The Living Joss

CHAPTER XXVII. DOOM TO THE FIEND!

“KWA!”

The insidious name came from the taunting lips of The Shadow. The word was more than a name; it was an accusation. Barton Schofield cringed against the wall.

“Your doom is here,” pronounced The Shadow. “You, Barton Schofield. The man who took the semblance of a fiend. You are the one who has played the part of Kwa, the Living Joss.”

Schofield, cowering in pitiful fashion, tried by action to deny the charge. The Shadow’s gibing mirth reverberated through the vault.

“Your dual personality was well concealed,” remarked The Shadow, in a strange whisper. “You planned well, feigning yourself to be a broken old man by day, so that you could take your insidious part by night.

“Your strategy was clever. A paragon of integrity, you lived a life of strictness, surrounding yourself with men of honesty, to better mask the secret life which you preferred to lead. With Huxley Corporation stock offering easy millions, you played a cunning game.

“Westley Hartnett — Blaine Goodall” — solemnly, The Shadow named the men who had died by Kwa’s insidious order — “they were your first victims. Koy Shan and Chun Shi were capable subordinates until I deprived you of their services.

“There were two others whom you planned to slay. You succeeded with one — Hugo Urvin — because he deserved to die. But David Moultrie did not die. I saved his life. I, The Shadow!”

A peculiar change was coming over Barton Schofield’s face. The man was still cringing, but his features were undergoing a strange distortion, which he appeared to force. His lips were protruding; his lower jaw, disjointed, was extending. The man’s eyes seemed to bulge as they took on a fiendish glare.

Barton Schofield, his double part declared by The Shadow, was assuming the hideous countenance that was the mark of Kwa, the Living Joss!

“You had a foil,” resumed The Shadow, his tone more mocking than before. “Doctor Ward Zelka. A rogue, perhaps, but not a criminal. Zelka was a traveler. He knew the ways of the Chinese. He liked to stroll in Chinatown.

“He was well suited to be the scapegoat — the man whom the law would readily accept as the Living Joss.

So you let Zelka live, knowing that he would quail when the time came to threaten him with death from Kwa.

“Your abduction was the step which you knew would place both Moultrie and Zelka in a hopeless position. By killing Moultrie, only Zelka would be left. Afraid of Kwa, afraid of police action, Zelka would have to flee to avoid being murdered or being declared a murderer.”

BARTON SCHOFIELD, whose face was now a grotesque, livid countenance, snarled venomously. His body was swaying as though ready for a spring toward the doorway where The Shadow stood. The threat of the automatic, however, was enough to hold back the fiendishness of Kwa.

A crumpled ball of paper appeared in The Shadow’s left hand. With a deft motion, the cloaked being smoothed it before the glaring eyes of Kwa.

“This was left at Zelka’s,” informed The Shadow. “He read its Chinese characters. He may have laughed at first, even though the message stated that Chun Shi had come from seeing one man die, and was going to slay David Moultrie.

“Then Zelka decided to find out if Moultrie had been slain. He learned that the plot had failed; but the police were in charge. He had only one course: to flee, as the note from Kwa had ordered him.”

The laugh of The Shadow was sibilant.

“You knew,” pronounced the being in black, “that Moultrie still lived. You were waiting for another opportunity. The police came here tonight. You tricked them. They still believe that Kwa is Ward Zelka.

“Your present ruse is to let them rescue you as Barton Schofield. Just now you realized that you could entrap the ones who had found you, and make another effort to escape. But you have faced The Shadow!

“I, The Shadow, have long since known the truth. A bounding figure upon the lawn of your mansion. That was an inkling. You planned a real abduction; to have Koy Shan bring you to Soy Foon, that he might lay you helpless in the temple of Kwa, where you, as Kwa’s prisoner, would become the Living Joss himself!

“The abductors failed. Koy Shan died. You took the part of Kwa yourself, and fled. Others thought that Kwa had carried Barton Schofield with him. I, The Shadow, alone divined the truth!”

Barton Schofield was a terrible sight. His fierce face, his clawing hands, his bounding form that bobbed up and down in rage — these were the proofs of the fiendish nature which he had so cleverly disguised from the world.

The Shadow laughed.

“If you wish to play the part of Kwa” — the whisper from the hidden lips was taunting — “put on the trappings which you have so lately discarded. You have hidden them, but you need them now. Those false upper teeth — those long, imitation finger nails — the grotesque robes of the Living Joss! Put them on to add fully to your evil personality!”

With a monstrous snarl, Barton Schofield advanced upon The Shadow. Three long bounds brought him almost to the muzzle of the menacing automatic. There, this man who had played Kwa came to a cowering halt. That looming weapon, with its huge opening; those steady, burning eyes — these were threats which stopped him.

BACKING away, Schofield cowered toward the opening in the corner of the room. His face was still livid, and suddenly a snarl of joy escaped his insidious lips. The Shadow had moved backward; the being in black was lost in darkness!

About to pounce forward, Schofield hesitated; then turned. He saw the reason for The Shadow’s quiet departure. The detectives, with Cardona at their head, were coming from the hole in the wall after a fruitless search down a blind passage!

Cardona blurted an amazed cry as he saw the face of Kwa upon the crouching figure in the center of the vaulted room. Then, as Cardona raised his revolver, Barton Schofield, as yet unrecognized by the detective, leaped forward and grappled with the sleuth.

The fiendish attack hurled Cardona backward; but as he staggered into the arms of Markham, who was behind him, Cardona fired. Furious hands clawed at his face. The fingers clutched Cardona’s throat; then their power weakened. The attacking monster toppled to the floor.

“Schofield! Where is he?”

Cardona looked toward the couch as he uttered this cry; then his gaze moved about the room, and finally centered upon the figure which was lying motionless at his feet. In the dead face of Kwa, Cardona caught the strange resemblance.

“It’s Schofield” cried the detective. “The old man was the fiend. Schofield, himself! It is incredible!”

The other men corroborated the discovery. In death, the semblance of fiendishness was slowly withering from Barton Schofield’s visage. The countenance of Kwa was losing its gruesome features as the facial muscles relaxed.

“Carry him up,” ordered Joe Cardona. “Search the place; get all the evidence we can discover. The robe he wore — anything else. Those tanks—”

CARDONA stood alone in the vaulted room after the others had acted. He knew now that Doctor Ward Zelka was innocent; that the physician had been forced to flee because of the mesh which Barton Schofield had curled about him.

The detective went forward, out of the vaulted room, up to the passage where the controls were located.

The other sleuths, headed by Markham, had pushed Schofield’s body up through the trap that led into the temple. They had taken the tanks along, to add them to the taboret and a gong of silence which had a transparent rubbery surface upon its face of brass.

Trophies of the superfiend! Cardona was not considering those items. The detective was staring at a new opening which had mysteriously appeared on the other side of the control room.

This must lead to the secret exit which the fiend had sought! Who had been there to stop his escape?

Cardona learned the answer as he stepped forward to investigate the new passage.

From the hollow spaces of a stonewalled corridor came the sinister tone of a distant laugh. Cardona knew the author of that weird mirth. He knew the meaning of the sibilant echoes that persisted like the dying cries of a host of unseen beings.

The Shadow, master of darkness, had laughed. His tones of mystery were a death knell. They were the symbolic notes of triumphant justice — justice aided by The Shadow.

The Shadow had brought doom to the most insidious plotter who had ever dwelt in New York’s Chinatown. The might of The Shadow had ended the crimes of Kwa, the Living Joss!