The Saint Overboard

The Saint's fierce whisper sizzled in his ear.

"Wenn du einen Laut von dir gibst, schneide ich dir den Kopf ab."

The man made no sound, having no wish to feel the hot bite of that vicious blade searing through his neck. He lay still; and the Saint slowly released the grip on his throat and used his freed hand to take the automatic from the man's hip pocket. Then he took his knee out of the man's chest.

"Get up."

The man worked himself slowly to his feet, with the muzzle of the gun grinding into his breastbone and the knife still under his eyes.

"Do you want to live to a ripe old age, Fritz?" asked the Saint gently.

The man nodded dumbly, licking his lips. And the Saint's white teeth flashed in a brief and cheerless smile.

"Then you'd better listen carefully to what I'm saying. You're not going to take all of that message to Ivaloff. You're going to take me along, and tell him that Vogel says I'm to go down. That's all. You won't see this gun any more, because it'll be in my pocket; but it'll be quite close enough to hit you. And if you make the slightest attempt to give me away, or speak one word out of your turn, I'll blow the front out of your stomach and let your dinner out for some air. Do you get my drift or shall I say it again?"

2

As they moved on, Simon amplified his instructions. He re­placed his knife in its sheath and put it inside his shirt; the gun he slipped into his trouser pocket, turning it up so that he could fire fairly easily across his body. He was still building up his plan while he was giving his orders. Crazy? Of course he was. But any man who was going to win a fight like that had to be crazy any­how.

And now he could fill in the steps of reasoning which the wild leap of his inspiration had ignored. The sight of those cases of bullion stacked around the after deck had started it; the grab not yet dismantled and lashed down had helped. Vogel's talk about unloading the gold had fitted in. And then, when he had heard Vogel speak about "going down" again, and gathered that Vogel himself was going to accompany Ivaloff, the complete and incontestable explanation had opened up in his mind like an exploding bomb. Loretta had told him-—-how many hundred years ago?—that Vogel must have some fabulous treasure-house some­where, where much of the proceeds of his astounding career of piracy might still be found, which Ingerbeck's had been seeking for five years. And now the Saint knew where that treasury was. He knew it as certainly as if he could have seen down through the thirty feet of stygian water over the side. Where else could it have been? Where else, in the name of all the sublime and extrav­agant gods of piracy, could Kurt Vogel, taking his loot from the trackless abysses of the sea, have found a more appropriate and inviolable depository for it than down there in the same vast lockers of Davy Jones from which it had been stolen?

And the Saint was going down there to find it. Vogel was going down with him to show him the last secret. And down there, in the heavy silence of that ultimate underworld, where no other soul could interfere, their duel would be fought out to its finish.

As they came to the companion, Simon was ripping off his tie and threading it through the trigger-guard of his automatic. He steadied the helmsman as they reached the lower deck.

"Hold my arm."

The man looked at him and obeyed. The Saint's blue eyes held him with a wintry dominance that would not even allow the idea of disobedience to come to life.

"And don't forget," added that smouldering undertone, which left no room for doubt in its audience that every threat it made would be unhesitatingly fulfilled. "If they even begin to suspect anything, you'll never live to see them make up their minds. Move on."

They moved on. The helmsman stopped at a door a little fur­ther up the alleyway and on the opposite side from the cabin in which Simon had been locked up, and opened it. Ivaloff and the two men who had dressed the Saint before were there, and they looked up in dour interrogation.

Simon held his breath. His forefinger took up the first pressure on the trigger, and every muscle in bis body was keyed up in terrible suspense. The second which he waited for the helmsman to speak was the longest he could remember. It dragged on through an eternity of pent-up stillness while he watched his inspiration trembling on a balance which he could do no more to control.

"The Chief says Templar is to go down again . . ."

Simon heard the words through a haze of relief in which the cabin swam round him. The breath seeped slowly back out of his thawing lungs. His spokesman's voice was practically normal—at least there was not enough shakiness in it to alarm listeners who had no reason to be suspicious. The Saint had been sent down once already; why not again?

Without a question, the two dressers got to their feet and stumped out into the alleyway, as the helmsman completed the order.

"He says you, Calvieri, see that there is a dress ready for him. He goes down himself also. He will be along in a few minutes— you are to be quick."

"Okay."

The two dressers went on, and Ivaloff was coming out to fol­low them when the helmsman stopped him.

