Featuring the Saint s-5

by Leslie Charteris

  Sheridan, with a low whistle, signalled that he was ready, and the battle began.

  The cartridges, lowered one by one into the braziers and there exploded by the heat, provided a realistic rattle up and down the line; while Kelly, firing and reloading like one possessed, sent bullets smacking into the walls of the houses and kicking up spurts of dust around the barricades. He took care not to aim anywhere where anyone might be hit.

  The defense replied vigorously, though no one will ever know what they thought they were shooting at, and there were some spirited exchanges. When another whistle from Sheridan announced that the strings of cartridges were exhausted, Kelly rejoined him, and they crawled down to the road and the waiting Ford, and drove boldly towards the town, Kelly waving a nearly white flag.

  The car was stopped but Kelly was well known.

  "They let me through their lines," he explained to the officer of the garrison. "That is why the firing has ceased. I was in Ondia when war was declared, and I came back at once."

  He told them that he was on his way to Santa Miranda.

  "Then travel quickly, and urge them to not delay sending help," said the officer, "for it is clear that we are attacked by a tremendous number. I have sent telegraphs, but you can do more by telling them what you have seen."

  "I will do that," promised Kelly, and they let him drive on.

  As soon as the car was clear of the town he stopped and assisted Sheridan to unearth himself from under the pile of luggage; for, being now an outlaw, Sheridan had had to hide when they passed through the towns on the journey up, and it was advisable for him to do the same for most of the return.

  A little farther down the road they stopped again, and Sheridan climbed a tree and cut the telegraph wires, so that the news of the fizzling out of the attack should not reach Santa Miranda in time for the troops that had been sent out to be recalled. Instead of organizing the "invasion" they might have tapped the wire there and sent on messages from the commander of the garrison describing the progress of the battle, and so saved themselves much labour and thought; but the short road between Esperanza and Las Flores (the next town) was too well frequented for that to be practicable in broad daylight.

  The Minister of the Interior was informed that it was no longer possible to communicate with Esperanza, and he could see only one explanation.

  "Esperanza is surrounded," he said. "The garrison is less than a hundred. The town will fall in twenty-four hours, and the advancing armies of Maduro will meet our reinforcements at Las Flores. It will be a miracle if we can hold the invaders from Santa Miranda for five days."

  "You should have kept some troops here," said Shannet. "You have sent every soldier in Santa Miranda. Once that army is defeated there will be nothing for the invaders to overcome."

  "Tomorrow I will recruit the peones," said Don Manuel. "There must be conscription. Pasala requires the services of every able-bodied citizen. I will draft a proclamation tonight for the President to sign."

  It was then nearly five o'clock, but none of them had had a siesta that afternoon. They were holding another of many unprofitable conferences in a room in the palace, and it was significant that Shannet's right to be present was undisputed. The President himself was also there, biting his nails and stabbing the carpet nervously with the rowels of his spurs, but the other two took no notice of him. The President and De Villega were both still wearing the magnificent uniforms which they had donned for the review of the troops that morning.

  Shannet paced the room, the inevitable limp unlighted cigarette drooping from his loose lower lip. His once-white ducks were as spiled and sloppy as ever. (Since they never be came filthy, it is apparent that he must nave treated himself to a clean suit occasionally, but nobody was ever allowed to notice this fact.) His unbrushed hair, as always, flopped over his right eye.

  Since the day before, Shannet had had much to think about. Campard's amazing cable, attributing the war to a criminal gang, had arrived, and Shannet had replied with the required information. He had passed on the suggestion of his employer to the Minister of the Interior, pointing to the undoubtedly lawless behaviour of Sheridan and the Unknown; but that two common outlaws could organize a war was a theory which De Villega refused to swallow.

  "It is absurd," he said. "They are ordinary criminals. Two men cannot be a gang. In due time they will be caught, the man Sheridan will be imprisoned, and the man Mussolini will be hanged."

