The Saint Overboard

"I'm afraid my enthusiasm ran away with me," said Vogel. "I should never have asked you to show me round at this hour. But I assure you it's been worth it to me—in every way."

He laid the faintest and most innocent emphasis on the last three words.

Simon leaned on the mast, with one arm curled round it, as if it had been a giant's lance. The stub of his old cigarette fizzed into the water.

"It's been no trouble at all," he murmured courteously. "What about one for the road?"

"Many thanks. But I've kept you up too late already."

"You haven't."

"Then I'll leave before I do." Vogel waved a hand to his mar­ine chauffeur. "Ivaloff!" He smiled, and held out his hand. "We'll look out for you, then, at St Peter Port?"

"I'll be there by tea-time, if we have any wind."

The Saint sauntered aft beside his guest. Beyond all doubt, the stars in their courses fought for him. If he could have given vent to his feelings, he would have serenaded them with crazy carols. He thought about the munificent rewards which might suitably be heaped on the inspired head of Orace, when that incompara­ble henchman could be made to reveal the secrets of his wizardry.

His right hand trailed idly along the boom. And suddenly his whole body prickled with an almost hysterical effervescence, as if the two halves of some supernal seidlitz powder had been incon­tinently fused under his belt.

"Goodnight," said Vogel. "And many thanks."

"Au revoir," responded the Saint dreamily.

He watched the other step down into the tender and touch the starter. The seaman cast off; and the speedboat drew away, swung round in a wide arc, and went creaming away up the dark estuary.

Simon stood there until the blaze of its spotlight had faded into a brilliant blur, and then he put his hands on the companion rail and slid down below. First of all he poured himself out a large drink, and proceeded to absorb it with profound delibera­tion. Then he grasped Orace firmly by the front of his shirt and drew him forward.

"You god-damned old son of a walrus," he said, with his voice torn between wrath and laughter. "Men have been shot for less."

"I couldn't think of nothink else, sir, sudding like," said Orace humbly.

"But it makes the ship look so untidy." Orace scratched his head.

"Yessir. But it was a bit untidy ter start wiv. Jremember the mains'l started to tear comin' dahn from St Helier? Well, when yer went orf to-night I thought I might swell do somefink abaht it. I sewed a patch on it while yer was awy, but I 'adn't 'ad time ter furl it agyne when yer came back. So when yer chucked that detective bloke at me——"

"You took him along to the hatch——"

"An" dreckly I sore yer go below, I 'auled 'im aht an' laid 'im on the boom an' folded the mains'l over 'im. I couldn't think of nothink else, sir," said Orace, clinging to his original defence.

Words failed the Saint for a while. And then, with a slow help-less grin dragging at his mouth, he brought up his fist and pushed Orace's chin back.

"Go up and fetch him in again, you old humbug," he said. "And don't play any more tricks like that on me, or I'll wring your blessed neck."

He threw himself down on the settee and began to think again. Murdoch still remained to be dealt with: and the Saint feared that he might not have been made any more amenable to reason by the sock on the jaw which had unfortunately been obliged to interrupt their conversation. Not that Murdoch could have been called an unduly sympathetic listener before that . . . Probably it made very little difference; but the original problem remained. There was also the question arising in his mind of whether Or­ace's manoeuvres with the mainsail had passed unnoticed by the seaman who had stayed in the speedboat—which would be even more difficult to determine. And the Saint's attention was busily divided between these two salient queries when he looked up and discovered that Orace had returned to the saloon and was gaping at him with a peculiarly fish-like expression in his eyes.

Simon Templar regarded the spectacle thoughtfully for one or two palpitating seconds. Orace's rounded eyes goggled back at him with the same trout-like intensity. The fringes of Orace's moustache waved in the draught of his breathing like the ciliated epithelium of a rabbit's oviduct. It became increasingly apparent to the Saint that Orace had something on his mind. "Are you laying an egg?" he inquired at length. "E's—e's gorn, sir!" said Orace weakly.

4

Simon got up slowly. Of all the spectacular things he had done that evening, he was inclined to estimate that restrained and dignified uprising as the supreme achievement. It was a crowning triumph of mind over matter for which he felt justly entitled to take off his hat to himself, afterwards, and when wearing a hat.

"He's gorn, has he?" he repeated.

"Yessir," said Orace hollowly.

Simon moved him aside and went up on to the deck. The dis­ordered mainsail, draped sloppily away from the boom, offered its own pregnant testimony to the truth of Orace's conjecture. Simon strolled round it and prodded it with his toe. There was no deception. The lump that had been Steve Murdoch, which he had felt under his hand as he walked by with Vogel, hadn't sim­ply slipped off its insecure perch and buried itself under the folds of canvas. Murdoch had taken it on the hoof.

" 'E must 've woke up while yer was talkin' to me an' 'opped overboard," said Orace gloomily.

The Saint nodded. He scanned the surrounding circle of black shining water, his hands in his pockets, listening with abstracted concentration. He could hear dance music still coming from one of the casinos, a waif of melody riding over the liquid under­tones of the harbour; that was all. There was no sight or sound to tell him where Murdoch had gone.

"You have the most penetrating inspirations, Orace," he mur­mured admiringly. "I suppose that's what must have happened. But we shan't get him back. It's nearly low tide, and he's had time to reach the shore by now. I hope he catches his death of cold."

He smoked his cigarette down with remarkable serenity, while Orace fidgeted uncomfortably round him. Certainly the problem of what to do with Steve Murdoch was effectively disposed of. The problem of what Steve Murdoch would now be doing with himself took its place, and the question marks round the problem were even more complicated and more disturbing. But the doubt of how much Kurt Vogel knew stayed where it was—intensified, perhaps, by the other complication.

"Do you think anyone saw you parking our friend up here?" he asked.

Orace sucked his teeth.

"I dunno, sir. I brought 'im aht soon's I sore yer go in an' lugged 'im along on me stummick. It didn't take arf a tick to lay 'im aht on the boom an' chuck the sile over 'im, an' the other bloke was lightin' 'is pipe an' lookin' the other way." Orace frowned puzzledly. "Yer don't think them thunderin' barstids came back an' took 'im orf, do yer?"

"No, I don't think that. I watched them most of the way home, and they wouldn't have had time to get back here and do it. If they saw you, they may come back later. Or something. The point is—were you seen?"

Simon's brow creased over the riddle. If the seaman had ob­served Orace's manoeuvres, he might have been clever enough to give no sign. He would have told Vogel on their way back. After which the sunshine would have come back into Vogel's ugly life, Simon reflected malevolently. And then ...

Vogel would know that the Saint didn't know he knew. And the Saint wouldn't know whether Vogel knew, or whether Vogel was banking on the Saint knowing that Vogel didn't know he knew he knew. And Vogel would still have to wonder whether the Saint knew he knew he knew he didn't know. Or not. It was all somewhat involved. But the outstanding conclusion seemed to be that the Saint could still go to St Peter Port with the assur­ance that Vogel wouldn't know definitely whether the Saint knew he knew, and Vogel could issue walk-into-my-parlour in­vitations with the certainty that the Saint couldn't refuse them without admitting that he knew Vogel knew he knew Vogel knew. Or vice versa. Simon felt his head beginning to ache, and decided to give it a rest.

"We'd better sleep on it," he said.

He left Orace slapping down the mainsail into a neat roll with a condensed viciousness which suggested that Orace's thoughts were concerned with the way he would have liked to manhandle Murdoch if that unfortunate warrior had been available for manhandling, and went below. As he got into his pyjamas he realised that there was at least one certainty about Murdoch's future movements, which was that he would try to reach Loretta Page either that night or early in the morning with his story. He would be able to do it, too. There might be many places on the continent of Europe where anyone clothed only in a pair of trousers couldn't hope to get far without being arrested, but Dinard in the summer was not one of them; and presumably the man had parked his luggage somewhere before he set out on his pig-headed expedition. The Saint only hoped that their encounter that afternoon had taught Murdoch the necessity of making his approach with a discreet eye for possible watchers, but he was inclined to doubt it.

He was awake at eight, a few moments before Grace brought in his orange juice; and by half-past nine he was dressed and breakfasted.

"Have everything ready to sail as soon as I get back," he called into the galley, where Orace was washing up.

He went out on deck, and as he stepped up into the brighten­ing sunlight, he glanced automatically up-river to where the Falkenberg lay at anchor. Something about the ship caught his eye; and after leisurely picking up a towel, as if that was all he had come out for, he went back to the saloon and searched for his field-glasses.

His eyesight had served Mm well. There was a man sitting in the shade aft of the deckhouse with a pair of binoculars on his knee, and even while the Saint studied him he raised the glasses and seemed to be peering straight through the porthole from which the Saint was looking out.

Simon drew back, with the chips of sapphire hardening in his blue eyes. His first thought was that he was now out of the doubtful class into the privileged circle of known menaces; but then he realised that this intense interest in his morning activi­ties need only be a part of Vogel's already proven thoroughness. But he also realised that if he set off hurriedly for the shore, the suspicion which already centred on him would rise to boiling point; and if somebody set off quickly to cover him at the Hotel de la Mer—that would be that.

The Saint lighted a cigarette and moved restlessly round the cabin. Something had to be done. Somehow he had to reach Lo­retta, tell her—what? That she was suspected? She knew that. That Murdoch was suspected ? She might guess it. That she must not take that voyage with Vogel? She would go anyway. Simon's fist struck impatiently into the palm of his hand. It didn't mat­ter. He had to reach her—even if the entire crew of the Falk­enberg was lined up on the deck with binoculars trained on the Corsair, arid even if the Hotel de la Mer was surrounded by a cordon of their watchers.

With a sudden decision he opened the door of the galley again.

"Never mind the washing up, Orace," he said. "We're sailing now."

Orace came out without comment, wiping his hands on the legs of his trousers. While Simon started the auxiliary, he swung out the davits and brought the dinghy up under the falls. While the engine was warming up, the Saint helped him to haul up the dinghy, and then sent him forward at once to get up the anchor.

It was a quarter to ten when the nose of the Corsair turned down the estuary and began to push up the ripples towards the sea.

"Let it hang," said the Saint, when Orace was still working at the anchor. "We'll want it again in a minute."

Orace looked at him for a moment, and then straightened up and came aft, lowering himself into the cockpit.

"Get ready to drop the dinghy again, and swing her out as soon as we're round the point," said the Saint.

He turned and and gazed back at the Falkenberg. There was a midget figure standing up on her deck which might have been Kurt Vogel. Simon waved his arm, and the speck waved back. Then the Saint turned to the chart and concentrated on the tricky shoals on either side of the main channel. He brought the Corsair round the Pointe du Moulinet as close as he dared, and yelled to Orace to get up into the bows. Then he brought the control lever back into reverse.

"Let go!"

The anchor splashed down into the shallow water and Simon left the wheel and sprang to the dinghy. With Orace helping him, it was lowered in a moment; and Simon dropped between the thwarts and reached for the oars. It was quicker than fitting the outboard, for a short pull like that; but the boat seemed to weigh a ton, and his shirt was already hot with sweat when the last fierce heave on the oars sent the dinghy grinding up on to the sands of the Plage de l'Ecluse. He jumped out and dragged it well up on the beach, and made his way quickly between the early sunbathers to the Digue.

It was five-past ten when he climbed up on to the pavement, and there was an uneasy emptiness moving vaguely about under his lower ribs. That watcher on the Falkenberg had made a difference of half an hour—half an hour in which, otherwise, he could have done all that he wanted to do. He realised that he had been incredibly careless not to have allowed for any obsta­cles such as the one which had delayed him, and it dawned on him that he only had Vogel's word for it that the Falkenberg would not sail before eleven. Loretta might be already on board, and they might be already preparing to follow him out to sea.

And then, straight in front of him, as if it had materialised out of empty air, he saw the square dour visage of Steve Murdoch coming towards him. It brought him back to the urgent practical present with a jar that checked him in his stride; but Murdoch came on without a pause.

"Not recognising me to-day, Saint?" Murdoch's grim harsh voice grated into his ears with a smug challenge that flexed the muscles of the Saint's wrists.

Simon looked him up and down. He was wearing a suit of his own clothes again, and every inch of him up to his glittering eyes told the story of what he had done in the intervening hours.

"I've only got one thing to say to you," said the Saint coldly. "And I can't say it here."

"That cramps your style, I bet. You talk pretty well with your fists, Saint. But you can't have it your own way all the time. Where you goin' now?"

"That's my business."

The other nodded—a curt jerk of his head that left his jaw set in a more unbroken square than it had been before.

"I bet it is. But it's my business too. Thought you'd get up early and pick up cards with Loretta again, did you? Well, you weren't early enough."

"No?"

"No. Take your eyes off my chin, Saint—it's ready for you this morning. Look at that gendarme down the road instead. Gazing in a shop window an' not takin' any notice of us now, ain't he? You're all right. But this ain't your boat now. You try to get tough with me again and he'll look at us quick enough. And when he comes up here, I'll have something to tell him about what you tried to do last night." Murdoch's own fists were quietly clubbed at his sides; and he was on his toes. There was vengeful unfriendliness and the bitter memory of another occa­sion gleaming out of his small unblinking eyes. "You turn round and go back the way you came from, Saint, unless you want to sit in a French precinct house and wait while they fetch over your dossier from Scotland Yard. And don't go near St Peter Port unless you want the same thing again. I said I was goin' to put you out, and you're out!"

Simon took a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and tapped a smoke thoughtfully on the edge of the packet. He put the ciga­rette in his mouth and slipped the package into the side pocket of his coat.

"It's too bad you feel that way about it, Steve," he said slowly, and his right hand jolted forward from his side like a piston.

For the second time in that young day Steve Murdoch felt the impact of the Saint's fist. And once again he never saw it com­ing. The blow only travelled about six inches, and it covered the distance so swiftly that even a man who had been watching them closely might not have seen it. It leapt straight from the edge of the Saint's side pocket to Murdoch's solar plexus, with the power of a pile-driver behind it; and Murdoch's face went grey as he doubled up.

Simon caught him and lowered him tenderly to the ground. By the time the first interested spectator had formed the nucleus of a crowd, the Saint was fanning Murdoch with his handkerchief and feeling for his heart with every symptom of alarm. By the time the shop-gazing gendarme had joined the gathering, it was generally agreed among the spectators that the Breton sun must have been at least a contributory cause to Murdoch's sudden collapse. Somebody spoke about an ambulance. Somebody else thought he could improve on the system of first aid which was being practised; and Simon handed the case over to him and faded quietly through the swelling congregation.

He moved on towards the Hotel de la Mer, as quickly as he dared, but with anxiety tearing ahead of his footsteps. That chance encounter—if it was a chance encounter—had wasted more of his precious and dwindling margin of time.

And then he stopped again, and plunged down in a shop door­way to tie up an imaginary shoelace. He had seen Kurt Vogel, smooth and immaculate in a white suit and a white-topped cap. turning into the entrance of the hotel. He was too late. And something inside him turned cold as he realised that there was nothing more that he could do about it—nothing that would not risk making Loretta's danger ten times greater by linking her with him. Murdoch had won after all, and Loretta would have to make the voyage unwarned.

V. HOW SIMON TEMPLAR WALKED IN A GARDEN,

AND ORACE ALSO HAD HIS TURN

IT was half-past four when the Corsair came skimming up over the blue swell past St Martin's Point, with her sails trimmed to coax the last ounce of power from the mild south-westerly breeze which had held steadily on her quarter all the way from the Pierres des Portes. In those five and a half hours since they had cleared the rocks and shoals that fringe the Côtes du Nôrd, Simon Templar had never taken his hands from the wheel: his eyes had been reduced to emotionless chips of blue stone, me­chanical units of co-operation with his hands, ceaselessly watch-ing the curves of the canvas overhead for the first hint of a flut­ter that would signify a single breath of the wind going by un­used. During those hours he almost surrendered his loyalty to the artistic grace of sail, and yearned for the drumming engines of the Falkenberg, which had overtaken them in the first hour and left a white trail of foam hissing away to the horizon.

He hardly knew himself what was in his mind. With all the gallant thrust of the Corsair through the green seas under him, he was as helpless as if he had been marooned on an iceberg at the South Pole. Everything that might be meant to happen on the Falkenberg could still happen while he was out of reach. Vogel could say "She decided not to come," or "There was an accident"; with all the crew of the Falkenberg partnering in the racket, it would be almost impossible to prove.

The Saint stared at the slowly rising coastline with a darken­ing of satirical self-mockery in his gaze. Did he want proof? There had been many days when he was his own judge and jury: it was quicker, and it left fewer loopholes. And yet ...

It wasn't quite so simple as that. Revenge was an unthinkable triviality, a remote shadow of tragedy that cut grim lines be­tween his lowered brows. More than any revenge he wanted to see Loretta again, to see the untiring mischief in her grey eyes and hear the smiling huskiness of her voice, to feel the touch of her hand again, or ... More than any boodle that might lie at the end of the adventure. . . . Why? He didn't know. Something had happened to him in the few hours that he had known her—something, he realised with a twist of devastating candour, that had happened more than once in his life before, and might well happen again.

The breeze slackened as they drew up the channel, and he started the auxiliary. As they chugged past the sombre ugliness of Castle Cornet and rounded the point of the Castle Breakwater, he had a glimpse of the white aero-foil lines of the Falk­enberg already lying snug within the harbour, and felt an odd indefinable pressure inside his chest.

He sat side-saddle on the edge of the cockpit and lighted a cigarette while Orace finished the work of tidying up. The Falk­enberg had probably been at her berth for three hours by then, and apart from a jerseyed seaman who was lethargically washing off the remains of salt spray from her varnish, and who had scarcely looked at the Corsair as she came past, there was noth­ing to be observed on board. Most likely Vogel and his party were on shore; but Loretta ... He shrugged, with the steel brightening in his eyes. Presently he would know—many an­swers.

"Wot nex', sir?"

Orace stood beside him, as stoical as a whiskered gargoyle; and the Saint moved his cigarette in the faintest gesture of direc­tion.

"You watch that boat. Don't let them know you're doing it —you'd better go below and fix yourself behind one of the port­holes most of the time. But watch it. If a girl comes off it, or a box or a bundle or anything that might contain a girl, you get on your way and stick to her like a fly-paper. Otherwise—you stay watching that ship till I come back or your moustache grows down to your knees. Got it?"

"Yessir."

Orace went below, unquestioningly, to his vigil; and the Saint stood up and settled his belt. There was action and contact, still, to take his mind away from things on which it did not wish to dwell: he felt a kind of tense elation at the knowledge that the fight was on, one way or the other.

He went ashore with a spring in his step, and a gun in his pocket that helped him to a smile of dry self-derision when he remembered it. It seemed a ridiculously melodramatic precaution in that peaceful port, with the blue afternoon sky arching over the unrippled harbour and the gay colour-splashes of idle holi­day-makers promenading on the breakwaters; but he couldn't laugh himself out of it. Before the end of the adventure he was to know how wise and necessary it was.

The cross-Channel steamer from Weymouth was standing out on the continuation of her voyage to Jersey, and Simon threaded his way to the New Jetty through the stream of disembarked passengers and spectators, and eventually secured a porter. In­quiries were made. Yes, the steamer had landed some cargo con­signed to him. Simon gazed with grim satisfaction at the two new and innocent-looking trunks labelled with his name, and spread a ten-shilling note into the porter's hand.

"Will you get 'em to that boat over there? The Corsair.

There's a man on board to take delivery. And don't mistake him for a walrus and try to harpoon him, because he's touchy about that."