"You are to stay here. You change into your shore clothes at once, and then you stay below here to see that none of the others come out on deck. No one except the engineer and his assistant must come out for any reason, he says, until this work is finished. Then you will go ashore with him."

"Boje moy," grumbled the other. "What is this?"

The helmsman shrugged.

"How should I know? They are his orders."

Ivaloff grunted and turned back, unbuckling his belt; and the helmsman closed the door on him.

It had worked.

The stage was set, and all the cues given. With that last order, the remainder of the crew were immobilised as effectively as they could have been by violence, and far more simply; while the one man whose unexpected appearance on deck would have blown everything apart was detailed to look after them. A good deal of jollification and whoopee might take place on deck while the authority of Vogel's command kept them below as securely as if they had been locked up—he had no doubt that a man like Vogel would have thoroughly impressed his underlings with the un­pleasant consequences of disobedience. And the exquisite strat­egy of the idea traced the first glint of a purely Saintly smile in the depths of Simon Templar's eyes. He only hoped that Kurt Vogel, that refrigerated maestro of generalship, would appreciate it himself when the time came ...

As he drew the helmsman, now white and trembling with the knowledge of what he had done, further along the alleyway, Si­mon flashed a lightning glance over the details of his organisa­tion, and found no flaw. There remained only the helmsman him­self, who could undo all the good work with the speech which he would undoubtedly make as soon as he had the chance. It was, therefore, essential that the chance should not come for a long time . . . Simon halted the man opposite the cabin where he had been imprisoned, and grinned at him amiably. And then his fist smoked up in a terrific uppercut.

It was a blow that carried with it every atom of speed and strength and science which the Saint had at his disposal. It im­pacted with surgical accuracy on the most sensitive spot of the helmsman's jaw with a clean crisp smack like the sound of a breaking spar, and the man's head snapped back as if it had collided with an express train. Beyond that single sharp crack of collision it caused no sound at all—certainly the recipient was incapable of making any, and the Saint felt reasonably sure that he would not become audible again for a full hour. He caught the man as he fell, lowered him to the ground inside the cabin which he should have been occupying himself, and silently shut the door.

As he hurried up the companion, Simon was rapidly knotting his tie behind his neck and stuffing it under his shirt. The auto­matic, already threaded on it by the triggerguard, hung at his collar-bone, where he could reach it in full diving kit so long as the helmet was off.

Calvieri and his assistant had been out of sight when the Saint struck that one vital blow, and they showed no surprise when he appeared on deck alone. In point of time only a few seconds had elapsed since they stumped up the companion before the Saint followed them; and the helmsman had had a separate message to give to Ivaloff. Probably they thought nothing about it; and the Saint's demeanour was so tractable that it would have seemed quite safe for him to be moving about without a close guard.

He sat down on the stool and unlaced his shoes. His experience that afternoon had made him familiar with the processes of dressing for the dip, and every second might be precious. As quickly as he could without seeming to be in frantic haste, he tucked the legs of his trousers inside his socks, pulled on the heavy woollen pants, and wriggled into the woollen sweater. They helped him on with the long coarse woollen overstockings which came up to his thighs, and steered his feet into the legs of the diving suit. Calvieri rubbed softsoap on his wrists, and he gripped the sleeve of the dress between his knees and forced his hands through the vulcanised rubber cuffs with the adroitness of a seasoned professional. They slipped on the strong rubber bands to tighten the fit of the wrists; and then, while Calvieri laced and strapped on the heavy-boots, the other man was putting the cushion collar over his head and wrestling the rim of the suit on to the bolts of the breastplate.

While they were tightening down the wing-nuts around the straps he slipped a cigarette out of the packet which he had put down beside him, and lighted it while they hitched on the lead weights back and front of the corselet. All the time he was lis­tening tensely for the first warning of Vogel's approach; but Calvieri had stepped back from the job before he heard foot­steps and voices on the deck behind him.

"Alors ... à demain."

"À demain, m'sieu."

Simon stood up. He heard the wooden clumping of Baudier climbing down into his dinghy, and then the double steps of Vogel and Arnheim coming along the deck. The hazards were not yet past.

A complete diving outfit weighs one hundred and eighty pounds, which is not the handiest load to walk and lounge about in on land; but Ivaloff was husky enough, and the Saint had to risk making him seem eccentric. He walked laboriously to the taffrail and leaned on it, smoking and watching the man in the dinghy pull slowly away out of range of the deck lights towards the shore. Behind him he heard the vague sounds of Vogel being encased in his suit, but there was no conversation. On his dip that afternoon, Simon had noticed that Vogel encouraged no unnecessary speech from his crew, and he had been hoping that the rule would still hold good. And once again the bet had come off. The Saint had been sent down before—why should the dress­ers comment on his being sent down again?

At last he heard the chuff-chuff of the air pump, and the slow thudding tramp of heavy boots behind him; and Calvieri ap­peared beside him with his helmet. He stooped for it to be put on, without turning his head, and waited for the front window to be screwed on before he looked round.

Then, safely hidden behind the small panel of reflecting plate glass, he turned round to the ladder which had been fitted into sockets on the counter, and saw Vogel following cumbrously after him. And at the same moment a three-hundred-watt sub­marine lamp suspended from the boom was switched on, deluging the after deck and the sea over the stern with light.

They sank down in the centre of its cone of brilliance. There was the sudden shock of air pressure thumping into the ear­drums, the sudden lifting of the load of the heavy gear, and then the eerie silence and loneliness of the deep. The lamp, lowered into the water after them, came to rest at the same time as they reached the bottom, and hung six feet over their heads, isolating them in its little zone of light. The effect of that night descent was stranger even than the twenty-fathom plunge which the Saint had taken in daylight. The lamp gave more light within its circumscribed radius than he had had in the Chalfont Castle even when the sun was blazing over the surface of the sea; and the water was so clear that they might have been in a tank. The contours of the rocky bottom within the narrow area in which vision was possible were as plain as if they had been laid out under the sun. The Saint could see scattered fronds of weed standing erect and writhing in the stir of imperceptible currents, and a few small surprised pollack darted under the light and hung poised in fishy puzzlement at the unceremonious invasion of their sleep.

Vogel was already ploughing away towards a huge rounded boulder that was dimly visible on the blurred outskirts of their field of light, and Simon adjusted his escape valve and waded after him. Again he had to adapt himself to the tedious struggle which the water forced upon every movement: it was rather like a nightmare in which invisible tentacles dragged against all his limbs and reduced progress to a snail-like crawl which no effort could hasten. It seemed to take several minutes to cover the few yards which he had to go; and as he got nearer he noticed that Vogel seemed to be trying to wave him away. He turned clumsily aside and swayed up towards the other side of the rock.

It occurred to him with a sudden clutch of anxiety that the lamp by whose light they were moving might make everything that happened down on the sea floor as plainly visible to the men on the deck of the Falkenberg as it was to him. And then, with his lips twisting in a faint curve of grim and unrelaxed relief, he realised that he had no cause for alarm. The ripples and tiny wavelets scampering across the surface of the water above would break up all details into a confused eddy of indistinguishable shapes. They would hardly be able to see any more than a swirl­ing nimbus of light down in the opaque surge of the deep. Why else would Vogel go down himself with one trusted man to keep the secret of his fantastic treasure-house?

He saw that Vogel was looking upwards, his helmet tilted back like the face of some weird dumb monster of the sea lifted to a blind pre-historic sky. Simon looked up also, and saw that the grab was coming down through the roof of the tent of light over them. Vogel began to work himself out to meet it, and the Saint did the same. Following what he could divine of Vogel's inten­tion, he helped to drag the great claw over and settle it around the rock by which they had been standing. Then they moved back; and he heard Vogel's voice reverberating in his helmet.

"All ready. Lift!"

The wire cables straightened, became taut and rigid as steel bars. A little cloud of disturbed sediment filtered out like smoke from the base of the rock. It was going up, rolling over to follow the diagonal drag. ...

"Stop!"

The boulder lurched once, and settled; the hawsers became slack again. Looking down breathlessly through the wispy grey fog that curled sluggishly up around his legs, the Saint saw that where the stone had once rested was now an irregular black oval crater in the uneven floor. At first he could make out no more than the hazy outlines of it, but even then he knew that the shifting of that rock had laid open the last of Kurt Vogel's se­crets, the most amazing Aladdin's cave that the hoards of piracy had ever known.

