The Saint Goes West

1

Simon Templar checked the fit of the specially built silencer on his .357 Magnum for the last time, and settled more snugly into the screen of tumbled rocks from which he was watching the road below. The crisp Arizona sun baked down on him out of a sky of such brilliant blue that it would have seemed artificial if it had not been so certain that no artifice on earth could have copied it, and his blue eyes that matched the sky as closely as anything could match it were narrowed slightly against the glare that came up from the open desert. A grey lizard lay and watched him from a little distance with one cold flat eye, its soft stomach pulsing quickly with breaths, but otherwise as motionless and as much a part of the landscape as he had become since he had seen the lazy billow of dust creeping along the twisted ribbon of dirt trail that wound past the foot of the knoll where he was lying.

There were many men in the world who would have been surprised to see him there, much as they had learned to accept Simon Templar’s sudden and disturbing appearances in all kinds of unlikely places: men in the variegated police uniforms of a dozen European and South American countries, as well as a staidly bowler-hatted Chief Inspector of Scotland Yard, and a certain gruff grey-haired detective in New York City, men who could have met at any time and talked lengthily on one common ground apart from their professional interest in the enforcement of the Law — namely, their separate and individual reminiscences of the impudent outlawries which had blazed Simon Templar’s trail around the earth. There were also an even larger number of public enemies from just as many places, who could have joined in the chorus with no less indignation, who would have been equally surprised to find him in a setting so different from the urbane backgrounds against which he was usually tracing his debonair and dangerous saga of adventure. But these surprises would have been purely geographical: there would have been no surprise that he lay there on the threshold of more trouble, for trouble was a thing that clung like an aura to the presence of Simon Templar, whom some imaginative newspaperman had christened the Robin Hood of modern crime, but who was much better known to police files and the unwritten records of the underworld as the Saint.

The dust-cloud lengthened sluggishly towards him, churned up by the wheels of a well-worn car whose labouring engine sent a faint grumble of protest to his ears through the great stillness, and the Saint waited for it with the infinite patience of any Indian who might have lain in the same ambush more than a hundred years before, watching a covered wagon crawl through the scrub-sprinkled valley below his eyes. You might have seen something of the same Indian, too in the intent lines of his tanned reckless face, but that would have been an easy illusion. The same lines would have fitted as naturally into the picture of a conquistador scanning the shore of a new world, or of d’Artagnan mocking the courts of France: they were only the heraldry of a character that would have been the same in any age or place, the timeless brand of the born buccaneer. Perhaps that was another reason also why he seemed as much at home there as he would have been against the shining sophistication of a city boulevard — because it was inevitably right that he should fit in wherever adventure offered, because he himself was the living embodiment of adventure... But the Saint himself would never have thought about it so romantically as that, being strictly concerned at the moment with the mechanical job that he was there to do.

The car rattled around another curve, with the driver nursing it gingerly over ruts and washboard, and then it was as close to where he was hiding as it would ever be. At that, he estimated the range at a little more than a hundred yards, and rested his brown right hand on a rock in front of him as coolly as if he had been trying a trick shot for his own amusement. Judgment of distance, speed, and elevation merged into one imperceptible coordination as he squeezed the trigger. The Magnum jarred in his grip with a discreet flup! but he still held the aim until he saw the car swerve on one flattened front tyre, bump a little way off the road, and come to a grinding stop. It had never had enough speed to be in any danger of overturning, and he had had no such fate in mind for it anyway.

Satisfied that he had done no more and no less than he meant to do, he slid away down the other side of the hillock, straightened up as soon as he was safely below the skyline, and walked quickly to the big Buick parked in the sandy arroyo below the sheltering slope, unscrewing the cumbersome silencer as he went; a few minutes later the long sedan jounced out of the wash on to the dirt road half a mile south, turned back, and battered its way north again over the tracks left by the car which he had just brought to an effective standstill.

Simon braked as he came up with it, and a white-haired man in a neat but incongruous business suit eased his back from a pained and unprofitable scrutiny of the deflated tyre. Simon leaned out and grinned amiably at him.

“Anything wrong?” he inquired.

The white-haired man gazed back at him through silver rimmed spectacles with the peculiarly sadistic tolerance reserved by all right-minded voyagers for those persons who ask futile questions in unspeakable situations.

“We had a blow-out,” he said, with admirable restraint.

“Maybe I can help,” said the Saint cheerfully.

He swung out of his car and inspected the evidence of his marksmanship with concealed satisfaction. His single bullet had done its job as neatly as he could have desired, ripping through tube and casing without leaving any evidence of its transit except for an expert. But the Saint only said, “Do you have a spare?”

“You could help me to get it out,” said the girl.

She backed her head out of the trunk to say it, and Simon placed a cigarette between his lips as he turned to look at her with a casualness that was only another concealment. For this was a part of the encounter which he had irrelevantly looked forward to all day — in fact, since he had first caught a passing glimpse of her the evening before.

She was only a minor character in the business that his mind was on, and yet he had been hoping that the impression he had been saving wouldn’t be destroyed. Now he saw that he need not have worried. Even with her brown hair a little scattered, her face a little flushed, she had the same quality that had caught in his memory. It was not the standard prettiness of blue eyes, of a smiling generous mouth, of a small nose that was still a cameo of classic modelling, but something much more, much rarer, and yet so simple that the only words for it seemed inadequate. You could only say that in one glance at her you knew that without being naive or stupid she was utterly without guile or coquetry or deceit, that her mind was as clean-cut and untrammelled as her sapling figure in its plain white shirt and blue slacks, and that whatever she did would be as real and honest as the friendly hills. But to the Saint, who had known so many other fascinations, this was one of the most arresting certainties that he had ever known.

“I’d love to,” he said.

He struck a match and put it to his cigarette as he strolled over, but he didn’t throw the burnt stem away. As he wrestled the spare wheel out, and carried it around the car, he kept working the match-stem into the valve, letting the air escape whenever there were other noises to mask the hiss of it, so that a few minutes later he could press the tyre flat with his hand and say, “It’s too bad, but this seems to be another dead one.”

“Now, that’s perfectly swell,” said the girl.

Simon let the wheel drop, and philosophically revived his cigarette.

“The nearest garage is back at Lion Rock,” he remarked. “I’ll leave word there later if you like. Or could I take you anywhere?”

The man said, “We were heading for the Circle Y — it’s three miles further on, off this road.”

“Visiting?”

“No. I... er... I happen to own it.”

“When were you going to be back at Lion Rock?” asked the girl. “We don’t want to take you out of your way, but it’s getting late. I mean...”

The Saint smiled down at her, rumpling his dark hair with apparent thoughtfulness. It was indeed getting late, as he had hoped it would be: bright as it still was, the sun was already dipping towards the high range to westward, and under the slanting light the barren battlements that ringed three of their horizons were putting on soft chiffons of rose and purple against the promise of an early twilight.

He said, “It might be quite a while before I see Lion Rock again. Perhaps I’d better take you to the Circle Y and you can send in to the garage tomorrow.”

“We hate to trouble you,” said the white-haired man half-heartedly.

“Don’t give it another thought,” said the Saint. “Have you got any parcels or things you want to take along?”

Five minutes later the Buick was rocking and rolling north again with two extra passengers, and the older man was making conversation from the other end of the front seat.

“I suppose we ought to introduce ourselves. My name is Don Morland, and this is my daughter Jean.”

“I’m Simon Templar,” said the Saint.

The name meant nothing immediately to them, and was not meant to. But he had known who they were before he lay down to wait for them not long after breakfast, behind the pulpit of erupted boulders which had already merged into the violet-shaded diorama behind.

“I’m sure glad you happened along,” Morland went on. “I wouldn’t have enjoyed trying to find my way home from there if we’d been caught after dark.”

“That doesn’t sound like a rancher talking,” Simon remarked lightly.

“I’m not really a rancher — of course you could tell that. I just happen to own a ranch. As a matter of fact, we’ve only been here a couple of days. It’s all quite an accident.”

Simon grinned.

“You won the Circle Y in a raffle?”

“It belonged to my brother. He died just recently, and I inherited it. I was a dentist in Richmond, Virginia. I’d been thinking I was about ready to retire, and Jean always wanted to see the West. So we thought we’d give it a trial.”

“Too bad it had to happen that way,” said the Saint. “I mean through your brother.”

Morland began filling a stubby pipe.

“Yes. It was very sudden. His horse threw him and kicked him — fractured his skull. He only bought the place himself about eighteen months ago... Well, if he could turn himself into a rancher I expect I can.”

“You think you’ll keep the place.”

“Probably. Our next-door neighbour from the J-Bar-B made me a rather attractive offer as soon as we got here, but I don’t think I’ll sell. I think I might get to like it here. Jean is going to buy me a big hat and some high-heeled boots and try to make me look like the real thing.”

The Saint’s strong hands worked on the wheel with imperturbable skill, his calm eyes picking the smoothest path over the derelict track as nonchalantly as though his role had actually been as fortuitous and disinterested as it was meant to seem. But into his mind went just a little more information than he had had before, and with it a repetition and revival of one grim question that he had already asked himself a great many times. Yet no one could have guessed that there were such things as murder in his thoughts.

Jean Morland was studying him with straightforward interest, taking in his quietly checkered blue shirt, his well-worn Levis, and coming back again to his lean tanned face with its hint of mockeries and mischief that must have known even wider fields than those traditionally great open spaces.

“I don’t think you’ve lived around here all your life, either,” she said.

He smiled at her.

“That isn’t really very hard to guess. As a matter of fact, I haven’t really been around here for about ten years. But I can still give a working imitation of the genuine article. I was riding herd in the Panhandle when you weren’t any further than the fourth grade. You need a good hand on the Circle Y?”

“You’ve got a nice car to look for work in,” she said.

“That’s part of the build-up. All of us cowboys ain’t bums. We seen ourselves in the pitchers, an’ we know better. Next time I’m going to be a straw boss, at least.”

She laughed.

“Seriously, what are you doing now?”

“You might call it vacationing. Wandering here and there, and seeing what may turn up. I haven’t a plan from one day to the next. But I love this country.”

“So do I,” she said. Then: “What do you think of doing right here?”

The Saint lighted a cigarette, taking his time.

Presently he said, “I thought I might do some hunting.”

It seemed to him that this might be a truthful way to put it, even though she would never guess what a deadly kind of quarry he was thinking of. Even though she might never know that the spoor he was following had been started months before when a certain Dr Ludwig Julius paddled out of his office on the Wilhelmstrasse and set off on an odyssey that had already taken him more than half-way around the world, by way of the Trans-Siberian railroad to Vladivostok, from Vladivostok to Yokohama, from Yokohama to San Francisco, and from San Francisco, after a pause at the Nazi consulate there, to the peaceful Arizona county where Simon Templar was on the trail of bigger game than his state hunting licence had ever been intended to include.

2

They sat on the porch of the ranch house after dinner, listening to the far-off yipping of coyotes and the nearer croaking of frogs down at the spring.

Simon had stayed, of course. He had always meant to stay, although he had put on a proper show of diffidence. In fact, he had taken quite a little trouble to make sure of becoming a welcome friend at the Circle Y. And with the insidious intimacy of dinner added to his acquaintance with Jean Morland, he was even more sure that it would be no hardship to spend the time that he expected to spend there.

“How much stock do you have here?” Simon asked.

It was one of those desultory conversations full of long pauses and random twists, but rich with warmth and contentment.

Morland said, “About five thousand head. Not very much, but not enough to be too big a headache.”

“Pretty good range?”

“Not so bad as you’d think. Eh, Hank?”

“We go back quite a ways into the hills,” said Hank Reefe. “They do pretty good back there. It’s handy havin’ the stream. They don’t ever need to go short of water.”

Reefe was the foreman. He sat in the fourth chair, on the other side of Jean, rocking himself gently, his long thin legs stretched out. He was probably not much more than thirty, but his weathered face was deeply carved with the lines that a man gets from staring into hot shimmering distances. He had good level eyes and the kind of long sinewy features that are an unmistakable inheritance from the stock that first fought its way through that untamed country.

“There’s no mining in these parts, is there?” Simon asked casually.

“Not right around here. Sometimes the prospectors’ll come through. But they’ll go anywhere.”

He had a slow, rather musical drawl, which to a sensitive ear was the same as a lapel badge would have been to the eye.

“You wouldn’t be a Texan, I suppose,” said the Saint.

“Yes, sir.” Reefe poured Bull Durham into a gutter of thin paper and spread it with his forefingers. “I heard Miss Jean say you worked in the Panhandle yourself.”

“A long time ago.”

The foreman’s deft fingers shaped and rolled. He sealed the cigarette with a flick of his tongue, and said, “Smoke?”

The sack of Bull Durham landed in Simon’s lap. Lazily Simon slid a paper out of the folder, curved it with thumb and fingers of one hand, poured tobacco, and rolled the cigarette while his other hand pulled the string of the sack against his teeth and tossed it back. His eyes met Reefe’s tranquilly over the match that the foreman leaned across with.

Neither of the Morlands would have realised that two men had measured each other, with challenge and answer, like two proud animals. And yet Jean Morland was very clearly a part of that watchful speculation, for Simon had seen something more in Hank Reefe’s manner towards her than the strictly dutiful respect to which her position as the boss’s daughter entitled her.

Reefe dragged on his own cigarette with an expressionless face, and said idly, “I was raised right around Hereford. Worked around two or three ranches up there ’fore I came west.” Smoke curled in the lamplight as he let it out through his nostrils. “There sure used to be some interestin’ characters around there.”

“Quite a few,” said the Saint.

“Was one feller I remember hearin’ about, came from England or somewhere. Everybody thought he was a dude. So when he asks for a job, first off, they put him on an outlaw horse for a laugh. Well, he was the guy who did most of the laughin’, because it turned out he could fork a bronc better ’n ’most any cowboy in that country, an’ he rode the horse out an’ kept him. After that they found out he could throw knives like somebody in a circus, an’ shoot the pips out of a six of spades just as fast as he could pull a trigger... I guess he couldn’t find anything wild enough for him around there, because later on he went south of the border an’ fought in one of those revolutions, an’ got to be a general or something. At least, so I heard. He was quite a young feller then, an’ I was only a kid myself, but I never forgot him because he had such a funny name for a chap like that. They called him the Saint.”

Simon Templar tilted his head back and blew leisured rings at the lamp.

“He must have been quite a guy.”

“Yeah... I’ve often wondered if he turned out to be the same Saint I’ve read about in the papers since. But I never met him myself, so I wouldn’t know.”

“I wonder what a man like that would be doing these days?” Morland said. “Fighting with the RAF or something like that, I suppose.”

“No,” said the girl. “That would be too conventional for him.” She hugged her knees and gazed out in to the dark. “He’d be rescuing prisoners from the Gestapo, or catching spies in London, or something of that sort.”

