She pointed silently. Timothy gave a faint exclamation under his breath.
A
figure was attempting to enter a ground-floor window of the mansion. The window
was wide open and the man was raising muscular hands to swing himself through the square aperture.
Faint as the lawyer's exclamation was, the figure heard him and whirled suspiciously. His face was a white blur in the darkness, but Edith and her uncle recognized him at once.
It was Bruce Dixon.
While they stared, unable to determine what to do, Bruce approached them.
Edith shrank back as she saw his face at close range. It was twisted with apprehension - and fury. The lips were drawn back from the teeth. If ever murder glittered in a man's eyes it was visible in the narrowed glance of Bruce
Dixon.
A gun menaced Timothy and his niece.
"Hands up!" Bruce snarled harshly under his breath. "If either of you make
a sound, I'll kill you!"
Edith uttered a low moan. "Oh, Bruce - Bruce!"
"Look here," Timothy gasped. "You can't do a thing like this! It's your own father you're plotting against! You can't -"
"Oh, can't I?" Bruce's laughter was like the crunch of frozen pebbles.
His gun forced them to turn, to walk silently past the shadow of the house. He made them proceed to the rear of the grounds. In the darkness, the squat shape of a toolhouse became visible.
Bruce unlocked the door, flung it open.
"In!" he growled. "Both of you!"
Timothy obeyed. But Edith made no move to follow. Instead, she faced her captor with a low, pleading cry that seemed to come from her very heart.
"Bruce! Are you mad? I - I love you! You love me! Or is it all a lie?"
"Love you?" His voice was like steel. "I'll kill you, if you don't do as you're told!"
Ruthlessly, he sent her spinning forward into the pitch blackness of the tool shed. The door shut, and an instant later the key turned.
BRUCE waited to make sure that his prisoners' cries could not be heard far
from the shed.
Satisfied, Bruce hurried through the silent grounds. He retraced his steps
toward the open window where he had been surprised by the unexpected arrival of
the girl and her uncle.
Everything was exactly as he had left it. The sash was still lifted halfway. The room within was black and utterly silent.
Bruce replaced his gun in his pocket, took something else out. It was a blackjack. Bruce didn't anticipate further trouble on the ground floor of the house; but if trouble came, he was prepared to deal with it silently. He wanted
no betraying noise to alarm the old man in the lighted bedroom upstairs.
Bruce climbed through the window. The rug masked the sound of his advancing feet. He began to move toward the door that led to the corridor and so to the floor above.
Halfway to the door, he stopped. His sharp ears had heard a faint creak.
It came from a corner of the room where the tall shape of a highboy was barely visible in the darkness.
A tiny funnel of light shot from a flash in Bruce's left hand toward the corner of the room. It lighted up the dark outline of a figure that had stepped
from behind the highboy. The figure moved slowly forward along the beam of the brilliant torch.
For an instant, Bruce quailed. There was something unreal, eerie about the
slow, silent approach of that black-cloaked figure with the flaming, deep set eyes.
"The Shadow!" Bruce gasped.
The sound of his own voice restored his shaken courage. He leaped forward,
grappled with The Shadow.
A STRANGE duel followed - a furious battle between blackjack and clubbed gun. For The Shadow made no effort to fire. He merely used his weapon as a parry to ward off the furious blows that rained at his skull from the whizzing blackjack.
The electric torch had fallen to the floor. Its beam still sent a narrow patch of radiance across the room.
The feet of the two antagonists made no sound on the soft rug. The Shadow kept giving ground, foot after foot. Once, he had a good chance to smash Bruce's skull with a quick blow of his gun butt. But he contented him with that
same peculiar defensiveness - a slow retreat.
He was almost at the open square of the window when the chance came for which he had been watching. The Shadow swerved. His free hand darted like lightning to the hollow of the young man's collar bone. He dropped his gun and clamped the other black-gloved hand on Bruce's forearm.
It was perfect jujutsu, but The Shadow did not apply pressure enough to cause his foe to scream with agony. He merely threw Bruce backward so that he sprawled full length on the soft rug.
The Shadow immediately bent and recovered his own dropped gun. As he did so, he made an intentionally awkward movement. A scrap of paper fell from his pocket to the floor. The Shadow took no apparent notice of his loss.
With a gasp of simulated terror, he escaped through the window. It was the
only cry he had uttered during the whole strange combat and he took care to keep
it low-toned.
By the time Bruce reached the window, The Shadow had fled into the darkness of the grounds.
Arnold Dixon's son turned away with a snarl of triumph. He had beaten The Shadow at his own game. He was free now to press his criminal plan to completion. He was certain that his father had heard nothing of the silent fight down here on the ground floor.
But as he turned to hurry to the staircase, he saw the scrap of paper that
had fallen from The Shadow's pocket. It lay in the light of the electric torch,
crumpled and white. Bruce's eyes gleamed as he saw it.
He picked it up, smoothed it with trembling fingers. It seemed to be the identical paper that The Shadow had obtained when Paul Rodney dropped it in the
house of the dead Snaper and Hooley.
Bruce read the awkward printing of the first two lines with eager attention. He didn't know it, but the lines were a perfect reproduction of the original; a photostatic copy:
When the Indian is high follow his nose and reach under It wasn't the cryptic sentence that made Bruce's eyes gleam. It was the typewritten paragraph that followed:
Memo: The "Indian" is a rock formation at the base of the cliff below the house that was burned. It is only "high" when the low tide exposes it. By sighting in a straight line from the nose, a spot is reached on the surface of the water that covers the entrance to a submerged tunnel leading inside the cliff itself. Reaching under at this exact spot will disclose the existence of the tunnel. It must logically lead to the place where the stolen Cup of Confucius is buried.
Bruce read the typed memo with a hissing intake of his breath. He darted to the open window and sprang out. His form disappeared in the blackness outside.
It was exactly what The Shadow had wanted him to do. Bruce had swallowed the bait and was off to retrieve for himself the million-dollar treasure from the ancient past of China.
Crouched close to the ground, The Shadow watched the panting young man flee.
CHAPTER XVI
CHANGED ORDERS
A MAN was crying out bitter words in the lighted top-floor room of the Dixon mansion. The man was Arnold Dixon himself. He sat bound and helpless in a
chair, glaring at two other men who sat a few feet away from him, guns in their
alert hands.
One of these silent captors was Clyde Burke, of the Classic, famous New York reporter and a loyal agent of The Shadow. His companion was Harry Vincent,
another agent, who was also there by orders received over the telephone from Burbank. It was those orders that had resulted in the tying up of the millionaire by these resolute intruders.
Clyde and Vincent had been told to guard Arnold Dixon and prevent, by whatever means they thought necessary, his leaving the house. They were to stay