their fellows had foolishly moved. But the motion came from Murk's
confederates. They were groping for the coffers, and they reached them. There
were slams as the lids went shut. Lugging their burdens, the crooks started out.
Even then, Murk's raspy tone was adding reminders. There was no telling
how many more of his tribe stood present. Durez and his comrades still
trembled, as did the bankers. Each felt sure that a gun had been trained upon
him just as the lights vanished, and that its muzzle still threatened death.
TWO men in the room were steady. They were two members of the Beach police
force, the pair that Murk hadn't seen go out. They weren't budging for the
present, because the time wasn't quite right.
They wanted to get at the crooks when the exodus started, so they were
gauging their wait for Murk's voice. It wouldn't do to start shooting while
helpless men were involved. Besides, the police felt they could count on
support.
They were thinking of the private dicks who had come with the bankers.
They didn't guess that those two supporters had already sold out to Murk, and
had guns ready, not for the crooks, but for the police themselves. This was a
set-up made to crime's order, and it went even deeper.
Murk revealed its depths when he spoke again.
"Some light out there in the hall," he ordered. The light came, enough to
show guns but not faces, for Murk and the two men with him had their backs to
the wall. "Now, let's look this over. Good!" Murk turned, very slightly,
muffling his face. "Come in, the rest of you. You're needed."
It wasn't a bluff. Two men eased in from the hallway, along which the
precious coffers had departed. They were experienced gunzels, these, for their
crouch, the handling of their revolvers, proved it. If Murk had shouted his
intention, it couldn't have been more plain. He was doing things as they
weren't done even in Centralba.
Murk intended to follow up his gigantic robbery with an absolute massacre!
It drilled home to Durez and his compatriots. It even gripped the
trembling bankers. Most of all, it stirred the two local officers. Quickly,
their hands went to their guns. They hadn't any idea that they were slated to
be shot in the back; that their own actions would be the signal for a complete
slaughter.
That was recognized by only one person opposed to crime, and his response
was singular.
He laughed.
Strange that a laugh should have changed the case entirely, but that was
because the laugh itself was strange. It came as a mocking challenge to all men
of evil; a taunt that they recognized as a threat of doom to themselves.
Sinister was that mirth from the doorway to the open balcony, where its
author was visible only as a wavering shape against the slight moonlight
reflected into the room.
It was the laugh of The Shadow!
Murk's rasp was the lead tone in a chorus of snarls as crooks, one and
all, wheeled toward the spot where The Shadow had entered. Even the traitorous
private detectives betrayed their hands. They swung from the officers they
covered and aimed for the balcony, too.
