They went to the edge of the verandah and looked down. Below them, about a mile away, Santa Miranda, as yet hardly astir from its siesta, lay bathed in the afternoon sunshine.
The town, indeterminately vignetted at the edges, had a definite core of nearly modern white buildings ranged down its principal streets. These numbered two, and were in the form of a T. The top of the T ran parallel with the waterfront; the upright, half-way down which was the Presidential Palace, ran inland for nearly a mile, tailing off in the mass of adobe huts which clustered round the core of the town.
From where they stood they could look down the length of the street which formed the upright of the T, and the situation was even as the Saint had diagnosed it…
“One minute for the fond farewell, Archie,” said the Saint briskly, and Sheridan nodded. Simon Templar drew Kelly inside the bungalow.
“By the way,” he said, “do you happen to have such a thing as a good-looking pot of paint?”
“I’ve got some enamel,” replied the mystified Kelly.
He produced a couple of tins, and the Saint selected one with every appearance of satisfaction.
“The very idea,” he said. “It’s just an idea of mine for dealing with this arrest business.” Kelly was suspicious.
“I don’t seem to have much to do,” he complained aggrievedly. “It’s hoggin’ the best of the fightin’ yez are. Now, if I had my way, I’d be sthartin’ the throuble with these policemen right away, I would.”
“And wreck the whole show,” said the Saint. “No, it’s too soon for that. And if you call being fifty percent of an invading army ’having nothing to do’ I can’t agree. You’re one of the most important members of the cast. Besides, if your bus doesn’t break down, you’ll be back here just when the rough stuff is warming up. You get it both ways.”
He adjusted his hat to an appropriately rakish and revolutionary angle on his head, and went out to collect Archie Sheridan.
They shook hands with the still grumbling Kelly, but the Saint had the last word with Lilla McAndrew.
“I’m sorry I’ve got to take Archie,” he said. “You see, he’s the one man I can trust here who can tap out Morse fluently, and I sent him out from England for that very reason, though I didn’t know it was going to pan out as it’s panning out now. But I’ll promise to get him back to you safe and sound. You needn’t worry. Only the good die young. I wonder how you’ve managed to live so long, Lilla?”
He smiled, and when the Saint smiled in that particularly gay and enchanting manner, it was impossible to believe that any adventure he undertook could fail.
“Archie is marked ‘Fragile—With Care’ for this journey,” said the Saint, and went swinging down the verandah steps.
He walked back arm-in-arm with Sheridan to the latter’s bungalow at a leisurely pace enough, for it was his last chance to give Sheridan his final instructions for the opening of the campaign.
Archie was inclined to voice much the same grievance as Kelly had vented, but Templar dealt shortly with that insubordination.
“I’m starting off by having the most boresome time of any of you,” he said. “If I could do your job, I promise you I’d be making you do mine. That being so, I reckon I deserve a corresponding majority ration of excitement at the end. Anyway, with any luck we’ll all be together again by Thursday, and we’ll see the new era in in a bunch. And if you’re going to say you’ve thought of another scheme that’d be just as effective, my answer is that you ought to have spoken up before. It’s too late to change our plans now.”
At the bungalow the Saint made certain preparations for the arrival of the police posse which to some extent depleted Archie Sheridan’s travelling athletic outfit. That done, he sent Sheridan to his post, and himself settled down with a cigarette in an easy chair on the verandah to await the coming of the Law.
4
The guindillas came toiling up the last two hundred yards of slope in a disorderly straggle. The hill at that point became fairly steep, they were in poor condition, and, although the sun was getting low, the broiling heat of the afternoon had not yet abated, and these factors united to upset what might otherwise have been an impressive approach. The only members of the squad who did not seem the worse for wear were the two comisarios, who rode in the van on a pair of magnificent high-stepping horses, obvious descendants of the chargers of Cortes’s invading Spaniards, the like of which may often be seen in that part of the Continent. The Saint had had an eye for those horses ever since he spied them a mile and a half away, which was why he was so placidly waiting for the deputation.
