"Shadow - Back Pages - 401201 - Hook McGuire Gives A Bowling Lesson" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moffat George Allan)

While Hook's car was racing for police headquarters, and Hook was worrying
about the old professor, a stealthy shadow appeared somewhere out of the
darkness outside the professor's modest little home. It moved across the yard and
up on the porch.
The figure went through the open door silently, slipped into the dark living
room. He tiptoed down the rear hall and into the laboratory where Professor
Minton was working on a test with his new bowling resin.
The old professor was grinning to himself as he prepared these tests. He had a
sense of humor, and with his testing resin he had written out the name, "Hook
McGuire," across a board that was standing upright against a solid base on the
edge of the table.
He was going to call the resin "Hook McGuire Resin."
The man that had entered the laboratory stopped behind the professor. "The
man was tall, with a thin and brutal face.
"A very good joke, professor," the man said in harsh, guttural tones. "A very
good joke for your dear friend, Hook McGuire."
Professor Minton turned around slowly. He looked at the brutal and thin face,
marked by a scar down the right cheek. But the professor wasn't looking at that
scar. He was staring at the automatic in the right hand of the man.
"Professor Hendrick!" the old man gasped. "You have a gun in your hand!"
Professor Hendrick laughed in a deep tone. "You are observing. Professor
Minton," he said. "Yes, I have a gun in my hand, and in a moment I shall use it!"
He brought the gun up slowly. Professor Minton rubbed a sleeve across his
forehead. He stared at Hendrick, convinced that the man had suddenly gone mad.
He knew Hendrick, who had come to the city a year before as a professor of
chemistry in the State college.
Hendrick had become a close acquaintance of Minton, though the old
professor had never liked the man. Nobody seemed to know where he came
from.
"We shall not play like children any more," Hendrick said. "I am not a refugee
professor, as I have wanted all to believe. I have come here for a purpose, and that
is either to learn the facts of your new experiments with gunpowder, or to see that
you never complete that experiment!"
Professor Minton relaxed, as if this information had suddenly cleared his
mind. Professor Hendrick was what Minton had sometimes suspected: a member
of a deadly espionage system.
"It is regrettable. Minton," Hendrick continued. "You and I have had many
pleasant meetings. I have come rather to admire you, but I cannot let my feelings
murder millions of my countrymen. You will be dead and the world will never
know of your experiments. It will be easy, and no one will ever suspect Professor
Hendrick, the poor refugee professor. Not even your friend Hook McGuire."

Professor Minton's face remained expressionless, but his mind was working
clearly and rapidly. He looked out the laboratory door. Only darkness came from
the corridor; and an odd silence from outside.
Hendrick's finger would squeeze the trigger of the automatic. There would be
a roaring explosion, but nobody would hear it. Hendrick would escape, and
nobody would suspect the refugee professor as a cold-blooded, ruthless killer, a
member of the espionage ring that was choking America into helplessness.
They wouldn't, unlessЧ