Title: Hounds in the Hills
Air date: February 20, 1938
Guest stars: Bill Johnstone as Jerry Rufford
Plot summary: The story opens in the Appalachians of North Carolina. A demented old woman, Old Sadie, is bodily forcing a young boy named Dickey into her shack, as her pack of dogs all bay like wolves. It seems that some years ago, Old Sadie dropped her young son, Jake, and as a result, Jake is a hunchback. Sadie has taken to kidnapping young boys to replace her maimed son, which Jake, who is alive and still around, does not care for at all.
Enter Lamont Cranston, who is on vacation with Margo Lane, staying at the home of his friend Jerry Rufford in North Carolina. They meet a local sheriff who tells them that not one, not two, not three, but four boys have fallen off a particularly hazardous mountain trail in recent days. The sheriff, who is useless, just assumes that it is a run of bad luck, and the reports from "colored folks" of dogs howling at the moon like ghosts is just hearsay.
Lamont Cranston doesn't believe it's hearsay. Instead, The Shadow goes exploring, and soon finds Dickey being held captive at Old Sadie's cabin. He has to figure a way to get all four boys (they're all still alive) out of Sadie's clutches. This is made more complicated by the presence of two other criminals, Duke and Slim, fugitives who are hiding out at Sadie's cabin. They're gangsters from up north who know about the Shadow.
Note: A guest appearance by Bill Johnstone, who took over the role of The Shadow after Orson Welles left the program in the fall of 1938.
Tropes:
- Angry Guard Dog: Old Sadie's pack of vicious attack dogs, which chase The Shadow until they have him cornered in a tree, and which later pounce on Slim and kill him.
- Badass in Distress: The dogs succeed in treeing The Shadow, and it becomes a siege in which the tension is whether or not the bad guys on the ground can wait out The Shadow up in the tree.
- Busman's Holiday: Lamont Cranston, on vacation in North Carolina, is pressed into service as The Shadow anyway.
- Chekhov's Gun: The Shadow gives a crying Dickey his handkerchief, in order to calm him down. Later the bad guys find this handkerchief and use it to give the scent to their dogs, which chase The Shadow.
- Cock-a-Doodle Dawn: The crowing of a rooster lets the audience know that the bad guys have waited out all night for their siege of The Shadow, who is still cornered in a tree.
- Evil Cripple: Jake the hunchback, who doesn't like the kids being in their home and would like to kill them.
- Hillbilly Horrors: An insane old lady kidnaps little boys. Her son isn't crazy, but would like to murder the little boys.
- Millionaire Playboy: Lampshaded in this episode when Lamont's friend Jerry describes him as a "playboy" and says that nobody knows what Lamont does, if anything, other than "dabbling" in his lab.
- Narrator: Possibly because of the unusual setting, the show starts with a narrator, something most episodes didn't do. The narrator sets the scene by describing hillbilly North Carolina before introducing Sadie dragging Dickey back to the cabin.
- They Have the Scent!: The bad guys figure out that while they can't see The Shadow, Old Sadie's guard dogs can still smell him. They loose the hounds, which wind up treeing The Shadow, setting up a standoff.
- Vacation Episode: A vacationing Lamont Cranston solves a series of kidnappings.
- Villain Opening Scene: Begins with Sadie forcibly taking a scared, crying Dickey back to her cabin.
- Will They or Won't They?: The show never confirmed Lamont and Margot were lovers beyond them calling each other "darling" from time to time, but the fact that the two of them are vacationing together certainly suggests that they aren't platonic.
