"I know," Brellick spoke rapidly. "I saw the news only a short while ago... Yes, I figure I can take half of Thurnig's share... By tonight, of course..."
Cloudiness was creeping down toward Brellick's head. He couldn't hear the hiss that caused it until he hung the receiver on its hook. Even then, the sizzle sounded feeble, for Brellick was conscious of something far more horrible.
A yellow cloud was all about him, choking, forcing him to gasps that he tried to resist. He was sickened by an odor that he could not identify. He saw the door of the booth so hazily that all outside was dim.
Wildly, Brellick found the handle of the door; he tugged, with no result. It wasn't until the hissing ceased that the door suddenly yielded to his yank. By that time, it was too late. Brellick reeled drunkenly from the telephone booth.
BEHIND the portly man, the yellow gas issued like a ghostly figure from the confines of the booth. It wavered; its coils looked like fantastic clutching arms. That was only momentary. As Brellick staggered away, the air of the passage absorbed the weird vapor. The cloudiness faded; the odor vanished with it.
Brellick was staggering for the open exit to the street. He was puffing clear air as he went, but it served only to increase his stumbles. He was having the same after effect that Thurnig had experienced. Like the previous victim, Brellick was fighting to reach the open.
He was on the sidewalk when he caved. Passers saw the long, hopeless sprawl that he took. A crowd gathered; by the time an officer arrived, they were lugging Brellick into the drug store.
First-aid measures didn't seem to help. Stretched on an improvised bench of soda fountain chairs, Brellick lay in a fixed stupor, his breathing heavy, slow, as though each effort would be his last.
Those who stood near were riveted. Those long gasps were like the slow ticks of a clock, coming in endless procession, until their very monotony made them seem a certainty.
An ambulance arrived; Brellick was started for the hospital. Druggist and policeman scarcely heard the whine of the ambulance's departing siren.
They were still counting those long, deep sighs that had come from the throat of Martin Brellick.
Within another hour, the big presses of the evening newspapers were grinding out early editions of another sensational story. The dread malady of sleeping sickness had struck again, as suddenly as before.
The second victim was not an out-of-towner, like George Thurnig. He was a New Yorker, Martin Brellick, who had been in Manhattan constantly for the past month.
It happened that photographs of both victims were available. Those pictures were rushed to press, and for a caption, a quick-witted editor coined a phrase that aptly described the state of the men concerned.
The caption read: "Dead Men Who Live."
Both cases, however, were classed as the result of a growing epidemic. The possibility of crime was too remote to be considered. The cases were outside the ordinary realm of police investigation, precisely as a master criminal had intended that they should be.
Perhaps that master mind had overlooked the fact that in New York, there dwelt a being who could scent crime where others believed that it did not exist.
That personage was one whose power was feared throughout the underworld, though crooks had never learned his identity. Crimeland knew that being only as The Shadow.
And The Shadow, alone, could solve the riddle of the Dead Who Lived!
CHAPTER III. LINKS TO CRIME
THAT afternoon, a visitor stood in the hotel room where George Thurnig had collapsed the night before.
The stranger was tall; leisurely of manner. His calm face was masklike, and the contours of his features gave him a hawkish air.
As he smoked a thin cigar, the visitor strolled idly about the room. He paused at the window, to stare indifferently toward the sky line of Manhattan. He stopped at a table to flick cigar ashes into a tray.
Choosing an easy-chair, he sat there smoking in the patient manner of a person who is bored; but too polite to show it.
All the while, however, that visitor had been busy. His eyes, seemingly idle, had taken in every feature of the room. He had noted the writing desk where Thurnig had last been seated. He had checked on the position of the telephone. He had even examined the window sill, near which the victim had been found.
A serious-faced young man stepped into the room. He had a brisk, professional manner. Methodically, he remarked:
"I shall be ready very soon, Mr. Cranston. If you can wait a few minutes longer -"
"Quite all right, Doctor Sayre," Cranston spoke from his chair. "I am in no hurry to leave."
Sayre left. Cranston arose; he stopped to relight his cigar close beside the door of a clothes closet. That door was partly open. Cranston reached through, tugged a light cord. His eyes showed a keen glint as they studied the interior of the closet.
Thurnig's tuxedo was hanging there. Cranston's hand probed the pockets, then extinguished the light.
His survey of the room was complete. Nowhere had this visitor uncovered a clue that indicated crime.
Cranston's eyes, though, were fixed upon a final spot that could scarcely be called a portion of the room.
That spot was the Servidor in the door to the corridor.
The door was ajar. Stepping to it, Cranston was half visible from the hall, as his inside hand opened the Servidor. He shifted the door slightly; light from the window disclosed the Servidor's interior.
Keen eyes made an instant discovery.
The latch inside the inner door had a tiny plunger that could be pressed downward to set a signal, indicating when clothes were in the Servidor. That plunger was circled by a small metal clamp; an object that had no regular purpose.
Cranston tried the plunger. Because of the girding clamp, the plunger did not push to its full depth.
Examining the clamp closely, Cranston noted the glisten of a broken wire. To ordinary observers, the tiny clamp would have passed notice, for it might have belonged on the plunger.
Cranston was no ordinary observer.
He had found a clue, from which he reconstructed the past. That clue meant the possibility of a mechanism once set inside the Servidor; a device which, prior to its removal, could have brought ill fortune to George Thurnig.
SOON, Cranston and Sayre were riding away from the hotel. Presumably, Lamont Cranston, wealthy New York clubman and world adventurer and traveler, had merely accompanied Doctor Rupert Sayre on a visit wherein the physician was investigating Thurnig's malady. Sayre was a specialist in the treatment of rare diseases. It was logical that he should have gone to see the hotel physician.
"Thurnig's case," declared Sayre, "shows marked symptoms of encephalitis lethargica, an affliction to which the term 'sleeping sickness' has been popularly applied. Quite different from trypanosomiasis, the African malady carried by the tsetse fly.
"I prefer, however, to reserve a positive diagnosis until we learn if other cases occur. Encephalitis strikes as an epidemic, although it attacks only a very small portion of the population."
Sayre was thinking deeply, and with good reason. He had met with other strange ailments in the past; cases in which Cranston had shown interest. Invariably, they had turned out to be of human making: criminal thrusts covered by the appearance of a disease.
Those cases had been investigated by a mysterious being known as The Shadow. Through them, Sayre had met Cranston. The physician was sometimes inclined to believe that Lamont Cranston and The Shadow were identical; at other times, that supposition seemed doubtful.