



Produced by Stephen Hutcheson, Mardi Desjardins and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team at
http://www.pgdpcanada.net









                               THE SHADOW


                                   BY
                            ARTHUR STRINGER


                                NEW YORK
                            THE CENTURY CO.
                                  1913

                          Copyright, 1913, by
                            The Century Co.
                       _Published, January, 1913_




                               THE SHADOW




                                   I


Blake, the Second Deputy, raised his gloomy hound's eyes as the door
opened and a woman stepped in. Then he dropped them again.

"Hello, Elsie!" he said, without looking at her.

The woman stood a moment staring at him. Then she advanced thoughtfully
toward his table desk.

"Hello, Jim!" she answered, as she sank into the empty chair at the desk
end. The rustling of silk suddenly ceased. An aphrodisiac odor of
ambergris crept through the Deputy-Commissioner's office.

The woman looped up her veil, festooning it about the undulatory roll of
her hat brim. Blake continued his solemnly preoccupied study of the desk
top.

"You sent for me," the woman finally said. It was more a reminder than a
question. And the voice, for all its quietness, carried no sense of
timidity. The woman's pale face, where the undulating hat brim left the
shadowy eyes still more shadowy, seemed fortified with a calm sense of
power. It was something more than a dormant consciousness of beauty,
though the knowledge that men would turn back to a face so wistful as
hers, and their judgment could be dulled by a smile so narcotizing, had
not a little to do with the woman's achieved serenity. There was nothing
outwardly sinister about her. This fact had always left her doubly
dangerous as a law-breaker.

Blake himself, for all his dewlap and his two hundred pounds of lethargic
beefiness, felt a vague and inward stirring as he finally lifted his head
and looked at her. He looked into the shadowy eyes under the level brows.
He could see, as he had seen before, that they were exceptional eyes,
with iris rings of deep gray about the ever-widening and ever-narrowing
pupils which varied with varying thought, as though set too close to the
brain that controlled them. So dominating was this pupil that sometimes
the whole eye looked violet, and sometimes green, according to the light.

Then his glance strayed to the woman's mouth, where the upper lip curved
outward, from the base of the straight nose, giving her at first glance
the appearance of pouting. Yet the heavier underlip, soft and wilful,
contradicted this impression of peevishness, deepened it into one of
Ishmael-like rebellion.

Then Blake looked at the woman's hair. It was abundant and nut-brown, and
artfully and scrupulously interwoven and twisted together. It seemed to
stand the solitary pride of a life claiming few things of which to be
proud. Blake remembered how that wealth of nut-brown hair was daily
plaited and treasured and coiled and cared for, the meticulous
attentiveness with which morning by morning its hip-reaching abundance
was braided and twisted and built up about the small head, an intricate
structure of soft wonder which midnight must ever see again in ruins,
just as the next morning would find idly laborious fingers rebuilding its
ephemeral glories. This rebuilding was done thoughtfully and calmly, as
though it were a religious rite, as though it were a sacrificial devotion
to an ideal in a life tragically forlorn of beauty.

He remembered, too, the day when he had first seen her. That was at the
time of "The Sick Millionaire" case, when he had first learned of her
association with Binhart. She had posed at the Waldorf as a trained
nurse, in that case, and had met him and held him off and outwitted him
at every turn. Then he had decided on his "plant." To effect this he had
whisked a young Italian with a lacerated thumb up from the City Hospital
and sent him in to her as an injured elevator-boy looking for first-aid
treatment. One glimpse of her work on that thumb showed her to be
betrayingly ignorant of both figure-of-eight and spica bandaging, and
Blake, finally satisfied as to the imposture, carried on his
investigation, showed "Doctor Callahan" to be Connie Binhart, the con-man
and bank thief, and sent the two adventurers scurrying away to shelter.

He remembered, too, how seven months after that first meeting Stimson of
the Central Office had brought her to Headquarters, fresh from Paris,
involved in some undecipherable way in an Aix-les-Bains diamond robbery.
The despatches had given his office very little to work on, and she had
smiled at his thunderous grillings and defied his noisy threats. But as
she sat there before him, chic and guarded, with her girlishly frail body
so arrogantly well gowned, she had in some way touched his lethargic
imagination. She showed herself to be of finer and keener fiber than the
sordid demireps with whom he had to do. Shimmering and saucy and debonair
as a polo pony, she had seemed a departure from type, something above the
meretricious termagants round whom he so often had to weave his
accusatory webs of evidence.

Then, the following autumn, she was still again mysteriously involved in
the Sheldon wire-tapping coup. This Montreal banker named Sheldon, from
whom nearly two hundred thousand dollars had been wrested, put a bullet
through his head rather than go home disgraced, and she had straightway
been brought down to Blake, for, until the autopsy and the production of
her dupe's letters, Sheldon's death had been looked upon as a