He went back down the pier to the esplanade, fitting a fresh cigarette into his mouth as he went. Those two trunks which he had collected and sent on equipped him for any submarine emer­gencies, and the promptness of their arrival attested the fact that Roger Conway's long retirement in the bonds of respectable if not holy matrimony had dulled none of his old gifts as the perfect lieutenant. There remained the matter of Peter Quentin's contribution; and the Saint moved on to the post office and found it already waiting for him, in the shape of a telegram:

Latitude fortynine fortyone fiftysix north longitude two twentythree fortyfive west Roger and I will be at the Royal before you are others will catch first airplane when you give the word also Hoppy wants to know why he was left out if you've already made a corner in the heroine we are going home I have decided to charge you with the cost of this wire so have much pleasure in signing myself comma at your expense comma yours till Hitler dedicates a synagogue dash

PETER

Simon tucked the sheet away in his pocket, and the first wholly spontaneous smile of that day relaxed the iron set of his mouth as he ranged out into the street again. If he had been asked to offer odds on the tone of that telegram before he opened it, he would have laid a thousand to one to any takers that he could have made an accurate forecast; and at that moment he was very glad to have been right. It was a tribute to the spell which still bound the crew of hell-bent buccaneers which he had once commanded, a token of the spirit of their old brother­hood which no passage of time or outside associations could alter, which sent him on his way to the Royal Hotel with a quickened stride and a sudden feeling of invincible faith.

He found them in the bar, entertaining a couple of damsels in beach pyjamas who could be seen at a glance to be endowed with that certain something which proved that Peter and Roger had kept their speed and initiative unimpaired in more directions than one. Beyond the first casual inspection with which any newcomer would have been greeted, they took no notice of him; but as he approached the counter, Roger Conway decided that an­other round of drinks was due, and came up beside him.

"Four sherries, please," he said; and as the barmaid set up the glasses, he added: "And by the way—before I forget—would you get a bottle of Scotch and a siphon sent up to my room some time this evening? Number fifteen."

Simon took a pull at the beer with which he had been served, and compared his watch with the clock.

"Is that clock right?" he inquired, and the barmaid looked up at it.

"Yes, I think so."

The Saint nodded, pretending to make an adjustment on his wrist.

"That's good—I've got an appointment at seven, and I thought I had half an hour to wait."

He opened a packet of cigarettes while Roger teetered back to his party with the four glasses of sherry adroitly distributed between his fingers, and soon afterwards asked for a lavatory. He went out, leaving a freshly ordered glass of beer untouched on the bar; and the man who had taken the place next to him, who had been specifically warned against the dangers of letting his attentions become too conspicuous stood and gazed at that reas­suring item of still life for a considerable time before being trou­bled with the first doubts of bis own wisdom. And long before those qualms became really pressing, the Saint was reclining gracefully on Roger Conway's bed, blowing smoke-rings at the ceiling and waiting for the others to keep the appointment.

They came punctually at seven; and, having closed and locked the door, eyed him solemnly.

"He looks debauched," Peter said at length.

"And sickly," agreed Roger.

"Too many hectic moments with the heroine," theorised Peter.

"Do you think," suggested Roger, "that if we both jumped on him together——"

They jumped, and there was a brief but hilarious tussle. At the end of which:

"Do your nurses know you're out?" Simon demanded sternly. "And who told you two clowns to start chasing innocent girls to their doom before you've hardly unpacked? Presently I shall want you in a hurry for some real work, and you'll be prancing over the hillsides, picking daisies and sticking primroses in your hair—— Did you speak, Peter?"

"How the hell could he speak," gasped Roger, "while you're grinding your knee into his neck? You big bully . . . Ouch! That's my arm you're breaking."

The Saint picked himself off their panting bodies, sorted the smouldering remains of his cigarette out of the bedclothes, and lighted another.

"You're out of training," he remarked. "I can see that I've only just thought of you in time to save you from being put in a vase."

"I don't know whether we want to be thought of," said Peter, massaging his torso tenderly. "You always get so physical when you're thinking."

"It only means he's got into another mess and wants us to get him out of it," said Roger. "Or have you found a million pounds and are you looking for some deserving orphans?"

Simon grinned at them affectionately, and threw himself into a chair.

"Well, as a matter of fact there may be several millions in it," he answered.

There was a quiet dominance in his voice which carried them back to other times in their lives when the fun and horseplay had been just as easily set aside for the other things that had bound them together; and they sorted themselves out just as soberly and sat down, Roger on the bed and Peter in the other chair.

"Tell us," said Roger.

Simon told them.

2

"So that's the story. Now . . ."

He sat up and looked at them through a haze of smoke, in one of those supreme pauses when he knew most clearly that he would not, could not, have changed his life for any other. It was like old times. It was like coming home. It was the freebooter coming back to the outlaw camp-fire where he belonged. He saw their faces across the room, Peter's rugged young-pugilist vital­ity, Roger's lean and rather grim intentness; and under the tur­bulent thoughts that were clouding the background of his mind he knew an enduring and inexplicable contentment.

"As I see it, if all the evidence that's been collected since Ingerbeck's took on the case was worked up, there might be enough of it to put Vogel away. But that's not good enough for the underwriters, and it isn't good enough for Ingerbeck's. The underwriters can't show any dividends on gloating over Vogel sitting in prison for a few years. They want to recover some of the money they've lost on claims since he went into business. And Ingerbeck's want their commission on the same. And we want——"

"Both," said Peter Quentin bluntly.

The Saint gazed at him thoughtfully for a moment and did not answer directly. Presently he said: "The argument's fairly simple, isn't it? Boodle of that kind isn't exactly ready money. You can't take a sack of uncut diamonds or half a ton of bar gold into the nearest pawnshop and ask 'em how much they'll give you on it. It takes time and organisation to get rid of it. And it isn't so easy to cart around with you while your organisation's functioning—particularly the gold. You have to park it some­where. And for similar reasons you can't use the ordinary safe deposit or keep it in a sock."

Roger nodded.

"Meaning if we could find this parking-place——"

The Saint spread out his hands.

"Find it, or find out where it is. Join Vogel's crew and get the key. Follow him when he goes there to fetch some of the boodle out, or put some more in. Or something . . ." He smiled, and reached for his glass. "Anyway, you get the general idea."

They had got the general idea; and for a minute or two they digested it in efficient silence. The magnitude of the situation which had been unfolded to them provoked none of the conventional explosions of incredulity or excitement: it was only on the same plane with what they had come to expect from the shame­less leader who sat there studying them with the old mocking light of irresistible daredevilry on his dark reckless face. And it is doubtful whether the morality of their attitude ever troubled them at all.

"That seems quite clear," Peter said at last. "Except for the beautiful heroine."

"She's only trying to get at Vogel from his soft side—if he has one. That's why she had to make that trip to-day. I ... wasn't in time to stop it. Don't know whether I could have stopped it anyway, but I might have tried. If she hasn't arrived here safely . . ." He left the thought in the air; but for an instant they saw a cold flame of steel in his eyes. And then there was only the glimmer of the scapegrace smile still on his lips. "But that's my own party," he said.

"It looks like it," Peter said gloomily. "I might have known we couldn't afford to give you a start like this. If you're staking a claim on the heroine, I think I shall go home."

"Is it a claim?" asked Roger seriously.

Simon drew the last smoke of his cigarette deep into his lungs, and shed the butt into an ashtray.

"I don't know," he said.

He stood up abruptly and prowled over to the window, almost unconsciously triangulating its exact position in the exterior geog­raphy of the hotel, in case he should ever wish to find it with­out using the ordinary entrances. Automatically his mind put aside Roger's question, and went working on along the sternly practical lines for which he had convened the meeting.

"Now—communications. We can't have a lot of these reun­ions. I had to ditch a shadow to make this one; and yesterday I did the same in Dinard. I think I was pretty smooth both times, but if I do it much more it'll stop looking so accidental. There's just a thin chance that Birdie is still wondering how smooth I am, and it's just possible I may be able to keep him guessing for another twenty-four hours; which might make a lot of difference. So we'll go back to splendid isolation for a while. Orace and I will get in touch with you here—one or the other of you must look in every hour, in case there's a message. If we can't send a message, we'll put a bucket on the deck of the Corsair, which means you look out for signals. Remember the old card code? We'll put the cards in one of the portholes. Those are general orders."

"Anything more particular?"

"Only for myself, at present. To-morrow they're going out to try Yule's new bathystol—and I've got an invitation."

Peter sat up with a jerk.

"You're not going?"

"Of course I am. Any normal and innocent bloke would jump at the chance, and until there's any evidence to the contrary I've got to work on the assumption that I'm still supposed to be a normal and innocent bloke. I've got to go. Besides, I might find out something."

"All about the After Life, for instance," said Peter.

The Saint shrugged.

"That's all in the kitty. But if it's coming to me, it'll come anyhow, whether I go or not. And if it happens to-morrow . . ." The Saintly smile was gay and unclouded as he buttoned his coat —"I looks to you gents to do your stuff."

Roger pulled himself off the bed.

"Okay, Horatius. Then for the time being we're off duty."

"Yes. Except for general communications. I just wanted to give you the lie of the land. And you've got it. So you can go back to your own heroines, if they haven't found something better by this time; and don't forget your powder-puffs."

He shifted nimbly through the door before the other two could prepare a suitable retaliation, and found his way back to the bar. His glass of beer was still on the counter; and the sleuth who had been watching it, who had been mopping his brow feverishly and running round in small agitated circles for some time past appeared to suffer a violent heart attack which called for a large dose of whisky to restore his shattered nerves.

Simon lowered his drink at leisure. It went down to join a deep and pervading glow that had come into being inside him, in curious contrast to an outward sensation of dry cold. That brief interview with Peter and Roger, the knowledge that they were there to find trouble with him as they had found it before, had given a solid foundation to a courage which had been sustained until then by sheer nervous energy. And yet, as the feeling of cold separateness in his limbs was there to testify, their presence had not altered the problem of Loretta, or made her safe; and a part of him remained utterly detached and immune from the intoxicating scent of battle as he set out to find her.

To find her ... if she was to be found. But he forced that fear ruthlessly out of his head. She would be found—he was becoming as imaginative as an overwrought boy. If Vogel had taken the risk of letting her sail on the Falkenberg at all, he must be interested; and if he was interested, there would be no point in murder until the interest had been satisfied. Vogel must be interested—the Saint had not watched that scene on the Falk­enberg's deck last night with his eyes shut. And Vogel's mathe­matically dehumanised brain would work like that. To play with the attractive toy, guarding himself against its revealed dangers, until all its amusing resources had been explored, before he broke it ... Surely, the Saint told himself with relentless insistence, Loretta would be found. The thing that troubled him most deeply was that he should be so afraid . . .

And he found her. As he walked by the harbour, looking over the paling blue of the water at the inscrutable curves of the Falkenberg as if his eyes were trying to pierce through her hull and superstructure to see what was left for him on board, he became aware of three figures walking towards him; and some­thing made him turn. He saw the tall gaunt aquilinity of Kurt Vogel, the gross bulk of Arnheim, and another shape which was like neither of them, which suddenly melted the ice that had been creeping through his veins and turned the warmth in him to fire.

"Good evening," said Vogel.

3

Simon Templar nodded with matter-of-faet cheeriness. And he wanted to shout and dance.

"I was just going to look you up," he said.

"And we were wondering where you were. We inquired on the Corsair, but your man told us you'd gone ashore. You had a good crossing?"

"Perfect."

"We were thinking of dining on shore, for a change. By the way, I must introduce you." Vogel turned to the others. "This is my friend Mr Tombs—Miss Page ..."

Simon took her hand. For the first time in that encounter he dared to look her full in the face, and smile. But even that could only be for the brief conventional moment.

". . . and Mr Arnheim."

"How do you do?"

There was a dark swollen bruise under Arnheim's fleshy chin, and the Saint estimated its painfulness with invisible satisfaction as he shook hands.

"Of course—you helped us to try and catch our robber, didn't you, Mr Tombs?"

"I don't think I did very much to help you," said the Saint deprecatingly.

"But you were very patient with our disturbing attempts," said Vogel genially. "We couldn't have met more fortunately—in every way. And now, naturally, you'll join us for dinner?"

The great hook of his nose curved at the Saint like a poised scimitar, the heavy black brows arched over it with the merest hint of challenge.

"I'd like to," said the Saint easily. And as they started to stroll on: "What about the Professor?"

"He refuses to be tempted. He will be working on the bathy­stol for half the night—you couldn't drag him away from it on the eve of a descent."

They had dinner at the Old Government House. To Simon Templar the evening became fantastic, almost frighteningly un­real. Not once did he catch Vogel or Arnheim watching him, not once did he catch the subtle edge of an innuendo thrust in to prick a guilty ear; and yet he knew, by pure reason, that they were watching. The brand of his fist on Arnheim's chin caught his eyes every time they turned that way. Did Arnheim guess— did he even know?—whose knuckles had hung that pocket earth­quake on his jaw? Did Vogel know? There was no answer to be read in the smooth colourless face or the black unwinking eyes. What did they know of Loretta, and what were their plans for her? If Murdoch had been identified while they had him on the Falkenberg she must have been condemned already; and it seemed too much to hope that Murdoch had not been seen by the sleuth who had observed his blatant arrival at the Hotel de la Mer the day before. How much had Loretta suffered al­ready? ... He could only guess at the answers.

It was an uncanny feeling to be eating and drinking on terms of almost saccharine cordiality with two men who might even then be plotting his funeral—and whose own funerals he himself would plot without compunction in certain circumstances—with every warning of antagonism utterly suppressed on both sides. If he had not had last night's experience of Vogel's methods to acclimatise him, he would have suffered the same sensation of nightmare futility again, doubled in intensity because Loretta was now with them; but his nerves had been through as much of that cat-and-mouse ordeal as they were capable of tolerating, and the normal reaction was setting in. Somehow he knew that that game could not be played much longer, and when the show­down came he would have his compensation.

But meanwhile Loretta was there, beside him—and he could give her no more than the polite interest called for by their re­cent introduction . . . when every desire in his mind was taking both her hands and laughing breathlessly with her and talking the quick sparkling nonsense which was the measure of their predestined understanding. He saw the shifting gold in her hair and the softness of her lips when she spoke, and was tormented with a hunger that was harder to fight than all Vogel's inhuman patience.

And then he was dancing with her.

They had discovered that there was a dance at the hotel, and after the coffee and liqueurs they had gone into the ballroom. Even so, he had waited while first Vogel and then Arnheim danced, before he had looked at her and stood up as if only to discharge his duty to a fellow-guest.

But he had her alone. He had her hand in his, and his arm round her; and they were moving quietly in their own world, like one person, to music that neither of them heard.

"It's a long time since I've seen you-all, Mary Jane," he said.

"Wasn't it before I put my hair up?"

"I think it was the Sunday School treat when you ate too many cream buns and had to give them up again in the rhodo­dendrons."

"You would remember that. And now you're such a big man, doing such big and wonderful things. I'm so proud of you, El­mer."

"George," Simon corrected her, "is the name. By the way, did I ever give you the inside dope on that dragon business? This dragon, which was closely related to a female poet, a dowager duchess, and a prominent social reformer and purity hound, was actually a most mild and charitable beast, except when it felt that the morals of the community were being endangered. On those occasions it would become quite transformed, turning red in the face and breathing smoke and fire and uttering ferocious gobbling sounds like those of a turkey which has been wished a merry Christmas. The misguided inhabitants of the country, however, mistaking these symptoms for those of sadistic dyspep­sia, endeavoured to appease the animal—whose name, by the way, was Angelica—by selecting their fairest damsels and leaving them as sacrifices, stripped naked and tied to trees and shrub­bery in its path. Angelica, on the other hand, mistook these friendly offerings for further evidence of the depravity which had overtaken her friends, and was only raised to higher trans­ports of indignation and gobbling. The misunderstanding was rapidly denuding the country in every sense, and in fact the dearth of beautiful damsels was become so acute that certain citizens were advocating that their grandmothers should be used instead, in the hope that Angelica might be moved by intellectual endowments where mere physical charm had only aggravated the gobbling, when I came along and . . . Why haven't I told you how beautiful you are, Loretta?"

"Because you haven't noticed?"

"Because it's too true, I think. And so many other ridiculous things have been happening all the time. And I've been so stu­pid . . . They'd have tied you to a tree for Angelica if they'd seen you, Loretta."

"With nothing on?"

"And everyone would have been asking 'Where's George?' He was a Saint, too."

There was a breath of cool night air on their faces; and as if there had been no voluntary movement they were outside. There must have been a window or a door, some steps perhaps, some mundane path by which they had walked out of the ballroom into the infinite evening; but it was as if mortar and stone and wood had melted away like shadows to leave them tinder the stars. Their feet moved on a soft carpet of grass, and the music whispered behind them.

Presently she sat down, and he sat behind her. He still kept her hand.

"Well," he said.

She smiled slowly.

"Well?"

"Apparently it wasn't death," he said. "So I suppose it must have been dishonour."

"It might be both."

He counted over her fingers and laid them against his cheek.

"You feel alive. You sound alive. Or are we both ghosts? We could go and haunt somebody."

"You knew something, Simon. When we met on the waterfront——"

"Was it as obvious as that?"

"No. I just felt it."

"So did I. My heart went pit-a-pat. Then it went pat-a-pit. Then it did a back somersault and broke its bloody neck. It still feels cracked."

Her other hand covered his mouth.

"Please. Simon. Every minute we stay here is dangerous. They may have missed us already. They may be talking. Tell me what you knew. What happened last night?"

"They caught Steve—slugged him and hauled him out of his canoe. I went back to the Falkenberg and slugged Otto and brought home the blue-eyed boy. Otto never saw me, but I don't know how many other people had inspected the boy friend be­fore I butted in. If the same guy who heard him asking for you at the Hotel de la Mer yesterday had seen him, I knew you were in the book."

"What about you?"

"Vogel came over shortly afterwards and put on a great show of being shown over the Corsair, while I changed my nappies and did the honours. But he didn't find Steve. I'm still technically anonymous; Steve got away."

"Who from?"

"From me. In between Vogel going home and me congratulat­ing Orace on the hiding-place, Steve saw the dawn and set a course for it. I saw him again in the morning, when I was trying to reach you before Vogel did and warn you what might be wait­ing—as a matter of fact, he held me up just long enough to let Vogel get in first. I missed seeing you by about thirty seconds. Where Steve is now I don't know, but if you bet your shirt he'll bob up here to-morrow you won't run much risk of being left uncovered." The Saint turned his face to her, and she saw the dim light shift on his eyes. "He saw you this morning, didn't he?"

"Yes."

"Telling you I tried to kidnap him."

"Yes."

"And speaking as follows: 'This guy Templar is just a tough crook from Toughville, Crook County, and if you think he's turned Horatio Alger because you gave him a pretty smile you're crazy.' "

"Were you listening?"

He shook his head.

"I'm a thought-reader. Besides, I did try to kidnap him, after a fashion. Anyway I tried to detain him. Obviously. He may be the hell of a good detective in some ways, but he doesn't fit into the game we're playing here. He'd done his best to break it up twice in one day, and I thought it'd be a good thing to keep him quiet for a bit. I still do."

"And the rest?" she said.

"What do you think?"

Her hand slipped down over his hair, came to rest on his shoulder. For once the dark mischievous eyes were quiet with a kind of surrendered sadness.

"I think Steve was right."

"And yet you're here."

"Yes. I'm a fool, aren't I? But I didn't tell you I was weak-minded. All Ingerbeck's people have to go through an intelligence test, and they tell me I've got the mentality of a child of five. They say I'll probably finish up in an asylum in another year or two."

