"Maxwell Grant - The Shadow - 159 - The Dead Who Lived" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Maxwell)

Servidor. He shifted the door slightly; light from the window disclosed the Servidor's interior.

Keen eyes made an instant discovery.

The latch inside the inner door had a tiny plunger that could be pressed downward to set a signal,
indicating when clothes were in the Servidor. That plunger was circled by a small metal clamp; an object
that had no regular purpose.

Cranston tried the plunger. Because of the girding clamp, the plunger did not push to its full depth.
Examining the clamp closely, Cranston noted the glisten of a broken wire. To ordinary observers, the tiny
clamp would have passed notice, for it might have belonged on the plunger.

Cranston was no ordinary observer.

He had found a clue, from which he reconstructed the past. That clue meant the possibility of a
mechanism once set inside the Servidor; a device which, prior to its removal, could have brought ill
fortune to George Thurnig.

SOON, Cranston and Sayre were riding away from the hotel. Presumably, Lamont Cranston, wealthy
New York clubman and world adventurer and traveler, had merely accompanied Doctor Rupert Sayre
on a visit wherein the physician was investigating Thurnig's malady. Sayre was a specialist in the treatment
of rare diseases. It was logical that he should have gone to see the hotel physician.

"Thurnig's case," declared Sayre, "shows marked symptoms of encephalitis lethargica, an affliction to
which the term 'sleeping sickness' has been popularly applied. Quite different from trypanosomiasis, the
African malady carried by the tsetse fly.

"I prefer, however, to reserve a positive diagnosis until we learn if other cases occur. Encephalitis strikes
as an epidemic, although it attacks only a very small portion of the population."

Sayre was thinking deeply, and with good reason. He had met with other strange ailments in the past;
cases in which Cranston had shown interest. Invariably, they had turned out to be of human making:
criminal thrusts covered by the appearance of a disease.

Those cases had been investigated by a mysterious being known as The Shadow. Through them, Sayre
had met Cranston. The physician was sometimes inclined to believe that Lamont Cranston and The
Shadow were identical; at other times, that supposition seemed doubtful.

Certainly, on this occasion, Sayre could visualize The Shadow as the governing force behind the
investigation.

That was to be proven much sooner than Sayre realized.

When the physician had left Cranston's limousine, the big car proceeded to the exclusive Cobalt Club.
There, as Cranston alighted, he heard the shrill cry of a newsboy. Purchasing an evening newspaper,
Cranston read the report of Brellick's collapse.

Had Sayre known of that case, he would have probably pronounced Thurnig to be a sleeping sickness
victim; for here was apparent proof of an epidemic disease. Cranston, however, was armed with other
facts, small though they were.