The Saint's Getaway

"Hail, Columbia," said the Saint

Monty Hayward recovered magnificently from his surprise.

"Go away," he said. "I thought we'd got rid of you. We were just getting along splendidly."

The Saint stared at him rudely.

"Hullo," he said. "What's happened to your little soup strainer? I always told you something would happen if you didn't keep moth balls in it."

"It was removed by special request," said Monty, with some dignity. "Pat told me it tickled."

"But what have you been doing?" asked the girl breathlessly.

The Saint laughed and kissed her. He chucked his straw hat up on the rack, loosened his tie, put the monocle away in his pocket, removed the flower from his coat and presented it ex­quisitely to Monty, and flung himself loosely into a corner seat, long-limbed and piratical and unchangeably disturbing —taking Patricia's cigarette from her lips and inhaling from it between merry lips.

"I've been keeping the ball rolling and adding another felony to our charge sheet Rudolf knows that the boodle is now in the post—he'd done a few calories of hot thinking and spooned the confirmation out of the head porter. I didn't dis­pute it. Then he offered to join forces and halve the kitty—told me we hadn't a hailstone's break in hell of making the grade alone. Well, the time was getting on, and I'd got to shake him off somehow. He told me his car was outside and it was mine if I cared to go in cahoots with him, so I told him quite truth­fully I should love to borrow it. I think he must have misunder­stood me, somehow, because we went out together, and he was quite shocked when I simply stepped in and drove away. I ran around a couple of blocks into a quiet street behind the sta­tion, and bailed out when no one was looking. Then I went through a shop and bought that lid, and an old woman sold me the veg for two marks because she said I'd a lucky face. And---do you know, Monty?—I believe I have!"

Monty nodded.

"You'll need it," he said decisively. "If Rudolf catches you again I should think he'll roast you over a slow fire."

"He's likely to try it," said the Saint lightly. "But d'you know what it was worth? . . . My villains, think of the situation I Right now we've got Rudolf—got him as he's never been got in his life before. He knows the boodle hasn't gone out of Ger­many—I couldn't have risked it, because it might have been opened by the Customs. His one hope is to trail me and watch me collect my mail. And the worst thing that could possibly happen to him would be to get us into more trouble with the police! Whatever we said to his proposition, he was doomed to move heaven and earth to keep the paws of the police from our coat collars, because once we were in jug the boodle'd be lost forever. He's got to take everything we give him. We can shoot up his staff—pinch his cars—pour plates of soup down his dicky—and he's got to open his face from ear to ear and tell the world how he loves a good joke!" Simon rolled over on one elbow and thumped Monty in the stomach. "Boys and girls—do you like it?"

The other two sorted his meaning gradually out of that jubi­lant cataract of words.They analyzed and absorbed it while he laughed at them; and then, before they could marshal their thoughts for a reply, he was raiding and scattering them again with a fresh twist of mountebank's magic.

"You two were followed to the station. Rudolf's pals were snooping round the hotel, even if they thought it was safer to stop outside. You can take it that a guy who could deduce the whole idea of shooting boodle into the post office would have his own notions about fire escapes. That little runt we laid out in the Königshof last night is on the train, and I'll bet he trod in on your heels. The one thing I'm wondering is whether he had time to get a message back before we pulled out" Si­mon was radiant. "And now try some more. Have you heard the new scream about the bishop?"

"Bishop?" repeated Monty feebly.

"Yep. And for once there's no actress in it——"

He broke off as a large-bosomed female burdened with two travelling rugs, a Pekinese, and the words of Ethel M. Dell threaded herself through the door and deposited herself in the vacant corner. The Saint glared at Monty and waved his arms wildly in the air. He raved on as if he had not noticed the in­trusion.

". . . and you would be locked up if I had my way. You ought to have gone to the hospital. I should think if the authorities knew you were tearing around like this with a dose of scarlet fever they'd clap you straight into an asylum. And what about me? Did I tell you I wanted to catch all your diseases——"

A muffled yelp wheezed out of the strong, silent corner, and the Saint started round in time to see a black bombazine rump undulating agitatedly out of view. Simon settled himself back and grinned again.

"Bishop?" Monty encored hazily. The pace was a bit rapid for him.

"Or something like it. But you must have seen him. Bloke with a face like a prawn and white fur round his ears. Damn it, he was rubbering in here a few minutes back! I was dodg­ing him in and out of lavatories all down the train, which is why I didn't join you before—him and Rudolf's five feet of stickphast. Well, I can tell you where I last saw Prawn-face. He was lashed to a chair in the Crown Prince's schloss with that hellish screw tightening into his skull—being invited to open his strong-box and disclose the sparklers. That parson is Com­rade Krauss, the bird who first lifted that packet of jewels and began the stampede!"

Patricia recaptured the remains of her cigarette.

"One minute, boy. . . . No—he couldn't have recognized Monty and me. He's never been near us in his life. And you dodged him. . . . But how did he get here?"

"Made his getaway in the confusion, as I expected he would. And if any man's got a right to be thirsting for Rudolf's blood, he has. Why he should be on this particular schnellzug is still

more than we know—unless maybe he overshot the mark think­ing we'd got farther ahead than we have. We shall know soon enough. If this journey is peaceful I shall have lived in vain."

The prospect appeared to please him. Nothing was more certain than that he was in the one element for which he had been born: the delight of it danced in those rakehell blue eyes——the eyes of a king in his own kingdom.

"What do we do?" asked Patricia.

She asked it from her own corner, with her hands tucked in the broad leather belt of her tweed costume. It was a swash­buckler's belt with a great silver buckle, an outrageous belt, a belt that no lady would have dreamed of wearing; and she looked like a scapegrace Diana. She asked her question with long, slim legs stretched out and her fair head tilted rather lazily back on the cushions, with a hint of the same laziness in her voice—perhaps the most obvious thing she could have said, but it made Monty Hayward fill his eyes with her, belt and all. And the Saint pulled her hair.

"What do we do, lass?" he challenged. "Well, what's wrong with a little tour of inspection? I could just do with a glimpse of the ungodly gnashing their teeth to give me an appetite for lunch."

"What's wrong with sitting where we are?" replied Monty reasonably. "We aren't getting, into mischief. You could spend several hours working out how you're going to get me across the next frontier and take the jewels with you as well. And by the way, where are the ruddy things?"

"They'll be waiting for us at the poste restante in Cologne— where moth and rust may corrupt, but Rudolfs will have a job to break through and steal."

Monty scratched his head.

"I'm still trying to get that clear," he said. "What have you done with them?"

"Bunged 'em into the post, laddie—all done up in brown paper, with bits of string and sealing wax and everything. As I told Rudolf. They're on their way now—they might even be on this very train—but there's no detective on earth who could prove now that I've ever had anything to do with them, even if he thought of looking for them in the right place. In this game the great idea is to have brains," said the Saint modestly.

Monty digested the pronouncement with becoming gravity. And then Patricia stood up.

"Let's go, boy," she said recklessly; and the Saint hauled himself up with a laugh.

"And shall we dally with the archdeacon or gambol with the gun artist?"

He framed the question in a tone that required no answer, balancing himself easily in the swaying carriage, with a ciga­rette between his lips and one hand shielding his lighter—he was as unanswerable as a laughing Whirlwind with hell-for-leather blue eyes. He was not even thinking of alternatives.

And then he saw the hole that had been bored through the partition on his left—just an inch or two below the mesh of the luggage grid.

The raw, white edges of it seemed to blaze into his vision out of the smooth, drab surface of the varnished woodwork, pin­ning him where he stood in a sudden hush of corrosive immo­bility. Then his gaze flicked down to the half-dozen fresh white splinters that lay on the seat, and the smile in his eyes hard­ened to a narrow glitter of steel.

"Or should we just sit here and behave ourselves?" he mur­mured; and the change in his voice was so contrasting that the other two stared at him.

Monty recovered the use of his tongue first.

"That's the most sensible thing I've heard you say for a long time," he remarked, as if he still doubted whether he should believe his ears. "You can't be feeling well."

"But, Simon——"

Patricia broke in with a different incredulity. And the Saint dropped a hand on her shoulder.

His other hand went out in a grim gesture that travelled straight to the hole in the partition.

"Let's keep our heads, Pat." The smile was filtering back into his voice, but it was so gentle that only the most sensitive ear could have picked it out. "Monty's the moderating influence— and he may be right. We don't want to make things unneces­sarily difficult. There's a long journey in front of us, and I'm not sure that I should object to a little rest. I'm not so young as I was."

He subsided heavily into his corner with a profound sigh; and the visible part of his audience tore their eyes from the tell-tale perforation in the wall and looked at him in the tense dawning of comprehension.

"Good-night, my children," said the Saint sleepily.

But he was reaching to his feet again as he said it, and there was not a trace of sleepiness in one inch of the movement. It was like the measured straightening of a bent spring. And it was just as he came dead upright that a dull thud seemed to bump itself on the partition, clearly audible above the mo­notonous rattling of the wheels.

"And happy dreams," said the Saint, in the softest of all whispers.

He slid out soundlessly into the corridor. Down towards the end of it he saw the back of a man lurching from side to side in a clumsy attempt to run, and instinctively the Saint's step quickened. Then he glanced sidelong into the next compart­ment as he passed it—he was merely satisfying a professional desire to see the other end of the listening-hole which had tapped through into his private business, but what he saw there made him pull up with his fingers hooking round the edge of the sliding door. Without another thought he shot it back along its grooves and let himself in. He went in quietly and without fear, for the eyes of the man who was crumpled up in the far corner looked at him with the calm greeting of one who has already seen beyond the Curtain. It was Josef Krauss, with one hand clutched to his side and the grey pallor of death in his face.

VIII. HOW SIMON TEMPLAR CONTINUED TO BE

DISCREET, AND MONTY HAYWARD IMPROVED

THE SHINING HOUR

SIMON TEMPLAR pulled the door shut behind him and went over to the dying man. He started to fumble with the buttons of the stained black waistcoat, but Krauss only smiled.

"Lassen Sie es nur," he said huskily. "It is not worth the time. The old fox has finished his journey."

Simon nodded. The first glance had told him that there was nothing he could do. He sat down beside the stricken thief and supported him with an arm round his shoulders; and Krauss looked at him with the same calm and patient eyes.

"I have only seen you once before, Herr Templar. That was when you saved me from the screw." A shiver passed over the man's bulky frame. "If I had lived, I should have repaid that kindness by robbing you. You know that?"

"Does it matter?" asked the Saint.

Krauss shook his head. There were beads of perspiration starting through the pink grease paint on his face, and each breath cost him an effort.

"Now the time is too short for these things," he said.

Simon eased him up a few inches, settling him more com­fortably into the corner. He knew that the end could be no more than a few minutes away, and he had time to spare. The man who had fired the shot, whose back he had seen scuttling down the corridor, could wait those few minutes for his turn. However the killer might choose to dispose of himself mean­while, he would still be available when he was wanted—unless he elected to step right off the train and break his neck. And the Saint would watch the old fox creep into the last covert, according to the rules of the game as he knew them. It had never occurred to him to refuse the unspoken appeal that had leapt at him out of the doomed man's weary eyes as he sidled that casual glance into the compartment; and yet he never guessed on what a strange twist of the trail that unthink­ing chivalry was to lead him.

He looked at the litter of curled wood shavings on the op­posite seat, and then up at the partition.

"I suppose you heard all you wanted to?" he said.

The reply came as a surprise to him, in a wry grin that warped its way across the man's face of bitter fatalism.

"I heard nothing, mein lieber Freund. Marcovitch heard— that little cub of the young jackal. If my gun had not stuck in my pocket you would have found him here instead of me."

"He was listening here when you found him?"

"Ja. And I think he has heard too much. You had better kill him quickly, Herr Templar—he will be troublesome."

Krauss coughed painfully; and there was blood on his handkerchief. Then he raised his eyes and saw the uniform of an­other ticket inspector in the corridor outside, and he seemed to smile cynically under his make-up. As the door grated open again he pulled himself together with an effort of will that must have been almost super-human. It was the most eerie performance that the Saint had ever seen, and it left him dumb with wonder at the magnificent sardonic courage of it.

Krauss jerked himself almost upright in his corner and sat there unsupported, with his hands clasped calmly on his lap. He met the Saint's eyes expressionlessly, and spoke in a voice that rang out oddly with the iron strength of his self-control— a voice that hadn't the minutest tremor in it—as if he were merely setting the trivial capstone on an ephemeral argument.

"After all," he said, "when one is confronted with a sum­mons, one can still pay one's debts with a good grace."

Simon groped around for his ticket and offered it to be clipped.

And Josef Krauss did the same. That was the one simple act with which he paid his debt in the only way that was left to him. He did it with an unflinching rendering of the benevolent and rather fatuous smile that belonged to his disguise, playing out the last lines of his part without a fault, while the hot stab of death seared bitterly into his lungs.

He received his ticket back, and beamed at the inspector.

"We come at half past-eleven to Köln, nicht wahr?"

"At eleven thirty-eight, mein Herr."

"So. Now I am very tired. Will you have to disturb me at Wurzburg and Mainz?"

A note rustled in his hand, and the inspector accepted it graciously.

"If you will allow me to keep your ticket until after we have left Mainz, hochehrwürdener Herr, I will see that your sleep is not interrupted."

"Herzlichen Dank!"

The official bowed his way out respectfully—he had pocketed a tip that would have been notable at any time, and which be­came almost an epoch-making event when the donor's garb confessed to a vocation whose members are rarely able to com­pete with millionaires in purchasing the small luxuries of travel. The door closed after him; and Simon turned slowly from watching him go, and saw the dour fatalism grinning again from Krauss's eyes.

"At least, my death will put you to no inconvenience," he said.

Then the supernatural endurance which had shored him up through those last minutes seemed to fall away as if the king­pins had been wiped out of it, and he sagged back with a little sigh.

Simon leaned over and dried a thin trickle of blood from one corner of the relaxed mouth. The glazing eyes stared at him mockingly, and Krauss fought for a breath. He spoke once more, but his voice was so low that the Saint only just caught the words.

"Sehen Sie gut nach . . . dem blauen Diamont. . . . Er ist . . . wirklich . . . preislos ..."

Then he was silent.

Simon Templar rose quietly to his feet. He put out a steady hand and pressed the lids down over the derisive eyes that had gone suddenly blind and rigid in their orbits; and then he looked round and saw Monty Hayward in the doorway. Pa­tricia Holm came in behind him.

"You know, Simon," said Monty, after a moment's eloquent stillness, "if you show me a few more stiffs, I believe I shall be­gin to get quite used to it."

"I shouldn't be surprised," said the Saint laconically.

He took out his cigarette case and canted a cigarette gently into his mouth, facing the others soberly, while they searched for the meaning of his terseness.

"Did you have trouble with that ticket inspector?" hazarded Patricia.

"Not one little bit." The Saint looked at her straightly. "There wasn't any cause for it. You see, Josef figured he had a bill to pay. He told the inspector he wanted to go to sleep, and tipped him like a prince not to be disturbed till we get to Cologne."

Slowly the other two built up in their minds the full signifi­cance of that curt explanation, while the only sound in the compartment was the harsh rattle and jar of their race over the metals. It was a silence which paid its inevitable tribute to the code by which the man in the corner had ordered his grim passing.

"Did Josef make that hole?" queried Monty Hayward presently.

"No. Marcovitch did that—the boy friend who tailed you on board. Josef walked in on him, and lost the draw. The last I saw of Marcovitch, he was busting all records down towards the brake van. And I guess he's my next stop."

The Saint pushed his hands into his trouser pockets and walked past, out into the corridor. Patricia and Monty fol­lowed him. They lined up outside; and the Saint drew at his cigarette and gazed through a window into the unrolling land­scape.

"Not the three of us," he said. "We aren't muscling in. Pat —I think it's your turn for a show. There may be trouble; and the ungodly are liable to be smooth guys before the Lord. I'd like to have you a carriage length behind me. Keep out of sight—and watch your corners. If the party looks tough, beat it quietly back and flag Monty."

"O. K., Chief."

"Monty, you stay around here till you're sent for. Get talk­ing to someone—and keep talking. Then you'll be in balk. You're the reserve line. If we aren't back in twenty minutes, try and find out what's wrong. And see your gun's working!"

"Right you are, old sportsman."

"And remember your wife and children," said the Saint piously.

He turned on his heel and went roaming down the train, humming an operatic aria under his breath. The decks were clearing for action in fresh earnest, and that suited him down to the ground. And yet a little bug of vague perplexity was starting to nose around in the dark backgrounds of his brain, nibbling about in the impenetrable hinterlands of intuition like the fret of a tiny whetstone. It blurred fitfully on the tenu­ous outfringings of a deep-buried nerve, sending dim flitters of irritation telegraphing up into the obscure recesses of his consciousness; and every one of those messages feathered up a replica of the same ragged little question mark into the sleek line of his serenity. Ten tunes in a minute he glossed the line down again, and ten times in a minute the identical finicky in­terrogation smudged through it like a wisp of fabric trailed across an edge of wet paint.

Still humming the same imperturbable tune, he came to the end of a coach and eased himself cautiously round into the con­nection tunnel. With equal caution he stepped across the sway­ing platforms and emerged circumspectly into the foyer of the next car. Down the length of the alleyway ahead he saw only a small female infant with platinum blonde pigtails, and continued on his way with unruffled watchfulness.

The dying words of Josef Krauss were ticking over in his mind as a kind of monotonous accompaniment to the melody that carolled contentedly along with him as he walked. They repeated themselves in a dozen different languages, word by word and letter by letter, wheeling and countermarching and forming fours in an infinite variety of restless patterns with all the aimless efficiency of a demonstration platoon of trained soldiers—and with precisely as much intelligence. They went through their repertoire of evolutions like a clockwork ma­chine; and it just didn't mean a thing. They ended up exactly where they started: two simple sentences spoken in a voice that had been so weak as to be incapable of expression, quali­fied by nothing but the enigmatical derision in the doomed man's eyes. Simon could still see those eyes as vividly as if they had been photographed on the air a yard beyond his nose, and the bland, flat gibe in them was the most baffling riddle he had encountered since he began wondering why the female corset should almost invariably be made in the same grisly shade of pink.

Hands still resting loosely in his pockets, Simon Templar con­tinued on his gentle promenade. Nearly every compartment he peered into yielded its quota of specimens for observation, but Marcovitch was not among them. Apart from that serious omission, any philanthropist in the widest sense would have found ample material on which to test the stamina of his ec­centric virtue. All along the panorama which unfolded to the Saint's roving eye, other excrescences upon the cosmos roosted at regular intervals in their upholstered pens, each tending his own little candle of witness to God's patronage of the almost human race. Simon looked at them all, and felt his share of the milk of human kindness curdling under the strain. But the second most important question in his mind remained unanswered. It was still probable that Marcovitch was not alone. And if he was not alone, the amount of support he had with him was still an entirely nebulous quantity. The Saint had received no clue by which he could pick out the proble­matical units of that support from the array of smug bipeds which had passed under his eyes. They might have been there in dozens; or he mightn't have seen one of them yet There was no evidence. It was a gamble on blind odds, and the Lord would have to provide.

Thus the Saint came through to the end of the last carriage, and still he had not seen Marcovitch. He stopped there for a moment, drawing the last puff from his cigarette and flatten­ing the butt under his toe. One episode in his last adventure in England was still far from fading out of his memory, and the remembrance of it sent a sudden ripple of anticipation pulsing through his muscles. He knew that he had not lost Marcovitch. On the contrary—he was just going to meet him. And most assuredly there would be trouble. . . .