"May I come and see you in the padded cell?"

"If you want to. But you won't. When you've had all you want from me——"

He silenced her with his lips. And with her mouth he tried to silence the disbelief in his own mind that sat back and asked cold questions. There was a hunger in him, overriding reason, that turned against the weary emptiness of disbelief.

He was a man, and human. He kissed her, touched her, held her face in his hands, and found forgetfulness in the soft sweet­ness of her body. He was aware of her with every sense; and of his own desire. There was no other answer he could give. He should have been thinking of so many other things; but he had stopped thinking. He was tired—not with the painful fatigue of ordinary exhaustion, but with the peace of a man who has come home from a long journey.

Presently he lay back with his head in her lap, looking up at the stars.

"Tell me something," she said.

"I'm happy."

"So am I. I've no reason to be, but I am. It doesn't seem to matter. You do love me, don't you?"

He was in a dream from which he didn't want to wake. Some­where in his memory there was the cynical impress of a thought he had had so long ago, that if the need came she would use her fascination to tempt him as she had hoped to tempt Vogel. And there was his own thought that if that was her strategy he would meet her cheerfully with her own weapons. But that was so faint and far away. Must he be always thinking, suspecting, fighting— when there was so much comfort in the present?

He said: "Yes."

"Say it all."

"I love you."

"Dear liar . . ."

She leaned over him. Her hair fell on his face. She kissed him.

"I don't care." she said. "To-morrow I shall be wise—and sorry. You're going to hurt me, Saint. And I don't seem to mind. I'm happy. I've had to-night."

"Is there any to-morrow ?"

She nodded.

"We must go in," she said.

Again they walked under the glittering sky, hand in hand, towards reality. There was so much that should have been said, so little that they could say. This was illusion, yet it was more real than life.

"What's your to-morrow?" he asked.

"The Professor's making his trial descent. I don't know what happens afterwards, but next week they're going down to Ma­deira. Vogel asked me to stay with them."

"And you said you would."

"Of course."

"Must you?"

"Yes." The word was quick, almost brutal in its curtness. And then, as if she had hurt herself also, she said: "You don't under­stand. This is my job. I took it on with my eyes open. I told you. I gave my word. Would you think the same of me if I broke it?"

Out of the sudden ache of madness in him he answered: "Yes, Just the same."

"You wouldn't. You think so now, because you want me; but you'd remember. You'd always remember that I ran away once —so why shouldn't I run away again? I know I'm right." He knew it, too. "You must let me finish the job. Help me to finish it."

"It's as good as finished," he said, with a flash of the old reck­less bravado.

"Kiss me."

The lights of the ballroom struck them like a physical blow. The orchestra was still playing. How long had they been away? Ten minutes? Ten years? She slipped into his arms and he went on dancing with her, as if they had never stopped, mechanically. He let the lights and the noise drug his senses, deliberately sink­ing himself in a stupor into which emotion could not penetrate. He would not think.

They completed a circle of the floor, and rejoined the others. Vogel was just paying a waiter.

"We thought you would like another drink after your efforts, Mr Tombs. It's quite a good floor, isn't it?"

4

Simon forced himself back to reality; and it was like stepping under a cold shower. And exactly as if he had stepped under a cold shower he was left composed and alert again, a passionless fighting machine, perfectly tuned, taking up the threads of the adventure into which he had intruded. The madness of a few moments ago might never have lived in him: he was the man who had come out on to the deck of the Corsair at the sound of a cry in the night, the cynical cavalier of the crooked world, steady-handed and steady-eyed, playing the one game in which death was the unalterable stake.

"Not at all bad," he murmured. "If I'd been in the Professor's shoes I wouldn't have missed it."

"I suppose it must always be difficult for the layman to understand the single-mindedness of the scientist. And yet I can sym­pathise with him. If his experiments ended in failure, I'm sure I should be as disappointed as if a pet ambition of my own had been exploded."

"I'm sure you would."

Vogel's colourless lips smiled back with cadaverous suavity.

"But that's quite a remote possibility. Now, you'll be with us to-morrow, won't you? We are making a fairly early start, and the weather forecasts have promised us a fine day. Suppose you came on board about nine ..."

They discussed the projected trip while they finished their drinks, and on the walk back to the harbour. Vogel's affability was at its most effusive; his stony black eyes gleamed with a curious inward lustre. In some subtle disturbing way he seemed more confident, more serenely devoid of every trace of impa­tience or anxiety.

"Well—goodnight."

"Till to-morrow."

Simon shook hands; touched the moist warm paw of Otto Arnheim. He saluted Loretta with a vague flourish and the out-line of a smile.

"Goodnight."

No more. And he was left with an odd feeling of emptiness and surprise, like a man who has dozed for a moment and roused up with a start to wonder how long he has slept or if he has slept at all. Anything that had happened since they came in from that enchanted garden had gone by so quickly that that sudden awakening was his first real awareness of the lapse of time. He felt as if he had been whirled round in a giant sling and flung into an arctic sea, as if he had fought crazily to find his depth and then been hurled up by a chance wave high and dry on some lonely peak, all within a space of seconds. He remembered that he had been talking to Vogel, quietly, accurately, without the slightest danger of a slip, like a punch-drunk fighter who has remained master of his technique without conscious volition. That was illusion: only the garden was real.

He shook himself like a dog, half angrily; but in a way the sensation persisted. His thoughts went back slowly and deliber­ately, picking their footholds as if over slippery stepping-stones. Loretta Page. She had come out of the fog over Dinard and disturbed his sleep. He had been fascinated by the humour of her eyes and the vitality of her brown body. On an impulse he had kissed her. How long had he known her? A few hours. And she had been afraid. He also had been afraid; but he had found her. They had talked nothing except nonsense; and yet he had kissed her again, and found in that moment a completer peace than he had ever known. Then they had talked of love. Or hadn't they?

So little had been said; so much seemed to have been under­stood. His last glimpse of her had been as she turned away, with Vogel tucking her hand into his arm; she had been gay and acquiescent. He had let her go. There was nothing else he could do. They were in the same legion, pledged to the same grim code. So he had let her go, with a smile and a flourish, for whatever might come of the fortunes of war, death or dishonour. And he had thought: "Illusion . . ."

Sssssh . . .

The Saint froze in the middle of a step, with his mind wiped clean like a slate and an eerie ballet of ice-cold pinpricks skitter­ing up into the roots of his hair. Once again he had been dreaming, and once again he had been brought awake in a chilling flash. Only this time there was no feeling of unreality about the gal­vanic arresting of all his perceptions.

He stopped exactly as he was when the sound caught him, on his toes, with one foot on the deck of the Corsair and the other reaching down into the cockpit, one hand on a stanchion and the other steadying himself against the roof of the miniature wheel-house, as if he had been turned into stone. All around him was the quiet dimness of the harbour, and the lights of the port spread up the slope from the waterfront in scintillating terraces of winking brilliance in front of him; somewhere on one of the esplanades a couple of girls were giggling shrilly at the inaudible witticisms of their escorts. But for that long-drawn moment the Saint was marooned as far from those outposts of the untroubled commonplace as if he had been left on the last outlaw island of the Spanish Main. And in that space of incalculable separation he stayed like the inanimate imprint of a moving man on a pho­tographic plate, listening for a confirmation of that weird tortured hiss that had transfixed him as he began to let himself down over the coaming.

He knew that it was no ordinary sound such as Orace might have made in moving about his duties; otherwise it would never have sent that unearthly titillation coursing over his spine. There was a strained intensity about it, a racking sibilance of frightful effort, that had crashed in upon his dormant vigilance as effec­tively as an explosion. His brain must have analysed it instinctively, in an instant, with the lightning intuition bred of all the dangerous years behind him: now, he had to make a laborious effort to recollect the features of the sound and work out exactly why it had stopped him, when subconscious reaction had achieved the same result in a microscopical fraction of the time.

A few inches in front of his left foot, the open door of the saloon stencilled an elongated panel of light across the cockpit. The ache eased out of his cramped leg muscles as he gently completed his interrupted movements and finished the transfer of his weight down on to his extended toes. And as both his feet ar­rived on the same deck he heard a low gasping moan.

He touched the gun on his hip; but that might be too noisy. His left hand was still grasping the stanchion by which he had been letting himself down, and with a silent twist he slipped it out of its socket. Then he took a long breath and stepped out across the door of the saloon, squarely into the light.

He looked down the companion into a room through which a young cyclone seemed to have passed. The bunks had been opened and the bedding taken apart; lockers had been forced open and their contents scattered on the floor; books had been taken from their shelves and thrown down anywhere. The carpet had been ripped up and rolled back, and a section of panelling had been torn bodily away from the bulkhead. The Saint saw all this at once, as he would have taken in the broad features of any background; but his gaze was fixed on the crumpled shape of a man who lay on the floor—-who was trying, with set teeth and pain-wrinkled face, to drag himself up on to his hands and knees. The man whose hiss of convulsive breathing had shocked him out of his sleep-walking a minute ago. Orace.

Simon put a hand on the rail of the companion and dropped into the saloon. He left his stanchion on the floor and hoisted Orace up on to one of the disordered couches.

"What's the matter?"

Orace's fierce eyes stared at him brightly, while he clutched his chest with one rough hand; and Simon saw that the breast of his shirt was red with blood. The man's voice came with a hoarse effort.

"Ain't nothink. Look out . . ."

"Well, let's have a look at you, old son——"

The other pushed him away with a sudden access of strength. Orace's head was turned towards the half-closed door at the forward end of the saloon, and his jaw was clamped up under the pelmet of his moustache with the same savage doggedness that had been carved into it when Simon had seen him making that heroic fight to get himself up from the floor. And at the same moment, beyond the communicating door, Simon heard the faint click of a latch and the creak of a board under a stealthy foot ...

A slight dreamy smile edged itself on to the Saint's mouth as he stooped in swift silence to recover his stanchion. Clubbed in his left hand, an eighteen-inch length of slender iron, it formed a weapon that was capable of impressing the toughest skull with a sense of painful inferiority; and the thought that the sportsman who had turned his cabin upside down and done an unascer­tained amount of damage to Orace was still on board, and might come within reach of a shrewd smack on the side of the head, brought a comforting warmth of grim contentment into his veins.

"Steady, me lad. We must get this coat off to see what the trouble is ... I never thought you'd go and hit the bottle di­rectly I was out of sight, Orace. And I suppose the cap blew off the ginger ale when you weren't looking . . . There we are. Now if we just change the cut of this beautiful shirt of yours ..."

He burbled on, as if he were still attending to the patient, while he picked his way soundlessly over the littered floor. His eyes were fixed on the door into the galley, and they were not smiling.

And then he stopped.

He stopped because the half-open door had suddenly jerked wide open. Beyond it, the further end of the alleyway was in darkness; but in the shadowy space between the light of the saloon and the darkness beyond he could see the black configuration of a man, and the gun in the man's hand was held well forward so that the light of the saloon laid dull bluish gleams along the barrel.

"Don't come any closer," said the shadow.

The Saint relaxed slowly, rising from the slight crouch to which his cautious advance had unconsciously reduced him. The man facing him seemed to be of medium height, square and thickset; his voice had a throaty accent which was unfamiliar.

"Hullo, old cockroach." Simon greeted him in the gentlest of drawls, with the stanchion swinging loosely and rather speculatively in his hand. "Come in and make yourself at home. Oh, but you have. Never mind. There's still some of the bulkhead you haven't pulled to pieces——"

"I'll finish that in a minute. Turn round."

"You're sure you haven't any designs on me?"

"Turn round!"

The Saint turned with a shrug.

"I suppose you know what'll happen if your hand shakes with that gun of yours, brother," he remarked. "You might have an accident and hit me. There's something about your voice which makes me think you've been practising in a place where little things like that don't matter, but over here they're a bit fussy. Have you ever seen a man hanged, old dear? It does the most comic things to his face. Although probably your face is comic enough——"

"You can forget that stuff," said the man behind him, coldly. "Now just drop that thing you've got in your hand."

"What, my little umbrella?"

"Yeah—whatever it is."

The Saint bent down slowly and laid the stanchion on the floor, choosing the place for it carefully.

"Now take two steps forward."

Simon measured the two paces, and stood still. His body was braced for the bullet which might conclude the interlude within the next three seconds, and yet his one desperate hope was pinned to the temptation he had left two steps behind—the iron rod which he had put down so carefully, with one end on an upset ashtray from which it could not be moved without the slight grating sound for which his ears were straining. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Orace leaning rigidly forward on the couch, his scarecrow face set in a stare of indomitable wrath. . . .

It came—the faint gritting scrape of metal which told him that the stanchion was being picked up. And the Saint flung him­self back with an instantaneous release of his tensed muscles.

His right heel went kicking backwards like a mule's, straight as a gunshot for the place where the head of the man behind him should have been if he was bending to pick up the stanchion, with all the power of the Saint's vengeful thews packed into it, and a silent prayer to speed it on its way. And the head of the intruder was exactly where Simon had computed it should have been. He felt the ecstatic squelch of the leather sogging home into something hard and only superficially yielding, heard the plop! of a silencer and felt something tug at his sleeve, and spun round, half overbalancing with the violence of his own impetuous effort.

From the man behind had come one single shrill hiccough of agony: and the Saint twisted round in time to see him rocking back on his haunches with one hand clapped to his face and the blood spurting through his fingers. His other hand still clutched the silenced gun, weaving it round in a blind search for a target. It plopped again, chipping the corner from a mirror on the after bulkhead; and Simon laughed softly and fell on him with his knees. As he grabbed the man's gun wrist he saw Orace lurching forward to pick up the iron bar which had given him his chance, and the obvious justice of the team play appealed to him irrestibly. He rolled under his victim with a quick squirm and a heave, and the man's weight came dead on his hands as Orace struck.

The Saint wriggled out from underneath and sat up, feeling for a cigarette and leaning against the bunk.

"A shrewd swipe, Orace—very shrewd," he commented, eyeing the sleeping beauty with professional approval. "It must have made you feel a lot better. What's all the excitement been about?"

While he explored the extent of his crew's injuries, Orace told him.

" 'E came alongside abaht 'arf-parst nine, sir. Said 'e 'ad a messidge from yer. 'Ho, yus?' I ses, 'wot is this 'ere messidge?' 'Yer to go an' meet Mr Tombs at the Queen's right awy,' 'e ses. 'Ho, yus?' I ses, 'well, Mr Tombs's larst words to me was to sty 'ere till it snows,' I ses. So 'e ses: 'This is very urgent. Can I come aboard an' tell yer the rest of the messidge?'—and before I could say anythink 'e'd come aboard. 'Not aht 'ere,' 'e ses, 'where we can be seen. Let's go below.' So 'e goes below, wivout so much as a by-your-leave, an' I follers 'im to tell 'im where 'e gets orf. 'I gotter whisper it,' 'e ses; an' then, bang, I got a biff on the 'ead that lide me right aht."

"What about this bullet?"

"That was afterwards. When I woke up 'e was still tearin' the saloon to pieces, an' 'e didn't notice me. I lay doggo fra bit, an' then I got 'old of one of the drawers wot 'e'd pulled out an' shied it at 'im. Must 've knocked 'im arf silly, becos I nearly got me 'ands on 'im, but I 'adn't got me legs back so much as I thought I 'ad, an' 'e pulled out 'is gun an' shot me."

"And damned nearly killed you," said the Saint thoughtfully.

The bullet had struck one of Orace's left ribs, glanced off, and torn an ugly gash in the muscle of his arm. So far as the Saint could tell, there were no bones broken; and he busied himself with expertly dressing and bandaging the wound, while his mind probed for the origins of that riotous visit.

It wasn't homicide alone and primarily, at least—he was sure of that. From the story, the shot which had crippled Orace looked more like an accident of panic, the desperate impulse of any thug who had felt himself on the point of being cornered and captured. And if that had been the object, it would have been easy enough to finish the job—he himself could have been picked off without warning while he stood at the head of the companion. If not that, then what? The eruptive appearance of the saloon provided a ready answer. Vogel was still searching for information; and the legend of convenient harbour thieves had already been established in Dinard.

There was another suggestion which he remembered as he put the last touches to Orace's bandages.

"Did a porter bring a couple of trunks along for me?" he asked; and Orace nodded.

"Yessir. They came abaht arf-parst seven. I put 'em in the starboard cabin."

Simon went forward as soon as he had finished, and found more or less what he had expected. The cords had been cut away from the trunks, and the locks had been ripped away by the scientific application of a jemmy. One of them was already open, and the lid of the other lifted at a touch. Clearly the visitor had just been completing his investigations when the sound of the Saint's arrival had disturbed him.

"Which is all very festive and neighbourly," reflected the Saint, as he surveyed the wreckage.

He strolled back to the saloon in a meditative frame of mind. There remained the problem of the investigator himself, who seemed destined to wake up with a sore head as well as a flattened face. The sore head might return to normal in twenty-four hours; even the flattened face might endear itself by a few years of devotion, and become as acceptable to its owner as the sym­metrical dial which perhaps it had once been; but the informa­tion which had been acquired during the same visit might prove to be more recalcitrant. It must not be allowed to take itself back to Vogel; but on the other hand it was doubtless keeping company with some useful information from the Vogel camp which might form a basis of fair exchange.

Simon Templar found himself warming to that idea on his return journey. He closed the door of the galley behind him and folded a wet towel which he had collected on his way, grinning at Orace rather dreamily.

"We might see if your boy friend feels talkative," he said. "And if he doesn't, you may be able to think of some way to thaw him out."

He cleared a space on one of the settees and yanked the in­truder up on it. For a minute or so he applied the cold towel methodically. Then he felt the back of the man's head, looked closely into his face, and opened up his shirt. After which he moved away and finished his cigarette with contemplative de­liberation. For nothing was more certain than that the sleeping beauty had listened to the last lullaby of all.

VI. HOW PROFESSOR YULE TESTED THE BATHYSTOL,

AND KURT VOGEL MADE A PROPOSITION

DEFINITELY an uninvited complication, thought the Saint; although he admitted that it was the sort of accident that was always liable to happen when a man had an iron bar in his hand and good reason to be annoyed. Orace had had no cause to feel tenderhearted, and perhaps the deceased's cranium had been more fragile than the average. The Saint's attitude was sympathetic and broadminded. He did not feel that Orace was to be blamed; but he did feel that that momentary lapse had altered the situation somewhat drastically. Considering the point again in the placid light of the morning after, he could find no encouragement to revise his opinion. What he had no way of foreseeing was how drastic that alteration was destined to turn out.

He folded his arms on the rail of the Falkenberg, and frowned ruminatively at a flight of gulls wheeling over the blue water. Somewhere back under that same blue water, out in the channel between Guernsey and Herm, the unfortunate visitor lay in his long sleep, moored down to the sea bed by a couple of pigs of ballast. The Corsair had been cleaned up and tidied, and every record of his intrusion effaced.

Simon Templar had done that alone, before he went to sleep; but his own plans had kept him awake for longer.

"The balloon's gone up, anyway," he had reasoned. "When the search party doesn't come home, Vogel will start thinking until his head gets hot. What'll he decide? That the fellow rat­ted? ... One chance in fifty . . . That he's had an accident. then? That's the forty-nine to one certainty."

He had thought round it from every angle that he could see, trying to put himself into Vogel's place, but there was no other conclusion he could come to. What then?

"Vogel won't talk to the police. For one thing, that would give him a hell of a tall story to think up, explaining how he knew anyone would be burgling my boat to-night. And to go on with, he doesn't want to draw the attention of the police any more than I do. And to put a lid on it, for all he may know up to this moment, I might be the police."

