no period mark to indicate whether the cryptic sentence was finished, or had been interrupted by the arrival of Rodney and his squint-eyed henchman. The Shadow had a strong feeling that the note was complete.

  Hooley and Snaper must have written this message for their own guidance.

  They must have done it when they had hidden the treasure, before they were surprised by their murderers. Yet the task of understanding it was well nigh hopeless.

  REACH under what? And what could the "Indian" mean? To the ordinary intelligence such a scrap of nonsense meant nothing at all. The Shadow, however, immediately divined the circumstances under which such a note might logically be written.

  He had no knowledge whatever of where the Indian was. But the fact that it

  was to be a "high" Indian and that one must reach down after following his nose,

  gave The Shadow all the preliminary information he needed.

  He was certain that he could find this tragic Cup of Confucius as soon as he decided it was necessary to bring it to light. In the meantime, it was safe where it was.

  The smoke in the bloodstained bedroom was now thick and choking. From the hall door came a scarlet blast of flame.

  The Shadow darted toward the front window. Down below he could hear the shouts of men, the throbbing of fire engines. Firemen were visible, flitting across the glare of the grounds. The Shadow's chance of escaping unseen from the building was practically gone.

  Nevertheless, he tested his chance of flight from the heat-seared bedroom window by raising the sash with a quick gesture and thrusting his head out into

  the noisy, flame-lighted darkness.

  The moment he did so, he heard something below that told him escape from the front of the house was hopeless. Worse than hopel
ess - it was absolute suicide!

  CHAPTER X

  FIRE - AND WATER

  THE sound that warned The Shadow he was trapped was the shrill, angry yell

  of a fireman.

  "There he is! Up at the top floor window! He's one of the firebugs - get him!"

  The Shadow stood revealed at the upper window, staring straight outward as

  if measuring his chances for a desperate leap across space to the blazing branches of an elm tree.

  He saw the blue sheen of a policeman's uniform. The copper was glaring upward. One hand shielded his eyes from the fierce heat and flying sparks; the other clutched a pistol.

  "Come down out of there!" the officer yelled. "Jump! If you don't surrender, I'll fire!"

  The Shadow's only answer was a harsh, sibilant laugh. It was a piercing, eerie sound that carried clearly above the roar and crackle of the flames.

  The policeman fired. His bullet spat like an arrow into the burning casement of the window. But The Shadow was no longer in view as a helpless target. He had glided backward into the blazing room.

  The bedroom doorway and the hallway beyond were like a writhing lake of fire. The Shadow knew his chance for life rested on speed and nerve. Wrapping his coat about his face, ducking his head low beneath the protection of one arm, he took a deep breath of hot, smoky air.

  He held the air like a miser in his expanded lungs. He knew he dared not breathe again until he had passed the spouting volcano of staircase and upper hallway. It was the only route to reach the comparatively safe haven the left rear wing.

  The right wing was already an impossible spot for a human being. The fire had breached a hole in the shingled roof and was shooting aloft like a gigantic

  torch.

  AS The Shadow nerved himself for his swift run, he heard part of the roof collapse. Sparks ascended like golden rain. The Shadow knew that the rear wall could not hold together much longer under the crumbling lick of hot flame.

  He ran straight through the heart of red chaos. He felt heat envelop him like a dizzy, agonized swirl. But his flying feet never faltered. Leaping a gap

  where the stair banisters had fallen inward, he swerved sharply in the fog of smoke and raced along the corridor that led to the left wing.

  He slammed a door, threw himself headlong to the floor. There were flames in this room, too, dancing like evil yellow serpents along the wood work; but the shutting of the door kept the worst of the conflagration momentarily outside.

  The Shadow rolled over and over on the smoldering floor. He managed to smother the sparks that were eating into his clothing in half a dozen places.

  His hands were inflamed and raw, but he was unmindful of the pain.

  Unless he could find a way to escape from a back window in the next moment

  or two, he was doomed to be roasted to a blackened crisp, like the two unfortunate blackmailers who lay with their throats gashed in the red roar of the front bedroom.

  He swung open a window that faced the storm-tossed sweep of Long Island Sound. From his gasping throat came again that grim, determined laugh. The Shadow could see that he had hardly improved his position by his daring plunge through the heart of the blaze.

  The rear window showed him that the house was built on a steep cliff that rose vertically out of the water. Sixty feet below the brow of the cliff was the frothy turmoil of Long Island Sound. The wind that had been increasing steadily all evening had now reached the proportions of a gale. Foam dappled the tossing waves of the Sound as far as the eyes of The Shadow could pierce the gloom.

  An ominous crackling drew his glance to the right wing of the house. The Shadow knew what that meant. The flame-gutted wing beyond him was swaying, tottering. In another instant, the wall would fall outward in toppling ruin from the loosening fingers of the ever-increasing heat.

  A yell of terror eddied upward from the brow of the rocky cliff that was directly below that swaying wall. The Shadow saw two figures racing away, desperately trying to reach the stone steps that were cut in the outer face of the cliff. These steps led steeply downward to a concrete boat landing at the foot of the cliff.

