"Maxwell Grant - The Shadow - 261 - The Museum Murders" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Maxwell)

jurisdiction. Crime was set for a mop-up in reverse - for The Shadow, elusive in the darkness of the
street, was the fighter who now controlled those gaping spaces that marked the ways of entry to the open
vans.

Given brief opportunity, The Shadow would have thinned Wolf's ranks by half, with Cliff and Hawkeye
chopping off all fugitives who tried to escape in flanking darkness. But Wolf, through accident rather than
design, offset The Shadow's strategy. There still was escape from this untimely battleground, and Wolf
took the route, howling for his crew to follow.

They dashed - except for a few who staggered - straight through the gate that led to the Argyle
Museum!

Inside the wall, they scattered as the truckers had. Without wasting a moment, The Shadow followed,
allowing his foemen no time to reorganize. Immediately, the old grounds of the Argyle mansion became
the scene of a fray so incongruous that it seemed impossible that such could have happened in
Manhattan.

OLD Henry Argyle hadn't been satisfied with collecting rarities solely for the interior of his mansion
museum. He'd made a curio grounds outside. Roughly, the place resembled an Italian garden, with
pillared bowers, marble benches, and small-sized bathing pools. To these he had added stone terraces,
topped by granite statuary, a few monoliths, and even a pair of Egyptian sphinxes that flanked the
entrance to a portico running along the house.

Amid this potpourri, van men and crooks dodged alike, while The Shadow in his turn picked a handy
shelter. So bullets were chipping statuary and ricocheting from pillars and benches, with no appreciable
effect. The occasional splashes that intervened indicated merely that some dodging fighter had tripped
into a pool and was climbing out again.

The men from the vans had guns and were using them, but to no more effect than any others. It was
battle hit or miss, practically all of the latter, but The Shadow preferred it that way. Wolf and his crew
were putting themselves more on the spot the longer they toyed around these premises.

The Shadow's main purpose was to control the gate, outside which Cliff and Hawkeye would meet the
crooks when they fled through and The Shadow would then lead others in a drive upon the pausing
mob.

All this while, Carl Croom was showing himself boldly in the doorway of the museum, where Clyde
Burke was cornered along with Ewell Darden and the other directors. Croom could afford to be bold,
for four private detectives were flanking him, taking pot shots at the mobsters they couldn't even see.
Meanwhile, Croom's workers, who included Harry Vincent, had rushed the crates back into the
museum.

Now matters reached a crux. Croom wanted the detectives to make a sortie. They refused flatly; their
guns were empty, for one thing. They'd be willing to defend the museum under Croom's command, but
only if the battle surged into its heart. So Croom bluntly ordered them indoors as a reserve and gestured
to Harry and the other picked attendants.

They had guns, too; unfired weapons that were ready. At Croom's urge, they sallied out through the wide
doorway. Wolf howled for his tribe to "give it," but the command was wasted. Before more than a few
scattered shots could respond, Harry and the other attendants were spread in the fancy garden. Half a