"Maxwell Grant - The Shadow - 269 - The Golden Doom" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Maxwell)

different route from the one that had brought him aloft.

He used a staircase that led downward through the public section of the hospital. Here were located the
private and semiprivate rooms occupied by hospital patients.

It took cleverness to avoid the attention of the elevator operator and the various nurses and attendants
who were on duty on these lower floors. But one vital fact was in the intruder's favor. The ceiling lights
were dimmed for the night. Only one light burned in each section of the corridor.

It helped the prowler to sneak silently from the staircase toward the spot had in mind.

He faded into the room of a sleeping patient. He didn't enter until he had made sure that the patient was
asleep. Then, quietly, he pressed the call button at the side of the patient's bed.

A BUZZER sounded at the desk of a nurse on duty at the other end of the hall. She rose, went to the
distant room from which the signal had been sent.

She was surprised and annoyed to find that the patient was sound asleep!

While she stood there, wondering who could have played such a silly joke on her, the man who had lured
the nurse away from her hallway post was again on the move!

He raced on tiptoe to the door of Room 317.

This was a private room. The patient who occupied it was wealthy. His name was Peter Verne.

Once a year Peter Verne came to Mercy Hospital for an annual checkup. He came to this particular
hospital because it was one of his pet projects. Verne was a trustee of Mercy Hospital. He was one of
the men who had promised Hanson Bartley a sizable donation for the endowment fund.

The intruder opened the closed door stealthily. His whispered mirth indicated satisfaction when he saw
that the room was empty.

He entered Verne's room for just a few seconds. A slight clink of glass was the only indication of what he
might be up to. Then he reappeared and faded down the blacked-out hall.

He was gone before the desk nurse on hall duty came back from her fruitless answer of the buzzer.

She was angry. She sat down at her desk, unaware that the door of Peter Verne's room was now slightly
open. The intruder, in his haste, had forgotten to close it.

Peter Verne, however, noticed it when he came back from the bathroom at the end of the corridor.
Dressed in bathrobe and slippers, he stared at his open door with a puzzled frown.

"That's odd," he said.

He walked onward to the nurse's desk, still frowning.

"Were you in my room, nurse, while I was away?"