"Maxwell Grant - The Shadow - 252 - Judge Lawless" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Maxwell)

JUDGE LAWLESS
by Maxwell Grant

As originally published in "The Shadow Magazine," August 15, 1942.

He made a mockery of law and justice in his courtroom of evil, until The
Shadow stepped in!


CHAPTER I

COURT OF CRIME

IT was a strange room, this underground place buried in the foundations
of
an old Manhattan garage. A long room, with low ceiling and stone walls, which
gave it the semblance of a prison cell.
The room should have been such a cell, considering the renegades who
occupied it. They were the scum of the criminal sour cream, men wanted by the
police for misdeeds of many sorts.
Not that they looked like what they were.
For one, Dave Channey didn't have a criminal air, nor did he note such
expressions on the faces which he observed in the dull light. Most of them
were
a lot like Menz, the garage man, who had conducted Dave to this underground
domain.
They were waiting here, a score of outcasts, on benches that filled the
center of the room. In front of them was a table on a platform, with a chair
behind it. Over to the right were a dozen chairs of the folding pattern,
arranged in two rows. They completed the furniture in the room.
As for the room itself, it had doors in the long side walls. Dave and
Menz
had entered through one of those doors, and some of the crowd had come through
the other. But there was another spot that might prove to be an entrance.
Behind the platform where the table stood, Dave saw shabby curtains that
apparently hid an alcove. It was toward those curtains that Menz and the rest
kept staring in expectant fashion.
In fact, at that moment Menz was nudging Dave in impatient fashion.
Turning, Dave faced the front of the room again and saw why Menz wanted his
attention. The shabby curtains were parting. Through them stepped a bowed,
crablike figure, whose hair was a powdery gray.
Without even raising his face, the new arrival took the chair. Picking up
a gavel, he gave the table a solid rap that brought everyone, Dave included,
to
their feet.
Across the shoulders of the group, Dave saw a shambling man step up
beside
the table, to receive a nod from the man with the gray hair. Facing the
throng,
the shambler piped in a sharp voice: