The Saint Closes the Case (The Last Hero)

He might have been unconscious for five minutes or five days; he had lost all idea of time. But the first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was the clock, and he knew that it must have been about twenty minutes.

The man Hermann sat in a chair opposite him, turning the pages of a magazine. Presently he looked up and saw that Roger was awake; and he put down the magazine and came over and spat in his face.

"Soon, English swine, you will be dead. And your country——"

Roger controlled his tongue with a tremendous effort.

He found that he could breathe. The iron bands about his chest had slackened, and the bodily anguish had lessened. There was still the throbbing pain in his back and the throb­bing pain in his head; but he was better. And he wasn't asking for any unnecessary aggravation of his troubles—not just then, anyway.

The man went on: "The Doctor is a great man. He is the greatest man in the world. You should have seen how he arranged everything in two minutes. It was magnificent. He is Napoleon born again. He is going to make our country the greatest country in the world. And you fools try to fight him——"

The speech merged into an unintelligible outburst in the man's native tongue; but Roger understood enough. He un­derstood that a man who could delude his servants into such a fanatical loyalty was no small man. And he wondered what chance the Saint would ever have had of convincing anyone that Marius was concerned with no patriotism and no nation­alities, but only with his own gods of money and power.

The first flush of futile anger ebbed from Conway's face, and he lay in stolid silence as he was tied, revolving plot and counter-plot in his mind. Hermann, failing to rouse him with taunts, struck him twice across the face. Roger never moved. And the man spat at him again.

"It is as I thought. You have no courage, you dogs of Englishmen. It is only when you are many against one little one— then you are brave."

"Oh, quite," said Roger wearily.

Hermann glowered at him.

"Now, if you had been the one who hit me——"

The shrill scream of a bell wailed through the apartment with a suddenness that made the conventional sound electrify­ing. Hermann stopped, stiffening, in the middle of his sen­tence. And a sour leer came into his face.

"Now I welcome your friend, pig."

Roger drew a deep breath.

He must have been careless, obvious about it, for Roger Conway's was not a mind much given to cunning. Or possibly Hermann had been expecting some such move, subconsciously, and had his ears pricked for the sound. But he stopped on his way to the door and turned.

"You would try to give warning, Englishman?" he purred.

His gun was in his hand. He reached Roger in three strides.

Roger knew he was up against it. If he didn't shout, his one chance of rescue, so far as he could see, was dished—and Norman Kent with it. If he looked like shouting, he'd be laid out again. And, if it came to that, since his intention of shouting had already been divined, he'd probably be laid out anyway. Hermann wasn't the sort of man to waste time gagging his prisoner. So——

"Go to blazes," said Roger recklessly.

Then he yelled.

An instant later Hermann's gun-butt crashed into the side of his head.

Again he should have been stunned; but he wasn't. He de­cided afterwards that he must have a skull a couple of inches thick, and the constitution of an ox with it, to have stood up to as much as he had. But the fact remained that he was laid out without being stunned; and he lay still, trying to collect himself in time to loose a second yell as Hermann opened the door.

Hermann straightened up, turning his gun round again. He put it in his coat pocket, keeping his finger on the trigger; and then, with something like a panicking terror that the warn­ing might have been heard and accepted by the person outside the front door, he scrambled rather than ran out of the room, cursing under his breath.

But the ring was repeated as he reached the front door, and the sound reassured him. He could not believe that anyone who had heard and understood that one yell would have rung again so promptly after it. Whereby Hermann showed himself a less ingenious psychologist than the man out­side. . . .

He opened the door, keeping himself hidden behind it.

No one entered.

He waited, with a kind of superstitious fear trickling down his back like a tiny cascade of ice-cold water. Nothing hap­pened—and yet the second ring had sounded only a moment before he opened the door, and no one who had rung a second time would go away at once, without waiting to see if the re­newed summons would be answered.

Then Conway yelled again: "Look out, Norman!"

Hermann swore in a whisper.

But now he had no choice. He had been given his orders. The man who came was to be taken. And certainly the man who had come, who must have heard Conway's second cry even if he had not heard the first, could not be allowed to escape and raise an alarm.

Incautiously, Hermann stepped to the door.

His feet were scarcely clear of the threshold, outside on the landing, when a hand like a ham caught his throat from behind, over his shoulder, and another enormous hand gripped his gun-wrist like a vice. He was as helpless as a child.

The hand at his throat twisted his face round to the light. He saw a ponderous red face with sleepy eyes, connected by a pillar of neck with shoulders worthy of a buffalo.

"Come along," said Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal drowsily. "Come along back to where you sprang from, and open your heart to Uncle!"

10. How Simon Templar drove to Bures,

and two policemen jumped in time

The road out of London on the north-east is one of the less pleasant ways of finding the open country. For one thing, it is infested with miles of tramway, crawling, interminable, blocking the traffic, maddening to the man at the wheel of a fast car—especially maddening to the man in a hurry at the wheel of a fast car.

Late as it was, there was enough traffic on the road to balk the Saint of clear runs of more than a few hundred yards at a time. And every time he was forced to apply the brakes, pause, and reaccelerate, was pulling his average down.

There was a quicker route than the one he was taking, he knew. He had been taken over it once—a route that wound intricately through deserted side streets, occasionally crossing the more populous thoroughfares, and then hurriedly break­ing away into the empty roads again. It was longer, but it was quicker to traverse. But the Saint had only been over it that once, and that by daylight; now, in the dark, he could not have trusted himself to find it again. The landmarks that a driver automatically picks out by day are of little use to him in the changed aspect of lamplight. And to get lost would be more maddening than the obstruction of the traffic. To waste min­utes, and perhaps miles, travelling in the wrong direction, to be muddled by the vague and contradictory directions of ac­costed pedestrians and police, to be plagued and pestered with the continual uncertainty—that would have driven him to the verge of delirium. The advantage that might be gained wasn't worth all that might be lost. He had decided as much when he swung into the car in Brook Street. And he kept to the main roads.

He smashed through the traffic grimly, seizing every opportunity that offered, creating other opportunities of his own in defiance of every law and principle and point of etiquette governing the use of His Majesty's highway, winning priceless seconds where and how he could.

Other drivers cursed him; two policemen called on him to stop, were ignored, and took his number; he scraped a wing in a desperate rush through a gap that no one else would ever have considered a gap at all; three times he missed death by a miracle while overtaking on a blind corner; and the pugna­cious driver of a baby car who ventured to insist on his right­ful share of the road went white as the Hirondel forced him on to the kerb to escape annihilation.

It was an incomparable exhibition of pure hogging, and it made everything of that kind that Roger Conway had been told to do earlier in the evening look like a child's game with a push-cart; but the Saint didn't care. He was on his way; and if the rest of the population objected to the manner of his going, they could do one of two things with their objections.

Some who saw the passage of the Saint that night will re­member it to the end of their lives; for the Hirondel, as though recognising the hand of a master at its wheel, became almost a living thing. King of the Road its makers called it, but that night the Hirondel was more than a king: it was the incarna­tion and apotheosis of all cars. For the Saint drove with the devil at his shoulder, and the Hirondel took its mood from his. If this had been a superstitious age, those who saw it would have crossed themselves and sworn that it was no car at all they saw that night, but a snarling silver fiend that roared through London on the wings of an unearthly wind.

For half an hour . . . with the Saint's thumb restless on the button of the klaxon, and the strident voice of the silver fiend howling for avenue in a tone that brooked no contention . . . and then the houses thinned away and gave place to the first fields, and the Saint settled down to the job—coaxing, with hands as sure and gentle as any horseman's, the last pos­sible ounce of effort out of the hundred horses under his control. . . .

There was darkness on either side: the only light in the world lay along the tunnel which the powerful headlights slashed out of the stubborn blackness. From time to time, out of the dark, a great beast with eyes of fire leapt at him, clamouring, was slipped as a charging bull is slipped by a toreador, went by with a baffled grunt and a skimming slither of wind. And again and again, in the dark, the Hiron­del swooped up behind ridiculous, creeping glow-worms, sniffed at their red tails, snorted derisively, swept past with a deep-throated blare. No car in England could have held the lead of the Hirondel that night

The drone of the great engine went on as a background of gigantic song; it sang in tune with the soft swish of the tyres and the rush of the cool night air; and the song it sang was: "Patricia Holm. . . . Patricia. . .. Patricia. . . . Patricia Holm!"

And the Saint had no idea what he was going to do. Nor was he thinking about it. He knew nothing of the geography of the "house on the hill"—nothing of the lie of the surrounding land—nothing of the obstacles that might bar his way, nor of the resistance that would be offered to his attack. And so he was not jading himself with thinking of these things. They were beyond the reach of idle speculation. He had no clue: therefore it would have been a waste of time to speculate. He could only live for the moment, and the task of the moment— to hurl himself eastwards across England like a thunderbolt into the battle that lay ahead.

"Patricia. . . . Patricia! . . ."

Softly the Saint took up the song; but his own voice could not be heard from the voice of the Hirondel. The song of the car bayed over wide spaces of country, was bruised and battered between the walls of startled village streets, was flung back in rolling echoes from the walls of hills.

That he was going to an almost blindfold assault took noth­ing from his rapture. Rather, he savoured the adventure the more; for this was the fashion of forlorn sally that his heart cried for—the end of inaction, the end of perplexity and help­lessness, the end of a damnation of doubt and dithering. And in the Saint's heart was a shout of rejoicing, because at last the God of all good battles and desperate endeavour had re­membered him again.

No, it wasn't selfish. It wasn't a mere lust for adventure that cared nothing for the peril of those who made the adventure worth while. It was the irresistible resurgence of the most fundamental of all the inspirations of man. A wild stirring in its ancient sleep of the spirit that sent the knights of Arthur out upon their quests, of Tristan crying for Isolde, of the flame in a man's heart that brought fire and sword upon Troy, of Roland's shout and the singing blade of Durendal amid the carnage of Roncesvalles. "The sound of the trumpet. . . ."

Thus the miles were eaten up, until more than half the journey must have been set behind him.

If only there was no engine failure. . . . He had no fear for fuel and oil, for he had filled up on the way back from Maidenhead.

Simon touched a switch, and all the instruments on the dashboard before him were illuminated from behind with a queer ghostly luminance. His eye flickered from the road and found one of them.

Seventy-two.

Seventy-four.

Seventy-five . . . six. . . .

"Patricia! ..."

"Battle, murder, and sudden death. . . ."

"You know, Pat, we don't have a chance these days. There's no chance for magnificent loving. A man ought to fight for his lady. Preferably with dragons. . . ."

Seventy-eight.

Seventy-nine.

A corner loomed out of the dark, flung itself at him, men­acing, murderous. The tyres, curbed with a cruel hand, tore at the road, shrieking. The car swung round the corner, on its haunches, as it were . . . gathered itself, and found its stride again. . . .

Ping!

Something like the crisp twang of the snapping of an over­strained wire. The Saint, looking straight ahead, blinking, saw that the windscreen in front of him had given birth to a star— a star of long slender points radiating from a neat round hole drilled through the glass. And a half-smile came to his lips.

Ping!

Bang!

Bang!

The first sound repeated; then, in quick succession, two other sounds, sharp and high, like the smack of two pieces of metal. In front of him they were. In the gleaming aluminum, bonnet.

"Smoke!" breathed the Saint. "This is a wild party!"

He hadn't time to adjust himself to the interruption, to parse and analyse it and extract its philosophy. How he came to be under fire at that stage of the journey—that could wait. Something had gone wrong. Someone had blundered. Roger must have been tricked, and Marius must have escaped—or something. But, meanwhile . . .

Fortunately the first shot had made him slow up. Otherwise he would have been killed.

The next sound he heard was neither the impact of a bullet nor the thin, distant rattle of the rifle that fired it. It was loud and close and explosive, under his feet it seemed; and the steering wheel was wrenched out of his hand—nearly.

He never knew how he kept his grip on it. An instinct swifter than thought must have made him tighten his hold at the sound of that explosion, and he was driving with both hands on the wheel. He tore the wheel round in the way it did not want to go, bracing his feet on clutch and brake pedals, calling up the last reserve of every sinew in his splendid body.

Death, sudden as anything he could have asked, stared him in the face. The strain was terrific. The Hirondel had ceased to be his creature. It was mad, runaway, the bit between its tremendous teeth, caracoling towards a demoniac plunge to destruction. No normal human power should have been able to hold it. The Saint, strong as he was, could never have done it—normally. He must have found some supernatural strength.

Somehow he kept the car out of the ditch for as long as it took to bring it to a standstill.

Then, almost without thinking, he switched out the lights.

Dimly he wondered why, under that fearful gruelling, the front axle hadn't snapped like a dry stick, or why the steering hadn't come to pieces under his hands.

"If I come out of this alive," thought the Saint, "the Hiron­del Motor Company will get an unsolicited testimonial from me."

But that thought merely crossed his mind like a swallow swimming a quiet pool—and was lost. Then, in the same dim way, he was wondering why he hadn't brought a gun. Now he was likely to pay for the reckless haste with which he had set out. His little knife was all very well—he could use it as ac­curately as any man could use a gun, and as swiftly—but it was only good for one shot. He'd never been able to train it to function as a boomerang.

It was unlikely that he was being sniped by one man alone. And that one solitary knife, however expertly he used it, would be no use at all against a number of armed men besieging him in a lamed car.

"Obviously, therefore," thought Simon, "get out of the car."

And he was out of it instantly, crouching in the ditch beside it. In the open, and the darkness, he would have a better chance.

He wasn't thinking for a moment of a getaway. That would have been fairly easy. But the Hirondel was the only car he had on him, and it had to be saved—or else he had to throw in his hand. Joke. The obvious object of the ambuscade was to make him do just that—to stop him, anyhow—and he wasn't being stopped. . . .

Now, with the switching off of the lights, the darkness had become less dark, and the road ran through it, beside the black bulk- of the flanking trees, like a ribbon of dull steel. And, looking back, the Saint could see shadows that moved. He counted four of them.

He went to meet them, creeping like a snake in the dry ditch. They were separated. Avoiding the dull gleam of that strip of road, as if afraid that a shot from the car in front might greet their approach, they slunk along in the gloom at the sides of the road, two on one side and two on the other.

It was no time for soft fighting. There was that punctured front wheel to be changed, and those four men in the way. So the four men had to be eliminated—as quickly and de­finitely as possible. The Saint was having no fooling about.

The leader of the two men on Simon's side of the road al­most stepped on the dark figure that seemed to rise suddenly out of the ground in front of him. He stopped, and tried to draw back so that he could use the rifle he carried, and his companion trod on his heels and cursed.

Then the first man screamed; and the scream died in a chok­ing gurgle.

The man behind him saw his leader sink to the ground, but there was another man beyond his leader—a man who had not been there before, who laughed with a soft whisper of desperate merriment. The second man tried to raise the automatic he carried; but two steely hands grasped his wrists, and he felt himself flying helplessly through the air. He seemed to fly a long way—and then he slept.

The Saint crossed the road.

A gun spoke from the hand of one of the two men on the other side, who had paused, irresolute, at the sound of the first scream. But the Saint was lost again in the shadows.

They crouched down, waiting, watching, intent for his next move. But they were looking down along the ditch and the grass beside the road, where the Saint had vanished like a ghost; but the Saint was above them then, crouched like a leopard under the hedge at the top of the embankment beside them, gathering himself stealthily.

He dropped on them out of the sky; and the heels of both his shoes impacted upon the back of the neck of one of them with all the Saint's hurtling weight behind, so that the man lay very still where he was and did not stir again.

The other man, rising and bringing up his rifle, saw a spin­ning sliver of bright steel whisking towards him like a flying fish over a dark sea, and struck to guard. By a miracle he suc­ceeded, and the knife glanced from his gun-barrel and tinkled away over the road.

Then he fought with the Saint for the rifle.

He was probably the strongest of the four, and he did not know fear; but there is a trick by which a man who knows it can always take a rifle or a stick from a man who does not know it, and the Saint had known that trick from his child­hood. He made the man drop the rifle; but he had no chance to pick it up for himself, for the man was on him again in a moment. Simon could only kick the gun away into the ditch, where it was lost.

An even break, then.

They fought hand to hand, two men on that dark road, lion and leopard.

This man had the advantage of strength and weight, but the Saint had the speed and fighting savagery. No man who was not a Colossus, or mad, would have attempted to stand in the Saint's way that night: but this man, who may have been something of both, attempted it. He fought like a beast. But Simon Templar was berserk. The man was not only standing in the way: he was the servant and the symbol of all the pow­ers that the Saint hated. He stood for Marius, and the men behind Marius, and all the conspiracy that the Saint had sworn to break, and that had caused it to come to pass that at that moment the Saint should have been riding recklessly to the rescue of his lady. Therefore the man had to go, as his three companions had already gone. And perhaps the man recog­nised his doom, for he let out one sobbing cry before the Saint's fingers found an unshakable grip on his throat.

It was to the death. Simon had no choice, even if he would have taken it, for the man fought to the end; and even when unconsciousness stilled his struggles Simon dared not let him go, for he might be only playing 'possum, and the Saint could not afford to take any chances. There was only one way to make sure. . . .

So presently the Saint rose slowly to his feet, breathing deeply like a man who has been under water for a long time, and went to find Anna. And no one else moved on the road.

As an afterthought, he commandeered a loaded automatic from one of the men who had no further use for it.

Then he went to change the wheel.

It should only have taken him five minutes; but he could not have foreseen that the spare tyre would settle down to a futile flatness as he slipped the jack from under the dumb-iron and lowered the wheel to the road.

There was only the one spare.

It was a very slight consolation to remember that Norman Kent, the ever-thoughtful, always carried an outfit of tools about twice as efficient as anything the ordinary motorist thinks necessary. And the wherewithal to mend punctures was in­cluded.

Even so, with only the spotlight to work by, and no bucket of water with which to find the site of the puncture, it would not be any easy job.

Simon stripped off his coat with a groan.

It was more than half an hour before the Hirondel was ready to take the road again. Nearly three-quarters of an hour wasted altogether. Precious minutes squandered, that he had gambled life and limb to win. . . .

But it seemed like forty-five years, instead of forty-five minutes, before he was able to light a cigarette and climb back into the driver's seat.

He started the engine and moved his hand to switch on the headlights; but even as his hand touched the switch the road about him was flooded by lights that were not his.

As he engaged the gears, he looked back over his shoulder, and saw that the car behind was not overtaking. It had stopped.

Breathless with the reaction from the first foretaste of bat­tle, he was not expecting another attack so soon. As he moved off, he was for an instant more surprised than hurt by the feel of something stabbing through his left shoulder like a hot spear-point.

Then he understood, and turned in his seat with the bor­rowed automatic in his hand.

He was not, as he had admitted, the greatest pistol shot in the world; but on that night some divine genius guided his hand. Coolly he sighted, as if he had been practising on a range, and shot out both the headlights of the car behind. Then, undazzled, he could see to puncture one of its front wheels before he swept round the next corner with a veritable storm of pursuing bullets humming about his ears and multi­plying the stars in the windscreen.

He was not hit again. The same power must have guarded him as with a shield.

As he straightened the car up he felt his injured shoulder tenderly. As far as he. could discover, no bone had been touched: it was simply a flesh wound through the trapezius muscle, not in itself fatally disabling, but liable to numb the arm and weaken him from loss of blood. He folded his hand­kerchief into a pad, and thrust it under his shirt to cover the wound.

It was all he could do whilst driving along; and he could not stop to examine the wound more carefully or improvise a better dressing. In ten minutes, at most, the chase would be resumed. Unless the pursuers were as unlucky with their spare as he had been. And that was tod much to bank on.

But how had that car come upon the scene? Had it been waiting up a side turning in support of the four men, and had it started on the warning of the first man's scream or the fourth man's cry? Impossible. He had been delayed too long with the mending of the puncture. The car would have ar­rived long before he had finished. Or had it been on its way to lay another ambush further along the road, in case the first one failed?

Simon turned the questions in his mind as a man might flick over the pages of a book he already knew by heart, and passed over them all, seeking another page more easily read.

None was right. He recognised each of them, grimly, as a subconscious attempt to evade the facing of the unpleasant truth; and grimly he choked them down. The solution he had found when that first shot pinged through the window-screen still fitted in. If Marius had somehow escaped, or been rescued, or contrived somehow to convey a warning to his gang, the obvious thing to do would be to get in touch with agents along the road. And warn the men in the house on the hill itself, at Bures. Then Marius would follow in person. Yes, it must have been Marius. . . .

Then the Saint remembered that the fat man and the lean man had not been tied up when he left Roger. And Roger Conway, incomparable lieutenant as he was, was a mere tyro at this game without the hand of his chief to guide him.

"Poor old Roger," thought the Saint; and it was typical of him that he thought only of Roger in that spirit.

And he drove on.

He drove with death in his heart and murder in the clear, cold blue eyes that followed the road like twin hawks swerv­ing in the wake of their prey. And a mere wraith of the Saintly smile rested unawares on his lips.

For, figured out that way, it meant that he was on a fore­doomed errand.

The thought gave him no pause.

Rather, he drove on faster, with the throbbing of his wounded shoulder submerged and lost beneath the more savage and positive throbbing of every pulse in his body.

Under the relentless pressure of his foot on the accelerator, the figures on the speedometer cylinder, trembling past the hairline in the little window where they were visible, showed crazier and crazier speeds.

Seventy-eight.

Seventy-nine.

Eighty.

Eighty-one . . . two . . . three . . . four, . . .

Eighty-five.

"Not good enough for a race-track," thought the Saint, "but on an ordinary road—and at night ..."

The wind of the Hirondel's torrential passage buffeted him with almost animal blows, bellowing in his ears above the thunderous fanfare of the exhaust.

For a nerve-shattering minute he held the car at ninety.

"Patricia! ..."

And he seemed to hear her voice calling him: "Simon!"

"Oh, my darling, my darling, I'm on my way!" cried the Saint, as if she could have heard him.

As he clamoured through Braintree, with thirteen miles still to go by the last signpost, two policemen stepped out from the side of the road and barred his way.

Their intention was plain, though he had no idea why they should wish to stop him. Surely his mere defiance of a London constable's order to stop would not have merited such a drastic and far-flung effort to bring him promptly to book! Or had Marius, to make the assurance of his own ambushes doubly sure, informed Scotland Yard against him with some ingenious and convincing story about his activities as the Saint? But how could Marius have known of those? And Teal, he was certain, couldn't. ... Or had Teal traced him from the Furillac more quickly than he had expected? And, if so, how could Teal have known that the Saint was on that road?

Whatever the answers to those questions might be, the Saint was not stopping for anyone on earth that night. He set his teeth, and kept his foot flat down on the accelerator.

The two policemen must have divined the ruthlessness of his defiance, for they jumped to safety in the nick of time.

And then the Saint was gone again, breaking out into the open country with a challenging blast of klaxon and a snarling stammer of unsilenced exhaust, blazing through the night like the shouting vanguard of a charge of forgotten valiants.

11. How Roger Conway told the truth,

and Inspector Teal believed a lie

Inspector Teal set Hermann down in the sitting-room, and adroitly snapped a pair of handcuffs on his wrists. Then he turned his slumbrous eyes on Roger.

"Hullo, unconscious!" he sighed.

"Not quite," retorted Roger shortly. "But darn near it. I got a good crack on the head giving you that shout."

Teal shook his head. He was perpetually tired, and even that slight movement seemed to cost him a gargantuan effort.

"Not me," he said heavily. "My name isn't Norman. What are you doing there?"

"Pretending to be a sea-lion," said Roger sarcastically. "It's a jolly game. Wouldn't you like to join in? Hermann will throw us the fish to catch in our mouths."

Mr. Teal sighed again, slumbrously.

"What's your name?" he demanded.

Roger did not answer for a few seconds.

In that time he had to make a decision that might alter the course of the Saint's whole life, and Roger's own with it—if not the course of all European history. It was a tough de­cision to take.

Should he give his name as Simon Templar? That was the desperate question that leapt into his head immediately. ... It so happened that he never carried much in his pockets, and so far as he could remember there was nothing in his wal­let that would give him away when he was searched. The fraud would certainly be discovered before very long, but he might be able to bluff it out for twenty-four hours. And in all that time the Saint would be free—free to save Pat, return to Maidenhead, deal with Vargan, complete the mission to which he had pledged himself.

To the possible, and even probable, consequences to himself of such a course, Roger never gave a thought. The sacrifice would be a small one compared with what it might achieve.

"I am Simon Templar," said Roger. "I believe you're look­ing for me."

Hermann's eyes widened.

"It is a lie!" he burst out. "He is not Templar!"

Teal turned his somnambulistic gaze upon the man.

"Who asked you to speak?" he demanded.

"Don't take any notice of him," said Roger. "He doesn't know anything about it. I'm Templar, all right. And I'll go quietly."

"But he is not Templar!" persisted Hermann excitedly. "Templar has been gone an hour! That man——"

"You shut your disgusting mouth!" snarled Roger. "And if you don't, I'll shut it for you. You——"

Teal blinked.

"Somebody's telling a naughty fib," he remarked sapiently. "Now will you both shut up a minute?"

He locomoted fatly across the room, and stooped over Roger. But he based his decision on the tailor's tab inside Roger's coat pocket, and Roger had not thought of that.

"I'm afraid you're the story-teller, whoever you are," he sighed.

"That's my real name," said Roger bitterly. "Conway— Roger Conway."

"It sounds more likely."

"Though what that fatherless streak of misery——"

"A squeal," explained Teal patiently. "A time-honoured device among crooks to get off lightly themselves by helping the police to jump more heavily on their pals. I suppose he is your pal?" added the detective sardonically. "You seem to know each other's names."

Roger was silent.

So that was that. Very quickly settled. And what next?

Hermann, then, had patently decided to squeal. Which seemed odd, considering the type of man he had made Her­mann out to be. But. . . .

Roger looked at the man, and suddenly saw the truth. It wasn't a squeal. The protest had been thoughtless, instinctive, made in a momentary access of panic lest his master should be proved to have made a mistake. Even at that moment Her­mann was regretting it, and racking his brains for a lie to cover it up. Racking his brains, also, for his own defence. . . .

The situation remained just about as complicated as it had been before the incident. Now Hermann would be racking his brains for lies, and Conway would be racking his brains for lies, and both of them would have the single purpose of cover­ing their leaders at all costs, and they'd both inevitably be contradicting each other right and left, and both inevitably ploughing deeper and deeper into the mire. And neither of them could tell the truth. ...

But could neither of them tell the truth?

The idea shattered the groping darkness of Roger's dilemma like the sudden kindling of a battery of Kleig arcs. The bold­ness of it took his breath away.

Could neither of them tell the truth?

As Roger would have prayed for the guidance of his leader at that moment, his leader was there to help him.

Wasn't the dilemma the same in principle as the one which the Saint had solved an hour ago? The same deadlock, the same cross-purposes, the same cataleptic standstill? The same old story of the irresistible force and the immovable object? . . . And the Saint had solved it. By sweeping the board clear with the one wild move that wasn't allowed for in the rules.

Mightn't it work again—at least, to clear the air—and, in the resultant reshuffling, perhaps disclose a loophole that had not been there before—if Roger did much the same thing— did the one thing that he couldn't possibly do—and told the truth?

The truth should convince Teal. Roger could tell the truth so much more convincingly and circumstantially than he could tell a lie, and it would be so easy to substantiate. Even Hermann would find it hard to discredit. And——

"Anyway," said Teal, "I'll be taking you boys along to the Yard, and we can talk there."

And the departure to the Yard might be postponed. The truth might be made sufficiently interesting to keep Teal in Brook Street. And then Norman Kent might arrive—and Nor­man was a much more accomplished conspirator than Roger. ...

"Before we go," said Roger, "there's something you might like to hear."

Teal raised his eyebrows one millimetre.

"What is it?" he asked. "Going to tell me you're the King of the Cannibal Islands?"

Roger shook his head. How easy it was! Teal might have been the one man in the C.I.D. who would have fallen for it, but he at least was a certainty. Such a lethargic man could not -by any stretch of imagination be in a hurry over anything— least of all over the prosaic task of taking his prisoners away to the station.

"I'll do a squeal of my own," said Roger.

Teal nodded.

As if he had nothing to do for the rest of the night, he set­tled himself in a chair and took a packet of chewing-gum from his pocket.

With his jaws moving rhythmically, he prompted: "Well?"

"If it's all the same to you," said Roger, to waste time, "I'd like to sit in a chair. This floor isn't as soft as it might be. And if I could smoke a cigarette——"

Teal rose again and lifted him into an armchair; provided him also with a cigarette. Then the detective resumed his own seat with mountainous patience.

He made no objection to the delay on the grounds that there were men waiting for him outside the building. Which meant, almost certainly, that there weren't. Roger recalled that Teal had the reputation of playing a lone hand. It was a symptom of the man's languid confidence in his own experienced ability —a confidence, to give him his due, that had its justification in his record. But in this case. . . .

"I'm telling you the truth this time," said Roger. "We're in the cart—Simon Templar included—thanks to some pals of Hermann there—only Templar doesn't know it. I don't want him to be pinched; but if you don't pinch him quickly something worse is going to happen to him. You see, we've got Vargan. But we weren't the first raiders. They were Hermann's pals——"

"Another lie!" interposed Hermann venomously. "Do you have to waste any more time with him, Inspector? You have already caught him in one lie——"

"And caught you sneaking about with a gun," snapped Roger. "What about that? And why the hell am I tied up here? Go on—tell him you're a private detective, and you were just going out to fetch a policeman and give me in charge!"

Teal closed his eyes.

"I can't listen to two people at once," he said. "Which of you is supposed to be telling this story?"

"I am," said Roger.

"You sound more interesting," admitted Teal, "even if Her­mann does prove it to be a fairy-tale afterwards. Go on, Conway. Hermann—you wait for your turn, and don't butt in again."

Hermann relapsed into a sullen silence; and Roger inhaled deeply from his cigarette and blew out with the smoke a brief prayer of thanksgiving.

"We went down to Esher to take Vargan," he said. "But when we got there, we found Vargan was already being taken. He seemed very popular all round, that night. However, we were the party that won the raffle and got him away."

"Where did you take him?"

"You follow your own advice, and don't butt in," said Roger shortly. "I'll tell this story in my own way, or not at all."

"Go on, then."

"We took Vargan—somewhere out of London. Then Templar and I came back here to collect a few things . . .How did you find this place, by the way?"

"I went to Brighton, and found your motor agent," said Teal comfortably. "All motor agents spend Sunday in Brighton and the most expensive cars out of their showrooms. That was easy."

Roger nodded.

He went on, slowly, with one eye on the clock:

"Hermann's pals knew we were interested in Vargan before the fun started. Never mind how—that's another story. . . . No, it isn't—now I come to think of it. You remember the first stunt at Esher?"

"I do."

"Two people escaped past Hume Smith's chauffeur—a man and a woman. They were Templar and a friend of his. They stumbled on the place by accident. They were driving past, and they saw a light and went to investigate. The alarm that scared them off was the second man—the giant whose footprints you found. I'll tell you his name, because he's the leader of Hermann's gang——"

Hermann cut in: "Inspector, this will be another lie!"

Teal lifted one eyelid.

"How do you know?" he inquired mildly.

"He knows I'm telling the truth!" cried Roger triumphantly. "He's given himself away. Now I'll tell you—the man's name was Dr. Rayt Marius. And if you don't believe me, get hold of one of his shoes and see how it matches the plaster casts you've got of the footprints!"

Both Mr. Teal's chins were sunk on his chest. He might have been asleep. His voice sounded as if he was.

"And these people traced you here?"

"They did," said Roger. "And on the way they got hold of the girl who was with Templar that first night—the girl he's in love with—and Marius came to say that he would ex­change her with Templar for Vargan. But Templar wasn't swapping. He wanted 'em both. We were able to find out where the girl was being taken, and Templar went off to rescue her. I was left to guard the prisoners—Marius and Hermann and another man called Otto. They tricked me and got away —Marius and Otto—and Hermann was left to guard me. I was to be an additional hostage against Templar. Marius and Otto went off in pursuit—they'd already arranged for an am­bush to stop Templar on the road. Marius did that by tele­phone, from here—you can ring up the exchange and verify that, if you don't believe me. And Templar doesn't know what he's in for. He thinks he'll take the men in the house on the hill off their guard. And he's gone blinding off to certain death——"

"Half a minute," said Teal. "What house on the hill is this you're talking about?"

The tone of the question indicated that the authentic ring of truth in the story had not been lost on Teal's ears; and Roger drew a deep breath.

Now—what? He'd told as much as he'd meant to tell—and that was a long and interesting preface of no real importance. Now how much could he afford to add to it? How great was the Saint's danger?

Roger knew the Saint's fighting qualities. Would those quali­ties be great enough to pull off a victory against all the odds? And would the arrival of the police just after that victory serve for nothing but to give the Saint another battle to fight? . . . Or was the Saint likely to be really up against it? Might it be a kind treachery to spill the rest of the beans—if only to save Pat? How could a man weigh a girl's safety against the peace of the world? For, even if the betrayal meant the sacrifice of the Saint and himself, it would leave Vargan with Norman Kent. And, in case of accidents, Norman had definite instruc­tions. ...

But where was Norman?

Roger looked into the small bright eyes of Chief Inspector Teal. Then he looked away, to meet the glittering, veiled eyes of Hermann. And, in the shifting of his gaze, he managed to steal another glimpse of the clock—without letting Teal see that he did so.

"What house on what hill?" demanded Teal again.

"Does that matter?" temporised Roger desperately.

"Just a little," said Teal, with frightful self-restraint. "If you don't tell me where Templar's gone, how am I going to rescue him from this trap you say he's going into?"

Roger bent his head.

Unless Norman Kent came quickly, now, and outwitted Teal, so that Roger and Norman could go together to the relief of the Saint, there would be nothing for it but to tell some more of the truth. It would be the only way to save the Saint— whatever that salvation might cost. Roger saw that now.

"Get through on the phone to the police at Braintree first," he said. "Templar will pass through there. Driving an open Hirondel. I'll go on when you've done that. There's no time to lose. ..."

All at once, Teal's weary eyes had become very wide awake. He was studying Roger's face unblinkingly. "That story's the truth?"

"On my word of honour!"

Teal nodded very deliberately.

"I believe you," he said, and went to the telephone with surprising speed.

Roger flicked his cigarette-end into the fireplace, and sat with his eyes on the carpet and his brain reeling to encompass the tumult unleashed within it.

If Norman was coming, he should have arrived by then. So Norman had decided not to come. And that was that

The detective's voice came to Roger through a dull haze of despair.

"An open Hirondel . . . probably driving hell-for-leather. . . . Stop every car that comes through to-night, anyway. . . . Yes, better be armed. . . . When you've got him, put a guard in the car and send him back to London—New Scotland Yard —at once. . . . Ring me up and tell me when he's on his way. ..."

Then the receiver went back on its hook.

"Well, Conway—what about this house?" Something choked Roger's throat for a moment.

Then:

"We only know it as 'the house on the hill.' That was what it was called in the letter we found on Marius. But it's at——"

Zzzzzzing . . . zzzzzing!

Teal looked at the door. Then he turned sharply.

"Do you know who that is?"

"I haven't the faintest idea."

Zzzzzzzzzzing!

Again the strident summons; and Roger's heart leapt crazily. He never knew how he kept the mask of puzzlement on his face, but he knew that he did it: the fading suspicion in Teal's stare told him that. And he had put everything he knew into his lie. "I haven't the faintest idea. . . ."

But he knew that it could only be one man out of all the world;

Hermann also knew.

But Roger gave no sign, and never looked at the man. It remained a gamble. With Roger telling the truth—and intend­ing, for all Hermann knew, to go on telling the truth—the man was in a quandary. The story that Roger was building up against himself was also giving Hermann a lot to answer. . . . Would Hermann be wise and swift enough to see that he would have a better chance with his unofficial enemies than with the police? . . .

Hermann never spoke.

Then Teal went out into the hall; and Roger could have cried his relief aloud.

But he could not cry out—hot even to warn Norman. That would be no use against Teal, as it would have been of use against Hermann. Norman had got to walk into the snare— and might all the Saint's strange gods inspire him as they would have inspired the Saint himself. . . .

Teal opened the front door. And he kept his right hand in his coat pocket.

Norman hesitated only the fraction of a second.

Afterwards, Norman said that the words came to his lips without any conscious thought, as if a guardian angel had put them unbidden into his mouth.

"Are you Mr. Templar?" asked Norman Kent.

And, as he heard the words that he had not known he was going to speak, he stood appalled at the colossal simplicity and colossal daring of the ruse.

"No, I'm not," said Teal curtly.

"Is Mr. Templar in?"

"Not at the moment."

"Well, is there anything you could do? I've never met Mr. Templar; but I've just had an extraordinary message, and I thought, before I went to the police——"

The word pricked Teal's ears.

"Maybe I can do something for you," he said, more cordially. "Will you come in?"

"Certainly," said Norman.

Teal stood aside to let him pass, and turned to fasten the door again.

Hanging on the walls of the hall were a number of curious weapons, relics of the Saint's young lifetime of wandering in queer corners of the globe. There were Spanish knives, and a matador's sword; muskets and old-fashioned pistols; South Sea Island spears, Malay krises and krambits and parangs; a scim­itar, a boomerang from New Zealand, an Iroquois bow, an assegai, a bamboo blow-pipe from Papua; and other things of the same kind.

Norman Kent's eye fell on a knobkerry. It hung very con­veniently to his hand.

He took it down.

12. How Simon Templar parted with Anna,

and took Patricia in his arms

To attempt to locate, in a strange part of the country and on a dark night, a house distinguished by nothing but the fact of being situated on "the" hill—particularly in a district where hills are no more than slight undulations—might well have been considered a hopeless task even by the most op timistic man. As he began to judge himself near the village, the Saint realised that.

But even before he could feel despair, if he would have felt despair, his hurtling headlights picked up the figure of a belated rustic plodding down the road ahead. The Saint, no stranger to country life, and familiar with its habit of retiring to bed as soon as the village pub has ejected it at ten o'clock, knew that this gift could only have been an angel in corduroys, sent direct from heaven. The Saint's gods were surely with him that night.

"Do you know the house on the hill?" demanded Simon brazenly.

"Ay, that Oi doo!"

Then the Saint understood that in the English country dis­tricts all things are possible, and the natives may easily con­sider "the house on the hill" a full and sufficient address, just as a townsman may be satisfied with "the pub around the corner."

"Throo the village, tourrn round boi the church, an' keep straight as ever you can goo for 'arf a moile. You can't miss ut." So the hayseed declared; and the Saint sped on. But he ran the car into a side turning near the crest of the hill, parked it with lights out, and continued on foot. He might be ex­pected, but he wasn't advertising his arrival unnecessarily.

He had been prepared to break into and shoot up every single house in the district to which the description "on the hill" might possibly have applied, until he came to the right one. But he had been saved that; and it remained to capitalise the godsend.

The gun in his pocket bumped his hip as he walked; and in the little sheath on his forearm he could feel the slight but reassuring weight of Anna, queen of knives, earned with blood and christened with blood. She was no halfling's toy. In blood she came, and in blood that night she was to go.

But this the Saint could not know, whatever presentiments he may have had, as he stealthily skirted the impenetrable blackthorn hedge that walled in the grounds of the house he had come to raid. The hedge came higher than his head; and impenetrable it was, except for the one gap where the gate was set, as he learned by making a complete circuit. But, standing back, he could see the upper part of the house loom­ing over it, a black bulk against the dark sky; and in the upper story a single window was lighted up. He could see nothing of the ground floor from behind the hedge, so that he had no way of knowing what there might be on three sides of it; but in the front he could see at least one room alight. Standing still, listening with all the keyed acuteness of his ears, he could pick up no sound from the house.

Then that lighted upper window gave him an idea.

On the face of it, one single lighted upper window could only mean one thing—unless it were a trap. But if it were a trap, it was such a subtle one that the Saint couldn't see it.

What he did see, with a crushing force of logic, was that the garrison of a fortified house, expecting an attempt to rescue their prisoner, would be likely to put her as far away from the attacker's reach as possible. Prisoners are usually treated like that, almost instinctively, being ordinarily confined in attics or cellars even when no attempt at rescue is expected. And a country house of that type would be unlikely to have a cellar large enough to confine a prisoner whose value would drop to zero if asphyxiated. Patricia could surely be in but one place —and that lighted window seemed to indicate it as plainly as if the fact had been labelled on the walls outside in two-foot Mazda letters.

The Saint could not know that this was the simple truth— that the same fortune that had watched over him all through the adventure had engineered that breakdown on the long‑distance wire to prevent Marius communicating with the house on the hill. But he guessed and accepted it (except for the breakdown) with a force of conviction that nothing could have strengthened. And he knew, quite definitely, without any re­course to deduction or guesswork, that Marius by that time must be less than ten minutes behind him. His purpose must be achieved quickly if it were to be achieved at all.

For a moment the Saint hesitated, standing in a field on the wrong side of the blackthorn hedge. Then he bent and searched the ground for some small stones. He wanted very small stones, for they must not make too much noise. He found three that satisfied his requirements.

Then he wrote, by the light of a match cupped cautiously in one hand, on a scrap of paper he found in his pocket:

I'm here, Pat darling. Throw Anna back over the hedge and then start a disturbance to divide their attention. I'll be right in.—SIMON.

He tied the scrap to the handle of Anna with a strip of silk ripped from his shirt, and straightened up.

Gently and accurately he lobbed up two stones, and heard each of them tap the lighted pane. Then he waited.

Now, if there were no response—suppose Pat had been tied up, or was doped, or anything like that. . . . The thought made his muscles tighten up so that he felt them quivering all over his body like a mass of braced steel hawsers. . . . He'd have to wade in without the help of the distracting disturbance, of course. . . . But that wasn't the thought that made his pulse beat quicker and his mouth narrow down into a line that hardly smiled at all. It was the thought of Patricia herself— the thought of all that might have happened to her, that might be happening. . . .

"By God!" thought the Saint, with an ache in his heart, "if any of their filthy hands . . ."

But he wanted to see her once more before he went into the fight that he was sure was jeopardised against him. In case of accidents. Just to see her blessed face once more, to take the memory of it as a banner with him in to the battle. . . .

Then he held his breath.

Slowly the sash of the window was being raised, with in­finite precautions against noise. And the Saint saw, at the same time, that what he had taken, in silhouette, to be leaded panes, were, in fact, the shadows of network of closely set bars.

Then he saw her.

She looked out, down into the garden below, and along the side of the house, puzzledly. He saw the faltered parting of the red lips, the disordered gold of her hair, the brave light in the blue eyes. ...

Then he balanced Anna in his hand and sent her flickering through the dark. The knife fell point home, quivering in the wooden sill beside the girl's hand.

He saw Patricia start, and stare at it with a wild surmise. Then she snatched it out of the wood and disappeared into the room.

Half a minute ticked away whilst the Saint waited with a tingling impatience, fearing at any moment to hear a car, which could only belong to one man, come purring up the hill. But, fearfully as he strained his ears, he found the stillness of the night unbroken.

And at last he saw the girl again. Saw her hand come through the bars, and watched Anna swooping back towards him like a scrap stripped from a moonbeam. . . .

He found the little knife, after some difficulty, in a clump of long grass. His slip of paper was still tied to the handle, but when he unrolled it he found fresh words pencilled on the other side.

Eight men here. God bless you, darling.—PAT.

The Saint stuffed the paper into his pocket and slid Anna back into her sheath.

"God bless us both, Pat, you wonderful, wonderful child!" he whispered to the stillness of the night; and, looking up again, he saw her still at the window, straining her eyes to find him.

He waved his handkerchief for her to see, and she waved back. Then the window closed again. But she had smiled. He had seen her. And the ache in his heart became a song. . . .

He was wasting no more time looking for a way through the hedge. His first survey had already shown that it was planted and trained as an effective palisade. But there was always the gate.

On the road. A perfectly ordinary gate.

That, of course, was the way they would expect him to come.

Pity to disappoint them!

He hardly spared the gate a glance. It was probably elec­trified. It was almost certainly wired with alarms. And it was covered by a rifleman somewhere, for a fiver. But it remained the only visible way in.

The Saint took a short run and leapt it cleanly.

Beyond was the gravel of the drive, but he only touched that with one foot. As he landed on that one foot, he squirmed aside and leapt again—to the silent footing of the lawn and the cov­ering shadow of a convenient shrub. He stooped there, thumb­ing back the safety-catch of the automatic he had drawn, and wondering why no one had fired at him.

Then wondering went by the board; for he heard, through the silence, faintly, very far off, but unmistakable, the rising and falling drone of a powerful car. And he had barely attuned his hearing to that sound when another sound slashed through it like a sabrecut—the scream of a girl in terror.

He knew it wasn't the real thing. Hadn't he directed it him­self? Didn't he know that Patricia Holm wasn't the kind that screamed? Of course. . . . But that made no difference to the effect that the sound had upon him. It struck deep-rooted chords of fierce protectiveness, violently reminding him that the cause for the scream might still be there, even if Pat would never have released it without his prompting. It froze some­thing in him as a drench of icy water might have done; and, again as a drench of icy water might have done, it braced and stung and savaged something else into a fury of reaction, some­thing primitive and homicidal and ruthless, something out of an age that had nothing to do with such clothes as he wore, or such weapons as he carried, or such a fortress as lay before , his storming.

The Saint went mad.

There was neither sanity nor laughter in the way he covered the stretch of lawn that separated him from the house and the lighted ground-floor window which he had marked down as his objective directly he had cleared the gate. He was even unable to feel astonished that no shots spat at him out of the darkness, or to feel that the silence might forebode a trap. For Simon Templar had seen red.

Eight men, Patricia's note had told him, were waiting to oppose his entrance. . . . Well, let 'em all come. The more the bloodier. . . .

He who had always been the laughing cavalier, the man who would always exchange a joke as he exchanged a blow, who never fought but he smiled, nor greeted peril without a song in his heart, was certainly not laughing at all.

He went through that window as surely no man ever went through a window before, except in a film studio. He went through it in one flying leap, with his right shoulder braced to smash through the flimsy obstacle of the glass, and his left arm raised to shield his face from the splinters.

That mad rush took him into the room without a pause, to land on the floor inside with a jolt, stumbling for an instant, which gave the six men who were playing cards around the table time to scramble to their feet.

Six of them—meaning that the other two were probably dealing with the scream. It ought to have been possible to dis­tract more of their attention than that; but since it had so fallen out. . . .

And where, anyway, were the defences that he should have to break through? As far as that window, he had an easy course to cover. And these men had none of the air of men prepared to be attacked.

These thoughts flashed through the Saint's mind in the split second it took him to recover his balance; and then he was concerned with further questions.

The gun was ready in his hand; and two who were swift to draw against him were not swift enough, and died in their tracks before the captured automatic jammed and gave the other four their chance.

Never before had the Saint attacked with such a fire of mur­derous hatred; for the cry from the upper room had not been repeated, and that could only mean that it had been forcibly stifled—somehow. And the thought of Patricia fighting her fight alone upstairs, as she would have to go on fighting alone unless Simon Templar won his own fight against all the odds. . . . The first hint of a smile came to his lips when the first man fell; and when the gun froze useless in his hand he looked at it and heard someone laugh, and recognised the voice as his own.

Then Anna flicked from her sheath and whistled across half the room like a streak of living light, to bite deep of the third man's throat.

If the Saint had thought, perhaps he would never have let Anna go, since she could only have been thrown once against the many times she could have stabbed. But he had not thought. He had only one idea, clear and bright above the swirl of red, murderous mist that rimmed his vision, and that was to work the most deadly havoc he could in the shortest possible space of time.

And the first man he met with his bare hands was cata­pulted back against the wall by a straight left that packed all the fiendish power of a sledge-hammer gone mad, a blow that shattered teeth in their sockets and smithereened a jawbone as if it had been made of glass.

And then the Saint laughed again—but this time he knew that he did it The first outlet of his blind fury, the first taste of blood, that first primevally ferocious satisfaction in the battering contact of flesh- and bone, - had cleared his eyes and steadied down his nerves to their old fighting coolness.

"Come again, my beautifuls," he drawled breathlessly, and there was something more Saintly in the laugh in his voice, but his eyes were still as cold and bleak as two chips of blue ice. . . . "Come again!"

The remaining two came at him together.

Simon Templar would not have cared if they had been twenty-two. He was warmed up now, and through the glacial implacability of his purpose was creeping back some of the heroic mirth and magnificence that rarely forsook him for long.

"Come again!"

They came abreast; but Simon, with one lightning spring sideways, made the formation tandem. The man who was left nearest swung round and lashed out a mule-kick of a punch at the Saint's mocking smile; but the Saint swerved a matter of a mere three inches, and the blow whipped harmlessly past his ear. Then, with another low laugh of triumph, Simon pivoted on his toes, his whole body seeming to uncoil in one smooth spasm of effort, and flashed in an uppercut that snapped the man's head back as if it had been struck by a pneumatic riveter, and dropped him like a poleaxed steer.

Then the Saint turned to meet the second man's attack; and at the same moment the door burst open and flopped the odds back again from evens to two to one against.

In theory. But actually this new arrival was fresh life to the Saint. For this man must have been one of those who had been busy suppressing the scream, who had laid his hands on Patricia. . . . And against him and his fellow the Saint had a personal feud. . . .

As Simon saw him come, the chips of blue ice under Simon's straight-lined brows glinted with an unholy light.

"Where have you been all my life, sonny boy?" breathed the Saint's caressing undertone. "Why haven't you come down before—so that I could knock your miscarriage of a face through the back of your monstrosity of a neck?"

He wove in towards the two in a slight crouch, on his toes, his fists stirring gently. And from the limit of his reach he snaked in a long, swerving left that only a champion could have guarded; and it split the man's nose neatly, for the Saint was only aiding to hurt—sufficiently—before he finished off the job.

And he should have won the fight on his head, according to plan, from that point onwards. Lithe, strong as a horse, swift as a rapier, schooled in the toughest schools of the fight­ing game ever since the day when he first learned to put up his hands, and always in perfect training, the Saint would never have hesitated to take on any two ordinary men. And in the mood in which they found him that night he was super­man.

But he had forgotten his wound.

The nearest man was swinging a wild right at him—the kind of blow for which any trained, cool-headed boxer has a supreme contempt. And contemptuously, almost lazily, and certainly without thinking at all about a guard which approxi­mated to a habit, Simon put up his shoulder.

The impact should have been nothing to a bunched pad of healthy muscle; but the Saint had forgotten. And it shot a tear­ing twinge of agony through him which seemed to find out every nerve in his system.

Suddenly he felt very sick; and for a second he could see nothing through the haze which whirled over his eyes.

In that second's blindness he took a high-explosive left cross to the side of the jaw from the man with the split nose.

Simon reeled, crumpling, against the wall.

For some reason, perhaps because they could not both con­veniently reach him at once, the two men held back for a moment instead of charging in at once to finish him off. And for that moment's grace the Saint sagged where he leaned, titanically scourging numbed and tortured muscles to obey his will, wrestling with a brain that seemed to have gone to sleep.

And through the singing of a thousand thrumming dyna­mos in his head, he heard again the song of the Hirondel: "Patricia! . . . Patricia! ..."

Suddenly he realised how much he had been exhausted by loss of blood. The first excitement, the first thrill and rapture of the fight, had masked his own weakness from him; but now he felt it all at once, in the dreadful slowness of his recovery from a punch on the jaw. And the blow he had taken on the shoulder had re-opened his wound. He could feel the blood coursing down his back in a warm stream. Only his will seemed left to him, bright and clear and aloof in the paralysing darkness, a thing with the terrible power of a cornered giant, fighting as it had never fought before.

And then, through the mists that doped his senses, he heard what all the time he had dreaded to hear—the sound of a car slowing up outside.

Marius.

Through the Saint's mind flashed again, like a long, shining spear, the brave, reckless, vain-glorious words that he had spoken, oh, infinite ages ago: "Let 'em all come. . . ."

And perhaps that recollection, perhaps anything else, perhaps the indomitable struggle of his fighting will, snapped the slender fetters of weary dizziness that bound him, so that he felt a little life stealing back into his limbs.

As the two men stepped in to end it, the Saint held up one hand in a gesture that could not be denied.

"Your master is here," he said. "Perhaps you'd better wait till he's seen me."

They stopped, listening, for their hearing would have had to be keen indeed to match the Saint's; and for Simon that extra second's breadier was the difference between life and death.

He gathered himself, with a silent prayer, for the mad gamble. Then he launched himself off the wall like a stone from a sling, and in one desperate rush he had passed between them.

They awoke too late; and he was at the door.

On the stairs he doubled his lead.

At the top of the stairs a corridor faced him, with doors on either side; but he would have had no excuse for hesitation, for, as he set foot in the corridor, the eighth man looked out of a door halfway along it.

The eighth man, seeing the Saint, tried to close the door again in his face; but he was too slow, or the Saint was too fast. The Saint fell on the door like a tiger, and it was the man inside who had it slammed in his face—literally slammed in his face, so that he was flung back across the room as helplessly as a scrap of thistledown might have been flung before a cyclone. And the Saint followed him in and turned the key in the lock.

One glance round the room the Saint took, and it showed him the eighth man coming off the floor with a mixture of rage and fear in his eyes, and Patricia bound to the bed by wrists and ankles.

Then, as the leader of the pursuit crashed against the door the Saint whipped round again like a whirlwind, and, with one terrific heave, hurled a huge chest of drawers across the room from its place on the wall.

It stopped short of the door by a couple of feet; and, as Simon sprang to send it the rest of the way, the eighth man intercepted him with a knife.

The Saint caught his wrist, Wrenched . . . and the man cried out with pain and dropped the knife.

He was strong above the average, but he could not stand for a moment against the Saint's desperation. Simon took him about the waist and threw him bodily against the door, knocking most of the breath out of him. And before the man could move again, the Saint had pinned him where he stood with the whole unwieldy bulk of the chest of drawers. A moment later the massive wardrobe followed, toppled over to reinforce the barricade, and the man was held there, fluttering feebly, like an insect nailed to a board.

The Saint heard the cursing and thundering beyond the door, and laughed softly, blessing the age of the house. That door was of solid oak, four inches thick, and set like a rock; and the furniture matched it. It would be a long time before the men outside would be able to force the barrier. Though that might only be postponing the inevitable end. ...

But the Saint wasn't thinking of that. He could still laugh, in that soft and Saintly way, for all his pain and weariness. For he was beside Patricia again, and no harm could come to her while he still lived with strength in his right arm. And he wanted her to hear him laugh.

With that laugh, and a flourish with it, he swept up the fallen knife from the floor. It was not Anna, but for one pur­pose, at least, it would serve him every whit as well. And with it, in swift, clean strokes, he slashed away the ropes that held Patricia.

"Oh, Simon, my darling. ..."

Her voice again, and the faith and unfaltering courage in it that he loved! . . . And the last rope fell away before the last slash of the knife, and she was free, and he gathered her up into his arms as if she had been a child. ,

"Oh, Pat, my sweet, they haven't hurt you, have they?"

She shook her head.

"But if you hadn't come . . ."

"If I'd come too late," he said, "there'd have been more dead men downstairs than there are even now. And they wouldn't have cleared a penny off the score. But I'm here!"

"But you're hurt, Simon!"

He knew it. He knew that in that hour of need he was a sorry champion. But she must not know it—not while there remained the least glimmer of hope—not while he could still keep on keeping on. . . . And he laughed again, as gay and as devil-may-care a laugh as had ever passed his lips.

"It's nothing," he said cheerfully. "Considering the damage I've done to them, I should say it works out at about two thou­sand per cent clear profit. And it's going to be two hundred thousand per cent before I go to bed to-night!"

13. How Simon Templar was besieged,

and Patricia Holm cried for help

Simon held her very close to him for a moment that was worth an eternity of battle; and then, very gently, he released her.

"Stand by for a sec, old dear," he murmured, "while I im­prove the fortifications."

The room was a narrow one, fortunately, and it held a large mass of furniture for its size. By dragging up the bed, the washstand, and another chest, it was just possible to extend the barricade in a tight jam across the room from the door to the opposite wall, so that nothing short of a battering-ram could ever have forced the door open. On the other hand, it was impossible to extend the barricade upwards in the same way to the height of the door. The Saint had been able to topple the wardrobe over; but even his. strength, even if he had been fresh and uninjured, could not have shifted the thing to cover the doorway in an upright position. And if axes were brought ...

But that again was a gloomy probability, which it wouldn't help anyone to worry about.

"They've got something to think about, anyway," said the Saint, standing back to view the result of his labours.

He had the air of listening while he talked; and when the sentence was finished he still listened.

The tumult outside had died down, and one voice rose clearly and stood alone out of the fading confusion.

Simon could not understand what it said, but he had no doubt who it was that spoke. No one could have mistaken that high-pitched, arrogant tone of command.

"Hullo, Marius, my little lamb!" he sang out breezily. "How's life?"

Then Marius spoke in English.

"I should stand well away from the door, Templar," he re-marked suavely. "I am about to shoot out the lock."

The Saint chuckled.

"It's all the same to me, honeybunch," he answered, "but I think you ought to know that one of your bright boys is stuck against the door, right over the lock, and I'm afraid he can't move—and I can't get him away without busting the works."

"That will be unlucky for him," said Marius callously; and the man pinned against the door shrieked once, horribly.

The Saint had Patricia away in a corner, covering her with his own body, when Marius fired. But, looking over his shoul­der, he saw the man at the door bare his teeth dreadfully before he slopped limply forwards over the chest of drawers and lay still. The Saint's nerves were of pure tungsten, but the inhuman deliberateness of that murder made his blood run cold for an instant.

"Poor devil," he muttered.

But, outside, Marius had barked an order, and the assault was being renewed.

Simon went to the window; but one look at the bars told him that they had been too well laid for any unaided human effort to dislodge them. And there was nothing in the room that might have been used as a lever, except, perhaps, one of the bedposts—to obtain which would have meant disorganising the whole of the barricade.

The trap was complete.

And no help could be expected from outside, unless Roger . . . But the mere fact that Marius was there ruled Roger Conway out.

"How did you get here?" the girl was asking.

Simon told her the whole story, with his mind on other things. Perhaps because his attention was so divided, he forgot that her quick intelligence would not take long to seize upon the salient deduction; and he was almost startled when she interrupted him.

"But if you left Roger with Marius——"

The Saint looked at her and nodded ruefully.

"Let's face it," he said. "Old Roger's dropped a stitch. But he may still be knitting away somewhere. Roger isn't our star pupil, but he has a useful knack of tumbling out of trouble. Unless Teal's chipped in——"

"Why Teal?"

Simon came back to earth. So much had happened since he last saw her that he had overlooked her ignorance of it.

He told her what she had missed of the story—the adventure at Esher and the flight to Maidenhead. For the first time he fully understood all that was involved, and understood also why she had been taken to the house on the hill.

Quietly and casually, with flippancy and jest, in his own vivid way, he told the story as if it were nothing but a trivial incident. And a trivial incident it had become for him, in fact: he could no longer see the trees for the wood.

"So," he said, "you'll see that Angel Face means business, and you'll see why there's so much excitement in Bures to­night."

And, as he spoke, he glanced involuntarily at the lifeless figure sprawled over the chest of drawers, a silent testimony to the truth of his words; and the girl followed his gaze.

Then Simon met her eyes, and shrugged.

He made her sit down on the bed, and sat down himself beside her; he took a cigarette from his case and made her take one also.

"It won't help us to get worked up about it," he said lightly. "It's unfortunate about Sam Stick-my-gizzard over there; but the cheerful way to look at it is to think that he makes one less of the ungodly. Let's be cheerful. . . . And while we're being cheerful, tell me how you came into this mess from which I'm rescuing you at such great peril."

"That was easy. I wasn't expecting anything of the sort, you see. If you'd said more when you rang me up. . . . But I fell for it like a child. There was hardly anyone on the train, and I had a compartment to myself. We must have been near Read­ing when a man came along the corridor and asked if I had a match. I gave him one, and he gave me a cigarette. ... I know I was a fool to take it; but he looked a perfectly ordinary man, and I had no reason to be suspicious——"

Simon nodded.

"Until you woke up in a motor-car somewhere?"

"Yes. . . . Tied hand and foot, with a bag over my head. . . . We drove for a long time, and then I was brought in here. That was only about an hour before you threw the stones at my window. . . . Oh, Simon, I'm so glad you came!"

The Saint's arm tightened about her shoulders.

"So am I," he said.

He was looking at the door. Clearly, the efficiency of his barricade had been proved, for the attack had paused. Then Marius gave another order.

For a while there was only the murmur of conversation; and then that stopped with the sound of someone coming heavily down the corridor. And Simon Templar caught his breath, guessing that his worst forebodings were to be realised.

An instant later he was justified by a rendering crash on the door that was different from all the other thundering that had smashed upon it before.

"What is it?" asked Patricia.

"They've brought up the meat-axe," said the Saint carelessly; but he did not feel careless at heart, for the noise on the door and the crack that had appeared in one panel told him that an axe was being employed that would not take very long to damage even four inches of seasoned oak.

The blow was repeated.

And again.

The edge of a blade showed through the door like a thin strip of silver at the fourth blow.

A matter of minutes, now, before a hole was cut large enough for the besiegers to fire into the room—with an aim. And when that was done ...

The Saint knew that the girl's eyes were upon him, and tried desperately to postpone the question he knew she was fram­ing.

"Marius, little pal!"

There was a lull; and then Marius answered.

"Are you going to say," sneered the giant, "that you will save us the trouble of breaking in the door?"

"Oh no. I just wanted to know how you were."

"I have nothing to complain of, Templar. And you?" .

"When there are grey skies," said the Saint, after the man­ner of Al Jolson, "I don't mind the grey skies. You make them blue, sonny boy. ... By the way, how did you leave my friend?"

Marius's sneering chuckle curdled through the door.

"He is still at Brook Street, in charge of Hermann. You re­member Hermann, the man you knocked out? . . . But I am sure Hermann will be very kind to him. ... Is there any­thing else you wish to know?"

"Nothing at the moment," said the Saint.

Marius spoke in his own language, and the axe struck again.

Then Patricia would no longer be denied. The Saint met her eyes, and saw that she understood. But she showed no fear.

Quite quietly they looked at each other; and their hands came together quite gently and steadily.

"I'm sorry," said Simon in a low voice. "I can never tell you how sorry I am."

"But I understand, Simon," she said; and her voice was still the firm, clear, unfaltering voice that he loved. "The gods haven't forgotten you, after all. Isn't this the sort of end you've always prayed for?"

"It is the end of the world," he said quietly. "Roger was my only reinforcement. If I didn't get back to Brook Street by a certain time, he was to come after me. But, obviously, Roger can't come now. ..."

"I know."

"I won't let you be taken alive, Pat."

"And you?"

He laughed.

"I shall try to take Marius with me. But—oh, Pat, I'd sell my soul for you not to be in it! This is my way out, but it isn't yours——"

"Why not? Shouldn't I want to see the last fight through with you?"

Her hands were on his shoulders then, and he was holding her face between his hands. She was looking up at him.

"Dear," he said, "I'm not complaining. We don't live in a magnificent age, but I've done my best to make life magnificent as I see it—to live my ideal of the happy warrior. But you made that possible. You made me seek and fight for the tre­mendous things. Battle and sudden death—yes, but battle and sudden death in the name of peace and life and love. You know how I love you, Pat. . . ."

She knew. And if she had never given him the ultimate depths of her heart before, she gave them all to him then, with a gladness in that kiss as vivid as a shout in silence.

"Does anything matter much beside that?" she asked.

"But I've sacrificed you! If I'd been like other men—if I hadn't been so fool crazy for danger—if I'd thought more about you, and what I might be letting you in for——"

She smiled.

"I wouldn't have had you different. You've never apolo­gised for yourself before: why do it now?"

He did not answer. Who could have answered such a gener­osity?

So they sat together; and the battering on the door went on. The great door shook and resounded to each blow, and the sound was like the booming of a muffled knell.

Presently the Saint looked up, and saw that in the door was a hole the size of a man's hand. And suddenly a strange strength came upon him, weak and weary as he was.

"But, by Heaven, this isn't going to be the end!" cried the Saint. "We've still so much to do, you and I."

He was on his feet.

He couldn't believe that it was the end. He wasn't ready, yet, to pass out—even in a blaze of some sort of glory. He wouldn't believe that that was his hour at last. It was true that they still had so much to do. There was Roger Conway, and Vargan, and Marius, and the peace of the world wrapped up in these two. And adventure and adventure beyond. Other things. . . . For in that one adventure, and in that one hour, he had seen a new and wider vision of life, wider even than the ideal of the happy warrior, wider even than the fierce de­light of battle and sudden death, but rather a fulfilment and a consummation of all these things—and how should he die before he had followed that vision farther?

And he looked at the door, and saw the eyes of Marius.

"I should advise you to surrender, Templar," said the giant coldly. "If you are obstinate, you will have to be shot."

"That'd help you, wouldn't it, Angel Face? And then how would you find Vargan?"

"Your friend Conway might be made to speak."

"You've got a hope!"

"I have my own methods of persuasion, Templar, and some of them are almost as ingenious as yours. Besides, have you thought that your death would leave Miss Holm without a protector?"

"I have," said the Saint. "I've also thought that my surren­der would leave her in exactly the same position. But she has a knife, and I don't think you'll find her helpful. Think again!"

"Besides," said Marius, in the same dispassionate tone, "you need not be killed at once. It would be possible to wound you again."

The Saint threw back his head.

"I never surrender," he said.

"Very well," said Marius calmly.

He snapped out another order, and again the axe crashed on the door. The Saint knew that the hole was being enlarged so that a man could shoot through it and know what he was shooting at, and he knew that the end could not now be long in coming.

There was no cover in the room. They might have flattened themselves against the wall in which the door was, so that they could not be seen from outside, but that would make little difference. A few well-grouped shots aimed along the wall by an automatic would be certain of scoring.

And the Saint had no weapon but the captured knife; and that, as he had said, he had given to Patricia.

The odds were impossible.

As he watched the chips flying from the gap which the axe had already made—and it was now nearly as big as a man's head—the wild thought crossed his mind that he might chal­lenge Marius to meet him in single combat. But immediately he discarded the thought. Dozens of men might have ac­cepted, considering the difference in their sizes: the taunt of cowardice, the need to maintain their prestige among their followers, at least, might have forced their hand and stung them to take the challenge seriously. But Marius was above all that. He had one object in view, and it was already proved that he viewed it with a singleness of aim that was above all ordinary motives. The man who had cold-bloodedly shot a way through the body of one of his own gang—and got away with it—would not be likely to be moved by any argument the Saint could use.

Then—what?

The Saint held Patricia in his arms, and his brain seemed to reel like the spinning of a great crazy flywheel. He knew that he was rapidly weakening now. The heroic effort which had taken him to that room and barricaded it had cost him much, and the sudden access of supernatural strength and energy which had just come upon him could not last for long. It was like a transparent mask of glittering crystal, hard but brittle, and behind it and through it he could see the founda­tions on which it based its tenacity crumbling away.

It was a question, as it had been in other tight corners, of playing for time. Arid it was also the reverse. Whatever was to be done to win the time must be done quickly—--before that forced blaze of vitality fizzled out and left him powerless.

The Saint passed a hand across his eyes, and felt strangely futile. If only he were whole and strong, gifted again with the blood that he had lost, with a shoulder that wasn't spreading a numbing pain all over him, and a brain cleared of the muzzy aftermath of that all-but-knock-out swipe on the jaw, to be of some use to Patricia in her need!

"Oh, God!" he groaned. "God help me!"

But still he could see nothing useful to do—nothing but the forlorn thing that he did. He put Patricia from him and leapt to the door on to part of the barricade, covering with his body the hole that was being cut. Marius saw him.

"What is it now, Templar?" asked the giant grimly.

"Nothing, honey," croaked the Saint, with a breathless little laugh. "Just that I'm here, and I'm carefully arranging myself so that if anyone shoots at me it will be fatal. And I know you don't want me to die yet. So it'll keep you busy a bit longer— won't it?—making that hole big enough for it to be safe to shoot through. . . ."

"You are merely being foolishly troublesome," said Marius unemotionally, and added an order.

The man with the axe continued his work.

But it would take longer—that was all the Saint cared about. There was hope as long as there was life. The miracle might happen . . . might happen. . . .

He found Patricia beside him.

"Simon—what's the use?"

"We'll see, darling. We're still kicking, anyway—that's the main thing."

She tried to move him by force, but he held her hands away. And then she tore herself out of his grasp; and with dazed and uncomprehending eyes he watched her at the window— watched her raise the sash and look out into the night.

"Help!"

"You fool!" snarled the Saint bitterly. "Do you want them to have the last satisfaction of hearing us whine?"

He forgot everything but that—that stern point of pride —and left his place at the door. He reached her in a few lurch­ing strides, and his hands fell roughly on her shoulders to drag her away.

She shouted again: "Help!"

"Be quiet!" snarled the Saint bitterly.

But when he turned her round he saw that her face was calm and serene, and not at all the face that should have gone with those cries.

"You asked God to help you, old boy," she said. "Why shouldn't I ask the men who have come?"

And she pointed out of the window.

He -looked; and he saw that the gate at the end of the garden, and the drive within, were lighted up as with the light of day by the headlights of a car that had stopped in the road beyond. But for the din of the axe at the door he would have heard its approach.

And then into that pathway of light stepped a man, tall and dark and trim; and the man cupped his hands about his mouth and shouted:

"Coming, Pat! . . . Hullo, Simon!"

"Norman!" yelled the Saint. "Norman—my seraph—my sweet angel!"

Then he remembered the odds, and called again:

"Look out for yourself! They're armed——"

"So are we," said Norman Kent happily. "Inspector Teal and his merry men are all round the house. We've got 'em cold."

For a moment the Saint could not speak.

Then:

"Did you say Inspector Teal?"

"Yes," shouted Norman. And he added something. He added it brilliantly. He knew that the men in the house were for­eigners—that even Marius, with his too-perfect English, was a foreigner—and that no one but the Saint and Patricia could be expected to be familiar with the more abstruse perversions and defilements possible to the well of native English. And he made the addition without a change of tone that might have hinted at his meaning. He added: "All breadcrumbs and breambait. Don't bite!"

Then Simon understood the bluff.

It must have been years since the sedate and sober Norman Kent had played such irreverent slapstick with the tongue that Shakespeare spake, but the Saint could forgive the lapse.

Simon's arm was round Patricia's shoulders, and he had seen a light in the darkness. The miracle had happened, and the adventure went on.

And he found his voice.

"Oh, boy!" he cried; and dragged Patricia down into the temporary shelter of the barricade as the first shot from out­side the smashed door smacked over their heads and sang away into the blackness beyond the open window.

14. How Roger Conway drove the Hirondel,

and Norman Kent looked back

A second bullet snarled past the Saint's ear and flattened itself in a silvery scar on the wall behind him; but no more shots followed. From outside the house came the rattle of other guns. Simon heard Marius speaking crisply, and then he was listening to the sound of footsteps hurrying away down the corridor. He raised his head out of cover, and saw nothing through the hole in the door.

"They're going to try and make a dash through the cordon that isn't there," he divined; and so it was to prove.

He stood up, and began to tear away the barricade, the girl helping him.

They raced down the corridor together, and paused at the top of the stairs. But there was no one to be seen in the hall below.

Simon led the way downwards. Without considering where he went, he burst into the nearest room, and found that it was the room in which he had fought the opening skirmish. The window through which he had hurled himself was now open, and through it drifted the sounds of a scattered fusillade.

He caught up a gun from the floor without halting in his rush to the window.

Outside, on the lawn, with the light behind him, he could see a little knot of men piling into a car. The engine started up a second later.

A smile touched the Saint's lips—the first entirely carefree smile that had been there that night. There was something ir­resistibly entertaining about the spectacle of that death-or-glory sortie whose reckless daring was nothing but the saying of a loud "Boo" to a tame goose—if the men who made the sortie had only known. But they could not have known, and Marius was doing the only possible thing. He could not have hoped to survive a siege, but a sortie was a chance. Flimsy, but a chance. And certainly the effect of a posse shooting all round the house had been very convincingly obtained. Simon guessed that the rescue party had spared neither ammunition nor breath. They must have run themselves off their legs to main­tain that impression of revolver fire coming from every quar­ter of the garden at once.

The car, with its frantic load, was sweeping down the drive in a moment. Simon levelled his gun and spat lead after it, but he could not tell whether he did any damage.

Then another gun poked into his ribs, and he turned.

"Put it up," said the Saint. "Put it up, Roger, old lad!"

"Well, you old horse-thief!"

"Well, you low-down stiff!"

They shook hands.

Then Norman Kent loomed up out of the darkness.

"Where's Pat?"

But Patricia was beside the Saint.

Norman swung her off her feet and kissed her shamelessly. Then he clapped Simon on the shoulder.

"Do we go after them?" he asked. The Saint shook his head.

"Not now. Is Orace with you?"

"No. Just Roger and I—the old firm."

"Even then—we've got to get back to Vargan. We can't risk throwing away the advantage, and getting the whole bunch of us tied up again. And in about ten seconds more this place is going to be infested with stampeding villagers thinking the next war's started already. We'll beat it while the tall timber looks easy!"

"What's that on your coat—blood?"

"Nothing."

He led the way to the Hirondel, walking rather slowly for him. Roger went beside him. At one step, the Saint swayed, and caught at Roger's arm.

"Sorry, son," he murmured. "Just came all over queer, I did. ..."

"Hadn't you better let us have a look——"

"We'll leave now," said the Saint, with more quietly incon­testable iciness than he had ever used to Roger Conway in his life before.

The strength, the unnatural vigour which had carried him through until then, was leaving him as it ceased to be neces­sary. But he felt a deep and absurd contentment.

Roger Conway drove, for Norman had curtly surrendered the wheel of his own recovered car. Thus Roger could explain to the Saint, who sat beside him in the front.

"Norman brought us here. I always swore you were the last word in drivers, but there isn't much you could teach Nor­man."

"What was the car?"

"A Lancia. He was stuck at Maidenhead without anything, so the only thing to do was to pinch something. He walked up to Skindle's, and took his pick."

"Let's have this from the beginning," said the Saint pa­tiently. "What happened to you?"

"That was a bad show," said Roger. "Fatty distracted my attention, and Angel Face laid me out with a kick. Then Skinny finished the job, near enough. Marius got on the phone, but couldn't get Bures. He arranged other things with Westminster double-nine double-nine——"

"I met 'em. Four of "em."

"Then Marius went off with Fatty, leaving Hermann in charge. Before that, I'd been ringing up Norman, and Norman had said he might come up. When the bell rang, I shouted to warn him, and got laid out again. But it wasn't Norman—it was Teal. Teal collared Hermann. I told Teal part of the story. It was the only thing I could think of to do—partly to keep us in Brook Street for a bit in case Norman turned up, and partly to help you. I told Teal to get through to the police at Braintree. Did they miss you?"

"They tried to stop me, but I ran through."

"Then Norman turned up. Took Teal in beautifully—and laid him out with a battle-axe or something off your wall. We left Teal and Hermann trussed up like chickens——"

The Saint interrupted.

"Half a minute," he said quietly. "Did you say you rang up Norman?"

Conway nodded.

"Yes. I thought——"

"While Marius was there?"

"Yes."

"He heard you give the number?"

"Couldn't have helped hearing, I suppose. But——"

Simon leaned back.

"Don't tell me," he said, "don't tell me that we already know that the exchange is not allowed to give subscribers' names and addresses. Don't tell me that Hermann, who's with Teal, mayn't have remembered the number. But what fool wouldn't remem­ber the one word 'Maidenhead'?"

Roger clapped a hand to his mouth.

The murder was out—and he hadn't seen the murder until that moment. The sudden understanding of what he had done appalled him.

"Won't you kick me, Saint? Won't you——?"

Simon put a hand on his arm, and laughed.

"Never mind, old Roger," he said. "I know you didn't think. You weren't bred to this sort of game, and it isn't your fault if you trip up. Besides, you couldn't have known that it was going to make any difference. You couldn't have known Angel Face was going to get away, or Teal was going to arrive—"

"You're making excuses for me," said Roger bitterly. "And there aren't any. I know it. But it's just the sort of thing you would do."

The hand on Roger's arm tightened.

"Ass," said the Saint softly, "why cry over spilt milk? We're safe for hours yet, and that's all that matters."

Conway was silent; and the Hirondel sped on through the night without a check.

Simon leaned back and lighted a cigarette. He seemed to sleep, but he did not sleep. He just relaxed and stayed quiet, taking the rest which he so sorely needed. No one would ever know what a gigantic effort of will it had cost him to carry on as he had done. But he would say nothing of that to anyone but Roger, who had found him out. He would not have Patricia know. She would have insisted on delaying the jour­ney, and that he dared not allow.

He explored his wound cautiously, taking care that his movements should not be observed from the back. Fortu­nately, the bullet had passed cleanly through his shoulder, and there were not likely to be any complications. To-mor­row, with his matchless powers of recuperation and the splen­did health he had always enjoyed, he should be left with noth­ing more seriously disabling than a stiff and sore shoulder. The only real danger was the weakness after losing so much blood. But even that he felt he would be able to cope with now.

So he sat back with his eyes closed and the cigarette smoul­dering, almost forgotten, between his fingers, and thought over the brick that Roger had dropped.

And he saw one certain result of it staring him in the face, and that was that Maidenhead would not be safe for his democracy for very long.

Marius, still at large, wouldn't be likely to lose much time in returning to the attack. And Maidenhead was not a large place, and the number of houses which could seriously be considered was strictly limited. By morning, Marius would be on the job, working with a desperation that would be doubled by the belief that in some way the police had been enleagued against him. In the morning, also, Teal would be rescued, and would start trying to obtain information from Hermann: and how long would Hermann hold out? Not indefinitely—that was certain. In the circumstances, the Powers Higher Up might turn a conveniently blind eye to methods of persuasion which the easy-going officialdom of England would never tolerate in ordinary times: for the affair might be called a national emer­gency. And once Teal had the telephone number . . .

Exactly. Say to-morrow evening. By which time Marius, with a good start to make up for his lack of official facilities, would also be getting hot on the trail.

The Saint was no fool. He knew that the Criminal Investi­gation Department, except in the kind of detective story in which some dude amateur with a violin and a taste for exotic philosophies made rings round their hardened highnesses, was not composed entirely of nitwits. Here and there, Simon did not hesitate to admit, among the men at New Scotland Yard, there was a brain not utterly cretinous. Claud Eustace Teal's, for instance. And Teal, though he might be something of a dim bulb at the spectacular stuff, was a hound for action when he had anything definite to act upon. And there might be more concrete things to act upon than a name and address in a chase of that sort; but, if there were, the Saint couldn't think of them.

Marius also. Well, Marius spoke for himself.

Taken by and large, it seemed as if Maidenhead was likely to become the centre of some considerable activity before the next nightfall.

"But we won't cry over spilt milk, my lads, we won't cry over spilt milk," went Simon's thoughts in a kind of refrain that harmonised with the rush of the big car. "We ought to have the best part of a day to play with, and that's the hell of a lot to me. So we won't cry over spilt milk, my lads—and so say all of us!"

But Roger Conway wasn't saying it.

He was saying: "We shall have to clear out of Maidenhead to-morrow—with or without Vargan. Have you any ideas about that?"

"Dozens," said the Saint cheerfully. "As for Vargan, by to-morrow evening there'll either be no more need to keep him a prisoner, or—well, there'll still be no need to keep him a prisoner. ... As for ourselves, there's my Desoutter at Hanworth. Teal won't have had time to find out about that, and I don't think he'll allow anything to be published about us in the papers so long as he's got a chance of clearing up the trouble without any publicity. To the ordinary outside world we're still perfectly respectable citizens. No one at Hanworth will say anything if I announce that we're pushing off to Paris by air. I've done it before. And once we're off the deck we've got a big cruising range to choose our next landing out of."

And he was silent again, revolving schemes further ahead.

In the back of the car, Patricia's head had sunk on to Norman's shoulder. She was asleep.

The first pale streaks of dawn were lightening the sky when they ran into the east of London. Roger put the Hirondel through the City as quickly as the almost deserted streets would allow.

He turned off on to the Embankment by New Bridge Street, and so they came to pass by Parliament Square on their way westwards. And it was there that Norman Kent had a strange experience.

For some while past, words had been running through his head, so softly that he had not consciously been aware of them—words with which he was as familiar as he was with his own name, and which, nevertheless, he knew he had not heard for many years. Words to a kind of chanting tune that was not a tune. . . . And at that moment, as the Hirondel was murmuring past the Houses of Parliament, he became con­sciously aware of the words that were running through his head, and they seemed to swell and become louder and clearer, as if a great choir took them up; and the illusion was so per­fect that he had looked curiously round towards the spires of Westminster Abbey before he realised that no service could be proceeding there at that hour.

"To give light to them that sit in darkness, and in the shadow of death: and to guide our feet into the way of peace. . . ."

And, as Norman Kent turned his eyes, they fell upon the great statue of Richard Coeur-de-Lion, which stands outside the House. And all at once the voices died away. But Norman still looked back, and saw Richard Coeur-de-Lion riding there, the last of his breed, huge and heroic against the pale dawn sky, with his right hand and arm hurling up his great sword in a gesture. And for some reason Norman Kent suddenly felt himself utterly alone and aloof, and very cold. But that might have been the chill of the dawn.

15. How Vargan gave his answer,

and Simon Templar wrote a letter

It was full daylight when they came to Maidenhead.

Orace was not in bed. Orace was never in bed when he could be useful, no matter at what unearthly hour that might be. But whether it was because he never went to bed at all, or whether it was because some strange clairvoyance always roused him in time to be ready for all emergencies, was his own mysterious secret.

He produced a great dish of sizzling bacon and eggs and a steaming pot of coffee as if by the waving of a magic wand.

Then the Saint gave orders.

"We will sleep till lunch-time," he said. "The difference it'll make to our strength will be worth the waste of time."

He himself was feeling ready to drop.

He took Orace with him to his room, and swore him to silence before he allowed him to see the wound. But Orace, seeing it, said: "Wot the thunderinell——"

Simon fluttered a tired hand.

"Don't swear, Orace," he rambled vaguely. "I didn't swear when it happened. And Miss Patricia doesn't know yet. . . . You'll look after Miss Patricia and the boys, Orace, if I conk out. Keep them out of mischief and so forth. . . . And if you see Angel Face, you'll shoot him through the middle of his ugly mug, with my compliments, Orace. . . ."

He slid sideways off the chair suddenly, but Orace's strong arms caught him as he fell.

Orace put him to bed as tenderly as if he had been a child.

And yet, next morning, the Saint was up and dressed before any of the others. He was rather pale under his tan, and his lean face seemed leaner than ever; but there was still a spring in his step. He had slept like a healthy schoolboy. His head was as clear as his eyes, and a cold shower had sent fresh life tingling through his veins.

"Learn a lesson from me," he said over his third egg. "If you had constitutions like mine, invigorated by my spiritual purity, and unimpaired, like mine, by the dissipation and riotous living that has brought you to the wrecks you are——"

And in this he was joking less than they thought. Sheer ruth­less will-power had forced his splendid physique on to the road of an almost miraculously swift recovery. Simon Templar had no time to waste on picturesque convalescences.

He sent Orace out for newspapers, and read them all. Far too much that should have been said was still left unsaid. But he could glean a hint here, a warning there, a confirmation everywhere; until at the end of it he seemed to see Europe ly­ing under the shadow of a dreadful darkness. But nothing was said in so many words. There were only the infuriating in­adequate clues for a suspicious man to interpret according to his suspicions. It seemed as if the face of the shadow was waiting for something to happen, before which it would not unveil itself. The Saint knew what that something was, and doubted himself for the first time since he had gathered his friends together under him to serve the ends of a quixotic ideal.

But still nothing whatever was said in the newspapers about the affair at Esher; and the Saint knew that this silence could only mean one thing.

It was not until three o'clock that he had a chance to discuss Vargan again with Roger and Norman; for it had been agreed that, although Patricia had to know that Vargan was a prisoner, and why he was a prisoner, and although his possible fate had once been mentioned before her, the question should not be raised again in her presence.

"We can't keep him for ever," said Simon, when the chance came. "For one thing, we look like spending a large part of the rest of our lives on the run, and you can't run well with a load of unwilling luggage. Of course, we might get away with it if we found some lonely place and decided to live like hermits for the rest of our days. But, either way, there'd still always be the risk that he might escape. And that doesn't amuse me in the least."

"I spoke to Vargan last night," said Norman Kent soberly. "I think he's mad. A megalomaniac. His one idea is that his invention will bring him worldwide fame. His grievance against us is that we're holding up his negotiations with the Government, and thereby postponing the front-page head­lines. I remember he told me he was naming a peerage as part of the price of his secret."

The Saint recalled his lunch with Barney Malone, of the Clarion, and the conversation which had reinforced his in­terest in Vargan, and found Norman's analysis easy to accept.

"I'll speak to him myself," he said.

He did so shortly afterwards.

The afternoon had grown hot and sunny, and it was easy to arrange that Patricia should spend it on the lawn with a book.

"Give your celebrated impersonation of innocent English girlhood, old dear," said the Saint. "At this time of year, and in this weather, anyone searching Maidenhead for a suspici­ous-looking house, and seeing one not being used in the way that houses at Maidenhead are usually used, will be after it like a cat after kippers. And now you're the only one of us who's in balk—bar Orace. So you'll just have to give the local colour all by yourself. And keep your eyes skinned. Look out for a fat man chewing gum. We're shooting all fat men who chew gum on sight, just to make sure we don't miss Claud Eustace. . . ."

When she had gone, he sent Roger and Norman away also. To have had the other two present would have made the affair too like a kangaroo court for his mood.

There was only one witness of that interview: Orace, a stolid and expressionless sentinel, who stood woodenly beside the prisoner like a sergeant-major presenting a defaulter to his orderly officer.

"Have a cigarette?" said the Saint.

He knew what his personality could do; and, left alone to use it, he still held to a straw of hope that he might succeed where Norman had failed.

But Vargan refused the cigarette. He was sullenly defiant.

"May I ask how much longer you propose to continue this farce?" he inquired. "You have now kept me here three days. Why?"

"I think my friend has explained that to you," said Simon.

"He's talked a lot of nonsense—-".

Simon cut the speech short with a curt movement of his hand.

He was standing up, and the professor looked small and frail beside him. Tall and straight and lean was the Saint.

"I want to talk to you seriously," he said. "My friend has appealed to you once. I'm appealing to you now. And I'm afraid this is the last appeal we can make. I appeal to you in the name of whatever you hold most sacred. I appeal to you in the name of humanity. In the name of the peace of the world."

Vargan glared at him short-sightedly.

"An impertinence," he replied. "I've already heard your proposition, and I may say that I've never heard anything so ridiculous in my life. And that's my answer."

"Then," said Simon quietly, "I may say that I've never in my life heard anything so damnable as your attitude. Or can it be that you're merely a fool—an overgrown child playing with fire?"

"Sir——"

The Saint seemed to grow even taller. There was an arro­gance of command in his poise, in an instant, that brooked no denial. He stood there, in that homely room, like a king of men. And yet, when he continued, his voice was even milder and more reasonable than ever.

"Professor Vargan," he said, "I haven't brought you here to insult you for my amusement. I ask you to try for the moment to forget the circumstances and listen to me as an ordinary man speaking to an ordinary man. You have perfected the most horrible invention with which science has yet hoped to torture a world already sickened with the beastliness of scien­tific warfare. You intend to make that invention over to hands that would not hesitate to use it. Can you justify that?"

"Science needs no justification."

"In France, to-day, there are millions of men buried who might have been alive now. They were killed in a war. If that war had been fought before science applied itself to the per­fection of slaughter, they would have been only thousands in­stead of millions. And, at least, they would have died like men. Does science need no justification for the squandering of those lives?"

"Do you think you can stop war?"

"No. I know I can't. That's not the argument. Listen again. In England to-day there are thousands of men blind, maimed, crippled for life, who might have been whole now. There are as many again in France, Belgium, Germany, Austria. The bodies that God gave, and made wonderful and intricate and beautiful—torn and wrecked by your science, often made so hideous that men shudder to see them. . . . Does science need no justification for that?"

"That is not my business."

"You're making it your business."

The Saint paused for a moment: and then he went on in a voice that no one could have interrupted, the passionate voice of a prophet crying in the wilderness.

"There is science that is good and science that is evil. Yours is the evil science, and all the blessings that good science has given to mankind are no justification for your evil. If we must have science, let it be good science. Let it be a science in which men can still be men, even when they kill and are killed. If there must be war, let it be holy war. Let men fight with the weapons of men, and not with the weapons of fiends. Let us have men to fight and die as champions and heroes, as men used to die, and not as the beasts that perish, as men have to die in our wars now."

"You are an absurd idealist——"

"I am an absurd idealist. But I believe that all that must come true. For, unless it comes true, the world will be laid desolate. And I believe that it can come true. I believe that, by the grace of God, men will awake presently and be men again, and colour and laughter and splendid living will return to a grey civilisation. But that will only come true because a few men will believe in it, and fight for it, and fight in its name I against everything that sneers and snarls at that ideal. You are such a thing."

"And you are the last hero—fighting against me?"

Simon shook his head.

"Not the last hero," he said simply. "Perhaps not a hero at all. I call myself a soldier of life. I have sinned as much as any man, and more than most. I have been a hunted criminal. I am that now. But everything I've done has been done for the glory of an invisible ideal. I never understood it very clearly before, but I understand it now. But you. . . . Why haven't you even told me that you want to do what you want to do for the glory of your own ideal—for the glory, if you like, of England?"

A fantastic obstinacy flared in Vargan's eyes.

"Because it wouldn't be true," he said. "Science is inter­national. Honour among scientists is international. I've of­fered my invention first to England—that's all. If they're fools enough to refuse to reward me for it, I shall find a country that will."

He came closer to the Saint, with his head sideways, his faded lips curiously twisted. And the Saint saw that he had wasted all his words.

"For years I've worked and slaved," babbled Vargan. "Years! And what have I got for it? A few paltry letters to put after my name. No honour for everybody to see. No money. I'm poor! I've starved myself, lived like a pauper, to save money to carry on my work! Now you ask me to give up everything that I've sacrificed the best years of my life to win—to gratify your Sunday-school sentimentality! I say you're a fool, sir —an imbecile!"

The Saint stood quite still, with Vargan's bony hands claw­ing the air a few inches from his face. His impassivity seemed to infuriate the professor.

"You're in league with them!" screamed Vargan. "I knew it. You're in league with the devils who've tried to keep me down! But I don't care! I'm not afraid of you. You can do your worst. I don't care if millions of people die. I hope you die with them! If I could kill you——"

Suddenly he flung himself at the Saint like a mad beast, blub­bering incoherently, tearing, kicking. ...

Orace caught him about the middle and swung him off his feet in arms of iron; and the Saint leaned against the table, rubbing a shin that he had not been quick enough to get out of the way of that maniacal onslaught.

"Lock him up again," said Simon heavily, and saw Orace depart with his raving burden.

He had just finished with the telephone when Orace re­turned.

"Get everybody's things together," he ordered. "Your own included. I've phoned for a van to take them to the station. They'll go as luggage in advance to Mr. Tremayne, in Paris. I'll write out the labels. The van will be here at four, so you'll have to move."

"Yessir," said Orace obediently.

The Saint grinned.

"We've been a good partnership, haven't we?" he said. "And now I'm clearing out of England with a price on my head. I'm sorry we've got to ... break up the alliance. . . ."

Orace snorted.

"Ya bin arskin forrit, aintcha?" he demanded unsympathetically. "Ain't I tolja so arfadozen times? . . . Where ya goin' ta?" he added, in the same ferocious tone.

"Lord knows," said the Saint.

"Never bin there," said Orace. "Allus wanted ta, but never adno invitashun. I'll be ready ta leave when you are, sir."

He turned smartly on his heel and marched to the door. Simon had to call him back.

"Shake, you darned old fool," said the Saint, and held out his hand. "If you think it's worth it——"

" Tain't," said Orace sourly. "But I'll avta look arfter ya."

Then Orace was gone; and the Saint lighted a cigarette and sat down by the open window, gazing dreamily out over the lawn and the sunlit river.

And it seemed to him that he saw a cloud like a violet mist unrolled over the lawn and the river and the white houses and the fields behind, a gigantic cloud that crept over the country like a living thing; and the cloud scintillated as with the whirling and flashing of a thousand thousand sparks of violet fire. And the grass shrivelled in the searing breath of the cloud; and the trees turned black and crumpled in hot cinders as the cloud engulfed them. And men ran before the cloud, men agonised for breath, men with white, haggard faces and eyes glazed and staring, men . . . But the creeping of the cloud was faster than the swiftest man could run. . . .

And Simon remembered the frenzy of Vargan.

For the space of two cigarettes he sat there with his own thoughts; and then he sat down and wrote a letter.

TO CHIEF INSPECTOR TEAL,

CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION DEPARTMENT,

NEW SCOTLAND YARD,

LONDON, S.W. 1.

DEAR OLD CLAUD EUSTACE,

Before anything else, I want to apologise for assaulting you and one of your men at Esher on Saturday, and also to apologise for the way a friend of mine treated you yesterday. Unfortunately, on both occasions, the circumstances did not permit us to dispose of you by more peaceful means.

The story that Roger Conway told you last night was noth­ing but the truth. We rescued Professor Vargan from the men who first took him—who were led, as Conway told you, by the celebrated Dr. Rayt Marius—and removed him to a place of safety. By the time you receive this, you will know our reason; and, since I have not the time to circularise the Press myself, I hope this explanation will be safe in your hands.

Little remains for me to add to what you already know.

We have tried to appeal to Vargan to suppress his invention on humanitarian grounds. He will not listen. His sole thought is the recognition which he thinks his scientific genius de­serves. One cannot argue with monomaniacs: therefore, we find ourselves with only one course open to us. . We believe that for this diabolical discovery to take its place in the armament of the nations of Europe, at a time when jealousies and fears and the rumours of wars are again lifting their heads, would be a refinement of "civilisation" which the world could well be spared. You may say that the exclusive possession of this invention would confirm Great Britain in an unassailable supremacy, and perhaps thereby secure the peace of Europe. We answer that no secret can be kept for ever. The sword is two-edged. And, as Vargan an­swered me by saying, "Science is international"—so I an­swer you by saying that humanity is also international.

We are content to be judged by the verdict of history, when all the facts are made known.

But in accomplishing what we have accomplished, we have put you in the way of learning our identities; and that, as you will see, must be an almost fatal blow to such an organisation as mine.

Nevertheless, I believe that in time I shall find a way for us to continue the work that we have set ourselves to do.

We regret nothing that we have already done. Our only regret is that we should be scattered before we have time to do more. Yet we believe that we have done much good, and that this last crime of ours is the best of all.

Au revoir!

SIMON TEMPLAR

("The Saint").

He had heard, while he wrote, the sounds of Orace despatch­ing luggage; and, as he signed his name, Orace entered with a tray of tea and the report that the van had departed.

Patricia came in through the French windows a moment later. He thought she could never have looked so slim and cool and lovely. And, as she came to him, he swung her up in one arm as if she had been a feather.

"You see," he smiled, as he set her down, "I'm not quite a back number yet."

She stayed close to him, with cool golden-brown arms linked round his neck, and he was surprised that she smiled so slowly.

"Oh, Simon," she said, "I do love you so much!"

"Darling," said the Saint, "this is so sudden! If I'd only known. . ., ."

But something told him that it was not a time for jesting, and he stopped.

But of course she loved him. Hadn't he known it for a whole heavenly year, ever since she confessed it on the tor above Baycombe—that peaceful Devonshire village—only a week after he'd breezed into the district as a smiling swashbuckler in search of trouble, without the least notion that he was waltzing into a kind of trouble to which he had always been singularly immune? Hadn't she proved it, since, in a hundred ways? Hadn't the very night before, at Bures, been enough in itself to prove the fact beyond question for all time?

And now, in the name of fortune and all the mysteries of women, she had to blurt it out of the blue like that, almost as if ... "Burn it!" thought the Saint. "Almost as if she thought I was going to leave her!"

"Darling old idiot," said the Saint, "what's the matter?"

Roger Conway answered, from the Saint's shoulder, having entered the room unnoticed. He answered with a question.

"You've seen Vargan?"

"I have."

Roger nodded.

"We heard some of the noise. What did he say?"

"He went mad, and gibbered. Orace rescued me, and car­ried him away—fighting like a wild cat. Vargan's a lunatic, as Norman said. And a lunatic said . . . 'No.' "

Conway went to the window and looked up the river, shad­ing his eyes against the sun. Then he turned back.

"Teal's on his way," he said, in a matter-of-fact voice. "For the last half-hour the same energetic bird has been scuttling up and down the river in a motorboat. We spotted him through the kitchen window, while we were drinking beer and wait­ing for you."

"Well, well, well!" drawled the Saint, very gently and thoughtfully.

"He was snooping all round with a pair of binoculars. Pat being out on the lawn may have put him off for a bit. I left Norman on the lookout, and sent Orace out for Pat as soon as we heard you were through."

Norman Kent came in at that moment, and Simon took his arm and drew him into the group.

"Our agile brain," said the Saint, "deduces that Hermann has squealed, but has forgotten the actual number of our telephone. So Teal has to investigate Maidenhead generally. That may yet give us another hour or two; but it doesn't alter the fact that we have our marching orders. They're easy. Your luggage has already gone. So, if you beetle off to your rooms and have a final wash and brush-up, we'll be ready to slide. Push on, souls!"

He left them to it, and went to the kitchen in search of Orace.

"Got your bag packed, Orace?"

"Yessir."

"Passport in order?"

"Yessir."

"Fine. I'd like to take you in the Desoutter, but I'm afraid there isn't room. However, the police aren't after you, so you won't have any trouble."

"Nossir."

The Saint took five ten-pound notes from a bulging wallet

"There's a train to London at 4.58," he said. "Paddington, 5.40. That'll give you time to say good-bye to all your aunts, and catch a train from Victoria at 8.20, which will take you via Newhaven and Dieppe to Paris, where you arrive at 5.23 to-morrow morning at the Gare St. Lazare. While you're wait­ing in London, you'd better tear yourself away from your aunts for as long as it takes you to send a wire to Mr. Tre­mayne and ask him to meet you at the station and protect you from all those wild French ladies you've read about. We'll meet you at Mr. Tremayne's. . . . Oh, and you might post this letter for me."

"Yessir."

"O.K., Orace. You've just got time to get to the station with­out bursting a bloodvessel. S'long!"

He went on to his room, and there he found Patricia.

Simon took her in his arms at once.

"You're coming on this getaway?" he asked.

She held tightly to him.

"That's what I was wondering when I came in from the garden," she said. "You've always been such a dear old quixotic ass, Simon. You know how it was at Baycombe."

"And you thought I'd want to send you away."

"Do you?"

"I should have wanted to once," said the Saint. "In the bad old days. . . . But now—oh, Pat, dear lass, I love you too much to be unselfish! I love your eyes and your lips and your voice and the way your hair shines like gold in the sun. I love your wisdom and your understanding and your kindli­ness and your courage and your laughter. I love you with every thought of my mind and every minute of my life. I love you so much that it hurts. I couldn't face losing you. Without you, I just shouldn't have anything to live for. . . . And I don't know where we shall go or what we shall do or what we shall find in the days that are coming. But I do know that if I never find more than I've got already—just you, lass!——I shall have had more than my life. ..."

"I shall have had more than mine, Simon. . . . God bless you!"

He laughed.

"He has," said the Saint. "You see how it is. ... And I know a gentleman would be strong and silent, and send you out into the night for your own sake. But I don't care. I'm not a gentleman. And if you think it's worth it, to be hunted out of England with me——"

But her lips silenced his, and there was no heed to say more. And in Simon Templar's heart was a marvel of thanksgiving that was also a prayer.

16. How Simon Templar pronounced sentence,

and Norman Kent went to fetch his cigarette-case

A few minutes later, the Saint joined Roger Conway and Norman Kent in the sitting-room. He had already started up the Hirondel, tested its smooth running as well as he could, and examined the tyres. The sump showed no need of oil, and there was gasoline enough in the tank to make a journey twice as long as the one they had to take. He had left the car ticking over on the drive outside, and returned to face the decision that had to be taken.

"Ready?" asked Norman quietly.

Simon nodded.

In silence he took a brief survey through the French win­dows; and then he came back and stood before them.

"I've only one preliminary remark to make," he said. "That is—where is Tiny Tim?"

They waited.

"Put yourselves in his place," said the Saint. "He hasn't got the facilities for trailing us that Teal has had. But Teal is here; and wherever old Teal is, Angel Face won't be far behind. Angel Face, being presumably anything but a bonehead, would naturally figure that the smartest thing to do, knowing Teal was trailing us, would be to trail Teal. That's the way I'd do it myself, and you can bet that Angel Face is nearly as rapid on the bounce, in the matter of brainwaves, as we are ourselves. I just mention that as a factor to be remembered during this fade-away act—and because it's another reason for us to solve a certain problem quickly."

They knew what he meant, and met his eyes steadily—Roger Conway grim, Norman Kent grave and inscrutable.

"Vargan will not listen to reason," said the Saint simply. "You heard him. . . . And there's no way out for us. We've only one thing to do. I've tried to think of other solutions, but there just aren't any. . . . You may say it's cold-blooded. So is any execution. But a man is cold-bloodedly executed by the law for one murder that is a matter of ancient history. We execute Vargan to save a million murders. There is no doubt in any of our minds that he will be instrumental in those mur­ders if we let him go. And we can't take him with us. ... So I say that he must die."

"One question," said Norman. "I believe it's been asked before. If we remove Vargan, how much of the menace of war do we remove with him?"

"The question has been answered before. I think Vargan is a keystone. But even if he isn't—even if the machinery that Marius has set in motion is able to run on without want­ing more fuel—even if there is to be war—I say that the wea­pon that Vargan has created must not be used. We may be accused of betraying our country, but we must face that. Per­haps there are some things even more important than winning a war. ... Do you understand, I wonder?"

Norman looked through the window; and some whimsical fancy, unbidden alien at such a conference, touched his lips with the ghost of a smile.

"Yes," he said, "there are so many important things to think of."

The Saint turned to Roger Conway.

"And you, Roger—what do you say?"

Conway fingered an unlighted cigarette.

"Which of us shall do it?" he asked simply.

Simon Templar looked from Roger to Norman; and he said what he had always meant to say.

"If we are caught," he said, "the man who does it will be hanged. The others may save themselves. I shall do it."

Norman Kent rose.

"Do you mind?" he said. "I've just remembered I left my cigarette-case in my bedroom. I'll be back in a moment."

He went out, and passed slowly and thoughtfully down the little hall to a door that was not his own.

He knocked, and entered; and Patricia Holm looked round from the dressing-table to see him.

"I'm ready, Norman. Is Simon getting impatient?"

"Not yet," said Norman.

He came forward and set his hands on her shoulders. She turned, with a smile awakening on her lips; but the smile died at the sight of a queer light burning deep in his dark eyes.

"Dear Pat," said Norman Kent, "I've always longed for a chance to serve you. And now it's come. You knew I loved you, didn't you?"

She touched his hand.

"Don't, Norman dear . . . please! ... Of course I knew. I couldn't help knowing. I'm so sorry. . . ."

He smiled.

"Why be sorry?" he answered gently. "I shall never bother you. I wouldn't, even if you'd let me. Simon's the whitest man in the world, and he's my dearest friend. It will be my hap­piest thought, to know that you love him. And I know how he loves you. You two will go on together until the stars fall from the sky. See that you never lose the splendour of life."

"What do you mean?" she pleaded.

The light in Norman Kent's eyes had in it something like a magnificent laughter.

"We're all fanatics," he said. "And perhaps I'm the most fanatical of us all. . . . Do you remember, Pat, how it was I who first said that Simon was a man born with the sound of trumpets in his ears? . . . That was the truest thing I ever said. And he'll go on in the sound of the trumpet. I know, be­cause to-day I heard the trumpet myself. . . . God bless you, Pat."

Before she knew what was happening, he had bent and kissed her lightly on the lips. Then he walked quickly to the door, and it was closing behind him when she found her voice. She had been left with no idea of what he meant by half the things he had said, and she could not let him go so mysteriously.

She called him—an imperative Patricia.

"Norman!"

He was back in a moment, almost before she had spoken his name. Something had changed in his face.

His finger signed her to silence.

"What is it?" she whispered.

"The last battle," said Norman Kent quietly. "Only a little sooner than we expected. Take this!"

He jerked back the jacket of a small automatic, and thrust it into her hands. An instant later he was rapidly loading a larger gun which he took from his hip pocket.

Then he opened the window noiselessly, and looked out. He beckoned her over. The Hirondel stood waiting on the drive, less than a dozen yards away. He pointed.

"Hide behind the curtains," he ordered. "When you hear three shots in quick succession, it's your cue to run for the car. Shoot down anyone who tries to stop you."

"But where are you going?"

"To collect the troops." He laughed soundlessly. "Good­bye, dear!"

He put his hand to his lips, and was gone, closing the door softly behind him.

It was when he had left the room for the first time that he had heard, through the open door of the sitting-room, the terse command, "Put up your hands!" in a voice that was certainly neither Roger's nor Simon's. Now he stood still for a moment outside Patricia's door, listening, and heard the in­imitably cheerful accents of Simon Templar in a tight corner.

"You're welcome—as the actress said to the bishop on a particularly auspicious occasion. But why haven't you brought Angel Face with you, sweetheart?"

Norman Kent heard the last sentence as he was opening the door of the kitchen.

He passed through the kitchen and opened another door. A flight of steps showed before him in the light which he switched on. He went down, and a third door faced him—a ponderous door of three-inch oak, secured by two heavy bars of iron. He lifted the bars and went in, closing that third door behind him as carefully as he had closed the first two. The three doors between them should be enough to deaden any sound. . . .

Vargan was sitting huddled up in a chair, scribbling with a stump of pencil in a tattered notebook.

He raised his head at the sound of Norman's entrance. His white hair was dishevelled, and his stained and shabby clothes hung loosely on his bones. The eyes seemed the only vital things in a lined face like a creased old parchment, eyes with the full fire of his madness stirring in them like the pale flick­ering flame that simmers over the crust of an awakening volcano.

Norman felt a stab of absurd pity for this pitifully crazy figure. And yet he knew that his business was not with the man, but with the madness of the man—the madness that could, and would, let loose upon the world a greater horror than anything that the murderous madness of other men had not conceived.

And the face of Norman Kent was like a face graven in dark stone.

"I have come for your answer, Professor Vargan," he said.

The scientist sat deep in his chair, peering aslant at the stern dark figure framed against the door. His face twitched spasmodically, and his yellow hands clutched his notebook clumsily into his coat; he made no other movement. And he did not speak.

"I am waiting," said Norman Kent presently.

Vargan passed a shaky hand through his hair.

"I've given you my answer," he said harshly.

"Think," said Norman.

Vargan looked down the muzzle of the automatic, and his lips curled back from his teeth in an animal snarl.

"You are a friend of my persecutors," he croaked, and his voice rose to a shrill sobbing scream as he saw Norman Kent's knuckle whiten over the trigger.

17. How Simon Templar exchanged back-chat,

and Gerald Harding shook hands

"We were expecting Angel Face," remarked the Saint. "But not quite so soon. The brass band's ordered, the Movietone cameramen are streaming down, the reporters are sharpen­ing their pencils as they run, and we were just going out to unroll the red carpet. In fact, if you hadn't been so sudden, there'd have been a full civic reception waiting for you. All except the mayor. The mayor was going to present you with an illuminated address, but he got lit up himself while he was preparing it, so I'm afraid he's out of the frolic, anyway. How­ever . . ."

He stood beside Roger Conway, his hands prudently held high in the air.

He'd been caught on the bend—as neatly as he'd ever been caught in the whole of his perilous career. Well and truly bending, he'd been. Bending in a bend which, if he could have repeated it regularly and with the necessary adornments of showmanship, would undoubtedly have made his fortune in a Coney Island booth as The Man with the Plasticene Spine. In fact, when he reviewed that bend with a skinned eye, he could see that nothing short of the miracle which is tradi­tionally supposed to save fools from the consequences of their folly could have saved him from hearing that imponderable inward ping! which informs a man supple on the uptake that one of his psychological suspender-buttons has come unstuck.

It struck the Saint that this last adventure wasn't altogether his most brilliant effort. It didn't occur to him to blame any­one else for the various leaks it had sprung. He might, if he had been that sort of man, have put the blame on Roger Conway, for Roger's two brilliant contributions, in the shape of dropping the brick about Maidenhead and then letting Marius escape, could certainly be made out to have something to do with the present trouble; but the Saint just wasn't that sort of man. He could only visualise the adventure, and those tak­ing part in it, as one coherent whole, including himself; and, since he was the leader, he had to take an equal share of blame for the mistakes of his lieutenants, like any other general. Ex­cept that, unlike any other general, he kept the blame to him­self, and declined to pass on the kick to those under him. Any bricks that were dropped must, in the nature of things, flop on everybody's toes simultaneously and with the same sicken­ing thud: therefore the only intelligent and helpful thing to do was to consider the bricks as bricks, and deal with the bricks as bricks simple and absolute, without wasting time over the irrelevant question of who dropped the brick and why.

And here, truly, was an admirable example of the species brick, a brick colossal and catastrophic, a very apotheosis of Brick, in the shape of this fresh-faced youngster in plus eights, who'd coolly walked in through the French window half a minute after Norman Kent had walked out of the door.

It had been done so calmly and impudently that neither Simon nor Roger had had a chance to do anything about it. That was when they had been so blithely on the bend. At one moment they had been looking through the window at a gar­den; at the next moment they had been looking through the window at a gun. They hadn't been given a break.

And what had happened to Norman Kent? By rights, he should have been back by that time. He should have been cantering blindfold into the hold-up—and Patricia with him, as like as not. Unless one of them had heard the conversation. Simon had noticed that Norman hadn't closed the door behind him, and for that reason deliberately raised his voice. Now, if Norman and Patricia received their cue before the hold-up merchant heard them coming . . .

"You wouldn't believe me," Simon went on affably, "if I told you how much I've been looking forward to renewing my acquaintance with Angel Face. He's so beautiful, and I love beautiful boys. Besides, I feel that a few more informal chats will make us friends for life. I feel that there's a kind of soul affinity between us. It's true that there was some unpleasantness at our first few meetings; but that's only natural be­tween men of such strong and individual personalities as ours, at a first acquaintance. It ought not to last. Deep will call to deep. I feel that we shall not separate again before he's wept on my shoulder and vowed again eternal friendship and lent me half a dollar. . . . But perhaps he's just waiting to come in when you give him the All Clear?"

A slight frown appeared on the face of the young man with the gun.

"Who is this friend of yours—Angel Face—anyway?"

The Saint's eyebrows went up.

"Don't you know Angel Face, honeybunch?" he murmured. "I had an idea you'd turn out to be bosom friends. My mis­take. Let's change the subject. How's dear old Teal? Still liv­ing on spearmint and struggling with the overflow of that boyish figure? You know, I can't help thinking he must have thought it very inhospitable of us to leave him lying about Brook Street all last night with only Hermann for company. Did he think it was very rude of us?"

"I suppose you're Templar?"

Simon bowed.

"Right in one, loveliness. What's your name—Ramon Novarro? Or are you After Taking Wuggo? Or are you just one of the strong silent men from the musical comedy chorus? You know: Gentlemen's clothes by Morris Angel and the brothers Moss. Hair by Marcel. Faces by accident. What?"

"As a low comedian you'd be a sensation," said the young­ster calmly. "As a clairvoyant, you'd probably make a most successful coal-heaver. Since you're interested, I'm Captain Gerald Harding, British Secret Service, Agent 2238."

"Pleased to meet you," drawled the Saint.

"And this is Conway?"

Simon nodded.

"Right again, son. You really are God's little gift to the General Knowledge Class, aren't you? . . . Speak your piece, Roger, and keep nothing back. You can't bamboozle Bertie. I shouldn't be surprised if he even knew where you hired your evening clothes."

"Same place where he had the pattern tattooed on those pants," said Roger. "Very dashing, isn't it? D'you think it reads from left to right, or up and down?"

Harding leaned one shoulder against the wall, and regarded his captures with a certain reluctant admiration.

"You're a tough pair of wags," he conceded.

"Professionally," said the Saint, "we play twice nightly to crowded houses, and never fail to bring them down. Which reminds me. May we do the same thing with our hands? I don't want you to feel nervous, but this position is rather tir­ing and so bad for the circulation. You can relieve us of our artillery first, if you like, in the approved style."

"If you behave," said Harding. "Turn round."

"With pleasure," murmured the Saint. "And thanks."

Harding came up behind them and removed their guns. Then he backed away again.

"All right—but no funny business, mind!"

"We never indulge in funny business," said Simon with dignity.

He reached for a cigarette from the box on the table and prepared to light it unhurriedly.

To all outward appearances he was completely unruffled, and had been so ever since Harding's arrival. But that was merely the pose which he habitually adopted when the storm was gathering most thickly; the Saint reserved his excitements for his spare time. He could always maintain that air of leisured nonchalance in any emergency, and other men before Harding had been perplexed and disconcerted by it. It was always the same—that languid affectation of indifference, and that genial flow of idle persiflage that smoked effortlessly off the mere surface of his mind without disturbing the concen­trated thought which it concealed.

The more serious anything was, the more extravagantly the Saint refused to treat it seriously. And thereby he was never without some subtle advantage over the man who had the drop on him; for Simon's bantering assurance was so per­fectly assumed that only an almost suicidally -self-confident opponent could have been left untroubled by a lurking un­easiness. Only a fool or a genius would have failed to jump to the conclusion that such a tranquil unconcern must base it­self on a high card somewhere up its frivolous sleeve. And very often the man who was neither a fool nor a genius was right.

But on this occasion the card up the sleeve was very ordi­nary. The Saint, inwardly revolving every aspect of the inter­ruption with a furious attention, could still find nothing new to add to his first estimate of the deal. Norman Kent re­mained the only hidden card.

By now, Norman Kent must know what had happened. Otherwise he would have been in the boat with them long ago, reaching down the ceiling while a youngster in plus eights whizzed his Webley. And if Norman Kent knew, Patricia would know. The question was—what would they be most likely to do? And how could Simon Templar, out of touch with them and practically powerless under the menace of Harding's automatic, divine their most probable plan of action and do something in collaboration?

That was the Saint's problem—to reverse the normal proc­esses of strategy and put himself in the place of the friend instead of in the place of the enemy. And, meanwhile, to keep Harding amused. ...

"You're a clever child," said the Saint. "May one inquire how you come to be doing Teal's job?"

"We work in with the police on a case like this," said Hard­ing grimly, "but we don't mind stealing a march on them if we can. Teal and I set out on an independent tour. He. took the high road and I took the low road, and I seem to have got there before him. I saw your car outside on the drive, and came right in."

"You should have a medal," said Simon composedly. "I'm afraid I can't give you anything but love, baby, but I'll write to the War Office about you, if you think that might help."

Harding grinned and smoothed his crisp hair.

"I like your nerve," he said.

"I like yours," reciprocated the Saint. "I can see you're a good man gone wrong. You ought to have been of Us. There's a place in the gang vacant for you, if you'd care to join. Per­haps you'd like to be my halo?"

"So you are the Saint!" crisped Harding alertly.

Simon lowered his eyelids, and his lips twitched.

"Touché! ... Of course, you didn't know that definitely, did you? But you tumbled to the allusion pretty smartly. You're a bright spark, sonny boy—I'll tell the cockeyed world."

"It wasn't so difficult. Teal's told everyone that he'd eat his hat if Vargan didn't turn out to be your show. He said he knew your work too well to make any mistake about it, even if it wasn't signed as usual."

Simon nodded.

"I wonder which hat Teal would have eaten?" he mur­mured. "The silk one he wears when he goes to night-clubs disguised as a gentleman or the bowler with the beer-stain? Or has he got a third hat? If he has, I've never seen it. It's a fas­cinating thought. . . ."

And the Saint turned his eyes to the ceiling as if he really were fascinated by the thought.

But the Saint thought: "If Bertie and Teal have been putting their heads together, Bertie must know that there's likely to be a third man on the premises. A man already proved handy with the battleaxe, moreover. . . . Now, why hasn't Bertie said anything about him? Can it be that Bertie, our bright and bouncing Bertie, is having a moment of mental aberration and overlooking Norman?"

Then the Saint said aloud: "However—about that halo job. How does it appeal to you?"

"Sorry, old man."

"Oh, not at all," sighed the Saint. "Don't apologise. . . . What else can we do for you? You seem to have everything your own way, so we'll try to oblige. Name your horse."

"Yes, I seem to have rounded you up fairly easily."

So the cunningly hidden question was answered. It was true. Norman Kent, being for the moment out of sight, had fallen for the moment out of mind.

For a fleeting second the Saint met Roger Conway's eyes.

Then:

"What do we do?" asked the Saint amiably. "Stand and de­liver?"

The youngster retired to the window and glanced out. Simon took one step towards him, stealthily, but there was an awkward distance between them, and Harding's eyes were only turned away for an instant. Then Harding turned round again, and the Saint was serenely selecting another cigarette.

"Have you got Vargan here?"

The Saint looked up.

"Ah!" said the Saint cautiously.

Harding set his lips.

In the few minutes of their encounter Simon Templar had had time to appreciate in the younger man a quiet efficiency that belied the first impression of youthfulness, combined with a pleasant sense of humour that was after the Saint's own heart. And at that moment the sense of humour was not so evident; but all the efficiency was there, and with it went a certain grimness of resolution.

"I don't know why you took Vargan," he said. "In spite of what we know about your ideas generally, that's still a mystery we haven't solved. Who are you working for?"

"Our own sweet selves," answered the Saint. "You see, our lawn's been going all to hell, and none of the weed-killers we've tried seem to do it any good, so we thought perhaps Vargan's electric exterminator might——"

"Seriously!"

Simon looked at him.

"Seriously, if you want to know," said the Saint, and he said it very seriously, "we took Vargan so that his invention should not be used in the war. And that decision of ours still stands."

"That was Teal's theory."

"Dear old Teal! The man's a marvel, isn't he? Just like a blinkin' detective in a story-book. . . . Yes, that's why we took Vargan. Teal will get a letter from me in the morning explaining ourselves at length."

"Something about the good of humanity, I suppose?"

"Correct," said the Saint. "Thereby snookering Angel Face, who certainly isn't thinking about the good of humanity."

Harding looked puzzled.

"This man you keep talking about—Angel Face——"

"Tiny Tim," explained Simon.

A light of understanding dawned upon the other.

"A man like an overgrown gorilla—with a face according——"

"How beautifully you put it, old dear! Almost the very words I used myself. You know——"

"Marius!" snapped Harding.

The Saint nodded.

"It rings the bell," he said, "and your penny will be re­turned in due course. But you don't surprise us. We knew."

"We guessed Marius was in this——"

"We could have told you."

Harding's eyes narrowed,

"How much more do you know?" he asked.

"Oh, lots of things," said the Saint blandly. "In my more brilliant moments I can run Teal a close race on some tracks. For instance, I wouldn't mind betting my second-best pair of elastic-sided boots that you were followed to-day—by one of Marius's men. But you mightn't have noticed that."

"But I did!"

Harding's automatic was still coolly and steadily aimed at the Saint's stomach, as it had been throughout the interview —when the aim was not temporarily diverted to Roger Con-way. But now there was just a little more steadiness and rigid­ity in the hand that held it. The change was almost imper­ceptible, but Simon Templar never missed anything like that. He translated the inflection in his own way; and when he . shifted his gaze back to Harding's eyes he found the interpre­tation confirmed there.

"I shook off my shadow a mile back," said Harding. "But I don't mind telling you that I shouldn't have come in here alone without waiting for reinforcements if I hadn't seen that somebody was a darned sight too interested in what I was do­ing. And the same reason is the reason why I want Vargan at once!"

The Saint rested gracefully against the table and blew two smoke-rings of surpassing perfection.

"Is—that—so!"

"That is so," said Harding curtly. "I'll give you two minutes to decide."

"The alternative being?"

"I shall start shooting holes in you. Arms, legs. ... I think you'll tell me what I want to know before that's gone on very long."

Simon shook his head.

"You mayn't have noticed it," he said, "but I have an im­pediment in my speech. I'm very sensitive, and if anyone treats me unkindly it makes my impediment worse. If you started shooting at me it'd make me stammer so frightfully that I'd take half an hour to get out the first d-d-d-d-damn—let alone answering any questions."

"And," said Harding relentlessly, "I'll treat your friend in the same way."

The Saint flashed Roger Conway a smile.

"You wouldn't breathe a word, would you, old Roger?"

"Let him try to make me!" Conway scoffed.

Simon turned again.

"Honestly, Algernon," he said quietly, "you'll get nothing that way. And you know it."

"We shall see," said Harding.

The telephone stood on a small table beside the window. Still keeping the Saint and Conway covered, he took up the receiver.

"Hullo. . . . Hullo. . . . Hullo. . . ."

Harding looked at his watch, fidgeting with the receiver-hook.

"Fifteen seconds gone. . . . Blast this exchange! Hullo. . . . Hullo!"

Then he listened for a moment in silence, and after that he replaced the receiver carefully. He straightened up again, and the Saint read his face.

"There was another man in your gang," said Harding. "I remember now. Is he here?"

"Is the line dead?"

"As pork."

"No one in this house would have cut the line," said Simon. "I'll give you my word for that."

Harding looked at him straightly.

"If that's true——"

"It can only be Marius," said the Saint slowly. "Perhaps the man who followed you wasn't so easy to shake off."

Roger Conway was looking out of another window from which he could see the lawn and the river at the end of the garden. Beyond the Saint's motor-boat another motor-boat rode in mid-stream, but it was not the motor-boat in which he had seen Teal. It seemed to Roger that the two men in the second motor-boat were looking intently towards the bunga­low; but he could not be sure.

"Naturally," he agreed, "it might be Marius."

It was then that Simon had his inspiration, and it made him leap suddenly to his feet.

"Harding!"

Simon cried the name in a tone that would have startled anyone. Harding would not have been human if he had not turned completely round.

He had been looking through a window, with the table be­tween himself and the Saint for safety, trying to discover what Conway was looking at. But all the time he had been there he had kept the windows in the corner of his eye. Simon had real­ised the fact in the moment of his inspiration, and had under­stood it. Norman had not been overlooked. But Harding ad­mitted that he had come alone, and he had to make the best of a bad job. He had to keep covering the two prisoners he had already taken, and wait and hope that the third man would blunder unsuspectingly into the hold-up. And as long as part of Harding's alertness was devoted to that waiting and hoping, Norman's hands were tied. But now . . .

"What is it?" asked Harding.

He was staring at the Saint, and his back was squarely turned to the window behind him. Roger Conway, from the other side of the room, was also looking at the Saint in perplexed surprise. Only the Saint saw Norman Kent step through the window behind Harding.

But Harding felt and understood the iron grip that fell upon his gun wrist, and the hard bluntness that nosed into the small of his back.

"Don't be foolish," urged Norman Kent.

"All right."

The words dropped bitterly from the youngster's lips after a second's desperate hesitation. His fingers opened grudgingly to release his gun, and the Saint caught it neatly off the carpet.

"And our own peashooters," said Simon.

He took the other two automatics from Harding's pocket, restored one to Roger, and stepped back to the table with a gun in each of his own hands.

"Just like the good old story-book again," he remarked. "And here we are—all armed to the teeth. Place looks like an arsenal, and we all feel at home. Come over and be sociable, Archibald. There's no ill-feeling. . . . Norman, will you have a dud cheque or a bag of nuts for that effort?"

"I was wondering how much longer it'd be before you had the sense to create a disturbance?"

"I'm as slow as a freight car to-day," said the Saint. "Don't know what's the matter with me. But all's well that ends well, as the actress used to say, and——"

"It is?" asked Norman soberly.

Simon lifted an eyebrow.

"Why?"

"I heard you talking about the telephone. You were right. I didn't cut the line. Didn't think of it. And if the line is dead——"

The sentence was not finished.

No one heard the sound that interrupted it. There must have been a faint sound, but it would have been lost in the open air outside. But they all saw Norman Kent's face sud­denly twist and go white, and saw him stagger and fall on one knee.

"Keep away from that window!"

Norman had understood as quickly as anyone, and he got the warning out in an agonised gasp. But the Saint ignored it. He sprang forward, and caught Norman Kent under the arms; and dragged him into shelter as a second bullet splin­tered the window-frame a few inches from their heads.

"They're here!"

Harding was standing recklessly in the open, careless of what his captors might be doing. The Saint rapped out a com­mand to take cover, but Harding took no notice. Roger Conway had to haul him out of the danger zone almost by the scruff of the neck.

Simon had jerked a settee from its place by the wall and run it across three-quarters of the width of the window open­ing; and he lay behind it, looking towards the road, with his guns in his hands. He saw something move behind the hedge, and fired twice at a venture, but he could not tell how much damage he had done.

There was the old Saintly smile back on the Saint's lips, and the old Saintly light back in his eyes. Against Harding, he hadn't really enjoyed himself. Against Teal, if it had been Teal outside, he wouldn't really have enjoyed himself. But it definitely wasn't Teal outside. Neither Chief Inspector Teal nor any of his men would have started blazing away like that with silenced guns and no preliminary parley. There was only one man in the cast who could conceivably behave like that; and against that man the Saint could enjoy himself thoroughly. He couldn't put his whole heart into the job of fighting men like Harding and Teal, men whom in any other circumstances he would have liked to have for his friends. But Marius was quite another matter. The feud with Marius was over some­thing more than an outlook and a technical point of law. It was a personal and vital thing, like a blow in the face and a glove thrown down. ...

So Simon watched, and presently fired again. This time a cry answered him. And one bullet in reply zipped past his ear, and another clipped into the upholstery of the settee an inch from his head; and the Saintly smile became positively beatific.

"This is like war," said the Saint happily.

"It is war!" Harding shot back. "Don't you realise that?"

Roger Conway was kneeling beside Norman Kent, cutting away a trouser-leg stained with a spreading dark stain.

"What do you mean?" he demanded.

Harding stepped back.

"Didn't you understand? You seemed to know so much. . . . But you hadn't a chance to know that. Still, it would have been announced in the lunch editions, and plenty of people knew about it last night. Our ultimatum was delivered at noon to-day, and they've got till noon to-morrow to answer."

"What country? And what's the ultimatum about?"

Harding answered. The Saint was not very surprised. He had not read between the lines of his newspapers so assidu­ously for nothing.

"Of course, it's all nonsense, like anything else that any country ever sent an ultimatum to another about," said Hard­ing. "We've put it off as long as you can, but they've left us no choice. They're asking for trouble, and they're determined to have it. Half the government still can't understand it—they think our friends ought to know better. Just swollen head, they say. That's why everything's been kept so dark. The Govern­ment thought the swelling was bound to pass off naturally. Instead of which, it's been getting worse."

The Saint remembered a phrase from the letter which he had taken from Marius: "Cannot fail this time. . . ."

And he understood that the simple word of a man like Marius, with all the power that he represented standing in support behind the word, might well be enough to sway the decisions of kings and councils.

He said, with his eyes still watching the road: "How many people have a theory to account for the swelling?"

"My chief, and a handful of others," said Harding. "We knew that Marius was in it, and Marius spells big money. But what's the use of telling ordinary people that? They couldn't see it. Besides, there was still a flaw in our theory, and we couldn't fill it up—until the show at Esher on Saturday. Then we knew."

"I figured it out the same way," said the Saint.

"Everything hangs on this," said Harding quietly. "If Marius gets Vargan for them, it means war."

Simon raised one gun, and then lowered it again as his target ducked.

"Why have you told me all this?" he asked.

"Because you ought to be on our side," Harding said steadily. "I don't care what you are. I don't care what you've done. I don't care what you're working for. But Marius is here how, and I know you can't be with Marius. So——"

"Somebody's waving a white flag," said the Saint.

He got to his feet, and Harding came up beside him. Behind the hedge, a man stood up and signalled with a hand­kerchief.

Then Simon saw that the road beyond the hedge was alive with men.

"What would you do here?" he asked.

"See them!" rapped Harding. "Hear what they've got to say. We can still fight afterwards. They will fight! Templar——"

The Saint beckoned, and saw a man rise from his crouched position under the hedge and walk alone up the drive. A giant of a man. ...

"Angel Face himself!" murmured Simon.

He swung round, hands on hips.

"I've heard your argument, Harding," he said. "It's a good one. But I prefer my own. In the circumstances, I'm afraid you'll have to accept it. And I want your answer quickly. The offer I made you is still open. Do you join us for the duration, or have I got to send you out there to shift for yourself? I'd hate to do it, but if you're not for us——"

"That's not the point," said Harding steadfastly. "I was sent here to find Vargan, and I think I've found him. As far as that's concerned, there can't be peace between us. You'll understand that. But for the rest of it ... Beggars can't be choosers. We agree that Marius must not have Vargan, whatever else we disagree about. So, while we have to fight Marius——"

"A truce?"

The youngster shrugged. Then he put out his hand.

"And let's give 'em hell!" he said.

18. How Simon Templar received Marius,

and the Crown Prince remembered a debt

A moment later the Saint was on his knees beside Norman Kent, examining Norman's wound expertly. Norman tried to delay him.

"Pat," whispered Norman; "I left her hiding in your room."

Simon nodded.

"All right. She'll be safe there for a bit. And I'd just as soon have her out of the way while Tiny Tim's beetling around. Let's see what we can do for you first."

He went on with the examination. The entrance was three inches above the knee, and it was much larger than the en­trance of even a large-calibre automatic bullet should have been. There was no exit hole, and Norman let out an involun­tary cry of agony at the Saint's probing.

"That's all, sonny boy," said the Saint; and Norman loos­ened his teeth from his lips.

"Smashed the bone, hasn't it?"

Simon stripped off his coat, and tore off the sleeve of his shirt to improvise a bandage.

"Smashed to bits, Norman, old boy," he said. "The swine are using dum-dums. ... A large whisky, Roger. . . . That'll be a consolation for you, Norman, old warrior."

"It's something," said Norman huskily.

He said nothing else about it, but he understood one thing very clearly.

No man can run very far or very fast with a thighbone splin­tered by an expanding bullet.

Strangely enough, Norman did not care. He drank the whisky they gave him gratefully, and submitted indifferently to the Saint's ministrations. In the pallor of Norman Kent's face was a strange calm.

Simon Templar also understood what that wound meant; but he did not think of it as Norman did.

He knew that Marius was standing in the window, but he did not look up until he had completed the rough dressing with practised hands that were as gentle as a woman's. He wanted to start some hard thinking before he began to bait Marius. Once well under way, the thinking process could con­tinue by itself underneath the inevitable froth of banter and backchat; but the Saint certainly wanted to get a stranglehold on the outstanding features of the situation first. And they were a pretty slimy set of features to have to pin down. What with Patricia on the premises to cramp his style, and Norman Kent crippled, and the British Secret Service, as represented by Captain Gerald Harding, a prisoner inside the fort on a very vague parole, and Chief Inspector Teal combing the district and liable to roll up on the scene at any moment, and Rayt Marius surrounding the bungalow with a young army corps that had already given proof enough that it wasn't accumu­lated in Maidenhead for a Sunday afternoon bun-fight—well, even such an optimistic man as the Saint had to admit that the affair had begun to look distinctly sticky. There had been a time when the Saint was amused to call himself a professional trouble-hunter. He remembered that pleasant bravado now, and wondered if he had ever guessed that his prayers would be so abundantly answered. Verily, he had cast his bread upon the waters and hauled up a chain of steam bakeries. ...

He rose at last to his feet with these meditations simmering down into the impenetrable depths of his mind; and his face had never been milder.

"Good-afternoon, little one," he said softly. "I've been look­ing forward to meeting you again. Life, for the last odd eight­een hours, has seemed very empty without you. But don't let's talk about that."

The giant inclined his head.

"You know me," he said.

"Yes," said the Saint. "I think we've met before. I seem to know your face. Weren't you the stern of the elephant in the circus my dear old grandmother took me to just before I went down with measles? Or were you the whatsit that stuck in the how's-your-father and upset all our drains a couple of years ago?"

Marius shrugged. He was again wearing full morning dress, as he had been when the Saint first met him in Brook Street; but the combination of that costume with this new setting, together with the man's colossal build and hideously rugged face, would have been laughably grotesque if it had not been subtly horrible.

He said: "I have already had some samples of your humour, Templar——"

"On a certain occasion which we all remember," said the Saint gently. "Quite. But we don't charge extra for an encore, so you might as well have your money's worth."

Marius's little eyes took in the others—Roger Conway loung­ing against the bookcase swinging an automatic by the trigger-guard, Norman Kent propped up against the sofa with a glass in his hand, Gerald Harding on the other side of the win­dow with his hands in his pockets and a faint flush on his boyish face.

"I have only just learnt that you are the gentleman who calls himself the Saint," said Marius. "Inspector Teal was indis­creet enough to use a public telephone in the hearing of one of my men. The boxes provided are not very sound-proof. I presume this is your gang?"

"Not 'gang,' " protested the Saint—"not 'gang.' I'm sure saints never go in gangs. But, yes—these are other wearers of the halo. . . .But I'm forgetting. You've never been formally introduced, have you? . . . Meet the boys. . . . On your left, for instance, Captain Acting Saint Gerald Harding, sometime Fellow of Clark's College, canonised for many charitable works, including obtaining a miserly millionaire's signature to a five-figure cheque for charity. The millionaire was quite annoyed when he heard about it. ... Over there, Saint Roger Conway, winner of' the Men's Open Beauty Competition at Noahsville, Ark., in '25, canonised for glorifying the American girl. At least, she told the judge it glorified her. . . . On the floor, Saint Norman Kent, champion beer-swiller at the last Licensed Victuallers' and Allied Trades Centennial Jamboree, canonised for standing free drinks to a number of blind beg­gars on the Feast of Stephen. The beggars, by the way, were not blind until after they'd had the drinks. . . . Oh, and my­self. I'm the Simple Simon who met a pieman coming through the rye. Or words to that effect. I can't help feeling that if I'd been christened Sootlegger I should have met a bootlegger, which would have been much more exciting; but I suppose it's too late to alter that now."

Marius heard out this cataract of nonsense without a flicker of expression. At the end of it he said, patiently: "And Miss Holm?"

"Absent, I'm afraid," said the Saint. "It's my birthday, and she's gone to Woolworth's to buy me a present."

Marius nodded.

"It is not of importance," he said. "You know what I have come for?"

Simon appeared to ponder.

"Let's see. . . . You might have come to tune the piano, only we haven't got a piano. And if we had a mangle you might have come to mend the mangle. No—the only thing I can think of is that you're travelling a line of straw hats and natty neckwear. Sorry, but we're stocked for the season."

Marius dusted his silk hat with a tenderly wielded handker­chief. His face, as always, was a mask.

Simon had to admire the nerve of the man. He still had a long score to settle with Marius, and Marius knew it; but here was Marius dispassionately dusting a silk hat in the very presence of a man who had promised to kill him. It was true that Marius came under a flag of truce, which he would justly ex­pect a man like the Saint to respect; but still Marius gave no sign of recognising that he was in the delicate position of hav­ing to convey an ultimatum to a man who, given the flimsiest rag of excuse, would cheerfully shoot him through the stomach.

"You gain nothing by wasting time," said Marius. "I have come in the hope of saving the lives of some of my men, for some will certainly be killed if we are forced to fight."

"How touching!—as the actress said to the bishop. Is it possible that your conscience is haunted by the memory of the man you killed at Bures, ducky? Or is it just because funerals are so expensive these days?"

Marius shrugged.

"That is my business," he said. "Instead of considering that, you would do better to consider your own position. Every telephone line for ten miles has been cut—that was done as soon as we had definitely located you. Therefore there can be no quicker communication with London than by car. And the local police are not dangerous. Even Inspector Teal is now out of touch with his headquarters, and there is an ambush pre­pared for him into which he cannot help falling. In addition to that, at the nearest cross-roads on either side of this house, I have posted men in police uniforms, who will turn back any car which attempts to come this way, and who will explain away the noise of shooting to any inquisitive persons. It must be over an hour before any help can come to you—and then it can only end in your own arrest. That is, if you are still alive. And you cannot possibly hope to deceive me a second time with the bluff which you employed so successfully last night."

"You're sure it was a bluff?"

"If it had not been a bluff I should not have found you here. Do you really think me so ignorant of official methods as to believe that you could possibly have been released so quickly?"

"And yet," said the Saint thoughtfully, "we might have been put here to bait a police trap—for you!"

Marius smiled. The Saint would never have believed that such a face could smile if he had not seen it smile once before. And it smiled with ghastly urbanity.

"Since Inspector Teal left London," said Marius, "he has never been out of the sight of my agents. Therefore I have good reason to be convinced that he still does not know where you are. Shall we say, Templar, that this time you will have to think of something more tangible than—er—what was the phrase your friends used?—than breadcrumbs and breambait?"

Simon nodded.

"A charming phrase," he murmured.

"So," said Marius, "you may choose between surrendering Vargan or having him taken from you by force."

The Saint smiled.

"Heads you win, tails I lose—what? . . . But suppose the coin falls on its blinkin' edge? Suppose, sweet pet, you got pinched yourself? This isn't Chicago, you know. You can't run little wars of your own all over the English countryside. The farmers might get annoyed and start throwing broccoli at you. I'm not sure what broccoli is, but they might throw it."

Again that ghastly grin flitted across the giant's face.

"You have not understood me. My country requires Vargan and his invention. In order to obtain that, I will sacrifice as many lives as I may be forced to sacrifice; and my men will die here for their country as readily as they would die on any other battlefield."

"Your country!"

The Saint had been lighting a cigarette with a cool and steady hand; and for all that might have been read in the scene by an observer who could not hear the words, they might have been discussing nothing more than the terms of a not-too-friendly golf match—instead of a situation in which the fates of nations were involved. ... At one moment. . . . And then the Saint split the thin crust of calm with those two elec­tric words. The voice that spoke them was no longer the Saint's gently mocking drawl. It was a voice of pure steel and rock and acid. It took those three simple syllables, ground and bonded a hundred knife-edges around them, fenced them about with a thousand stinging needle-points, and spoke them in a breath that might have whipped off the North Pole.

"Your country!"

"That is what I said."

"Has a man like you a country? Is there one acre of God's earth that a man like you loves for no other reason than that it's his home? Have you a loyalty to anything—except the bloated golden spiders whose webs you weave? Are there any people you can call your people—people you wouldn't sacrifice without a qualm to put thirty pieces of silver into your pocket? Do you care for anything in the world but your own greasy god of money, Rayt Marius?"

For the first time Marius's face changed.

"It is my country," he said.

The Saint laughed shortly.

"Tell us any lie but that, Marius," he said. "Because that one won't get by."

"But it is still my country. And the men outside lent to me by my country for this work—"

"Has it occurred to you," said the Saint, "that we also might be prepared to die for our country—and that the certainty of being imprisoned if we were rescued might not influence us at all?"

"I have thought of that."

"And don't you place too great a reliance on our honesty? Is there anything to stop us forgetting the armistice and hold­ing you as a hostage?"

Marius shook his head.

"What, then," he said silkily, "was there to stop my coming here under a white flag to distract your attention while my men occupied the rest of the house from the other side? When the fortune of one's country is at stake one has little time for conventional honesty. A white flag may be honoured on a battlefield, but this is more than a mere battlefield. It is all the battlefields of the war."

Simon was teetering watchfully on his heels, his cigarette canted up between his lips. His hands hung loosely at his sides, but in each of them he held sudden death.

"You'd still be our hostage, loveliness," he said. "And if there's going to be any treachery——"

"My life is nothing," said Marius. "There is a leader out there"—he gestured towards the road—"who would not hesitate to sacrifice me and many others."

"Namely?"

"His Highness——"

Simon Templar drew a deep breath.

"His Highness the Crown Prince Rudolf of——"

"Hell!" said the Saint.

"A short time ago you saved his life," said Marius. "It is for that reason that His Highness has directed me to give you this chance. He also wished me to apologise for wounding you yesterday, although it happened before we knew that you were the Saint."

"Sweetest lamb," said the Saint, "I'll bet you wouldn't have obeyed His Highness if you hadn't needed his men to do your dirty work!"

Marius spread his huge hands.

"That is immaterial. I have obeyed. And I await your decision. You may have one minute to consider it."

Simon sent his cigarette spinning through the window with a reckless flourish.

"You have our decision now," he said.

Marius bowed.

"If you will answer one question," said the Saint.

"What do you want to know?"

"When you kidnapped Vargan, you couldn't take his apparatus with you——"

"I follow your thoughts," said the giant. "You are thinking that even if you surrender Vargan the British experts will still possess the apparatus, which they can copy even if they do not understand it. Let me disillusion you. While some of my men were taking Vargan, others were destroying his apparatus —very effectively. You may be sure that nothing was left which even Sir Roland Hale could make workable. I'm sorry to disappoint you—"

"But you don't disappoint me, Angel Face," said the Saint. "On the contrary, you bring me the best news I've had for a long time. If you weren't so unspeakably repulsive, I believe I'd—I'd fling my arms round your bull neck, Angel Face, dear dewdrop! . . . I'd guessed I could rely on your efficiency, but it's nice to know for certain. ..."

Roger Conway interposed from the other side of the room.

He said: "Look here, Saint, if the Crown Prince is outside, we've only got to tell him the truth about Marius——"

Marius turned.

"What truth?" he inquired suavely.

"Why—the truth about your septic patriotism! Tell him what we know. Tell him how you're just leading him up the garden for your own poisonous ends——"

"And you think he would believe you?" sneered Marius. "You are too childish, Conway! Even you cannot deny that I am doing my best to place Vargan's invention in His High-ness's hands."

The Saint shook his head.

"Angel Face is right, Roger," he said. "The Crown Prince is getting his caviar, and he isn't going to worry why the stur­geon died. No—I've got a much finer bead on the problem than that."

And he faced Marius again.

"It's really truly true, dear one, that Vargan is the key to the whole situation?" he asked softly, persuasively.

"Exactly."

"Vargan is the really truly cream in your coffee?"

The giant twitched his shoulders.

"I do not understand all your idioms. But I think I have made myself plain."

"I was wondering who did it," said Roger sympathetically.

But a new smile was coming to Simon Templar's lips—a mocking, devil-may-care, swashbuckling, Saintly smile. He set his hands on his hips and smiled.

"Then this is our answer," smiled the Saint. "If you want Vargan, you can either come and fetch him or go home and suck jujubes. Take your choice, Angel Face!"

Marius stood still.

"Then His Highness wishes to say that he disclaims all responsibility for the consequences of your foolishness——"

"One minute!"

It was Norman Kent, trying painfully to struggle up on to his sound leg. The Saint was beside him in a moment, with an arm about his shoulders.

"Easy, old Norman!"

Norman smiled faintly.

"I want to stand up, Simon."

And he stood up, leaning on the Saint, and looked across at Marius. Very dark and stern and aloof he was.

And—

"Suppose," said Norman Kent—"suppose we said that we hadn't got Vargan?"

"I should not believe you."

Roger Conway cut in: "Why should we keep him? If we'd only wanted to take him away from you, he'd have been re­turned to the Government before now. You must know that he hasn't been sent back. What use could we have for him?"

"You may have your own reasons. Ransom, perhaps. Your Government should be prepared to pay well for his safety——"

Norman Kent broke in with a clear, short laugh that shat­tered Marius's theory more fatally than any of the words that followed could have done,

"Think again, Marius! You don't understand us yet! . . . We took Vargan away for the sake of the peace of the world and the sparing of millions of good lives. We hoped to persuade him to turn back from the thing he proposed to do. But he was mad, and he would not listen. So this evening, for the peace of the world . . ."

He paused, and passed a hand across his eyes.

Then he drew himself erect, and his dark eyes gazed with­out fear into a great distance, and there was no flinching in the light in his eyes.

His voice came again, clear and strong.

"I shot him like a mad dog," he said.

"You——"

Harding started forward, but Roger Conway was barring his way in an instant.

"For the peace of the world," Norman Kent repeated. "And—for the peace of my two dearest friends. You'll under­stand, Saint. I knew at once that you'd never let Roger or me risk what that shot meant. So I took the law into my own hands. Because Pat loves you, Simon, as I do. I couldn't let her spend the rest of her life with you under the shadow of the gallows. I love her, too, you see. I'm sorry. . . ."

"You killed Vargan?" said Marius incredulously.

Norman nodded. He was quite calm.

And, outside the window, the shadows of the trees were lengthening over the quiet garden.

"I found him writing in a notebook. He'd covered sheets and sheets. I don't know what it was about, or whether there's enough for an expert to work on. I'm not a scientist. But I brought them away to make sure. I'd have burnt them before, but I couldn't find any matches. But I'll burn them now before your eyes; and that'll be the end of it all. Your lighter, Saint——"

He was fumbling in his pocket.

Roger Conway saw Marius's right hand leap to his hip, and whirled round with his automatic levelled at the centre of the giant's chest.

"Not just yet, Marius!" said Roger, through his teeth.

The Saint, when he went to support Norman, had dropped one gun into his coat pocket. Now, with one arm holding Norman, he had had to put his other gun down on the arm of the sofa while he searched for his petrol-lighter.

He had not realised that the grouping of the others had so fallen that Conway could not now cover both Harding and Marius. Just two simple movements had been enough to bring about that cataclysmic rearrangement—when Norman Kent stood up and Marius tried to draw. And Simon hadn't noticed it. He'd confessed that he was as slow as a freight car that day, which may or may not have been true; but the fact remained that for a fraction of a second he'd allowed the razor-edge of his vigilance to be taken off. And he saw his mis­take that fraction of a second too late.

Harding reached the gun on the arm of the sofa in two steps and a lightning dive; and then he had his back to the wall.

"Drop that gun, you! I give you three seconds. One——"

Conway, moving only his head to look round, knew that the youngster could drop him in his tracks before he had time to more than begin to move his automatic. And he had no need to wonder whether the other would carry out his threat. Harding's grim and desperate determination was sufficiently arrested by the mere fact that he had dared to make the gamble that gave him the gun and the strategic advantage at the same time. And Harding's eyes were as set and stern as the eyes of a young man can be.

"Two——"

Suppose Roger chanced his arm? He'd be pipped, for a mil­lion. But would it give Simon time to draw? But Marius was ready to draw, also. . . .

"Three!"

Roger Conway released his gun, even as Harding had had to do not many minutes before; and he had all the sense of bitter humiliation that Harding must have had.

"Kick it over to me."

Conway obeyed; and Harding picked up the gun, and swung two automatics in arcs that included everyone in the room.

"The honour of the British Secret Service!" drawled the Saint, with a mildness that only emphasised the biting sting of his contempt.

"The truce is over," said Harding, dourly. "You'd do the same in my place. Bring me those papers!"

The Saint lowered Norman Kent gently; and Norman rested, half-standing, half-sitting, on the high arm of the settee. And Simon tensed himself to dice the last foolhardy throw.

Then a shadow fell on him; and he looked round and saw that the number of the congregation had been increased by one.

A tall, soldierly figure in grey stood in the opening of the window. A figure utterly immaculate and utterly at ease. . . . And- it is, of course, absurd to say that any accident of breeding makes a man stand out among his fellows; but this man could have been nothing but the man he was.

"Marius," spoke the man in grey, and Marius turned.

"Back, Highness! For God's sake——"

The warning was rapped out in another language, but the man in grey answered in English.

"There is no danger," he said. "I came to see why you had overstayed your time limit."

He walked calmly into the room, with no more than a care­less glance and a lift of his fine eyebrows for Gerald Harding and Gerald Harding's two circling guns.

And then the Saint heard a sound in the hall, beyond the door, which still stood ajar.

He reached the door in a reckless leap, and slammed it. Then he laid hold of the heavy bookcase that stood by the wall, and with a single titanic heave toppled it crashing over to fall like a great bolt across the doorway. An instant later the table from the centre of the room had followed to reinforce the bookcase.

And Simon Templar stood with his back to the pile, breath­ing deeply, with his head thrown back defiantly. He spoke.

"So you're another man of honour—Highness!"

The Prince stroked his moustache with a beautifully mani­cured finger.

"I gave Marius a certain time in which to make my offer," he said. "When that time was exceeded, I could only presume that you had broken the truce and detained him, and I ordered my men to enter the house. They were fortunate enough to capture a lady——"

The Saint went white.

"I say 'fortunate' because she was armed, and might have killed some of them, or at least raised an alarm, if they had not taken her by surprise. However, she has not been harmed. I mention the fact merely to let you see that my intrusion is not so improvident as you might otherwise think. Are you Simon Templar?"

"I am."

The Prince held out his hand.

"I believe I owe you my life. I had hoped for an opportunity of making your acquaintance, but I did not expect that our meeting would be in such unpropitious circumstances. Nevertheless, Marius should have told you that I am not insensitive to the debt I owe you."

Simon stood where he was.

"I saved your life, Prince Rudolf," he answered, in a voice like a whip-lash, "because I had nothing against you. But now I have something against you, and I may take your life for it before the end of the day."

The Prince shrugged delicately.

"At least," he remarked, "while we are discussing that point, you might ask your friend to put away his weapons. They distress me."

Captain Gerald Harding leaned comfortably against the wall, and devoted one of his distressing weapons entirely to the Prince.

"I'm not Templar's friend," he said. "I'm a humble member of the British Secret Service, and I was sent here to get Var­gan. I didn't arrive in time to save Vargan, but I seem to have got here in time to save something nearly as valuable. You're late, Your Highness!"

19. How Simon Templar went to his lady,

and Norman Kent answered the trumpet

For a moment there was an utter silence; and then Marius began to speak rapidly in his own language.

The Prince listened, his eyes narrowing. Apart from that attentive narrowing of the eyes, neither his attitude nor his expression changed at all. The man had an inhumanly sleek superiority to all ordinary emotion.

Simon made no attempt to interrupt Marius's recital. Some­one had to explain the situation; and, since Marius had as­sumed the job, Marius might as well go on with it. The inter­val would give the Saint another welcome breather. And the Saint relaxed against his barricade and took out his ciga­rette-case, and began to tap a cigarette thoughtfully against his teeth.

Then the Prince turned to him, and spoke in his sleek, vel­vety voice.

"So! I begin to understand. This man caught you, but you came to an agreement when you found that you were at least united against me. Is that right?"

"But what a brain Your Highness has!" murmured the Saint.

"And he has ended the armistice in his own way without giving you notice?"

"I'm afraid so. I think he got some sort of stag fever when he saw the papers. Anyway, he forgot the spirit of the Eton Boating Song."

"And you have no influence with him?"

"None."

"But your friend"—the Prince indicated Norman Kent— "has the papers?"

"And I've got the friend," said Harding cheerfully. "So what do you all do about it?"

In that instant he stood absolutely alone, dominating the situation; and they all looked at him. He was young, but he had the spirit, that boy. And the Saint understood that Hard­ing could not have helped breaking his parole, even where an older man might have hesitated.

And then Harding no longer stood alone; for in the next instant Norman Kent had usurped the limelight with a com­pelling movement of his hand that drew every eye.

"I should like to have something to say about this," said Norman Kent.

His voice was always low and measured. Now it was quieter than ever, but every syllable was as sure as a clarion.

"I have the papers," he said, "and Captain Harding has me. Perfectly true. But there is one thing you've all overlooked."

"What is that?"

It was the Prince who spoke; but Norman Kent answered to them all. He took one glance out of the window, at the sun­light and the trees and the green grass and a clump of crimson dahlias splashed against the hedge like a wound, and they saw him smile. And then he answered.

"Nothing is won without sacrifice," he said simply.

He looked across at the Saint.

"Simon," he said, "I want you to trust me. Ever since we came together I've done everything you ordered without ques­tion. We've all followed you, naturally, because you were always our natural leader. But we couldn't help learning something from your leadership. I've heard how you beat Marius in Brook Street last night—by doing the one thing you couldn't possibly do. And I've heard how Roger used the same principle, and helped us to beat Teal with it—by doing the one thing he couldn't possibly do. It's my turn now. I think I must be very clever to-day. I've seen how to apply the principle to this. In my own way. Because now—here—there is something that no one could do. And I can do it. Will you follow me?"

And Norman's dark eyes, with a queer fanatical light burn­ing in them, met the Saint's clear sea-blue eyes. For a second's tense stillness. ...

Then:

"Carry on," said the Saint.

Norman Kent smiled.

"It's easy," he said. "You've all appreciated the situation, haven't you? . . . We have you, Prince, and you, Marius, as hostages; but you have as a counter-hostage a lady who is very dear to all but one of us. That in itself would be a deadlock, even if it were not for Captain Harding and his guns."

"You express it admirably," said the Prince.

"On the other hand, Captain Harding, who for the moment . is in command, is in a very awkward situation. He is by far the weakest party in a three-cornered fight. Whether the fact that you hold a friend of ours as a hostage would weigh with him is open to doubt. Personally, I doubt it very much. He's never met the lady—she's nothing more than a name to him—and he has to do what he believes to be his duty. Moreover, he has already given us an example of the way in which his sense of duty is able to override all other considerations. So that we are in a very difficult predicament. As Englishmen, we are bound to take his part against you. As mere men, we would rather die than do anything to endanger the lady whom you have in your power. These two motives alone would be com­plication enough. But there's a third. As the Saint's friends, who hold to his ideals, we have set ourselves to accomplish something that both you and Captain Harding would do any­thing to prevent."

"You could not have made a more concise summary," said the Prince.

Again Norman Kent smiled.

"So you will agree that the deadlock only exists because we are all trying to win without a sacrifice," he said. "And the answer is—that the situation doesn't admit of a victory with­out sacrifice, though there are plenty of means of surrender without the sacrifice of more than honour. But we dislike surrenders."

He took from his pocket three sheets of paper closely written in a small, neat hand, folded them carefully, and held them out.

"Captain Harding—you may take these."

"Norman! Damn you——"

The Saint was crossing the room. His mouth was set in a hard line, and his eyes were as bleak as an arctic sky. But Norman Kent faced him without fear.