He watched them with a detached interest, smoking his cigarette. They were an unkempt and ferocious-looking lot (in Pasala, as in many other Latin countries, Saturday night is Gillette night for the general public), and every man of them was armed to somewhere near the teeth with a musket, a revolver, and a sabre. The Saint himself was comparatively weaponless, his entire armoury consisting of a beautifully-fashioned little knife, strapped to his left forearm under his sleeve, which he could throw with a deadly swiftness and an unerring aim. He did not approve of firearms, which he considered messy and noisy and barbarous inventions of the devil. Yet the opposition’s display of force did not concern him.
His first impression, that the entire police force of Santa Miranda had been sent out to arrest him, proved to be a slight over-estimate. There were, as a matter of fact, only ten guardias behind the two mounted men in resplendent uniforms.
The hand came to a bedraggled and slovenly halt a few yards from the verandah, and the comisarios dismounted and ascended the short flight of steps with an imposing clanking of scabbards and spurs. They were moustached and important.
The Saint rose.
“Buenos tardes, Señores,” he murmured courteously.
“Señor,” said the senior comisario sternly, unfolding a paper overloaded with official seals. “I regret that I have to trouble a visitor illustrious, hut I am ordered to request your honour to allow your honour to be taken to the prevencion, in order that in the morning your honour may be brought before the tribunal to answer a charge of grievously assaulting the Señor Shannet.”
He replaced the document in his pocket, and bowed extravagantly. The Saint, with a smile, surpassed the extravagance of the bow.
“Señor polizante,” he said. “I regret that I cannot come.”
Now the word “polizante” while it is understood to mean “policeman,” is not the term with which it is advisable to address even an irascible guardia—much less a full-blown comisario. It brought to an abrupt conclusion the elaborate ceremony in which the comisario had been indulging.
He turned, and barked an order, and the escort mounted the steps and ranged themselves along the verandah.
“Arrest him!”
“I cannot stay,” said the Saint sadly. “And I refuse to be arrested. Adios, amigos!”
He faded away—through the open door of the dining-room. The Saint had the knack of making these startlingly abrupt exits without any show of haste, so that he was gone before his audience had realised that he was on his way.
Then the guardias, led by the two outraged comisarios, followed in a body.
The bungalow was small, with a large verandah in front and a smaller verandah at the back. The three habitable rooms of which it boasted ran through the width of the house, with doors opening on to each verandah. The dining-room was the middle room, and it had no windows.
As the guardias surged in in pursuit, rifles at the ready, with the comisarios waving their revolvers, the Saint reappeared in the doorway that opened on to the back of the verandah. At the same moment the doors to the front verandah were slammed and barred behind them by Archie Sheridan, who had been lying in wait in an adjoining room for that purpose.
The Saint’s hands were held high above his head, and in each hand was a gleaming round black object.
“Señores,” he said persuasively. “I am a peaceful revolutionary, and I
cannot be pestered like this. In my hands you see two bombs. If you shoot me, they will fall and explode. If you do not immediately surrender I shall throw them—and, again, they will explode. Is it to be death or glory, boys?”
He spoke the last sentence in English, but he had already said enough in the vernacular to make the situation perfectly plain. The guardias paused, irresolute.
Their officers, retiring to a strategic position in the background from which they could direct operations, urged their men to advance and defy death in the performance of their duty, but the Saint shifted his right hand threateningly, and the guardias found the counter-argument more convincing. They threw down their arms and the comisarios, finding themselves alone, followed suit as gracefully as they might.
The Saint ordered the arsenal to be thrown out of the door, and he stepped inside the room and stood aside to allow this to be done. Outside, the guns were collected by Archie Sheridan, and their bolts removed and hurled far away into the bushes of the garden. The cartridges he poured into a large bag, together with the contents of the bandoliers which the Saint ordered his prisoners to discard, for these were required for a certain purpose. Then the Saint returned to the doorway.