3

Vogel was floundering to the edge of the hole in the awkward slow-motion which was the best that either of them could achieve down there, his arms waving sprawlingly like the feelers of an octopus in an attempt to help himself along. He sank down on his knees and lowered his legs into the pit: there seemed to be a ladder fixed to the rock inside, for presently his feet found the rungs and he began to descend step by step.

Simon started to follow him, but again Vogel waved him back. He heard the muffled clatter of the telephone.

"Stay there and guide the cases down to me."

The Saint hesitated. Down there in that narrow cavern at his feet, beyond any doubt, was Vogel's outlandish strong-room; and down there must lie the stupendous booty for which so much had been risked and suffered—for which three men had already set out on a quest from which they never returned, for which Wes­ley Yule had gone down into the silence and died without know­ing why, for which Loretta and himself had stood under the sentence of death and more than death. Having fought his way to it so far, at such a cost, it was almost as much as he could do to hold himself back from the last step.

And then he realised that the step could wait. The murky smokiness under his feet was settling down, and he could see Vogel's helmet gleaming below him. The boulder which had just been lifted away was protection enough for the treasure. There would be no more doors to open. . . .

A vague bulk swaying into the margins of his vision made him turn with a start. The grab had released the boulder and gone up, and now it was descending again with a stack of bullion cases clutched in its giant grip.

"Steady!" snapped the Saint into his telephone, and heaved himself unwieldily towards it.

The descent stopped; and he got his hands to the load and pushed it towards the hole. It was hard work against the resist­ance of the water, and he needed all his strength. At last it was in position, and he ventured to give the order for it to go on.

"Lower slowly."

The grab descended again, while he strained against it—the Falkenberg was not quite vertically overhead, and the five or six feet which the load had to be held out seemed like a hundred yards. He kept his weight thrusting against it till it was below the lip of the hole, and presently Vogel gave the order to stop. Simon recovered his balance with an effort. He could feel a pric­kle of sweat breaking out over his body, and his vision seemed to have become obscured. He realised that a film of steam had con­densed inside the glass panel of his helmet; and he opened the air cock on the left of his helmet and sucked in a mouthful of water, blowing it out over the glass as Ivaloff had told him to do that afternoon. It ran down into the collar of the dress, and he could see better.

The claw opened when Vogel gave the word, and presently came up again empty. Simon helped it over the edge of the hole and let it go by. He tried to estimate how much had gone down on its first voyage. Half a million? A million? It was difficult to calculate, but even the roughest guess staggered the imagination. It is one thing to talk airily in such astronomical figures; it is something else again to see them made concrete and tangible, to push and toil against a load of solid wealth which even a million­aire himself might never see. It dawned upon the Saint that he had always been too modest in his ambitions. With all his fame and success, with all the amazing coups which he had engineered and seen blazoned across the front pages of the world's press, he had never touched anything that was not beggared by this prodi­gious plunder of which the annals of loot might never see the like again.

But he could judge time better than he could judge the value of bar gold. About four minutes, he concluded, was all that went by between the time when the grab vanished empty out of the light and the time when it came sinking down again with the second load. Therefore it would be wise to prepare the setting for the last scene at once.

Again he toiled and struggled to steer the laden grab over the hole. But this time, as soon as it had gone below his reach, he groped round for Vogel's life-line and drew down a fathom of slack from the hands that held it up on the deck.

Then he took the keen heavy-bladed diver's knife out of its sheath on his belt.

He knew exactly what he was doing; but he was without pity. He thought of Professor Yule, with the winch inactive and the oxygen failing, waiting for death in the grey-green darkness of the Hurd Deep, while his voice spoke through the loud speaker in the blessed light and air without fear. He remembered himself standing in the wreck of the Chalfont Castle, waiting with a cold and cynical detachment for the monotonous chuffing of the air driving into his helmet to give place to the last silence in which death would come. He remembered Loretta, and the price for which he had done Vogel's work—a price which she had chosen, he knew now, a different way to pay. And he was without pity. In his own way, in all his buccaneering, he had been just; and it seemed to him that this was justice.

He began to cut through the fibres of Vogel's life-line.

Load after load of gold came down, and he had to put his knife away while he fought it over to the hold and held it clear while it went down to Vogel; but in the four-minute intervals between those spasms of back-breaking labour he sawed away at the tough manila with his heart cold and passionless as iron. He cut through Vogel's life-line until only the telephone wires were left intact. Then he cut through his own line till it only hung together by the same slender link. When he had finished, either line could be severed completely with one powerful slash of the knife-blade. It had to be done that way; because while the loud speaker would not tell which line a voice came over, and the telephonic distortion combined with the reverberation inside the helmet would make it practically impossible to identify the voice, the man who held the other ends of the lines would still know which was which when the time came to haul them up.

