He was a brave man, and he had a shotgun, and moreover he considered himself quite athletic. It therefore filled him with some confusion to find his avenging rush checked by a single arm that appeared from nowhere and encircled his body, clamping the shotgun against his own chest. The manager struggled frenziedly, but the arm seemed to have the impersonal solidity of a tree that had suddenly grown round him. His fluent cursing made up for his physical restriction for a couple of brief moments, until a large portion of the road seemed to heave up in the most unfriendly manner to smack him on the head and turn the whole of his brain into a single shooting star that floated off like a dying rocket into a dark void…
Mr Uniatz ambled up with the man over his shoulder as Simon finished sliding back the doors.
“Boss, dis must be de only one.”
“Tie him up and gag him,” said the Saint.
With the aid of the headlights which now shone into the garage he was inspecting the nearest of the fabulous machines that were stabled there.
It looked like an automobile engineer’s nightmare, but there was no doubt that it also looked highly utilitarian. For coachwork, a boatlike body, blunt at both ends, hung between the four gigantic wheels. There was no luxurious upholstery, but it had an encouraging air of being ready to go places. The huge balloon tyres would serve the dual purpose of flattening out to lay their own road through mud and sand and buoying up the contraption when it was in the water, while in its aquatic manoeuvres the deep flanges on the rear tyres would continue to propel it after a fashion by turning them into a pair of extempore paddle wheels. He recognised the steering controls as being of the tractor type, and hoped that he had not forgotten a lesson in their manipulation which he had once been given by a friendly farmer.
He found a yardstick on the wall and measured the gasoline in the tank. It was nearly full, but he located an extra five-gallon can and put it in the back. He found a switch that kindled the two powerful high-slung headlights. He squeezed into the driving seat, and the starter unhesitatingly twisted the engine into a clattering roar of life. He took hold of the two clutch levers, put his feet on the two brake pedals, and gingerly worked the thing out of the garage.
He stopped it again in the road, and drove the Cadillac into the space that it left vacant. Hoppy by that time had made a compact bundle of the unconscious manager, which under Simon’s direction he jammed into the back of the car. They closed the garage doors and returned to the marsh buggy, in which Gallipolis and Charlie Halwuk were already installing themselves.
The Indian appeared to be quite unconcerned by the short spell of violence which he had witnessed.
“Too much plenty can happen,” he said stoically, as Simon and Hoppy got in. “Better take food.”
The Saint turned, settling beside him.
“I thought we’d be there by morning.”
“Maybe morning,” said Charlie Halwuk noncommittally. “Maybe night. Plenty damn big country. Plenty too much trouble maybe. Maybe two-three day.”
“Maybe plenty damn glad I bring some shine,” contributed Gallipolis.
Simon lighted a cigarette. The check frayed at the tightly drawn fibres of his nerves, but he could hardly dispute its sober sanity.
“Where can we get food at this time of night?” he queried steadily.
“There’s a general store a short way down the road,” said Gallipolis. “Of course, they don’t keep open all night, but I don’t suppose that will bother you.”
“We’ll open it.”
The marsh buggy started off again, and warped itself into the main street like some grotesque clumsy insect picking its course with great fiery eyes.
Simon stopped a short distance from the store that Gallipolis indicated, and switched out the lights. He moved through the mist like a wraith to the back of the building, and went to work on a flimsy window more stealthily than he had worked on the garage door. It took him less than two minutes to master it, and for the next ten minutes he was tracking down canned goods, an opener, a coffee-pot, and a frying pan, and passing them out for Hoppy Uniatz to porter back to the buggy. He pinned two ten-dollar bills to the broken window with an ice pick, selected two bottles of Scotch and a bottle of brandy to complete the provisioning, and prudently took those to the buggy himself.
They rolled westwards, scattering wisps of fog.