Simon looked at her thoughtfully.

“You mean, you really believe those stories about him?” he said teasingly, and again he had to encounter the disconcerting calm clearness of her eyes.

“I want to believe in a few things like that,” she said simply.

They went on looking at each other for a while, with the same quiet steadiness, and then Reefe’s chair creaked abruptly as he sat forward.

“Seems as though we have some late visitors,” he said.

The lights of a car were creeping up from the desert, two yellow eyes that quivered under the punishment of the road. They all watched them coming closer, twisting jerkily up the hillside, until the station wagon that carried them jolted to a stop in front of the porch.

The headlights went out and under the porch light Simon could read the words “J — B Ranch” on the door of the station wagon as it opened.

“Our neighbour,” Morland said.

The man who came clumping up the steps with the spurs jingling on his high-heeled boots was big and broad, and everything about him had a heavy swagger that was as aggressive as a clenched fist. Under the brim of his black hat he had thick black brows and a square dark jaw that looked as useful to hit as a chunk of granite. He was dressed with the curious contradictions of a man who liked his western fopperies and was still ready to do a day’s work with any of them. There were rubies and gold flowers in the buckle of his hat-band, ruby eyes in the longhorn steer’s head knotted in his scarf, jewels and gold inlay in the big silver buckle of his belt, but all of them had been smoothed and scarred with service, like the fancy leather trim on his dusty gaberdines. He showed a perfect set of white teeth and said, “Hullo ev’rybody.”

Unexpectedly, his voice was a soft tenor, not quite light enough to be effeminate, and yet light enough to strike a note that set the Saint’s delicate sense of menaces on edge.

Morland said pleasantly, “Hullo Max.” He made the only necessary introduction. “This is Mr... er... Templar. Mr Valmon.”

“Glad to know you, Mr Templar.”

Max Valmon’s grip was as hard as his voice was soft. Simon was expecting that. He smiled gently, and used some of the strength of his own right hand. It gave the encounter an air of rather excessive cordiality, and made Valmon’s eyes harden a little under his heavy brows.

“Glad to know you, Max,” said the Saint affably.

Valmon’s glance held another moment of suspicious calculation, and then he turned away and tossed his hat in to a chair. He sat on the arm of the chair and said, “Well, Don — got any news for me?”

Morland knocked out his pipe and began to refill it.

“I don’t think so. We haven’t done very much. Went into town this morning and got stuck with a blow-out coming home. Luckily Mr Templar came along, and—”

“I don’t mean that sort of news.”

“Well, really, there isn’t—”

“I mean, haven’t you made up your mind to accept my offer for the Circle Y?”

Morland blinked.

“Why no, Max. I told you the other day I wasn’t planning to sell. Jean and I like it here.”

“But I told you I was planning to buy.” Valmon’s voice was still soft and friendly. “I’m obstinate. And I was here first. Why don’t you face it? You don’t know much about this country, Don. It won’t feed both of us.”

The older man frowned in a sort of innocent puzzlement, his thumb poised over the bowl of his pipe. Reefe’s chair became still, as if chilled into suddenly watchful waiting, but Morland didn’t seem to be ready with a lead. It was as though he had just begun to sense something in Valmon’s undertones that was so foreign to his experience that he was afraid of being mistaken about it.

It was the Saint who hooked a leg over the arm of his chair and said diffidently, “Not that it’s particularly my business, but you make it sound like peculiar country. What makes it that way?”

Valmon turned with his flashing smile.

“Water,” he said. “I’ve got a spring on my side of the hills, but it goes dry every summer.”

“We do all right,” Reefe said quietly.

“I know.” Valmon’s smile was untouched. “But your stream rises on my land. Only it doesn’t stay there long enough to do me much good, especially when it runs low. To do any good, I’d have to blast a new channel — turn it around that shoulder up there, and let it run down my way to where I could build a dam. Of course, that’s the same as starving you out.”

“The law won’t let you do that,” Reefe said.

Valmon shrugged.

“I don’t know. The water comes from my property. The law couldn’t say much after I’d done it, and it wouldn’t take much doing. Just a few sticks of dynamite in the right places, and you’d be dry. Then I suppose you could go to court and try to get an order to make me blast it the other way again. But before you could do that, and make me do it, you wouldn’t have any stock. So where does it get you?”

He had divided his words between Reefe and Morland, and he was looking at Morland when he finished, but then his eyes went back to the Saint, as if somehow Simon was the only one that he was in doubt about. And curiously, the others seemed to wait for the Saint too, as though without any assertion he had become felt as the man who was the most natural match for Valmon.

And yet the Saint hadn’t moved. He only seemed to become longer and lazier in his chair as he lighted another cigarette with his eyes narrowed but still casual against the smoke.

“You make it all sound so much like the plot of any western picture,” he remarked, “that I can only think of what the answer would be in any western. If I were Don, I guess I’d just cut down your fence and drive my cattle right through to your beautiful new dam.”

“And you know what happens in westerns when somebody does that,” Valmon said in the same tone.

“I don’t want any fighting,” Morland said, with the slightest jerkiness in his voice. “If you’re really in trouble, and you come to me properly, we’ll see if we can work something out. Perhaps I could let you water your cattle over here. I just don’t like you pretending to threaten me.”

“It’s the ham in him,” murmured the Saint, so lightly that for a second he didn’t seem to have said anything, and then calmly, astonishingly, so unpredictably that somehow it was not instantly believable, he began to sing something to himself to the tune of “Home on the Range”:

Valmon snapped to his feet, and his smile was gone.

“All right,” he said. “I’ve made you a fair offer. I’ll give you just twenty-four hours to take it. You can come and tell me tomorrow night. If you think I’m pretending, don’t come. You’ll find out when I start blasting the next morning.”

Morland stood up also, more slowly, his face a little paler.

“I think you’d better go, Valmon,” he said tightly.

Valmon picked up his hat and clapped it on at an insolent slant.

“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll go — while there are three of you telling me. But I’ll be back here after you’ve gone. And then we’ll see who makes the funniest cracks.”

His voice was still soft and well-modulated, but instead of taking the sting out of his words, that incongruous dulcetness gave them the malignance of a snake’s hiss. It whipped a dull flush into Morland’s face, but his lip quivered with the uncertainty of a man unused to violence. Hank Reefe started forward with a low growl, but Simon caught his arm and stepped ahead of him. Very courteously the Saint bowed Valmon towards the steps.

“Good night, Maxie dear,” he cooed, and Valmon gave him a long stare.

“I’ll know more about you before that,” he said.

“Maybe.”

Simon leaned on the porch rail and concluded his improvisation while Valmon strode across to his car and slammed the door.

The line ended in a vicious rasp of angrily meshed gears, and the station wagon’s engine roared as Valmon jarred in the clutch and pulled away.

Simon watched the lights bumping down the trail, and turned back with a little of the humorous mischief fading from his eyes.

“So,” he said slowly. “That seems to have done it.”

Jean Morland was hugging her father’s arm.

“Did you see?” she said wonderingly. “He looked really — wicked. Did you see, Daddy?”

“I’m afraid it’s my fault,” said the Saint. “I knew just how to get under his skin, and I couldn’t resist it. I’ve got an evil gift for that sort of thing. You’re right, Jean — he’s bad. But I suppose it still wasn’t my business. Now I’ve blown everything up for you. I’m sorry.”

“Perhaps it’s just as well,” Morland said quietly. “At least we’ve seen him in his true colours... I’ll go in to town tomorrow and see the sheriff, or whoever you have to see.”

The Saint shook his head slightly.

“You’re going to have trouble,” he said. “Maybe you’ll need some extra help. I kind of brought this to a head, so my offer still goes.”

Morland fumbled with his matches, trying to get his pipe going again. His hands were just a trifle clumsy, not quite so steady as they would otherwise have been.

“It’s very nice of you, but — we haven’t any right to bother you. I’m not going to worry.”

“But we can’t turn Mr Templar out at this hour of the night,” Jean said quickly. “At least we can find a bed for him.”

“We... we don’t have any room to offer him dear.”

Simon smiled at the girl.

“I can put up with the bunkhouse,” he said, “if you can put up with me. I’d like to stay.”

“There’s a spare bed in my room,” Reefe said detachedly. “He’s welcome to that.”

Half an hour later Simon Templar sat on the spare bed in Hank Reefe’s room, pulling off his boots and watching the foreman silently roll another cigarette. With the smoke going, Reefe dug under his bed and pulled out a well-worn suitcase. Out of it he extracted an almost as well-worn cartridge belt, from which the holster hung heavy with a Colt.45. He took the revolver out, sprung out the cylinder and spun it, checking the load.

“At least you didn’t think I was kidding,” said the Saint.

Reefe looked at him with his lean poker face.

“I’ve seen trouble build up before,” he said. “My father saw a lot more of it, when he wore this belt all the time. Things don’t change very much, out here.”

Simon Templar peeled off his socks and sat rubbing one instep, developing his own estimates.

3

They were drinking coffee after breakfast at the long communal table outside the kitchen with the four cowboys, Jim and Smoky and Nails and Elmer, and Don Morland said, “How far can Valmon really go?”

Jim drained his cup and got up, hitching his belt, and as if he was the spokesman for the others he said, “Well, you can go as far as you like, an’ if he wants to fight we’ll be right there with you.”

The others nodded and grinned in the slow slight way of their kind, as they also got to their feet, and Nails said, “You bet.”

“Let’s git goin’,” said Jim, with the speechmaking finished.

Hank Reefe watched them go, dawdling to roll a cigarette.

“They’re good boys,” he said.

“But what can Valmon do?” Morland protested.

“He can do enough.”

“But there’s still some law and order here, isn’t there?” The older man seemed to be arguing with himself. “There must be something about water rights in the title to this property. Valmon can’t do just what he likes and get away with it.”

“You heard what he said last night,” Reefe persisted woodenly. “He can do what he likes on his own land. If that damages you, you can sue him. Dunno if that does you much good, after the damage is done. An’ if we go in on his land to interfere with him, that’s trespassin’, an’ maybe he can sue you. Guess that wouldn’t help him so much either, if we had him stopped.”

“So he wouldn’t let us stop him,” said Jean. “He’d fight.”

“Sure,” Reefe agreed. “But he’s not the only one who can do that.”

“It’s ridiculous,” Morland said. “Things like that just don’t go on any more. I’m going to town and talk to the sheriff.”

Reefe nodded.

“You can try that,” he said expressionlessly, and shaped the brim of his hat as he straightened up. “I’ll get on with my job.”

They watched him walking away down towards the corral, the well-worn cartridge belt drooping under his right hip and the holstered Colt purposefully tied down to his thigh. He could so easily have looked melodramatic, and yet the stoical naturalness of him made that word impossible.

Morland turned to the Saint with a little bewildered gesture, as if all these things were too much for him.

“What does he mean? Does he think the Sheriff would be on Valmon’s side?”

“You can never tell,” said the Saint philosophically. “Such things have happened.”

Morland’s lips tightened.

“Well, I’m going to find out!” He stuck his pipe in his mouth at a stubborn angle which to Simon had the ironic pathos of unconscious futility. “If... if I could borrow your car, I could pick up my wheels on the way in and have them fixed, and then someone could fetch the station wagon in this evening.”

“Help yourself,” said the Saint cordially, and held out his keys.

Jean Morland came slowly back to the porch after she had seen her father start. She turned again beside the Saint, who was smoking a cigarette there with one hip hitched on the rail, and looked down the canyon where Morland’s dust was creeping down towards the desert.

One of her hands curled into a small fist, but it was much longer than that before her eyes moved. And then suddenly she turned on him, almost savagely, and said, “Why are you all so cruel to him?”

“Nobody’s been cruel, Jean,” he said steadily. “The boys are ready to fight for him. Hank Reefe is toting the old family six-shooter for him. They just don’t talk a lot.”

She brushed back her hair helplessly.

“Oh, I know. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t ever have said that. But it seems cruel. As if you were all laughing up your sleeves at everything he says.”

“We could be, in a sort of way. If he had some of these boys back on his home ground in Richmond, Virginia, he could probably make them look pretty naive. Well, out here he looks pretty naive to them. But it isn’t unkind. He seems to have a lot of ideas of his own, so they figure the best thing is to leave him to it and let him find out for himself. Then he’ll get it out of his system. You see, they know.”

“And you think you know, too.”

“I don’t know much. I’ve only just arrived. But if I have to take somebody for an authority, I’ll take Hank and the boys. After all, they’ve been here for a while... I only want to do the best I can for you.”

He smiled, and the Saint’s smile could be as quietly irresistible as it could be quietly deadly. Quite naturally he touched her arm.

“Why don’t you show me around this morning,” he said, “and let me get my bearings on the battlefield?”

“Of course,” she said, and she went on looking at him with that open-eyed straightforwardness that was more baffling than any coquetry. “Yes, I’d like that.” And there was nothing but the sincere direct statement of fact in her voice. But it was as if she was realising, with a little surprise and puzzlement, that they were not new acquaintances any more. Or had they ever been strangers?... “You could go on ahead and saddle the horses, and I’ll be ready as soon as I’ve cleared up some of these dishes. Mine is a pinto — the only one in the corral. You can choose your own.”

“Okay,” he said.

After he had saddled the pinto his own choice was immediate — a beautiful golden palomino with lines that would have stood out in any company. He was just tightening the cinch when he heard the girl’s step behind him, and turned to find her standing with her eyes fixed on the horse in an uncertain kind of stillness.

“I should have known you’d pick Sunlight,” she said slowly.

Simon unhooked the stirrup from the horn and returned her gaze innocently.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“He’s the horse that killed my uncle. Nobody else has ridden him since then.”

The Saint paused to light a cigarette, and then he deliberately put his foot in the near stirrup and swung lightly into the saddle. The palomino didn’t stir. Simon stroked its sleek neck.

“It seems like an awful waste of a good horse,” he murmured.

“Let’s follow the brook up to Valmon’s boundary and see what the scenery’s like around there.”

The stream crossed the boundary line near the north-west corner of the Morland ranch. For a full mile around that corner the country was a cluster of tall rolling hills, but it seemed to Simon from where they halted to survey it, with Jean Morland pointing out the landmarks, that all the higher crests were on the Circle Y. She confirmed this.

“But the spring starts lower down,” she explained. “It rises on Valmon’s side. Then it does a horseshoe turn back on to our land.”

“Which I suppose makes it easier for Max to turn it back again,” said the Saint.