  Shannet, asked for the name of the man who had assaulted him, had replied indignantly: "He told me his name was Benito Mussolini!" Since then, he had been impelled to make several protests against the conviction of the officials that this ' statement was to be believed; but the idea had taken too firm a root, and Shannet had to give up the attempt.

  But now he had an inspiration.

  "There can be no harm in finding out," he urged. "Send for the peón that all the trouble is about, and let us question him."

  "I have a better idea than that," exclaimed De Villega, jumping up. "I will send the peón to the garrote to-morrow, for an encouragement to the people. They will enjoy the spectacle, and it will make them more ready to accept the proclamation of conscription. I will make a holiday--"

  But Shannet's brain had suddenly taken to itself an amazing brilliance. In a flash it had soared above the crude and elementary idea of sending for the peón and forcing him to speak. He had no interest in De Villega's sadistic elaboration of the same idea. He had seen a much better solution than that.

  9

  Rapidly Shannet explained his inspiration to the others. It was as simple as all great inspirations.

  He was now firmly convinced in his mind that Sheridan and the Unknown were at the bottom of all the trouble, and this belief was strengthened by the fact that no trace of them had been found since their escape, although both police and military had searched for them. Some of the things that the Unknown had said-before and after the interlude in which words were dispensed with-came back to Shannet with a dazzling clarity. It all fitted in.

  And ready to his hand lay the key to the trap in which he found himself. He saw that what the Unknown had started the Unknown could stop. It was Campard's own idea, but Shannet was more conveniently placed to apply it than his master had been. Also, he had the necessary lever within a few minutes' reach.

  Lilla McAndrew.

  She was the master card. Sheridan, he knew, was infatuated. And Sheridan was an important accomplice of the Unknown. With Lilla McAndrew for a hostage Shannet could dictate his own terms.

  "I know I have reason!" Shannet said vehemently, while he inwardly cursed the limitations of his Spanish, which prevented him driving his ideas home into the thick skulls of his audience more forcibly. "I know well the Seńor Campard, for whom I have worked for years. Perhaps it sounds fantastic to you, but I know that he is not an easy man to frighten. If I had suggested this to him myself, that these two men could have plotted a war, he would have laughed me to scorn. But he has said it of his own accord. Therefore I know that he must have some information."

  "I think everyone has gone mad," said De Villega helplessly. "But you may proceed with your plan. At least it can do no harm. But I warn you that it is on your own responsibility. The Senorita McAndrew is a British subject, and questions may be asked. Then I shall say that I know nothing of it; and, if the authorities demand it, you will have to be handed over to them."

  It was significant of the way in which Shannet's prestige had declined since the commencement of the war, for which De Villega was inclined to blame him; but Shannet did not care.

  "I will take the risk," he said, and was gone.

  In the palace courtyard his horse was still being held by a patient soldier-one of the half-dozen left behind to guard the palace. Shannet clambered into the saddle and galloped out as the gates were opened for him by a sentry.

  His first course took him to an unsavoury cafe at the end of the town, where he knew he would find the men he needed. He enrolled t
wo. They were pleased to call themselves "guides," but actually they were half-caste cutthroats available for anything from murder upwards. Shannet knew them, for he had used their services before.

  He explained what he wanted and produced money. There was no haggling. In ten minutes the three were riding out of the town.

  Kelly, too late, had thought of that very possibility, as he had hinted to Sheridan in the jungle clearing that morning. But Kelly and Sheridan were still twenty miles away.

  And the Saint, in the President's palatial bathroom, was leisurely completing the process of dressing himself in the clean clothes which he had found. They fitted him excellently.

  Meanwhile, the men whom Shannet had left in conference were receiving an unpleasant surprise.

  "God!" thundered De Villega. "How did this peón escape?"

