"Maxwell Grant - The Shadow - 153 - Murder For Sale" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Maxwell)

before the magistrate got there."
Mutually, the park guards agreed that this was one jam from which Louis
Rulland could neither talk nor buy his way out of. In their opinion, he would
have been luckier had he been sentenced the week before on the drunken driving
charge.
An added statement, however, was more ominous than the man who uttered it
supposed.
"Funny thing," said a park guard, the way these accidents happen in a
bunch. There was that fellow Warling, who was killed when his horse threw him
up on the Wissahickon Drive; and that sporting chap, Landrew, out in Media,
whose gun went off when he was cleaning it. Both of them were worth a pile of
dough, like Rulland. Then there was--"
The park guard cited no further cases. The grim work of removing
Rulland's body from the turf on the river bank caused him to interrupt
himself.

THERE were others, however, who saw Rulland's death as another in a chain
of startling accidents. They were the city editors of the Philadelphia morning
newspapers. Later that evening, big presses were grinding out front-page
headlines announcing the society man's death plunge from the Girard Avenue
Bridge.
None of the accounts beneath those headlines carried any inkling of the
real story.
That had escaped the observation of all so-called "witnesses", for no one
driving across the bridge had guessed that there was a second man in the
coupe, one who had been the actual driver; that is; no observer except the
taxi driver who had been on hand to spirit the man away.
Nor had any riders on the express from New York glimpsed the essential
details of the car crash, with the sole exception of Harry Vincent. However,
of all the passengers on that train, none could have been a better or more
important witness.
For Harry Vincent had come to Philadelphia for the specified purpose of
investigating the accidental deaths that had stirred so much comment in the
Quaker City. Having gotten first-hand evidence as to how those "accidents"
happened, Harry had sent the news along to his chief, in New York.
That chief was a mysterious personage known as The Shadow, master
investigator who hunted down men of crime. Whenever The Shadow gained evidence
of evil, he trailed it to its source.
Whoever the man might be who had managed these murders in Philadelphia,
he would soon hear from The Shadow!

CHAPTER II
FACTS OF CRIME
IT was morning, but pitch-black gloom filled a windowless room in
Manhattan. That hidden spot was The Shadow's sanctum, where crime's master-foe
prepared his campaigns against crookdom. A click sounded. A bluish light
flooded the surface of a polished table. Into that glow came hands, with long
fingers that moved like detached creatures. From one finger of the left hand
sparkled a strange fire opal. That rare stone, called a girasol, was the
symbol of The Shadow.