"Maxwell Grant - The Shadow - 166 - Crime Rides The Sea" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Maxwell)

human being, had begun to stir!
It was drawing away from the advancing trio. They spotted it and threw
aside their stealth. As one man whipped a long knife from his belt, the other
two bounded forward. With expert swing, the knife wielder flung his blade
between his driving pals, straight for the post that made a background for the
fading figure.
The flight of that knife seemed endless to Harry. Then the blade arrived,
point first, to dig deep into the post and hang there, quivering. The knife
had
found no human target, for such prey had vanished. Instead, it had come to a
useless goal, a splintery mass of weather-beaten wood.
While the knife still trembled, the other huskies reached the packing
cases. Their shouts told that they, at least, had found the foe they sought.
But the sequel was not the sort they expected. As they drove into the wooden
boxes, gloved hands gun-sledged for their heads. Amid a clatter of overturning
crates, the dock-wallopers went staggering, to finish with stumbly falls.
Guns began to bark from the inner end of the pier. Other thugs were
coming
up, to help the lone man who had thrown the knife and who was now trying to
pull
it from the post. Out from the scattered packing cases came answering tongues
of
fire from splitting shots of automatics - the same guns that had been used as
cudgels to drop the first attackers.
The Shadow was in action. Harry knew it from the way that his foemen
spilled, even though he could not see his chief among the boxes that served as
The Shadow's improvised entrenchments.
Stopped short by The Shadow's sudden counterthrust, crooks were due for
utter rout. Before they could scatter, motorcycles were roaring down upon
them.
The thugs became a medley of flying human forms, landing dazed and wounded. A
few managed to jump from the pier, among them the fellow who had tried to
reclaim his knife.
Harry Vincent saw all that. He knew that The Shadow had conquered foemen
on the pier. But Harry spied danger from another quarter. Only fifty feet
away,
Pell was aiming a revolver in the direction of the packing cases. Before Harry
could reach him, Pell had opened fire.
Fortunately, Harry did not have to show his own hand. After a few wild
shots, Pell saw the ship's captain coming and pocketed his gun. He muttered
something about "helping the police," to which the captain responded that they
had taken care of matters on their own. He ordered the third officer to have
the gangplank pulled in.


TURNING away to escape attention, Harry Vincent happened to glance toward
that very gangplank. In so doing, he glimpsed something that no one else saw.
In those last moments of chaos along the pier, while the attention of persons
on the Ozark was directed toward the police roundup of the vanquished crooks,
an elusive figure glided up the gangplank.