The Saint Meets the Tiger

Chapter XVI IN THE SWIM

To fall one hundred and sixty feet takes just a shade over three seconds, but it seems a lot longer. Simon Templar knew this very vividly, for he seemed to live through three aeons between the instant of sickening breathlessness when he felt the cut-away flooring giving way under his weight, through the four odd pulsebeats of hurtling down and down into darkness, till he struck water with a stinging splash.

He sank like a plummet, and struck out mightily for the surface. He must have gone deep, for by the time his head came up his heart was pounding furiously and his chest felt as if it were about to cave in under the pressure. He drew a giant's breath, and choked at the end of it, for, unsuspecting, he had let himself be sucked under again. The undertow was terrific. He kicked out with all his strength, and as he rose again, gasping and spitting, his hand touched stone and got a grip on it instinctively. In spite of his experience, he still misjudged the power of the current: his hold was all but broken as soon as he obtained it, and his arm was nearly jerked from its socket with the strain. With an exertion of every bit of force he could rally, he drew himself up with his shoulder muscles, thrashing the water with his legs, until he got the fingers of his other hand crooked over that providential ledge. There he hung, panting, with the sinews of his arms taut and creaking, while he shook the water out of his eyes and tried to get his bearings.

Already he had been swept some distance from where he had fallen — it must have been a longish way, reckoning by the force of the stream as measured by the pull on his arms. The blackness was not complete, fortunately. His eyes were already used to the darkness, and so he was able to take in the surroundings comparatively well by the faint phosphorescent light which filtered up, apparently, from the surface, of the water.

He had been dropped into some sort of subterranean river. His handhold was a rough projection in the rock wall of the cavern through which the stream ran. The cave was no more than a dozen' feet wide, but the vaulted roof arched over a good twenty-five feet from the surface: during the centuries of its mill-race career the river must have worn itself deeper and deeper into its bed. "Mill-race" was a good description. The superficial smoothness of the water was no guide to the murderous speed and power of the current. The Saint wondered what beneficent deity had placed that shelf of rock directly under his flailing hand, for without it he would undoubtedly have been dragged down and drowned in a few minutes. Even now he wasn't out of the wood: the agonizing twinges of overworked muscle were throbbing up and down his arms, and though he had fingers of steel they wouldn't stand up to that gruelling tension indefinitely.

Clearly the great thing was to slip the clutch of the torrent which was patiently struggling to pluck him away and haul him down to the death which had been arranged for him. The Saint pulled himself up a few inches to test his muscles, and groaned, for he had been weakening faster than he realized. He let himself down again for a second's rest and set his teeth. Perhaps he prayed. . . . Then he took and held a deep breath, and heaved again. He edged up six inches ... seven ... eight.... There he stopped to breathe again. Even that slight drawing of his body from the clasp of the rushing water lessened the stress, and he tackled the next effort with a better heart. This time he brought his chin over the ledge, and one of his feet, scrabbling for help against the submerged face of the rock, lodged in a cranny and enabled him to get enough support from his legs partially to relax his arms and hands while he gathered strength for a final spurt.

He looked up, wondering now whether this strenuous climbing was only going to lead to a postponement of the end — to a cramped and painful clinging to the stone until his endurance petered out and he slipped and fell again into those evil waters. And then he had difficulty in stopping himself wasting precious energy in a resounding cheer, for he saw a wide black opening in the rock some ten feet over his head. That was certainly a recess where he could lie down and rest almost indefinitely. It seemed as if the kind gods were giving him all the breaks that afternoon.

"Not yet, my Tiger, not yet," muttered the Saint, with all his old indomitable jauntiness flooding back. "Shoals of people have sweated like Harry to bump me off, but I'm beginning to think it can't be done!"

The sight of that prospective refuge was enormously encouraging, and he felt new reserves of strength tingle into his body. He shifted his grip to another narrow angle of rock at arm's length overhead, and with a long pull he managed to hitch himself right out of the water and get his toes on to the ledge which had saved his life, while his hands moved up from crevice to crevice in the stone; so that when he paused again he was standing straight up, flattened out against the rock, with the river slinking past clear beneath him.

The opening he had seen was temptingly near now, and in his eagerness he nearly overreached himself. He flung his weight on to a jutting bit of rock without first testing it, and it broke away in his hand. He was left swinging by three fingers of his left hand in a hold barely an inch deep, and it was several nerve-racking and muscle-racking seconds before he found fresh holds. Thereafter he proceeded with more circumspection, and eventually scrambled over the rim of the ledge he had marked down with no further mishap.

He stretched himself out on his back and closed his eyes. Now that the immediate peril was past, reaction came. In the ordinary way his nerves were faultless, but perhaps the prefatory shock of the fall, followed by the awful sensation of being swirled helplessly down into the depths of the underground river, had between them succeeded in undermining some of his confidence. He felt utterly weary, and he was shaking in every limb — though this could have been largely due to the reaction of relaxing muscles and tendons. It was some time before he was able to roll over on his side and peer down at the treacherous, glimmering sheen of smooth water a dozen feet below. Unenviable as his position still was, the Saint contrived a twisted grin.

"Rotten luck, son," he croaked. "Sorry to disappoint you, but I don't want to die to-day."

Then in the nebulous light which permeated the clammy atmosphere, he turned to examine the possibilities of further progress. He had heard of such caverns as this, and knew that parts of the country were honeycombed with a vast network of such subterranean natural excavations. Some of these caves went further than even the most intrepid had ever dared to explore them: he remembered a story he had heard about Cheddar Caves, of a party which had set out to investigate a certain tunnel and had never returned, and he recalled how his fertile imagination had been fired with visionings of strange prehistoric beasts surviving in the bowels of the earth, and perhaps a race of semi-human beings similarly entombed, and how he had resolved one day to go in search of the lost explorers. But that would have been with all the armoury he wanted, suitable companions, ropes, and torches.... This, however, was not Cheddar, and he had nothing but his soaking clothes and the few things in his pockets. Yet, since there was no retreat toward the water, he must go the other way. He was certain that he had been carried too far down the stream for there to be any hope of a search party getting in touch with him.

Behind him what he had thought was simply the ledge proved to be a low gap in the face of the rock. He crawled a little way in, and felt again the helplessness of being without the flashlight which he ought to have had with him in any case. Still, it wasn't any use crying about it — you couldn't weep luminous tears — so the only thing to do was to carry on and hope for the best.

A distinct draught chilled his face as he wriggled along in the pitchy blackness, and his hopes began to rise again, tentatively. If the air circulated freely, it meant that somewhere there must be an outlet, and the grim doubt was whether, when he found it, it would prove to be an outlet he could use.

It was a vague sort of consolation to find that his wrist watch, which was guaranteed to stand any amount of rough handling on land or sea or air, had stood up to this last test. It was still ticking smoothly, and he could time his laborious progress by the luminous dial. The floor of the tunnel seemed to be practically level, and long-forgotten eroding waters had worn it flat and eaten the jaggedness off the irregularities which had survived, so that worming along on his stomach was not so arduous as it might have been. Once he cracked his head against a wall of rock right in his path, and so found that the passage took a twist to the right. After that, he felt his way gingerly, and thus circumnavigated the subsequent windings uninjured. Always he made sure that the air blew on his face, and by that means he saved himself the expenditure of much time and energy on following up a side branch which must have been a blind alley. He went on like this for over an hour, and at the end of that time, raising himself slowly to his feet, he found that the roof had receded far enough to allow him to proceed upright, which was an improvement.

Still he felt his way forward very carefully with feet and hands, for he had no desire to step over the edge of a small precipice or run his head against a sudden dip of the rock above. He kept one hand on the wall to steer by and worked patiently on.

The darkness had that pitchy intensity which torments the eyes and rasps the nerves to a shrieking rawness. He understood then as never before the full agony of blindness. Queer flashes of crimson rocketed across his sight, and the strain of transferring all his reliance to his sense of touch was working him up into a quivering torment of fraying ganglions. There was a terrible desire to sink down on the stone and crawl aimlessly about till sleep and forgetfulness came. Then this was replaced by the struggling of a childish terror to unthrone his reason and set him pounding helpless fists against the rock — to rush madly into the blackness till he crashed against another wall and was flung broken and screaming to the ground — to give up the attempt altogether and stand raving and cursing this false blindness, praying recklessly for the relief of death. For all the darkness that cloaks the world under the sky is as dazzling sunshine to the awful numbing terror of the darkness in the places under the earth where there has never been light since the beginning.

But the Saint slogged on, though toward the end he scarcely knew what he was doing, and his pace grew slower and slower, jerky and automatic, till it stopped altogether. Then he would drive himself forward again. Then he would find that he had come to a standstill again, and the routine would be repeated. Wild snatches of all the songs he had ever heard burst from his dry lips and boomed and reechoed crazily about his ears. Once he was deafened with a harsh roar of eerie, discordant laughter, and was only half conscious that it cackled from his own throat. He found that he chattered and babbled foolish, meaningless strings of words, and here and there in his madness sentences from widely separated conversations stood out with ridiculous clarity in the senseless jumble. And each time he caught himself giving way to these forerunners of insanity he stopped and lashed himself back to trembling silence. He grew careless of his safety. Sometimes he ran as though fiends pursued him; then he would crash against an obstacle and fall headlong, and there he would lie and wrestle with himself till he could rise and go on again. He reeled and thudded against the wall, and went on — he stumbled and tripped and fell, and went on — he was aching with a hundred bruises, but still he went on ... on ... on.... Sometimes he blasphemed, sometimes he prayed. But yard by yard he advanced; and always, high and safe above the maelstrom of breaking nerves, he had before him the one guiding beacon which could possibly bring him out of that hell alive — to fight on and on and keep that draught of clean, fresh air blowing squarely in his face.

The strength of an unfaltering will to live drove him on when tearing muscles cried for rest. He could no longer see his watch: when he tried to look at it, the figures and the hands whirled and jazzed before his eyes in a dizzy tangle which he had lost the power to control. But hours had ceased to mean anything — in that Stygian emptiness there was no time, no anything but pain and madness. Always there was that impenetrable darkness, clinging, pulsating, palpable. It wound sinuously about his limbs and tried to hold them — it looped a noose round his chest and tightened it — it thudded on his temples and seared his eyes — swelled in upon him till he seemed to be ploughing through a tenuous liquid, and yet when he hit out and strove to break away from its grip it thinned away and let him go, only to swathe him round again in an instant. It stuck in his throat like a fog, curling ghostly, evil fingers caressingly about his face. He thought of Light, Light, Light — of glowing coals and the leaping flicker of campfires, of the pale, mystical light of the moon and the dim, dusty light of stars, of searchlight beams and the headlights of cars, of the sizzling white glare of arc lamps. He thought of all great lights — of the merciless blaze of eye-aching tropical suns flaming over amethyst desert skies. But there was only the darkness... . And he toiled on....

***

And then ahead of him was no longer darkness.

He had turned a corner of the passage, staggering round a buttress and falling heavily over a boulder which he saw but had not the strength to avoid. And as he lay on the ground, sore and weary to death, he saw that the rock about him was picked out with the faintest of faint silver lights. He wondered if this were madness at last — if his eyes had been won over to the Enemy and were joining in the derision of his defeat — if his vision had been seduced to refining his torture with hallucinations of victory. Slowly, fearfully, he raised his head.