  "Excellency," said the abashed governor of the prison, "it was during the siesta. The man fell down moaning and writhing as if he would die. The warder went to attend him, and the man grasped him by the throat so that he could not cry out, throttled him into unconsciousness, and bound and gagged him. He also surprised the gatekeeper, and hit him in the English fashion--"

  De Villega let out an exclamation.

  "What meanest thou, pig-'in the English fashion'?"

  The governor demonstrated the blow which the gatekeeper had described. It was, in fact, the simple left uppercut of the boxer and no Latin American who has not been infected with our methods ever hits naturally like that.

  "What manner of man was this peón?" demanded Don Manuel, with understanding dawning sickeningly into his brain.

  "Excellency, he was tall for a peón, and a man of the strength of a lion. If he had washed he would have been handsome, with an aristocratic nose that such a man could hardly have come by legitimately. And he had very white teeth and blue eyes--"

  "Blue eyes!" muttered De Villega dazedly, for, of course, to the Latin, all Englishmen have blue eyes.

  He turned to the governor with sudden ferocity.

  "Tonto de capirote!" he screamed. "Imbecile, dost thou not know whom thou hast let slip through thy beastly fingers? Dost thou not even know whom thou hast had in thy charge these three days?"

  He thumped upon the table with his fist, and the governor trembled.

  "Couldst thou not recognize him, cross-eyed carrion?" he screeched. "Couldst thou not see that he was no true peón? Maggot, hast thou not heard of the outlaw Benito Mussolini, for whom the rurales have searched in vain while he sheltered safely in the prison under thy gangrenous eyes?"

  "I am a worm, and blind, excellency," said the cringing man tactfully, for he knew that any excuse he attempted to make would only infuriate the minister further.

  De Villega strode raging up and down the room. Now he believed Shannet, wild and far-fetched as the latter's theory had seemed when he had first heard it propounded. The news of the prisoner's escape, and the-to Don Manuel-sufficient revelation of his real identity, provided incontrovertible proof that the fantastic thing was true.

  "He must be recaptured at once!" snapped De Villega. "Every guardia in Santa Miranda must seek him without rest day or night. The peones must be pressed into the hunt. The state will pay a reward of five thousand pesos to the man who brings him to me, alive or dead. As for thee, offal," he added, turning with renewed malevolence upon the prison governor, "if Sancho Quijote, or Benito Mussolini-whatever he calls himself-is not delivered to me in twelve hours I will cast thee into thine own prison to rot there until he is found."

  "I will give the orders myself, excellency," said the governor, glad of an excuse to make his escape, and bowed his way to the door.

  He went out backwards, and, as he closed the door, the Saint pinioned his arms from behind, and allowed the point of his little knife to prick his throat.

  "Make no sound," said the Saint, and lifted the man bodily off his feet.

  He carried the governor down the passage, the knife still at his throat, and took him into a room that he had already marked down in his explorations. It was a bedroom. The Saint deposited the man on the floor, sat on his head, and tore a sheet into strips, with which he bound and gagged him securely.

  "I will release you as soon as the revolution is over," the Saint promised, with a mocking bow.

  Then he walked back to the other room and entered softly, closing the door behind him. De Villega was penning the announcement of the reward, and it was the President who first noticed the intruder and uttered a strangled yap of startlement.

  Don Manuel looked up, and loosed an oath. He sprang to his feet, upsetting the ink pot and his chair, as if an electric current had suddenly been applied to him.

  "Who are you?" he demanded in a cracked voice, though he had guessed the answer.

  "You know me best as Benito Mussolini, or Sancho Quijote," said the Saint. "My friends-and enemies-sometimes call me El Santo. And I am the father of the revolution."

  He lounged lazily against the door, head back, hands rested carelessly on his hips. The Saint was himself again, clean and fresh from razor and bath, his hair combed smoothly back. The clothes he had appropriated suited him to perfection. The Saint had the priceless gift of being able to throw on any old thing and look well in it, but few things could have matched his mood and personality better than the buccaneering touch there was about the attire that had been more or less thrust upon him.