A gay glimmer of the Saintly fighting smile touched his lips. The pain which had afflicted him during his patient survey of so much unbeautiful humanity was gone altogether. He had forgotten the very existence of those anonymous boils on the universe. Just one more stage south of him was the brake van, and Simon Templar went towards it with a new unlighted cigarette in his mouth and his hands transferred to his coat pockets. He could have reached out and touched the handle when he saw it jerk and twist under his eyes, and leapt back round the corner. He had one glimpse of the man who came stumbling out—a man in the railroad uniform, capless, with a gash over his temple and his face straining to a shout of terror. It didn't require any genius to reconstruct the whole inside history of that frantic apparition: Simon had no time to think about it anyway, but he guessed enough without think­ing. The thud of a silenced gun was one of the diverse inci­dents that tumbled hectically into one crowded second of light­ning action in which there was positively no time for meditation. In the same second Simon caught the brakeman by the arm as he flung past.

"Verweile doch—du hist zu schnell," said the Saint gently. They were face to face for an instant of time; and Simon saw the man's eyes wide and staring. "Let's take a walk," said the Saint.

He screwed the wrist he was holding up into the nape of the brakeman's neck, and pushed him back into the van. There was another shot as they came through, and the man flopped for­ward like a dead weight. Simon let go and let him fall side­ways. Then he kicked the door shut behind him and stood with his shoulders lined up square against it, with his feet spaced apart and three quarters of his weight balancing on his toes.

The cigarette slanted up into a filibustering angle as he smiled.

"Hullo, Uglyvitch," he said.

Marcovitch showed his teeth over the barrel of an automatic. There were four other men round him; and the blithe Saintly gaze swept over them in an arc of affectionate greeting.

"Feelin' happy, boys?" drawled the Saint. "It's a grand day for fireworks." He looked past them at the piles of litter on the floor of the van. Every mailbag had been ripped open, and the contents were strewn across the scenery like the landmark of a megalomaniac's paper-chase. Letters had been torn through and parcels slit across and discarded in a search that had winnowed that vanload of mail through a fine-meshed sieve. "Somebody getting married?" asked the Saint interest­edly. "Or is the confetti for me?"

There was a tantalizing invitation in the slow lift of his eye­brows that matched the interrogative inflexion of his voice. Quite coolly he sized up the strength of the men before him, and just as coolly he posed himself in the limelight for them to return the compliment. And he saw them hesitate. If he had been blindfolded he could have deduced that hesitation equally well from the one vital fact that he was still alive. The wide smiling insolence of his unblinking candour, the bare­faced effrontery of his very artlessness, walled them into that standstill in a way that no other approach could have done. While it lasted, it held them up as effectively as a regiment of Thomson guns. They couldn't bring themselves to believe that there was no more in it than met the eye. It dangled them on red-hot tenterhooks of uncertainty, peeling their eyes sore with suspicion of the trap they couldn't see.

"Well?"

Marcovitch forced the monosyllable out of his throat in a hoarse challenge that indexed his embarrassment to the last decimal point; and the Saint smiled again.

"This is an auspicious occasion, brother," he remarked ami­ably. "I've always wanted to know just what it feels like to be a slab-faced little squirt of dill-water with a dirty neck and no birth certificate; and here you are—the very man to tell me. Could you unbosom for us, little flower?"

Marcovitch licked his lips. He was still casting around for the one necessary hint that would give him confidence to tighten up on the trigger of his gun and send an ounce of swift and unanswerable death snarling into the easy target in front of him. His knuckle was white for the pull-off, the automatic trembling ever so slightly in the suppressed tension of his hand.

"What else have you got to say, Templar?"

"Lots. Have you heard the one about the old farmer named Giles, who suffered acutely——"

"Perhaps you were looking for something?"

The question came in a vicious monotone that dared a di­rect reply. And the Saint knew that his margin of time for stall­ing was wearing thin as a wafer under the impatient rasp of the Russian's overstressed nerves.

"Sure—I was taking a look round."

He flaunted Marcovitch eye to eye, with that heedless little smile playing up uncloudedly to the tilt of his cigarette, and his fingers curling evenly round the grip of his own gun. The twitch of a muscle would have roared finis for Marcovitch in the middle of any one of those sentences; but Simon Templar knew when he was deadlocked. He knew he was deadlocked then, and he had known it ever since he stepped into the van. He could have dropped Marcovitch at his pleasure, but the re­maining four men represented just so many odds against any human chance of surviving to boast about it. And the Saint was not yet tired of life. He bluffed the deadlock without turn­ing a hair—smiled calmly at it and asked it to play ball—because that was the only thing to do. Any other line would have sung his requiem without further debate. But he knew that his only way out was along the precarious alleyways of peace with honour—with black italics for the peace, if any­thing. It was unfortunate, admittedlly, but it was one of the immutable verities of the situation. He had breezed in to take a peek at the odds, and there they were in all their mathemati­cal scaliness. A tactful and strategic withdrawal announced it­self as the order of the day.

"I just thought I might find some crown jewels," said the Saint; and Marcovitch steadied his automatic.

"Did you?"

Simon nodded. His level gaze slid down the other's coat and detected a bulge in one pocket that signified as much as he re­quired to know.

"Yeah. Only you got here first." Lower down, he caught a gleam of reflected light from the floor. "Excuse me—I think you missed something."

He took a pace forward stooping as if to pick up the stone.

Then he hurled himself at the knees of the nearest man like the bolt from a crossbow. Marcovitch fired at the same mo­ment, but the Saint's luck held. His impetus somersaulted him clean over the sprawling body of his victim, and he rolled over like a scalded eel and ducked behind the struggling breastwork. His left hand whipped round the man's waist and fastened on the man's gun wrist, holding him in position by the sheer strength of one arm.

"Sorry about this," said the Saint

The others paused for a second, and in that breathing space the Saint got to his feet again, bringing his human shield up with him in a heave of eruptive effort. He backed towards the door, reached it, and got it open; then the man half broke from his hold in a flurry of cursing fight, and Simon flung him away and leapt through the door with a bullet crashing past his ear. Patricia Holm was outside, and the Saint caught her in his arms and spun her round before she could speak.

"Run for it!" he rapped. "This is why angels have wings!"

He thrust her on; and then his eye fell on the emergency rescue outfit in its glass-fronted case on the wall beside him. He let go his gun and put his elbow through the glass, snatching the light axe from its bracket, and ran backwards with it swing­ing in his hand. Everything was a matter of split seconds in that extraordinarily discreet getaway, and no one knew better than Simon Templar that only an exhibition of agility that would make cats look silly was going to skin a ninth life out of the hornets' nest that had blown up under his feet He had been labelled for the long ride from the moment he had entered that raided brake van: the urgent menace of it had been flaming at him through the atmosphere as plainly as if it had been chalked up on the wall. And the Saint felt appropriately self-effacing. ... As the leading gunman came out of the van, Simon drew back his hand and sent the axe whistling down the corridor in a long, murderous parabola. The man let out an oath and threw up his arms to save his skull—short of com­mitting suicide, he had no option in the matter—and that distraction gave Simon the few seconds' start he needed. He raced up behind the girl and swung her into the nearest com­partment, and its solitary occupant looked up from her Ethel M. Dell and displayed a familiar face freezing into a glare of indignant horror.

"Must you follow me everywhere?" she squeaked. "You and your filthy germs——"

"Madam, we were just having a little bug hunt," said the Saint soothingly; and then the woman saw the gun in his hand and rushed to the communication cord with a shrill scream.

Simon grinned faintly and glanced past her out of the win­dow. They were running over a low embankment at the foot of which was a thick wood; he couldn't have arranged it better if he had tried—it was the one slice of luck that had come to him without a string on it that day.

"Saved us the trouble," murmured the Saint philosophically.

He was wedging his automatic at an angle between the slid­ing door and its frame, so that it pointed slantingly down the corridor. The train was slowing down rapidly, and he prayed that that whiskered gag would get by for as long as they took to stop. Also he had an idea that the alarm given by the fright­ened lady would push a hairier fly into the ointment of the un­godly than anything else that could have happened.

He looked round and saw the shadow of puzzlement on Patricia's forehead.

"Has anything gone wrong, lad?" she asked; and the ques­tion struck him as so comic that he had to laugh.

"Nothing to speak of," he said. "It's only a few rough men trying to kill us, but we've had people try that before."

"Then why did you want the train stopped?"

"Because I want to back Bugle Call for the Derby, and I've heard no news of totes in heaven. I can't think when we've been so unpopular. It seems a lot of fuss to make over one little blue diamond, but I suppose Rudolf knows best."

He went over to the other side of the compartment and opened the window wide. The train was grinding itself to a standstill, and once it came to rest there would be very little time to spare. In one corner, the apostle of strength and silence was clutching her Pekinese and moaning hysterically at inter­vals. Simon ruffled the dog's ears, hauled himself up with his hands on the two luggage racks, and swung his legs acrobati­cally over the sill.

2

Monty Hayward was a couple of coaches farther north when the train stopped.

He had begun to drift thoughtfully southward a minute or two after Patricia Holm left him. The Saint's instructions to engage someone in conversation appealed to him. He felt that a spot of light-hearted relaxation was just what he needed. And the orders he had been given seemed to leave him as free a hand as he could have desired. The prospect lifted up his spirits like an exile's dream of home.

He squeezed past a group of chattering Italians and came up beside the girl who was gazing pensively through a window near the end of the corridor. She moved aside abstractedly to let him pass, but Monty had other ideas.

"Don't you know that policemen get their flat feet from standing about all day?" he said reproachfully.

The girl looked at him critically for several seconds, and Monty endured the scrutiny without blinking. There was a curl of soft gold escaping from under one side of her rakish little hat, and her lips had a sweet curve. And then she smiled.

"Can you tell me what that station was that we just went through?" she asked.

"Ausgang," said Monty. "I saw it written up."

She laughed.

"Idiot! That means 'Way Out.' "

"Does it?" said Monty innocently. "Then I must have been thinking of some other place." He offered his cigarette case. "I gather that this isn't your first visit to these parts."

She accepted a cigarette and a light with an entire absence of self-consciousness, which was one of the most refreshing and' at the same time one of the most complimentary gestures that he had seen for a long time.

"I ought to know the language," she said. "My father was born in Munich—he didn't become an American citizen until he was three years old. But still, they say it's a young country." She had a frank carelessness of conventional snobbery that matched her natural grace of manner. "As a matter of fact, I've just finished spending a fortnight with his family. That was the excuse I made for coming over, so I couldn't get out of it"

"My father was a Plymouth Brother," said Monty rerninis­cently. "He once thought of going abroad to convert the heathen, but Mother didn't trust him. Now, if he'd been a Bavarian, I might have been your cousin—and that would have been a quite different story."

"Why?"

"I should have refused to allow you to leave us without a chaperon."

"Would you?"

"I would. And then I'd have proposed myself for the job. I'm not sure that it's too late even now. Could I interest you in a thoroughly good watchdog, guaranteed house-trained and very good with children?"

She glanced at him mischievously.

"I should want to see your references."

"I was four years in my last place, lady."

"That's a long time."

"Yes, mum. I was supposed to be in for seven, but there was a riot, and I climbed over a wall."

He was confirmed in an early impression that her laugh was like a ripple of crystal bells. She had very white teeth, and eyes like amethysts, and he thought that she was far too nice to be travelling alone.

She turned back her sleeve and consulted a tiny gold watch.

"Do you think they'll ever serve tea?" she said. "I've got one of the world's great thirsts, and Germany doesn't care."

Monty had a saddening sense of anticlimax. He was starting to realize the sordid disadvantages of being a buccaneer. You can take a beauteous damsel's acquaintance by storm, but you can't offer her a cup of tea. He felt that the twentieth century was uncommonly inconsiderate to its outlaws. He tried to pic­ture Captain Kidd in a similar predicament. "I'd love to buy you a glass of milk, my dear, but Grandma's walking the plank at five. . . ."

"I'm afraid you've beaten me," he said. "I'm not allowed to move from here until Simon gets back."

"And what's Simon doing?"

"Well, he's trying to find some crown jewels; and if he gets shot at I'm supposed to go along and get shot as well."

The girl looked at him with a slight frown. "That one's a bit too deep for me," she said.

"It's much too deep for me," Monty confessed. "But I've given up worrying about it. I don't look like a desperate character, do I?"

She contemplated him with a renewal of the detached curi­osity with which she had estimated his first advance. Her an­cestry might have been German, but her quiet self-possession belonged wholly to the American tradition. Monty would have counted the day well spent if he had been free to take her under his wing; but his ears were straining through the con­tinuous clatter of the train for the first warnings of the violent and unlawful things that must soon be happening somewhere in the south, and he knew that that pleasant interlude could not last for long. He returned her gaze without embarrass­ment, wondering what she would say if she knew that he was wanted for murder.

"You look fairly sane," she said.

"I used to think so myself," said Monty amusedly. "It's only when I come out in a rash and find myself biting postmen in the leg that I have my doubts."

"Then you might let me share the joke."

"My dear, I'd like to share lots of things with you. But that one isn't my own property."

The full blaze of her unaffected loveliness would have daz­zled a lesser man.

"Weren't you ever warned that it's dangerous to tease an inquisitive woman?"

Monty laughed.

"Why not have half my shirt instead?" he suggested cheer­fully; and then the sudden check of the train as the brakes came on literally threw her into his arms.

He restored her gently to her balance, and found himself abstractedly fingering the butt of the gun in his pocket while she apologized. He needed the concrete reminder of that cold, metallic contact to fetch him back to the outlook from which he had been trying to escape—the view of his corner of the world as a place where murder and sudden death were commonplaces, and freedom continued only as the reward of a ceaseless vigilance.

"That's all right," he said absently. "You didn't have to help yourself to it. If you'd asked me for it I'd have given it to you."

He kept his hand in his pocket and stared out of a window at the finest angle that he could manage. Instinct alone told him that the stoppage had nothing to do with any ordinary incident of the journey—it was the hint that he had been wait­ing for, the zero signal that strung up his nerves to the last brittle ounce of expectation. Beside him, the girl was saying something; but he never had the vaguest idea what it was. He was listening for an intimation of how the typhoon would burst, knowing beyond all possibility of evasion that the break-up was as inevitable as the collapse of a house of cards. For a moment he felt like a man who has just seen the tail of a slow fuse vanishing into a cask of gunpowder: the uncanny hush that had settled down after the train pulled up seemed to span out to the cracking brink of eternity. He heard the sibi­lant hiss of the Westinghouse valves, the subdued mutter of voices from a dozen compartments, the distant clank of a coupling shaking down into equilibrium; but his brain was striving to tune through those normal sounds to the first whis­per of the abnormal—speculating whether it would come as a babel of enraged throats or the unequivocal stammer of artil­lery.

Then a door was flung open up at the northward end of the carriage, and the heavy tread of official-sounding boots made his heart miss a beat. Out of the corner of his eye he saw two men in uniform advancing down the passage. They stopped at the first compartment and barked a question; and the chattering of the group of Italians farther up died away abruptly. A deeper stillness lapped down on the perspective, and through it Monty heard the question repeated and the boots moving on.

He felt the girl gripping his arm and heard her speaking again.

"Say, don't you Englishmen ever get excited? Somebody's pulled the communication cord. Boy, isn't that thrilling?"

Monty nodded. The officials came nearer, interrogating each compartment as they reached it. One of them turned aside to accost him with the same standardized inquiry, and Monty schooled his features to the requisite expression of sheep-like repudiation.

"Nein—ich habe nichts gehört."

The inquisition passed on, and the group of Italians trailed gaping after them. A fresh buzz of conversation broke out along the carriage.

Monty found the girl eyeing him indignantly.

"Were you trying to kid me you didn't speak German?" she demanded.

He faced her shamelessly.

"I must have forgotten it for the moment."

"Anyway," she affirmed, "I'm going to see what it's all about This is much too good to miss."

Monty looked at her steadily. He realized that he had put his foot in it from nearly every conceivable aspect, but it was too late to draw back.

"I should keep out of it if I were you," he said quietly, and there was that in his tone which ought to have told her that he was in earnest.

He walked past her without giving her time to reply, and went through to the tiny lobby at the end of the coach. It was pure intuition, again, which told him that the stopping of the train must have its repercussions outside—whoever had given the alarm. He opened the door at one side and looked out, but he could discover no exterior symptoms of a disturb­ance; then he crossed to the other side, and the first thing he saw was Simon Templar skidding elegantly down the embank­ment towards the trees. A second later he saw that Patricia Holm was already at the foot of the slope: the Saint was tak­ing his time, glancing back over his shoulder as he went.

It was Monty Hayward that the Saint was looking for, and the sight he had of him was a considerable relief.

"If you stayed well back among that timber, Pat, you might live a long time," he murmured. "I don't think Marcovitch'll run the risk of taking pot shots at us now, but it's best to be on the safe side."

He waved to the figure in the doorway and strolled along the bottom of the embankment to meet him. It was not en­tirely typical of the Saint that he scorned to follow his own advice and take cover, but Simon was beginning to feel that he had done a lot of work that day with his rudder to the wind, and that unheroic position had lost a great deal of its charm. He waited until Monty had scrambled down to the low level before he turned off and steered him through a narrow path into the shelter of the wood; and his recklessness was justified by the fact that there was no more shooting.

"I'm afraid this is good-bye to our luggage," said the Saint, by way of explanation, "but let's think what we've saved in death duties."

"Was it as bad as that?" asked Monty; and Simon laughed.

"I reckon a swell time was had by all."

They came out into a small clearing around the roots of a giant elm, and at the same tune Patricia Holm threaded her way through the shrubbery on the opposite side and joined them under the tree.

From where they stood they could get a strip view of the train without being seen. An assortment of passengers from various carriages had climbed out and scattered themselves along the permanent way; a few of them were dislocating their necks in the attempt to peer through into the depths of the wood, but the majority were heading excitedly down to add their personalities to the knot of gesticulating orators who were thumping the air beside the brake van. The principal performers appeared to be Marcovitch, the two uniformed officials, and the lady with the Pekinese. Flourishing their arms wildly towards the unresponsive heavens on the rare occasions when words failed them, they were engaged in shouting each other down with a tireless vociferousness that would have glad­dened the heart of an argumentative Frenchman. It was several minutes before the lady in black bombazine began to turn purple for lack of breath; and then the Pekinese, seizing its chance, rushed into the conference with a series of strident yaps which worthily maintained the standard of uproar. Si­mon gathered that Marcovitch was keeping his end up with no great difficulty. His voice, when it rose above the oratorio, could be heard speaking passionately of bandits, thieves, rob­bers, murderers, battles, perils, pursuits, escapes, and his own remarkable perspicacity and valour; and the generous panto­mime of his hands supplied everything that was drowned by the persistence of the other speakers. From time to time the other members of his party chimed in with their corroboration.

"That little skunk'll qualify himself for a medal before he's through," said the Saint fascinatedly. "He's the loveliest liar since Ulysses."

"What was the truth of it?" asked Monty.

Simon put his hands on his hips and continued to gaze up at the drama on the line.

"We were bounced off," he said simply. "Marcovitch rode us out on a rail. I'm not bragging about it. He'd cleaned up the van when I got there—and my guess was right The jewels were travelling with us. His pockets were stuffed with 'em, and I saw a diamond he'd dropped wedged between the floor boards to make it a cinch. And right there when I blew in it was a choice of death or get from under. We got from under— just."