He could see all the cave in which he lay — the height and the length and the breadth of it. The light was so dim that it hardly amounted to more than normal darkness, but after the appalling blind blackness in which he had wandered for so many hours it was as startling a contrast as the rising of the sun after night. Almost sobbing with thankfulness, he dragged himself to his feet and went reeling on. There was another bend about fifty yards ahead, and at that corner it seemed as if the light was a little stronger. He reached the angle of rock and stumbled around it in a torment of apprehension lest after all he should have been deceived. But before him lay a short stretch of widening cave, and at the end of that showed a great rough-hewn opening. And through that opening he saw the blessed sky — an infinitely deep and clean blue evening sky sprinkled with merry, winking stars.

Somehow he reached the opening and saw all the glory of the radiant night, the jewelled heavens above and the quiet sea below. He stood and gazed, supremely happy, marvelling at all these | things as a man might do who had seen none of | them before and would see none of them again.

"Oh, God!" said the Saint in a breathless whisper.

Then he sagged limply against the wall and slid down to the ground in a dead faint.

It was three hours before he opened his eyes again, though this the Saint did not know. He had fallen in the entrance of the cave, and he was awakened by the light of the rising moon shining across his face. Slowly he opened his eyes and gazed unwinkingly into the round white luminous disk that was heaving itself out of the sea. A memory of the nightmare of blindness through which he had passed seethed horribly across his half-consciousness, and he sprang up with a cry. The movement roused him completely, and he found himself leaning against the wall with his heart thudding like a triphammer and his breath coming in short gasps. He smiled crookedly, collecting himself. He must have had it badly! Never before had he passed out like that.

He waited, gathering his wits and trampling the aftermath of the nightmare. It was then that he looked at his watch and found that it was half-past eleven. The rest had revived him — the crazy muzziness had gone from his head, and he felt his strength welling back in great refreshing waves. Elbows and knees were grazed and sore, his knuckles were skinned, tender bumps were coming up all over his skull, and his entire body throbbed like one big bruise, but this was where his strenuous training stood him in good stead: so great were the recuperative powers of his matchless constitution that already he was stretching his limbs experimentally to see whether he could honestly certify himself fit and tuned up for the next round.

And gradually the awareness of a singular noise began to percolate his brain, and that noise was the faint, clanking, chugging noise of machinery. He stiffened, and turned his head. The sound faded away into silence, and he wondered if his ears were playing him tricks and he was hearing nothing but the singing of his own battered cranium. Then that gentle rattling started up again — only the muffled phantom of a bated whisper of a noise, but quite unmistakable to the Saint.

He looked out, and blinked incredulously.

The island called the Old House lay in the quiet sea below. A little farther out a long, lean, black shape rode at anchor, picked out in delicately stippled high lights where the moon touched it — a picture to rejoice the heart of an artist or a seaman. And presently, while Simon watched, the tinkle of the engine stopped again. In a moment a small boat shot out from under the shadow of the ship's hull and began to pull swiftly over to the island, and at the same time another boat emerged from behind the Old House and worked over toward the motor ship. The boat which came from the island wallowed low in the water and moved sluggishly; the Saint could see a squat pile of crates loaded amidships. The night was so still that his keen hearing could even detect the faint jar of the rowlocks.

"God bless my soul!" ejaculated the Saint mildly.

The inconceivable good luck which had stood by him throughout his lawless career, and which had been prodigiously attentive to him in this adventure, was still working overtime. There he was, alive and more or less well, when he ought by rights to have been drowned in the underground stream or lost in the interminable blackness of the caves — and no sooner had his little guiding star picked him out of that mess, and given him a few minutes to get his wind, than he was handed out this incredible gift! It seemed to him that he was streets ahead of the mortal for whom mere manna falls from heaven: to the .Saint, for no reason that he could cudgel out of his brains, Heaven seemed to spend all its spare time dispatching perfectly cooked eight-course dinners with a selection of appropriate wines complete, what time he did nothing more than providing the silver and cutlery. His gods had landed him up in pretty good order at exactly the place where he wanted to be, at exactly the hour he wanted to arrive, and had thoughtfully thrown in the fact that by then the Tiger would be working his gang overtime patting himself on the back for having so slickly annihilated the thorn which for so long had been playing the devil with their ugly hides!