Driving the buggy was not so easy as driving a car. The lever-and-pedal system necessitated by the obvious impossibility of applying conventional steering to wheels of that size was tricky to handle. To make a left-hand turn, for instance, you fed more power to the right-hand wheels, and disconnected and braked the left-hand ones, the sharpness of the turn being governed by the relative violence of both manipulations, up to the point where the buggy would practically whip round on its own axis. Keeping a straight course at any speed was much harder to do. The Saint was able to nurse it up to about thirty miles an hour, and found the pace more hair-raising than any driving he could ever remember having done.
A warm breeze laden with dampness beat across his face and ruffled his hair. In addition to the mechanical difficulties of control, he had to follow the road by clairvoyance rather than sight, for both sides were swallowed up in the mist. It seemed endless hours, endless leagues more than the estimated thirty miles on the map, before Charlie Halwuk touched his shoulder with an arresting hand and said, “Turn off road here.”
Simon eased off the throttle and swung to the right. There was a fleeting moment of instinctive panic when the buggy nosed over the graded banking and felt as if it was rolling off the edge of the world. Then the headlights picked up a narrow unrailed bridge of logs which led across the broad ditch.
“This was your idea,” Simon told Charlie and Gallipolis impartially, and set his teeth as he sent their crazy chariot bucketing down.
The lights dipped woozily and rose slowly again towards the sky. When they levelled again, the way was barred with a solid curtain of sickly green that glittered with an unearthly luminescence. It took him some moments to realise that he was facing a motionless barrier of sawgrass with heavy stalks alight with clinging beads of dew.
“Plenty grass,” said Charlie Halwuk. “But bottom got some sand right here. Drive on.”
For an interminable hour the Saint clung to the levers with sweating hands as the marsh buggy ploughed on through. The parted grass gave off smoky clouds of midges and mosquitoes. They filled the air with a vicious droning hum that was audible above the rattle of the engine, beat against the headlights like a living storm, and massed into savage onslaught against every inch of exposed human flesh. The intermittent glugs of Hoppy’s bottle alternated with stinging slaps of his palm. Gallipolis fanned himself and cursed interestingly in his mother tongue. Simon, with both hands occupied, finally stopped and tied his handkerchief round the lower part of his face for a modicum of protection, and took off his coat and draped it over his head like a bonnet in an attempt to save his neck and ears. Only the Seminole, at home in the lands of his ancestors, seemed completely untroubled. He sat almost somnolently beside the Saint, directing their passage with occasional grunts and touches on Simon’s arm.
The sawgrass ended as suddenly as though some celestial gardener had taken a stroke with a stupendous scythe. Ahead was a clear wide space of flat metallic blackness. The mist hung above it in lowering clouds, letting the headlights sweep out to light a forest of death.
White with age, hoary with moss, and stark as the blasted timber-lands of Hades might have been, the great gnarled cypresses loomed on the far side of the clearing, their upper branches lost in the low ceiling of fog.
“Plenty slow,” said Charlie Halwuk. “Go on.”
Simon went into bottom gear, and the great wheels settled down. It seemed as if the ground beneath them melted away, turning into a sheet of slaty liquid, foul and oleaginous, that threatened to rise and engulf them and suck them down. They sank into it relentlessly until it swirled sluggishly above the hubs of the wheel
s.
“Chees!” said Hoppy, and was quiet after that.
Simon could have reached beside him and touched the enveloping wetness with his hand. Slashing like an antediluvian swimmer, the marsh buggy went on.
Wings flashed startlingly ahead, beating branches, and the night was wild with hoarse cries as a hidden colony of egrets took to flight and crashed blindly heavenward before the approach of the terrifying intruder in their preserves. The amphibian wallowed on into the blanched grey forest, and the world of reality was gone.
A rudder at the stern of the hybrid craft, geared in with the dual clutch mechanism, took hold and lent its help to the steering, and the Saint had already developed a fair amount of assurance in the handling of his charge, but now there were new problems in the threading of a path through the trees. His piloting was an outstanding blend of inspiration and desperation. He judged each opening to a nicety, driving through gaps where there were only inches to spare, and yet as if they were caught in some gargantuan bagatelle table each opening, instead of bringing them to a clear passage, only brought them face to face with another tree.
