"Maxwell Grant - The Shadow - 320 - Reign of Terror" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Maxwell)

The cab drove off into the night. From the rear of it welled up a mocking bitter laugh.

CHAPTER VIII
WHEN The Shadow had made his way up the fire escape and wormed his way into the office of the
Clarion, confusion had greeted his view. Men milling around in ordered chaos were busy with the task of
putting an edition to bed.

Directly in front of the patch of darkness that concealed The Shadow was the circle of desks that is
known as the Slot in newspaper parlance. In the Slot the copy readers, the men who wrote the headlines,
were working fast.

The editor was looking with raised eyebrows at a folder that lay on the desk before him. He said,
"Whew... so this is Teller's legacy to the Fourth Estate!" He read rapidly and before he had finished he
yelled out, "Hold everything. Replate the front page. Teller Tells All is the news head!"

Men swarmed around him at his call. The Shadow watched quietly while the preparations were in the
making. He was still quiescent when a copy boy came running to the editor with a sheaf of galleys in his
hand. He put them on the desk. As the editor began to read them over, The Shadow moved for the first
time. He reached in his pocket and removed a coin. It was a quarter. He held it by its rim and tossed it.

It landed with a ping against a window that was to the editor's left. The editor looked up puzzled. He got
up from his desk and went to investigate. When he returned after finding nothing his desk looked
undisturbed.

It wasn't till five minutes later that he found that one set of the galleys was gone from his desk.

When he discovered this loss, The Shadow, comfortably ensconced in the rear of Shrevvie's cab, was
just finishing a rapid skimming of the missing galleys.

He placed them in his lap and looked off into space. This was dynamite. Teller had known quite a bit
about Corbaccio's past. He had known even more than The Shadow about Corbaccio's early rise to
fortune. It was all in the galleys. The time that Corbaccio risked some money on industrial diamonds
during the war and had cashed in for a three hundred per cent profit by selling the industrials to Germany
through South America. That had been just the beginning. There didn't seem to be a single dirty racket
that Corbaccio had missed.

No wonder Teller had been gunned!

"Ja hear the explosion?" Shrevvie asked.

"No. What was it?" The noise of the presses had drowned any outside sounds.

Shrevvie went into detail. "The sound," he finished up, "seemed to come from down here." He gestured
with one hand at the street ahead.

Ahead policemen were busy roping off an area. The Shadow saw the size of the hole in the pavement.
Shrevvie whistled, "Wow! Somebody drop an atom bomb?"

"I'm afraid," was The Shadows answer, "that if it had been an A-bomb you wouldn't be here to ask the