"Maxwell Grant - The Shadow - 268 - Murder Lake" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Maxwell)

So The Shadow let the truck gain its start while he halted the borrowed car, left it, and scooped Harry
from the ground. Planting his agent in Harry's own coupe, The Shadow took the wheel and resumed the
chase. He'd given the crooks a good half-mile; now The Shadow intended to show them how little that
leeway would count.

The coupe was geared for speed. Within the next three minutes The Shadow had the taillights of the
slower car in sight. They twinkled off above a rise that The Shadow took at fast speed.

Ahead, the highway took a downward slant with a swerve to the left, which would have meant a sure trail
if The Shadow had not been in time to catch a ruddy twinkle bobbing among trees and underbrush at a
sharp slant to the right.

The fugitives had veered along an old dirt road, its entrance hidden past a large rock, so obscure that
even The Shadow would have passed it in his haste, but for the telltale gleam.

Braking the car, The Shadow whipped it right around the rock and hit the dirt, all in a single action. The
fugitive delivery truck was bouncing over another hump less than a hundred yards ahead. Jamming into
high-speed second gear, The Shadow zoomed after it.

Over the rise he saw the truck again. Grooved to the deep tracks in the abandoned road it was jouncing
crazily down another slope, gathering momentum as it went. The Shadow didn't bother to change gears;
power was as valuable as speed along this stretch. Leaning from the driver's seat, an automatic aimed
from his left fist, The Shadow delivered a final laugh to tell the fugitives that further flight was useless.

It was almost The Shadow's last laugh.

With a final jolt the delivery truck disappeared completely. With it went a crash of splintering boards,
marking a road barrier that the truck itself had obscured. Within a dozen yards of the spot, The Shadow
saw blackness dead ahead, engulfing blackness that formed a huge mass of night-filled space!

Like a monstrous creature, that Stygian blanket absorbed the coupe's headlights as though ready to gulp
the car completely and forever. It would have gulped it, too, if The Shadow hadn't been using second
gear.

The motor retarded valiantly as The Shadow's foot shifted from accelerator to brake pedal. Leaning far
to the left, his body swinging up and over, The Shadow turned the wheel so hard that he hoisted the
coupe right out of the deadly ruts, just as the car was upon the brink.

Even with that right-angled turn, the car was hovering over the edge of an absolute precipice, its outer
wheels threatening to sideslip it to eternity, when The Shadow gave a quick jab to the accelerator. With a
lunge, the coupe wedged itself between two trees, one hanging, the other upright.

AS if in echo to the brief crash came a rising clatter from a quarry a hundred feet below, denoting the
final destination of the delivery truck, whose occupants had left it back on the hump, hoping that its
further trail would lure The Shadow to his doom!

The jolt did one thing. It awakened Harry. He saw The Shadow open a door and swing out into space,
then pivot handily from a leaning tree to reach solid ground.