Oblivious, the youth on the pavement walked on — coming diagonally abreast of the sedan in the next instant as two automatics trained their beads directly on his hurrying figure.
“Okay, Tony!”
The purring motor of the Cadillac rose abruptly to a vibrating clamor as Tony’s foot jammed down the accelerator. The two guns leveled from the front and rear windows. Flame leaped livid in the night from their jerking muzzles!
The motor almost drowned completely the quick reports, so they were not heard by any passing motorists.
The four shots flamed in swift succession.
As if grabbed by some unseen giant hand in the dark, the youth on the pavement stopped in his tracks. His stocky frame whirled completely around. His hands clutched at his chest — and through his clawing fingers blood spurted darkly.
Slowly, his knees buckled. He dropped on them. In contrast to the darkness, his face showed white, agonized as it turned towards the roaring but immobile sedan.
Then a choking cry as of defiance came from the youngster. He still clutched the manila envelope — and some miracle of purpose seemed to spur his riddled body into motion again. Crablike, half-crawling in the gloom, he was moving forward.
THE BROKEN-NOSED GUS saw that movement, gave vent to a livid oath. He yanked the rear door of the Cadillac open, his eyes peering up and down the street. It was dark, deserted. He leaped out, gun in hand. Pete and hatchet-faced Choppy followed.
Simultaneously the riddled youth, evidently seeing them coming, was suddenly, miraculously on wabbly legs — running, darting like a wild, wounded animal, instinctively trying to lose himself from his hunters.
Clutching the envelope he actually reached the corner, rounding the building as the others gained in their pursuit. They did not fire now — for their quarry was only a vague blur in the almost opaque gloom caused by the shadowy side of the building, near a railed areaway.
In that gloom, Gus, Pete, and Choppy closed in. Their hands groped. There was the sound of a scuffle — the ripping of paper — confusion.
The three gangsters became accustomed enough to the dark to regain vision. They found themselves in a tangle.
Gus cursed. “He went over the rail! He can’t get far with them slugs in him — an’ I don’t know if we got all we want! Come on, guys, we gotta find him!”
They climbed over the rail, dropping into the lower areaway. Groping in the gloom, guns still in hand.
And at that same instant, Eddie Collins, youthful cartoonist, was swaying against the cage of a freight elevator which was speeding upwards inside the building. He heard his own blood dripping to the floor of the ascending lift. Torpor was dragging at his agonized body. Yet, like some stubborn spark, a fierce determination was keeping him alive and active.
Floors went by in a blur, painfully slow. Up through the building the elevator ascended. Then it stopped of its own accord, on the top floor, up in the tower.
Collins pulled his coat about his chest as if hoping to stem the flow of his own blood. He groaned with the effort of opening the gate, staggered out through a corridor, thence through swing service doors.
Somehow he found the frosted-glass doors he sought. He pushed into a lighted, well-appointed anteroom. He pushed on through, reached another door, marked PRIVATE.
Eddie Collins grabbed the door handle — burst into the huge, private office whose French windows looked high over the Manhattan night.
At his rude entry, two men jerked up startled, surprised heads.
FRANK HAVENS, ELDERLY, RUGGED-FACED OWNER of the Clarion and a string of other equally powerful papers throughout the nation, rose to his feet from the big desk where he had been sitting, proof-sheets bearing gruesome murder-news before him.
Richard Curtis Van Loan, wealthy young idler and man-about-town, who was here as Mr. Havens’s friend and guest, lifted his bored, world-wearied grey eyes in questioning annoyance. Seated in a comfortable chair, Van Loan was puffing idly at a cigarette, his immaculately dress-trousered legs crossed.
Then, before anyone could speak, the bored Richard Curtis Van Loan suddenly leaped from his chair. His grey eyes lost their ennui, became sharp slits. It was he who saw the oozing, crimson trickle coming from beneath Collins’s coat and dripping soundlessly to the soft carpet.
Collins’s body swayed giddily as Van Loan leaped forward. The latter’s strong arms reached out, caught the young cartoonist even as the youth went limp, collapsing.
“This man’s been shot!” Van Loan said, his customary drawl sharp now.
Havens’s momentary annoyance turned to quick alarm. The publisher grabbed an interoffice phone, called a downstairs office secretary, ordering that a doctor be summoned. Then he went over to where Van Loan had carried the riddled youth to a lounge and placed him on it.
“Collins!” he cried, all concern now. “What happened? Who — ?”
The eyes of Eddie Collins, already going dull, flickered. His lips moved. A sighing rattle made the words which came from his throat difficult to hear.
“Envelope —” he gasped. “Envelope! Gangsters — probably still down in areaway cellar looking for me. Freight elevator — They got it — from me — but they aren’t sure —”
“Got what, Collins? What do you mean?” Havens spoke with fierce bafflement. “How could you — a comic strip man — be mixed up with thugs, with shooting!”
“Envelope tells,” Collins repeated. “Big case — Mr. Havens. I was doing it for a feature — when murder story broke. Bringing it for — the Phantom — now.”
Even in his agony, he pronounced that name with reverent awe.
Havens stiffened. The publisher’s eyes flashed to his worldly young friend, Richard Curtis Van Loan. And he got a fresh shock of surprise.
FOR VAN LOAN HAD SUDDENLY GONE into a whirl of swift action! He had peeled off his dress coat. In his hands was a flat leather kit, which was snapped open, to reveal a mirror and an array of tubes and jars.
Again Collins’s gasping voice interrupted. “Case — for Phantom! God, if only you could — get him now, Mr. Havens.” He sobbed. “Envelope — thugs got it —”
Havens administered to the riddled man as best he could while Van Loan worked away on his queer little kit.
When the publisher turned toward Van Loan, his jaw gaped.
Van, standing close, eyes darting from the man on the lounge to his own mirror, was still dabbing his face with a special charcoal. In seconds his handsome, world-weary features had almost completely vanished! In their place had grown another visage — the face of Eddie Collins!
It was not a semblance that could stand close inspection under bright light, being more an impressionistic sort of job, the likeness cleverly created by a few lines, by shading. Nor did Van Loan take any more precious time adding to it.
“Give me Collins’s coat, Frank — quickly! It ought to be enough!”
Van Loan pulled on the coat and assumed a stoop. Though he was tall, he seemed by his posture to look even more like the bullet-riddled cartoonist.
So swiftly had he made the transformation that now, before the dying Collins saw what was happening, his own “double” was darting out of the office in a swift blur of motion which concealed both the incongruity of his dress, and his makeshift disguise.
Collins hadn’t seen any of this. Nor had Collins dreamed that Richard Curtis Van Loan, the rich playboy he had seen so many times, was actually the mysterious and amazing sleuth whose fearsome name he had breathed, whose services he had demanded — the Phantom Detective whose perilous exploits in the dark byways of the underworld were known by the police the world over.