Altogether six loads came down, and the Saint's nerves were strained to the uttermost pitch of endurance while he waited for the last two of those loads. Even then, he could still lose everything; he could still die down there and leave Loretta helpless, with the only satisfaction of knowing that Kurt Vogel at least would never gloat over his defeat or her surrender. If the helms­man recovered too soon from the volcanic punch under the jaw ... He rubbed his cold right fist in the palm of his left, hand, wondering. His knuckles were still sore and his wrist still ached from the concussion; he was sure that never in his life had he struck such a blow. And yet, if Fate still had the cards stacked against him . . . He wondered what sort of a bargain he could strike, with Vogel at his mercy down there. . . .

"That's all."

It must have been Arnheim's voice. The Saint heard it through a sort of muffling fog for which the acoustics of the helmet could not have been entirely responsible. He saw that the empty grab was coming up out of the pit for the last time. It bumped over the rocky floor, swung clear, and rose up under the steadily blazing lamp. The gold was all down, and only the account remained for settlement.

The thudding beat of the Saint's pulses which had crept up imperceptibly to a pounding crescendo during those last minutes of nerve-splitting suspense suddenly died down. Only then did he become aware, from the void left by its cessation, that it had ever reached such a height. But his blood ran as cool and smooth as a river of liquid ice as he folded Vogel's telephone wires over his knife-blade and snapped them through with one powerful jerk of his arm.

Quietly and steadily as if he had been dressing himself in cos­tume for a dance, he brought the end of Vogel's lifeline round his own waist and knotted it in a careful bowline. He spoke into the telephone in a sufficient imitation of the flat rhythm of Vo­gel's accent.

"Wait a moment."

He drew down some more of his own life-line and hitched it round a jagged spur of granite above the cut he had made in it, so that it would still be anchored there after he broke the telephone wires.

The top of Vogel's helmet was coming to the surface as he climbed up the ladder.

Simon went down on one knee at the edge of the hole. His right hand dabbed round and found a large loose stone, twice the size of his fist. He picked it up.

"No," he said, still speaking with Vogel's intonation. "You stay here. I have something else for you to do. I shall come down again in a few minutes."

Vogel's hand came over the top of the hole and clutched for a hold. His head rose above the surface, and he waved the Saint impatiently back to make room for him to clamber out.

Simon did not move.

The broken end of Vogel's life-line trailed away from its lash­ing on his helmet, but he did not seem to have noticed it. His head turned up towards the light, and his lips moved in some words which no one would ever hear.

The Saint stayed where he was.

Perhaps it was the fact that he received no answer to whatever he had said that started the first wild and ghastly doubt in Vo­gel's mind. Perhaps it was the absolute immobility of the grotesque shape crouching over him. Whatever it may have been, he stopped. And then he brought his helmet slowly nearer to the Saint's, until barely six inches separated their front windows.

The Saint let him look. It had never been part of his plan that Vogel should be spared that final revelation. For the first time he held up his head and turned it so that the other could get a straight view into his helmet. The light above them reflected into his face from Vogel's upturned casque and filtered through the side panels to outline his features. The effect must still have been dim and shadowy, but at that close range it would still be recog­nisable.

And Vogel recognised it. His black burning eyes widened into fathomless pools of horror, and the thin bloodless lips drew back from his teeth in a kind of snarl. For the first time the smooth waxen mask was smashed away from his face, and only the snarl of the wolf remained. Then he began to speak. His mouth twisted in the shape of soundless words that no human ears would ever hear. Until he found that there was no answer and no obedience; and one of his hands groped round and found the loose trailing end of his severed line . . .