He gazed thoughtfully at the painted grandeur of the landscape, wishing that he had nothing else to look for than the beauty which Nature had squandered there in a riot of heroic sculpture. He had a passing notion that with water established in that sort of formation it should have been possible to tunnel or drill on Morland’s side of the hills and bring a new stream gushing from the same buried reservoir, but he was not much of a geologist, and anyway the point was not instantly constructive or even closely related to his original quest. He wished too that he had been free to share the spell of the scene, with no other consideration on his mind, with the girl who had so simply and so unaccountably, in less than a day’s span, become one of his oldest friends, but that also was just an unprofitable dream, so long as Dr Ludwig Julius was in Arizona. His face was a tanned mask studying the terrain, and his right hand rested unconsciously on the butt of the Magnum that he had belted on that morning as automatically as Reefe had put on his Colt.

“Let’s ride on some more,” he suggested.

He turned the palomino into a trail that looked as if it might find a way to the top of one of the higher slopes from which there should be a fair panorama of Valmon’s property. As they climbed, the wild brush-pocked hills opened and spread below them, pushing back the rugged horizon to let broad tablelands press up to the north-west. The trail, if it had ever really been a trail, petered out unobtrusively, until the Saint was breaking new ground all the time and his eyes were kept busy in search of ways to circumvent steeper slopes and increasing obstacles of tumbled rock. Presently he was on a spoon-shaped ledge from which at first sight all progress seemed to be blocked by a precipitous mass of broken boulders.

He reined his horse there and turned cross-saddle to estimate the view, as Jean Morland urged the pinto’s nose up to his knee. Below and to the left, near the foot of the hills which they were climbing, he could now see some of the scattered buildings of the J-Bar-B, looking like toy models at the distance of two miles or more. There was one section of shallow canyon behind him where he could see a stretch of water sparkling in the sun, but he couldn’t locate the rest of its course.

Then something said BOOM! in a thick throaty cough like the bursting of a giant drum, and the sound went echoing and rippling through the hills in a thinner diminuendo of repetitions. The horses started and moved nervously, their ears rigidly cocked, and Simon’s face hardened.

“Max isn’t wasting any time,” he said.

But Jean Morland was frowning at the settling cloud of dust that had mushroomed from behind one of the rock castles some way to the north.

“The stream doesn’t go there,” she said.

“Maybe that’s where Max is planning for it to go,” said the Saint. “He’d get his new channel ready in advance, but he won’t set off the last blast that would turn the stream until his ultimatum has run out.”

The girl turned to him with her lips and eyes divided between fight and pleading.

“But why do we have to let him do it — get everything so that he only has to press one button to ruin us?”

“It won’t hurt him or his men to put in an honest day’s hard work,” said the Saint calmly. “They haven’t pressed that last button yet, and what makes you think that we’re going to let them?” He reached for her hand, and took her fingers lightly into his. “Let’s go on a bit and see if we can’t see some more.”

“There might be a way over there—”

She urged her horse on to squeeze past him, and forced it out on to a narrow shelf that looked as if it might sneak around the barrier. It was foolhardy riding, for if the shelf had proved to be a blind alley there would have been no chance to turn round and come back, and he wondered whether she did it in ignorance or recklessness. But he followed her because it was too late to argue, and was relieved to find that in a few yards the sheer drop that fell away from the ledge eased into a less perpendicular slope of rubble — still dangerous enough to navigate, but not offering the same prospects of instant and irrevocable disaster. He kept close behind her, skirting a pile of smaller boulders; she seemed quite unperturbed, and she kept looking off the trail towards the point where the blast had been, as if there was much more on her mind than any casual risk of the route.

Perhaps that was why she never saw the rattlesnake curled sleepily on a rock that rose waist-high from the slope as she rode past it. The Saint saw it, and his hand went like lightning to his gun, but from the start of that movement everything seemed to happen at once. He saw the rattler’s tail dissolve into a quivering blur of warning, but before the sound even reached his ears the pinto had heard it and lurched sideways, losing its foothold on the treacherous scree. Simon thought that he fired at the same moment as the snake struck, but he had no chance to meditate about it just then. He had had no time to wonder whether the horses were gun-broke, and it would probably have made very little difference if he had. It turned out that they weren’t. His palomino reared up on its hind legs like a tidal wave, twisted wildly as its rear hoofs skidded and took a half-sideways leap into space that landed it twenty feet down the slope. Through some incredible agility it remained upright, but there were seconds of frantic scrambling and sliding after that before the Saint had a chance to realise that he was still definitely in the saddle. It was a feat of horsemanship that an audience of bronc riders and mountain cavalry could have stood together and cheered, but he was less concerned with that than with the slim figure clinging to the slope above him.

“Jean — are you all right?”

It sounded to him like particularly stupid dialogue, but it was the only thing to shout as he drove the trembling palomino back up a ladder of precarious zigzags. Then as he reached her he saw that she was shaking half with laughter.

“I can’t help it, Simon! You floated gracefully through the air on a flying horse, while I was landing on my behind... Oh God, the romance of the great open spaces!”

He lowered himself from the saddle beside her, and helped her to sit up.

“You’re sure you aren’t hurt?”

“Only some undignified bruises.”

But she looked at the rattlesnake writhing and lashing a few feet away, its back almost cut through by the Saint’s bullet. He edged over and crushed its head with a stone, and looked at her more closely when he came back.

“ ‘I’m hoping it didn’t touch you,” he said.

The tone of his voice made her raise her right arm slowly to see where his eyes were fixed. There was a tear in her shirt — two tears, actually, close together and parallel, near the firm swell of her breast. Simon knelt beside her and opened one of the rents with steady impersonal fingers. He saw golden skin, softly rounded, unmarked.

“Another half-inch would probably have done it,” he said. “You’re going to make me believe you haven’t got any nerves.”

She met his eyes with sober directness.

“I just didn’t want to be sloppy about saying thank you.”

That was when it seemed so natural to kiss her.

He stood up abruptly.

“Hold on a minute and I’ll get your horse,” he said.

He led the palomino up the slope first, to a more level stretch of firmer ground. Then he went back for the pinto which by some other miracle seemed to have also avoided rolling over or breaking a leg. He stroked the animal’s nose and talked to it until he had calmed it down enough to struggle back up the incline with the reins in his hand.

Beside Jean Morland again, he gave her his other hand and got her to her feet. She stumbled at once, almost into his arms, as another patch of loose surface slid from under her, but as he steadied her, somehow, he was not looking at her but over her shoulder at the ground behind her, where the weathered surface was freshly scarred and churned up by the varied scuffles of feet and hoofs. Then, quietly, he bent and picked up a broken chunk of red rock and squeezed it into his pocket before he gave her his hand again and helped her up on to where the palomino was waiting.

Even after he had turned the pinto loose there, it still seemed spontaneously inevitable for their hands to stay linked together until they sat side by side on a bench of rock and he had to light cigarettes for both of them. There was nothing to say about it. All their lives it had been certain that this would happen if they ever met.

With the smoke from his mouth curling and vanishing in the lazy air, Simon Templar took out the piece of rock he had picked up and turned it in his hands, while the girl glanced at it curiously.

“What is it?” she asked. “A souvenir? Or are you going to find gold in these hyar hills?”

He shook his head.

“No, darling. Not gold. That would have been rather corny, somehow. But some people would give a lot of gold for it. It’s more useful, in certain ways... I think I’m beginning to get somewhere.”

He turned the rock this way and that. It was heavier than one would have expected for its size. One face was caked with brown limestone, that matched many of the surrounding formations. But the rest of it was a hard greenish-grey, quartz-like stone, faintly dappled with darker shadows. And in this quartz ran veins and beads of bright magenta.

The Saint, as had been admitted, was no great geologist, but there were a useful few ores which he could recognise at a glance, and he knew now why Dr Julius must be greatly interested in Max Valmon’s feud with the Circle Y.

4

“They’ve rounded up some cattle for branding in a canyon a couple of miles over that way,” Jean Morland said. “I think I can find it, and we can have lunch with them.”

They had found another way down through the hills without any more accidents.

“Just one thing,” said the Saint. “Don’t say anything about my mineral studies yet. I’d like to get a few more ideas and do some figuring first.”

Her eyes were clear and level.

“Okay.”

Hank Reefe straightened up from untying a calf and held her horse while she dismounted. Away from the branding fire, there was another fire where three pots stood steaming, and Nails was stirring one of them experimentally with a large ladle. Reefe’s tanned face was lighted with a quiet smile of pleasure when he saw her, and just as quietly the smile went away when he saw the rent in her shirt which she had roughly pinned together. His glance shifted evenly to the Saint.

“A rattlesnake did that,” Jean explained, and told the story.

The foreman’s steady gaze only left her again when she had finished. Then it went back to the Saint and he smiled again, but differently.

“That was nice shootin’, Simon,” he said. It was as if he had shaken hands. The Saint grinned and said, “We’re starving.”

“We were just goin’ to have a bite.”

When they were sitting on a rock with fragrant bowls of stew balanced on their knees, Reefe said, “I thought I heard a shot once, but they’ve been blastin’ too, so I wasn’t sure.”

“They’ve been blasting, all right,” said the Saint. “We saw one charge go off. But they haven’t touched the stream yet, and until they do that we’ll have to be careful how we interfere. Max Valmon can blast holes all over his property if he wants to, and we haven’t any right to stop him until he does us some harm. In fact, if he’s got the sheriff in his pocket it’d only make things worse for us. We might give them an excuse to lock us up legally and keep us out of the way until the damage was all done. Valmon might even be playing for that.”

“All the same,” said Reefe, “that feller I was talkin’ about last night — the Saint — he wouldn’t ’ve sat around doin’ nothing.”

“Too bad we can’t send for him,” said the Saint. “He might be handy to have around.”

He went on eating without saying any more about it, and Reefe seemed to draw back into himself in a disappointed way, as if Simon had let him down. Presently he began to talk to Jean in a rather strained manner, making stiff and trivial conversation. The girl answered him more easily, but every now and again her eyes turned back to the Saint in silent puzzlement.

Simon was too preoccupied with his own speculations to do much about it. They finished eating, and one of the cowboys brought mugs over and poured them coffee. The conversation of Reefe and Jean dried up again, and again they seemed to be waiting for the Saint’s lead. Simon lighted a cigarette and stared frowning at the tinted hills.

At last Reefe got to his feet.

“You want to try your hand at helpin’ us rope some of these calves?” he asked stolidly.

Simon shook his head. He finished his coffee and stood up.

“I think I’ll ride back to the house. Mr Morland should be back with my car before long, and I want to drive into town.”

Hank Reefe considered him lengthily. Then he spoke with deliberation, as if he had finally made up his mind and was satisfied to go through with his decision.

“You ain’t figurin’ on doin’ anything about Valmon at all?”

Simon looked him in the eyes, with the faintest glimmer of a smile.

“Hell no,” he said. “It wouldn’t be legal. In fact, I might even think of taking some dynamite over and helping him a bit... Of course, I couldn’t do that now, though — not in broad daylight. I think that Max has a proud and sensitive nature, and he wouldn’t be happy if he knew about it. But if you and I rode over very quietly after dinner, we might be able to do a couple of little things for him... Of course, that’d just be a little secret between us.”

Reefe’s face relaxed so slowly that there was not a movement of a muscle which could have been identified, and yet the change was so profound that he no longer looked like the same man.

“Why, sure,” he agreed. “It’s nice ridin’ around here after the moon’s up.”

“I’ll go back with you and show you the way,” said the girl.

Simon knew how Reefe looked at her without watching. He said, “You don’t really need to. It won’t be any trick to find.”

“It’s time I was getting back, anyhow. I want to know how Daddy made out.”

The Saint shrugged.

On the way back he said, “Hank is good people.”

She said, “Yes.”

It was all there. He didn’t have to say, “You know he’s in love with you, of course. But how do you feel?” And she didn’t have to answer, “I don’t know now, since you came here. So what about you?” And that saved him from having to say, “We should be afraid of this. It’s got to be something we’re both imagining. It musn’t be anything else.” But those words were all there, intuitively, unspoken, so that it was as though he knew she was reading it all out of his mind just as her mind couldn’t deceive his, and he knew it and couldn’t stop it, and didn’t want to, only it was not so cold that way as it would have been in words. And so they talked idly about everything else, and this was all they said all the time.

It was soon after two when they rode down to the ranch house. There was an unfamiliar car parked outside, a green coupe, and an unfamiliar man rose from a chair on the porch as they stepped up, and bowed with insinuating politeness.

“Good afternoon,” he said.

He wore a greenish speckled tweed suit, conventionally cut on city lines and complete right down to the waistcoat with a gold watch-chain strung across the stomach, and he carried a green felt hat with a feather in it, so that he looked rather as if he had been outfitted to correspond with a Bronx tailor’s specifications for a country gentleman’s costume. He was of medium height and soft in the middle. His face was round and pink and a little shiny, and his smooth brow extended back over the top of his head, like a polished atoll surrounded by a surf of sandy grey hair. His eyes were pale gunmetal, and looked like small marbles behind the thick lenses of his gold-rimmed spectacles. They anatomised the girl rather completely, and turned back to Simon.

“Are you Mr Don Morland?”

“Mr Morland isn’t here,” said the Saint coolly. “But I’m his manager. Can I help you?” The other pursed his small red lips.

“Of course. Of course. Mr Morland would be an older man.” He spoke English perfectly, yet he could have been neither American nor English. His accent was faultless, but his voice was pitched in the wrong part of his mouth. “So you’re his manager. Yes. You mean you are in absolute charge of all his affairs?”

“Just that,” said the Saint pleasantly.

It is only a matter of history that he never even paused to wonder whether Jean Morland would fail to back him up, but without looking at her he could sense that she hadn’t betrayed him by the flick of an eyelid.

“I see.” The tone was much too ingratiating to be sceptical, but the cautious advance was there just the same. “So that any business proposition he received would have to be referred to you?”

There were ethereal emphases and question marks in just the right places.

“Exactly.”

“Even quite a private matter?... Such as... if I were interested in buying this ranch?”

“Even that,” said the Saint cheerfully. “But as a matter of fact, the ranch isn’t on the market.”

“Of course not. No. But I could be permitted to wonder whether a sufficiently attractive price — let us say, perhaps, double Mr Valmon’s offer...”

Simon looked at him unhelpfully.

The visitor sat on the arm of a chair and dabbed his pink forehead with a large silk handkerchief.

“Perhaps I should make a fuller explanation. I’ve always wanted to own a place of this kind. It so happens that I’m a temporary guest of Mr Valmon’s — he used to have business connections with a cousin of mine, who sent me to him with an introduction. I had never met him before. Naturally, I heard about what happened last night. I hate to say it, but I feel that Mr Valmon’s behaviour must have been very bad. And yet of course I have no control over him. But I do feel that his attitude absolves me from some of my ordinary obligations as a guest.”

“So that you’re free to go behind his back and bid for a place that he’s interested in?” Simon suggested politely.