Twice he turned hopelessly to the phlegmatic Indian, to have his unspoken question met by Charlie Halwuk’s flat “Drive on.”
Shining eyes came redly towards them, moved together into a single stop light, and vanished as a twenty-foot alligator sank below the surface like a waterlogged tree.
The wheels began to churn on a different note, and Simon realised that they were not making any progress.
“We’re stuck,” he said, as though he were afraid some unseen listener might hear.
“Log,” said Charlie Halwuk. “Plenty back. Then go on.”
The Saint reversed. The ten-foot flanged wheels at last took hold and dragged them backwards. He found another opening and coddled the marsh buggy through it, and sighed wearily at the sight of more grass ahead. He pointed without speaking.
The Indian said, “Plenty more grass now. Then swamp again. Then hammock. You keep a little more left.”
Black mud boiled up under the landboat even as he spoke. The Saint fed more gas. Dripping water, the machine began to climb with a changing cadence, shaking itself like a mechanical bear. Beyond, the grass looked as if it stretched endlessly. Simon felt stifled and had to pull off his masking handkerchief in spite of the mosquitoes, searching for a draught of breathable air.
Life became a game of pressing down sawgrass and wondering how many times Charlie Halwuk would say “Drive on.” Without warning, they were in a swamp again. They got out of it. Then still more grass, and, suddenly, trees. They plunged into trackless jungle—a nightmare of dodging matted vines, fallen logs, and pliant unbreakable trailers that seeped down from above to claw at their faces with inch-long thorns. At no time was there anything like a trail, or anything to point a direction; he sometimes wondered if he was driving round in circles, destined eventually to find himself back where he had been two hours before. But the Seminole never seemed to know any uncertainty, and kept warning him to veer left and right with as much wooden confidence as if he had been watching a compass.
Then at last, as though he were emerging from the dreamland of a dispersing anaesthetic, Simon began to realise that he could see around him, that the shining green under the headlights was fading, and above and about them the blackness was turning to a dull grey. Then, far above, the matted branches were touched with a thin blush of fire.
“Look,” said the Saint.
Beside him, Charlie Halwuk said, “Day.”
The marsh buggy pushed on into the blistering dawn.
CHAPTER SEVEN
HOW SIMON TEMPLAR FOUND A NEAT RECIPE FOR ROAST PORK AND HOPPY COULD NO LONGER CONTROL HIS TOIST
1
Heat came with the morning—a sticky, oppressive heat that stewed itself softeningly into every bone and cartilage. The Saint had known jungles and deserts, but he had never felt himself overwhelmed with such torrid enervation. The mists fled before the sun, leaving the swampland a visible vastness of tangled draperies that seemed to have neither beginning nor end, but over the riotously intertwining foliage the humidity still weighed down like an invisible blanket. His arms ached with the strain of fighting the twin clutch levers, and his whole body felt as if it had been left overnight in a Finnish bath.
“How much further, Charlie?”
Simon found that his voice also had sunk into a lower key. He used his sleeve to wipe perspiration from the clutch handles.
The Indian pointed away from where the climbing sun was slanting into their eyes, and said, “Over there. Maybe ten miles. Maybe fifteen. Maybe more. Dunno.”
“For Christ’s sake,” Simon swore. “I thought it was only ten miles when we left the road. Now it’s maybe more. What am I doing—driving this goddam tank backwards?”
“Plenty hard,” said the Indian impassively. “No can go straight. Plenty long way round.”
“We should have gone back to Miami and bought an aeroplane,” said the Saint dispiritedly.
“If you wanted to land anywhere in this country,” said Gallipolis, “you’d have to get out with a parachute.”
It was only too plain, as Simon stared at the landscape ahead, that the Greek was not exaggerating. Simon took time off to light another cigarette, and admitted it. There was nothing else to do but what they were doing.
Charlie Halwuk said, “Can go back.”
Simon caught the glint in the Seminole’s flat black eyes, and twisted his lips back to the reckless smile that so seldom left them.