God knows what thoughts, what roaring maelstroms of incred­ulous understanding, must have gone thundering through his brain in those infinite seconds. He must have known even then that the death which he had meted out to others had found him in his turn, but he would never know how it had come about. He had been on the peaks of triumph. He had won every point; and this last descent should have been no more than a stereotyped epilogue to a finished history. He had left Simon Templar a pris­oner, outwitted and disarmed and beaten, locked up to await the moment when he chose to remove him forever from the power of interference. And yet the Saint was there, smiling at him with set lips and bleak steel-blue eyes, where Ivaloff should have been. The Saint had come back, not beaten, but free and inescapable. The crew had dressed him and sent him down without a word. That was the last bitter dreg of realisation which he had to ac­cept. The Saint had reversed their weapons. But how it had been done, how the crew had been bribed or intimidated, by what inconceivable alchemy the Saint had turned the tables, remained a riddle that he would never solve.

He fought. As if the shock had wiped away the last fragments of that more than human self-control, his hand shot out and clawed at the Saint's shoulder. His fingers slipped on the coarse twill, and the Saint grasped his wrist and twisted it away.

From the distance of a foot, which might have been the breadth of the Atlantic, Simon Templar looked at him through the wall of water which cut them off, and his blue eyes smiled with a soundless and terrible laughter into the wild distorted face. And he brought down the stone he was holding in a fearful blow on the fingers of Vogel's right hand where they clung to the rock.

A spasm of agony crawled across Vogel's features. And as the crushed hand released its hold, Simon slashed his knife clean through Vogel's air pipe and pushed him away.

Vogel fell, absurdly slowly, toppling backwards from the lad­der very gradually and deliberately, with his arms waving and his hands clutching spasmodically at the yielding water. He went down, and the darkness of his own treasure-cave closed on his gleaming helmet. A slender trickle of bubbles curled up out of the gloom. ...

The Saint climbed lumberingly to his feet.

"Otto," he said curtly, still imitating Vogel's voice; and in a moment Arnheim answered.

"Yes?"

"Bring me up alone."

Vogel's life-line, knotted around his waist, tightened against his body. And at once he slashed through the telephone wires which were his last link with his own line.

His feet dragged off the ground, and he rose up through the light, past the lamp, up through the deep green shadowiness be­yond. The circle of illuminated sea floor dwindled below him. Down in the darkness of the crypt into which Vogel had fallen he seemed to catch a glimpse of a moving sheen of metal, as if Vogel was trying to fight his way up again. But all that was very far away. He went up alone, up through the darkening shadows and the silence.

4

Coming up from that depth, there was no need for a gradual decompression. In three minutes he was getting his feet on to the rungs of the ladder. There was the sudden release of pressure from his body, and the pull of the weights on his shoulders. He climbed up into the light.

Hands helped him up on to the deck, tapped on his helmet and pointed, guiding him to the stool that was placed behind him. He sat down, facing the sea, and they unscrewed the porthole in the front of his helmet. He felt the sweet freshness of the natural air again.

The round opening where the porthole had been slid sideways across his vision as the helmet was released. He bent his head for it to be lifted off, and at the same time he slipped his knife out of its sheath into his left hand. As the helmet came off, he kept his head bowed and felt for the automatic inside his collar. He found it; and the knife flashed momentarily as he cut through the tie on which he had slung the gun. Then he turned round and faced the deck.

"I think this is the end, boys," he said quietly.

At the sound of his voice, those who had not been looking at him turned round. Calvieri, who was putting down the helmet, dropped it the last six inches. It fell with a deep hollow thud. And then there was utter stillness.

Arnheim had got up out of his chair and had been advancing towards him. He stopped, as if a brick wall had suddenly materi­alised in front of his toes; and his pink fleshy face seemed to turn yellow. His gross paunch quivered. A glassy film spread over his small pig eyes, turning them into frozen buttons of ink; and his soft moist mouth drooped open in a red O of fluttering unbe­lief. The Saint spoke principally to him.

"Kurt Vogel is dead. Or he soon will be. I believe there's enough air in a diving suit to last a man about five minutes after his air-line is cut. That is my justice. . . ." The Saint paused for a moment, and his calm gaze swept over the rest of them there with the timeless impassivity of a judge. "As for the rest of you," he said, "some of you may get away with a nice long rest in prison—if you live long enough to stand your trial. But to do that you will have to put your hands high up above your heads and take great care not to annoy me, because if any of you give me a scare——"

The automatic in his hand cracked once, a sudden sharp splash of sound in the persuasive flow of his words; and Otto Arnheim, with his hand halfway to his pocket, lurched like a drunken man. A stupid blankness spread across his face, and his knees folded. He went down limply on to the deck, rolled over, and lay still, with his staring eyes turned to the winking stars.