“Indeed, no. I don’t see it that way. I feel rather that I’m trying to make some amends, by proxy, for his bad manners.”

“Did he tell you what he was threatening to do — about the stream?”

“He did say something about trying to cut it off.”

“Which would make this place practically worthless.”

“That would be a great pity. But it might not happen.”

“You must think quite a lot of your drag with Valmon.”

The pink-faced man fluttered a plump deprecating hand. His smile was so unshakably sweet that a baby would have been ashamed not to give him its favourite rattle.

“Perhaps I should have a slight advantage — through my cousin’s business connection. Perhaps I’m just too proud of myself as a psychologist. But I’m quite willing to take my risk. Even if I lost, I should be satisfied to think that you hadn’t suffered.”

“Now I come to think of it,” said the Saint, “my mother did tell me about Santa Claus.”

The pale grey eyes gleamed limpidly.

“Will you give Mr Morland my message?”

The Saint lighted a cigarette, and in doing it confirmed an impression that he had caught out of the corner of his eye. His Buick had just then turned the corner in from the desert, but he did not want to help the other to notice it.

“Sure,” he said. “I’ll talk it over with him, and he’ll do what I advise.”

“Mr Morland must have great confidence in you.”

The probing dubiety was still there, but the man’s saccharine accents made the words sound like a compliment.

“This is Mr Morland’s daughter,” said the Saint easily. “She’ll tell you.”

Without looking at him, the girl said, “My father always does what Mr Templar tells him.”

There was a stillness in which the whole earth took part. It seemed as if no living thing could be moving or breathing anywhere. And yet all of that hush was mental, without any change of expression anywhere to which it could be attached. Jean Morland must even have been unaware that it had taken place at all. The visitor went on looking at Simon with his deferential smile and appealing spaniel eyes, his fingers pulling on his soft lower lip.

He said, almost apologetically, “Then... surely... Mr Templar could tell me now — whether I have any hope—”

“Give me a day or two to think it over,” Simon said.

“But this wild threat of Mr Valmon’s. He said he had given you some sort of ultimatum. It’s absurd, of course, but he’s the type of man who might be capable of carrying it out. Then this property would be spoiled. Then, of course, I shouldn’t have had even a sporting chance to make good with it. So then it wouldn’t be fair to ask me to repeat my offer. I don’t want to rush you, but you must see why my proposition can only be good for tonight.”

Simon Templar gazed at him levelly. The stillness had left him bubbling away before a spring of deep inward laughter that didn’t stir a muscle of his chest. The same laughter seeped into the depths of his eyes, like the shift of something stirring far down in a blue mountain lake, without changing a facet of the surface.

He felt quite unreasonably happy. But to the Saint there was always a reckless delight like no other mirth in the world when the wolves split the first stitch of the first tiny seam of their well-tailored sheepskins, and he knew that the cards were coming on to the table and the fight was going to be on. All the sparring and exploring and the rubber stilettos were great fun in their time, but they were only shadows until those moments of reality touched them like magic wands putting life into a picture...

“I’ll see you tonight, then,” he said.

“With something definite?”

“With something definite.”

The other’s hopeful eyes searched his face, as though they were seeking an innuendo that could have been confirmed there, and yet that hadn’t been hinted by the minutest inflection of a single syllable.

“I hope we shall both be pleased about it,” said the visitor at last, wistfully, and stood up. He bowed obsequiously to the girl. “It’s been a pleasure, Miss Morland.” He put out his hand towards her. There was only the faintest hesitation before she responded, and then his head dipped again infinitesimally over her fingers. He turned at once. “Until tonight, then, Mr Templar.”

His soft white hand hovered persuasively in front of the Saint.

Simon enclosed it in brown steel fingers, in a grip like the caress of a hydraulic press set to crack eggshells. He smiled with incomparable hospitality.

“I’ll be looking forward to it,” he murmured cordially, “Dr Julius.”

The other’s eyes misted at him through thick distorting lenses for an infinite instant, and the pink tonsure bobbed at him with impeccable punctilio before it turned away.

Simon Templar put his cigarette back in his mouth and drew long and deep as he eased his hip carefully on to the porch rail, before he turned to meet the inevitable unwavering challenge of Jean Morland’s calm clear eyes.

5

The green coupe had started away before she spoke. And then her voice had the same inquiring detachment as her gaze.

“He never mentioned his name,” she said. “But you knew it.”

The Saint nodded.

“How did he know mine?” he asked.

“I told him.”

Quite clearly she had no idea of the meaning that he might have placed on the word “know.” She went on, as though she was methodically determined to work through to something: “Why did you tell him you could speak for Daddy?”

“Why did you back me up?”

“I thought you must have something in mind, and I didn’t want to spoil it.”

“You must have great confidence in me,” he said, in smiling mimicry of Dr Julius’s saponaceous lisp.

“But now it isn’t fair to keep me guessing.”

The Saint took one of her hands.

“Did I forget to tell you were perfect, darling? You were. No old campaigner could have done better without a rehearsal. You only made one mistake, and that simply wasn’t your fault.”

“What was it?”

“It doesn’t really matter. Ludwig would probably have found out anyway, in next to no time, and it was fun to see him do his frozen-fish take... But as for the rest of it, I just didn’t have any deep-laid motives. I became your father’s manager to find out what went on. If it was a legitimate visitor I could always back down. If it was the Ungodly, I might be able to draw the fire. In case you still feel there are loose ends, it was the Ungodly.”

“Then Valmon was only bluffing?”

“Oh, no. Valmon would always be effective in an emergency. You heard the subtle way the threat and the ultimatum were repeated? But Ludwig Julius is smarter than Valmon. He’ll go a long way to avoid trouble, because when there’s trouble you never know what may blow off. He’ll even go so far as to double the ante, which is a long way for a guy like that to go. I give you my word, if he were sure of getting away with it, Comrade Julius could play so much rougher than Valmon that he’d make Max look like a squeamish school-teacher.”

Her eyes still held him.

“You still haven’t told me how you know so much about him.”

Simon’s glance switched off the verandah again. His car was just pulling up in front of the house.

“There isn’t time now,” he said. “I’ll tell you presently. Just for now, it’d be so much better if your father didn’t know anything about it. He’s a swell guy and everything else, but he just doesn’t know these games. You’ve backed me so far. Will you back me some more?”

She took a long quiet breath. She was aloof in a dispassionate appraisal that few other women he had ever known could have simulated, let alone made sincere. Yet it all died in the helpless quirk of her shoulders and the surrendering downward turn of her lips.

“I’m nuts,” she whispered. “But I’d back you to hell and back.”

“One way is enough,” he said. “There are no bets on the return journey.”

But his eyes said everything else that there was no time to speak.

And then he was rising to greet Don Morland as he came up the porch steps, as though nothing at all had happened since they had parted.

The old man’s step was quick and nervous, and he asked the obvious question in the most obviously conventional way.

“Who was that fellow I passed on the road?”

“He was working his way through correspondence college,” Simon replied gravely, “with a line of hogwash and fertiliser. I told him we didn’t keep hogs and we weren’t farming, and he went away.”

Morland nodded as if he had scarcely heard. His face looked lined and fretful with worry.

The girl took his arm.

“We want to know how you got on,” she said.

“I didn’t get on at all,” Morland said flatly, and her shoulders drooped.

“Then—”

“The sheriff wasn’t there. The sheriff wasn’t in town. The sheriff was away. Nobody knew where he was. The sheriff was busy on some case. Nobody knew anything about the case or how to get in touch with him. Nobody knew when he’d be back.”

“But didn’t he have any deputies?”

“Oh, yes, there was a deputy in the office. He’d be glad to do anything he could for me. But this was a bit too much. He didn’t rightly know what the law was in a case like this. He reckoned this was too much responsibility for him to take on his own. He’d have to talk to the sheriff about it. But he didn’t know exactly how to get hold of the sheriff. Of course, he’d be back. Maybe tomorrow. Or the next day. Certainly before the end of the week... And that was all I could do.”

The pounding of clipped bitter sentences died away with the last one into a dull hopelessness. Morland gave his daughter’s hand a little squeeze and turned towards a chair. She looked at the Saint, and he gave a faint tight-lipped shrug.

He said, “What is technically known as the good old runaround. It might be a coincidence, but it’s a hundred to one the sheriff has been got at. Only he couldn’t come out in the open and refuse to do anything — that’d be as good as putting a rope round his neck. So he just can’t be found. When he can be found it’s too late, and then it’s just too goddam bad. You can go on from there.”

Morland sat with his hands clasped and his forearms on his knees; not fuming or fidgeting, and Simon realised that he was not really weak and foolish. He was just stumbling in a new language.

Then he looked up suddenly, and his eyes were hard and bright.

“Now I know what you all meant this morning,” he said. “You must have thought I was very stupid. I was. But I won’t be any more. If I’ve got to fight to keep this place, I’ll fight. I don’t care what happens. I’ll get a gun and fight for it with every one of you who’ll stand by me.”

A slow smile came to the Saint’s lips.

“That’s the kind of talk the boys are waiting to hear, Don,” he said, and took himself off the porch rail. “Tell ’em ’bout it when they come in. They’ll cheer you.” He flipped the end of his cigarette away on to the drive. “Now I’m going into town and attend to a couple of little things myself.”

Jean Morland said slowly, as if she was asking for a new hope to be kindled, “Perhaps you could find the sheriff—”

The Saint shook his head.

“I’m not even going to try. This is something much more important. I’ll be back in time for supper, and I may be able to tell you about it then.”

Morland stood up.

“That wheel is still in your car — I had to buy a new tyre,” he said. “If you’re going out again you might as well drop me by the station wagon and I can bring it back. I’d rather have something to do than sit here waiting.”

“Good enough.”

The three of them went back to the Buick together. The girl took her father’s arm again, but she took the Saint’s arm as well. He tightened his arm against his side in answer to the pressure of her fingers...

Besides some important research in the county records, he had a couple of purchases to make in Lion Rock, and the dusk was deepening as he drove back towards the Circle Y. It had been a profitable trip, and he was humming idly to himself as he nursed the big Buick over the unsuccessful imitation of a road. He felt it as one of those happy intermissions of adventure, the twilight between the cold daylight and exciting darkness, the empty stage between the acts, the gathering pause that was platitudinously called the calm before the storm. But to him it was only in those moments that the full flavour of an episode could be savoured in anticipation, like the bouquet of a rare wine before tasting, before it had changed for ever into retrospect. This one had been a little slow to grow upon the senses, but now he knew that all the analyses had been worked out and the vintage would prove to belong with the most distinguished aristocracies of such brews. Even his wordless understanding with Jean Morland belonged with it — but he didn’t want to think about that too much yet, when thinking only brought back too many questions that would have to be answered before the end Just then he only wanted to be glad that they had met and talked a little, without saying anything. It would have been enough to leave it like that, perhaps; and yet he was aware of a moment’s absurd contentment as he drove up in front of the ranch house and switched out his lights, and saw her coming to the head of the porch steps, with the lamplight behind her limning the eager cleanness of her silhouette.

He ran up the steps and took her hand.

“I told you I’d be back for supper,” he said, “and I’m starving.”

“You’ll get pork and beans,” she smiled.

But her smile was something that came quickly, just for the moment of greeting him, and then lost its spontaneity as quickly as it had found it. Her eyes left his face, and seemed to search the background behind him.

“I’ll bring it out,” she said, and turned back towards the kitchen.

Simon Templar strolled over to the table that was already set up on the verandah, and tossed his hat over a pair of stag horns nailed to one of the rafters. He pulled out a chair and sat down and tilted the chair back, opening a new pack of cigarettes and tapping one out on the stretched denim over his left knee. As definitely as if a bell had rung, he realised that the interlude was already over.

A little way along the porch, Hank Reefe gazed at him steadily from the rocking chair where he sat with his gun belt across his knees, and said, “You come back alone?”

“Yes. I dropped Papa off where the station wagon was ditched yesterday. He was going to change the wheel and bring it in.”

“You didn’t see him after that?”

Little electric needles stitched a ghostly seam up the Saint’s spine.

“No. The station wagon wasn’t there when I came by just now. I thought he’d be back here.”

“He hasn’t been back.”

Jean Morland came through the kitchen door and set bowls on the table.

“We’d better go ahead and eat,” she said. “Hank must be starving too.”

The foreman came over silently and sat down on the other side of her. He sat looking at Jean, and the Saint looked at her too. Her eyes went to one of them after the other, and she smiled again, rather quickly and nervously. Reefe stretched out his big hand and took hold of her arm gently.

He said, “You might be worrying about nothing, Jean. He could’ve remembered something he forgot to buy, and gone back into town for it. Or maybe he thought he’d have another try at getting hold of the sheriff or somebody.”

“I know,” she said mechanically.

“Let’s face it,” said the Saint evenly. “The question is whether anything could have happened to him.”

His bluntness hit her with a kind of chilling shock that only lasted for a fraction of a second. And then it was as if a light had been turned on in a haunted room. Whatever had to be faced could be seen and estimated, and no matter how it looked it could never be worse than the creation of imagination feeding upon fear. She had had many thoughts about the Saint already, but never before had she sensed the quality of power that gave life to every other impression that could be caught from him. All at once, with a curiously calm relaxation, she had a ridiculous feeling that he was a man who could never fail, because he would never know when to be afraid of failure.

He smiled at her as he crushed out his cigarette.

“I’m going to eat, anyway,” he said. “It won’t do your father any good for us to starve ourselves, and we won’t be able to do nearly as much to help him with our stomachs sticking to our spines like punctured balloons.”

He ate thoughtfully for a while, without talking, as if nothing could disturb his appetite or his enjoyment of the food, but his face was intent, and his brain was coldly sorting one speculation after another, as dispassionately as though they were moves in a casual chess game. Yet he avoided looking at Jean Morland while he was thinking, because he was not certain whether the fine edge of his detachment would stand up to that.

Presently he said, “We can start working from this: Don Morland hasn’t been killed, and won’t be — barring accidents. But for that matter he could always fall down in a bath tub and break his neck. The Ungodly certainly wouldn’t encourage that.”

Jean said, “But they’re trying to get the ranch—”

“How would that get it for them? They aren’t his nearest relatives. The odds are that if anything drastic happened to him, you’d inherit it. If they used... various persuasions to force him to sign a new will before he had an accident, you’d probably contest it and the estate would be tied up for years before they got anything, if they ever did. And there’d also be a lot more publicity than they want.”

“They might think Jean’d be easier to deal with than the old man,” said Reefe.

“Then it would’ve been much more practical to kidnap her. Look, this way, the old man first has to die, and then either they’ve made him sign a new will leaving the ranch to them, which could be fought through every court in the country, or Jean inherits it and they have to start all over again working on her. Either way, the deal would be held up till there were whiskers on it that you could weave into blankets. They don’t want that. They want quick results. See their ultimatum. Any plot of that kind is much too complicated — it takes too long to work out, and it could spring leaks in too many places. Therefore they certainly wouldn’t kill Don Morland.”