The smile on the Saint's lips was as superficial as a reflection in burnished bronze. There was something of the implacable immobility of a watching Indian about him as he stood at gaze with his eyes narrowed against the sun. The staccato sen­tences of his synopsis broke off like a melody cut short in the middle of a bar, leaving his listeners in midair; but the con­clusion was carved deep into the unforgetting contours of his face. He wasn't complaining. He wasn't saying a word about the run of the cards. He wasn't even elaborating one single vaporous prophecy about what might happen when he and Marcovitch got together again over a bottle of vodka to yarn over old times. Not just at that moment But the indomitable purpose of it was etched into every facet of his unnatural qui­escence, sheathing him like a skin of invisible steel. And once again the parting riddle of Josef Krauss went ticking through the core of his stillness like a gramophone record that has jammed its needle into one hard-worn groove. . . .

And then the gas picnic up on the track began to sort itself out. One of the officials tore himself away from the centre of rhetoric and started to urge the passengers back into their car­riages. The empurpled lady lifted her yapping paladin tenderly into the last coach, and was in her turn assisted steatopygously upwards. The second official, brandishing a large notebook vaguely in his left hand, pressed the still voluble Marcovitch after her. Gradually the train re-absorbed its jabbering de­bris like a large and sedate vacuum cleaner. The locomotive, succumbing at last to the force of overwhelming example, let out a mighty cloud of steam and wagged its tail triumphantly. Somebody blew a whistle; and the northbound express resumed its interrupted journey.

Simon Templar turned away from the emptying landscape with an imperceptible shrug. He had not expected any im­promptu search party to be organized. A trio of armed and desperate mail bandits would have very few attractions as a quarry to a trainload of agitated tourists, and transcontinental expresses cannot be left lying about the track while their pas­sengers play a game of hare and hounds. The incident would be reported at the next station, twenty miles up the line, and the whole responsibility turned over to the police. And the get­away would have to find its own way on.

The Saint threw himself down on a bank of grass, and lay back with his hands behind his head, staring up into the sky through the soft green tracery of the leaves.

"After all," he said profoundly, "life is just a bowl of cher­ries." Patricia leaned on the trunk of the great tree and kicked at a stone.

"You might have borrowed Monty's gun and plugged Mar­covitch while he was talking," she said wistfully.

"Sure. And then I don't suppose they'd even have had to bother to turn out his pockets. The minute he became hori­zontal he'd 've cascaded diamonds like a dream come true. I don't know how you feel about it, old girl, but I should just hate those jools to fall into the hands of the police. It might be kind of difficult to establish our claim and get 'em back."

Monty Hayward produced a pipe and began to scrape it out with his penknife.

"Getting them back from Marcovitch," he observed, "will be comparatively child's play."

"As Simon said," murmured Patricia softly, "it seems a lot of fuss to make over one little blue diamond."

She spoke almost without thinking; and after she had spoken there was a silence.

And then, very firmly and distinctly, the Saint said: "Hell! . . ."

"I know how you feel about it, old man," said Monty Hay-ward sympathetically; and there he stopped, with the rest of his speech drying up in a hiatus of blank bewilderment. For the Saint had rolled over on one elbow in a sudden leap of volcanic energy, and his eyes were blazing.

"But that's just what you don't know!" he cried. "We've been bounced off a train—chucked out on our ears and darned glad to be let off as lightly as that. And why? God of battles, what have we been thinking about all this time? What have we been daydreaming about Rudolf?"

"I thought he was a crook," said Monty rationally.

"I know! That's the mistake we've all been making. And yet you can't say you ever heard me speak of Rudolf as a crook. He never had to be. It wasn't so long ago when Rudolf could have bought us both up every day for a week and never missed it. It wasn't so long ago when Rudolf and Rayt Marius were playing for bigger chips than a few coloured stones. It was war in those days, Monty—death rays and Secret Service men, spies and Bolsheviks and assassinations—all the fun of the fair. Naturally there was money in it, but that was all coming to Rayt Marius. Marius was a crook, even if he was dealing in millions. But Rudolf was something that seems much stran­ger in these days. Something a damned sight more dangerous."

"And what's that?"

"A patriot," said the Saint.

Patricia kicked at her stone again, and It tumbled out of reach. She hardly noticed it.

"Then when we found we were up against Rudolf again——"

"We ought to have been wide awake. And we weren't. We've been fast asleep I We've watched Rudolf moving heaven and earth to get his hands on those jewels—killing and torturing for them—even coming down to offering me a partnership while his men had orders to shoot us on sight—and we took it all as part of the game. We've been on the spot ever since Stan­islaus went home with us. Up in that brake van—I've never seen anything so flat-and-be-damned in my life! Marcovitch was primed to put me out of the way from the beginning. It was written all over his face. And after that he'd 've shot up anyone else who butted in for a witness, and taken you and Monty for a dessert—made a clean sweep of it, and shovelled the whole mortuary out onto the line." The Saint's voice was tense and vital with his excitement. "I thought of it once my­self, right in the first act; but since then there doesn't seem to have been much spare time. When Rudolf walked into our rooms at the Königshof, I was wondering what new devilment we'd stumbled across. I was telling myself that there was one thing we weren't going to find in this adventure—and that was ordinary boodle in any shape or form. And then, just be­cause a quarter of a million pounds' worth of crystallized min­erals fell out of that sardine tin, I went soft through the skull. I forgot everything I ever knew."

"Do you know any more now?" asked Monty skeptically. Simon looked at him straightly.

"I know one thing more, which I was going to tell you," he answered. "Josef Krauss gave me the hint before he died. He said: 'Take great care of the blue diamond. It is really priceless.' And just for the last few minutes, Monty, I've been think­ing that when we know what he meant by that we shall know why Rudolf has made up his mind that you and I are too dangerous to live."

IX. HOW SIMON HAD AN INSPIRATION, AND

TRESPASSED IN THE GARDEN OF EDEN

MONTY HAYWARD dug out his tobacco pouch and investi­gated, the contents composedly. His deliberately practical in­telligence refused to be stampeded into any Saintly flights of fancy.

"If it's any use to you," he said, "I should suggest that Josef was trying to be helpful. Perhaps he didn't know you were a connoisseur of blue diamonds."

"Perhaps," said the Saint.

He came to his feet with the lithe swiftness of an animal, settling his belt with one hand and sweeping back the other over his smooth hair. The cold winds of incredulity and com­mon sense flowed past his head like summer zephyrs. He had his inspiration. The flame of unquenchable optimism in his eyes was electric, an irresistible resurgence of the old Saintly exaltation that would always find a new power and hope in the darkest thunders of defeat. He laughed. The stillness had fallen from him like a cloak—fallen away as if it had never existed. He didn't care.

"Let's be moving," he said; and Monty Hayward stowed his pipe away again with a sigh.

"Where do you think we could move to?" he asked.

And once again it seemed to Patricia Holm that the breath of Saintly laughter in the air was like the sound of distant trumpets rallying a forlorn venture on the last frontiers of outlawry.

"We can move out of here. It won't be fifteen minutes after that train gets into Treuchtlingen before there'll be a cordon of gendarmerie packing around this neighbourhood closer than fat women round a remnant counter. And I've got a date with Marcovitch that they mightn't want me to keep."

He flicked the automatic adroitly out of Monty's pocket and dropped it into his own; and then a blur of colour moved in the borders of his vision, and his glance shot suddenly across Monty's shoulder.

"Holy smoke!" said the Saint. "What's this?"

Monty turned round.

It may be chronicled as a matter of solemn historical fact that the second in which he saw what had provoked the Saint's awed ejaculation was one of the most pregnant moments of his life. It was a back-hander from the gods which zoomed clean under his guard and knocked the power of protest out of him. To a man who had laboured so long and steadfastly to uphold the principles of a righteous and sober life in the face of unlimited discouragement, it was the unkindest cut of all.

He stood and stared at the approaching nucleus of his Wa­terloo with all the emotions of a temperance agitator who dis­covers that some practical joker has replenished with neat gin the glass of water from which he has just gulped an ostenta­tious draught of strength for his concluding peroration. He felt that Providence had gone out of its way to plant a banana skin directly under his inoffensive heel. If his guardian angel had bobbed up smirking at that moment with any chatty re­marks about the. weather, Monty would unhesitatingly have socked him under the jaw. And yet the slim girl who was walk­ing towards them across the clearing seemed brazenly un­aware that she was making Nemesis look like a decrepit washerwoman going berserk on a couple of small ports. She was actually smiling at him; and the unblushing impudence of her put the finishing touch to Monty Hayward's débâcle.

"It's—it's someone I met on the train," he said faintly, and knew that Patricia Holm and the Saint were leaning on each other's shoulders in a convulsion of Homeric mirth.

It was Monty's only consolation that his Waterloo could scarcely have overtaken him in a more attractive guise. The awful glare with which he regarded her arrival almost sprained the muscles of his conscience, but it disconcerted her even less than the deplorable exhibition that was going on be­hind him.

"Hullo, Mr. Bandit," she said calmly.

The Saint freed himself unsteadily from Patricia's embrace. He staggered up alongside the stricken prophet.

"Shall we have her money or her life?" he crooned. "Or aren't we going to be introduced?"

"I think that would be a good idea," said the girl; and Monty called up all his battered reserves of self-control.

He glanced truculently around him.

"I'm Monty Hayward," he said. "This is Patricia Holm; and that nasty mess is Simon Templar. You can take it that they're both very pleased to meet you. Now, are we allowed to know who you are?"

"I'm Nina Walden." The girl's introspective survey con­sidered Simon interestedly. "Aren't you the Saint?"

Simon bowed.

"Lady, you must move in distinguished circles."

"I do. I'm on the crime staff of the Evening Gazette—New York—and there's nothing more distinguished than that out­side a jail. I thought I recognized your name."

She took a packet of cigarettes from her bag, placed one in her mouth, and raised her eyebrows impersonally for a light. The Saint supplied it.

"And did you get left behind in the excitement?" he mur­mured.

"I arranged to be left. Your friend told me there was a story coming—he didn't mean to give away any secrets, but he said one word too many when the train stopped. And then when he jumped out and left me floating, I just couldn't re­sist it. It was like having a murder committed on your own doorstep. Everyone was hanging out on this side of the track, so I stepped out on the other side while they were busy and lay low under the embankment. I walked over as soon as the train pulled out, but I certainly thought I should have to chase you a long way. It was nice of you to wait for me." She smiled at him shamelessly, without a quiver of those down­right eyes. "Gee—I knew I was going to get a story, but I never guessed it'd be anything like this!"

The Saint brought his lighter slowly back to his pocket. On his left, Monty Hayward was stomaching that final pulverizing wallop of revelation with a look of pained reproach on his face which was far more eloquent than any flow of speech; on his right, Patricia Holm was standing a little aloof, with her hands tucked into the slack of that swashbuckling belt of hers, silently enjoying the humorous flavour of the scene; but the Saint had flashed on far beyond those things. A wave of the inspired opportunism which could never let any situation be­come static under the ceaseless play of his imagination had lifted him up to a new level of audacity that the others had yet to reach. The downfall of Monty Hayward was complete: so be it: the Saint saw no need to ask for further details—he had thrust back that supreme moment into the index of episodes which might be chortled over in later years, and he was work­ing on to the object which was just then so much more ur­gently important Nina Walden was there—and the Saint liked her nerve.

"So you're a dyed-in-the-wool reporter?" he drawled; and the girl nodded bewitchingly.

"Yes, sir."

"And you've got all your papers—everything you need to guarantee you as many facilities as a foreign journalist can corner in this country?"

"I think so."

"And you want the biggest story of your life—a front-page three-column splash with banner lines and black type?"

"I'm hoping to get it."

The Saint gave her smile for smile. And the Saintly smile was impetuous with a mercurial resolve that paralleled the swaggering alignment of his shoulders.

"Nina, the story's yours. I've always wanted to make one newspaper get its facts about me right before I die. But the story isn't quite finished yet, and it never will be if you're in too much of a hurry for it. We were just pushing on to finish it—and we've wasted enough time already. Come on with us—leave the interviews till afterwards—and I'll give you the scoop of the year. I don't know what it is, but I know it'll be a scoop. Wipe all your moral scruples off the map— help me as much as I'll help you—and it's a monopoly. Would you like it?"

The girl picked a loose flake of tobacco from the edge of her red mouth.

"Reporters are born without moral scruples," she said can­didly. "You're on."

"We're leaving now," said the Saint.

He flung an arm round Patricia's waist and turned her to­wards a path which led out of the clearing away from the em­bankment, a grass-paved ride broad enough for them to walk abreast; and if she had been a few pounds lighter his exuber­ance would have swung her off her feet. Even after all those years of adventure in which they had been together he would never cease to amaze her: his incredible resilience could conceive nothing more fantastic than the idea of ultimate fail­ure. In him it had none of the qualities of mere humdrum doggedness that it would have had in anyone of a more dull and commonplace fibre; it was as swift as a steel blade, a gay challenge to disaster that never doubted the abiding favour of the stars. It if had been anything less he could never have set forth in such a vein to find the end of that chequered story. Marcovitch was gone. The jewels were gone. Prince Rudolf had become an incalculable quantity whose contact with the current march of events might weave in anywhere between Munich and the North Pole. And three tarnished brigands plus a magazine-cover historian, who had been lucky to escape from the last skirmish with their lives, were left high and dry in an area of strange country that would shortly be seething with armed hostility. The task in front of them might have made hunting needles in haystacks seem like an idle pastime for blind octogenarians; but the Saint saw it only as a side road to victory.

"Pat, when this jaunt is over I think we must go back to England. You've no idea how I miss Claud Eustace Teal and all those jolly games we used to have with Scotland Yard."

She knew that he was perfectly serious—as the Saint under­stood seriousness. He had never changed. She did not have to look at him to see the sunny glint in his eyes, the careless faith in a joyously spendthrift destiny.

She said: "What about Monty?"

The Saint gazed ahead down the widening lane of trees.

"I should like to have kept him, but I suppose he isn't ours."

Westwards as they walked the trees were thinning out, open­ing tall windows into a landscape of green fields and homely cottages. The golden daylight broke through the laced boughs overhead and dappled their shady path with pools of lumin­ance. A lark dived out of the clear infinity of blue and drifted earthwards like an autumn leaf. Way over on a distant slope the midget silhouettes of a ploughing team moved placidly against the sky, the tinkle of bells and the crack of the ploughman's whip coming vividly through the still air. It seemed almost unbelievable that that peaceful scene could be overrun with grey-clad men combing inexorably through the hedgerows and hollows for a scent of the irreverent corsair who had tweaked their illustrious beards; but the Saint stopped suddenly at a turn of the path, halting Patricia with him, and she also had seen the road and heard the voices.

"Wait here while I take a look," he murmured.

He flitted in among the trees like a shadow, and the girl stood motionless in the shelter of a clump of bushes with her heart beating a little faster. Monty Hayward and the Eve­ning Gazette were closing up in an interrogative silence; and Patricia had a numbing sense of the magnitude of the feat which Simon Templar had set himself to perform. Escape would have seemed difficult enough for one man alone—a mere modest getaway that was satisfied with a whole skin for its reward—but the Saint was cheerfully booking passengers for the tour and announcing his unalterable intention of col­lecting a quarter of a million pounds' worth of expenses en route. That was the measure of his genius, the squandered greatness that created its own worlds to conquer.

He came back in a few moments; and he was smiling.

"Down there," he said, "there's a covered wagon. And the crew are having an early tea. I ordered them specially to meet us here, and they look good enough to me. Let's take 'em."

He turned back with a swing of lean, venturous limbs; and Monty Hayward followed him in a mood of unwonted light-headedness. Something inside Monty Hayward was reacting vengefully against the continued impact of circumstance. He felt that he had taken as much dragooning from circumstance as he could stand, and his capacity for meek long-suffering was wearing out. A malicious freak of fate had thrown up an un­ceremonious slip of a girl to let the Saint acclaim him hilari­ously as a full-fledged buccaneer, and that was the last straw. Buccaneer he would be—and let the blood flow in buckets.

They reached a narrow gap in the undergrowth, and there the Saint touched Monty's shoulder, pointing down to the road. A six-wheeled lorry was drawn up close to the side, and just below where they had paused two weatherbeaten men in overalls were reclining against the low bank. Each of them held a massive sandwich of bread and sausage in one hand and a steaming cup in the other; and Monty's eyes fastened on one of those cups fascinatedly. It occurred to him that a twen­tieth-century buccaneer might not necessarily be at such a disadvantage as he had once thought. . . .

"Make it snappy," said the Saint.

He went over the bank in a flying dive, and Monty was only a second behind him. Patricia heard one muffled howl, an eddy of whirling effort, and the smack of bone against bone; then she also came over the bank and saw Simon already starting to strip the overalls from his victim. Monty was dust­ing his trousers, and in his right hand he held like a captured banner the unspilt cup which he would always estimate as one of the outstanding achievements of his life. He raised it dra­matically to Nina Walden as she came through the trees.

"Madam," he said, "your tea."

It was a moment which atoned to him for everything that had gone before; and the girl stepped down smiling into the road and accepted his triumph in the same way as Queen Elizabeth might have accepted the Armada.

"You boys certainly know how to work," she said; and Monty shrugged.

"We do this sort of thing every day," he stated aggressively.

The Saint laughed.

"You're getting the spirit of the business, Monty," he said. "Now if you can hustle into those jeans before anyone else comes along we might call the boat pushed out. Pat, you take a peep under the tarpaulins and find out what the cargo is. They might be carrying some more crown jewels!"

"They're carrying engine castings," Patricia reported.

"O. K., lass. There ought to be room for you girls to pack between them. I'm sorry it wasn't eiderdowns, but, after all, it's a warm day."

The Saint was completing one of those lightning changes which had always been the envious wonder of bis select audi­ences. The immaculate draperies of Savile Row and St. James's had disappeared under a soiled blue boiler suit as if he had never worn them; the shoes of Lobb were stuffed into his pockets and replaced by the dusty boots of toil; the patent-leather hair was tousled into negligent curls. Those who knew him best had asserted that Simon Templar could parade more miracles in the way of disguise with a dab of treacle and a length of string than most men could have accomplished with the largest make-up box in Hollywood. To him the out­ward paraphernalia of costume was merely the show case for a perfect cameo of character study—an inimitable transforma­tion of personality in which no living man could equal him.

"What you boys and girls have got to remember, now and for evermore," he said, "is that the bushiest false whiskers on earth won't help you unless you can put on the authentic pride of whiskeredness. The hair has got to enter into your soul."

He was working in front of the open bonnet of the lorry while he talked, rubbing a judicious blend of grease and grime into his hands and finger-nails and smearing artistic stains of it across his face. It seems a simple thing to write, and yet the bare truth of it is that when he turned round again he had literally annihilated Simon Templar—he was a German truckdriver, with a past and a present and a future and an aged aunt in Frankfort to whom he faithfully sent a card every Christmas.

Monty Hayward was just securing the last button of his own overalls, and the Saint lugged him boisterously over and smudged his immaculate face and hands with half a dozen similarly rapid master-strokes.

"Sit quiet and blow your nose on your sleeve occasionally," he said, "and we can't go wrong."

He ran a hawk-like eye over the details of his protégé's at­tire; and then he grinned boyishly and smote Monty a deto­nating blow between the shoulder blades.

"C'mon! Let's push these birds out of the way."

