"Maxwell Grant - The Shadow - 317 - Ten Glass Eyes" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Maxwell)

The slide for life had not brought a whistle or a command to stop. The man was not a detective, then!
That made it worse! When the elevator stopped at the ground floor, a badly frightened young man, all
gaiety gone, eeled his way through the maddening crush of shoppers.

He wanted to get out into the air, out where there was some elbow room. As he walked as fast as he
could without looking as if he were running, he kept looking behind him. His head turned for a glance
backward so often that it looked as if he had a nervous tic.

Here on the street, the sunlight bathing everything with a hard brassy glare, he felt a bit better. After all,
he thought, with all this melodrama it should either be a dark black night, or there should be a bitter storm
brewing.

The sunlight washed away some of the fear. He couldn't be too frightened with all these people around.
Why, not fifteen feet away a big burly traffic cop was busily unsnarling a traffic jam.

His mercurial mood shifted again when one of his backward glances showed standing out from the crowd
of anonymous faces the gaunt harsh face of... This was too much. How had the other man followed him?
It was uncanny. Go into no matter what crowd he would, let him dash into a swirling pool of mankind,
still that face arose to haunt him.

Forty-eight hours. He shook his head. Maybe he was getting a bit punchy. Maybe some sleep would
make a bit of difference. If he could sleep... he yawned. Just a nap would help. This way it seemed like
black magic. Perhaps if he were rested, things would look differently.

But where could he go? Where to escape, if only for an hour? He walked on through the streets of the
strange city. He'd never been here before. All his life had been spent on different levels. He was
accustomed to being taken care of. Ordinarily, one of the servants bought his train tickets, the chauffeur
drove him to the station, guided him to the proper track, and practically put him on the train.

Going it blind this way, he could see how much his father's money had coddled him. Maybe if his heart
hadn't had that murmur, if he'd been in the army, he might have become more self-reliant. But if he'd been
in the army, he probably wouldn't have been in this scrape.

He shrugged. He had come to a part of the city where wealth and poverty were sisters in arms. Most big
cities have these strange areas where the poor are being usurped by the rich, where the process has not
come to an end.

In New York, he thought, there was Sutton Place, where a distance of twenty feet could take you from
an elevator apartment to a tenement, and the rent for the apartment for a month could pay the tenement
rent for more than a year.

This was such an area. He could not go toward the expensive looking section. There was no surcease for
him there. Perhaps... he turned to the left. If he had gone to the right? That would have been another
story. Looking back on it, an hour later, he could not help but wonder what his fate would have held for
him had he gone to the right.

TO the left, past garages, past tumble-down wooden fronted houses, past garbage cans whose covers
lay to one side, pushed there by gaunt alley cats, allowing the contents of the cans to fester in the hot
sun.