The girl bit her lip.

“But if they just... tortured him and tried to make him sell—”

“Why go to all that trouble when there’s an easier way? Maybe they could break him — almost anybody can be broken if he doesn’t die on you first — but they’d have to kill him afterwards so he couldn’t tell about it. And that still wouldn’t keep the rest of us quiet. These people aren’t amateurs. If they’d wanted to work that angle they’d have tried to take Jean; then they could have had anything they wanted from her father, and the rest of us wouldn’t have dared to say a word.”

Reefe studied the Saint unexpressively over his spoon.

“You kept on saying ‘they,’ ” he observed. “You figure there’s somebody else in on this with Valmon?”

“I’m sure of it.”

“I figured you were,” the Texan said placidly, “from the way you talk. You seem to know quite a bit about them. You know they aren’t amateurs. You know they’re pretty clever. You knew this man Julius who was here this afternoon, Jean told me. An’ he seemed to know something about you. If we knew some of these things ourselves maybe we could’ve done quite a bit of figurin’ ourselves.”

His tone was reserved and sensible, exactly the same as he might have used to call a hand of poker. There was no belligerence or animosity in it. He was inquisitive and he could be wrong, but he had a right to find out what was sitting across the table, in a polite and impersonal way.

Simon Templar gazed back at him appreciatively, but still with flakes of steel resting in his eyes to match the challenge that was almost imperceptible in the foreman’s courteous simplicity.

“Yes, I know quite a bit about them,” he said. “I know that they don’t want any more commotion than they’ve got to have — which is why Valmon’s performance last night, when I made him mad enough to be stupid, must have been worrying Comrade Julius no little. I know why Comrade Julius must be even more worried since he was here this afternoon, I know that they may be able to make a small county sheriff play ball, but that there are other departments that they couldn’t even begin to talk to — which is why they’d much rather not get involved with kidnappings and killings.”

“All right,” said Reefe. “Then wouldn’t it help if we all knew?”

Simon pushed away his plate and took out a cigarette.

“Maybe it would,” he said at last. “I wouldn’t have told you any sooner because it’s kind of dangerous to know. But by this time they’re liable to think I’ve told you anyhow. So just for fun you could start worrying about this—”

He got no further, because at that moment they were all aware of quickened footsteps scuffling up the hill from the lower mesa where the other ranch buildings were.

The girl stiffened and checked her breath. Hank Reefe, with a different instinctive reaction, turned and began to stretch out a long arm towards the chair where he had shed his gun belt. The Saint crossed his legs and dragged quietly and deeply on his cigarette; Don Morland’s footsteps couldn’t have had that weight, and the Ungodly would have been much stealthier.

The dark shape of a man loomed into the aura of lamplight beyond the porch, and his upturned face showed as a suddenly lighter patch picked out of the night.

“What is it, Elmer?”

Jean Morland said it. She was already at the porch rail as Simon got to his feet.

The cowboy came to a stop, catching his voice after the haste of his climb.

“It’s Smoky, miss,” he said. “He stayed out to watch the cows tonight so we wouldn’t have to round ’em up again in the mornin’. His horse just come home alone — an’ there’s blood on the saddle!”

6

It seemed like a crazy thing to attempt — to set out to look for a man’s body at night, in wild broken country, with several square miles of it to cover. But they did it.

They belted on guns and picked up flashlights and rode out in a reckless cavalcade. But it was possible only because the moon was bright and clear, brilliant enough to throw hard black shadows against the ground that it washed with luminous grey, so bright that for any ordinary observation the flashlights were less than unnecessary. It was one of those amazing subtropical desert moonlights which are unknown to any other parts of the earth, which seem to have been designed expressly and solely for soft music and romance, and the Saint rode beside Jean Morland and reflected that this sort of thing always seemed to be happening to a lot of good moments in his life. Perhaps it was part of the price you paid for living that way: the same trail of adventure that led towards romance just as inevitably had to lead on and lead away again...

They headed for the canyon where they had had lunch, and found Smoky’s camp fire still burning; his bed-roll was opened beside it, but hadn’t been slept in. There was no sign of any disturbance. Apparently he had just mounted his horse and gone on a late patrol, or gone to investigate something that had aroused his attention or his suspicion.

They broke up and spread out from there; after arranging their signals Simon took the spoke of the fan that pointed most directly towards the hill from which he had reconnoitred Valmon’s territory that morning, and it was he who found Smoky, with surprising quickness, lying out on an open slope only a few yards from the boundary. He looked at the crumpled figure very briefly, and then fired one shot in the air and swung his flashlight round and round in a vertical circle for a while until he had received five answering twinkles from different directions.

Jean and Hank reached him first, and they looked at the sprawled heap that had been Smoky while Jim and Nails and Elmer rode up one by one and clumped stiffly into the circle.

Nails said it first.

“The same way as Frank Morland. His haws musta throwed him an’ then trod on him.”

It looked just like that; there was the clear print of a horseshoe on the side of Smoky’s pulped face, and others, just as clear, in the bloody mess where his chest had been crushed in.

The Saint lighted a cigarette.

“I just don’t know very much,” he remarked diffidently. “I’ve seen a few trick horses in my time, but Smoky’s must be something to tell Ripley about. Maybe you could sell him to a circus.”

Hank Reefe stared at him levelly, but it was Jim who growled, “What for?”

“There was blood on the saddle, wasn’t there?” said the Saint. “It must be a pretty acrobatic horse if it could have done this to him while he was still on top.”

“I’ve knowed a hawss to r’ar up an’ fall back on a man so’s he got the horn in his chest,” Nails said slowly. “I’ve seen hawss an’ man fall together an’ the hawss roll over on him.”

“The blood wasn’t on the horn,” answered the Saint, “and the saddle hadn’t been rolled on. It was quite a new saddle, and there wasn’t a scar on it.”

It was a strangely dramatic scene, all of them standing silently there around Smoky’s body with the silver moonlight carving out shadows as sharp and flat as a woodcut and drawing a kindly vagueness over the ugly details of death. So the moon would never mean soft music and romance to Smoky anymore, and its light on his broken body was only the same light that it had shed on hundreds and thousands of other broken bodies in European cities where soft music was also only the memory of a dream. But it seemed to Simon Templar that even in the timeless hush of those Arizona hills he could hear the grinding mutter of the mad machinery of destruction that had reached half-way around the world to lay a simple cowboy on the same altar with the peasants of Poland and the villagers of Greece.

Hank Reefe was nodding quietly.

“Sounds right enough,” he said. “So it could’ve been the same way with Frank Morland.”

“It’s been done before. Makes it look like a good accident. But they muffed Smoky a bit, or the saddle wouldn’t have given it away. He must have been shot or stabbed first, before they went to work with the big mallet with horseshoes nailed to it.”

“But why?” demanded the girl.

Simon shrugged grimly.

“Probably he saw something he shouldn’t have seen. Probably your Uncle Frank did the same. They won’t tell us.”

The foreman hooked his thumbs in his belt.

“Well, what now?”

It was purely an invitation, but it was curious how inevitable it sounded. Now that a leader was plainly called for, there was not a moment’s question about who it was to be. The leadership was offered and accepted with such unconscious naturalness that perhaps nobody even realised at the time that it had happened at all.

“Somebody’d better take Smoky back to the house,” said the Saint. “Nails, you do it. Jim and Elmer — you stick around here. You might see some more of what Smoky saw, and if it means trouble you can help to look after each other. Jean, you go back with Nails. Hank, you can go with her. Take a car and drive over to Valmon’s. Raise hell. Talk a lot. Demand to see the foreman and the boss and everyone else. Tell ’em about Smoky. Say that you’re sure there’s dirty work going on, and you’re going to know more about it, or else you’re going to shoot up the place or roust out the sheriff or anything else you can think of. I’ll leave the dialogue to you. The one thing is to cause plenty of commotion and make it last as long as possible and keep as many of them occupied as you can.”

“While you’re havin’ a look round?”

“Exactly. The more you can distract their attention, the more I may be able to do. So try and keep ’em bothered without actually letting it go into a free-for-all. But when the time comes — and it’ll probably be my time too — come out shooting.”

“I’ll do that.”

Simon turned and handed his reins to Nails.

“You can put Smoky on my horse — I’ll be walking from here on.”

Then, as he must have expected, Jean Morland was the only one who had to be answered. She came and took his arm while the men were picking Smoky up and mounting him for his last meaningless ride, and the Saint was finishing his cigarette and staring over the shadowy terrain of the J-Bar-B.

“You’ve got quite a way of taking charge, haven’t you, cowboy?”

“Everybody knows what has to be done,” he tried to tell her. “Somebody just has to say it.”

“I suppose that usually turns out to be you.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re really the boss, when your father’s away. But you haven’t been here so long, and — well, you could have too much on your mind.”

“That’s just it,” she said, and this was not what he had expected at all. “I have got too much on my mind. And I wouldn’t be any good. And I know I ought to be left out. I don’t want to be the stupid wench in the story who gets heroic and keeps dashing in where she doesn’t belong and messing everything up. I know you wouldn’t have any use for that. I just wish I knew why I was so sure that you know so much.”

He put his hands on her shoulders and faced her.

“I think Hank will tell you about that one day.”

“Couldn’t I want you to tell me?”

“There isn’t time now.”

“But something.”

He drew a breath and held it for the slightest pause.

“Do you happen to remember that there’s a war on, Jean?” he asked quietly. “Well, this is part of it. Even here. Just a little frontier skirmish that the history books will never write about. But one day thousands of men will be killed and cities will be blasted with what there is on this ranch. I’m trying to make sure that they’re the right men and the right cities.”

She was standing quite still, and the moonlight glossed out all the subtleties of expression so that he couldn’t be sure how much she understood or whether she understood anything.

She said in that clear steady voice of hers, “Just be careful, Simon. So you can tell me the rest.”

She took a step closer, and for an instant he felt her lips cool and tremorless against his. Then she turned away, and he turned back with her to the others and saw that Smoky’s body was already wrapped in a blanket and tied over his saddle. Jim and Elmer stepped back, and Nails led the palomino over to his own horse and bridged his stirrups. Jean Morland mounted without another word, and Hank Reefe turned to the Saint with his reins in his hand.

“Good luck.”

“You too.”

They gripped. Then, as the foreman set the brim of his hat and put one hand to the saddle horn, he said, “One day I’m goin’ to know why you remind me of that feller I was talkin’ about — the Saint.”

That was all. He swung a long leg over the cantle, and the Saint turned away, grinning, and was starting down the slope without waiting to see them get away.

He figured that he might have a little time to spare, and he was interested to see not only what preparations Max Valmon might have made to carry out his threat to blast the stream out of its course but also what other engineering arrangements might have been initiated in the vicinity.

He also knew that from there on he was taking risks not only with his own life but also with the entire outcome of that frontier skirmish which were entirely unauthorised by any of the published books of rules. One telephone call to the right number, when he was in Lion Rock, would have taken the whole thing out of his hands and delivered it into the lap of a highly organised team of genial gentlemen with elegant badges and all the resources of the Law at their disposal. But to the Saint there was personal pride in certainty as against wild suspicion, and a delight in danger for its own sake that eliminated all such prosaic solutions. From the beginning this had been his adventure, and if he could drop it now he could have dropped it from the beginning, and there was no clear dividing line. And there would have been nothing to remember. It was all very reprehensible, no doubt, and respectable officials in Washington would get ulcers about it; but if the Saint hadn’t been doing reprehensible things all his life there would never have been a Saint Saga, and this chronicler would have had to devoted his genius to writing a syndicated column of advice and good cheer to lovely hearts.

It was easy for Simon to find the stream, and he followed it over the boundary line as it traced a wide rising quadrant. Then it turned sharply and came tumbling down over steeply rising boulders in a series of chattering cascades. The Saint climbed beside it, and presently found himself on a high grassy flat across which the brook rustled through a broad ribbon of wild alfalfa. This, then, must have been the place where it could easily have been diverted, for the mesa fell away to his left through a rim of jagged rocks beyond which there must have been plenty of natural channels to lead it clear out to the open acres of the J-Bar-B. In fact, one path had already been cut in that direction, but it was not an aqueduct. It was a wide, nicely graded, soundly surfaced road.

Simon stood and gazed at it with profound interest. He had studied maps of the district enough to know that there should be no public highway there. And ranchers did not normally build private roads of that quality so that they could drive out to odd corners of their estates and admire the view. This road had been constructed for the efficient movement of heavy loads, and it was still new enough not to have been much scarred by the traffic.

Turning, the Saint thought that he could look across from there back to the slope where he had found Smoky, and while he looked he saw the red mote of a cigarette-end dance and brighten like a tiny firefly in a patch of shadow, and his lips hardened grimly. The road itself would not have been visible from where Smoky had been, since it lay safely below the raised rim of the plateau, but Smoky might have seen something on it that he should not have seen, and might have betrayed his presence with a carelessly handled cigarette exactly as Jim or Elmer was doing then...

Simon followed the road up, and the road followed the brook. They turned north together, into the rocky hills on the other side of the mesa where the ground went on climbing in ragged steps towards the general level of the place where the Saint had killed his snake that day and found crystals like blood in a broken stone... He realised that in fact the place where he had picked up the stone could not have been much more than half a mile from where he was going, and must have been part of the same geological outcropping... Then he was at the end of both the brook and the road.

They separated about a hundred yards before that, towards the foot of a sheer rock cliff where the meadow ended. He followed the stream first. It climbed precipitously up a funnel of steep falls, and abruptly he was at its source where it sprang clean and sparkling out of a natural cleft in the rock. Above there was nothing but the soaring battlements of age-eroded stone.

The Saint worked westwards along the foot of the escarpment towards the road, and now he practically knew what he would find there. Without any feeling of surprise he saw the angular spidery shapes of machinery that certainly had nothing to do with agriculture, the gaunt utilitarian forms of buildings that were not barns or granaries.

The entrance of the mine was a square patch of blackness in the side of the bluff. Simon picked his way over to it, and reached for the flashlight in the hip pocket of his Levis. He was still a few steps from the opening when a voice that was not at all western spoke out of the darkness.

It said, “Reach for some stars, buddy, and keep coming.”

7

The Saint raised his hands slowly, and walked the last four paces to the mouth of the mine.

The voice said, “Drop the flashlight.”

Simon dropped it.

He stood in front of the pitch-black gap, trying uselessly to penetrate its inky opacity.

“Take out your rod,” ordered the voice. “Put it on the ground. Then turn around and go back six steps.”