They carried the two unconscious men into the wood and hid them in a thicket, after the Saint had bound and gagged them with strips of their own clothing. Simon's departing flour­ish was to pin a hundred-mark note to each of their shirt-fronts—the assault on their persons had been a regrettable ne­cessity, but it was one of those little debts which the Saint never forgot. And in the corner of each note he sketched the quaint little haloed figure which had been the signature of more rol­licking outrages than Scotland Yard could discuss in polite lan­guage. It was a long time since the Saint had last used that flippant symbol, and the chance appealed to him as an omen that could not be passed by.

He returned jauntily to the road, and saw that Patricia and the Evening Gazette had already taken up their positions. Si­mon pulled up the starting handle and vaulted into the driv­ing seat.

As they lumbered clangorously round the next bend a car that was speeding towards them swerved peremptorily across their path and stopped broadside on. An officer in field grey climbed out and marched authoritatively over to the Saint's side. The stamp of his commission was branded all over him, and the flap of his revolver holster was unstrapped and turned back into his belt.

"Woher kommen Sie, bitte?" he demanded curtly; and the Saint drew a grubby hand across an even grubbier forehead.

"Aus Ingolstadt, Herr Hauptmann."

"So. Haben Sie auf diesem Wege nicht zwei Männer und eine Frau gesehen? Der grössere Mann trägt einen hellgrauen Anzug, die Frau ist ganz hübsch und gut gekleidet——"

"Doch!"

"Kolossal!" The officer whipped out a notebook and sig­nalled vehemently to his men. "Welche Richtung haben sie eingeschlagen?"

Simon took one hand from the wheel and pointed back over the fields.

"Sie sind soeben dort über die Wiesen gegangen. Ich begreife es jetzt noch immer nicht, doss ich das Mädchen nicht überfahren habe, denn sie ist mir gerade aus der Hecke unter die Vorderräder gelaufen——"

"Ihr Name?"

"Franz Schneider."

"Adresse?"

"Nürnberg, Juliusstrasse, seibzehn."

The police car rushed up alongside, and the officer stepped on the running board and called out a volley of instructions. He turned and shouted to Simon as the driver let in the clutch.

"Wenn wir diese Verbrecher fangen, behommen Sie viel­leicht eine hohe Belohnung!"

Simon slewed round in his seat and watched the police car vanishing in a cloud of dust.

And then, very gravely, he leaned forward and engaged the gears. ...

They had travelled less than a quarter of a mile up the road before Monty Hayward could contain himself no longer. He sat forward on his perch, that imperturbable and law-abiding gentleman, and flung the bruised fragments of his conscience over the horizon with a stentorian bellow of jubilation that drowned even the ear-splitting racket of the six-wheeler's en­trails.

"Kolossal!" he bawled ecstatically. "Tremendous affair! They legged it over the fields, they did, and we nearly ran over one of them. Tally-ho! And if they're caught we may qualify for a reward. Yoi!" Monty let out another whoop of rhapsody that should have made the welkin turn pale. "Well, dear old sports­man and skipper—where shall we go and file our claim?"

"Treuchtlingen is the next stop, dear old mate and bloke," said the Saint, raising his voice more modestly above the up­roar of the engine. "They must have kept Marcovitch there to get his statement, but the train wouldn't wait for him. He'll have to wait for another—and we might be in time to buy him a bouquet!"

2

The lorry crashed on to the northwest at a sonorous twenty-five miles an hour; and Simon Templar settled himself as com­fortably as he could on the hard seat and pondered the prob­lem of the two girls behind.

He knew exactly what he had taken on, even if he refused to allow the knowledge to depress him. Hairbreadth odysseys had been made through hostile country before—by desperate men whose superlatively virile strength and speed and cunning kept them moving in a tireless rush that never let up until sanctuary was reached. He could remember no similar in­stance in which a woman had taken part. It had been tried often enough, and always it had been the woman who had proved the fugitive's undoing. Always it had been the woman's inferior wieldiness that had damped the spark of ruthless prim­itive momentum without which no such enterprise could ever succeed. It was she who negatived all the man's resources of strength and speed and left him with cunning as his only asset; and every time his wits had failed to carry the load.

Simon Templar reckoned himself something unique in the way of outlaws, and his restless imagination was bearing around the handicap as optimistically as if it had been thrust upon him in a friendly game of hide-and-seek. One thing at least was certain, and that was that Patricia Holm couldn't ride into Treuchtlingen on the lorry. Quite apart from the risk that they might be stopped again and subjected to a search, the rare spectacle of a Bond Street three-piece crawling out from under the tarpaulin of a six-wheeler in the middle of the main street could scarcely escape attention. Marcovitch would doubtless have given a photographic description of her in which the musical-comedy American disguise that had sailed her through the barriers at Munich Hauptbahnhof must have received due credit; therefore it was time for something bright and new to be thought up, and the Saint drove with one eye on the road and the other questing for his opportunity.

From time to time the gentle undulations of the scene gave him a vista of the Altmühl winding like a silver snake be­tween the meadows; and twelve miles farther on it was that same river which provided him with his solution. It caught his wandering eye through a girdle of trees that ringed round a sheltered fold in the broad valley, and if he had not been in Germany he might have believed for a moment that some sorcery had transported him into a pastoral of Ancient Greece. The glimpse lasted for less than a second, but it looked prom­ising enough. He ran the truck another hundred yards up the road, kicked it out of gear, and jumped lightly down to the tarmac.

"Hold the fort for a minute, Monty," he said. "I've just seen a girl."

Monty Hayward rolled over and grabbed the wheel. The elevation of his eyebrows was a five-furlong speech in itself.

"You've just seen a what?" he blurted, and the Saint chuck­led.

"A girl," said the Saint. "But she's much too nice for a mar­ried man like you."

He flagged Monty a debonair au revoir, and slipped hope­fully off the road down a shallow bank that led round towards the hollow where he had seen his vision. It really was a very charming little scene; and in any other circumstances, not being afflicted with the Teutonic temperament, he could have waxed poetic over it for some time. It says much for his stern devotion to duty that he was back within ten minutes, sad­dened to think that the serpent of Eden would probably have viewed such vandalism as his with loathing, but bringing with him nevertheless a large bundle which he tossed into Monty's arms before he climbed back into the cockpit.

The lorry groaned in its intestines and moved on; and Monty Hayward gazed at the trophies on his lap and appeared to sigh.

"You don't mean to say these are her clothes?" he croaked, and felt that the difficulty of making himself heard robbed the utterance of much of its delicacy.

"I'm afraid they are," answered the Saint, with similar emo­tions. "And her girl friend's as well. You see, she wasn't using them. . . . And Greta was divine, Monty. It'd be worth taking up this Freikörperkultur just on the chance of meeting her again."

Another three miles nearer Treuchtlingen, when he decided that they were temporarily safe from any immediate pursuit, he braked the lorry again beside a small spinney and hopped out. The road was clear; and he threw back the tarpaulins and lifted Patricia down to the grass verge. Nina Walden followed her unconcernedly, and the Saint reclaimed his booty and dumped it into Patricia's hands.

"You two are going to be a couple of Wandervögel with great open faces," he said. "Take this stuff into the jungle and get on with it. The things you're wearing will go in the ruck­sacks. And don't carry on as if you were dressing to go to a dance—we can't stay here more than a week."

His lady stared suspiciously at the collection of garments which he had thrust upon her.

"But where did you get these things from?" she demanded; and Simon propelled her towards the coppice with a laugh.

"Now don't waste time asking indiscreet questions. I found them lying in a field, and the actress never told the bishop a smoother one than that."

He paced up and down beside the lorry, smoking a ciga­rette, while he waited for the girls to return. An open touring car jolted past with its springs labouring under the avoirdupois of a healthy Prussian commercial traveller and his Frau, but beyond that the prospect had no reason to complain that only man was vile. It was an almost miraculous stroke of for­tune for the Saint, and he rendered thanks accordingly. The accident which had enabled him to misdirect the pursuit had been a bonanza in itself: it meant that the plight of the truck's crew might not be discovered for several hours, and meantime the hue and cry would be spreading away at right angles to the course he was taking. The last place in which any policeman would expect to see him was Treuchtlingen—the very town from which the alarm had emanated. The hunt would be de­ploying westward to intercept him at the French frontier, but Simon Templar was not going that way.

His cigarette had still half an inch to go when Patricia Holm emerged from the spinney and presented herself for his inspection.

"If we've got the rest of a week to spare," she said blandly, "I think I might have a smoke too."

Simon offered his packet. She had put on a brief leather skirt and a plain cotton jumper, and her legs were bare to the rawhide sandals. Her nose was definitely shiny, and the fair hair was pushed carelessly back from her forehead as if the wind had been rumpling it all day. She had even remembered to take off her gold wrist watch; and the Saint noted that touch with a slow smile of appreciation.

"There isn't much more I can teach you, old Pat," he said.

Nina Walden joined them a few moments later, and her garb was much the same. Simon showed her how to adjust the rucksack; and then he took her in his arms and kissed her heartily. For at least three seconds she was too thunderstruck to move, and then her voice returned.

"Are you getting fresh?" she demanded huskily; and Simon Templar laughed.

"I was just taking off some of your lipstick, darling. It's not being worn on great open faces these days, and it seemed a shame to mess up your hankie."

He whirled expeditiously up to the cockpit and sat on the edge of it to give his orders, leaning over with one forearm on his knee and his eyes dancing.

"You two'll have to make it on foot from here—it's under seven kilometres by the milestones, and you couldn't have a better day for a walk. Besides which, this lorry alibi mayn't last forever, and we don't all need to ride in one basket with the eggs. Go into Treuchtlingen and look for the station. Pat goes into the nearest Konditorei and buys herself a cup of chocolate to pass the time; Nina, you shunt into the Bahnhof and take a return ticket to Ansbach. Slide through the door marked Damen and make yourself at home. Change back into your ordinary clothes, wrap the other things into a parcel with some brown paper which you'll get on the way, wait till you hear the next train through, cross the line, and walk out the other side as if you owned the railroad—giving up the return half of your ticket. All clear so far?"

"I think so," said the American girl slowly. "But what's it all for?"

"I've got a job for you," said the Saint steadily. "You wanted the complete story of those crown jewels, and this is part of it. Your next move is the police station. You're a perfectly honest American journalist on vacation who's got wind of the at­tempted mail robbery and general commotion. We must know definitely what's happened to Marcovitch and his troupe of performing gorillas, and there's only one way to find out. Some­one's got to jazz into the lion's den—and ask."

Simon looked down at her quietly; but the hell-for-leather twinkle was still dancing way down in his eyes. Sitting up there beside him, Monty Hayward began to understand the spell which the Saint must have woven around those cynical young freebooters of death who had followed him in the old days— the days which Monty Hayward knew only from hearsay and almost legendary record. He began to understand the fanatical loyalty which must have welded that little band together when they flung their quixotic defiance in the teeth of Law and Un­derworld alike, when every man's hand was against them and only the inspired devilry of their leader stood between them and the wrath of a drab civilization. And it came to Monty Hayward, that phlegmatic and unimpressionable man, in a sudden absurd flash of blind surrender, that if ever that little band should be gathered once more in the sound of the trumpet he would ask for no prouder fate than to be among their company. ...

"I'm not asking you to do anything disreputable," said the Saint. "As a reporter, it's your job to get all the news; and if you happen to share some of it with a friend—well, who's going to lose their sleep?"

"I should worry. But when do I get the rest of the story?"

"When we've got it ourselves. I've promised you shall have it, and I shan't forget. But this has got to come first I told you I'd help you as much as you helped me. I wouldn't give you the run-around for worlds—I couldn't afford to. We need that piece of news. It's the one thing that'll lead us to the only cli­max that's any use to anyone. If we lose Marcovitch, I lose my crown jewels—and your story's up the pole. You're the only one who can save the game. You're a journalist—will you go on and journalize?"

The others went still and silent in a heart-stopping moment of revelation. The preposterous surmise that had been tapping at the doors of their belief ever since the Saint began speaking burst in on them as an eternal fact. And with it came a real­ization of all that hung from the Saint's madness and that crazy instant of inspiration back in the woods by the railroad.

The Saint had never been thinking of defeat. With the hunt hard behind him and a price on his head, when he should have been thinking of nothing but escape, he had still been able to play with a madcap idea that fortune had thrown into his path. There was something about it which stunned all logic and all questions—a sense of the joyously inevitable which swept every sane criticism aside. It stirred something in the heart which was beyond reach of reason, like the cheering of a thousand throats or the swing of a regiment moving as one man—something that was rooted in the core of all human impulse, a primeval passion of victory that lifted the head higher and sent the blood tingling through the veins. . . . And the Saint was almost laughing.

"Will you try it?" he asked.

And Nina Walden said, with her marvellous amethyst eyes full upon his: "I can do that for you—Saint."

The Saint reached down and put out a brown hand.

"Good girl. . . . And when you've got the dope, all you have to do is rustle back to the Konditorei where you left Pat. Monty and I will park the lorry and be around. We'll find you somewhere. And it'll be a swell story." He smiled. "And thanks, Nina," he said.

The girl smiled back.

Then the Saint spilled over into his seat. He caught Patricia up to him and kissed her on the lips. The six-wheeler's engine raced with a protesting scream, and the huge truck jolted on up the road.

X. HOW SIMON TEMPLAR DISCOURSED ABOUT

PROHIBITION, AND PATRICIA HOLM WALKED

LIKE A PRINCESS

SIMON drove the lorry clear through Treuchdingen and out the other side. Pressed hard on its elephantine second gear, it rumbled through the streets with a din that shook the town on its foundations, and several scores of the population turned away from their jobs with representative emotions to see it go. Simon Templar had no objection. That part of the journey was one of those master strokes of strategy which mul­tiplied in his fertile inventiveness like a colony of rabbits with their souls in the business. He had plenty of time to give it rein, and the system of tactics tickled his sense of fun. Two po­licemen had marked his noisy passage; and if the theft of the lorry were prematurely discovered their statements ought to give the pursuit a fresh start in the wrong direction. What­ever happened, Treuchtlingen would still be the last place on earth in which the hue and cry would search for them.

He went eight kilometers beyond Treuchtlingen on the Ansback road, and abandoned the truck within sight of a cross­roads which would annoy the pursuit still more. They dou­bled back across country, for there were other travellers on the road, and the alarm would soon be spreading like a forest fire.

"This police force will just hate me before I'm through," said the Saint lightly; and then he laughed. "What'll you do with your share of the boodle, Monty?"

For once it never occurred to Monty Hayward to question whether that share would ever materialize.

"I haven't had time to think about it," he said. "I suppose I shall spend most of it on fares—trying to keep out of jail."

The list of crimes for which he could be tried and almost certainly convicted had faded into the dim outskirts of his consciousness like a tally of old scars. The prospects for his future had gone the same way, Like a distant appointment with the dentist. And yet he knew, from the swift sidelong glance which answered his thoughtless remark, that the Saint had not forgotten. The Saint was thinking of the same thing, even then.

Monty fell into a kind of reverie as he walked. He knew that the Saint was quietly searching for a scheme that would clear up the tangle and allow Monty Hayward at least to go free, and for a while he allowed himself to fancy that even such a forlorn hope as that might be carried through by a man to whom no hope seemed too forlorn for a dice with the gods. Suppose the miracle had been worked, and the hue and cry spumed past him like a turning tide, leaving him to dry his wings far up on the shore? . . . Then there would be silence for a week or so, broken at length by a characteristic message of salutation to announce that a worthy proportion of the boodle, mysteriously converted into sterling, had been credited to him through his bank—and tell Ann to have a large plateful of those cakes hot from the oven for him next time he called. That would be the Saintly method—a conclusive share-out that precluded all possibility of refusal. And an un-regenerate patchwork of a letter in which every vigorous line would bring back the tang of a ridiculous glamour. . . . And what then? The Consolidated Press, the snug office, the regular hours, the respectable week-ends, the everlasting discussion or rough-neck plots with swan-necked authors, the barometric eye on the circulation figures every Monday. Or an even dead­lier retirement, with a sports car and a yacht for toys, Medi­terranean summers, luxury cruises, and the bromidic gossip of other douce, unambitious parasites who had the whole world for their playground and could only see it as a race track or a tennis court. In either alternative, the same end­less quest for a meaning in life that he had come near to grasping on one wild drive through the Bavarian hills. It gave him a queer feeling of emptiness and futility; and he said very little more during that walk back into the town.

Simon Templar also was silent. There had been times when he had deliberately tried to shut out from his mind the respon­sibility for Monty Hayward's predicament, and yet it had never been very far below the surface of his thoughts. He had ig­nored it, joked with it, passed it over; but now, with the tight­ening of the net round them, it was brought home to him as another debt that was still to be paid.

He picked their route with an unerring instinct: to Monty Hayward it seemed almost inconceivable that such a journey could be made in broad daylight without at least one casual observer to see them pass, but the Saint achieved it. There was a spring in his stride and a fighting line to his mouth that told their own tale. For him the story could have only one denoue­ment; but the precious minutes were ticking up against them, and the time he had to play with was hacked sharp and square out of the schedule of destiny. Three hours, perhaps, he might allow for the local gendarmerie to amuse themselves with their squad cars and bloodhounds; but inside that limit the Higher Command would get its circus licked into shape. The Higher Command, with its coat off and the arrears of Löwenbräu oozing out of its stagnant pores, would be fusing telephone wires in all directions with the coordinating groundwork of a cordon that would demand identification papers from a mi­grating tapeworm. The Higher Command, with its ineffable moustachios fairly bristling to avenge the affronts which had been sprayed upon them, would be winnowing through the enclosed area in an almighty clean-up that would fan the pants of every citizen in that peaceful community. The Higher Command, in short, would be taking a personal interest in the gala; and when that time came Simon Templar had no de­sire to be around.

It was six o'clock when Treuchtlingen received them again, letting them into its back streets through a narrow path be­tween two houses—less than fourteen hours since that moment by the bridge in Innsbruck when Monty Hayward of his own unsuspecting free will had launched them on that harebrained steeplechase. The town seemed quiet enough. Like the core of a cyclone, it was a paradoxical oasis of tranquillity within the belt of official spleen that must have been raging round it. The Saint and Monty plunged into it as if the mayor were their personal friend, and no one paid any attention to them; but the Saint had expected that much immunity. Doubtless the next day's newspapers would inform him that his exploits had roused the neighbourhood to a fever of indignation, but if he had hoped to be regaled with the magnificent spectacle of Treuchtlingen's aldermen woofling up and down the main street with their ties under their ears and the veins standing out on the backs of their necks he would have been disap­pointed. Treuchtlingen went about its daily business, and left any woofling that might be called for to the authorities who were paid to woofle on suitable occasions. It was a sidelight on the social system which deputes its emotions to a handful of salaried wooflers that had stood the Saint in good stead before; and yet perhaps only Simon knew how thin was the veneer of apathy on which his bluff was based.

But once they were inside the town concealment was impos­sible, and the only way to proceed was by that sheer arrogance of brass-neckedness in which the Saint's nerve had never failed him. They located the police station without difficulty and walked past it. Farther on, a heaven-sent Weinstube swam into their ken; and Monty Hayward realized that his throat had beeH parched for hours. He glared at the temptation like a starving rabbi resisting a fat slice of ham, but the Saint saw no objection.

"Why shouldn't we?" drawled the Saint. "We don't want to roam about the streets. We can't go into a Konditorei—they'd think there was something wrong with us. Why not?"

Their trail turned through the doors. It was Simon who called for beer and sausages, and produced a packet of evil-smelling cigarettes from his overalls. Monty began to wish that he had suffered his thirst in silence: he had caught a smile in the Saint's eye which forboded more mischief.

"I have been thinking," said the Saint.