  It was a toss-up for thirty tense seconds whether the two fleeing fugitives would reach the cliff steps before the wall fell. Their blackened, terrified faces were clearly visible to The Shadow at his upper window. He recognized them with a tightening of his lips.

  One of the men was the brown-bearded Paul Rodney. The other was his pinched-eyed little henchman - Squint.

  THE two killers reached the steps and threw themselves flat under a projecting stone. An instant later, with a rumbling roar like a landslide, the whole swaying rear of the right wing of the house toppled outward and down.

  It missed the crouched forms of the terrified murderers, but it penned them temporarily at the head of the cliff steps, kept them from reaching the concrete platform far below their feet. The thing that had trapped them was the

  huge blazing length of an enormous timber that had fallen athwart the descent, rendering it impassable.

  In the meantime, The Shadow was wriggling out on the narrow sill of his window. The door behind him had burst from its hinges under an irresistible blast of flame and heat. Fire roared through the opening like the forced draft of a flue in a furnace.

  The Shadow's hands caught at the vertical line of a metal drain pipe. He swung away from the licking horror that spouted straight out the window he had just quitted. He slid swiftly down the hot length of the pipe.

  His action was obscured from the view of the crooks on the cliff top by the dense roll of greasy smoke. He could see them, however, as they raced like ants along the brow of the cliff, determined to get past the blazing timber that blocked the steps below. They were mad with the desire to descend to that concrete platform lashed by the gale-tossed Sound.

  The Shadow knew why when he saw a speedboat tethered there, its bow rising

  and falling jerkily. Any moment might see the craft dashed to pieces. It was the

  last hope of Rodney and Squint. A feeble hope, too, The Shadow reasoned grimly as he slid swiftly down the vertical drain pipe to the roof of a rear sun parlor. The extension rested on the clifftop like an eyebrow on the enormous stone head of a giant.

  The Shadow crept to the edge of the sloping roof, his clothing whipped by the fury of the offshore gale. His plan was to reach that speedboat below -

  and

  reach it ahead of the crooks. He had slim chance for doing so, unless he dived headlong to the foaming surface of the distant water.

  Rodney and Squint had managed to crawl along the brow of the cliff and pass the obstruction of the falling timber. In another minute or two, they would reach the boat and cast off.

  THE SHADOW'S calculation for a successful dive was practically an instantaneous process of thought. He realized that he had to clear the clifftop

  itself by a ten-foot outward leap. In addition to that, he had to fall sixty feet through empty space to the torn surface of the water. And he had no proof whether the depth was sufficient to take up the tremendous impetus of his whizzing body.

  The formation of the cliff decided him. Only fairly deep water could lap the rocky ramparts of such a cliff.

  The Shadow dived outward and down through space.

  He missed the brow of the cliff by a clear six inches. Down - down - wind roaring in his ears. Then he struck the surface in a clean, knifelike dive and the cold bite of the water was like a healing poultice on his scorched body.

  His hands swept upward and curved him toward the surface. His knee grazed a submerged granite shelf. It ripped his trousers leg as if a sharp knife had slashed through the cloth from ankle to knee. But The Shadow disregarded it in his grim, gasping effort to swim to the speedboat unseen.

  The Shadow's head emerged. Spume blew in his face as he struck out for the

  boat. He dived below the keel and reached it from the windward side.

  Rodney and Squint, almost at the bottom of t
he cliff steps, were unaware that at this moment, The Shadow was wriggling like a huge eel across the wet gunwale of the craft.

  The peak of the bow hid his body from the onrushing killers. Quickly, he had squirmed head-foremost under the protection of the decked-in space. A tarpaulin had been left there to keep the craft from flooding under the wild fury of wind and wave. The Shadow spread it over his hunched body, and waited for the next development of this wild night of peril.

  The Shadow was puzzled by the peculiar flight to the boat of Rodney and his henchman. He knew that it would be impossible for a frail craft such as this to make a trip across the raging Sound without capsizing. Where were the crooks really going?

  The Shadow waited.

  Soon feet thumped hastily aboard the craft. It began to rock crazily with a wild, spinning motion. The Shadow knew that one of the fugitives must have slashed the rope that held it. The sudden snarling roar of the engine stopped the crazy gyrations of the boat. It began to nose forward into the heaving waves.

  The voice of Squint and Paul Rodney became faintly audible over the whine of wind and the surge of water. "Hug the shore, Paul! Do, you think we can make

  it?"

  "Hug the shore, hell! Do you want us to pile up like a spilled box of matches on those damned rocks? Keep your head and leave this job to me. In five

  minutes we'll hit smooth water and then - we're set!"

  Rodney laughed hoarsely. Evidently he had some better scheme in mind than the hopeless task of trying to cross the Sound to the distant Long Island shore.

  Squint's frightened yell justified The Shadow's deduction.

  "Do you think we can make the cove okay?"

  "You bet! Here's the headland now! We're slipping inside the breakwater!"

  THE SHADOW could feel an instant change. The craft raced along without that horrible pitching and tossing that had threatened at any moment to capsize