The Saint obeyed. There was nothing else for it. Out there in the open, bathed in the moonlight, he was a perfect target while the Voice was only cold words out of utter emptiness. He could have been dropped where he stood before he even knew what to shoot at.

He stood where he had been told to stop, feeling cold ripples inching up his spine, not knowing when the tearing smash of a bullet would blast through his chest and hurl him forward into eternal nothingness. Behind him he heard crunching steps — it sounded like two men. They paused momentarily, picking up the Magnum, and came on. Something hard and blunt prodded his back.

“Walk to that first building on your right.”

Simon walked, with the hard bluntness in his back all the time. He was steered to a door, and told to open it and go in. When he had taken three or four steps into blackness, a switch clicked behind him and a dim bare bulb lit up over his head. He saw that he was in a corner of some sort of ore mill, but he didn’t know enough about it to identify any of the machines that loomed away beyond the limits of the little patch of light where he stood.

The gun muzzle ceased pressing against him for the first time.

“Okay, buddy,” said the voice. “You can turn around now.”

Simon turned.

He saw two men, both in dirty blue overalls. One, who was unmistakably the owner of the Voice, was big and square, very broad-shouldered and a little paunchy. He carried a submachine gun. He had a close-cropped sandy head and small crinkly eyes and a heavy stubbly chin. The other, who held the Saint’s Magnum, was smaller and thinner. He had brown hair and big black eyes with a moist flat look to them, and a very pale narrow face gashed with a pink slit of a mouth.

The big man studied Simon’s face with satisfaction.

“It’s him,” he announced to his companion. “I thought so.”

“Well, I’m surprised,” said the Saint reprovingly. “If you were expecting me I should think you’d have hung out flags and ordered a brass band.”

The big man ignored this.

“Better call Valmon,” he said over his shoulder.

The thin man nodded, and went over to a corner where there was an old-fashioned wall telephone. He took off the receiver and cranked it.

Presently he said, “This is Eberhardt. The Saint is here. He came to the mine, and Neumann and I caught him.”

His voice was as thin as he was, with a strongly accented whine. He listened for a while and said “Ja.” Then he said “Okay,” and hung up the receiver and came back.

“They’ll be right up,” he said.

Simon gazed at the two men pleasantly.

“It’s rather an unusual way to announce a visitor,” he remarked, “but I suppose you have the real welcoming spirit underneath it all. By the way, will you offer me a cigarette or shall I smoke my own?”

“You can smoke,” Neumann said stolidly. “But don’t try any funny business.”

The Saint took out a pack of cigarettes, and took a cigarette from the pack. He flicked a match with his thumb-nail and lighted it.

“Incidentally,” he went on, in the same easy conversational tone, “how is the good old Bund making out these days? You must feel sort of lost with your Gauleiter in the sneezer and so many new laws everywhere about your marching around and heiling Hitler.”

“Can it,” said Neumann coldly. “Or I won’t wait till Valmon gets here.”

“Maybe you could fool them by saying ‘Heil Schickelgruber,’ ” Simon suggested helpfully.

The other glowered at him without movement, and Simon smiled faintly and turned to pick himself a seat on a packing case against the wall. He leaned back and enjoyed his cigarette, while Neumann and Eberhardt watched him like wooden sentries. They were certainly not the most convivial company he had ever been with, but he could console himself with the expectation that Max Valmon would soon introduce a brighter note.

The whole picture was complete now, so simply and comprehensively that the only surprise was in the amount of insolent audacity that had laid out its composition. If he had only known just how the disappearance of Don Morland fitted in, he wouldn’t have had one question left to ask. And it wasn’t likely to be much longer before he had that final answer.

The only real problem was, what good his knowledge was going to do him. He hadn’t expected to be caught so suddenly, if at all. And Hank Reefe wouldn’t have had time to ride back with Smoky and drive over to Valmon’s estancia yet. It was a situation that would have been more than slightly discouraging to most men, but to the Saint it was a tightening of nerve and sinew, the firing spark to an unquenchable fighting recklessness that had never yet admitted that any corner was hopeless. At that moment he had no idea what miracle he could possibly perform to equalise the reversal that had so catastrophically placed him where he was, but until that last and perhaps inevitable exception when The End would be written unarguably and for ever, he would always have his ridiculous and magnificent faith that if the tables could be turned once they could be turned again...

There was the sound of a car purring up outside and stopping. Then footsteps. Then the door opened, and Valmon came in.

After him, almost apologetically, came Dr Ludwig Julius.

Simon stood up in his own easy-going time. He gave them a smile so casual and carefree that it was hard to believe that he was not himself the host of the interview, instead of a prisoner at the mercy of four men, a Tommy gun, and a few other items of assorted ordnance.

“Hullo, Maxie dear,” he drawled. “I know you asked me to drop in tonight, but I didn’t think it was going to be such a formal affair. Comrades Neumann and Eberhardt have been frightfully zealous about turning themselves into a guard of honour — in fact, if I wasn’t so well up in these military traditions I might have been afraid I was being kidnapped.”

Valmon stood looking at him with that dark heavy swagger, his thumbs hooked in his carved and jewelled belt, his black brows drawn down unsmilingly.

“You should have come to the house,” he said. “I was waiting for you.”

“I thought I’d take a stroll around first,” said the Saint. “It was such a lovely night, and I knew there’d be lots of interesting things to see.”

“What made you so sure of that?”

“It sort of dawned on me gradually. But I suppose I was really quite sure when I picked up a chunk of cinnabar this morning, about half a mile from here, on the Circle Y.”

Neumann and Eberhardt had drawn back unobtrusively towards the shadows. They were still on watch there, but they had left Simon with Valmon and Julius grouped under the dim spotlight like the principals in a theatrical stage setting.

Valmon and Julius looked at each other, and Julius moved in a little from his self-effacing place a little behind Valmon.

Simon beamed at him encouragingly.

“Of course,” he admitted, “I’d started to get a few ideas before that. I suppose I really got the first one when I happened to find out that Dr Ludwig Julius, the great mining expert and one of dear Adolf’s Deputy Kommissars of Supply, was taking a personal trip to Arizona for a nice healthy vacation.”

“How did you know that?” Julius asked gently.

“My spies,” said the Saint, “are everywhere. It sounds awfully funny, I know, but it’s quite true. All kinds of people tell me things — people I’ve never met and probably never will meet. They just think I might be interested and do something. That’s what happens when you get to be such a notorious character. You must try another purge in your Department, Ludwig — that is, if you ever have the chance.”

Julius’s bald head shone like smooth wet coral.

“How very interesting!” he said softly. “Do you wish to tell us anything more?”

“Anything you like... Of course, when I knew you were here I wanted to snoop around. So I took a little trouble to get into the next-door ranch. I didn’t know at the time that they were so very closely connected. But when I heard about the previous owner’s unfortunate accident, I did begin to wonder.”

“And then?”

Valmon’s modulated tenor was a melodic organ-note of challenge. His lips had drawn apart in a set way that bared his glistening teeth.

The Saint inhaled and blew out a leisured drift of curling smoke.

“Then, you were so anxious to buy the Circle Y. In fact, you were more than anxious — you insisted. Quite rudely. I thought your technique was rather crude at the time, and I didn’t see why you had to be so corny. And there was all that yawp about damming the stream, with all the trimmings straight out of Hopalong Cassidy. There had to be something phony about that but I couldn’t get it at first.”

“And now you know all about it,” suggested Julius.

“I think so — since I came this way tonight.”

“We are waiting breathlessly.”

“You’ve already driven an exploratory shaft. It confirms what I would have guessed from the cinnabar I found. The vein runs clear through. More — the whole mountain is probably fuller of it than a ripe Limburger is full of mould. You might want to cut acres of it away in chunks. But no matter how you work it, you’re practically certain to break through the reservoir that feeds the stream. There’ll be a small but exciting flood, more or less according to how big the source is, and then — no more stream.”

The small pale grey eyes of Dr Julius were like melting marbles behind their thick lenses.

“You must have been a promising student of geology Mr Templar,” he said milkily. “That wasn’t so difficult.”

“Has anything been difficult for you?”

It was dulcet sarcasm of the most treacly kind, but it was also another delicate challenge to go on.

The Saint threw away the stub of his cigarette and lighted another, without hurrying. It was all taking time — time in which Hank Reefe could catch up with his assignment. And that would give the Saint at least one ally within useful distance, and according to his irrepressible arithmetic, leave him almost nothing to cope with himself except four men, a Tommy gun, and a few other items of assorted ordnance.

And there was no reason why he shouldn’t go on talking, as long as Valmon and Julius wanted to listen. He was telling them nothing that they didn’t know already, except how much he knew himself — and they could have used unnecessarily unpleasant methods to try to find that out. But in the circumstances he had no objection to telling them. It was a convenient way of verifying his own deductions — and at the same time he was steadily building up the subtle moral advantage that he had assumed from the first instant, the gnawing doubt in their minds that any man in his position could talk so coolly and cheerfully without having at least one ace up his sleeve. He wanted that idea to germinate in them all by itself...

“It’s all been a most amusing plot,” he murmured. “Valmon makes this strike on his ranch, or somebody makes it for him, but anyway, he’s still a good Heinie under his ten-gallon hat, so the nearest Bund heeler is the first to hear of it — unless Maxie wears that exalted title himself, which is most likely. Anyway, there’s no commotion. There is a little quiet geologising and assaying, and the word goes back to Berlin that this is rich. Awful rich. And one of the things that the Fatherland needs quite badly, to kill a few more un-kultured barbarians with. So badly that the great Dr Julius comes here in person to organise it. Now unfortunately the nasty Jewish-controlled and plutocracketeering United States have passed a lot of unsympathetic embargoes against giving nice little Nazis materials to make fireworks with. But that might be gotten around. This is a pretty deserted part of the world, and a lot of machinery could be quietly brought in, and you could rake up plenty of demobilised Bundsmen with the skill to work it, and get a mine going that nobody else knew anything about — and smuggle the produce out and away to a suitable coast where it could be sneaked on to a freight-carrying submarine and carted off to dear old Deutschland. A very pretty and enterprising scheme, and well worth the trouble when you figure that a lode like this must be good for hundreds of tons of pure mercury. And if I’m not mistaken, mercury is the stuff that makes the detonators that pop off the bombs and shells that your Aryan heroes are distributing to illuminate the beauties of the New Order to the admiring women and children of the world.”

He had all the confirmation he needed in Max Valmon’s fixed ivorine smile, in the softly perspiring pink attentiveness of Ludwig Julius.

He went on after a moment, with the same hibernal confidence that was holding them at arm’s length almost like a sword in his hand, even though he knew that his dialogue was running out and he was coming to the dizzy end of certainty like a downhill skier racing towards a precipice.

“However, there was one other snag. A little more prospecting showed that aside from the business of busting up the stream, your operations were going to be dangerously close to the Circle Y — in fact, some of the richest deposits were across their border. So the Circle Y had to be taken over. Of course it had to be done in a phony way — they mustn’t know about the cinnabar, partly because you didn’t want to have to pay that much more for the place, but most importantly because nobody at all must know that there’s cinnabar here and a mine ready to produce. That’s why you had to murder Frank Morland not long ago, and one of our cowboys tonight — because they could have seen you moving machinery and asked questions or talked about it.”

“Murder is a very unpleasant word, Mr Templar,” said Julius, and suddenly in his lisping way he was almost jovial. “Why not call it... er... liquidation of enemy agents to prevent vital information?”

“I prefer calling it murder,” said the Saint, no less amiably. “It’s such a help to clear thinking. Murder to conceal grand larceny.”

The black scowl darkened over Valmon’s rigid smile.

“What larceny?”

“Larceny of a large quantity of quicksilver from the people of the United States.” The Saint smiled. “I made a check of your title in the County Records Office this afternoon. I found that when this ranch was first homesteaded, the Government specifically excluded certain mineral rights from the patent granted. The same on the Circle Y. Mercury was just one of the mineral rights reserved by Uncle Sam.”

“I am learning to admire your thoroughness more and more every moment,” said Julius ingratiatingly, but for the first time there was the faintest strain in the smooth surface of his indulgent superiority.

Simon Templar caught it without an outward sign, but his pulses moved into a sharper tempo of tentative delight. This might have been it — the break that he had been waiting for, the first hint of a crevice into which a wedge might be driven that might split the trap wide open. He pressed at it with the nerveless restraint of a master cutter attacking a priceless diamond.

“It was just routine,” he said modestly. “But you certainly have stirred yourselves into a pot of soup, haven’t you? You go around murdering people — and you might have gotten by with it once, but tonight was too often: I was able to prove that tonight’s job wasn’t an accident, and that throws doubt on Frank Morland’s accident, and all the boys are going to remember it and talk about it. You’re trying to start up an illegal mine, and they’re going to talk about that too—”

“You told them about that?”

“Naturally,” Simon lied. “Did you think I’d be dumb enough to come over here and keep it a secret, so that you’d have nobody to knock off but me?”

“But a little while ago you said that you really only understood everything after you came here tonight.”

Because he was the Saint, Simon didn’t even flip a muscle, though it seemed to him that his heart stopped for an instant.

“That was just on corroborative evidence — did all my guessing long ago,” he said smoothly, and went on quickly: “So you’ll never be safe unless you can wipe out the whole personnel of the Circle Y with no questions asked — which is going to be quite a problem, even for you... And then on top of all that you had to kidnap Papa Don Morland, which is a Federal rap all by itself. A bad break, Ludwig — very bad. And my poor little brain can’t see what good you ever hoped it would do you. You might possibly be able to force him to sign the ranch over to dear Maxie or some other stooge of yours—”

“I beg your pardon,” interrupted Dr Julius humbly.

“By all means.”

“You should be more precise in your use of the conditional. Let us at least face facts, and admit that we have already persuaded Mr Morland to give us his signature.”

The Saint’s eyes turned colder, and Julius smiled.

“Really, we weren’t very brutal,” he said. “Only just enough to make him psychologically receptive. Then I told him in considerable detail about all the things that would happen to his beautiful daughter if he was obstinate, and he signed almost at once.”

“You mean he believed you?”

“I can be very convincing, especially when I don’t have to bluff. As a matter of fact—”

The wall telephone broke in with a tinny stutter, and for some reason everything else went quiet.

Eberhardt answered it. He put the receiver to his ear and then took it away again and looked at Julius.

“Pardon me,” said Julius punctiliously, and went to the instrument.

He spent most of the time listening, with an occasional monosyllable of acknowledgment. It was not long. Then he spoke one sentence in German, which the Saint understood perfectly, and hung up the receiver and came back. He seemed even pinker and shinier and squirmily complacent than before.