"——this gun is liable to go off," said the Saint.

None of the men moved. They looked down at the motionless body of Otto Arnheim, and kept their hands stretched well above their heads. And the Saint smiled with his lips.

"I think we shall have to put you away for a while," he said. "Calvieri, you take some of that life-line and tie your playmates together. Lash 'em by the waists about a yard apart, and then add yourself to the string. Then we'll all go below, with you leading the way and me holding the other end of the line, and see about rounding up the rest of the herd."

"That's already been done, old boy," murmured Roger Con-way, stepping out on to the deck from the after companion, with a gun in each hand and Steve Murdoch following him.

IX. FINALE

"IT was quite easy really," said Roger Conway patronisingly. "When we got Loretta's radiogram we set off at once, straight for here. We nearly piled your boat up on several rocks on the way, but Orace managed to see us through. Took us about three hours. The Falkenberg passed us about halfway, somewhere in the distance, and we just managed to keep her in sight. Luckily it was getting dark, so we turned out our lights after a bit and crept up as close as we dared. We dropped our hook about a quarter of a mile away, and as soon as we'd given the Falkenberg time to get well settled in we manned the dinghy and paddled over to reconnoitre. Everybody on deck seemed to be pretty busy with the diving business, so we came aboard on the other side and went below. We collected seven specimens altogether on the round-up, including a bloke who seems to have got a broken jaw. Anyway he's still asleep. The rest of 'em we gagged and tied up and left for inspection. We made a pretty thorough job of it, if I may say so."

With which modest summary of his activities, Roger helped himself to one of Vogel's cigars, threw another to Peter Quentin, and subsided exhausted into the most comfortable armchair.

Simon Templar regarded them disparagingly.

"You always were frightfully efficient at clearing up the bat­tlefield after all the troops had gone home," he remarked appre­ciatively. "And where did you collect the American Tragedy?"

"Oh, him? He crashed on to the Corsair while we were having a drink with Orace, earlier in the afternoon," Peter explained. "Seemed to be all steamed up about something, and flashed a lot of badges and things at us, so we brought him along. He seemed to be very excited about Loretta batting off on this party, so I suppose he's her husband or something. Are you the co-re­spondent?"

Steve Murdoch dug his fists into his coat pockets and glowered round with his square jaw thrust out. His rugged hard-boiled face made the luxurious furnishings of the wheelhouse seem faintly effeminate.

"Yeah, I'm here," he stated truculently. "And this time I'm stayin'. I guess I owe you something for helpin' me clean up this job, Saint; an' maybe it's good enough to account for those two punches you hung on me. But that's as far as it goes. I'll see that Ingerbeck's hear about what you've done, and probably they'll offer you a share of the reward. If they do, you can go up an' claim it honest. But for the time being I'll look after things my­self."

Simon looked at the ceiling.

"What a lot of modest violets there are around here," he sighed. "Of course I wouldn't dream of trying to steal your cur­tain, Steve, after all the brilliant work you've put in. But what exactly are you going to do?"

"I'm goin' to ask one of you boys to go ashore an' see if you can knock up the gendarmerie. If you can find a telegraph office, you can send one or two cables for me as well. The gendarmes can grab this guy Baudier before he skips, an' come on down to post a guard on board here. That'll do till I can start things movin' from the top. But until I've got that guard posted I'm going to sit over the diving gear myself, in case one of you thought he might go down an' see what he could pick up. I guess you've done enough diving for one day, Saint, an' you're not goin' down again while I can stop you. An' just in case you're thinkin' you can put me to sleep again like you did before, let me tell you that if you did get away with anything like that you'd have to shoot me to stop me puttin' every police organisation in the world on your trail as soon as I woke up. Do you get it?"

"Oh, I get you, Steve," said the Saint thoughtfully. "And I did tell Loretta I was tempted to come in for a share of the commission. Although it does sort of go against the grain to earn money honestly. It's such an anti-climax . . ."

He slid off the edge of the table and stood up, stroking his chin meditatively for a moment. And then, with a rueful shrug, he turned and grinned cheerfully at the detective.

"Still, it's always a new experience; and I suppose you've got to earn your living the same as I have," he drawled. "We'll let you have your fun. Peter, be a good boy and toddle along and do what Mr Murdoch asks you to."

"Right-ho," said Peter doubtfully.