He broke off while their order was placed on the stained wooden table in front of them. To fill up the interval he smiled winningly at the barmaid. She smiled back, disclosing a faceful of teeth that jutted out over, her lower lip like a frozen Niagara of ivory. The Saint watched her departure with some emotion; and then he turned to Monty again and raised his glass. They were in an isolated corner of the room where their conversation could not be overheard.

"Great thoughts, Monty," said the Saint.

"I suppose you must think sometimes," conceded Monty discouragingly, without any visible eagerness to probe deeper into the matter. He swilled some Nürnberger round his palate with great concentration. "Why can't they make beer like this in England?" he asked, pulling out the best red herring he could think of.

"Because of your Aunt Emily," said the Saint, whose pa­tience could be inexhaustible when once he had made up his mind. "In America they have total prohibition, and the beer is lousy. In England they have semi-prohibition, in the shape of your Aunt Emily's wall-eyed Licensing Laws, and the beer is mostly muck. This is a free country where they take a proper pride in their beer, and if you tried to put any filthy chemi­cals in it you'd find yourself in the can. The idea of your Aunt Emily is that beer-drinkers are depraved anyway, and there­fore any poison is good enough to pump into their stomachs —and the rest is a question of degree. Now let's get back to business. I have been thinking."

Monty sighed.

"Tell me the worst."

"I've been thinking," said the Saint, with his mouth full of sausage, "that we ought to do a job of work."

He took another draught from his glass and went on merci­lessly.

"We are disguised as workmen, Monty," he said, "and there­fore we ought to work. We can't stay here indefinitely, and Nina'll only just have got started on the pump-handle. That police station looked lonely to me, and I'd feel happier if we were on the spot"

"But what d'you think you're going to do?" protested Monty half-heartedly. "You can't go to the door and ask if they've got any chairs to mend.'^r

The Saint grinned.

"I don't think I could ever mend a chair," he said. "But I know something else I could do, and I've always wanted to do it. I noticed a swell site for it right opposite that police sta­tion. We'll be moving as soon as you're ready."

Monty Hayward finished his beer with rather less enthusi­asm than he had started it, while Simon clinked money on the table and treated himself to another yard of the barmaid's teeth. It was on the tip of Monty's tongue to spread out a bar­rage of other and less half-hearted protests—to say that the jam was tight enough as they were without giving it any gratui­tous chances—but something else rose up in his mind and stopped him. And he knew at the same time that nothing would have stopped the Saint. He caught that smile in the Saint's eye again; but now it was aimed straight at him, with a sprin­kling of banter in it, cutting clean as a rapier thrust to his in­most thoughts. It stripped the meaningless habit of lukewarm criticism clear away from him, taking him back to other mo­ments in those fourteen crowded hours which he had lately been remembering with a contentment that he could not have explained in words. It brought him face to face with a self that was still unfamiliar to him, but which would never be un­familiar again. In that instant of utter self-knowledge he felt as if he had broken out of a bondage of heavy darkness; he was a free man for the first time in his life.

"O. K.," he said.

They went out into the streets again, finding them softened by the first shadows of twilight. Monty was still wondering what new lunacy had brewed itself in the Saint's brain, but he asked no more questions.

Men and women passed them on the pavements, sparing them no more than a vacant glance which observed nothing.

Monty began to feel the flush of a growing confidence. After all, there was nothing about him which could legitimately induce a sane population to stand still and gape at him. He looked again at the Saint, detachedly, and saw a subtle change in his leader which increased that assurance. The Saint was slouching a little, putting his weight more ruggedly on his heels, with his shoulders rounded and the half-smoked ciga­rette drooping negligently from one corner of his mouth: he was just a plain, unaspiring artisan, with Socialistic opinions and an immoderate family. Again the picture was perfect; and Monty knew that if he played his own rôle half as well he would pass muster in any ordinary crowd.

A miscellaneous junk store showed up on the other side of the road, with its wares overflowing onto benches set out on the sidewalk. Simon crossed the road and invaded the gloom­ily odorous interior. He emerged with a large and shabby sec­ond-hand bag, with which they continued their journey. A hardware store was the next stop, and there Simon proceeded to acquire an outfit of tools. The purchase taxed his German to the utmost, for the layman's technical vocabularies may be sketchy enough in his own language, without venturing into the complexities of a specialized foreign jargon. The Saint, who could carry on any everyday conversation in half a dozen different dialects, could no more have trusted himself to ask for a centre-bit or a handspike than he could have knitted himself a suit of combinations. He explained that his kit had been stolen, and bluffed his way through, wandering round the shop and collecting likely-looking instruments here and there, while he kept the proprietor occupied with a flow of patter that was coarse enough to keep any laughter-loving Boche amused for hours. It was finished at last, and they hit the footway again while the storekeeper was still wheezing over the Saint's final sally.

"Well—what are we supposed to be?" inquired Monty Hay-ward interestedly, as they turned their steps back towards the police station; and the Saint shrugged at him skew-eyed.

"I haven't the vaguest idea, old lad. But if we don't look impressively energetic it won't be my fault."

They stopped directly opposite the station, and Simon laid his bag down carefully in the road. Gazing about rather blankly, Monty noticed for the first time that there was a rec­tangular metal plate let into the cobbles at his feet. Simon fished a hooked implement out of his bag, inserted it in a sort of keyhole, and yanked up the slab. They got their fingers un­der the edge and lifted it out onto the road beside the chasm which it disclosed. Without batting an eyelid, the Saint de­liberately spread out an imposing array of tools all round him, sat down in the road with his legs dangling through the hole, and stared down at the maze of lead tubes and insulated wiring which he had uncovered, with an expression of owlish sagacity illuminating his face.

2

"It's not so good if you happen to open up a sewer by mis­take," Simon remarked solemnly, "but this looks all right."

He hauled up a length of wire and inspected its broken end with the absorbed concentration of a monkey that has scratched up a bonanza in its cousin's scalp. He tapped Monty on the shoulder and required him also to examine the frayed strands of copper, pointing them out one by one in a dumb-show that registered a Wagnerian crescendo of distress and disapproval. Monty knelt down beside the hole and shook his head in manifest sympathy. Rousing himself from his grief, the Saint picked up a hammer and launched a frenzied as­sault on the nearest length of lead pipe. It lasted for the best part of a minute; and then the Saint sat back and surveyed the dents he had made with an air of professional satisfac­tion.

"Gimme that file," he grunted.

Monty pasted it over; and the Saint bowed his head and began to saw furiously at the angles of a joint that he had spotted lower down in the pit.

If there had been any genuine experts in the vicinity that performance would never have got by for ten seconds; but no one seemed sufficiently inquisitive to make a lengthy study of the Saint's original methods. Hardly anyone gave them a second glance. Planted right out there in the naked expanse of the highway, they were hidden as effectively as if they had buried themselves under the ground. And the necks of Treucht­lingen were innocent of the taint of rubber. An occasional automobile honked round them, and a dray backed up close to Monty's posterior and parked there while the driver went into a good pull-up for carmen. Apart from the infrequent sounds of plodding boots or grinding machinery going past them, they might have been a couple of ancient lights for all the sensation they provoked. So long as he didn't electrocute himself or carve into a gas main and blow the windows out of the street, the Saint figured that he was on velvet

And if he had wanted to be near the scene of action, he couldn't have got much closer without walking in and intro­ducing himself. As he bent down over his improvised program of free services to the Treuchtlingen municipality, he could study the whole architecture of the police station under his left arm—a drab, two-storied building to which not even the kindly shades of the evening could lend any mystery. It stood up as squat and unimaginative as the laws behind it, a monument of prosaic modernity wedged in among the random houses of a more leisurely age. Simon looked up at the regular squares of window that divided the stark façade in geometric sym­metry, and saw the first of them light up.

"Six-thirty," he said to Monty. "Nina must be getting them warmed."

Monty fiddled with a spanner.

"There's no chance that she left before we arrived, is there? She might have got what she wanted quicker than we expected."

"Not here or anywhere else, in a blockhouse like that. There isn't a government official anywhere in the world who could get anything done in less than seventy-nine times as long as it'd take you or me to do it. They're all born with moss under their feet—it's one of the qualifications."

The Saint lugged out another line of cable and battered it ferociously with a chisel. Underneath the triviality of his words ran a thin, taut thread of strain. Monty heard it then for the first time, hardening the edges of Simon's voice. There was no weakness about it, no trace of fear: it was the strain of a man whose faculties were strung up to a singing intensity of alertness, the cold expectancy of a boxer waiting to enter the ring. It showed up something that Monty alone had overlooked dur­ing those fourteen hours of his adventure. The Saint's own op­timism had made it all seem so easy, even in its craziest gyra­tions; and yet that very smoothness had derived itself from nothing but the steel core of inflexible purpose behind the whimsical blue eyes that had unconsciously slitted themselves down for a moment into two splinters of the same steel. And the story had still to be brought to the only possible end. ...

Simon snapped his cable in the middle, tied the pieces to­gether again, wrapped a strip of insulating tape round the connection, and hammered it out flat. His movements had the gritty restraint of fettered impatience. Inside that cubist's bellyache of a fortress the real work was being done for him by a girl; and as the time went on he knew that he would rather have done it himself—shot up the police station in per­son and extracted his information at the snout of a Webley. Anything would have been better than that period of nerve-rasping inaction. He knew that he was thinking like a fool— that any such course would have been nothing short of a high road to suicide—but he couldn't help thinking it. The suspense had started to tug at the muscles of his stomach in an inter­mittent discharge of hampered energy. Somehow it shook up the cool flow of his mind, when he should have been focusing solely on the task that was coming to him as soon as the infor­mation was obtained. It was as if he had been trying to see down into a pool of clear water, and every now and then something in the depths stirred up a cloud of silt and swal­lowed up his objective in a turbid fog. Somewhere in that fog Marcovitch was sneering at him, capering farther and farther beyond his reach. ...

A chilled drop of moisture trickled clammily down his side, and the Saint shook himself in the sudden astonishment of finding that he was sweating. The pale eyes of Josef Krauss loomed up before him again, glazed with that unforgettable film of bitter mockery. Simon set his lips. He couldn't under­stand himself. In everything physical he was the same as he had always required himself to be: his hand was steady, his sight was clear, his heart beat normally. The rhythm of his aim­less hammering still gave him the joy of perfect bodily fitness, trained to the last ounce. And there he was behaving like a frightened schoolboy, losing control of his mind just at the point where it should have been tuning itself up to concert pitch for the showdown.

He forced himself back into the train of thought that kept slipping away from him. How much ground had Marcovitch been able to put between them during those three hours since the carnival in the brake van? Simon tried to work it out again. Half an hour to get to Treuchdingen; at least another half hour to get through to the local police chief; then an hour of romancing and circumstantial fiction. Leaving another hour in which anything might have happened. And meanwhile, what had become of Rudolf? The stolen Rolls would have been recovered before long, once the theft had been notified—cer­tainly before the departure of the next northbound express at five-thirty—and Rudolf would probably elect to follow up by road. He would have to make contact with Marcovitch again somewhere, and Marcovitch was an unstable quantity. The Saint made an effort to put himself in the enemy's place. What would he do if he were Rudolf? He'd have every possible route out of Munich measured out, with points of communication arranged for on all of them. If Marcovitch had succeeded in getting a message back from the station before the train left, which seemed very probable, he would know what road to take as soon as he could find a conveyance; and the rest would sim­ply be a matter of making inquiries at the pre-arranged points along the route to which news might be telephoned. Sooner or later that system would link them up again; and in view of the spare hour with which Simon had to credit Marcovitch, the vote went to sooner. Marcovitch would have made the wires sizzle with the narrative of his accomplishment at the earliest opportunity, and the panegyric would already be waiting for Rudolf to catch it up. Ingolstadt seemed a likely junction. . . . Which meant that Rudolf might even then be speeding on into Treuchtlingen to take over the command. ... And if Mar­covitch and his aviary of jailbirds were actually holding on in Treuchtlingen, waiting for Rudolf to meet them there . . .

The Saint took a grim hold on himself. Once again the thread had slipped through a loophole in his mind at that point, as it had done every time before. The fog swirled up again, blotting it out in a maddening haze. He wrestled against it in a moment of frozen savagery, but the mists only swelled thicker. The thread had gone back on him for good, and his own efforts to recapture it only seemed to drive the loose end into a more infuriating obscurity. He felt as if his brain had chosen that moment to fall into a sluggish conflict of cross-purposes with itself—as if one part of it had mutinied and dis­ordered the clean running of the rest, jarring through insubordinately with a shapeless idea of its own. And it was not until many weeks afterwards, when he recalled that span of unaccountable impotence, that he could see in it the inter­ference of some psychic power which was beyond understand­ing.

He looked up at the flat, concrete face of the police station. Other windows were lighting up as the dusk overtook them, slashing their mathematical squares of luminousness out of the grey blankness of the wall. The low rectangle of doorway was still dark, like a cuneiform rat's hole.

Simon passed a hand over his eyes.

"If we knew which of these things were telephone wires, we might cut 'em," he said, without a change in the cool level of his voice. "I'm not sure that we mayn't have disorganized some­thing already—those were two very classy-looking bits of wire before I repaired "em."

That was all he said. And he left off speaking so naturally that for several seconds Monty Hayward guessed nothing of what had happened.

And yet before the last words were out of his mouth Simon Templar had seen a thing which crushed every other thought out of his head; It burst in on his senses with the stupefying concussion of an exploded bomb, gripping his brain in an icy constriction of sheer paralysis, so that for one heart-stopping instant the whole world seemed to stand still all round him. And then the full torrent of comprehension weltered down on him like a landslide and shattered the fragile stillness as though it had been held in a gigantic bubble of glass, blasting the shredded fragments of his universe into a swimming vortex of incoherence that made the blood roar in his ears like a hun­dred dynamos.

It had started so very quietly and gently that he had watched its approach without the slightest flicker of suspicion. His eyes had taken it in exactly as they took in the details of the sur­rounding houses, or an individual cobblestone among the scores that lay all around him—merely as one uneventful item of the general street scene with no particular significance in itself. He sat there and spread himself wide open to it, wide open as a new-born babe crowing innocently at the distended hood of a cobra.

Three people were coming down the road.

The Saint gazed at them merely because he happened to be looking in their direction. They were sixty or seventy yards up the street when he first noticed them, too far away for him to see them as anything but shadowy figures in the failing light; and they meant nothing more to him than any of the other figures that had passed and repassed since he had been sitting there. He watched them without seeing them, while his mind was wholly occupied with other things. The thread of his deduc­tions was still eluding him at the most vital knot, baffling him again in that murky whirlpool of disjointed ideas which per­sisted in deflecting the straight trajectory of his thoughts, and he was bullying himself back to the fence which his imagination steadily refused to take. If Marcovitch was waiting for Rudolf in Treuchtlingen . . . The figures came nearer: he made out that one of them was a woman, and somewhere beside her he seemed to catch a sheen of bright metal, but even then he thought nothing of it. The fog had balked him again. He glanced up at the police station—began speaking to Monty, giving no hint of the struggle within himself. . . .

And then the street lights went on suddenly, leaping into yellow orbs of incandescence that studded the dusk with moons. The rays of one of them fell clearly over the three figures less than twenty yards away, striking full on the pale, proud face of the girl in the middle; and Simon saw that it was Patricia Holm.

The Saint went numb. Dully he made out the features of the two men—the policeman on one side, holding her by the arm: Marcovitch on the other, viciously jubilant. The deadly unex­pectedness of it stunned him. He felt as if destiny had slammed a door in bis face and turned a key, and he was help­lessly watching the bolts sinking home into their sockets, one by one. It was the one thing that he had never even found a place for in his calculations. He tried stupidly to find a reason for it, as if only a logical interpretation could confirm the evidence of his eyes. The lost end of the thread that he had been pursuing whisked through his brain again like a streak of hot quicksilver: "If Marcovitch was waiting for Rudolf in Treuchtlingen——" It snapped off there like an overstrained wire, splitting under the shock of a boiling inrush of realiza­tion. The facts were there. Patricia was caught, disarmed, locked in the iron clutch of the Law as surely as if the door of a cell had already been closed upon her; and Marcovitch was going with her to the station to clinch the charge. The machinery was in motion, clamping its bars round her, dragging her inexorably into the relentless mill. The bubble had burst.

Dimly Monty Hayward became aware of the terrible still­ness beside him, and raised his eyes. The Saint was rigid to his fingertips, staring across the road like a man in a nightmare. Turning to follow that stare, Monty Hayward also saw; and in the next searing instant he also understood.

Then the Saint came to life. A red mist drove across his eyes, and the pent-up desperation of his stillness smithereened into a reckless bloodlust. His right hand leapt to his hip pocket; and then Monty Hayward pulled himself together in a blaze of strength that he had not known he possessed and caught at the flying wrist.

"Simon—that won't help you!"

For a second he thought the Saint would shoot him while he spoke. The Saint's eyes drilled through him sightlessly, as if he had been a stranger, with those pin-points of red fire smoulder­ing behind brittle flakes of blue. There was no vestige of reason or humanity in them—nothing but the insensate flare of a bar­baric vengefulness that would have gone up against an army with its bare hands. For that second the Saint was mad— raving blind and deaf with a different madness from any that Monty had seen in him before. Monty looked death in the face, but he held his ground without flinching. He gripped the Saint's wrist like a vise, forcing his words through the dead walls of the Saint's stark insanity. And slowly, infinitely slowly, he saw them groping to their mark. The Saint's wrist relaxed, ounce by ounce, and the red glare sank deeper into his eyes. The eyes wavered from their blind stare for the first time.

"Maybe you're right."

The Saint's voice was almost a whisper; but Monty saw his mouth frame the syllables, and watched a trace of colour creep­ing back into the lips which had been pressed up into thin ridges of white stone. He let go the Saint's wrist, and Simon picked up a wire and twisted it mechanically.

The street was undisturbed. In all those tense seconds there had only been two violent movements, and neither of those would have impressed any but the closest observer in that faint light. And the pavements were practically deserted, except for the three figures passing under another lamp-post, only half a dozen yards now from the doors of the police station. The curi­ous glances of the. few pedestrians in sight were centred ex­clusively on the girl: none of them had any attention to spare for the commonplace counter attraction of two workmen squatting over a hole in the road tinkering with wires. Mar­covitch never knew how near he had been to extinction. He was gloating over his triumph, oblivious of everything else around him, walking straight for the entrance of the police station without a glance to right or left. It was he who led the way up the steps; and then Simon had one more glimpse of the girl, a glimpse that he would remember all his life, with her fair head fearlessly tilted and the grace of a princess in her unfaltering stride. And then she also was gone, and the dark doorway sprang into empty brilliance after her.

"I think Marcovitch will have to die," said the Saint

The wire broke in the twisting of his fingers like a piece of rotten thread, and he dropped it without noticing that it had broken.

He stared expressionlessly up and down the road. The scat­tering of people near by were resuming their affairs as if noth­ing had happened; but at either end of the street he could see more of them, drifting in desultory mosaics under lampposts and lighted windows. Monty had been right—bitterly right. They could never have got away. There wasn't a vehicle of any kind in sight—nothing that they could have commandeered for such an escape as they would have had to make. The first shot would have hemmed them in with a human wall.

Simon felt as if an arctic wind had blown through him, turn­ing his stomach to ice. He sat with his fists clenched in a spasm that ached up his arms, with his eyes fixed on nothing, tasting the dregs of humiliation.