“As a matter of fact,” he resumed, as if there had been no interruption, “Miss Morland is with us already. Party Member Nagel has just brought her in. You knew him, I understand, as ‘Nails.’ ”

8

Time crawled over the Saint’s head — long-drawn-out intense dissected months of it, it seemed. He stood absolutely motionless, like a statue, through a crawling eternity, and this was solely because he knew that the slightest movement he made would betray him. He had to wait until his muscles and nerves linked themselves up again, as they would have to do after an unwarned smash on the head.

Actually it could only have been very few seconds, and Dr Julius was still facing him with that smug and pseudo-deferential leer.

The Saint said, “You’re fairly thorough yourself, aren’t you, Ludwig?”

“After all, it was a rather obvious precaution, to make sure that we had at least one friend in your camp.”

“The famous fifth-column technique, in fact.”

Julius almost giggled in happy agreement.

“And incidentally, Mr Templar, of course it makes one less of your men who will have to be convinced of how absurd the theories are which you have been scattering around.”

“I was working that out.”

“While it does make it easy for me to have a very important private talk with Miss Morland.”

The Saint’s gaze was a caress of ice.

“Dear Ludwig,” he said, very gently, “I hope you won’t be brutal with her. Because if you are, if I have to come back from the grave to do it, I swear that I’ll cut a hole in your stomach and pull your guts out inch by inch and roast them over a slow fire.”

Julius cocked his head on one side like a bird.

“You’re quite fond of her, aren’t you?”

“A mind like yours wouldn’t understand it, but I am.”

“Then that should be helpful... In fact, it gives me a most amusing idea. Let us go down to the house for a little while.”

He turned and went to the door, with Valmon following him. At once Neumann and Eberhardt closed in behind the Saint and forced him after them.

There was no chance to make a break for it. Even after the dim light inside the mill, the moonlight outside was still bright enough for him to have been a certain notch on Neumann’s Tommy gun before he had run half a dozen yards. Valmon and Julius were already getting into the front of the station wagon. Eberhardt opened the door to the back, and went around to the other side to cover him from there. It was all handled as efficiently as if they had had their training in the old-time gang wars of Chicago — which, Simon reflected, was perfectly probable.

Valmon drove in silence to the ranch house, and stopped. Neumann and Eberhardt got out, one on each side again. The Saint followed. They moved a little way from the car.

Julius said to Neumann, “Bring Morland here.”

Eberhardt, standing a little behind the Saint, touched the small of his back with his revolver to remind him that he was still helpless.

The Saint looked around. They were standing near a corral fence. There were other cars parked a little way off, and among them he recognised his own Buick. So there was probably no doubt that Julius was telling the truth about Jean having been taken. And in another moment Simon had his final proof, when he saw her come to the window of a lighted room with Nails looming behind her. He seemed to be about to drag her back, but Julius called to him with sudden volume, for the window was some distance off: “Let her stay there.”

Neumann came back from the direction of one of the other buildings with another man in overalls. They were half leading and half dragging Morland between them.

“Tie him to the fence,” said Julius.

There were ropes around Morland’s arms already, and the two men deftly rearranged them so that his arm were spread out along the fence and bound down by the wrists, his body bent slightly forwards to conform with the height. The headlamps of the station wagon, which had been left on, illuminated the scene. He twisted his head around and looked up at the Saint with a grey hopelessness that was incapable of even properly rendering surprise.

Simon was aware that Julius had left his side for a moment, but he was back now. He had a three-foot whip in his soft hands, running its supple length affectionately through his fingers.

“I’m not anxious to be too unkind to Miss Morland,” he said syrupily. “But it is necessary for Mr Morland to receive a little extra discipline. To be exact, his sentence is ten lashes. I am going to ask you to administer them.”

‘What the hell,” asked the Saint, involuntarily and incredulously, “do you think I am?”

Julius had so obviously been expecting such an answer that he scarcely paused for it. “There is, of course, an alternative,” he admitted. “Miss Morland herself may need some... er... psychological conditioning. I was hoping that this would be sufficient. But if you object, it can be applied to her direct. She can be brought out here, and stripped. And then she can be beaten by Neumann. Neumann is quite an expert — he was a guard in Dachau for a time. She would have to receive one hundred lashes: ten for every one which you refused to give her father. The choice is entirely up to you.”

Simon stared at him.

Julius held out the quirt.

“You mustn’t keep us waiting too long, Mr Templar.”

His voice was wheedling, succulent, with a kind of obscene eagerness in it.

Mechanically Simon took the whip. He looked at Julius, at the distant lighted window with the girl’s silhouette in it, at Don Morland. He had a sense of frightful unreality contending with inescapable belief, much as an intelligent savage might have had on first listening to a radio. It was impossible, but it could not be denied. Julius was absolutely capable of making good his threat. There was no answer to it. And the gun in Eberhardt’s hand prodded him in the back again.

“Let’s talk this over,” said the Saint stupidly.

“Afterwards, if you like. But you must do what I tell you. Otherwise I shall send for Miss Morland at once.”

Don Morland spoke, his voice desperate but clear.

“Please do what he tells you. Please. Please.”

Simon stepped forward like an automaton into the harsh glare of the headlights. The whip whistled as he raised it. He hit Morland once across the shoulders. There was no strength in his arm.

“One,” counted Julius contentedly. “But you must try to make it look more convincing — otherwise I shall still have to let Neumann demonstrate on Miss Morland. However, we will count that as a first attempt. There are still ninety lashes that you can save Miss Morland.”

It was a nightmare, a Grand Guignol horror that made the Saint feel as if black clouds were creeping into his mind. His arm rose and fell, quickly, because he knew that in a flogging the pause and waiting between blows while the curling agony of each stroke sinks into the flesh is half the torture. He put everything that he knew of control and timing into the job of seeming to throw all his weight into every blow, and pulling his arm at the last fraction of an inch to let it land as lightly as possible, always trying to land on a loose fold of Morland’s shirt that would make the maximum noise while it helped to cushion the shock.

Even so, he must have hurt the old man. He couldn’t tell how much. He hoped that most of Morland’s writhing and groaning was in co-operation with him, to make it look good. He would a thousand times rather have been flogged himself. But that was not the alternative. He could see Jean Morland there, the red bars creeping up her white skin, and red beads swelling and trickling down to criss-cross them in a ghastly network, Neumann’s powerful muscles bunching and stretching, Eberhardt’s hungry black eyes and damp pink mouth...

“...ten,” said Julius.

Simon stepped back and threw down the whip. He felt sick. The inside of his head was numb and throbbing, as if he had taken a terrific pounding in the ring.

“A little hasty and unskilful,” went on that sugary voice. “Neumann would have done much better. But it will do.”

“I only hope,” said the Saint, “the practice will come in handy when I have the chance to do the same to you.”

Julius sniggered delightedly.

He turned to Neumann.

“Take him back.”

Simon felt for his pack of cigarettes. There were only two left in it. He chose one with exaggerated care. For once in his life, his hands were unsteady.

Neumann and the other man were untying Morland and dragging him away. There was no one to be seen in the lighted window any more. Julius was speaking to Valmon.

“I shall leave you to begin explaining things to Miss Morland, while I finish with Mr Templar. Eberhardt and I can take care of him... You will not need to make any apologies for what Mr Templar has just done. You understand? Mr Templar is one of our best allies.”

Into Valmon’s dark face came a thin thread of white, the spreading gleam of his teeth.

“I get it.”

He waited while Simon was steered into the back seat of the station wagon. Julius took the wheel. Eberhardt sat in the middle seat, facing around, the barrel of the Magnum resting on the back and trained on the centre of Simon’s chest.

There was an idea in the Saint’s head, a picture that he was trying to round out, but his brain still couldn’t quite get hold of it. He sat back and tried to chase the fogs out of his mind.

When they stopped at the side door of the mill again, the disembarking was as efficient as before, even though Neumann was not there. Julius covered one side of the car, to forestall any break in that direction. Eberhardt backed out the other door and made the Saint follow him out. They entered the building in loose procession — Simon first, Eberhardt on his heels, and Julius a little behind. Once again, under the light, Simon was told to turn around. Eberhardt had stepped to one side of the door, and the Saint faced Julius. The Komissar of Supply had an automatic in his hand now, and it was clear that he knew how to use it. He stood just far enough away to be out of reach of any sudden spring.

“Now, my dear Saint,” he said, and it was the first time he had used that name, “I hope you are quite satisfied with my thoroughness.”

The Saint was conscious of his pulses, and they were as steady as perfectly balanced reciprocating motors again. He glanced at the dwindling cigarette between his fingers, and the smoke went up from it as cleanly cut as a vein in marble. His mind was clear and cool — as cool as a Himalayan stream.

“No,” he said regretfully. “No, Ludwig, I’m afraid I’m not.”

“You will tell me why?”

“You’ve had a nice little excursion at my expense. I admit it. And I suppose it was a great moment of triumph for your sadistic little maggoty soul. But it hasn’t changed a thing since we left here.”

“Please go on.”

“You’ve made Morland sign something. All right. But there are still five people who are going to fight it, whatever it is — unless you can get away with killing us all. Which, as I said, is liable to attract some attention. You may have a conniving sheriff in your pocket, but I expect most of us have got friends and relatives here and there, and someone is going to get some publicity for it that even he can’t stop. Then—”

“Let me answer your points as you make them. Frank Morland’s death has already been disposed of — officially. I have seen a report of the inquest. As for this cowboy tonight — you proclaimed a theory. It was a rather nebulous one, and the men you spoke to aren’t too imaginative. Remember that they still accept Nagel as one of themselves. After he talks to them some more, I think they will soon stop worrying.”

“And will they forget about your secret mercury mine?”

“Yes,” said Julius. “Because you never told them.”

Simon looked at him steadily.

“It’s your neck,” he remarked. “You risk it.”

“There really isn’t any risk. In the first place, you contradicted yourself when we were talking — you remember? Then, I’ve spoken to Nagel since then. He said nothing about it. If you had divulged anything so important, he would certainly have mentioned it. I confess that you had me bothered for a moment, but now I’m completely unconcerned.”

The Saint shrugged.

“If you want to draw to an inside straight, I can’t stop you. But there’s still Morland.”

“What about him?”

“Whatever you’ve made him sign, he’ll repudiate it as soon as you turn him loose. Therefore you can’t turn him loose. But if you kill him, that’ll be a third mysterious death, and even Nails is going to have a tough time talking that one off. On the other hand, you can’t hold him for ever, or his daughter either. Not in this country. Sooner or later—”

Julius smiled.

“Pardon me again,” he said, “but there is no question of holding Mr Morland in this country.”

It seemed to Simon that a frozen cataract had exploded over his head. The chill of it went down into his bones like a distilled essence from the immemorial bleakness of the dark side of the moon... He wondered how he could ever have been so naive.

“Now you go on,” he said.

“Mr Morland,” Julius explained, enjoying it, “has been persuaded to sign an unlimited power of attorney made out to his daughter. He will now be taken, as quickly as possible, and by various special routes which I need not tell you about, to Germany. There he will be placed in a concentration camp. You have heard about our concentration camps, no doubt. And of course Miss Morland has heard about them too. Valmon at this moment is probably giving her some additional information. And with your co-operation, we have just been able to show her a small sample of the treatment which her father might receive. But that, of course, is entirely up to her. The Gestapo has great powers of discrimination. If Miss Morland is disposed to help and obey all our instructions, I’m sure that her father need not suffer any more inconvenience than if he were confined to a sanatorium.”

It was all there, and the petty details could fill themselves in... Jim and Elmer could be sent away on some pretext, and other demobilised Bundsmen like Nails would take their place — as Julius had said, they were not very imaginative men, and they would not be hard to deal with... Even Hank Reefe might be got rid of, with a little more ingenuity. Jean could get rid of him... Jean would do whatever she was told, with that fear held over her — exactly as he himself had done a much more improbable thing that night.

“All of which,” said the Saint in a very even voice, “is just as beautiful as I might have expected... if you leave me out of it.”

“I’m afraid I was proposing to do that,” said Julius unctuously. “You’ve been very kind to make it so easy for us. I can hardly tell you how much I appreciated the service you did for me a few minutes ago. But you can imagine it for yourself. Without that, if Miss Morland reciprocated your tender feelings, as she probably did, your disappearance might have made her harder to handle. But now that she has seen you flogging her father, with her own eyes, she will not even need convincing that you have been on our side all along. So she will feel even more alone and helpless, and she will be even more amenable.”

It was the rest of the picture, the link that Simon had tried to find in the car when his brain was still out of step — the clinching knowledge that had been foreshadowed when Julius gave that significant inflection to “Mr Templar is one of our best allies.”

The Saint found himself nodding.

“Did I ever happen to tell you,” he inquired carefully, “that out of a lot of yellow-bellied swine that I’ve met, you could take a very distinguished place?”

Only for an instant Julius’s face took on a deeper flush, and his pale eyes burned behind the thick glasses. And then he smiled again.

“Fortunately your opinions will soon be of no consequence,” he said, and the Saint’s eyes were lazy with contempt.

“You mean after I’ve been — what was your polite totalitarian word for it? — liquidated?”

“Precisely.”

“And when does that happen?”

“Immediately.”

The Saint looked again at the remains of the cigarette in his fingers, and reached for his package. He took out the last cigarette and lighted it very deliberately from the stub. A great deal seemed to depend on that simple action. But when there is so little between a man and the end of his life, not even the smallest thing can be taken lightly.

When he looked up, his eyes were almost gay.

“Do tell me,” he said. “I’m sure you’ve got something picturesque thought out.”

“You had better let Eberhardt tie your hands behind you first.”

A man does these things. Even on the march to execution, he obeys. He becomes trapped into a kind of automatism, in which there is only the one hypnotising thought that death waiting at the end of a few seconds is still not yet death.

With the cigarette held between his lips, Simon put his hands together behind his back. He placed them with the edges of his wrists together and his muscles tense. Eberhardt walked around behind him, and he felt the roughness of cords tightening on his skin.

When Eberhardt stepped away again, pulling out the gun which he had temporarily thrust into one overall pocket, Julius went to the door and switched on some more lights. Deeper reaches of the long barren shed with its Martian islands of machinery sprang into sight under the crude glare of more powerful bulbs hung from the roof.

“Since this was your great discovery, I think it deserves to be your last memory,” Julius said.

He crossed to a larger and much more complicated switchboard which had become visible on one of the side walls, and made another connection. The air trembled with a deep and almost musical note that soared quickly and settled into a thin but tangible whine that Simon could feel in the soles of his feet. He recognised it in a moment as the hum of a mighty generator.

“I don’t know how familiar you are with the process of extracting mercury from cinnabar,” Julius said conversationally.

“Not so familiar as I might be,” said the Saint in the same tone. “Do you stick a glass tube in it and put it in an oven so that it climbs out like a thermometer, or do you sit over it with a microscope and pick it out with tweezers?”

