In answer came the flame of the automatic. Harry and Jurling were upon the floor, below the level of the window. The Shadow’s answering bullet was purposely high. It clipped a windowpane and delivered a shattered shower of glass to the courtyard many floors below.
Jurling fired at the spot where he had seen the first flash. The Shadow’s response came from another location. A second window shattered. Jurling, fighting away from Harry, fired again. Then, with elation, the crook was free.
Harry Vincent had released him. Those window-shattering shots had been a message from The Shadow. For Harry, brought to reason by the clatter of the broken glass, knew suddenly that The Shadow would not normally fire high.
The Shadow wanted to know that Harry was clear of danger. That was the reason for his strange, misguided aim. And Harry, diving for the shelter of a table, was quick with his return cue. He spilled the table to the floor, just as Jurling’s revolver delivered another chance jab of flame.
The Shadow responded on the instant. Jurling’s shot from one side of the windows; the crash of the table falling at the other end were proofs that the combatants lay far apart. The automatic blazed from the inner darkness. Jurling, with a wild cry fired madly at the stab of light. The automatic barked again, four feet distant from the previous shot.
A brief pause. Then came another spurt of Jurling’s revolver; almost with it, the flash of The Shadow’s automatic. Echoes died. Something clattered to the floor by the window. A groan was followed by a cough.
The duel in the dark was finished. Dale Jurling had tempted luck too long. His random shots, delivered at an ever-shifting target, had proven hopeless thrusts, but The Shadow’s bursts had been promptly given.
The first shots, warning Harry to roll clear, had served as bait as well. They had beckoned Jurling into the final fray. He had even thought the odds were in his favor. The result had given him the doom that he deserved.
HARRY VINCENT, rising from behind the toppled table, was prompt at the sound of a hissed order. He headed for the door of the suite. Reaching the corridor, he dashed in the direction of a fire tower that lay down a passage close by.
Harry, like Cliff and Hawkeye, was clearing the vicinity, knowing that The Shadow would follow.
Some seconds after his agent’s departure, The Shadow appeared at the door to the corridor. No one was in sight. People coming from below had naturally headed toward Suite 1472.
The Shadow stepped into the corridor. From his hidden lips came a rising laugh that finished with a shudder. Then The Shadow was gone, following Harry Vincent’s course.
Through the corridor came the answer to that strident mirth; ghoulish whispers from the ends of the long, deserted hall. Walls had caught and held The Shadow’s triumph laugh.
Joe Cardona heard those whispers as he arrived through from Verne’s suite. As the final echoes faded, the ace detective pressed the light switch. He looked about. He saw Montague Verne, pale and shaky, coming in to join him. Then Tully Kelk, released from his bonds by house detectives.
Looking across the floor, the arrivals saw the prone form of the murderer who had fought and lost. Sprawled beneath the shattered window was Dale Jurling, the killer who had gained just death for himself.
Beside him lay the empty revolver; before him were his outstretched hands. Joe Cardona smiled grimly as he saw the murderer’s wrists. One bracelet was no longer dangling. It was clamped to Jurling’s left wrist.
The justice of it came home to Joe Cardona. First, Tully Kelk had worn those handcuffs tonight. Then the clamps had gone on Montague Verne. Both had been marked for death by Jurling.
But now the bracelets had clicked where they belonged. In gloom-enshrouded fight, The Shadow had been forced to deliver death to a killer. But he had remained long enough to complete the significant attachment of those handcuffs: the completion of a duty which Joe Cardona had begun.
To the detective, those handcuffs were a symbol. Clamped to dead wrists, they stood as a reminder that The Shadow would remember the timely aid that Joe had given in the moment when a master of crime had risen to victory’s verge.
Detective Joe Cardona had received a parting tribute from The Shadow.