“They’re the ones,” stated Goodling. “Lanford told us they were all right; but we didn’t believe him until Parrell started to act up and Dolthan broke in on the meeting.”
CLYDE was looking at Lanford, who pointed toward Croy. Clyde stared at the big man; he saw Croy grin. Then Clyde smiled as he nodded. He was indicating that he had at last recognized the man with whom he had battled while on the running board of the old sedan.
“Rufus Dolthan is dead,” declared Goodling, solemnly. “Roy Parrell also. They admitted their crimes, believing that we were helpless. Then a rescuer arrived; as nearly as I can judge, he must have been the same one who aided Miss Dolthan to safety.”
“He came in by the window,” put in Croy, with a nod. “That is it. By the window.”
“After you were gone, Miss Dolthan,” added Daggart, to Myra, “he held Croy and myself there, so that we would be ready when your uncle came to kill you.”
The girl uttered a startled cry. Then, realizing that all danger was past, she reached to the table beside her and picked up a little book that lay there.
“My diary,” she stated. “I cannot imagine how it came here.”
“Parrell found it in the station wagon,” explained Clyde, to Kermal and Claig. “While he was looking for his pipe. I was with him. That’s how he guessed where you were.”
Bit by bit, the story was being pieced. More comments followed; yet, as the talk continued, the part by The Shadow increased in its mysterious proportions. One suggestion followed another; it was Jay Goodling, finally, who summed the case.
“Whoever he was,” declared the prosecutor, solemnly, as he referred to The Shadow, “he must have learned everything through sheer deduction. Not only a superfighter, he is a supermind. A superbeing.
“It was he who scattered those crooks at the house on Dobson’s Road and brought us to the first goal in our hunt. He learned that Kermal was at your house, Claig. He went there and prepared to save Myra from danger that he foresaw.
“He must have analyzed the case to perfection; known that you were on the level, Kermal; that Dolthan was crooked. He must have analyzed it from Yager’s murder, the way you outlined it tonight.
“He was for you, Kermal. He wanted a show-down. He wanted to make Dolthan reveal himself as the villain. No one but this mysterious stranger could have placed that diary in the station wagon. But how he knew so many other things is what amazes me.
“Parrell’s pipe in my office. Parrell found it in the station wagon instead. Burke and Vincent on that rear road; with their lights out. Yet this superbeing found that out while he was rescuing Myra Dolthan and sent the girl to safety.
“He handled Daggart and Croy; then pitched in to start the fight against them. He had Rufus Dolthan figured to the dot. He knew that Dolthan would set out to kill Myra; and then he had Daggart and Croy waiting. The very men with whom he had battled less than a quarter of an hour before.”
OTHERS nodded their heads in understanding. Each terse detail was new proof of The Shadow’s might. Men who had fought for right felt like mere pygmies as they considered the craft, the strategy, the prowess of The Shadow.
“Well, Myra,” announced Kermal, after Goodling had concluded. “Congratulations are in order. You are twenty-one; your father’s estate is yours. Here is the will that I made out” — he produced the crumpled paper; he had taken it from Rufus Dolthan’s pocket — “and I still advise you to sign it.
“There’s no one now to influence your stepbrother should he be named as your heir; but I’ve seen enough of crooks to know we shouldn’t trust one just because he hasn’t gone to prison. As for witnesses” — Kermal chuckled as he looked about the group — “we have plenty of them now.”
Kermal spread the crumpled will upon the table. Myra Dolthan took a pen that Fred Lanford brought from a desk. She dipped the pen in ink, wrote her signature below the will and passed the document to Taussig Kermal.
It was then that all were stilled by a weird sound that reached them. Though the timing of that distant call might have been mere coincidence, it impressed every listener with the startling thought that an unseen being had known all that passed within this room.
From somewhere outside the hotel, floating through silent night that blanketed the town of Sheffield came the burst of eerie mirth, that faded into shivering echoes, wafted by a dying breeze. As if he claimed the privilege of being the first witness to the will, The Shadow’s tones had come from the invisible spaces that formed his habitat.
Justice had triumphed. Men of right had conquered insidious crime. All through the strength of The Shadow, that master being whose token of departure remained, unforgotten, in the minds of those who had heard.