Rising from just beyond the shaft was a shrouded form that reared ghostlike in the flashlight’s glow.
Cloaked shoulders obscured a living form. Burning eyes glared from beneath the brim of a slouch hat.
“The Shadow!”
THE discoverer gulped the cry of recognition. His words told The Shadow the fellow’s ilk. This man must be a mobster, imported by Jubal from New York. A local outlaw would not have made so prompt a statement of identification.
The cry, moreover, told The Shadow how the man would act. He had sought to suppress this fellow who had blundered upon the mine shaft. There was no chance to do that now.
Looming forward, The Shadow dropped into the edge of the pit. An automatic swung up in his right fist.
The move came as the mobster fired. Viciously, the thug stabbed flame into the night, hoping to down the archenemy of crime. Hard on the first wild shots came The Shadow’s answer. The automatic tongued its flash.
The mobster went sprawling on the rocks. His flashlight dropped uselessly to the ground. In place of it came the glare of half a dozen other torches. The crew, clambering close, was ready to take up the cause of the man whom The Shadow had dropped.
Jubal’s voice roared hoarse with its command. With it came a fierce growl that The Shadow recognized: that of Chuck Haggart, the mobleader who had escaped after the battle behind the Club Renaldo.
Chuck was the leader of the imported crew. Jubal had brought him out to Michigan to escape the dragnet. With him, Chuck had carried along an outfit of gorillas. Once again, The Shadow was faced by vicious marksmen.
Yet The Shadow’s laugh rose strident, before guns could bark. Weird, defiant mockery was loosed from the pit upon the hillside. His course no longer one of watching, The Shadow was delivering a pent-up challenge that brought fear to the hard men who heard it.
The Shadow was fighting from a stronghold. Resting upon the rough edge of the pit, he was weaving his head and shoulders in the light. Harry and Rex, by their excavation, had provided him with a perfect fortress.
Deep in the improvised pill-box, The Shadow opened stinging fire. Twisting, he aimed for lights. Plucking targets from about him, he sent mobsters sprawling to the turf. Revolvers spoke as would-be killers pointed for that weaving silhouette. But the odds were all against the maddened gorillas.
The Shadow’s head dipped with uncanny fashion. It dropped behind projecting lumps of rock. His automatics thundered from crevices that served as loopholes. Revolver bullets dug up turf; they ricocheted from jagged stones, but those slugs failed to find the defender.
Men with flashlights sprawled. The Shadow picked them as his first targets. A few were quick enough to blink out their torches. From then on, all were firing in darkness — the mobsters at the flashes of The Shadow’s guns; The Shadow at the spurts from mobster revolvers.
ODDS were with The Shadow. His muzzles pointed from jagged edges of rock. When they moved, they merely withdrew, to find some new loophole that he could use in the darkness. The guns of mobsters, however, told The Shadow where their bearers were.
The Shadow’s slugs were crippling. The attackers found no luck. Dropping away from the withering fire, they dropped for cover, firing spasmodically, at total disadvantage.
A lull. Mobsters arose to start new shots. A quick volley came from the blackness where The Shadow lay. The master fighter had paused to reload. Mobsters ducked and stopped their fire.
Another lull. Then came a voice, snarling through the darkness from some sheltered spot. It was Jubal, calling a command to Firth.
“Give me a light!” cried Jubal. “I’ll fix him! Like we were going to fix them in the shack—”
“He’ll pick me off!” came Firth’s wheezy plea. “He’s watching—”
“I’ll give you a light!” came Chuck Haggart’s rasped interruption. “Get ready. Here goes!”
A powerful electric torch released its glow. A burning bull’s-eye for The Shadow, had he chosen to fire.
Chuck had wedged the torch in the crotch of a small tree, ducking as he pressed the switch.
But The Shadow did not fire. He wanted Jubal for his victim. He was searching, from beside a rock edge, to spot the first man who had called. Jubal was beyond the range of Chuck’s torch. The Shadow did not find him on the instant. His keen ears caught a swish in the darkness. His eyes spied an object coming through the air.
Too late to stop the unexpected missile, The Shadow pressed the triggers of both automatics. One shot shattered Chuck Haggart’s torch. The other whizzed close to the spot where Jubal lay. Rising as he fired, The Shadow took the recoil.
As the torch went out, Jubal and his men saw the cloaked form dropping backward. In one split-second, The Shadow had launched himself down into the pit. It was his only way to escape that rounded object that Jubal had hurled high into the air.
One second later the missile struck. It hit just beyond the pit, driving against crushed stones that lay imbedded in the upper turf. The aim, however, was good enough.
A terrific explosion shook the embankment just above the shaft. Flame flashed up; rocks split and timbers crackled. Huge stones rolled down upon the hole into which The Shadow had plunged. Masses of earth, chunks of wood were added to the avalanche.
The Shadow had caught the significance of Jubal’s words. The crook had brought a spherical bomb for emergency. He had intended, if occasion called, to toss the “pineapple” into the shack occupied by Rex Brodford and Harry Vincent. He had used it, instead, to counteract The Shadow’s bulwark at the opening of the mine shaft.
The blast had riddled the slope beyond the pit. Rocks were still crashing — some bouncing into the opening; others clattering down the hillside. Trees had wavered, then fallen about the shaft. The marking birch tree had toppled.
Lights were flashing now as Jubal and his men came clambering up to the spot of chaos. Their torches showed the devastation that the pineapple had wreaked. Large stones had clogged the opening. Earth was sifting through in chunks.
Willingly, mobsmen seized stones and threw them down to fill the spaces in the blocked entrance. The Shadow was entombed, perhaps dead, but they were taking no chances. Their job was to block the space so completely that their foe could never wedge his way out.
As they worked, crooks croaked their triumph. Jubal had turned the tide. The Shadow’s battle was ended. They had balked their superfoe. The uncovered outlet had again been filled.
The Shadow was buried below!
CHAPTER XVI. IN THE DEPTHS
QUICK action had always been The Shadow’s forte. Not only when he took the offense; but when he found need to protect his own position. Grim abandon was a measure that he could seize upon when circumstances demanded it.
Such had been his system when he had caught sight of Jubal’s hurtling bomb. The Shadow had realized that some desperate device was coming into play. He had remained above ground on the chance that Jubal would fluke the opportunity.
In an instant, he had picked the one way out; seeing the bomb coming close to his nest of rock, he had entrusted himself to the depths of the mine shaft. His backward fall had thrown him away from the jagged points that marked the inner end of the shaft.
At that, The Shadow took no easy fall. He struck bottom just before Jubal’s pineapple burst. He kept on rolling, huddled in his cloak, down the lesser slant. His automatics clattered in the darkness; his tight fists helped to break his tumble.
With the end of The Shadow’s roll came the deluge of debris from above. Chunks of stone rattled downward. They struck before they reached The Shadow’s huddled form. The missiles bounced hard against The Shadow’s shoulders. A shower of earth half buried him as it shook loose from above.