There was still that thin and brittle straw of anonymity to clutch.

"What would I do? ... I'd come right over and have a look. But Vogel won't. He's pulled that one already; and he'd have a job to find another excuse to get shown over the boat for the second time in twenty-four hours. Besides, he knows he wouldn't find anything. If I'm police or if I'm just one of the idle rich, the burglar's already lodged in jail, and there's nothing he can do about it except try to bail him out in the morning when he hears the story. And if there's a chance that I'm police, he'd have to be damn careful how he went about that. On the other hand, if I'm in the racket too, I'd be waiting for something like that, and he'd expect to be walking into a reception if he did come over."

That seemed the most unlikely chance of all. The Saint mod­estly reckoned himself to be something unique in his profession; and there was a sober possibility that Vogel would not think of his peculiar brand of interference at all—unless he had already been identified. Simon slept with his hand on his gun and this debatable chance in mind; but he woke for the first time in the early morning. Yet this uninterrupted sleep gave him nothing more definite to work on. It was still possible that Vogel had stayed away for fear of being expected.

Over breakfast he had had to make his own decision, and his crew glared at him incredulously.

"Yer must be barmy," was Orace's outspoken comment.

"Maybe I am," admitted the Saint. "But I've got to do it. If I don't keep that date this morning, I'm branded. An innocent man would keep it, even if he had caught a burglar during the night. Even a policeman would keep it—and that card may be worth holding for another few hours, though it won't last much longer."

"It's that perishin' girl," said Orace morosely.

Simon paused in the act of fastening a strap around his leg just below the knee—a strap which supported the sheath of the slim razor-sharp knife, Belle, which in his hands was almost as deadly as any firearm. He looked up at Orace sardonically, then ruefully; and he smiled.

"She's not perishing, Orace. Not while I'm still on my feet."

"Yer won't be on yer feet fer long, any'ow," said Orace, as if the thought gave him a certain gloomy satisfaction. "And wot the 'ell 'appens to my job when yer feedin' the shrimps like that bloke I 'it last night?" he added, practically.

"I expect you could always go back to your old job as an artist's model," said the Saint.

He straightened his sock and stood up, smiling that curiously aimless and lazy smile which only came to him when he was shaking the dice to throw double or quits with death. His hand dropped on Orace's shoulder.

"But it won't be so bad as that. I'll put the cards in the port­hole for Mr Conway or Mr Quentin to look you up during the day, and they'll see you don't starve. And I'll be having the time of my life. I'll bet Birdie is just hoping and praying that I'll plant myself by not showing up. Instead of which, it'll take all the wind out of their sails when I step on board, bright and beautiful as a spring morning, as if I hadn't one little egg of a wicked thought on my mind. It ought to be a great moment."

In its way, it had been quite a great moment; but it had suf­fered from the inherent brevity of its description.

Simon watched the play of light on the water, the swiftly-changing lace of the foam patterns swirling and spawning along the side, and recalled the moment for what it was worth. It was the first time he had found any of the signs of human strain on Vogel's face. Even so, his practised eyes had to search for them; but they were there. A fractionally more than ordinary glaze of the waxen skin, as if it had been drawn a shade tighter over the high prominent cheekbones. An extra trace of shadow under the black deep-set eyes. Nothing else. Vogel was as spotlessly turned out as usual, his handshake was just as cold and firm, his genial­ity no less smooth-flowing and urbane.

"A perfect morning, Mr Tombs."

"A lovely morning after a gorgeous night before," murmured the Saint.

"Ah, yes! You enjoyed our little evening?"

"And the bed-time story."

Vogel lifted his dark eyebrows in tolerant puzzlement—and the Saint could just imagine how well that gesture of polite per­plexity must have been rehearsed.

Simon smiled.

"There must be something catching about this harbour thief business," he explained, with the air of a man in the street who is simply bursting with his little adventure and is trying to ap­pear blase about it. "I had a caller myself last night."

"My dear Mr Tombs! Did you lose anything valuable?"

"Nothing at all," said the Saint smugly. "We caught him."

"Then you were luckier than we were," said Arnheim, with his round flabby face full of admiration and interest. "Did he put up a fight?"

"He didn't have a chance——"

Simon looked up as Loretta came towards them along the deck. He had felt the beat of his heart when he saw her, had seemed to discover an absurb lightening of the perfect morning as if a screen had been taken away from before the sun. Vogel took her arm.

"My dear, Mr Tombs has been telling us what happened after he left us last night. He had one of those harbour thieves on board his own boat—and caught him!"

"But how exciting." She was smiling coolly, but her eyes were steady with questions. "How did you do it?"

"He came along to my bloke, Orace, and said I wanted him—it must have been while we were at the hotel. Orace was a bit suspicious and wanted to know more about it, and then this fellow hit him over the head with something. Orace came to again before the burglar had gone, and he went on with the fight. They were still at it when I got back. The burglar had a gun and everything, but it had misfired, so——"

"What happened?"

Vogel had asked the question, with his face as calm as stone; and the Saint had known that his answer would mark the sharp pinnacle of the moment which he had deliberately courted. He had allowed himself time to light a cigarette before he replied.

"Well, we were wrestling all over the saloon trying to get his gun away from him, and Orace grabbed hold of a stanchion that he'd brought down to clean and hit him over the head. Then we tied him up and took him ashore and lugged him along to the police station. But when they tried to give him first aid, they found he was—sort of dead."

For a little while there was an absolute silence. Even in the most humdrum circumstances, a revelation like that would natu­rally have taken a few seconds to establish itself in the minds of the audience; but the Saint had been waiting for a more preg­nant silence than that. It was while he was actually on his way over to the Falkenberg that he had finally decided to bring his story as close to the truth as possible. If he had said that the burglar was lodged alive in jail, and Vogel's ingenuity had been equal to devising a way of putting through an inquiry, the fiction could have been exposed in an hour or two. But the truth would offer an obvious inducement to wait for confirmation in a news­paper story which could not appear for another twenty-four hours, and it might well dispose of direct inquiries by making their prospects manifestly unprofitable: and, as Simon had told it, it had a ring of authenticity which an invention might not have had.

Simon had been waiting for a pregnant silence, and he was not disappointed. Yet even he did not know until later how much that silence had contained.

"Dead?" Arnheim repeated at last, in a strained voice.

The Saint nodded.

"Orace must have underestimated his strength, or something— I suppose it's quite understandable, as we were fighting all over the place. He'd bashed the devil's skull right in."

"But—but won't you be arrested?" faltered Loretta.

"Oh, no. They call it accidental death. It was the fellow's own fault for being a burglar. Still, it's rather a gruesome sort of thing to have on your conscience."

Vogel put up a hand and stroked the side of his chin. His pas­sionless eyes, hard and unwinking as discs of jet, were fastened on the Saint with a terrible brightness of concentration. For the first time since they had been talking there seemed to be some­thing frozen and mechanical about his tight-lipped smile.

"Of course it must be," he agreed. "But as you say, the man brought it on himself. You mustn't let it worry you too much."

"What's worrying him?"

The Professor came ambling along, with his rosy cheeks beam­ing and his premature grey beard fluttering in the breeze, and the story had to be started over again. While it was being repeated, a seaman came up and handed Vogel a telegram. Vogel opened it with a slow measured stroke of his thumb-nail: while he read it, and during the conclusion of the second telling of the adventure, he seemed to regain complete command of himself with a mental struggle that showed only in the almost imperceptibly whitened pallor of his face.

He buttoned his jacket and glanced along the deck as Yule added his hearty voice to the general vote of exoneration.

"We're ready to sail," he said. "Will you excuse me if I go and attend to it?"

And in that way the big moment had touched its climax and gone on its incalculable trajectory, leaving Simon Templar to consider where it left him.

2

The Saint lighted a cigarette in the shield of his cupped hands, and stared thoughtfully over the sun-sprinkled ripple of the sea towards the blue-pencilled line of the horizon. An impenitent ripple of the same sunlight glinted at the back of his eyes and fidgeted impudently with the fine-drawn corners of his mouth. He had always been mad, by the Grace of God. He still was. Obviously.

Roger, Peter, and Orace were back in St Peter Port; and though they knew where he had gone, they could do nothing to help him. And there he was, with Loretta, racing through the broad waters of the Channel on the Falkenberg while Vogel and Arnheim thought him over. In addition to whom, there was a crew of at least ten more of Vogel's deep-water gangsters, whom he personally had inspected, also on board; and presumably none of them would be afflicted with any more suburban scruples than their master. Out there on the unrecording water, as he had realised to the full when Loretta was the only passenger, anything could happen: a shot could be fired that no unsuspected wit­nesses would hear, a cry for help could waste itself in the vast emptiness of the air, an unfortunate accident could be registered in the log which no investigations on shore could disprove. There were no prying busybodies peeping from behind curtains of seaweed to come forward later and upset a well-constructed story. The sea kept its secrets—only a few hours ago he had availed himself of that inviolable silence. . . . Verily, he was an accredited member of the company of divine lunatics.

Wherefore the Saint allowed that twinkle of sublime reckless­ness to play at the back of his eyes, and drew sea air and smoke into his lungs with the seraphic zest which he had always found in the fierce tang of danger.

The deep-voiced hum of the engines died away suddenly to a soft murmur, and the curling bow wave sank down and shortened to a feather of ripples along the side. Simon looked about him and turned to the Professor, who was puffing a stubby briar at his side.

"Is this where you take your dip?"

Yule nodded. Vogel was in the wheelhouse with Loretta, and Arnheim had moved out of the sun to spread his perspiring bulk in a deck chair.

"This should be it. We went over the chart last night, and the deepest sounding we could find was ninety-four fathoms. It isn't much, but it'll do for the preliminary test."

Simon gazed out to sea with his eyebrows drawn down against the glare. Under them his set blue eyes momentarily gave up their carefree twinkle. He realised that there was a third person in the same danger as himself, about whom he had forgotten to worry very much before.

"Have you known Vogel long?" he asked casually.

"About six months now. He came to me after my first descent and offered to help, and I was very glad to accept his offer. He's been a kind of fairy godmother to me. And all I've been able to do in return was to name a new deep-water fish that I discovered after him—Bathyphasma vogeli!" The Professor chuckled in his refreshingly boyish way.

"You haven't started to think about the commercial possibili­ties of your invention yet?"

"No. No. I'm afraid it's just a scientific toy." Yule's eyes wid­ened a little. "Are there any commercial possibilities?"

The Saint hesitated. In the face of that child-like unworldli­ness he didn't know where to begin. And he knew that to be caught in the middle of an argument, into which Vogel or Arnheim might be drawn, would be more surely fatal than to keep silence.

"I was only thinking——" he began slowly; and then he heard footsteps behind him, and turned his head to see Vogel and Lo­retta coming out on to the deck. He shrugged vaguely, and said goodbye to the lost chance with a grim question in his mind of whether it had ever really come within his reach. "For instance, could you take movies down there? They'd be something quite new in travelogues."

"I don't know," said Yule seriously. "What do you think, Mr Vogel?"

"We must ask someone with more technical knowledge." Vo­gel's bland glance touched on the Saint for a moment with a puzzling dryness, and returned to his protegee. "Would you like to check over the gear before lunch?"

The Professor knocked out his pipe, and they moved aft. Arn­heim stayed in his chair in the shade, with his mouth half open and his hat tilted over his eyes.

Simon fell in beside Loretta and followed the procession. It was the first time that day that he had had a chance to speak to her alone—Vogel had kept her close beside him from the mo­ment they left the harbour, and Arnheim had gone puffing after her with some conversational excuse or other if she had ever moved more than a couple of yards away. The Saint dropped his cigarette, and glanced back as he picked it up. Arnheim had not moved, and his round stomach was distending and relaxing with peaceful regularity . . . Simon rejoined the girl, and slackened his stride.

"Perhaps you heard how I'd been thinking," he said.

His hand brushed hers as they walked, and he took her fingers and held her back.

"Is this safe?" she asked, hardly moving her lips.

"As safe as anything on this suicides' picnic. It'd be more suspicious if I didn't try to speak to you at all." He pointed back towards the turreted fortress of the Casquet lighthouse rising from its plinth of rocks to the south, as if he were making some remark about it, and said quietly: "There's one person who may be sitting on the same volcano as we are; but he doesn't know it."

"Professor Yule?"

"Yes. Have you thought about him?"

"Quite a lot."

"It's more than I've done. Until just now. Where does he come in—or go out?"

"I'd like to know."

"I wish I could tell you. We know Birdie isn't interested in scientific toys. When this new bathystol is passed okay, he'll 've had all he wants out of Yule. Then he'll get rid of him. But how? And how soon?"

He turned away from the lighthouse and they walked on again. Vogel was watching them. The Saint laughed as if at some trivial flippancy, and said in the same sober undertone: "I'm worried. You can't help liking the old boy. If anything sticky happened to him, I'd feel I had a share in it. If you got a chance you might manage to talk to him. God knows how."

"I'll try." She smiled back at him, and went on in her natural voice as they came within earshot of Vogel: "But it must be hard for the lighthouse-keeper's wife."

"I expect it is, if she's attractive."

Simon came to a lazy halt in front of the apparatus which three seamen were manoeuvring out on to the deck—a creation like some sort of weird Martian robot drawn by an imaginative artist. The upper part of it combined torso and head in one great sphere of shining metal, from the sides of which projected arms that looked like strings of huge gleaming beads socketing together and terminating in steel pincers. It balanced on two short bulbous legs of similar construction. The spherical trunk was studded with circular quartz windows like multiple eyes, and tubes of flexible metal coiled round it from various points and connected with a six-foot drum of insulated cable on the deck.

"Is this the new regulation swim suit?" asked the Saint inter­estedly. "But it doesn't look as if you could move about in it."

"It's fairly hard work," Yule admitted. "But it looks a great deal heavier than it is. Of course, the air inside helps to take off quite a lot of the weight when it's under water. And then, the whole value of the bathystol is its light construction. Dr Beebe went down more than three thousand feet in his bathysphere in 1934, but he was shut up in a steel ball that half a dozen men couldn't have lifted. I set out with the idea of achieving strength by internal bracing on scientific principles instead of solid bulk, and this new metal helped me by reducing the weight by nearly seventy-five per cent. You need something pretty strong for this job."

"I suppose you do," said the Saint mildly. "I don't know what sort of pressures you meet down there——"

"At three thousand feet it's more than half a ton to the square inch. If you lowered a man in an ordinary diving suit to that depth, he'd be crushed into a shapeless pulp—by nothing more solid than this water we've been cruising on." The Professor grinned cheerfully. "But in the bathystol I'm nearly as comforta­ble as I am now. You can go down in it yourself if you like, and prove it."

The Saint shook his head.

"Thanks very much," he murmured hastily. "But nothing could make me feel less like a hero. I'll take your word for it."

He stood aside and watched the preparations for a shallow test dive. The ten-ton grab on the after deck, which he had dis­covered on his nocturnal exploration, had been stripped of its tarpaulin and telescoped out over the stern, but the claw mecha­nism had been dismantled and stowed away somewhere out of sight. All that was visible now was a sort of steel derrick with an ordinary hook dangling from its cable.

The hook was hitched into a length of chain welded to what might have been the shoulders of the bathystol, the nuts were tightened up on the circular door through which Yule would lower himself into the apparatus when he went down in it, one of the engineers touched the controls of the electric winch, and the cumbersome contrivance dragged along the deck and rose slug­gishly towards the end of the boom. For a moment or two it hung there, turning slowly like a monstrous futuristic doll; and then it went down with the cable whirring and vanished under the water. Again the engineer checked it, while Yule fussed round like an excited urchin, and the telescopic boom shortened on its runners like the horn of a snail until the wire cable came within the grasp of a man stationed at the stern. Three other men picked up the insulated electric cable and passed it along as it unreeled from the drum, and the man at the stern fastened it to the supporting cable at intervals with a deft twist of rope as the bathystol descended.

"That's enough."

At last the Professor was satisfied. He stepped back, mopping his forehead like a temperamental impresario who has finally obtained a rehearsal to his satisfaction, with his hair and beard awry and his eyes gleaming happily. The engineer reversed the winch, and the cable spooled back on to the drum with a deepen­ing purr until the bathystol pushed its outlandish head above the surface and rose clear to swing again at the nose of the derrick.

"Five hundred feet," muttered Yule proudly. "And I'd hardly even call that a trial run." He put his handkerchief away, and watched anxiously while the bathystol was lowered on to the deck and two men with wrenches and hammers stepped up to unfasten the door. As soon as it was open he pushed them away, climbed up on a chair, and hauled out the humidity recorder. He frowned at it for a moment, and looked up grinning. "Not a sign of a leak, either. Now if I can walk about in it better than I could in the old one——"

"I take it there is no serious doubt of that?" said Vogel, with intent solicitude.

"Bless you, no. I'm not in the least worried. But this new jointing system has got to be tested in practice. It ought to make walking much easier; unless the packing won't stand up to the job. But it will."

"Then we shall have to try and find something special for lunch."

Vogel took the Professor's arm, and Yule allowed himself to be torn reluctantly away from his toys. Simon caught Loretta's eye with a gaze of thoughtful consideration. It would have said all that he could find to say without the utterance of a single word; but as they strolled on he spoke without shaping his mouth.

"A smile on the face of the tiger."

She glanced over the turquoise spread of the water, and said: "After we've been to Madeira."

"I suppose so."

The sunlight slanting across his face deepened the twin wrin­kles of cold contemplation above his nose. After the Falkenberg had been to Madeira . . . presumably. There was deep water there, within easy reach. The Monaco Deep, if Yule wanted a good preliminary canter. The Cape Verde Basin, which the Pro­fessor had already mentioned, if he felt ambitious and they cruised further south. Enough water, at any rate, to establish the potentialities of the bathystol beyond any shadow of doubt. Which was unquestionably what Vogel wanted. . . . But long before then, if the photographer in Dinard hadn't fogged his plates, and Vogel's intelligence service was anything like as efficient as his other departments, the Saint's own alibi of apologetically intruding innocence would have been blown sky-high, and there would be nothing to stop the joyride terminating ac­cording to the old Nigerian precedent. Unless Vogel himself had been disposed of by that time, which would have been the Saint's own optimistic prophecy. . . . And yet the indefensible appre­hension stayed with him through the theatrically perfect service of luncheon, to sour the lobster cocktail and embitter the exqui­sitely melting perfection of the quails in aspic.

He put it aside—thrust it away into the remoter shelves of his mind. Just then there seemed to be more urgent dangers to be met halfway. It was one of those mental sideslips which taunt the fallibility of human concentration.

"You're very preoccupied, Mr Tombs."

Vogel's insinuating accents slurred into his reverie, with a hint of malicious irony; and Simon looked up with unruffled noncha­lance.

"I was just thinking what a sensation it must be for the fish when the Professor goes wading about among them," he mur­mured. "It ought to make life seem pretty flat for the soles when he goes home."

3

There were two oxygen cylinders, of the same alloy as the bathystol, unpacked from their case and being passed out on to the deck as Yule wriggled into a motheaten grey sweater in preparation for his descent. He tested the automatic valves him­self before he shook hands all round and climbed up on to the deckhouse roof to lower himself into his armour. The door in the of the bathystol was only just large enough to let him through; but presently he was inside, peering out of one of the portholes, exactly like a small brat at a window with his nose flattened against the pane. Then the oxygen cylinders were passed in to him, and fitted into the clamps provided for them on the interior of the sphere. After which the door was lowered into place by two men, and the clang of hammer and wrench rattled over the sea as the bolts which secured it were tightened up. To the submarine pioneer imprisoned inside the echoing globe of metal, the terrific din must have been one of the worst ordeals he had to suffer: they could see his face, through one of the quartz lenses, wrinkled in a comical contortion of agony, while he squeezed his fingers ineffectually into Ms ears.