“Hasta la vista!” he murmured mockingly. “Until we meet again!”
And he hurled the two gleaming round black objects he carried, and a wail of terror went up from the doomed men.
The Saint sprang back, slamming and barring the doors in the face of the panic-stricken stampede and the two tennis-balls, which he had coated with Kelly’s providential enamel for the purpose, rebounded off the heads of the cowering comisarios, leaving great splashes of paint on the gorgeous uniforms and the gorgeous moustachios of Santa Miranda’s Big Two, and went bouncing insolently round the room.
The Saint vaulted over the verandah rail and ran round to the front of the bungalow. Sheridan, his bag of cartridges slung over his shoulder, was already mounted on one of the police horses, and holding the other by the bridle. From inside the dining-room could be heard the muffled shouting and cursing of the imprisoned men, and on the panels of the barred doors thundered the battering of their efforts to escape. The Saint sprang into the saddle.
“Vamos!” he cried, and smacked his hand down on the horse’s quarters.
The pounding of departing hoofs came to the ears of the men in the locked room, and redoubled the fury of their onslaught on the doors. But the mahogany of which the doors were made was thick and well-seasoned, and it was ten minutes before they broke out. And then, on foot, and unarmed, there was nothing for them to do but to return to Santa Miranda and confess defeat.
The which they did, collaborating on the way down to invent a thrilling tale of a desperate and perilous battle, in which they had braved a hundred deaths, their heroism availing them naught in the face of Simon Templar’s evil cunning. But first, to restore their shattered nerves, they partook freely of three bottles of Sheridan’s whisky which they found. And it may be recorded that on this account the next day found them very ill, for, before he left, Archie Sheridan had liberally adulterated the whisky with Epsom salts, in anticipation of this very vandalism. But, since guardia and comisario alike were unfamiliar with the flavour of whisky, they noticed nothing amiss, and went unsuspecting to their hideous fate.
But when they returned to Santa Miranda they said nothing whatever about bombs, wisely deeming that the inclusion of that episode in their story could not but cover them with derision.
Meantime, Simon Templar and Archie Sheridan had galloped neck and neck to Kelly’s bungalow, and there Kelly was waiting for them. He had a kit-bag already packed with certain articles that the Saint had required, and Simon took the bag and lashed it quickly to the pommel of his saddle.
Sheridan dismounted. The Saint shook hands with him, and took the bridle of the spare horse.
“All will be well,” said the Saint blithely. “I feel it in my bones. So long, souls! See you all again soon. Do your stuff—and good luck!”
He clapped his heels to his horse, and was gone with a cheery wave of his hand.
They watched him till the trees hid him from view, and then they went back to the bungalow.
“A piece of wood, pliers, screws, screwdriver, and wire, Kelly, my bhoyl,” ordered Sheridan briskly. “I’ve got some work to do before I go to bed tonight. And while I’m doing it you can gather round and hear the biggest laugh yet in this revolution, or how the Battle of Santa Miranda was nearly won on the courts of Wimbledon.”
“I thought you weren’t coming back,” said the girl accusingly.
“I didn’t know whether I was or not,” answered the shameless Archie. “It all depended on whether the Saint’s plan of escape functioned or not. Anyway, a good-bye like you gave me was far too good to miss just because I might be coming back. And don’t look so disappointed because I got away. I’ll go down to the town and surrender, if that’s what you want.”
Towards sundown a squadron of cavalry galloped up to the bungalow, and the officer in command declared his intention of making a search. Kelly protested.
“You have no right,” he said, restraining an almost irresistible desire to throw the man down the steps and thus precipitate the fighting that his fists were itching for.
“I have a warrant from the Minister of the Interior, El Supremo é Ilustrisimo Señor Manuel Concepcion de Villega,” said the officer, producing the document with a flourish.