“I’m hungry and sleepy and the mosquitoes have taken enough blood out of me for a transfusion, and I’ve tooled this cockeyed charabanc around all night through stuff that I didn’t think anything on wheels would go through,” he drawled. “After that, what’s another day more or less? I always wanted to see these Everglades, anyway. Let’s have some breakfast, and I’ll drive on.”
They built a small fire to boil water to make coffee, since that was the only way to disguise the colour of the swamp water and at the same time reduce its probable bacterial content. They ate corned beef and canned beans cold—or as cold as the outside temperature allowed them to be, which was really lukewarm. And the Saint drove on.
On and on.
It was like winding through a labyrinth with walls which only Charlie Halwuk could see. There was the sun now to give Simon a sense of direction, but that would have been no help to him if he had been alone. The trail that Charlie Halwuk knew would have looked on a map like the track of an intoxicated eel. And always the wilderness opened before them with sullen hostility and timeless patience, as though it were a sentient hungry thing that knew they must weaken in the end and be devoured…
The marsh buggy chugged through endless alternations of jungle and swamp and grass and graves where the ghostly remnants of cypress trees spired upwards to make circular pincushions of mysterious pools. As the heat grew more stifling, jutting ends of logs became the sun-roofs of assorted turtles basking in friendly fashion beside deadly cottonmouths. As the buggy approached, snakes and turtles quietly slipped away, leaving nothing but widening circles in stream or pool, and roseate spoonbills, blacknecked stilts, burrowing owls, and stately herons rose before their intrusion and took refuge in the air. But only once the Seminole caught Simon’s arm as a small bird much like a falcon rose before them.
“Look,” he whispered.
The Saint’s eyes followed the speeding flash of blue and grey.
“Everglade kite,” said Charlie Halwuk. “Maybe last time white man ever see. One time plenty. No more. Twenty, thirty maybe, now. Soon come be gone like Indian. White man never see!”
Time crawled on as slowly as they moved.
The marsh buggy took to shallow milky water. Simon wrenched it along the serpentine course for a few hundred yards, and then the denseness of a bayhead barred them with a wiry thorny wall. The soil about them was a deep quaking humus that clung like salve to the broad soft tyres. Follo
wing Charlie Halwuk’s pointing, the Saint turned south and skirted the impenetrable barrier until he found a knoll of comparatively higher and drier ground. He stopped there for another brief rest and a cigarette.
Mr Uniatz moved his Neanderthal bulk, yawned with the daintiness of a breathing switch engine, and said, “Dis jalopy is makin’ me seasick, boss. When do we eat again?”
Simon saw from his watch that it was after one o’clock.
“Very soon, I think,” he said, and started the buggy again.
Almost at once, as if in answer to the movement, a dog hidden somewhere in the undergrowth yapped loudly. Others joined in, shattering the barren deadness with their snarling bedlam. The noise was so sharp and savage and unexpected that the Saint’s hackles rose and Gallipolis fumbled for his gun, but the Indian showed a trace of pleasure.
“Chikee there,” he said. “My people camp. We get plenty sofkee. Drive on.”
In a hundred yards the bayhead fell away. Simon pulled up in astonishment.
They had run into a great moss-draped amphitheatre floored with dry loamy ground. A fire burned in the centre, blazing brightly in the hub of ten enormous logs arranged like the spokes of a wheel. High above the fire was a roof of thatched palmetto leaves supported by four uprights driven into the ground. Pots and pans interspersed with dried meat and herbs hung from the rafters. At one corner of the tribal fireplace was a mortar hollowed from the head of a cypress log, where their arrival failed to interrupt an ancient squaw who sat pounding corn with a wooden pestle.
Chikees formed a square around the central kitchen. They were similar to the roofed fireplace, except that they had floors of plaited saplings raised several feet above the ground. Blanketed forms roused from the floors at the stopping of the marsh buggy, while others rose from where they had been sitting on the fire logs, and when Simon stepped down and stretched his aching limbs he found himself surrounded by a curious group of them.
The Saint in Miami (The Saint Series) Page 19