Then it was finished, and the hammerers climbed down. The Professor fitted a pair of earphones over his head and adjusted the horn-shaped transmitter on his chest; and his voice, cu­riously shrill and metallic, clattered suddenly out of a small loud speaker standing on a table by the rail.

"Can you hear me?"

"Perfectly. Can you hear us?"

Vogel had settled the loop of a similar transmitter round his neck, and it was he who checked up the telephone communica­tion. The Professor grinned through his window.

"Fine! But I shall have to get this thing soundproofed if I'm going to use it much. I wish you knew what the noise was like!"

His hands moved over the racks of curious instruments with which he was surrounded, testing them one by one. Under one of the windows, on his right, there was a block of paper on a small flat shelf, for notes and sketches, with a pencil dangling over it on a length of ridiculously commonplace string. On his left, mounted on a sort of lazy-tongs on which it could be pulled out from its bracket, was a small camera. He touched a switch, and the interior of the globe was illuminated by a dim light over his notebook; at the touch of another switch, a dazzlingly powerful shaft of luminance beamed out from a quartz lens set in the upper part of the sphere like the headlight of a streamlined car. Then he slipped his arms into the sleeves of the apparatus, moved them about, and opened and closed the pincer hands. He bent his knees, and lifted first one leg and then the other in their ponderous harness. At last his voice came through the loud speaker again.

"Right! Let her go!"

"Good luck," said Vogel; and the bathystol lifted and swung out over the side as the winch whined under the engineer's move­ment of the control lever.

Peering over the side into the blue water beneath which the bathystol had disappeared, Simon Templar found himself forget­ting the implications of the experiment he was watching, the circumstances in which he was there, and the menace that hung over the whole expedition. There was a quiet potency of drama in the plunge of that human sounding-line to the bottom of the sea which neutralised all the cruder theatricalities of battle, mur­der, and sudden death. Granted that this, according to Yule, was hardly even a preliminary canter, and that enough water did not exist under their keel to provide the makings of any sort of rec­ord—there was still the breath-taking comprehension of what should follow from this trial descent. It was the opening of a field of scientific exploration which had baffled adventurers far longer than the conquest of the air, a victory over physical lim­itations more spellbindingly sensational than any ascent into the stratosphere. The precarious thread of chance on which hung his own life and Loretta's seemed temporarily of slight importance beside the steel cable which was sliding down into the depths through the concentric ripples dilating out from it across the surface.

After fifteen minutes which might have been an hour, the cable swayed with the first trace of slackness and the loud speaker suddenly squeaked: "Whoa!" The burring of the winch died away, and the man who was chalking the cable in ten-foot lengths as it slipped over the boom looked at his figures and called a guttural "Five hundred seventy-five."

"Five hundred and seventy-five feet," Vogel relayed impas­sively over the phone.

"Splendid. I'm on the bottom." It was indescribably eerie to listen to Yule's matter-of-fact voice speaking from the eternal windless night of the sea bed. "Everything's working perfectly. The heating arrangement makes a lot of difference—I'm not a bit cold."

"Can you move about?"

"Yes, I think so. This bathystol is a lot lighter than the last one."

"Could you bend down to pick anything up in it?"

There was a brief pause. Glancing at Kurt Vogel in a mo­ment's recollection of what this preliminary experiment stood for besides its contribution to scientific knowledge, Simon saw that the man's face was taut and shining with the same curiously waxen glaze which he had noticed on that hair-raising search of the Corsair.

Then the Professor's voice came through again.

"Yes—I got hold of a bit of rock. Quite easy. . . . Phew! That was a small fish nosing the window, and I nearly caught him. A bit too quick for me, though . . . Now I'm going to try and walk a bit. Give me another twenty feet of cable."

The winch thrummed again for a few seconds; and then there was absolute silence on deck. The engineer wiped his hands me­chanically on a piece of cotton waste, and thrust it back, in his pocket. The man who had been checking off the lengths of cable put away his chalk and pulled reflectively at bis ear. The carpen­ter tied a last linking hitch between the cable and the telephone line, and clambered down from his perch. The other seamen drew together at the stern and stood in a taciturn and inexpressive group, oddly reminiscent of a knot of miners waiting at the pit­head after a colliery explosion.

There was the same sullen stoicism, the same brooding inten­sity of imagination. Simon felt his pulses beating and the palms of his hands turning moist. He flashed another glance at Vogel. The pirate was standing stiff and immobile, his head thrust a little forward so that he looked more than ever like a pallid vul­ture, his black eyes burning vacantly into space; his face might have been carved in ivory, a macabre mask of rapt attention.

The Saint's gaze turned to catch Loretta's, and he saw an infinitesimal tremor brush her shoulders—twin brother to the ballet of ghostly spiders that were curveting up his own spinal ganglions. He felt exactly as if he were waiting for the initial heart-releasing crash of a tropical thunderstorm, and he did not know why. Some faint whisper of warning was trying to get through to his brain in that utter silence of nerve-pulping ex­pectation; but all he could hear was the stentorous breathing of Otto Arnheim and the swish and gurgle of the swell under the counter. . . .

"I can walk quite comfortably." The sharp stridency of the loud speaker crackled abruptly into the stillness, somehow with­out breaking the suspense. "I've taken about thirty steps in two directions. It is a bit slow, but not excessively fatiguing. There is no sign of a leak, and the reading of the humidity recorder is still normal."

One of the seamen spat a cud of tobacco over the side, and the engineer pulled out his cotton waste and rubbed introspectively at an invisible speck on a chromium-plated cleat. Vogel's gaunt figure seemed to grow taller as he raised his head. His eyes swept round over Arnheim, Loretta, and the Saint, with a sudden blaze of triumph.

Then the loud speaker clattered again.

"Something seems to have gone wrong with the oxygen supply. One of the cylinders has just fizzled out, although the gauge still shows it three-quarters full. The valve must have been damaged in packing and started a slow leak. I'm turning on the other cyl­inder. I think you might bring me up now."

The slight fidgeting of the cluster of seamen stopped alto­gether. The engineer looked round.

"Up!" snapped Vogel.

Loretta was gripping the Saint's arm. Simon was only numbly aware of the clutch of her fingers: for a perceptible space of time his mind was half deadened with incredulity. His reactions were momentarily out of control, while his brain reeled to en­compass the terrific adjustment that Vogel had sprung on him. Even then he was uncertain, unconvinced by that horrible leap of foresight—until the rumble of the winch stopped again almost as soon as it had started, and left a frightful stillness to force its meaning back into his unbelieving ears.

Vogel was watching the engineer with a faint frown.

"What is the matter?"

"A fuse, I think."

The man left his controls and vanished down a companion, and Vogel spoke into the telephone mouthpiece in his clear flat voice.

"They're just fixing the winch, Professor. We'll have you up in a few minutes."

There was a short interval before Yule's calm reply.

"I hope it isn't anything serious. The reserve cylinder seems to be worse than the first. The pressure is falling very rapidly. Please don't be long."

The Saint's eyes were freezing into chips of ultramarine. Every instinct he possessed was shrieking at him for action, and yet he was actually afraid to move. He had straightened up off the rail, and yet some twisted doubt within him still held him from taking the first step forward. So successfully had the cun­ning of Kurt Vogel insinuated itself into his mind.

Professor Yule had made his descent, established the safety and mobility of the new bathystol, stooped down and picked up rocks and walked in it—proved practically everything that Vogel needed to know. True, the tests had not been made at any im­pressive depth; but Vogel's previous experience of the invention might have satisfied him to dispense with that. And yet Simon was still trying to make himself believe that he was standing by, watching in silence, while Yule was being murdered in cold blood.

He saw it at once as the practically perfect crime, the incon­trovertible accident—an automatic provision for fatalistic obit­uaries and a crop of leading articles on the martyrs of science. And yet the nerveless audacity of the conception, in the circum­stances in which he was seeing it, had to fight its way up to the barricades of his reason. The inward struggle was tearing him apart, but while it went on he was gripped in a paralysis more maddening than any physical restraint. The torturing question drummed sickeningly through his brain and rooted him to the deck: Was this only another of Vogel's satanically deep-laid traps?

Vogel had walked across to the companion down which the engineer had disappeared. He was standing there, looking down, tapping his fingers quietly on the rail. He hadn't even seemed to look at the Saint.

"Can't we do anything?" Loretta was pleading.

Vogel glanced at her with a shrug.

"I know nothing about machinery," he said; and then he stepped back to make way for the returning engineer.

The man's face was perfectly wooden. His gaze flickered over the circle of expectant faces turned towards him, and he an­swered their unspoken questions in a blunt staccato like a rolling drum.

"I think one of the armature windings has burnt out. They're working on it."

Another hush fell after his words, in which Otto Arnheim emp­tied his lungs with a gusty sigh. Loretta was staring at the taut cable swaying slightly from the nose of the boom as the Falkenberg tilted in the swell, and her face had gone paler under the golden tan. A gull turned in the bright sky and went gliding soundlessly down a long air-slope towards the east.

Simon's fists were clenched till the nails bit into his palms, and there was a kind of dull nausea in his stomach. And the loud speaker clacked through the silence.

"The reserve cylinder seems to be worse than the first. I don't think it will last much longer. What is the matter?"

"We are trying to repair the winch," Vogel said quietly.

Then he looked at the Saint. Was that intended to be a tragic appeal, or was it derision and sinister watchfulness in the black eyes? Simon felt his self-command snapping under the intolera­ble strain. He turned to the loud speaker and stared at it in the most vivid torment of mind that he had ever known. Was it possible that some expert manipulation of the wiring might have made it possible to cut off the Professor's voice, while one of Vogel's crew somewhere on the ship spoke through it instead?

"The cylinder has just given out."

Yule's voice came through again unfalteringly, almost casually. The Saint saw that Loretta's eyes were also fixed on the loud speaker: her chest was scarcely moving, as if her own breathing had stopped in sympathy with what those six words must have meant to the man helplessly imprisoned in his grotesque armour five hundred feet below the bountiful air.

"Can't you put the cable on to another winch?" asked the Saint, and hardly recognised his own voice.

"There's no other winch on the ship that would take the load."

"We can rig up a tackle if you've got a couple of large blocks."

"It takes more than twenty minutes to raise the bathystol from this depth," Vogel said flatly. "With a block and tackle it would take over an hour."

Simon knew that he was right. And his brain worked on, mechanically, with its grim computation. In that confined space it would take no more than a few minutes to consume all the oxygen left in the air. And then, with the percentage of carbon dioxide leaping towards its maximum ...

"I'm getting very weak and giddy." The Professor's voice was fainter, but it was still steady and unflinching. "You will have to be very quick now, or it will be no use."

Something about the scene was trying to force itself into the Saint's attention. Was he involuntarily measuring his distances and marking down positions, with the instinct of a seasoned fighter? The group of seamen at the stern. One of them by the drum of insulated cable, further up the deck. Vogel at the head of the companion. Arnheim . . . Why had Arnheim moved across to stand in front of the winch controls, so that his broad squat bulk hid them completely?

There was another sound trying to break through the silence— a queer jerky gasping sound. A second or two went by before the Saint traced it to its source and identified it. The terrible throaty sound of a man battling for breath, relayed like every other sound from the bathystol by the impersonal instrument on the table . . .

In some way it wiped out the last of his indecision. He was prepared to be wrong; prepared also not to care. Any violence, whatever it might bring, was better than waiting for his nerves to be slowly racked to pieces by that devilish inquisition.

He moved slowly forwards—towards the bulkhead where the winch controls were. Towards Arnheim. And Arnheim did not move. The Saint smiled for the first time since the Professor had gone down, and altered his course a couple of points to pass round him. Arnheim shifted himself also, and still blocked the way. His round pouting mouth with the bruise under it opened like a trout's.

"It isn't easy to wait, is it?" he said.

"It isn't," agreed the Saint, with a cold and murderous preci­sion; and the automatic flashed from his pocket to grind its muz­zle into the other's yielding belly. "So we'll stop waiting. Walk backwards a little way, Otto."

Arnheim's jowl dropped. He looked down at the gun in his stomach, and looked up again with his eyes round as saucers and his wet mouth sagging wider. He coughed.

"Really, Mr Tombs——"

"Have you gone mad?"

Vogel's dry monotone lanced across the feeble protest with calculated contempt. And the Saint grinned mirthlessly.

"Not yet. But I'm liable to if Otto doesn't get out of my way in the next two seconds. And then you're liable to lose Otto."

"I know this is a ghastly situation." Vogel was still speaking calmly, with the soothing and rather patronising urbanity with which he might have tried to snub a drunkard or a lunatic. "But you won't help it by going into hysterics. Everything possible is being done."

"One thing isn't being done," answered the Saint, in the same bleak voice, "and I'm going to do it. Get away from those con­trols, Otto, and watch me start that winch!"

"My dear Mr Tombs——"

"Behind you!"

Loretta's desperate cry pealed in the Saint's ears with a frantic urgency that spun him round with his back to the deckhouse. He had a glimpse of a man springing at him with an upraised belaying-pin; and his finger was tightening on the trigger when Arn­heim dragged down his wrist and struck him a terrific left-handed blow with a rubber truncheon. There was an instant when his brain seemed to rock inside his skull. Then darkness.

4

"I trust you are feeling better," said Vogel.

"Much better," said the Saint. "And full of admiration. Oh, it was smooth, very smooth, Birdie—you don't mind if I call you Birdie, do you? It's so whimsical."

He sat in an armchair in the wheelhouse, with a brandy and soda in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Both of them had been provided by Kurt Vogel. He was not even tied up. But there the free hospitality ended, for Vogel kept one hand obtru­sively in his jacket pocket, and so did Arnheim.

Simon Templar allowed himself a few more moments to digest the profound smoothness of the ambush. He had been fairly caught, and he admitted it—caught by a piece of machiavellian strategy that was ingenious enough to have netted even such a wary bird as himself without disgrace. Oh, it had been exceed­ingly smooth; a bait that flesh and blood and human feeling could scarcely have resisted. And the climax had supervened with an accuracy of co-ordination that could hardly have been slicker if it had been rehearsed—from which he deduced that it proba­bly had. If he had been unprepared, the seaman with the belay­ing-pin would have got him; if he was warned, Arnheim had his chance . . .

"And the Professor?" he asked.

Vogel lifted his shoulders.

"Unfortunately the fault was traced too late, Mr Templar."

"So you knew," said the Saint softly.

The other's thin lips widened.

"Of course. When you were photographed in Dinard—you remember? I received the answer to my inquiry this morning. You were with us when I opened the telegram. That was when I knew that there would have to be an accident."

Naturally. When once the Saint was known, a man like Vogel would not have run the risk of letting the Professor be warned, or snatched out of his power. He had been ready in every detail for the emergency—was there anything he had not been ready for? . . . Simon had a moment's harrowing vision of that naive and kindly man gasping out his life down there in the cold gloom of the sea. and the steel frosted in his blue eyes . . .

He thought of something else. Loretta's piercing cry; the last voice he had heard before he was knocked down, still rang through his aching head. If he had been known since the morn- . ing, the stratagem had had no object in making him give himself away. But it had provided a subsidiary snare for Loretta while it was achieving the object of disarming him. And she also had been caught. Simon acknowledged every refinement of the con­spiracy with inflexible resolution. Kurt Vogel had scooped the pool in one deal, with the most perfectly stacked deck of cards that the Saint had ever reviewed in a lifetime of going up against stacked decks.

He realised that Vogel was watching him, performing the sim­ple task of following his thoughts; and smiled with unaltered coolness.

"So where," he murmured, "do you think we go from here?"

"That depends on you," said Vogel.

He put a match to his cigar and sat on the arm of a chair, leaning forward until the Saint was sitting under the shadow of his great eagle's beak. Looking at him with the same lazy smile still on his lips, Simon was aware of the vibration of the power­ful engines, and saw out of the corner of his eye that a seaman was standing at the wheel, with his back to them, his eyes intent upon the compass card. Wherever they were going, at any rate they were already on their way . . .

"You have given me a good deal of trouble, Templar. Not by your childish interference—that would be hardly worth talking about—but by an accident for which it was responsible."

"You mean the Professor?" Simon suggested grittily.

Vogel snapped his fingers.

"No. That's nothing. Your presence merely caused me to get rid of him a little earlier than I should otherwise have done. He would have come to the same end, anyway, within the next few weeks. The accident I am referring to is the one which hap­pened last night."

"Your amateur burglar?"

"My burglar. I should hardly call him an amateur—as a mat­ter of fact he was one of the best safe-breakers in Europe. An invaluable man . . . And therefore I want him back."

The Saint sipped his brandy.

"Birdie," he said gently, "you're calling the wrong number. What you want is a spiritualist."

"You were telling the truth, then?"

"I always do. My Auntie Ethel used to say——"

"You killed him?"

"That's a crude way of putting it. If the Professor had an unfortunate accident this afternoon, so did your boy friend last night."

"And then you took him ashore?"

"No. That was the only part of my story where I wandered a little way from the truth. A bloke with my reputation can't afford to deliver dead bodies at police stations, even if they died of old age—not without wasting a lot of time and answering a lot of pointed questions. So we gave him a sailor's funeral. We rowed him out some way from the harbour and fed him to the fish."

The other's eyes bored into him like splinters of black marble, as if they were trying to split open his brain and impale the first fragment of a lie; but Simon met them with the untroubled steadiness of a clear conscience. And at last Vogel drew back a little.

"I believe you. I suspected that there was some truth in your story when you first told it. That is why you are alive now."

"You're too generous, Birdie."

"But how long you will remain alive is another matter."

"I knew there was a catch in it somewhere," said the Saint, and inhaled thoughtfully from his cigarette.

Vogel got up and walked over to one of the broad windows; and Simon transferred his contemplative regard to Otto Arn­heim, estimating how long it might take him to bridge the dis­tance between them. While Vogel and the man at the wheel both had their backs turned to the room, could a very agile man . . . ?

And Simon knew that he couldn't. Reclining as he was in the depths of one of those luxuriously streamlined armchairs, he couldn't even hope to get up on his feet before he was filled full of lead. He tried hauling himself up experimentally, as if in search of an ashtray, and Arnheim had a gun thrusting out at him before he was even sitting upright. The Saint dropped his ash on the carpet and lay back again, scratching his leg rumina­tively. At least the knife strapped to his calf was still there—if it came to a pinch and the opportunity offered, he might do some­thing with that. But even while he knew that his life would be a speculative buy at ten cents in the open market, he was being seized with an overpowering curiosity to know why Vogel had left it even that nominal value.

After about a minute Vogel turned round and came back.

"You are responsible for the loss of one of my best men," he said with peremptory directness. "It will be difficult to replace him, and it may take considerable time. Unfortunately, I cannot afford to wait. But fortunately, I have you here instead."

"So we can still play cut-throat," drawled the Saint.

Vogel stood looking down at him impassively, the cigar glow­ing evenly between his teeth.

"Just now you wanted to know where we were going, Templar. The answer is that we are going to a point a little way south­west of the Casquet Lighthouse. When we stop again there, we shall be directly over the wreck of the Chalfont Castle—you will remember the ship that sank there in March. There are five mil­lion pounds' worth of bullion in her strong-room which I intend to remove before the official salvage operations are begun. The only difficulty is that your clumsiness has deprived me of the only member of my crew who could have been relied upon to open the strong-room. I'm hoping that that is where your inter­ference will prove to have its compensations. I said that the man you killed was one of the best safe-breakers in Europe. But I have heard that the Saint is one of the greatest experts in the world."