  The loose, full-sleeved shirt, the flaring trousers, the scarlet sash-the Saint wore these romantic trappings with a marvelous swashbuckling air, lounging there with a reckless and piratical elegance, a smile on his lips. . . .

  Seconds passed before the minister came out of his trance.

  "Revolution?"

  De Villega echoed the word involuntarily, and the Saint bowed.

  "I am the revolution," he said, "and I have just started. For my purpose I arranged that the army should leave Santa Miranda, so that I should have nothing to deal with but a few officials, yourselves, and a handful of guardias. Wonderful as I am, I could not fight an army."

  "Fool!" croaked Don Manuel, in a voice that he hardly knew as his own. "The army will return, and then you will be shot."

  "Permit me to disagree," said the Saint. "The army will return, certainly. It will be to find a new government in power. The army is the servant of the state, not of one man, nor even of one government. Of course, on their return, the soldiers would be free to begin a second revolution to overthrow the new government if they disliked it. But I do not think they will do that, particularly as the new government is going to increase their pay. Observe the subtle difference. To have attempted to bribe the army to support a revolution would have been treason, and rightly resented by all patriotic citizens; but to signalize the advent of the new constitution by a bonus in cash to the army is an act of grace and generosity, and will be rightly appreciated."

  "And the people?" said Don Manuel, as in a dream.

  "Will they weep to see you go? I think not. You have crushed them with taxes-we shall liberate them. They could have liberated themselves, but they had not the initiative to begin. Now I give them a lead, and they will follow."

  The Saint straightened up off the door. His blue eyes, with a sparkle of mischief in them, glanced from the Minister of the Interior to the President, and back to the Minister of the Interior again. His right hand came off his hip in a commanding gesture.

  "Senores," he said, "I come for your resignations."

  The President came to his feet, bowed, and stood to attention.

  "I will write mine at once, seńor" he said hurriedly. "It is plain that Pasala no longer needs me."

  It was the speech of his life, and the Saint swept him a low bow of approval.

  "I thank your excellency!" he said mockingly.

  "Half-wit!" snarled De Villega over his shoulder. "Let me handle this!"

  He thrust the President back and came round the table.

  A sword hung at his side, and on the belt of his ceremonial uniform wa
s a revolver holster. He stood before the Saint, one hand on the pommel of his sword, the other fiddling with the little strap which secured the flap of the holster. His dark eyes met Simon Templar's bantering gaze.

  "Already the revolution is accomplished?" he asked.

  "I have accomplished it," said Templar.

  De Villega raised his left hand to stroke his moustache.

  "Seńor," he said, "all this afternoon we have sat in this room, which overlooks the front courtyard of the palace. Beyond, as you know, is the Calle del Palacio. Yet we have heard no commotion. Is a people that has been newly liberated too full of joy to speak?"

  "When the people hear of their liberation," said the Saint, "you will hear their rejoicing."

  De Villega's eyes glittered under his black brows.

  "And your friends, seńor?" he pursued. "The other liberators? They have perhaps, surrounded the palace and over come the guards without an alarm being raised or a shot fired?"

  The Saint laughed.

  "Don Manuel," he said, "you do me an injustice. I said I was the father of the revolution. Can a child have two fathers? Alone, Manuel, I accomplished it-yet you persist in speaking of my private enterprise as if it were the work of a hundred. Will you not give me the full credit for what I have done?" De Villega stepped back a pace.

  "So," he challenged, "the people does not know. The palace guards do not know. The army does not know. Will you tell me who does know?"

  "Our three selves," said the Saint blandly. "Also two friends of mine who organized the war for me. And the governor of the prison, whom I captured on his way to mobilize the guardias against me. It is very simple. I intend this to be a bloodless revolution, for I am against unnecessary killing. You will merely resign, appointing a new government in your places, and leave Pasala at once, never to return again on pain of death."

  The holster was now undone, and De Villega's fingers were sliding under the flap.