"Maxwell Grant - The Shadow - 167 - Realm Of Doom" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Maxwell)

They were photographs!
Upon that single card were more than one hundred and fifty portraits,
depicting human faces in clear detail. Faces that were of many types, but all
with a sordid touch that marked them as the countenances of crooks, despite
the
smooth expressions that many possessed.
Beneath each portrait, but inscribed within the printed circle, was a
name
identifying the owner of the face. The card that Cranston carried was a
rogues'
gallery in miniature!


UPON that card, Cranston found one face he wanted. It showed a man of
light complexion, whose eyes were almost colorless and whose lips wore a
twisty
smile, caught to perfection by a timely click of the camera.
Beneath that portrait was the name: Rigger Bayne.
A few circles away, another photograph portrayed a sallow-faced subject
whose eyes and hair were dark. It bore the name of Clip Rallin.
Those two members of Cranston's pocket rogues' gallery were the men who
had watched him in the dining room. Crooks they were, as Cranston alone had
suspected.
The lobby clock showed half past seven, as Cranston strolled past.
Ascending to his fifth-floor room, Cranston stared out across the lighted
streets of Charleston, toward the flowing blackness of the Kanawha River. That
moving darkness, that seemed a portion of night itself, reminded him of a part
that he himself could play.
Removing his coat and vest, Cranston pulled away the collar of his stiff
shirt and seated himself before a mirror. With deft fingers, he began to
change
his face. He molded it into a new shape, building its contours with dabs of a
puttylike substance, until only a semblance of its hawkish look remained.
From changed lips came a whispered laugh that brought eerie echoes from
surrounding walls. Neither Rigger Bayne nor Clip Rallin would have enjoyed
that
mirth. They would have identified it with a being cloaked in black, whose ways
brought doom to persons of their ilk.
That tone was the laugh of The Shadow, master fighter who conquered men
of
crime!


CHAPTER II

THE SECOND MEETING

IN the dusk that The Shadow viewed from his hotel window, Rigger Bayne
was
driving through the side streets of Charleston, taking a circuitous course to