So that was it ... Simon dropped his cigarette-end into his empty glass, and took out his case to replace it. A miniature power plant was starting up under his belt and sending a new and different tingle along his arteries.

It was his turn to follow Vogel's thoughts, and the back trail was blazed and signposted liberally enough.

"You want me to go down and give a demonstration?" he said lightly, and Vogel nodded.

"That is what I intend you to do."

"In the bathystol?"

"That won't be necessary. The Chalfont Castle is lying in twenty fathoms, and an ordinary diving suit will be quite sufficient."

"Are you offering me a partnership?"

"I'm offering you a chance to help your partner."

Something inside the Saint turned cold. Perhaps it was not until he heard that last quiet flat sentence that he had realised how completely Vogel had mastered the situation. Every twist and turn of strategy fitted together with the geometrical exacti­tude of a jigsaw puzzle. Vogel hadn't missed one finesse. He had dominated every move of the opposition with the arrogant ease of a Capablanca playing chess with a kindergarten school.

Simon Templar had never known the meaning of surrender; but at that moment, in the full appreciation of the supreme gen­eralship against which he had pitted himself, the final understanding of how efficiently the dice had been cogged, he was as near to admitting the hopelessness of his challenge as he would ever be. All he had left was the indomitable spirit that would keep him smiling and fighting until death proved to his satisfac­tion that he couldn't win all the time. It hadn't been proved yet . . . He looked fearlessly into the alabaster face of the man in front of him, and told himself that it had still got to be proved.

"And what happens if I refuse?" he asked quietly.

Vogel shrugged.

"I don't need to make any melodramatic threats. You are intelligent enough to be able to make them for yourself. I prefer to assume that you will agree. If you do what I tell you, Loretta will be put ashore as soon as it is convenient—alive."

"Is that all?"

"I don't need to offer any more."

The answer was calm, uncompromising; blood-chilling in its ruthless economy of detail. It left volumes unsaid, and expressed every necessary word of them.

Simon looked at him for a long time.

"You've got all these situations down to their lowest common denominator, haven't you?" he said, very slowly. "And what inducement have I got to take your word for anything?"

"None whatever," replied Vogel carelessly. "But you will take it, because if you refuse you will certainly be dead within the next half-hour, and while you are alive you can always hope and scheme and believe in miracles. It will be interesting to watch a few more of your childish manoeuvres." He studied his watch, and glanced out of the forward windows. "You have about fifteen minutes to make your choice."

VII. HOW SIMON AND LORETTA TALKED TOGETHER,

AND LORETTA CHOSE LIFE

"ONCE upon a time," said the Saint, "there was a lugubrious yak named Elphinphlopham, who grazed on the plateaus of Tibet and meditated over the various philosophies and religions of the world. After many years of study and investigation he eventually decided that the only salvation for his soul lay in the Buddhist faith, and he was duly received into the Eightfold Path by the Grand Lama, who was fortunately residing in the district. It was then revealed to Elphinphlopham that the approved method of attaining Nirvana was to spend many hours a day sitting in a most uncomfortable position, especially for yaks, whilst engaging in an ecstatic contemplation of the navel. Dutifully searching for this mystic umbilicus, the unhappy Elphinphlopham discovered for the first time that his abdomen was completely overgrown with the characteristic shaggy mane of his species; so that it was physically impossible for him to fix his eyes upon the prescribed organ, or indeed for him to discover whether nature had ever endowed him with this indispensable adjunct to the Higher Thought. This awful doubt worried Elphinphlopham so badly——"

"Nothing worries you very much, does it?" said Loretta gently.

The Saint smiled.

"My dear, I gave that up after the seventh time I was told I had about ten minutes to live. And I'm still alive."

He lay stretched out comfortably on the bunk, with his hands behind his head and the smoke spiralling up from his cigarette. It was the same cabin in which he had knocked out Otto Arnheim not so long ago—the same cabin from which he had so successfully rescued Steve Murdoch. With the essential dif­ference that this time he was the one in need of rescuing, and there was no one outside who would be likely to do the job. He recognised it as Kurt Vogel's inevitable crowning master-stroke to have sent him down there, with Loretta, while he made the choice that had been offered him. He looked at the steady hu­mour in her grey eyes, the slim vital beauty of her, and knew by the breathless drag of his heart how accurately that master‑stroke had been placed; but he could never let her know.

She sat on the end of the bunk, leaning against the bulkhead and looking down at him, with her hands clasped across her knees. He could see the passing of time on her wrist watch.

"How long do you think we shall live now?" she said.

"Oh, indefinitely—according to Birdie. Until I'm a toothless old gaffer dribbling down my beard, and you're a silver-haired duenna of the Women's League of Purity. If I do this job for him, he's ready to send us an affectionate greeting card on our jubilee."

"If you believe him."

"And you don't."

"Do you?"

Simon twitched his shoulders. He thought of the bargain which he had really been offered, and kept his gaze steadfastly on the ceiling.

"Yes. In a way I think he'll keep his word."

"He murdered Yule."

"For the bathystol. So that nobody else should have it. But no clever crook murders without good reason, because that's only adding to his own dangers. What would he gain by getting rid of us?"

"Silence," she said quietly.

He nodded.

"But does he really need that any more? You told me that some people had known for a long time that this racket existed. The fact that we're here tells him that we've linked him up with it. And that means that we've got friends outside who know as much as we know."

"He knows who I am, then?"

"No. Only that you've been very inquisitive, and that you tried to warn me. Doubtless he thinks you're part of my gang— people always credit me with a gang."

"So he'd let you go, knowing who you are?"

"Knowing who I am, he'd know I wouldn't talk about him to the police."

"So he'd let you go to come back with some more of your gang and shoot him up again?"

Simon turned his head to cock an eye at her. She must not know. He must not be drawn further into argument. Already, with that cool courageous wit of hers, she had him blundering.

"Are you cross-examining me, woman?" he demanded quizzi­cally.

"I want an answer."

"Well, maybe he thinks that I'll have had enough."

"And maybe he believes in fairies."

"I do. I saw a beautiful one in Dinard. He had green lacquered toe-nails."

"You're not very convincing."

The Saint raised himself a little from the pillow, and shook the ash from his cigarette. He met her eyes without wavering.

"I'm convinced, anyway," he said steadily. "I'm going to do the job."

She looked at him no less steadily.

"Why are you going to do the job?"

"Because it's certain death if I don't, and by no means certain if I do. Also because I'll go a long way for a new sensation, and this will be the first strong-room I've ever cracked in a diving suit."

Her hands unclasped from her knees, and she opened her bag to take out a cigarette. He propped himself up on one elbow to light it for her. Then he took her hand and held it. She tilted her golden-chestnut head back against the bulkhead, and a shaft of sunlight through the porthole lay across her face so that she looked like a fallen angel catching the last light from heaven. He had no regrets.

"We have had one or two exciting days," she said.

"Probably we've had exciting lives."

"You have."

"And you. If I can imagine all you haven't told me ... You're not a bit like a detective, Loretta."

"What should I be?"

He shrugged.

"Tougher?" he said.

"Don't you think I'm tough?"

"Yes. I know you are. But not all through."

"Ought I to be an ogre?"

"You couldn't. Not with a mouth like yours. And yet . . ."

"I oughtn't to have a heart."

"Perhaps."

"I know. I must get rid of it. Do you think there'd be any second-hand market for it?"

"I could introduce you to a second-rate buccaneer who'd make a bid."

She laughed.

"And yet you're not everything that a second-rate buccaneer ought to be—not as I've known them."

"Tell me."

She considered him for a while, with a shadow of wistfulness in her mocking gaze that made him aware of his own hunger, though her parted lips still smiled.

"You're kind," she said simply, "and you want so much that you can never have. You have an honour that honest people couldn't understand. You're not fighting against laws: you're fighting against life. You'd tear the world to pieces to find some­thing that's only in your own mind; and when you'd got it you'd find it was just a dream. . . . Besides, you don't talk out of the side of your mouth enough."

He was silent for a moment.

"I expect I could cultivate that," he said at length, and sat up so that he could put her hand to his lips. "Otherwise, we aren't so different. We both wanted something that wasn't there, and we set out to find it—in our own ways."

"And now we've found plenty." She glanced out of the port­hole, and turned back to him thoughtfully. "We'll probably both be down somewhere in the sea before the sun comes up again, Saint. . . . It's a funny sort of thought, isn't it? I've always thought it must be so exasperating to die. You must always leave so much unfinished."

"You're not afraid."

"Neither are you."

"I've so much less to be afraid of."

She closed her eyes for a second.

"Oh, dishonour! I think I should hate that, with death after it."

"But suppose it had been a choice," he said conversationally. "You know the old story-book formula. The heroine always votes for death. Do you think she really would?"

"I think I should like to live," she said slowly. "There are other things to live for, aren't there? You can keep your own honour. You can rebuild your pride. Life can go on for a long while. You don't burn your house down because a little mud has been trodden into the floor."

Simon looked over his shoulder. The sea had turned paler in the glassy calm of the late afternoon, and the sky was without a cloud, a vast bowl of blue-tinted space stretching through leagues of unfathomable clearness beyond the sharp edge of the horizon.

"Meanwhile," he said flippantly, "we might get a bit more morbid if I told you some more about the horrible dilemma of Elphinphlopham."

She shook her head.

"No."

"You're right," he said soberly. "There are more important things to tell you."

"Such as?"

"Why I should fall in love with you so quickly."

"Weren't you just taking advantage of the garden?" she said, with her grey eyes on his face.

"It may have been that. Or maybe it was the garden taking advantage of me. Or maybe it was you taking advantage of both. But it happened."

"How often has it happened before?"

He looked at her straightly.

"Many times."

"And how often could it happen again?"

His lips curved with the fraction of a sardonic grin. Vogel had never promised him life—had never even troubled to help him delude himself that his own life would be included in the bargain. Whether he opened the strong-room of the Chalfont Castle or not, Vogel had given his sentence.

Simon Templar had had the best of outlawry. He had loved and romanced, dreamed and philandered and had his fling, and loved again; and he had come to believe that love shared the impermanence of all adventures. Of all the magnificent mad­nesses of youth he had lost only one—the power to tell himself, and to believe, that the world could be summed up and completed in one love. Yet, for the first time in his life, he could tell the lie and believe that it could be true.

"I don't think it'll happen again," he said.

But she was laughing quietly, with an infinite tenderness in her eyes.

"Unless a miracle happens," she said. "And who's going to provide one?"

"Steve Murdoch?" he suggested, and glanced round the bare white cabin. "This is the dungeon I fished him out of. He really ought to return the compliment."

"He'll be in St Peter Port by now. ... But this boat is the only address he's got for me, and he won't know where we've gone. And I suppose Vogel won't be going back that way."

"Two friends of mine back there have some idea where we've gone. Peter Quentin and Roger Conway. They're staying at the Royal. But I forgot to bring my carrier pigeons."

"So we'll have to provide our own miracle?"

"Anyway," said the Saint, "I don't like crowds. And I shouldn't want one now."

He flicked his cigarette-end backwards through the porthole and turned towards her. She nodded.

"Neither should I," she said.

She threw away her own cigarette and gave him both her bands. But she stayed up on her knees, as she had risen, listening to the sounds which had become audible outside. Then she looked out; and he pulled himself up beside her.

The Falkenberg was hove to, no more than a long stone's throw from the Casquet Rocks. The lighthouse, crowning the main islet like a medieval castle, a hundred feet above the water, was so close that he could see one of the lighthouse-keepers leaning over the battlements and looking down at them.

For a moment Simon was puzzled to guess the reason for the stop; and then the sharp clatter of an outboard motor starting up, clear above the dull vibration of the Falkenberg's idling engines, made him glance down towards the water, and he under­stood. The Falkenberg's dinghy had been lowered, and it was even then stuttering away towards the landing stage, manned by Otto Arnheim and three of the crew. As it drew away from the side the Falkenberg got under way again, sliding slowly through the water towards the south.

Simon turned away from the porthole, and Loretta's eyes met him.

"I suppose the lighthouse overlooks the wreck," she said.

"I believe it does," he answered, recalling the chart which he had studied the night before.

Neither of them spoke for a little while. The thought in both their minds needed no elaborating. The staff on the lighthouse might see too much—and that must be prevented. The Saint wondered how drastically the prevention would be done, and had a grim suspicion of the answer. It would be so easy for Arnheim, landing with his crew in the guise of an innocent tripper asking to be shown over the plant. . . .

Simon sat down again on the bunk. His lips were drawn hard and bitter with the knowledge of his helplessness. There was nothing that he could, do. But he would have liked, just once, to feel the clean smash of his fists on Vogel's cold sneering face. . . .

"I guess it's nearly time for my burglary," he said. "It's a grand climax to my career as a detective."

She was leaning back, with her head on his shoulder. Her cheek was against his, and she held his hands to her breasts.

"So you signed on the dotted line, Simon," she said softly.

"Didn't you always know I would?"

"I hoped you would."

"It's been worth it."

She turned her face a little. Presently she said: "I told you I was afraid, once. Do you remember?"

"Are you afraid now?" he asked, and felt the shake of her head.

"Not now."

He kissed her. Her lips were soft and surrendering against his. He held her face in his hands, touched her hair and her eyes, as he had done in the garden.

"Will you always remember me like this?" she said.

"Always."

"I think they're coming."

A key turned in the lock, and he stood up. Vogel came in first, with his right hand still in his side pocket, and two of his crew framed themselves in the doorway behind him. He bowed faintly to the saint, with his smooth face passive and expectant and the great hook of his nose thrust forward. If he was enjoying his triumph of scheming and counter-plot, the exultation was held in the same iron restraint as all his emotions. His black eyes re­mained cold and expressionless.

"Have you made up your mind?" he asked.

Simon Templar nodded. In so many ways he was content.

"I'm ready when you are," he said.

2

They were settling the forty-pound lead weights over his shoulders, one on his back and one on his chest. He was already encased in the heavy rubber-lined twill overall, which covered him completely from foot to neck, with the vulcanised rubber cuffs adjusted on his wrists and the tinned copper corselet in position; and the weighted boots, each of them turning the scale at sixteen pounds, had been strapped on his feet. Another mem­ber of the crew, similarly clad, was explaining the working of the air outlet valve to him before the helmet was put on.

"If you screw up the valve you keep the air in the dress and so you float. If you unscrew it you let out the air, and you sink. When you get to the bottom, you adjust the valve so that you are comfortable. You keep enough air to balance the weights without lifting you off your feet, until it is time to come up. You understand?"

"You have a gift for putting things plainly," said the Saint.

The man grunted and stepped back; and Kurt Vogel stood in front of him.

"Ivaloff will go down with you—in case you should be tempted to forget your position," he explained. "He will also lead you, to the strong-room, which I have shown him on the plans of the ship. He will also carry the underwater hydro-oxygen torch, which will cut through one and a half inches of solid steel—to be used as and when you direct him."

Simon nodded, and drew at the cigarette he was smoking. He fingered an instrument from the kit which he had been examin­ing.

"Those are the tools of the man you killed," said Vogel. "He worked well with them. If there is anything else you need, we will try to supply you."

"This looks like a pretty adequate outfit."

Simon dropped the implement back in the bag from which he had taken it. The brilliance of the afternoon had passed its height, and the sea was like oiled crystal under the lowering sun. The sun was still bright, but it had lost its heat. A few streaks of cloud were drawing long streamers towards the west.

The Saint was looking at the scene more than at Vogel. There was a dry satirical whim in him to remember it—if memory went on to the twilight where he was going. Death in the afternoon. He had seen it so often, and now he had chosen it for himself. There was no fear in him; only a certain cynical peace. It was his one regret that Vogel had brought Loretta out on to the deck with him. He would rather have been spared that last reminder.

"I shall be in communication with both of you by telephone all the time, and I shall expect you to keep me informed of your progress." Vogel was completing his instructions, in his invariable toneless voice, as if he were dealing with some ordinary mat­ter of business. "As soon as you have opened the strong-room, you will help Ivaloff to bring out the gold and load it on to the tackle which will be sent down to you. ... I think that is all?"

He looked at the Saint inquiringly; and Simon shrugged.

"It's enough to be going on with," he said; and Vogel stood aside and signed to the man who waited beside him with the helmet.

The heavy casque was put over the Saint's head, settled in the segmental neck rings on the corselet, and secured with a one-eighth turn; after which a catch on the back locked it against accidental unscrewing. Through the plate-glass window in the front Simon watched the same process being performed on Ivaloff, and saw two seamen take the handles of the reciprocat­ing air pump which had been brought out on deck. His breathing became tainted with a faint odour of oil and rubber. . . .

"Can you hear me?"

It was Vogel's voice, reverberating metallically through the telephone.

"Okay," answered the Saint mechanically, and heard his own voice booming hollowly in his ears.

Ivaloff beckoned to him; and he stood up and walked clumsily to the stern. A section of the taffrail had been removed to give them a clear passage, and a sort of flat cradle had been slung from the end of the boom from which the bathystol had been lowered. They stepped on to it and grasped the ropes, and in another moment they were swinging clear of the deck and com­ing down over the water.

Taking his last look round as they went down, Simon caught sight of the outboard coming back, a speck creeping over the sea from the north-west; and he watched it with an arctic stillness in his eyes. So, doubtless, the lighthouse had been dealt with, and two more innocent men had gone down perplexedly into the shadows, not knowing why they died. Before long, probably, he would be able to tell them. . . .

Then the water closed over his window, and, as it closed, seemed to change startlingly from pale limpid blue to green. In an instant all the light and warmth of the world were blotted out, leaving nothing but that dim emerald phosphorescence. Looking up, he could see the surface of the water like a ceiling of liquid glass rolling and wrinkling in long slow undulations, but none of the crisp warm sparkle which played over it under the sun came through into the weird viridescent gloaming through which they were sinking down. Up over his head he could see the keel of the Falkenberg glued in bizarre truncation to that fluid awning, the outlines growing vaguer and darker as it receded.

They were sinking through deeper and deeper shades of green into an olive-green semi-darkness. There was a thin slight singing in his ears, an impression of deafness: he swallowed, closing his nasal passages, exactly as he would have done in coming down in an aeroplane from a height, and his ear-drums plopped back to normal. A long spar rose out of the green gloom to meet them, and he realised suddenly that it was a mast: he looked down and saw the dim shapes of the funnels rising after it, slipping by ... the white paintwork of the upper decks.

The grating on which they stood jarred against the rail of the promenade deck, and their descent ceased. Ivaloff was clam­bering down over the rail, and Simon followed him. In spite of all the weight of his gear, he felt curiously light and buoyant— almost uncomfortably so. Each time he moved he felt as if his whole body might rise up and float airily away.

"Unscrew your valve."

Ivaloff's gruff voice cracked in his helmet, and he realised that the telephone wiring connected them together as well as keeping them in communication with the Falkenberg. Simon obeyed the instruction, and felt the pressure of water creeping up his chest as the suit deflated, until Ivaloff tapped on his hel­met and told him to stop.

The feeling of excessive buoyancy disappeared with the reduction of the air. As they moved on, he found that the weights with which he was loaded just balanced the buoyancy of his body, so that he was not conscious of walking under a load; and the air inside his helmet was just sufficient to relieve his shoul­ders of the burden of the heavy corselet. Overcoming the resistance of the water itself was the only labour of movement, and that was rather like wading through treacle.

