Cardona blurted an amazed cry as he saw the face of Kwa upon the crouching figure in the center of the vaulted room. Then, as Cardona raised his revolver, Barton Schofield, as yet unrecognized by the detective, leaped forward and grappled with the sleuth.
The fiendish attack hurled Cardona backward; but as he staggered into the arms of Markham, who was behind him, Cardona fired. Furious hands clawed at his face. The fingers clutched Cardona’s throat; then their power weakened. The attacking monster toppled to the floor.
“Schofield! Where is he?”
Cardona looked toward the couch as he uttered this cry; then his gaze moved about the room, and finally centered upon the figure which was lying motionless at his feet. In the dead face of Kwa, Cardona caught the strange resemblance.
“It’s Schofield” cried the detective. “The old man was the fiend. Schofield, himself! It is incredible!”
The other men corroborated the discovery. In death, the semblance of fiendishness was slowly withering from Barton Schofield’s visage. The countenance of Kwa was losing its gruesome features as the facial muscles relaxed.
“Carry him up,” ordered Joe Cardona. “Search the place; get all the evidence we can discover. The robe he wore — anything else. Those tanks—”
CARDONA stood alone in the vaulted room after the others had acted. He knew now that Doctor Ward Zelka was innocent; that the physician had been forced to flee because of the mesh which Barton Schofield had curled about him.
The detective went forward, out of the vaulted room, up to the passage where the controls were located.
The other sleuths, headed by Markham, had pushed Schofield’s body up through the trap that led into the temple. They had taken the tanks along, to add them to the taboret and a gong of silence which had a transparent rubbery surface upon its face of brass.
Trophies of the superfiend! Cardona was not considering those items. The detective was staring at a new opening which had mysteriously appeared on the other side of the control room.
This must lead to the secret exit which the fiend had sought! Who had been there to stop his escape?
Cardona learned the answer as he stepped forward to investigate the new passage.
From the hollow spaces of a stonewalled corridor came the sinister tone of a distant laugh. Cardona knew the author of that weird mirth. He knew the meaning of the sibilant echoes that persisted like the dying cries of a host of unseen beings.
The Shadow, master of darkness, had laughed. His tones of mystery were a death knell. They were the symbolic notes of triumphant justice — justice aided by The Shadow.
The Shadow had brought doom to the most insidious plotter who had ever dwelt in New York’s Chinatown. The might of The Shadow had ended the crimes of Kwa, the Living Joss!