“Here we use some improvements on the Almadén method,” said Julius, rather like a pedantic lecturer. “But the process is fundamentally the same. First the ore is crushed with some new machinery designed by Bruechner of Essen. Then it is carried by a conveyor belt to a continuous furnace. As it passes down through the furnace, it is roasted at high temperature.”

He selected a heavy lever and threw it over, and the shed suddenly trembled with a tremendous thumping clatter like a regiment of cavalry trotting over an iron drumhead. A second similar lever added a harsh groaning whirr to the din.

“The fumes, which contain the mercury, are passed through a condenser which consists first of a masonry chamber, and then pipes of earthenware, wood, and glass,” Julius continued, raising his voice calmly. “The soot which is deposited in the condenser is also worked over for mercury, with an extractor designed by Colonel von Leicht... Let me show you some of this.”

He led the way to a short flight of steps that climbed to a railed catwalk that ran around the nearest huge cylindrical engine. Prodded by Eberhardt, the Saint followed. He stood by the inside rail at the top of the stair, with Julius on one side of him and Eberhardt on the other.

He looked down into something like a huge round vat. From an elevator tower outside the building, a broad chute led down through one wall to the edge of the vat. There was a layer of coarse broken ore on it, and as Julius pulled a mechanical lever near the rail the ore began to trickle down like a slow steady avalanche. Inside the vat, operating from a central axle, a double ring of iron pile-drivers like the multiple legs of a fantastically symmetrical spider rose and fell with monotonous precision, marching round in an endless circle and pounding up and down with a tireless thundering force that shook the girdered framework. Beyond the vat, another conveyor drew crumbled ore from the bottom and raised it to an opening high in the side of a gigantic grey-white kiln.

“This is Bruechner’s reducer,” Julius explained, “which prepares the rock for our fine-ore furnace. It would, naturally, prepare anything else for the same treatment.”

Then the Saint knew just what he meant.

So... this was it. Now and for ever. And there would be no retakes.

He turned the flat of his wrists together, and his upper arms stiffened and his shoulders bowed quietly as if under the load of an unutterable surrender. But he had never been farther from surrender. His lungs locked, and under his shirt, invisibly, the leathery muscles swelled and crisped and strained into corded knots. The ropes cut his flesh, but he never felt them; only one question mattered at that moment, and it sounded curiously academic: how much did Eberhardt, with all his efficiency, know about Houdini...

The Saint straightened up again at last, as if with a final resolution. He took a last deep pull on his cigarette, and half turned, and opened his mouth to let it fall on the platform behind him.

Then he faced Julius again.

“I’m glad you haven’t disappointed me,” he said. “It’s a very charming idea.”

“Will you step off by yourself,” asked Julius, “or would you prefer to be pushed?”

He was not joking. In those words and in his face was the whole evil softness of the man. His round face gleamed with a thin film of sweat, and his small protruding slaty eyes were liquid with pleading. He licked his lips, leaving them wet.

Simon turned and looked down into the pit again, where the terrible revolving iron pistons jolted up and down. He seemed to have lost the power of speech.

“You must make up your mind,” Julius insisted at length.

Simon waited as long as he could before he raised his head.

“I would much rather be pushed,” he said.

Then they took hold of him, one of them on each side.

And at that moment the last cigarette which he had dropped behind him went off, for he had prepared it for just such a desperate diversion with a roll of toy caps and some photographer’s flash powder which he had bought that afternoon. It was not a new trick, even for him, but it could always be counted on to create one or two precious seconds of disorganisation. And such stolen seconds often made all the difference between reminiscences and obituaries.

It went off with a sharp crack like a small-calibre pistol shot, and a brilliant burst of blue-white luminance that splashed through the shed as if a bolt of lightning had gone through it. The other two men would not have been human if they hadn’t loosened their hold on him and started to turn to see what had happened. And that was as much as he needed. He slipped one hand out of the rope around his wrists, and took hold of them in his turn.

He took Julius’s right wrist in his left hand, and Eberhardt’s left wrist in his right hand, and with simultaneous reverse twists he wrenched each man’s arm backwards and around and high up between the shoulder blades. The agonising leverage bent them forward over the rail. They struggled and kicked deliriously but there was nothing they could do against that lock clamped by fingers of steel. Eberhardt yelled out inarticulately, and the Magnum in his free hand crashed twice like a cannon, but he couldn’t get it around to aim it.

The Saint didn’t even notice it. His legs braced apart like a Colossus, his back straight and rigid, his arms thrust out, he pressed the two men over the rail until their weight was all hung on it. Still he forced them away, inch by inch, until their centres of gravity teetered infinitesimally over it. The sweat broke out on his forehead, and his mouth was a line of stone. And then, with one last convulsive effort, he forced them clear over and let go.

There was one shrill wailing hideous scream that reverberated hollowly through the clangour of the machinery and then nothing but the relentless rhythmic thudding and crunching of the multiple steel shafts trampling their endless circle.

9

Simon Templar stepped back, turned, and went slowly down the stairs. His face had the impassive coldness of a bronze casting. He walked to the door, and methodically turned out all the lights. He didn’t try to stop any of the machinery. Let that finish what it had begun. He went out into the moonlight night.

With the door closed behind him, the deafening clatter sank to a steady rumble. Moon silver lay on the rocks and hills, and etched its sweeps and stipples of jet over the broken spaces; there were stars twinkling in the clear sky. Here, still, was peace. He got into the station wagon, switched on lights and engine, turned, and drove down the road. In a moment there was not even the grumbling of the machines any more, only the whispering hum of the engine and the cool night air slipping by.

He drove to the place near the ranch house where he had been taken before, and stopped there. The next step might have been a little ticklish, but it seemed as if his guardian angel, having at last come out of an alarmingly prolonged siesta, was determined to make amends. He had not even had time to worry over the problem when he saw a man coming towards the car. It was Neumann, carrying his sub-machine gun slackly under his arm.

Simon left the headlights on, to dazzle Neumann as much as possible, and opened the door beside him. Without getting out, he swung around on the seat so that he was clear of the steering wheel and his legs were out of the car; then he bent over as if he were fumbling for something he had dropped on the running board. He heard Neumann coming close, but he waited until he saw the man’s feet and knew his distance exactly.

“Heil Schickelgruber,” said the Saint, and straightened up like a spring.

His fist smashed squarely on to Neumann’s fleshy nose in a co-ordinated extrusion of the same movement that had the vicious potency of a mule’s hind leg. Neumann gave a weird squeaky hiccough and went reeling and back-pedalling and windmillng back for three or four paces until his heel caught and he went sprawling.

It was no time for any of the polite gestures of refined combat.

The Saint took one step, and jumped on the man’s chest with both feet. It sounded as if something cracked, but Simon didn’t wait to be sure. He grabbed the Tommy gun out of the man’s limp grasp and pounded the butt on the man’s head several times, until he was quite sure that Party Member Neumann would take no further active part in the festivities that night, if ever.

Simon went back to the station wagon and switched out the lights. The episode had not been entirely silent, but it seemed to have attracted no attention. There were no sounds of interest anywhere. The lighted window in the ranch house was still lighted, but the shades had been drawn and nobody had looked out. The Saint thought that he saw the silhouette of Max Valmon pass across it, as if pacing up and down, but he could not be sure.

He headed towards the outer buildings from which Don Morland had been brought. Chinks of light showed there from between the crevices of closed shutters. He had no way of guessing how many demobilised Bundsmen there would be inside, but he had an idea that there would be several. But he had the grips of the Tommy gun in his hands now, and the exact number was not too important.

Actually, there were nine. They looked up with the blank faces of frozen fish when he threw open the door. Three of them were lying on the cots which were ranged along both sides of the big barrack-like dormitory; the other six were apparently having some quiet fun for themselves with Don Morland, who was tied to a chair in the centre of the room.

The Saint’s forefinger was feather-light on the trigger of his machine gun.

“I’m sorry to interrupt a happy cultural evening, boys,” he said affectionately, “but this is round-up time. Two of you can untie Mr Morland. The rest of you will please move to the back of the room with your hands high in the air. You may try any tricks you like, but I must tell you that nothing would amuse me more than blowing large holes in your dinners.”

None of them, it seemed, felt overly ambitious. They herded sullenly towards the back of the room, to be joined in another few moments by the two who had stayed behind to untie Morland.

The old man half fell out of the chair, and then pulled himself up and limped towards the Saint.

Simon waved him to one side, out of the line of fire.

“Have you been around long enough to know any good place where we can lock them up?” he asked.

“There’s a sort of store-room right back there,” said Morland. “It doesn’t have any windows, and the door only opens from this side. That’s where they kept me.”

“Then they must know it’s all right,” said the Saint and raised his gun and his voice a little: “Into the doghouse comrades.”

The men went in. It was rather a tight squeeze, but they all made it. Morland closed the door on them and slid a heavy wooden bolt into its socket.

Simon went up and inspected the fastening. It looked solid enough, but nine muscular Aryans were a slightly different proposition from one old retired dentist.

“Better give me a hand with the beds,” he said.

He hauled one cot out and set it against the door, facing out lengthwise. Between them, they jammed four more cots up against it in the same direction, until the line reached to within a foot of the far wall. The remaining space they wedged full of chests and chairs and other assorted furniture until it was certain that nothing less than a tank could have broken out of the back room.

Simon surveyed the barricade with approval.

“I can’t help thinking it’s going to be quite uncomfortable for them,” he remarked. “Rather like the Black Hole of Calcutta. But then, they’ll only appreciate Leavenworth so much more when they get there.”

It was then that he heard two muffled shots from a distance outside.

He snatched up the Tommy gun and ran out of the bunkhouse. Instinctively he headed towards the ranch building — there was no other place in the vicinity from which it was likely that the reports could have come. But after a few yards he paused. There was no other noise or commotion. The one lighted window in the ranch house still glowed steadily, a single blank square of yellow in the halftone dark.

Simon went towards it more slowly and cautiously. He stepped on to the verandah, and found a door near the window. Light came from under it. There was no sound at all, inside or outside.

The Saint kicked the door inwards and took two steps into the room. Across from him, unbound but unarmed, Jean Morland stared at him with wide-eyed horror and contempt. Between them, on the floor, Max Valmon and the man called Nails lay in the grotesque attitudes of sudden death.

He heard a single footfall behind him, and a gun jarred into his back. A voice that was somehow familiar, and yet distorted so that he didn’t recognise it at once, said, “Drop the gun.”

Simon stood still and dropped it.

The voice said, “Go on in.”

Simon obeyed. It seemed as if a time machine had been turned back and he was repeating a scene that had already been played once that night.

“Now turn round.”

The Saint turned, and saw Hank Reefe standing square in the doorway, frosty-eyed and expressionlessly leather-faced, with his old-fashioned Colt held level at his hip.

“I want you to see it coming, you rat,” said that only half familiar voice.

The Saint looked at him steadily.

“It’s good to see you, Hank,” he said in a very even tone. “I’m glad you were able to get Max and Nails for yourself. I was afraid—”

“Save your breath Templar,” said the Texan coldly. “Jean’s told me about you already. Now stand up and take it.”

Simon Templar’s lips curled in a faint smile that was almost cynical. He gazed at ironic death with clear blue eyes and found it a little funny.

It was the perfect moment for Don Morland to rush in and clutch Reefe’s right arm and gasp frantically: “No, no! They made him do it to save Jean from being beaten. I heard them.”

“I left as soon as we got back to the house,” Reefe explained. “I started off all right when I got here, but Nails couldn’t ’ve been more than a few minutes behind me. I was doin’ fine when there was a knock on the door an’ one of the men went out. When he came back, he just said a couple of words in German to the others, an’ they all jumped on me at once. Knocked me out cold. When I woke up I was tied to a chair in the kitchen. Took me some time to get loose.”

“Nails fixed me a drink after Hank had gone,” said the girl. “There must have been something in it, because suddenly I felt dizzy and everything started to go black. The next thing I knew, I was here.”

“So,” said the Saint, “I guess this winds up the interlude.”

He had already told them his own story and completed the background for them.

“What do we do now?” asked Reefe.

“You’d better drive into Lion Rock and phone the FBI in Phoenix,” said the Saint. “You can drop Mr Morland and Jean off at the house on your way. I’ll wait here and look after the prisoners till the flying squad arrives, and give them the whole story. They’ll take a few hours to get here.”

“Okay,” said Reefe.

He stood up and hitched his belt. There was a slight softening of amusement in his dour face.

“I guess I know now why you kept remindin’ me of that feller the Saint,” he said.

Simon looked him in the eyes.

“I guess you do,” he admitted.

They shook hands, and Reefe and Morland started towards their car.

Jean Morland linked her arm with the Saint’s as he rose and followed. “I’ll wait for you,” she said.

“Don’t wait too long,” he answered lightly. “It may be some time, and you’re going to need some rest.”

They took two or three steps more, quite slowly.

“It’s dreadful to think that Hank might have killed you,” she said, and the Saint chuckled.

“I’ve had a few happier moments myself. But he was quite right, according to what he knew. He’s a good guy. He’ll always be a good guy... He kind of likes you I think.”

She said nothing.

Morland and Hank were already in Morland’s station wagon. Just a few yards from it, Jean Morland stopped, and turned in front of him.

“Thank you so much,” she said, “—Saint.”

Her arms slipped around his neck, and for a long moment he felt the pressure of her lips.

Then she was gone.

He stood and watched the station wagon drive away.

After several minutes, he turned and walked over to the bunkhouse. The buttress of cots and furniture was undisturbed, and looked likely to remain that way until somebody from outside moved it. There was very little noise from the store-room where the nine Bundsmen were imprisoned. There was not likely to be much. A shortage of oxygen is highly discouraging to violent effort.

Simon went back to the ranch house and explored a bit. He found a bottle of Peter Dawson, and a bottle of Benedictine.

He decided that the occasion deserved the more expensive drink. He poured himself some Benedictine, and went back to the living room. There, after some searching, he gathered together some paper, a pen, and a package of cigarettes.

He sat down at the dining table, with his drink and a lighted cigarette, and for more than an hour he wrote steadily in his neat individualistic hand. When he had finished, the complete synopsis of the story, with all relevant facts and avenues of inquiry, was there for the forthcoming G-Men to read. He signed it with his name, and below that he carefully sketched a skeleton figure crowned with a correctly elliptical halo.

He finished his drink while he read it over and put it down again and nailed it to the table with the pen. Then he lighted one more cigarette, put the rest of the pack in his pocket, and went out to his car.

He got in and drove to the so-called main road, and there without hesitation he turned to the right and drove away westwards — which was not the way to the Circle Y. He had the greatest admiration for the FBI, but they were liable to lead into formalities that he was too busy to be annoyed with.

He drove quickly, with the softness of Jean Morland’s lips on his mouth, and his heart singing.