That was certainly an unhoped-for blessing. The Tiger thought Mr. Templar was dead. Well, Mr. Templar decided to let the Tiger cherish that harmless little delusion for a space. Being theoretically dead, the Saint was going to stay dead till it suited his book to stage a resurrection.

There were, of course, contrary considerations. By that time Orace and Pat and Carn would have turned Baycombe inside out, and they would have found only that gaping hole in the floor of the inn. Wherefore at least two of that party, and one of them especially, would be — But that had got to stand aside. They'd have presumed him dead for some hours now, and it would only mean delaying the homecoming a few more hours. Against that he could set the help it gave him to know that Patricia would be safely out of the fireworks, though he would feel the absence of Orace. All the same, taking it by and large, he reckoned that debit and credit weren't so far off balancing. With a continuance of his miraculous luck, the curtain could be rung down a lot sooner, now that everything was arranged for him to catch the Tiger on the hop....

"The Saint versus the Tiger," murmured Simon. "This is where all the early Christian martyrs will look down from heaven and see the old game played under rules they'd never heard of in Rome — and, we hope, with a surprise ending that Nero never saw."

It was the Saint himself who spoke. All his bubbling optimism was sparkling up through his system again. He was tired, naturally, but he still felt fit enough to tackle anything the Tiger Cubs were prepared to hand out to him, and he had never reviewed an impending struggle more eagerly, for by all the omens it was going to be the last of his exploits, and his sense of theatre demanded that he should finish up in a blaze of glory.

He searched for his weapons, and found them securely in their places. The cigarettes in his case, which might have been useful, had been ruined by the wet; but the case itself, with the fine steel blade running along one edge of it, was a tried asset in emergencies, and this went into the hip pocket of his trousers. His coat he left in the cave.

Looking down, he saw that there were only a dozen yards to climb down to the beach. With the moon to help him, this was no difficult task. He swung over the edge at once, and in a few minutes he stood on the crunching shingle with the water lapping round his ankles. There was a longish swim yet to get through, but by now he felt capable of all that and more. He waded out up to his waist and then slithered forward into the ripples without a splash, like an otter, and struck out for the Tiger's ship with clean, powerful strokes.

His arms rose and fell rhythmically, making not the least sound as they cleared the water and then dived back at full stretch. The Saint could keep up that graceful overarm for hours, but on this occasion he had no need for such a display of stamina. His trained muscles drove him forward tirelessly at a pace that ate up distance. He steered a wide circling course to keep well out of the danger zone between the Old House and the ship, where he might have been spotted by a pair of keen eyes in one of the rowboats or by anyone who happened to be looking across that reach of water from either side, for the moonlight was strengthening with every minute — an act of cussedness on the part of Nature which made the job in hand a more ticklish proposition for both Saint and Tiger alike. Even so, it was not very long before he came up under the motor ship's cruiser stern, after covering the last hundred yards under water with only three cautious floatings-up for breath.

He clung there for a moment's rest, and then worked his way along the seaward side, where it would be safest, forward to the bows, hugging close in to the hull. It then occurred to him that the climb up the anchor chain, in full view of the island and the ship's bridge, would be a very chancy method. Yet the vessel's sides rose sheer and unbroken for six feet before they were cut by the lowest row of portholes.

But once more his luck held. As he swam slowly along, pondering this problem, he ran right into a rope ladder which hung .down from the deck. It couldn't have been more conveniently provided if he had asked for it to be lowered against his arrival, but a little thought gave him the reason for its presence. It must have been dropped for the Tiger and his principals to come aboard, and since then the tide must have swung the ship right round on her moorings. And there it was, temporarily forgotten, and just the very thing he wanted.

The noise of the donkey engine, throttled down though it was, and the creaking of the derricks which were taking the gold on board, was louder now, and he could hear the sound of sea boots grating on the deck, and the subdued voices of men. As far as he could gather on his way up they were working on the after hold, for he heard nothing from directly above him.

