| Synopsis
| - Sandman and Sandy are swinging high above the empty streets of the Lower East Side, pursuing the Bookworm. From a rooftop they observe as the Bookworm, with one henchman , breaks into a bookstore. The owner, old Conners, lives on the premises, and the two crooks wake him up are harshly questioning him about the whereabouts of a particular manuscript, when Sandman and Sandy run into the room. There’s a very short fight, then the heroes try to revive the injured Conners, and the bookworm rallies himself up enough to pull out a pistol and aim it at the Sandman. Sandy snatches the water bottle off the nearby water cooler, and throws it at the Bookworm’s shooting hand, to good effect. Panicked now, the Bookworm flees, toppling a bookshelf along the way, slowing down his two pursuers. He makes it to his car and drives away while they’re still on foot.
Sandman figures that the Bookworm will strike again the next night, but instead, apparently, he strikes again later that same night, and in the morning Wes Dodds reads in the paper that old Conners has been murdered.
Meanwhile at his hideout, the Bookworm is having a tantrum. He found Conners dead when he got there, and he couldn’t find the manuscript either! Even his own hoods don’t seem to believe him. Bookworm declares his intention to return to Conners’ shop that night, and meanwhile he sends two hoods to get down to the courthouse, meet up with their mouthpiece, spring Butch on bail, and send him to the Bookworm, hurry up.
Night falls. The Sandman still can’t be certain whether the Bookworm found the manuscript or not, but he gambles that the crook will show up at Conners’ shop again this night. He and Sandy swing there on their wirepoon equipment. Bookworm and Butch do show up, and break in, and Butch is able to crack Conners’ safe, but the manuscript isn’t in there, either. Time to keep searching, but now there’s a commotion at the door! It’s Sandman and Sandy, taking out the two lookouts posted there, then the fight moves into the shop. Soon the four criminals are just about subdued when out of nowhere there’s a pistol shot, and Butch falls down dead. Sandman investigates the bookcase on that wall, and finds a rigged-up pistol, set on a hair trigger, and next to it is a manuscript.
From this, Sandman deduces that the late Conners set up this apparatus, and later, in a frenzied state of panic, forgot about it, and was killed by his own trap. The Bookworm lunges and grabs out the manuscript, but this of course sets off the pistol, and he catches a bullet in the chest. Worse yet, the hot bullet, passing through the old, brittle manuscript, has ignited it, and the hand-written book burns. The Bookworm, dying, claims that this was an unpublished novel by Edgar Allen Poe and that the world had now lost the only existing copy.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)