In that ghostly and fatiguing slow-motion they went down through the ship to the strong-room. It was indescribably eerie, an unforgettable experience, to trudge down the carpeted main stairway in that dark green twilight, and see tiny fish flitting between the balusters and sea-urchins creeping over a chan­delier; to pick his way over scattered relics of tragedy on the floor, and see queer creatures of the sea scuttle and crawl and rocket away as his feet disturbed them; to stand in front of the strong-room door, presently, and see a limpet firmly planted beside the lock. To feel the traces of green scum on the door under his finger-tips, and remember that a hundred and twenty feet of water was piled up between him and the frontiers of hu­man life. To see the uncouth shape of Ivaloff looming beside him, and realise that he was its twin brother—a weird, lumber­ing, glassy-eyed, cowled monster moving at the dictation of Si­mon Templar's brain. . . .

The Saint knelt down and opened his kit of tools, and spoke into the telephone transmitter:

"I'm starting work."

Vogel was reclining in a deck chair beside the loud speaker, studying his finger-nails. He gave no answer. The slanting rays of the sun left his eyes in deep shadow and laid chalky high-lights on his cheekbones: his face was utterly sphinx-like and inscruta­ble. Perhaps he showed neither anxiety nor impatience because he felt none.

Arnheim had returned, clambering up from the dinghy like an ungainly bloated frog; and the three hard-faced seamen with him had hauled it up on the davits and brought it inboard before moving aft to join the knot of men at the taffrail.

Vogel had looked up briefly at his lieutenant.

"You had no trouble?"

"None."

"Good."

And he had gone back to the idle study of his finger-nails, breathing gently on them and rubbing them slowly on the palm of the opposite hand, while Arnheim rubbed a handkerchief round the inside of his collar and puffed away to a chair in the background. The single question which Vogel had asked had hardly been a question at all, it had been more of a statement challenging contradiction; his acceptance of the reply had been simply an expression of satisfaction that the statement was not contested. There was no suggestion of praise in it. His orders had been given, and there was no reason why they should have mis­carried.

Loretta stared down into the half-translucent water and felt as if she was watching the inexorable march of reality turn into the cold deliberateness of nightmare. Down there in the sunless liq­uid silence under her eyes, under the long measured roll of that great reach of water, men were living and moving, incredibly, unnaturally, linked with the life-giving air by nothing but those fragile filaments of rubber hose which snaked over the stern; the Saint's strong lean hands, whitened with the cold and pressure, were moving deftly towards the accomplishment of their most fantastic crime. Working with skilled sure touches to lay open the most fabulous store of plunder that could ever have come in the path even of his amazing career—while his life stood helpless at the mercy of the two men who bent in monotonous alterna­tion at the handles of the air compressor, and waited on the whim of the impassive hooknosed man who was polishing his nails in the deck chair. Working with the almost certain knowl­edge that his claim to life would run out at the moment when his errand was completed.

She knew. . . . What had she told him, once? "To do your job, to keep your mouth shut, and to take the conse­quences" . . . And in her imagination she could see him now, even while he was working towards death, his blue eyes alert and absorbed, the gay fighting mouth sardonic and un­afraid, as it had been while they talked so quietly and lightly in the cabin. . . . She could smile, in the same way that he had smiled goodbye to her—a faint half-derisive half-wistful tug at the lips that wrote its own saga of courage and mocked it at the same time. . . .

She knew he would open the strong-room; knew that he had made his choice and that he would go through with it. He would never hesitate or make excuses.

A kind of numbness had settled on her brain, an insensibility that was a taut suspension of the act of living rather than a dull anaesthesia. She had to look at her watch to pin down the leaden drag of time in bald terms of minutes and seconds. Until his voice came through the loud speaker again to announce the fulfilment of his bargain, the whole universe stood still. The Falkenberg lifted and settled in the stagnant swell, the two automatons at the air-pump bent rhymically at the wheels. Vogel rubbed his nails gently on his palms, the sun climbed fractionally down the western sky; but within her and all around her there seemed to be a crushing stillness, an unbearable quiet.

It was almost impossible to believe that only forty minutes went by before the Saint's voice came again through the loud speaker, ending the silence and the suspense with one cool steady sentence: "The strong-room is open."

3

Arnheim jumped as if he had been prodded, and got up to come waddling over. Vogel only stopped polishing his nails, and turned a switch in the telephone connection box beside him. His calm check-up went back over the line.

"Everything is all right, Ivaloff?"

"Yes. The door is open. The gold is here."

"What do you want us to send down?"

"It will take a long time to move—there is a great deal to carry. Wait. ..."

The loud speaker was silent. One could imagine the man twenty fathoms down, leaning against the water, working around in laboured exploration. Then the guttural voice spoke again.

"The strong-room is close to the main stairway. Above the stairway there is a glass dome. We can go up on deck again and break through the glass, and you can send down the grab. That way, it will not be so long. But we cannot stay down here more than a few minutes. We have been here three quarters of an hour already, which is too long for this depth."

Vogel considered this for a moment.

"Break down the glass first, and then we will bring you up," he directed, and turned to the men who were standing around by the winch. "Calvieri—Orbel—you will get ready to go down as soon as these two come up. Grondin, you will attend to the grab——"

For some minutes he was issuing detailed orders, allotting duties in his cold curt voice with impersonal efficiency. He shook off the lassitude in which he had been waiting without losing a fraction of the dispassionate calm which laid its terrifying de­tachment on everything he did. He became a mere organising brain, motionless and almost disembodied himself, lashing the cogs of his machine to disciplined movement.

And as he finished, Ivaloff's voice came through again.

"We have made a large enough opening in the dome. Now we should come up."

Vogel nodded, and a man stepped to the controls of the winch. And at last Vogel got up.

He got up, straightening his trousers and settling his jacket with the languid finickiness of a man who has nothing much to do and nothing of importance on his mind. And as casually and expressionlessly as the same man might have wandered towards an ashtray to dispose of an unconsidered cigarette-end, he strolled over the yard or two that separated him from the air pump, and bent over one of the rubber tubes.

His approach was so placid and unemotional that for a mo­ment even Loretta, with her eyes riveted mutely on him, could not quite believe what she was seeing. Only for a moment she stared at him, wondering, unbelieving. And then, beyond any doubt, she knew. ...

Her eyes widened in a kind of blind horror. Why, she could never have said. She had seen death before, had faced it herself only a little while ago, had lived with it; had stood pale and silent on that same deck while Professor Yule died. But not until then had she felt the same frozen clutch on her heart, the same dumb stab of anguish, the same reckless annihilation of her re­straint. She didn't know what she was doing, didn't think, made no conscious movement; and yet suddenly, somehow, in another instant of time, she was beside Vogel, grasping his wrist and arm, tearing his hand away. She heard someone sobbing: "No! No! Not that!"—and realised in a dazed sort of way that she was hearing her own voice.

"No! No!"

"My dear Loretta!"

He had straightened up, was looking down at her with his hooked waxen face cold and contemptuously critical. She became aware that she was breathing as if she had just run to him from a great distance, that her heart was pounding against her ribs like a deliriously wielded hammer, that there must have been a wild stupidity in her gaze. And she realised at the same time that the winch had stopped again.

"Why have you done that?" she gasped.

"Done what?"

She was shaking his arm unconsciously.

"Stopped bringing them up."

"My dear girl!" His tone was bland and patronising. "That is the normal process. When a man has been working for three quarters of an hour at the depth where they have been, his blood becomes saturated with nitrogen. If he was brought up quickly and the pressure was suddenly taken off, the gas would form bubbles in his blood like it does in champagne when the cork is drawn. He would get a painful attack of diver's paralysis. The pressure has to be relieved gradually-—there is a regular time­table for it. Our divers have been stopped at thirty feet. They will rest there for five minutes; then for ten minutes at twenty feet; then for fifteen minutes——"

She knew that he was trying to make her feel foolish, but she was too sure of her knowledge to care.

"That's not all you were doing," she said.

"What else?"

"You were going to take one of those airlines off the pump."

"My dear——"

"Weren't you?"

He looked at her impassively, as if he was playing with the possible answers at his disposal, deliberating their probable effect on her rather than their accuracy. She shrugged bitterly.

"Oh, I know. You don't need to lie. You were going to kill him."

A faint flicker of expression, the gleam of passionless calculat­ing cruelty which she had seen before, passed over his face.

"And if I was? How deeply will his death hurt you?"

"I should be hurt in a way you couldn't understand."

He waited. She had an uncanny spine-chilling feeling that he was not sane—that he was giving rein to the solitary sadistic megalomania that was branded on all his actions, playing with her like a cat and savouring the lustful pleasure of watching her agony. Searching for his eyes under the heavy shadow of his brows, she suddenly found them devouring her with a weird rigidity that struck her cold. She found herself speaking dis­jointedly, breathlessly again, trying to drown the new horror in a babble of words that she would never be able to utter unless she let them pour blindly out.

"I know why he went down. I know why he opened that strong-room for you. He wouldn't have done that to save his life —not his own life. He wouldn't have believed you. He tried to tell me that that was why he was going to do it, but couldn't make me believe it. He knew you meant to kill him as soon as it was done. He wasn't afraid. I saw him. I talked to him. He lied to me. He was splendid. But I knew. You offered him something that he could believe. You made him do it for me!"

"Really, my dear Loretta, this is so dramatic. I must have misunderstood our friend Templar. So he becomes the perfect gentle knight, dying to save a lady's honour——"

"Yes. I told you that you wouldn't understand."

He gave a short harsh exhalation of breath that could not have been called a laugh.

"You little fool! He never did anything of the kind."

Then she remembered.

"No. But I told him that I should like to live. He did it to save my life."

"The perfect knight again!"

"Something that you could never understand. I know now. That's the truth, isn't it? You made that bargain with him. My life against his—and a little work. Didn't you?"

He sighed.

"It would have been such a pity not to give such a classical chivalry its chance," he said.

The sneer brought the blood to her cheeks. She felt a disgust that was almost petrifying. The mask which he had worn since she had first known him was gone altogether now. The smooth imperturbability of his face was no longer the veneer of impene­trable self-possession—it was the fixed grimace of a demon gloat­ing over its own inhumanity. Now she had seen his eyes. . . .

"He never had any right to bargain for me," she said, and tried not to let her voice tremble. "I didn't ask him for any sac­rifice—I wouldn't take any. I'm here, and I can make my own bargain. The Saint's done all you wanted him to. Why not let him go?"

"To come back presently and interfere with me again?"

"You could make it a condition that he said nothing—that he forgot everything he knew. He'd keep his word."

"Of course—the perfect knight. . . . How ridiculous you are!"

"Did you always think that?"

He stopped short, with his head on one side. Then his cold reptilian hand went up and slowly touched her face.

"You know what I think of you, my dear. I told you, once. You were trying to deceive me. You tried to destroy me with your beauty, but you would have given me nothing. And yet for you I took risks—I placed myself in fantastic danger—I gam­bled everything—to keep you beside me and see how treacherous you could be. But!"—his hand suddenly dropped on her arm in a grasp so brutal that she almost cried out—"I had my own idea about how treacherous I would allow you to be, and how you would make amends for it later."

He dragged her up against him and ravished her mouth, briefly, cold-bloodedly. She stood unresisting and still as death until he thrust her away.

"Now," he said, "you are not in a position to make bargains."

He stooped over the air-line again. She tore at his hand, and he stood up.

"If you are going to be a nuisance," he said in his supercilious expiring voice, "I shall have you taken away."

"You can't do it!" she panted. "You haven't everything you want yet. If you kill him, you could never have it."

"I have you."

"Only as a prisoner. You can do what you like with me, I suppose. What you want, you can take by force. If that's all you want——"

"It will be enough."

"But I could give . . ."

"What?"

He was staring at her, seized with a new stillness. There was a thread of moisture on his thin lips, and the high glaze on his cheekbones shone with a dull white lustre. His eyes squinted slightly, smouldering like dark coals. His soft clammy hands gripped her shoulders.

"What?" he repeated.

She could not look at him, or her courage would not be enough. Already she felt denied, shuddering at the dank chill of his touch. She closed her eyes.

"If you let him go I will stay with you willingly—I will be to you anything that you like."

4

Altogether they took over forty minutes to come up—nearly as long as they had spent on the bottom. It was a wearisome business going through the gradual decompression, hanging suspended in the green void through the lengthening pauses, rising a little further and halting for another interregnum of blank inac­tivity. The Saint felt no ill effects from his long submersion other than a growing fatigue, which had become almost over­powering in the last ten minutes when they had been breaking through the glass dome above the stairway. He had never real­ised that the resistance of the water which had to be overcome with every smallest movement could eat up so much strength; fit and strong as he was, he had a dull ache in every limb and a nervous hunger for unhampered movement in all his muscles which made the exasperatingly slow ascent harder to endure than anything that had preceded it. He would have given half the millions which he had uncovered down there for a cigarette, but even that solace was unattainable.

He realised at the same time that he was lucky to be able to experience discomfort. When he stood back from the open door of the strong-room and announced the completion of his work into the microphone beside his mouth, he had waited for the quick blotting out of all sensation. He did not know exactly how it would come, but he believed that it would be swift and certain. He had done all that Vogel required of him; and, beyond that, he survived only as a potential menace, to be logically obliter­ated as soon as possible, before he could do any further damage. Like Loretta, he felt that it must be infuriating to die, leaving so much unfinished, down there in the lonely dark, with none of the drunken exaltation of battle to give it a persuasive glory; but that was what he had gone down to do. When he still lived, he wondered what could have happened to bring him the reprieve.

Had Vogel changed his mind? That was more than the Saint could make himself believe. Or had Vogel begun to wonder whether it would be safe to kill him, when he must be presumed to have associates somewhere who knew as much as he knew and knew also where he had gone, who would make inquiries and take action when he didn't come back? The Saint could see practical difficulties in the way of casually bumping himself off which might have made even Kurt Vogel stop to think; and yet he couldn't quite convince himself that Vogel's strategic talents had at last been baffled.

He was alive without knowing why—without knowing how long that delicious surprise could last, but believing that it could not possibly last for long. And yet the instinct of life is so strong that he was more occupied with wondering how he would turn the reprieve to the most profit. Even when he was working down there on the strong-room door, believing that he had no hope of seeing the light again, that same queer instinct of survival had made him prepare for the impossible chance. Now, when he moved his arm, he could feel a wet discomfort in his sleeve that was more than compensated by the small steel instrument which slithered against his wrist—an instrument which he had not pos­sessed when he left the deck of the Falkenberg, which might yet be worth more to him than all the gold of the Chalfont Cas­tle. . . .

The water above his head thinned and lightened, became a mere film which broke against his helmet. The weight on his shoulders became real again, and the massive boots dragged at his feet. Then expert hands unlocked the helmet and detached it from the breastplate, and he filled his lungs with the clean sea air and felt the breath of the sea on his face.

Vogel stood in front of him.

"Perhaps you were justified in calling my former assistant an amateur," he remarked urbanely. "Judged by your own excep­tional standard, I fear he was not so efficient as I used to think."

"It's hardly fair to compare anyone with me," murmured the Saint modestly. "And so where do we go after the compliments, Birdie?"

"You will go to your cabin below while I consider what is to be done with you."

He left the Saint with a satirical bow, and went on to give further instructions to the two replacement divers who were waiting to have the straps tightened on their corselets. Simon sat on a stool and loosened the cords and straps of his boots, while his own breastplate was taken off. As he wriggled out of the cum­bersome twill and rubber suit he managed to get the instrument in his sleeve into his hand, and during the process of peeling off the heavy woollen sweater and pants with which he had been provided to protect him against the cold of the water he managed to transfer it undetected into an inside pocket of his clothes. He was not dead yet—not by a million light-years. . . .

He fished out a crumpled packet of cigarettes and lighted one while he sought a sign from Loretta. The smoke caressed the hungry tissue of his lungs and sent its narcotic balm stealing gratefully along his nerves; and over by the rail he saw her, slim and quiet and desirable in her scanty white dress, so that it was all he could do not to go over and take her quietly into his arms. Even to see her and to desire her in helpless silence was a part of that supreme ecstasy of the return to life, a delight of sensual survival that had its place with the smell of the sea and the reddening retreat of the sun, a crystallisation of the voluptuous rapture of living; but she only looked at him for a moment, and then turned away again. And then he was seized by the arms and hurried down the companion.

Loretta heard him go, without looking round. She heard the feet of men on the deck, and the whine of the winch as the sec­ond pair of divers were lowered. Presently she heard Arnheim's fat voice:

"How much longer will this take?"

And Vogel's reply:

"I don't know. Probably we shall have to send Ivaloff down again, with someone else, when Orbel and Calvieri are tired. I expect it will be dusk before we can reach St Martin."

"Are they expecting us?"

"I shall have to tell them. Will you attend to the telephone?"

Loretta rested her elbows on the rail and her chin on her hands. Her face slid down between her hands till her fingers combed through her hair. She heard without hearing, gazed over the sea and saw nothing.

A touch on her shoulder roused her. She shivered and straight­ened up, shaking the hair out of her eyes. Her face was white with a sort of lifeless calm.

Vogel stood beside her, with his hands in his pockets.

"You are tired?" he said, in his cold grating voice.

She shook her head.

"Oh, no. It's just—rather dull, waiting, isn't it? I suppose you're interested in the work, but—I wish they'd be quick. We've been here for hours. . . ."

She was talking aimlessly, for the sake of talking, for the sake of any distraction that would reassure her of her own courage. His thin lips edged outwards in what might have been a smile.

"Would you like a drink?"

"Yes."

He touched her arm.

"Come."

He led her into the wheelhouse and pressed the bell for a stew­ard. As the man entered silently, he said: "A highball?—I think that would be your national prescription."

She nodded, and he confirmed the order with a glance. He held out an inlaid cigarette-box and struck a match. She inhaled the smoke and stood up to him without recoiling, with her head lifted in that white lifeless pride. Her heart was beating in quick leaden strokes, but her hand was steady.

Was it to be so soon? She wished it could be over before she was weakened by her fear; and yet the instinct of escape prayed for a respite, as if time could give cold logic a more crushing mastery of her revulsion. What did it amount to after all, this physical sacrifice, this brief humiliation? Her mind, her self that made her a living personality, her soul or heart or whatever it might be called, could not be touched. It was beyond reach of all the assailments of the body for so long as she chose to keep it so. "You don't burn your house down because a little mud has been trodden into the floor." She, her essential self, could triumph even in the defeat of the flesh. What a lot of exaggerated non­sense was talked about that one crude gesture. . . . And yet her heart throbbed with that leaden pulse before the imminent real­ity.

"Excuse me a moment."

Either he had observed nothing, or he was insensible to her emotions. Without touching her, he turned away and moved over to the bookcases at the after end of the room.

She had her respite. The steward returned, and put down a tray on the table beside her; he poured out a drink and went out again without speaking. Loretta took up the glass and tasted it: after she had sipped, it occurred to her that it might be drugged, and she almost put it down. And then her lips moved in the ghost of a wry grimace. What did it matter?

She looked to see what Vogel was doing. He had taken a chair over to the bookcase and sat down in front of it. The upper shelves had opened like a door, carrying the books with them, and in the aperture behind was the compact instrument panel of a medium-powered radio transmitting station. Vogel had clipped a pair of earphones over his head, and his long white fingers were flitting delicately over the dials—pausing, adjusting, tuning his station with quick and practised touches. Somewhere in the still­ness she could hear the faint whirr of a generator. . . . And then she heard a clearer, sharper, intermittent tapping. Vogel had found his correspondent, and he was sending a message.

