"Maxwell Grant - The Shadow - 242 - Formula for Crime" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Maxwell)

crew, he could easily march them out of the premises that they had invaded.

In token of such intent, The Shadow took three strides forward from his corner.

Lucky strides, those!
Hardly had The Shadow finished the third step before the floor coughed behind him. It
coughed in a titanic style, with a muffed burst that shook the entire building.

Up from the floor, amid a gust of flame and a deluge of smoke, came chunks of solid
masonry, like brimstone from a volcano's throat.

Only a pace clear of the blasting corner, The Shadow was lifted by the upheaving floor and
flung forward ahead of the tidal wave of stone that gushed to the ceiling and bashed great
chunks of plaster that descended, pulverized like snow, along with the hail of stone.
The Shadow's guns spoke as he took that long, sprawling dive, but their bursts were feeble,
unnoticed, amid the echoes of the huge blast. Mort and his followers, spilled by the quake of
the floor, were clear of The Shadow's gunfire.

Men of crime were saved from their arch-foe by the intervention of a power more formidable
than The Shadow's own!

CHAPTER II. TRAPS REVERSED
HURLED headlong by the explosion, flayed by the chunks of stone, The Shadow should
have proven easy prey for Mort Lombert and his murderous crew. But they were in no mood
to take advantage of the fortune that had come their way.

The burst from the corner, timed almost to The Shadow's own endeavors, seemed
something of his own making. Thinking it was meant for them, mobbies couldn't believe that
The Shadow had suffered by it.
Staggering as they found their feet, they heard Mort shout to rally them, but thought that he
was calling them to flight. All but one had lost their flashlights, and the man who still held one
kept waving it frantically, trying to find the spiral stairway. The two men felled earlier by The
Shadow were on their feet, blundering into the rest.
From somewhere on the floor they heard The Shadow's laugh, and Mort, like the rest, went
short on nerve. Matters were swinging The Shadow's way, had he chosen to take immediate
advantage; but The Shadow had a different plan.

His head had escaped blows from the peppering stones, and his quick wits were
functioning at their fullest, when he turned and drove straight toward the huge gap that the
explosion had opened in the floor.

The Shadow was expecting new invaders—and they came, out from the pit that they had
manufactured. They, too, had flashlights, and the glow from below showed their leader, a
burly warrior with an oversized face that looked gigantic, from bulging forehead to
underslung jaw.

There was only one face that looked like that. It belonged to Hogger Unstrum, noted for his
ways of crime. Hogger had passed from sight when he tried to sabotage a river tunnel in
which he and some of his cronies had been working. Wanted by the police, Hogger had
shown skill in burrowing from their sight.