And then he saw a new shaft of luminance swimming round into the street. It fanned out along the line of houses, lifting them in turn into a garish oval of illumination and drop­ping them back into the dark. For a moment the Saint was caught squarely in the beam, but he had bent his head instinc­tively and commenced to play with the wires. Then the beam went past him, settling into a long, low stream of light that swept straight down the road and turned the cobblestones into gleaming mountains with black pits behind them. The car sped down the opposite side of the road with the soft hiss of a per­fectly balanced engine, and braked to an effortless stop out­side the police station.

Then a wave of gloom rolled back on it as the headlights were switched off; and the Saint looked at it over his shoulder in a throb of incredulous expectation. The chauffeur was run­ning round to open the door, and as the passenger stood up Simon saw his profile clean-cut against the light in the station doorway. It was the Crown Prince Rudolf.

XI. HOW MONTY HAYWARD RECITED POETRY,

AND SIMON TEMPLAR TREATED HIMSELF TO

A WASH

THE Crown Prince dusted his sleeve and walked up the steps of the police station, exquisite and inscrutable as ever. He disappeared into the gaunt building. Simon watched him go.

And then something seemed to crack in the Saint's brain. Something had to give way under the tearing impact of the desperation that had engulfed him, and the thing that gave way was the desperation itself. A great weight lilted off his shoulders, and his lungs opened to a mighty breath of life. The heaving earth steadied itself under him. He felt like a strong swimmer who has been trapped in a clinging entanglement of weed, who has fought back out of the choking darkness into a blaze of sunlight and blessed air. The horrible constriction of helplessness broke away from his head, and he felt the wheels of his mind spinning sweet and true again, unhindered even by the disorder which had been throwing them out of gear before the bomb burst. He could have given no reason for that strange reawakening: he only knew that the old fighting cour­age had come back, sending the blood racing warm along his veins and filling his muscles with the old unconquerable sense of power. He stretched himself like a cat in the exultant gath­ering of that flame of indomitable strength. And already he knew how the story was going to end.

Monty Hayward looked at him, and was amazed. The bleak­ness was still in the Saint's eyes, but suddenly there was a twinkle with it as if the sun had glinted over two chips of blue ice. There was the phantom of a smile on the Saint's lips—a smile that had still to reach the careless glory of pure Saintli­ness, but yet a smile that had not been there before. And the Saint spoke in a voice that shared his smile.

"Could anything be better?"

Monty shied away from that voice as if a thunderbolt had hit the ground in front of him. He could hardly believe that it came from the man whom he had seen reaching for his gun a few seconds earlier. It was lilting—positively lilting. "I don't see what you mean, old chap," he said awkwardly. "Don't you see what's happened?" The lilt in the Saint's voice was stronger—and the Saint was still smiling at him. "Marco­vitch was waiting for Rudolf in Treuchtlingen! He saw Pat somewhere, we don't. know where, and put the cop onto her. Then when he came along here with her he had to leave a mes­sage at the rendezvous to say where he'd gone. Rudolf must have arrived a couple of minutes later, and he naturally followed straight on. And here they are!"

Again Monty Hayward felt as he had done in the hotel in Munich—that the Saint must have gone bughouse under the strain. Only this time the feeling verged on an awful certainty.

"What about it?" he said quietly.

The Saint laughed under his breath.

"This about it! They're here—Pat, Rudolf, Marcovitch—the whole all-star cast of unparagoned palukas! And the crown jewels are with them somewhere—I'll bet you a million dollars. Marcovitch would never dare to let them out of his sight. The whole bag of tricks, Monty, packed up and sealed for delivery in that futurist abomination of a Polizeiamt! Just as if we'd fetched 'em together on purpose for the reunion. And only a skeleton staff inside. Every able-bodied man they can lay their hands on is out in the wide county chasing our trail through the cowslips. And here we are as well—wearing out our sterns on this goddam field of bricks while the ungodly are collected for us twenty feet away. We've got 'em cold!"

Monty stared at him.

"What's your idea?" he articulated slowly; and the Saint answered with five syllables that leapt back at him like bullets.

"Go in and get "em!"

A couple of working girls went past them, giggling over the cryptic gossip that working girls giggle over in every country in the world; and Monty Hayward looked into the twinkling icicles of the Saint's eyes, and knew what he would find there before he looked. The Saint meant every crackling consonant of it. Monty had the dubious consolation of knowing that his diagnosis was a bull's-eye. The Saint was as mad as a hatter's March hare. But it was not the red, homicidal ferocity of a moment ago—it was the madness of the bridge in Innsbruck and the ride into Treuchtlingen, a thing against which Monty couldn't argue any more.

"I'll go with you," he said.

It never occurred to him to question why he said it. Hell!— he was damned anyway. Why worry? There was still a good scrap waiting, and retribution would follow soon enough. He hadn't discovered his new self such a short while ago only to throw it away unused.

He heard the quick rippling voice of the tempter in his ear. Simon was leaning over towards him, scraping a chisel about somewhere among the pipes.

"It's the only thing we can do, Monty. We'll never get a chance like this again. And it's got to be done right now, while they're all busy. Death or glory, Mont!"

"Lead on, son and brother."

The Saint grinned.

He inspected the road sideways under his arm. The chauffeur was patrolling comatosely up and down the road beside the cream-coloured Rolls, with the mystic neutrality of chauffeurs; but Simon recognized him as the man whose nose he had been privileged to pull a few hours before.

"We shall have to remove the grease ball," he said. "I may want his car. And you'll have to remove him, Monty, because he knows me."

He gave further instructions.

And thereupon a number of remarkable experiences began to enliven the daily round of Herr Bruno Pelz, chauffeur extraordinary to His Indescribable Pulchritude the Crown Prince Rudolf.

They initiated themselves harmlessly enough with the decep­tively commonplace incident of an overalled workman lever­ing himself out of the hole in the road where he had been en­gaged in his own abstruse travail, and walking across to­wards him. They continued in the same deceptively common­place manner with the workman approaching Herr Pelz and politely requesting the loan of a match for his cigarette. And they went on with Herr Pelz providing the required light; which was also a very commonplace event in itself, for Herr Pelz was not yet submerged in such abysses of indiscriminate churlishness as to revolt against the custom of a country where fire is as free as air. But at that point in Herr Pelz's history the ordinariness of the affair ended for ever.

He struck a match and held it to the workman's cigarette, glancing at him casually as he did so. And that casual glance gave him the shock of his life.

Over the uncertain flame the workman was ogling him with the most horrifying squint that he had ever seen. The round, goggling eyes swivelled over him with a repulsive significance that was as nauseating as the leer of a bloated harpy in a lecher's delirium. Herr Pelz recoiled from it in an involuntary convulsion of disgust. He felt the hairs rising on the nape of his neck, as if those odiously astigmatic eyes had stretched out of their orbits and laid their slimy contact on his flesh. But the workman seemed utterly unconscious of the repugnance which he aroused. He muttered his thanks, and turned away with a final hideous wink that warped his whole face into one ghastly deformity of innuendo.

Herr Pelz's head revolved in a perfect mesmerism of loath-ing to watch him hobbling down the street. He couldn't even tear his gaze away from the man's back while his memory was still crawling with the impressions of that repellent stare. And thus it came about that Herr Pelz saw what he might not otherwise have noticed: that as the workman passed under the next street lamp he pulled a filthy handker­chief out of his pocket, and a scrap of paper was dragged out with it and fluttered down to the pavement.

Herr Pelz could no more have resisted that scrap of paper than he could have vowed himself into a monastery. He started towards it without a second thought, impelled solely by the degenerate curiosity which the experience had aroused. Then as he came nearer, he saw that the scrap of paper was a hun­dred-mark note.

He picked it up, and turned it over suspiciously in the lamp­light. It was unquestionably genuine.

Curiosity gave way to an even more deeply rooted cupidity. Herr Pelz flashed a furtive glance around him to see if anyone else had observed the accident. But no one seemed to be pay­ing any attention to him, and the other workman was ham­mering away at his pipes with uninterrupted vigour. Herr Pelz returned his gaze with a little less revulsion to the bene­ficent ogre's retreating figure. And as Herr Pelz looked, the ogre replaced the handkerchief in his pocket—and a second hundred-mark note drifted down on to the pavement. If there was any manifestation of Providence at which Herr Bruno Pelz had ever prayed to be a witness, it was the phe­nomenon of an endless flood of hundred-mark notes pouring down at his feet; and at that moment he seemed to be spectat­ing the nearest approach to such a prodigy that he was ever likely to see. While he stared up the street with bulging eyes, a third scrap of paper fell from the workman's pocket and floated down into the gutter—closely followed by a fourth. A fifth, a sixth, and a seventh joined them with incredible rapid­ity. The workman was shedding money all over the road like a perambulating mint. And then he turned off into a dark side alley with the eighth hundred marks flopping down to the pav­ing stones behind him.

Herr Pelz didn't even hesitate. He plunged on to his doom with his mouth hanging open, as fast as his legs would carry him. Prince Rudolf was still inside the police station, and even if he came out unexpectedly, an excuse should be easy to find. And meanwhile Fortune was opening her cornucopia and de­canting largesse with a liberality which it would have been a sin to ignore. Whether the workman was a thief, an escaped lunatic, or an eccentric millionaire—if he could be caught in that dark alley . . . Herr Pelz's black eyes gleamed like mar­bles. There had been days when he had ruled a minor under­world as master of the precarious trade of the garotte, and his hand had not lost its cunning. It would be over and finished in ten seconds, without a sound.

He hurried down the pavement, snatching up hundred-mark notes as he went. His fingers grasped the last one as he turned into the alley, and a few yards down the lane he saw another. He stooped to pick it up. . . .

And then a massive lump of metal wielded with masterly precision crashed into the back of his head. For one blissful second he gaped at a complete free fireworks display that would have been the making of any Fourth of July; and then a hospitable darkness came down and folded him in his dreams.

Monty Hayward returned like a paladin from the wars.

He lowered himself to the cobbles beside the hole in the road, and looked at the Saint with eyes that were no longer squinting. There was the seed of a smile in them—a seed such as can only be sown by the force of a doughty blow struck for the honour of lawlessness. And the Saint smiled back.

"Oke?" he drawled.

"Oke," said Monty Hayward. "I hid in a doorway and dotted him a peach. There was a sort of van close by, and a bloke was just starting it up. I heard him say they'd have to hustle to get to Nürnberg by dinner time, so I picked up your pal and heaved him in with the greens." He looked round as an an­tique Ford swung into the street and clattered past. "And there he goes!"

Simon Templar nodded, and the nod spoke volumes.

He stood up and stretched his legs.

"Then he won't bother us for some time," he said. "I guess we can begin."

"Suits me, Saint."

The Saint gazed down at him steadily. In fewer years than the other man had lived, he had come to know the game from every angle, and grown used to its insidious allurements. Its seductive charms held him no less than they had always done; but he knew their treachery. Even then, he hesitated to take advantage of Monty's surrender.

"There's no need for you to come inside," he said. "This isn't quite like anything we've done before. We may be running into a trap. If you'd like to hang on here for a bit——"

"Why not get on with it?" said Monty Hayward shortly. "I wouldn't miss a show like this for a thousand pounds."

The Saint smiled ruefully.

"On your own head be it," he said; but his hand rested on Monty's shoulder for a moment.

And then he turned and walked across the road.

He had no illusions about what he was trying to do. Before it was finished there might easily be a miniature war storming in that peaceful street. He had to take the risk. And if neces­sary, he'd have to fight the war. It was the only way. Patricia Holm was inside that police station, irreparably meshed in the ponderous dragnet of the Law; and even if he had been a free man, that would have seemed hopeless enough—to sit scheming with lawyers, pulling the sticky threads of bail and remand, pitting miserable atoms of truth against the massed batteries of intrigue and influence that Rudolf could command, know­ing that the scales were weighted against him from the begin­ning. With the police offering rewards for his own capture it couldn't be thought of. He was taking the one chance that the fall of the cards gave him—a clean fighting chance to win the game as he had fought it from the start, as he had won such games before, with the honest steel of a gun butt in his hands, clearing the tangled chess board with a challenge of death.

He ran up the station steps and entered the bare vestibule. On his left was a corridor; farther down he came to a pair of glass doors opening into a microscopic space where the com­mon citizen could stand and lean over a counter to hold con­verse with the Law. Beyond the counter was an untidy sort of office, in which he could see one bald-headed policeman writ­ing laboriously at a desk and another thoughtfully picking his teeth.

Simon burst in unceremoniously, with one quick glance backwards to make sure that Monty was following. The game had to be played fast—taken at a rush that would allow the enemy no time to ponder over details or gaze too closely at his own charming features. He fell breathlessly on the counter with his face a mask of agitation under the grime.

"Machen Sie schnell!" he panted. "Ein Kind ist von einem Motorrad angefahren worden!"

The toothpicking officer might not have been sentimentally moved by the thought of a child being knocked down by a motor-bicycle, but he had a commendable devotion to duty.

He picked up his cap and came through a flap in the coun­ter, buttoning the neck of his tunic. Simon stood aside to let him pass. As the policeman stepped out of sight of his colleague in the office, Simon hit him twice on the back of the neck—two slaughterous ju-jitsu blows delivered with the edge of his hand. The policeman slumped forward soundlessly— straight into Monty's arms.

"Hold him up and talk to him!" rapped the Saint. "You can be seen from outside. I'll just get the other one. . . ."

Monty propped the policeman against the wall and clung to him dazedly. He had never been called upon to do anything like that, even in his wildest dreams of buccaneering. But the daylight lamps in the vestibule were beating down on him like a battery of limes, and he knew that to anyone glancing in from outside he was as conspicuous as the central figure on a lighted stage. In a kind of stage fright he began to recite "The Wreck of the Hesperus," with violent gesticulations. . . .

Simon raced back into the office, and the clerkly constable looked up. The Saint gave him no more time to think than he had given the first man.

"Wollen Sie hinauskommen, bitte? Der andere Schupo bedarf Hilfe——"

The scribe rose from his chair grumbling. Simon caught him with the same blow as he came through the counter, and left him where he fell.

He went back and found Monty returning hoarsely to the first stanza, having lost his memory after three verses.

"And the skipper had taken his little daughter to bear

"All clear," said the Saint.

He closed in on the other side of Monty's vis-à-vis. Together they bore the unconscious man into the office and laid him on the floor, dragging the clerkly one farther in to join him. Simon rummaged round and discovered handcuffs with which they fastened the two policemen's wrists and ankles; then he improvised gags with their handkerchiefs and screwed-up balls of blotting paper. It was all done with amazing speed and in perfect silence.

The Saint jerked his head towards a door on the far side of the office, through which came the murmur of voices.

"I think that must be the charge room," he whispered, in Monty's ear. "Don't make a sound—we aren't ready for the alarm yet——"

A subdued clicking noise blurred into his speech, and he looked round swiftly. It came from a private telephone ex­change in one corner, where a tiny red bulb was blinking its impatient summons.

The Saint dropped into the operator's stool and plugged in on the calling circuit. Monty listened tensely, trying to make out the brief words which were clacking through the receiver diaphragm. Only a couple of sentences were spoken; and then he saw the Saint smile and clip out a single word of reply.

"Sofort!"

Simon came out of the stool and searched round for the main lead-in wire. He found it and broke it loose with one jerk. Then he spoke a second time in Monty's ear.

"The Big Cheese is somewhere upstairs. That was him—ask­ing for Pat and the witnesses to be taken up to his office. Keep things quiet while I look after him—there are guns on those stiffs which you can take, and there's sure to be another way out of the charge room which you'll have to watch for. Don't shoot if you can possibly help it. I'll be right back."

He vanished into the vestibule and turned into the corridor which he had already observed. A short way down it there was a door on the right, through which he heard the same voices talking—the second entrance to the charge room which he had already guessed of. Simon would have given much to listen there for a while, but the ticking seconds were vital. The dusk was now well advanced, and at any moment the squad cars which had depleted the station staff to a negligible fraction would be snoring up the street again with the reports of their fruitiest chase. And when that happened the slugs would be fairly spawning in the salad. . . . The Saint closed his lips grimly and tiptoed past the door without a backward glance.

He came through to a flight of stone stairs and went up them. On the landing above there were doors all around him. He sank on one knee and scanned the floor for a sign of the room from which the telephone call had come. Only one door showed a tell-tale streak of light dose to the ground. His luck was holding magnificently. He walked up to the door and knocked, instantly receiving the curt command to enter.

A white-haired man with a square jaw and military shoul­ders, and a middle-aged man with a typical bullet head, both in plain clothes, looked up from a desk littered with maps and papers as the Saint came in.

Simon let them see his gun and his smile, and reverted to his very best German.

"I believe you were looking for me," he said.

2

The two men coagulated where they stood, staring at him whitely in the dumb startlement of his arrival. If the door had opened to admit a herd of emerald-green hippopotami they could scarcely have been more flabbergasted. But beyond the involuntary swelling of their eyes and the limp fall of their chins they made no movement. Whatever they may have lacked as shining lights of the Law, they were not deficient in human courage.

Several seconds went by before the elder of the two spoke.

"What do you want?" he asked calmly.

"A little talk," said the Saint. He gestured with his auto­matic towards the chief's right hand, which was sliding stealth­ily across the desk towards a row of bell pushes. "You can save yourself the trouble of ringing—all the wires are disconnected, and in any case no one would answer."

Perhaps he was guilty of stretching the truth, but the chief did not know it. And the warning was spoken with such an air of quiet conviction that it went home as effectively as a shot from the Saint's steady gun. The chief's hand relaxed.

"How did you get in?"

"I walked in. The door was open."

The two men remained motionless, continuing to stare. It was the Saint's gun and the Saintly smile that had paralyzed them at first—their first thought had been that they were dealing with a maniac, and the Saint knew that after the initial shock of his appearance had worn off they were both weighing the chances of his touching off the trigger if either of them made an incautious movement. Against that they were balanc­ing the alternative potentialities of a tactful submission until they could distract the attention of those unwavering blue eyes.

Then Simon observed that the younger man was studying his face intently; he sensed the incredulous understanding before it was fully formed in the man's own mind and forestalled it cheerfully:

"I am Simon Templar—the Saint."

The two men remained motionless—and now the reason for their stillness was concentrated entirely in his gun hand. He could feel every phase of the struggle that went on in their minds. The most wanted man in Europe—the man for whom the whole German police force was scouring the country—the man on whose head extravagant rewards had been placed— was standing coolly before them in that room. The prize that every man in the force would have given his right hand to win was tempting them from a range of four yards. And the auto­matic in his hand was held in the tremorless grip of a steel ro­bot The terse information they had received had magnified itself in their imaginations to something almost fabulous. Whichever of them made the first threatening move would be doomed—the other might possibly survive to win the glory. The atmosphere stifled with the terrific pressure of their inward battle.

"I shall have to handcuff you," said the Saint quietly. "You will turn your backs and put your hands behind you—and keep them well away from your bodies." He saw their limbs go tense as the full meaning of his order became plain to them, and went on swiftly, with his voice tightened up in a crisp urgency of menace: "You think that any risk would be preferable to the disgrace of having been made prisoners in your own strong­hold. You would be wrong. Both of you would die before you could take a step towards me. You have heard of me—you can estimate your own prospects. I give you my word that no harm will come to you."

It was a war of wills, fought out silently in that confined space over the thrusting swords of their eyes. The Saint had no wish to shoot. And yet, if it had been forced upon him, he would have dropped those two men as mercifully as he could. To him there was a bigger issue at stake even than the lives of two innocent martyrs to duty.