The staccato rhythm of the transmitter key pattered into her brain and translated itself almost automatically into letters and words. Like everyone else in Ingerbeck's, she had studied the Morse code as part of her general training: it was second nature to interpret the rattle of dots and dashes, as effortless a perform­ance as if she had been listening to Vogel talking. She did it so instinctively, while the active part of her mind was too turbulent with other thoughts to pay attention, that it was a few seconds before she coordinated what she was hearing.

Dot-dot-dash-dot . . . dot-dot-dash . . . dash-dot-dash-dot . . . She searched through her memory: wasn't that the call signal of the radio station at Cherbourg? Then he was giving his own call signal. Then, with the swift efficiency of a professional operator, he was tapping out his message. A telegram. "Bau­dier, Herqueville. . . . Arrive ce soir vers 9 heures demi. Faites préparer phares ..."

The names meant nothing to her; the message was unimpor­tant—obviously Vogel must have a headquarters somewhere, which he would head for at such a time as this. But the fact that was thundering through her head was the radio itself. It wasn't merely in touch with a similar station at his headquarters—it could communicate openly with Cherbourg, and therefore pre­sumably with any other wireless telegraph receiving station that it could reach. The Niton station in the Isle of Wight, for in­stance, might easily be within range; from which a telegram might be relayed by cable to St Peter Port . . . There seemed to be no question about the acceptance of the message. Ob­viously the Falkenberg was on the list of registered transmitters, like any Atlantic liner. She almost panicked for a moment in trying to recall the signal by which Vogel had identified himself, but she had no need to be afraid. The letters were branded on her memory as if by fire. Then, if she could only gain five minutes alone in the chair where Vogel was sitting . . .

He had finished. He took off the headphones, swung over the main switch in the middle of the panel, turned out the light which illuminated the cupboard, and closed the bookshelf door. It latched with a faint click; and he came towards her again.

"I didn't know you were so well equipped," she said, and hoped he would not notice her breathlessness. .

He did not seem to notice anything—perhaps he was so confident that he did not care. He shrugged.

"It is useful sometimes," he said. "I have just sent a message to announce that we shall soon be on our way."

"Where?"

"To Herqueville—below Cap de la Hague, at the northern end of the Anse de Vauville. It is not a fashionable place, but I have found it convenient for that reason. I have a chateau there where you can be as comfortable as you wish—after to-morrow. Or, if you prefer, we can go for a cruise somewhere. I shall be entirely at your service."

"Is that where you'll put the Saint ashore?"

He pressed up his under lip.

"Perhaps. But that will take time. You understand—I shall have to protect myself."

"If he gives you his word——"

"Of course, that word of a gentleman!" Vogel smiled sarcastically. "But you must not let yourself forget the other knightly virtue: Chivalry . . . He might be unwilling to leave you."

Loretta had put down her glass. Her head ached with the tumultuous racing of her brain; and yet another part of her mind was numb and unresponsive. She had reached a stage of nervous exhaustion where her thoughts seemed to be torn be­tween the turmoil of fever and the blank stupor of collapse. What did anything matter? She passed a hand over her forehead, pushing back her hair, and said hazily: "But he mustn't know."

"Naturally. I should not attempt to reconcile him to our bar­gain. But he will want to know why you are staying with us, and we shall have to find a way to satisfy him. Besides, I have too much to risk . . ."

She half turned her head towards a window, so that she need not look at his smooth gloating face. Her head was throbbing with disjointed thoughts that she could not discipline. Radio. Radio. Peter Quentin. Roger Conway. Orace. Steve Murdoch. The Corsair. At St Peter Port. The Royal Hotel, If only a mes­sage could get through to them . . . And Vogel was still talking, with leisured condescension.

"You understand that I cannot go about with such a cargo as we shall have on board. And there have been other similar car­goes. The banks are no use to me, and they take time to dispose of. Therefore I have my own bank. Down at the bottom of the sea off Herqueville, under thirty feet of water, where no one could find it who did not know the exact bearing, where no one could reach it who did not possess equipment which would be beyond the understanding of ordinary thieves, I have such a treasure in gold and jewels as you have never dreamed of. When I have added to-day's plunder to it there will be nearly twelve millions; and I shall think that it may be time to take it away somewhere where I can enjoy it. It is for you to share—there is nothing in the world that you cannot have. To-night we shall drop anchor above it, and the gold of the Chalfont Castle will be lowered to the same place. I think that perhaps that will be enough. You shall go with me wherever you like, and queens will envy you. But I must see mat Templar cannot jeopardise this treasure."

He was looking at her sidelong; and she knew with a horrible despair that all his excuses were lies. Perhaps she had always known it. There was only one way in which the Saint could cease to be a danger, by Vogel's standards, and that was the way which Vogel would inevitably dictate in the end. But first he would play with them while it pleased him: he would let the Saint live —so long as in that way she might be made easier to enjoy.

"I suppose you must," she said; and she was too weary to argue.

"You will not be sorry."

He was coming closer to her. His hands touched her shoulders, slipped round behind her back; and she felt as if a snake had crawled over her flesh. He was drawing her up to him, and she half closed her eyes. It was a nightmare not to struggle, not to hit madly out at him and feel the clean shock of her young hands striking into his face; but it would have been like hitting a corpse. And what was the use? Even though she knew that he was mocking her with his promises and excuses, she must submit, she must be acquiescent, just as a man obeys the command of a gun even though he knows that it is only taking him to his death —because until the last dreadful instant there is always the delu­sion of life.

His lips were an inch from hers; his black stony eyes burned into her. She could see the waxen glaze of his skin, flawless and tight-drawn as if it had been stretched over a skull, filling her vision. Something seemed to break inside her head—it might have been the grip of the fever—and for a moment her mind ran clear as a mountain stream. And then her head fell back and she went limp in his arms.

Vogel held her for a second, staring at her; and then he put her down in a chair. She lay there with her head lolling sideways and her red lips open, all the warm golden life of her tempting and unconscious; and he gazed at her in hungry triumph for a moment longer before he rang the bell again for the steward.

"We will dine at eight," he said; and the man nodded wood­enly. "There will be smoked salmon, langoustine Grand Duc, Suprême de volatile Bergerette, fraises Mimosa."

"Yes, sir."

"And let us have some of that Château Lafitte 1906."

He dismissed the man with a wave of his hand, and carefully pierced the end of a cigar. On his way out on to the deck he stopped by Loretta's chair and stroked her cheek . . .

All the late afternoon Simon Templar heard the occasional drone of the winch, the heavy tramp of feet on the deck over his head and the mutter of hoarse voices, the thuds and gratings of the incredible cargo coming aboard and being manhandled into place; and he also thought of Peter and Roger and Orace and the Corsair, back in St Peter Port, as Loretta had done. But most of all he was thinking of her, and tormenting himself with unanswerable questions. It was nearly eight o'clock when at last all the noises ceased, and the low-pitched thrum of the engines quivered again under his feet. He looked out of the port-hole, over the sheen of the oily seas streaming by, and saw that they were heading directly away from the purple wall of cloud rimmed with scarlet where the sun was dipping to its rest. A seaman guarded by two others who carried revolvers brought him a tray of food and a glass of wine; and half an hour later the same cortege came back for the tray and removed it without speaking. Simon lighted a cigarette and heard the key turn in the lock after them. For the best part of another hour he sat on the bunk with his knees propped up, leaning against the bulkhead, smoking and thinking, while the shadows spread through the cabin and deepened towards darkness, before he ventured to take out the instrument which Fortune had placed in his hands so strangely while he was opening the strong-room of the Chalfont Castle in the green depths of the sea.

VIII. HOW SIMON TEMPLAR USED HIS KNIFE,

AND KURT VOGEL WENT DOWN TO HIS TREASURE

THE lock surrendered after only five minutes of the Saint's silent and scientific attack.

Not that it had ever had much chance to put up a fight. It was quite a good reliable lock by ordinary domestic standards, a sound and solid piece of mechanism that would have been more than adequate for any conventional purpose, but it had never been constructed to resist an expert probing with the sort of tool which Simon Templar was using.

Simon kissed the shining steel implement ecstatically before he put it away again in his pocket. It was much more than a scrap of cunningly fashioned metal. At that moment it represented the consummation of Vogel's first and only and most staggering mis­take—a mistake that might yet change the places of victory and defeat. By sending him down to open the strong-room, Vogel had given him the chance to select the instrument from the burglar's kit with which he had been provided, and to slip it under the rubber wristbands into the sleeve of his diving dress; by letting him come up alive, Vogel had given him the chance to use it; by giving him the chance to use it, Vogel had violated the first canon of the jungle in which they both lived—that the only enemy from whom you have nothing to fear is a dead enemy ... It was all perfectly coherent and logical, as coherent and logical as any of Vogel's own tactical exercises, lacking only the first cause which set the rest in motion. For two hours Simon had been trying to discover that first cause, and even then he had only a fantastic theory to which he trembled to give credence. But he would find out . . .

A mood of grim and terrible exhilaration settled on him as he grasped the handle of the door and turned it slowly and without sound. At least, whatever the first cause, he had his chance; and it was unlikely that he would have another. Within the next hour or so, however long he could remain at large, his duel with Kurt Vogel must be settled one way or the other, and with it all the questions that were involved. Against him he had all Vogel's generalship, the unknown intellectual quantity of Otto Arnheim, and a crew of at least ten of the toughest twentieth-century pirates who ever sailed the sea; for him he had only his own strength of arm and speed of wit and eye, and the advantage of surprise. The odds were enough to set his mouth in a hard fight­ing line, and yet there was a glimmer of reckless laughter in his eyes that would have flung defiance at ten times the odds. He had spent his life going up against impossible hazards, and he had the knowledge that he could have nothing worse to face than he had faced already.

The latch turned back to its limit, and he drew the door stealth­ily towards him. It came back without a creak; and he peered out into the alleyway through the widening aperture. Opposite him were other doors, all of them closed. He put his head cau­tiously out and looked left and right. Nothing. The crew must have been eating, or recuperating from the day's work in their own quarters: the alleyway was an empty shaft of white paint gleaming in the dim lights which studded it at intervals. And in another second the Saint had closed the door of his prison si­lently behind him and flitted up the after companion on to the deck.

The cool air struck refreshingly on his face after the stuffiness of the cabin. Overhead, the sky was growing dark, and the first pale stars were coming out; down towards the western horizon, where the greyness of the sky merged indistinguishably into the greyness of the sea, they were becoming brighter, and among them he saw the mast-head lights of some small ship running up from the south-west, many miles astern. The creamy wake stretched away into the darkness like a straight white road.

He stood there for a little while in the shadow of the deck­house and absorbed the scene. The only sounds he could hear there were the churning rush of the water and the dull drone of the engines driving them to the east. Above him, the longboom of the grab jutted out at a slight angle, with the claw gear dan­gling loosely lashed to the taffrail; and all around him the wet wooden cases of the bullion from the Chalfont Castle were stacked up against the bulkheads. He screwed an eye round the corner and inspected the port deck. It was deserted; but the air-pump and telephone apparatus were still out there, and he saw four diving suits on their stretchers laid out in a row like steam­rollered dummies with the helmets gathered like a group of decapitated heads close by. Further forward he could see the lights of the wheelhouse windows cutting the deck into strips of light and darkness: he could have walked calmly along to them, but the risk of being prematurely discovered by some member of the crew coming out for a breather was more than he cared to take. Remembering the former occasion on which he had prowled over the ship, he climbed up over the conveniently arranged stairway of about half a million pounds on to the deckhouse roof, and went forward on all fours.

A minute or so later he was lying flat on his tummy on the roof of the streamlined wheelhouse, with the full wind of their twenty knots blowing through his hair, wondering if he could risk a cigarette.

Straight ahead, the scattered lights of the French coast were creeping up out of the dark, below the strip of tarnishing silver which was all that was left of the daylight. He could just see an outline of the black battlements of a rocky coast; there was nothing by which he could identify it, but from what he knew of their course he judged it to be somewhere south of Cap de la Hague. Down on the starboard beam he picked up a pair of winking lights, one of them flashing red and the other red and white, which might have belonged to Port de Diélette . . .

"Some more coffee, Loretta?"

Vogel's bland toneless voice suddenly came to him through one of the open windows; and the Saint drew a deep breath and lowered his head over the edge of the roof to peep in. He only looked for a couple of seconds, but in that time the scene was photographed on his brain to the last detail.

They were all there—Vogel, Arnheim, Loretta. She had put on a backless white satin dress, perfectly plain, and yet cut with that exquisite art which can make ornament seem garish and vulgar. It set off the golden curve of her arms and shoulders with an intoxicating suggestion of the other curves which it concealed, and clung to the slender sculpture of her waist in sheer perfection: beside her, the squat paunchy bulk of Otto Arnheim with his broad bulging shirtfront looked as if it belonged to some obscene and bloated toad. But for the set cold pallor of her face she might have been a princess graciously receiving two favoured ministers: the smooth hawk-like arrogance of Kurt Vogel, in a blue velvet smoking-jacket, pouring out coffee on a pewter tray at a side table, fitted in completely with the illusion. The man standing at the wheel, gazing straight ahead, motionless except for the occasional slight movements of his hands, intruded his presence no more than a waiting footman would have done. They were all there—and what was going to be done about it?

Simon rolled over on his back, listening with half an ear to the spasmodic mutter of absurdly banal conversation, and considered the problem. Almost certainly they were heading for Vogel's local, if not his chief, headquarters: the stacks of bullion left openly on the after deck, and the derrick not yet lashed down and covered with its tarpaulin, ruled out the idea that they were putting into any ordinary port. Presumably Vogel had a house or something close to the sea; he might unload the latest addition to his loot and go ashore himself that night, or he might wait until morning. The Saint realised that he could plan nothing until he knew. To attempt to burst into the wheelhouse and cap­ture the brains of the organisation there without an alarm of any sort being raised was a forlorn hope; to think of corralling the crew, one by one or in batches as he found them, armed only with his knife, without anyone in the wheelhouse hearing an outcry, was out of the question even to a man with Simon Tem­plar's supreme faith in his own prowess. Therefore he must wait for an opportunity or an inspiration; and all the time there was a thread of risk that some member of the crew might have been detailed to keep an eye on him and might discover that he had vanished out of his prison . . .

"The lights, sir."

A new voice jarred into his divided attention, and he realised that it must be the helmsman speaking. He turned over on his elbow and looked out over the bows. The lights of the shore were very close now; and he saw that two new pairs of lights had appeared on the coast ahead, red and very bright, one pair off the port bow and one pair off the starboard. He guessed that they had been set by Vogel's accomplices on shore to guide the Falkenberg between the tricky reefs and shoals to its anchorage.

"Very well." Vogel was answering; and then he was addressing Loretta: "You will forgive me if I send you below, my dear? I fear you might be tempted to try and swim ashore, and you gave us a lot of trouble to find you last time you did that."

"Not with the Saint?"

There was a sudden pleading tremor of fear in her voice which the Saint had never heard there before, and Simon hung over the edge again to see her as Vogel replied.

"Of course, that would be difficult for you. Suppose you go to your own cabin? I will see that you are not locked in any longer than is necessary."

She nodded without speaking, and walked past the steward who had appeared in the doorway. Before she went, Simon had seen the mute embers of that moment's flare of fear in her eyes, and the veiled smirk which had greased through Vogel's reassur­ance of her told him the rest. Once again he stood before the open strong-room of the Chalfont Castle, twenty fathoms down under the tide, wondering why the death that he was expecting did not come; and all the questions that had been fermenting in his mind since then were answered. He could no longer shut out belief from what his brain had been telling him. He knew; and his bowels turned to water. He knew; and the understanding made his knuckles whiten where they gripped the edge of the roof, and burned in his mind like molten lead as he crushed his eyes for a moment into his arm. He was bowed down with an unutterable humility and pride.

He half rose, with the only thought of following and finding her. She at least must be free, whatever he did with his own liberty . . .

And then he realised the madness of the idea. He had no knowledge of where her cabin was, and while he was searching for it he was just as likely to open a cabin occupied by some member of the crew—even if no steward or seaman caught sight of him while he was prowling about below decks. And once he was discovered, whatever hope the gods had given him was gone again. Somehow he must still find the strength to wait, though) his muscles ached with the frightful discipline, until he had a chance to take not one trick alone but the whole grand slam.

"Will you unload the gold to-night?"

It was Arnheim's fat throaty voice; and Simon waited breath­lessly for the reply. It came.

"Yes—it will be safer. The devil knows what information this man Templar has given to his friends. He is more dangerous than all the detective agencies in the world, and it would be fatal to underrate him. Fortunately we shall need to do nothing more for a long time ... It will be a pity to sink the Falkenberg, but I think it will be wise. We can easily fit out a trawler to recover the gold ... As for disposing of it, my dear Otto, that will be your business."

"I made the final arrangements before we left Dinard."

"Then we have very little cause for anxiety."

Vogel's voice came from a different quarter; and the Saint treated himself to another cautious glimpse of the interior set. Vogel had taken over the wheel and was standing up to the open glass panel in the forward bay, a fresh cigar clipped between his teeth and his aquiline black-browed face intent and complacent. He pushed forward the throttle levers, and the note of the en­gines faded with the rush of the water.

Simon glanced forward and saw that they were very near the shore. The granite cliffs loomed blackly over them, and he could see the white line of foam where they met the sea. The lights of a village were dotted up the slope beyond, and to the left and right the pairs of red lights which he had noticed before were now nearly in line. Closer still, another light danced on the wa­ter.

So unexpectedly that it made the Saint flatten himself on the roof like a startled hare, a searchlight mounted close to his head sprang into life, flooding the foredeck and the sea ahead with its blazing beam. As they glided on over the black water, the danc­ing light which he had observed proved to be a lantern standing on one of the thwarts of a dinghy in which a solitary man was leaning over the gunnel fishing for a cork buoy. The helmsman came forward into the drench of light and took the mooring from him with a boathook, making it fast on one of the forward bollards; and the dinghy bumped along the side until the boat­man caught the short gangway and hauled himself dexterously on board, while the Falkenberg's engines roared for a moment in reverse. Then the engines stopped, and the searchlight went out again.

"Ah, mon cher Baudier!" Vogel greeted his visitor at the door of the wheelhouse. "Ça va bien? Entrez, entrez——"

He turned to the helmsman.

"Tell Ivaloff to be ready to go down in a quarter of an hour. And tell Calvieri to have a dress ready for me. I shall be along in a few minutes."

"Sofort."

The seaman moved aft along the deck, and Vogel rejoined Baudier and Arnheim in the wheelhouse. And the Saint drew himself up on his toes and fingertips and shot after the helmsman like a great ghostly crab.

Only the Saint's own guardian angel could have said what was in the Saint's mind at that moment. The Saint himself had no very clear idea. And yet he had made one of the wildest and most desperate decisions of his life in an immeasurable fraction of a second—a decision that he probably would not have dared to make if he had stopped to think about it. He hadn't even got the vaguest idea of the intervening details between the first movement and the final result which he had visioned in that microscopical splinter of time. They could be filled in later. The irresistible surge of inspiration had taken all those petty triviali­ties in its stride, outdistancing logic and coherent planning . . . Without knowing very clearly why, the Saint found himself spreadeagled on the roof again in front of the unsuspectingly ambulating seaman; and as the man passed underneath him Si­mon's arm shot out and grasped him by the throat . . .

Before the cry which the man might have uttered could gain outlet it was choked back into his gullet by the merciless clutch of those steel fingers, and before he could tear the fingers away the Saint's weight had dropped silently on his shoulders and borne him down to the deck. Staring up with shocked and dilated eyes as he fought, the man saw the cold flash of a knife-blade in the dim light; and then the point of the knife pricked him under the chin.