The Golden Circle Read Free Page B

in a wire-sided traveling case and was wailing with great sadness.
Standing in the shadows among stacked trunks, Lt. Colma felt the rain-laden wind on his cheek. He narrowed his eyes and made out that one of the baggage car windows had been smashed out.
Carefully he went over. The few fragments of glass which had fallen inside crunched underfoot. The lieutenant peered out. Rain slapped him in the face. "Huh, what the hell," he said. "Don't tell me he jumped."
After he found the light switch, the lieutenant made a rapid tour of the car. There was no one hiding there. And no sign of any big dog.
"Could both of them have jumped?" Colma leaned back against something. He realized it was a crated coffin and moved.
Then he noticed the clothes. Walker's tan overcoat and the rest of what he'd been wearing were in a pile on the car floor. "Is he out there naked as a jaybird?" The stock policeman quickly went through the discarded clothes. He found nothing, no scrap of paper, not even a label or laundry mark.
When he finished he shook a new cigarette out of his pack. "Still two left. That's not bad. Maybe I can cut down to half a pack a day pretty soon." As he lit the cigarette his eyes fell again on the crate which held the coffin.
Colma crossed to it, felt at the nails. "Sealed up tight." he observed. "But I wonder. Maybe Walker smashed that window, then ducked inside one of these big trunks or crates. Better check it out."
A half hour later the stocky lieutenant wiped his forehead, lit his final cigarette, and admitted to himself "Nope, they must have jumped."
The Phantom had gone rolling and tumbling down the muddy hillside. He was in excellent shape and he notonly knew how to jump but also how to land.
beneath the civilian outfit he'd donned for his sojourn among relatively civilized men he wore the skintight uniform of the Phantom. He had stripped to thet in the train in order to give himself unencumbered mobility for the leap to freedom.
"A little muddy," he remarked, standing up. "But no great harm done."
Devil, his gray mountain wolf, had leaped along with him. Surefooted, the great animal came padding up to him now, nuzzling his master's side.
"Good boy," the Phantom told him. He scanned the rainy dark. The last lights of the Manhattan bound train were tiny blurred dots far off. "So much for Lt. Colma of the New York City Robbery Division."
In the distance he heard the swish of highway traffic. "Don't think we want to head that way, Devil. Although we want to get out of this storm for a while. No need for the good lieutenant to know where we landed. Let's head up that hill over there and find ourselves a less traveled road."
As the masked man began trudging through the field the wolf fell in at his side.
In his hand the Phantom still held the golden arrow pin the blonde girl had lost in his compartment. "We could simply forget about this business tonight,
Devil," he said. "Hop a jet and get back to Bangalla and the Deep Woods."
The Phantom tossed the pin once, caught it. "But there's been a murder done. We're going to find our lethal pair of lady friends."
The wolf gave a low growl.
CHAPTER FOUR
the community of Thornburg is approximately 152 miles from New York. It has a population of just under 11,000; a small town which the railroad tracks rut almost exactly' in half. Because Thornburg is a small town, patrolman Wally Reisberson of the municipal police patrols alone in his three-year-old sedan.
He was cruising along West Street at 3:00 A.M., listening to an all-night talk show on the transistor radio he kept sitting next to him on the seat. Thorn- burg was usually quiet at this hour and his police radio receiver emitted only static. On his transistor a woman with a nasal voice was telling the host about her first-hand experiences with extrasensory perception.
Patrolman Reisberson slowed at the intersection of West and Mandell streets. The rain was really coming down. There were instants between the flicks of the wipers when