Perhaps the two men, by some strange telepathy carried on that clash of opposing wills, felt what was on the Saint's mind. But the elder man bowed his head and turned slowly round. His subordinate paused a moment before following his ex­ample, and turned round at last with an unswerving glare of defiance.

Simon sensed all the galling bitterness of their surrender as he fastened handcuffs on their wrists and linked their ankles similarly together; but he breathed again. He pocketed his gun and allowed them to turn round to their former positions. In another corner of the room he saw an enormous steel cabi­net, with plenty of room for two men to stand between the shelves of documents that lined the walls. He went over and examined it more closely; but, as he had feared, the great door would seal it hermetically.

He faced his prisoners again.

"I do not want to make your position more painful than my own safety demands," he said. "If you will give me your pa­roles as gentlemen that you will make no attempt to escape, or to attract attention in any way, whatever happens, I shall be able to spare you further indignity."

The chief gazed at him sombrely.

"You could scarcely do more than you have done already," he remarked, with a trace of irony; "and it seems that you have taken effective measures to protect yourself. What else do you want?"

"I have still to enjoy the little talk I spoke of," said the Saint. "But your part in it is silent. You must not be allowed to interrupt. I assure you, it would distress me to have to stun you while you are defenseless, and then gag you, before I placed you in that cabinet. The alternative is in your own hands. I shall require you to stand inside the cabinet during my con­versation. You will do nothing to betray your presence, what­ever you hear, until five minutes after I have finally left the room."

"May I know your object?"

"You will realize it soon enough."

The white-haired soldier hesitated, and in his hesitation the younger man let loose a string of snarling protests.

The chief cut him short with a movement of his head.

"We do not help ourselves by inviting injury, Inspecktor," he said. "I shall give my parole."

The Saint bowed. In that self-possessed, white-haired chief of police he recognized a quality of manhood which he would have been glad to meet at any time.

"I am in your debt, Herr Oberst" he said. "And you, In­spektor?"

The younger man drew himself up stiffly.

"Since I am commanded," he replied shortly, "I have no choice. I give you my word of honour."

"You are very wise," murmured the chief.

Simon smiled. He opened the door of the cabinet wide and ushered the two men in. As soon as they had settled themselves he closed it again, leaving only a two-inch gap which would give them plenty of air to breathe. He left them with a final warning:

"Remember that you have given your paroles. I shall be back in a few moments. Whatever happens, you will remain hidden."

Then he left the room and went down the stairs again to re­lieve Monty Hayward's vigil. His arteries were playing an angelic symphony, and there was a new brightness in his eyes. Perhaps after all the running fight could become a triumph. Thus far he had no complaints to make. The gods were spilling Eldorados on him with both hands. If only the breaks held. ... It would be a worthy finish to one story and a merry over­ture to many more. Admittedly there was a price to pay, and those lost few minutes would have boosted the bill against him to heights that would have made most men giddy to think of, but he had learned that in his chosen way of life there were no bargain sales. It was wine while it lasted. And he had never really wanted to be good.

He came upon Monty Hayward with a swinging step and the Saintly smile still on his lips. The automatic spun on his first finger by the trigger guard.

"I have cleaned up, Monty," he said. "Let's make it a party."

He burrowed through his overalls and produced his own cigarette case. As he opened it, the polished interior showed him a reflection of his own face. He grinned and closed the case again.

"Back along the corridor," he said, "I think I heard the swishing song of a gents' toilet. I should hate Rudy to see us like this—and we can still keep an ear on the charge room from there."

If there was anything which finally emerged as supremely nightmarish out of Monty Hayward's memories of the cumula­tive palpitations of that day, it was the wash and brush-up which the Saint thereupon ordained. Monty hadn't proposed himself for anything quite so hair-raising as that. Battle, mur­der, and sudden death were things immutable in themselves; but to make oneself free of the lavatories of a captured police station in which an uncertain number of the personnel were still at large called for a granitic quality of nerve to which only a Simon Templar could have aspired. To the Saint it was a pleasure with a pungent spice. He stripped off his greasy over­alls, threw them into a corner, and abandoned himself to the delights of warm water and yellow soap as if he were in his own home. As far as he was concerned, the only visible reminiscence of the things that waited a couple of walls away was the blue-black shape of the automatic pistol placed care­fully on the marble top of the wash basin beside him.

Monty sighed and made the best of it. Now that he saw him­self in a mirror for the first time, he began to understand how he had been able to travel so far without being identified. It was some relief to be able to divest himself of the stained blue jeans and feel himself in a more accustomed garb; it was even better to be able to scrub the oil and grime from his face and hands and feel clean. He looked up presently with a sort of indefinite optimism—and saw the Saint coolly manicuring his nails.

"Ready for more, Monty?"

The Saint's piratical eyes rested on him humorously. Monty nodded.

"Surely."

They went back towards the office. The two policemen still slept. Simon expected them to be out to the world for all of another ten minutes—the handcuffs and gags were an addi­tional precaution. He knew where he was when the blade of his hand got home with those tricky blows.

He took out his cigarette case again, offered it to Monty, and helped himself. The ratchet of his lighter scraped a flame out of the shielded wick. He stood there for a moment, draw­ing the mellow smoke gratefully into his lungs to wipe away the last dry harshness of the stuff that he had had to inhale in his former rôle. Monty watched him releasing the smoke again through his lips and nostrils with a slow widening of that new­born Saintly smile. The tanned, rakish contours of that lean face, cleared now from their coating of dust and dirt, were more reckless than he had ever seen them before. The black hair was brushed back in one smooth swashbuckling sweep. No one else in the world could have been so steady-nerved and at ease, so trim and immaculate after the rough handling of his clothes, so alive with the laughing promise of danger, so careless and debonair in every way. The Saint was going to his destiny.

"You take the corridor," he said. "Stand outside the door and listen. Come in as soon as you hear my voice."

"Right."

Monty walked away.

Simon Templar drew at his cigarette again, gazing back the way Monty had gone. He was still smiling.

Then he turned back to the office. He gave it one more glance round to make certain that everything was in order—policemen securely bound, telephone disconnected, windows barred. He went rapidly through the drawers of the desks, taking over a bunch of keys and a couple of spare automatics. Then he went to the door of the charge room.

With his ear pressed to the panels, he could make words out of the murmur that he had heard before. The conversation was in English—he heard Prince Rudolf's silkily faultless accent, commanding the scene as interpreter,

"Would it not be unusual, Miss Holm, if our friend showed no interest in your whereabouts?"

Then Patricia's unfaltering stone-wall:

"I really don't know."

"And yet you insist that he had made no arrangements about meeting you again."

"He isn't a nursemaid."

"But, my dear lady! You must remember that we have met before. I have had my experience of the esteem in which Mr. Templar holds you. Are we to understand that he has transferred his affections elsewhere? I must confess I had heard rumours——"

"As a matter of fact," said Patricia calmly, "we did quarrel."

"Ah! And was it because of another woman?"

"No."

"Will you tell us the reason?"

"Certainly. He said you were a slimy baboon, and I told him I wouldn't have him insulting baboons."

A guttural voice broke in with a rattle of short-tempered German. Prince Rudolf replied soothingly; then he spoke again in English, imperturbably as ever, but with the suave malignity razoring even more clearly through his voice.

"Miss Holm, you will be unwise to attempt to imitate your —er—friend's celebrated gift of repartee. Perhaps you have not yet realized the seriousness of your position. You are charged with being an accessory to three crimes. It would be a pity for you to waste your beauty in prison."

"Is that so?"

"I am instructed to tell you that there are two ways of turn­ing State's Evidence, and only one of them is voluntary—or pleasant. One can be—persuaded."

There was a brief silence; and then another voice entered the discussion with the confidence of its own personality. It was Nina Walden's.

"Now you're getting interesting, Prince," she remarked. "That'll make a grand story at the trial. It'll be front page stuff. 'Crown Prince Practises Third Degree—Lady Killer In Real Life—Royal Exile Retains Torture Chamber!' Say, wait till I get this all down!"

"Miss Walden, I should advise you——"

"I didn't ask for advice," said the American girl coldly. "I'm here as a reporter. If it's your job to find three men to bully a woman, it's my job to tell the world."

There was another silence.

Then the German officer muttered something vicious and impatient. Simon heard a faint gasp—then the smack of a flat palm and a startled oath.

He turned the handle and kicked open the door.

The figures in that charge-room scene printed themselves on his eyes one by one in a second of unbroken immobility, just as his own image was stamped forever on their memories. They spun round together at the sound of his entry, those of them who had their backs to him, and froze on their feet all at once. His eyes went over them bleakly, like a camera panning round a group set. The sergeant standing by a high desk at the end of the room. The policeman who had brought Patricia in, with her wrist still half twisted in the grasp of one hand, while his other hand moved unbelievingly over the red brand of fingers on his cheek. Nina Walden standing close to him, just as she had been when she hit him. Marcovitch in the background, caught in the middle of his gloating as if he had taken a bullet in the stomach. The Crown Prince, poised with his unfailing grace, with his pale delicate features as reposeful as an ala­baster mask, raising his long jade cigarette holer in tapering fingers that were as steady as a statue's. And Patricia Holm staring, with the leap of a bewildered hope coming to her lips. ...

"Good-evening, boys and girls," said the Saint softly.

They gazed at him speechlessly, striving to orient their intel­ligences to the astounding fact of his presence. And the Saint gave them all the time they needed. He lounged against the jamb of the doorway, smiling at them, circling his gun over them in a gentle arc. He was enjoying his moment. Such in­stances as that were the sky-signs of his career, the caviare that made all the rest of it worth while. He liked to linger over them, tasting every shade and subtlety of their rare flavour, writing them into the mental memoirs that would shed their light over his declining years—if he lived long enough to de­cline.

And then Patricia Holm broke the stillness with his name.

"Simon!"

The Saint nodded, looking at her. The conversation that he had heard before he came through the door was still in his mind. He saw the blind happiness in her face, the faith in her eyes, the eager courage of her slim body; and he knew that, whatever happened, whatever the price to be paid, he had taken the very best of life.

"I'm here, lass," he said.

The man who had hold of her roused out of his stupor. He let go the girl's wrist and grabbed for the Luger in his belt . . .

Crack!

Simon's automatic spat from a half-charged cartridge with a sound like two thin planks of wood slapped smartly together, and the Luger banged down to the stone floor. The policeman, with a limp right arm, stared foolishly at a dribble of blood that was running out of his sleeve down the back of his hand.

The Saint glanced aside and saw that Monty had advanced through the other door. Then he faced the group again.

"So long as you all behave yourselves," he murmured, "everything will be hunky dory. Rudolf, I've been looking for you everywhere!"

XII. HOW NINA WALDEN SPOKE, AND MONTY

HAYWARD LOOKED OUT OF A WINDOW

COMPARED with the silence there had been before, the taci­turnity that greeted the Saint's affable announcement swelled up to deafening proportions. No one who might by any chance have associated himself with its scope succumbed to any irresistible desire to step forward and offer an illuminated address of welcome in reply. An aura of obstinate bashfulness draped itself over the scene like a pall—suspended from the swinging muzzle of the Saint's gun, and trimmed at its edges with the crimson smudge on the back of the policeman's hand. The sergeant at the desk shamelessly took the lesson of that single shot into his well nourished bosom and allowed it to incubate. He went puce to the end of his nose, and his neck flowed wrathfully over his collar, but he made no movement. Marcovitch tried to sidle away behind him. Even the prince said nothing. And the Saint's blue eyes flitted over them mock­ingly.

"Pat, you'd better take that Luger and toddle out of the line of fire."

Patricia picked up the fallen gun and came over to him. His left arm slipped around her shoulders, and for a moment he held her close to him. Then he set her quietly aside.

"Marcovitch, you mop that gaffed cod mouth off your face and keep well out in the open. I don't like being able to see you, but I don't feel safe when I can't. Jump to it! . . . Hands up over your head—and keep 'em there till your spine cracks I . . . That's better. Monty, you can go round behind 'em and take their artillery. Pat and I'll take care of any acrobatics they're thinking of."

Monty Hayward dropped his guns into his side pockets and went on the round. Simon looked at the American girl.

"I heard Rudy call you Miss Walden," he said, "and you mentioned being a reporter. Are those details correct?"

Nina Walden understood. He was not implicating her at all. She accepted her cue easily.

"That's right."

"What's the job here?"

"I came in for the story of your mail robbery, Mr. Templar. Maybe you can tell me some more about it."

The Saint swept her a bow.

"Sister, you came in at the right time. You're going out with more thrills than you ever thought you'd get. But I'm afraid this news isn't released yet. You can stay on if you give me your word not to interfere—or do anything else that might bother me."

The girl smiled.

"I guess I haven't much choice."

Simon's left hand saluted her. He had time to play Claude Duval with the most charming reporter he had ever met, but even while he did it he was wondering how much grace the gods were going to give him to gather up the loose ends. His glance transferred itself to the clock over the sergeant's desk. Twenty minutes after seven—and almost dark outside. . . . Yet it never occurred to him to doubt whether the wash and brush-up that bad done so much to enhance his beauty had been a wise expenditure of time. That power of thinking ahead, almost intuitively, into the most distant possibilities, and pre­paring for them long before they arose, was the gift which had made the grand moguls of the Law gnash their teeth over him for so many years in vain. And that night he might need it all.

The tableau remained mute while Monty passed from one man to the next, making a collection of their weapons. The sergeant was unarmed. Marcovitch yielded an automatic and a long thin-bladed knife. The Crown Prince had a tiny nickel-plated pistol. Simon frowned a little—he was expecting some­thing else. He waited until Monty had retired again to his position with his pockets weighted down by the load of armoury, and then he crooked a coaxing finger.

"Marcovitch—little blossom—come hither! You're too retir­ing—and we want to know all the secrets of your underwear."

The Russian came forward sullenly. Monty Hayward and Patricia were covering the other men, and the Saint's auto­matic had suddenly taken entire charge of him. Its round gleaming barrel had slanted up and settled in a dead line with the bridge of his nose, so that he stared down the black tunnel from which sudden death could spurt into his brain at a touch.

"Right here—right up close to papa, sweetheart!"

The Saint's voice rapped at him with a ring that made him start. And Marcovitch came on. He fought every inch of the way, with his lips snarling—but he came on. The single black eye of the gun dragged him inexorably across the room, step by step—that and the living bleak blue eyes behind it.

He stopped in front of the Saint, a yard away; and the blue eyes looked him over slowly and thoughtfully.

Then the Saint's left hand flashed out at him. Marcovitch cringed from the blow that he could not avoid. But the mistake was his—the blow never materialized. Simon had done his job before Marcovitch knew what was happening. There was the sharp splitting tear of rending cloth, and one half of Mar­covitch's coat hung off him down to the elbow. In another second it was joined by half of his shirt. And the Saint grinned amiably.

"Wool next the skin, Uglyvitch?" he murmured. "Dear me! And I thought you were a tough guy. . . ."

Something else was revealed besides the woollen vest, and that was a band of tape that stretched across the man's chest and disappeared under his armpit. A neat little bundle hung there, tied in a soiled linen handkerchief slung from the tape which passed over the opposite shoulder.

Simon ripped it off. There was another similar bundle con­cealed under the man's left arm.

"An old game—which you ought to have remembered, Monty," said the Saint. "He might just as well have had a gun there. . . . You can go back to your place in the bread line now, Comrade."

He pushed Marcovitch away. The man's face was white with fury, but Simon Templar could endure hardships like that with singular fortitude. The two knotted handkerchiefs filled his spread hand, and their contents crunched juicily when he squeezed them in his fingers.

He gave the Crown Prince a broadside of his most seraphic smile.

"Dear old Gaffer Rudolf!" he drawled. "So that's the simple end of an awful lot of fuss. Well, well, well! We none of us grow younger, do we?—as we've been telling each other sev­eral times to-day."

The prince gazed at him passionlessly.

"Would it be in order to congratulate you?" he murmured; and the Saint laughed.

"Perhaps—when we've finished."

Simon turned to Monty.

"If you'd like something more to do, old dear," he said, "you might try and find some more handcuffs. We shall want six pairs—if the station'll run to it. Hands only for Rudolf and Marcovitch—they've got to walk. Hands and feet for the Law —we don't want them at all. And mind how you go around that sergeant. He looks as if he might burst at any moment, and you wouldn't want to get splashed with his supper."

Monty searched around. After a few moments he discov­ered a locker that was plentifully stocked with both hand and leg irons; he came back trailing the chains behind him. Under the Saint's directions the two police officers were efficiently manacled together; and finally an extra pair of handcuffs fast­ened them to a ringbolt set in the wall, which had apparently been used before for the restraint of refractory prisoners.

The prince smoked tranquilly until his turn came; and then he detached the cigarette end from the long jade holder, placed the holder leisurely in an inside pocket, and extended his own hands for the bracelets.

"This is a unique experience," he remarked, as Monty locked the cuffs on his wrists. "May I ask where we are to go?"

"Upstairs," said the Saint coolly. "We've got a little talk coming, and the air's better up there."

The prince raised his sensitive eyebrows, but he made no reply.

They went up the stairs in a strange procession: Patricia and Nina Walden leading, the Saint going up backwards after them and covering the cortege, Prince Rudolf and Marcovitch following him, and Monty Hayward bringing up the rear. The prince's face remained impassive. Simon knew that that impassivity belied the workings of that quiet ruthless brain; but the prince and Marcovitch were firmly sandwiched be­tween two fires, and they could do nothing—at the moment. And the Saint didn't care. The prince must have known it— even as the two men in the room above must have known. It was significant that Rudolf had been very silent, ever since that playful séance in the charge room had received its staggering interruption.

"This way, boys."

Simon opened the door of the police chief's office and let the caravan file past him. He went in last—closed the door and leaned back on it.

"Sit down."

Prince Rudolf sank into a chair. Monty prodded Marco­vitch into another with the nose of his Luger. And the Saint cleared a space on the desk and sat there, dumping the two knotted handkerchiefs beside him. He put away his gun and opened the bundles, pouring the contents of both onto a sin­gle handkerchief in a shimmer of rainbow flames that seemed to light up the whole dingy room.

"The time has come, Rudolf, for us to have a little reck­oning," he said; and once again, for no reason that the others could think of, he was speaking in German. And yet to Monty Hayward there was no difference, for the man who spoke was still the Saint, making even that stodgy language as vivid and pliable as his own native tongue. "We have a few things to learn—and you can tell us about them. And we'll have all the jewels out to encourage you. Fill your eyes with them, Rudolf. You used to be a rich man. But just for this quarter of a mil­lion pounds' worth of stones you were ready to kill men and torture them; you were ready to run up a list of murders that'd get anyone hanged three times—and frame them onto Monty and me. Which was very unkind of you, Rudy, after all the fun we had together in the old days. But you aren't denying any of it, are you?"

The prince shrugged.

"Why should I? It was unfortunate that you personally should be the victim, but——"

"Highness!"

Marcovitch sprang up from his chair. And at the same in­stant the Saint came off the desk like a streak of lightning. His fist smashed into the Russian's mouth and sent him reeling back.

"I never have liked your voice, Uglyvitch," said the Saint evenly. "And it's rude to butt in like that. Gag him, Monty."

Simon lighted another cigarette while the order was being carried out. It had been a close call, that; but his face showed no sign of it. He had been watching Marcovitch from the start. It was odd how an inferior mentality might sometimes feel brute suspicions before they came to the more highly geared intelligence.

He sat down in the police chief's chair behind the desk and laid his automatic on the papers in front of him.

"As you say, it was unfortunate that I should have been the victim," he murmured, as if nothing had happened. "I've never been a very successful victim, and I suppose habits are hard to break. But there were others who weren't so lucky. It was all the same to you."