The Saint came level with the deck and peeped over. All was clear at that point and forward of it, but he could see a few figures clustered round the small hatch aft, and an arm of timber stood out against the sky with a square case dangling at the end of it. Fortunately, they were all intent on their task, and already he had banked on the ship being short-handed, so that all the crew there was would be occupied with other things than loafing about getting in his way. With a quick heave, the Saint gained the rail, went over, and landed on the deck without sound. Facing him was an open door and a companionway. He jumped for it.

On the first step he paused and listened, but the work was going steadily on, and clearly nobody had noticed the dripping dark shape that had slipped over the rail and leaped across the exposed bit of deck.

"So far, so very good!" said the Saint, and a smile of joyous anticipation flitted across his lips. "Once aboard the lugger and the gold is mine!"

The companion ran down into a dimly lighted alleyway, and there the Saint hesitated. That was a risky place to loiter in. Cabins were also risky — they needed only the turning of a key to turn them into prisons. But he wanted a few seconds to rest and plan the next move, and bad to take his chance.

There was a promising-looking door right opposite him, and he tiptoed across the alley and turned the handle very softly. But the door must have been locked, for his gently increasing pressure failed to make it budge. The Saint was promptly intrigued by that locked door. It immediately drove all thoughts of safety and rest and scheming out of his head, and in his reckless fashion he resolved to have a look inside that cabin with the least possible delay, whether it was occupied or not — and, listening with his ear to a panel, he came to the conclusion that the unbroken silence within laid more than a shade of odds on its being empty. But to open a locked door required more implements than he had on him, and he was about to go in search of the engine-room workshop to collect suitable apparatus when he heard the sound of approaching footsteps.

In a flash he located their origin — round the nearest corner of the passage. The Saint retreated a little way up his companion ladder — an unwise move, since it left him with a very groggy line of withdrawal if the man glimpsed him and raised the alarm; but Simon, ever an opportunist, was curious to see who it was that had time to spend below when all hands were toiling to get the cargo loaded in the shortest practicable time.

He peeped one eye round the angle of the bulkhead, and then drew back sharply.

It was Bloem, carrying a tray on which was a plate with a pile of sandwiches and a siphon. The Saint glanced back over his shoulder, but behind him the deck was still deserted, though he was in imminent danger of discovery by anyone who happened to pass and glance down. For an instant he meditated flight — but only for an instant. The deck would be an unhealthy place for Simon Templar to wander around just then, and, besides, there was the door to open and Bloem to tail up in case the Boer were bringing the Tiger a little supper.

The Saint flattened himself atainst the bulkhead; and, as the footsteps drew level with him, he tensed up ready to take instant action, if Bloem noticed him. But the Boer was already turning away when he came into view, and Simon's eyes fired up as he saw that Bloem was making for the locked door.

Bloem set the tray down on the floor, fumbled for a key, and turned it in the lock. He pushed the door half open, and the Saint could see one corner of the cabin, for the lights were on inside. Then Bloem bent down to pick up the tray, and as he did so Simon dived from the eighth stair.

The Saint landed on one hunched shoulder, and that shoulder impinged accurately over Bloem's kidneys. The man gave a grunt of agony. All the weight of Simon's leaping, falling body was hurtling on behind that muscular shoulder, and Bloem was caught off his equilibrium. The impact sent the Boer toppling over, and his head was bumped forcefully against the floor as Simon crashed on top of him.

Bloem was absolutely out, but the sound of the scuffle might possibly have been heard. The Saint was on his feet again with the speed of a fighting panther. He— grabbed Bloem by the collar and yanked him into the cabin; then he snatched in the tray. In a moment he had the door shut and had turned with his back to it to see what his impulse had let him in for.

It was not till then that he saw someone sitting quietly on the bunk.

"Oh, how d'you do, Auntie?" said the Saint, who was always polite, and Agatha Girton's lips curved ironically.

"You're really rather a wonderful man, Mr. Templar," she remarked.