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 the 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.