"Roger, you can keep Steve company on his vigil. You'll have lots of fun telling each other how clever you are, but I'd much rather not listen to you."

The ineradicable suspicion darkened again in Murdoch's eyes.

"If you think you're goin' to talk Loretta round again," he began growlingly, "let me tell you——"

"Write it all down and post it to me in the morning, dear old bird," said the Saint affably and opened the door for them.

They filed out, Murdoch going last and most reluctantly, as if even then he couldn't believe that it was safe to let the Saint out of his sight. But Simon pushed him on, and closed the door after them.

Then he turned round and came towards Loretta.

She sat in her chair, rather quiet and still, with her lips slightly parted and the hint of mischief hushed for the moment into the changing shadows of her grey eyes. The lines of her slim body fell into a pattern of unconscious grace that made him almost hold his breath in case she moved, although he knew that in moving she would only take on a new beauty. He knew that, when all was said and done, in the last reckoning it was only the queer hunger which she could give a man that had tempted Kurt Vogel into his first and fatal mistake. She had so much that a man dreams about sometimes in the hard lonely trails of out­lawry. She had so much that he himself had desired. In the few overcrowded hours since they had been thrown together, they had met in an understanding which no words could cover. They had walked in a garden, and talked together before the doors of death. He had known fear, and peace.

He stood looking down at her, half smiling. And then, with a sudden soft breath of laughter, she took both his hands and came up into his arms.

"So you don't like your dotted line?" she said.

"Maybe it grows on one."

She shook her head.

"Not on you."

He thought for a moment. Between them, who had lived so much, a lie had no place.

"This job is finished," he said. "Steve Murdoch's mounting guard over the diving gear, and I promise I won't touch him. We can start again. Wash out the dotted line."

"And then?"

"For the future?" he said carelessly. "I shall still have the fun of being chivvied by every policeman in the world. I shall steal and fight, win and lose, go on—didn't you say it?—wanting so much that I can never have, fighting against life. But I shall live. I shall get into more trouble. I may even fall in love again. I shall end up by being hanged, or shot, or stabbed in the back, or something—if I don't find a safe berth in prison first. But that's my life. If I tried to live any other way, I'd feel like a caged eagle."

"But to-morrow?"

He laughed.

"I suppose I'll have to dump Peter and Roger somewhere. But the Corsair's, still ready to go anywhere. She's not so luxurious as this, but she's pretty comfortable. And about a hundred years ago I was in the middle of a vacation."

His hands were on her shoulders; and she smiled into his eyes.

"What do either of us know about the day after to-morrow?" she said.

Nearly an hour later he came out on deck, as half a dozen palpitating gendarmes were scrambling up the gangway. Mur­doch had met the leader of them and was struggling to converse with him in a microscopical vocabulary of French delivered in a threatening voice with an atrocious accent. Simon left him to perspire alone, and drew Peter and Roger to one side.

"We're going back to the Corsair," he said.

"Without the heroine?" protested Peter. "Why, I was only just getting to know her."

The Saint took him by the arm.

"You'll be able to improve the acquaintance to-morrow," he said kindly. "For as long as it takes us to sail back to St Peter Port and get rid of you. On your way."

They dropped into the dinghy; and Simon settled himself lazily in the stern, leaving the others to take the oars. He lighted a cigarette and gazed up at the star-dusted sky.

The lights of the Falkenberg drifted away behind them, and the cool quietness of the night took them in. The voices died away, and there was only the creak of the rowlocks and the gentle plash of the water. The Saint watched his smoke floating in gossamer veils across the stars, and let his mind stray through the lanes of memory. There was the only real knowledge, and all other doubt and disbelief could steal nothing from it. What did either of them know about the day after to-morrow? . . .

Roger's voice broke into his thoughts.

"Well, that's goodbye to those millions you promised us," he remarked glumly; and Simon sat up with the old buccaneering glint wakening in his eyes.

"Who said goodbye? My dear Roger, we're not going to bed yet! We're going to bring the Corsair up closer and unpack those nice new diving suits we've got on board. And then one of you drawing-room heroes is coming down with me on a little treas­ure-hunt. Steve and his gendarmes can mount guard over Vogel's diving gear all night for all I care. But they don't know how much boodle is stowed away down there, and what they don't know about they'll never miss. We're going to make sure of our share of the reward to-night," said the Saint.