“El Disgustando y Horriblisimo Señor!” muttered Kelly.
The officer shrugged, and indicated the men who waited below.
“I do not wish to use force, Señor Kelly,” he said significantly, and Kelly submitted to the inevitable.
“But,” he said, “I do not know why you should suspect me to be hiding him.”
“You are known to be a friend of the Señor Sheridan,” was the brief reply, “and the Señor Sheridan is a friend of this man. We are looking for both of them.” Kelly followed the officer into the house.
“What did you say was the name of this man you are looking for?” he inquired.
“To the Señor Shannet, whom he attacked,” said the officer, “he gave his name as Benito Mussolini.”
He was at a loss to understand Kelly’s sudden earthquaking roar of laughter. At last he gave up the effort, and put it down to another manifestation of the well-known madness of all ingleses. But the fact remains that the joke largely compensated Kelly for the indignity of the search to which his house was subjected.
The officer and half a dozen of his men went through the bungalow with a small-toothed comb, and not a cubic inch of it, from floor to rafters, escaped their attention. But they did not find Archie Sheridan, who was sitting out on the roof, on the opposite side to that from which the soldiers had approached.
At last the search-party allowed themselves to be shepherded out, for barely an hour’s daylight was left to them, and they had already fruitlessly wasted much valuable time.
“But remember, Señor Kelly,” said the officer, as his horse was led up, “that both Sheridan and Mussolini have been declared outlaws for resisting arrest and assaulting and threatening the lives of the guardias civiles sent to apprehend them. In the morning they will be proclaimed, and the Señor Shannet, who has heard of the insolence offered to the Law, has himself offered to double the reward for their capture, dead or alive.”
The troopers rode off on their quest, but in those latitudes the twilight is short. They scoured the countryside for an hour, until the fall of night put an end to the search, and five miles away they found the horses of the two comisarios grazing in a field, but of the man Mussolini there was no trace. The Saint had had a good start, and what he did not know about the art of taking cover in the open country wasn’t worth knowing.
He was stretched out on a branch of a tall tree a mile away from where the horses were found when the troop of cavalry reined in only twelve feet beneath him.
“We can do no more now,” said the officer. “In the mo
rning we shall find him. Without horses he cannot travel far. Let us go home.”
The Saint laughed noiselessly in the darkness.
5
That night there came into Santa Miranda a peón.
He was dirty and disreputable to look upon. His clothes were dusty, patched in many places, and threadbare where they were not patched, and his hair was long, and matted into a permanent thatch, as is the slovenly custom of the labourers of that country.
Had he wished to do so, he might have passed unnoticed among many other similarly down-at-heel and poverty-stricken people, but this he did not seem to want. In fact, he went out of his way to draw attention to himself, and this he found easy enough, for his poverty-stricken appearance was belied by the depth of his pocket.
He made a fairly comprehensive round of the inferior cafés in the town, and in each he bought wine and aguardiente for all who cared to join him. Naturally, it was not long before he acquired a large following, and, since he seemed to account for two drinks to everybody else’s one, there was no surprise when he became more and more drunk as the evening wore on.
It was not to be expected that such display of affluence on the part of one whose outward aspect argued against the probability that he would have more than a few centavos to his name could escape comment, and it was not long before the tongues that devoured the liquor which he bought were busy with rumour. It was whispered, as with authority, that he was a bandit from the Sierra Maduro, over the border beyond Esperanza, who had crossed into Pasala to spend his money and rest until the rurales of Maduro tired of seeking him and he could return to his old hunting-grounds with safety. Then it was remarked that on his little finger was a signet ring bearing a heraldic device, and with equal authority it was said that he was the heir to a noble Mexican family indulging his hobby of moving among the peónes as one of themselves and distributing charity where he found it merited. Against this, another school of thought affirmed that he was a peón who had murdered his master and stolen his ring and his money.
Featuring the Saint (The Saint Series) Page 10