"My dear young friend, we are not playing a game for children——"

"No. We're playing a game for savages. We've come down in the world. Once upon a time it was a game for soldiers—in the old days. I liked you because you were a patriot—and a sportsman—even though we were fighting on opposite sides. Now it's only a game of hunting for sacrifices to put on the altar of your bank account." The Saint's eyes were cold splin­ters of blue light across the table. "Two men died because they stood between you and these jewels. An agent of yours—didn't you refer to him as 'the egregious Emilio?'—murdered Hein­rich Weissmann in my hotel bedroom in Innsbruck after I rescued him from three detectives whom we mistook for ban­dits. He was taking the jewels to Josef Krauss, whom you had allowed to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for you. You tor­tured Krauss last night; and today, when he had escaped, Marcovitch murdered him on the train between Munich and here. And Marcovitch would also have murdered all three of us if we'd given him the chance."

"My dear Mr. Templar——"

"I haven't quite finished yet," said the Saint quietly. "Mar­covitch was the man who raided the brake van on that train, with four more of your hired thugs, to regain those jewels after I'd taken them off you. And when we had to jump off to save our lives, he told the officials that it was I who stole the mail. That also meant nothing to you. You were ready to have all your crimes charged against us—just as you were ready to have them actually committed by your dirty hirelings. You hadn't even the courage to do any of the work yourself, be­fore it was framed onto me. But only a few minutes ago you were ready to apply your torturing methods to a girl, to make certain that there would be more blood on those jewels be­fore you'd done with them. The methods of a patriot and a gen­tleman!"

For the first time Simon saw a flush of passion come into the pale face opposite him. The taunt had gone to its mark like a barbed arrow.

"My dear Mr. Templar!" The prince still controlled his voice, but a little of the suavity had gone from it "Since when have your own methods been above reproach?"

"I'm not thinking of only myself," answered the Saint coldly. "I'm only alleged to have robbed a train. Monty Hay-ward here is accused of murdering Weissmann as well, and he's the most innocent one of us all. The only thing he ever did was to help me rescue Weissmann in the first place, through a mistake which anyone might have made. And since then, of course, he's helped me to hold up this police station in order to see justice done, for which no one could blame him. But you know as well as I do that he isn't a criminal."

"His character fails to interest me."

"But you know that what I've said is the truth."

"Have I denied it?"

The Saint leaned forward over the desk.

"Will you deny that Weissmann was murdered by an agent of yours and by your orders; that Josef Krauss died in the same way; and that it was Marcovitch and other agents of yours who robbed the mail?"

The prince lifted one eyebrow. He was recovering his self-control again. His face was calm and satirical.

"I believe you once headed an organization which purported to administer a justice above the law," he said. "Do I understand that I am assisting at its renaissance?"

"Do you deny the charge?"

"And supposing I admit it?"

"I'm asking a question," said the Saint, with a face of stone. "Do you deny the charge?"

A long, tense silence came down on the room. Marcovitch moved again, and Monty's hand caught him round the neck. The significance of it all was beyond Monty Hayward's understanding, but the drama of the scene held him spellbound. He also had begun to fall into the error that was deluding the Crown Prince. The Saint's face was as inexorable as a judge's. The humour and humanity had frozen out of it, leaving the rakish lines graven into a grim pitilessness in which the eyes were mere glints of steel. They stared over the table into the depths of the prince's soul, holding him impaled on their merciless gaze like a butterfly on a pin. The tension piled up between them till the very air seemed to grow hot and heavy with it.

"Do you deny the charge?'

Again those five words dropped through the room like sepa­rate particles of white-hot metal, driving one after another with ruthless precision into the same cell of the prince's brain. They had about them the adamantine patience of doom itself. And the prince must have known that that question was going to receive a direct answer if it waited till the end of the world. He had come up against a force that he could no more fight against than he could fight against the changing of the tides, a force that would wear through his resistance as the continual dripping of water wears through a rock.

And then the Saint moved one hand, and quietly picked up his gun.

"Do you deny the charge?"

The prince stirred slightly.

"No."

He answered unemotionally, without turning his eyes a fraction from the relentless gaze that went on boring into them. There was the stoical defiance of a Chinese mandarin in the almost imperceptible lift of his head.

"Does your worship propose to pronounce sentence?" he in­quired mockingly,

The Saint's mouth relaxed in a hard little smile.

Every word had been registered on the ears of the two cap­tive police officers whom he had hidden in the corner cabinet. The gods fought on his side, and the star of the Crown Prince had fallen at last. Otherwise such an old snare as that could never have caught its bird. Marcovitch had smelt it—but Mar­covitch was silenced, and now he had gone white and still. The prince had been a little too clever. And Monty Hayward was free. ...

"Your punishment is not in my hands," said the Saint. "It will overtake you in the course of legal justice, and I see no need to interfere."

He ran his fingers again through the heap of jewels, letting them trickle through his fingers in rivulets of coloured splen­dour that caught the light on a hundred cunning facets.

"Pretty toys," said the Saint, "but they tempted you. And you could have bought them. You could have had them all for no more trouble than it would have taken you to write a cheque. I shall often wonder why you did it. Was it a kink of yours, Rudolf, that told you you couldn't enjoy them unless they were christened in blood? The Maloresco emeralds—the Ullsteinbach blue diamond——"

"What did you say?"

It was Nina Walden who spoke, starting forward suddenly from her place in the background.

Simon looked at her curiously. He picked up the great blue stone and held it in the light.

"The Ullsteinbach blue diamond," he said. "Wedding gift of the late Franz Josef to the Archduke Michel of Presc—ac­cording to information in The Times. Josef Krauss tried to tell me something about it before he died, but he didn't get far. Do you know anything about it?"

The American girl took the stone from his fingers and turned it over and over. Then she looked at the Saint again.

"I know this much," she said. "It's a——"

"Look out!" yelled Monty.

He had seen the prince's hand move casually to his sleeve, as if in search of a handkerchief, and had thought nothing of it. Then the hand came out again with a jerk, and the knife that came with it went spinning across the desk in a vicious streak of silver. The Saint hurled himself sideways, and it skimmed past his neck and clattered against the wall. The prince flung himself after it like a madman, clawing at the Saint's gun.

Simon stood up and met him with a straight left that smashed blood out of the contorted face and set the man stag­gering back against his chair.

"Keep your gun in his ribs, Monty," ordered the Saint crisply. "This is getting interesting. What were you going to tell me, Miss Walden?"

The girl gave him back the stone.

"It's a piece of coloured glass," she said.

2

Simon Templar subsided on to the desk as if his legs had given out under him. The room danced round him in a drunken tango. And once again he heard the dying jest of Josef Krauss ringing in his ears: "Sehen Sie gut nach . . . dem blauen Diamant. . . . Er ist . ... wirklich . . . preislos. . . ." And the bitter derisive eyes of the man. . . .

"The Ullsteinbach diamond is in America." Nina Walden went on speaking without a glance at the prince. "It was sold to Wilbur G. Tully, the straw hat millionaire, just before the war. The owners were hard up, and they had to raise money somehow: their treasurers wouldn't give them any more, so they raided the crown jewels. This imitation was made, and the real stone was sold to Tully under a vow of secrecy. He keeps it in his private collection. I don't think any living person knows the story besides Tully and myself. But my grandfather made the imitation. I've known about it for years, and I've been saving the scoop for a good occasion. The Archduke Michel did that when he was sowing wild oats in his fifties—and he's Prince Rudolf's father, at present the King of——"

"Great God in Heaven!"

The Saint leapt up again. He understood. The mystery was solved in a flash that almost blinded him. He cursed himself for not having thought of it before. And he was half laughing at the same time, shaking with the sublime perfection of the truth.

"Let me get this straight!" he gasped. "It wasn't the other crown jewels that Rudolf gave a damn about. They just hap­pened to be among the spoils. What he wanted was the Ullsteinbach blue diamond. And he didn't want it because it was valuable, but because it wasn't—because it was literally priceless! He couldn't let the jewels come into any ordinary market, because someone would certainly have discovered the fraud, and the whole deception would have been shown up from the beginning. The old Archduke would probably have been booted off the throne, and Rudolf would have gone with him. He had to let Josef Krauss pinch the jewels, and then take them off Josef. Josef had discovered the secret when he handled the stones, so he had to go. And then I got hold of them by a fluke, and I might have discovered it—so I was a marked man. And everyone with me was in the same boat. Hell! ..."

The Saint flung out his arms.

"I said it wasn't ordinary boodle—and it isn't! It's the most priceless collection of boodle that's ever been knocked off! There were men dying and being tortured for it—mail vans broken—policemen sweating—thrones tottering—and all be­cause the star turn of it wasn't worth more than an empty beer bottle! My God—why didn't I know that joke hours ago? Why wasn't I told till now?"

He hugged Nina Walden weakly.

Monty swallowed. He didn't know what to say. He realized dimly that he had just heard the unravelling of the most amaz­ing story he was ever likely to hear, but it was all too crush­ingly simple. For the moment his brain refused to absorb the elementary enormity of it.

In the same daze he saw Simon Templar pick up the glit­tering blue crystal from the carpet where he had dropped it and advance solemnly towards the Crown Prince. And the Saint's voice spoke uncertainly.

"Rudolf—my cherub—you may have it as the souvenir I promised you."

Monty saw the prince's livid face. . . .

And then a new sound broke into the room—faint and dis­tant at first, swelling gradually until it seemed to pierce the eardrums like a rusty needle. The Saint stiffened up and stood still. And he heard it again—the mournful rising and falling wail of a police siren. It shrilled into his brain eerily, mount­ing up to its climax like the shriek of a lost soul, moaning round the room at its height like the scream of a tormented ghost. It was so clear that it might have been actually under his feet.

Simon sprang to the window and flung it up. Down in the street below he saw two squad cars pulling in to the curb, spilling their loads of uniformed men. Among them, under a street lamp, he could recognize the officer whom he had mis­directed on the road. The pursuit squadron had come home.

The Saint turned and faced the room. In his heart he had expected no less. He was quite calm.

"Will you hold the fort again, Monty?" he said.

He ran quickly down the stairs and the corridor leading to the vestibule. As he came out of the corridor he saw the of­ficer mounting the steps. For an instant they stared at each other across the doorway.

Then Simon slammed the great doors in the officer's face, and dropped the bar across them.

He heard a muffled shout from outside, and then the thumping of fists and gun butts on the massive woodwork; but he was dashing into the nearest room with a window on the street. He looked out and saw a third squad car driving up; then a bullet slapped through the glass beside him and combed his hair with flying splinters. He ducked, and grap­pled with the heavy steel shuttering that was rolled away on one side of the window. He unfolded it and slammed it into place, and went to the next window. A hail of shots wiped the glass out of existence as he reached it, but the next volley spattered against the plates of armour steel. He had been right about that police station—it was built like a fortress. Simon sprinted from room to room like a demon, barricading one window after another until the whole of the ground floor on the street side was as solid as the walls in which the win­dows were set.

Then he went through to the back of the building. A section of armed men detached from the main body nearly forestalled him there: there was a back door opening onto a small square courtyard, and one of them had his foot over the threshold when the Saint came to it. Simon swerved round the levelled Luger: the shot singed his arm before he thrust the man back­wards and banged the door after him.

The other windows at the back were barred, and Simon could tell at a glance that the bars would withstand any as­sault for at least half an hour. A face loomed up in one of the windows while the Saint was making his reconnaissance, and he was barely in time to throw himself to the floor before the man's automatic was spitting lead at him like a machine gun.

Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat!

Simon lay flat on his belly and watched the bullets stringing a ruled line of pock-marks along the plaster of the wall over his head. He crawled out on his stomach and went upstairs again, and when he reached the police chief's office he had a Luger automatic rifle under each arm.

He pushed one of them into Patricia's hands.

"Over the landing, and take any of the rooms opposite. Some of 'em are trying to break in at the back. Keep "em away from the door. Don't hit anyone if you can help it—and don't get hit yourself!"

He flung himself across to the window which he had opened before. Some of the policemen were keeping back the crowd of civilians who had materialized from nowhere; others were standing in groups watching the police station, and the Saint's appearance was the signal for a scattered fusillade. Another man was running across the street with an axe.

Bullets chipped the window frame and scraped showers of plaster from the ceiling as the Saint took aim. He dropped the man with the axe with a flesh wound in the fleshy part of his leg; another man picked up the axe and rushed for the main doors. Simon spread a curtain of clattering steel along the cobbles in front of the man's feet and checked the rush. It was certain suicide to take a step further into that rain of spattering death. The officer shouted a command, and the man ran back with the Saint slamming bullets round his feet.

The police retired behind the shelter of their cars, and paused. Simon saw the peak of the officer's cap rise up, and sent it flying with a well aimed shot. The man sank down again, and Simon proceeded methodically to plug the tires of the police cars. A couple of volunteers were carrying the wounded man away, and the Saint let them get on with it.

A lull descended on the street side of the battle, and through it Simon heard Patricia's rifle across the landing spitting its syncopated stutter of defiance. He waited, ramming a fresh feeder of ammunition into the clips.

Then another order rang out, and the police leapt up as one man in a second and better organized attack.

One squad charged for the door, headed by the man with the axe. The others covered their advance with a storm of fire that went whistling round the Saint's head like a cloud of an­gry hornets. Simon made his Luger belch lead till the barrel scalded his hands. It was a miracle that he was not hit him­self, while he sprayed shots along the armour of the police cars and sent volleys of ricochets whining away off the cobble stones. One shot clipped his ear and drew blood: he shook his head and crowded a new box of cartridges onto the Luger's hungry breech.

Suddenly he found Monty Hayward beside him, automatic raised, taking aim. The Saint caught his wrist and dragged him away.

"You stay out of it!" he snarled. "I didn't take all this trou­ble just for you to get a bullet through your head, and I didn't clear you of one set of charges so that you could be pinched for shooting policemen."

Monty Hayward looked him in the eyes.

"That be damned for a yarn——"

"And you be damned for a fool. Your job is to look after Rudolf. What're you doing about him?"

"I knocked him out and left him," said Monty calmly.

The Saint looked round. He saw the prince lolling back in his chair with his face turned vacuously to the ceiling—and also he saw that the cabinet door was wide open, and the police chief and his inspector were standing in the room.

"What do you mean—you cleared me?" said Monty Hayward.

Simon turned him round by the shoulders.

"Rudolf's confession was heard. I arranged it like that— that's why I made him answer me, and got rather theatrical in the process. But it worked. You're clear, Monty—and if you do anything silly now those same men will be witnesses against you."

Monty looked at the white-haired police chief and then back to the Saint. His mouth set in a stubborn line.

"I told you I'd see it through with you," he said.

He flung off the Saint's hand and went back to the window. Then he felt the Saint's gun in his back.

"I mean it, Monty. If you don't stay out I'll plug you. Or else I'll lay you out as you laid out Rudolf. Don't be a fool!" They eyed each other steadily, while the guns outside thun­dered and chattered erratically. The regular thudding of the axe at the front doors resonated up through the building. And the Saint's face softened. "Monty, it's been swell having you. But you've done your share. Leave this to me."

He swung back to the window with his rifle coming up to his shoulder. Again the hysterical rattle of the Luger battered through the room, like a sheet of tin jabbed against a fast-moving fly-wheel. Simon poured the bullets round the knot of men clustered in the doorway, kicking up little spurts of dust and powdered stone from the cobbles. The fury of his fire drove them back for a moment; then a shot from the barrage that rained through the window struck the side of his gun, numbing his hands and hurling him backwards with the im­pact. When he tried to bring a fresh cartridge into the cham­ber he found that the action had jammed.

He threw the useless weapon across the room and dashed through the door. Out on the landing the sounds of thudding and smashing timber were louder, and he knew that the min­utes of the front door's resistance were numbered. He took no notice. In a moment he was back, hauling a Nordenfeld machine gun behind him.

"They shall have everything but the kitchen sink," he said; and Monty saw that he was smiling.

Monty stood and watched him drag the heavy gun to the window and set it up so that it pointed down at the nearest squad car. A full belt of cartridges was clamped through the slots, and the Saint jerked at the cocking lever to make sure of its smooth running. He fanned a burst along the street; and then he straightened up.

"It's been a great day," Monty," he said.

He glanced round the room.

Prince Rudolf was rousing again, staring as if hypnotized at the police chief and the inspector who were gazing down at him. The meaning of their presence was writing itself over his brain in letters of fire. Then he turned his head and saw the Saint.

He struggled to his feet. One of the things that Simon would always remember was the Crown Prince's last charm­ing smile, and the gesture of those eloquent hands.

"After all, my dear young friend," said the prince gently, "you have not disappointed me."

The Saint looked at him without answering.

Then he turned to the desk and picked up a flat ebony ruler, He went with it to the machine gun and rammed it through the firing handles, locking down the trigger button, and the Nordenfeld started a continuous crackling as the breech sucked in the long belt of ammunition.

Simon left it and faced Monty again.

"Good luck, old lad," he said.

The Saint's hand was out, and the blue eyes smiled. Monty Hayward found himself without words, though there were questions still teeming in his mind. But he took the Saint's hand in a firm grip.

He felt a last strong touch on his shoulder, and the Saint laughed. And then Simon Templar was gone.

Monty Hayward heard him across the landing, calling to Patricia. The firing from the other room ceased. Their foot­steps went down the stairs.

Monty stood where he was. He wondered whether those two splendid outlaws were choosing to go out as they had lived, in a blaze of their own glory and the stabbing flames of guns, making one last desperate bid for freedom. And he didn't know. His brain had gone hazy. He saw the Crown Prince fingering a button on his coat, saw the prince's hand go to his mouth; but still he didn't move—not even when Nina Walden cried out, and the prince sat down quietly like a tired man. . . . The door below was breaking in. He could hear every blow pounding through the heart of the seasoned oak, and the hoarse voices of the men working. There was less firing outside, but the Nordenfeld with the jammed trigger still played the crackling message of the man who had gone,

A long time afterwards—it might have been centuries, or it might have been a few seconds—Monty Hayward went to the window and stood beside the gun, looking out.

He saw the front doors give way, and the grey-uniformed men pouring in. He heard their boots clattering up the stairs, heard them pounding on the door of the room where he was, shouting for it to be opened. A bullet crashed through the panels and flattened itself on the wall a yard to his left. Still he did not move. The Saint had locked the door as he went out and taken the key. The police chief bawled some­thing to that effect, and a dozen shoulders tore the door from its hinges. Policemen filled the room.

Monty knew that the gun at his side gave a last expiring cough and went silent; that the room was a babel of voices; that Nina Walden was standing beside him and looking out also; that men were shaking him, barking their questions in his ear. He knew all those things, but they were only vague impressions in the haze of his memories.

What he saw, and saw clearly, was a figure in field grey that came out of the main doors with the limp form of a fair-haired girl slung over his shoulder. Monty saw the crowd surge round them, heard the uniformed man's curt explanation murmured from lip to lip through the crowd, and made out the word "venvundet" in it. He saw a passage open up through the mob, and the girl carried through on the shoul­der of the grey uniform to the Crown Prince's Rolls. He saw the yellow car begin to move slowly through the milling crowd, gaining speed as it won through the densest part, with the grey uniform at the wheel and the girl beside him in the front seat. And he saw, he would have sworn he saw, that as the yellow car reached the open street and whirled away into the night, the driver raised one hand in gay debonair wave—even before another man appeared on the station steps with a shout of revelation that was taken up in the furious rumbling of a thousand throats.