"Smoke!" breathed the Saint. "This is a wild party!"
He hadn't time to adjust himself to the interruption, to parse and analyse it and extract its philosophy. How he came to be under fire at that stage of the journey—that could wait. Something had gone wrong. Someone had blundered. Roger must have been tricked, and Marius must have escaped—or something. But, meanwhile . . .
Fortunately the first shot had made him slow up. Otherwise he would have been killed.
The next sound he heard was neither the impact of a bullet nor the thin, distant rattle of the rifle that fired it. It was loud and close and explosive, under his feet it seemed; and the steering wheel was wrenched out of his hand—nearly.
He never knew how he kept his grip on it. An instinct swifter than thought must have made him tighten his hold at the sound of that explosion, and he was driving with both hands on the wheel. He tore the wheel round in the way it did not want to go, bracing his feet on clutch and brake pedals, calling up the last reserve of every sinew in his splendid body.
Death, sudden as anything he could have asked, stared him in the face. The strain was terrific. The Hirondel had ceased to be his creature. It was mad, runaway, the bit between its tremendous teeth, caracoling towards a demoniac plunge to destruction. No normal human power should have been able to hold it. The Saint, strong as he was, could never have done it—normally. He must have found some supernatural strength.
Somehow he kept the car out of the ditch for as long as it took to bring it to a standstill.
Then, almost without thinking, he switched out the lights.
Dimly he wondered why, under that fearful gruelling, the front axle hadn't snapped like a dry stick, or why the steering hadn't come to pieces under his hands.
"If I come out of this alive," thought the Saint, "the Hirondel Motor Company will get an unsolicited testimonial from me."
But that thought merely crossed his mind like a swallow swimming a quiet pool—and was lost. Then, in the same dim way, he was wondering why he hadn't brought a gun. Now he was likely to pay for the reckless haste with which he had set out. His little knife was all very well—he could use it as accurately as any man could use a gun, and as swiftly—but it was only good for one shot. He'd never been able to train it to function as a boomerang.
It was unlikely that he was being sniped by one man alone. And that one solitary knife, however expertly he used it, would be no use at all against a number of armed men besieging him in a lamed car.
"Obviously, therefore," thought Simon, "get out of the car."
And he was out of it instantly, crouching in the ditch beside it. In the open, and the darkness, he would have a better chance.
He wasn't thinking for a moment of a getaway. That would have been fairly easy. But the Hirondel was the only car he had on him, and it had to be saved—or else he had to throw in his hand. Joke. The obvious object of the ambuscade was to make him do just that—to stop him, anyhow—and he wasn't being stopped. . . .
Now, with the switching off of the lights, the darkness had become less dark, and the road ran through it, beside the black bulk- of the flanking trees, like a ribbon of dull steel. And, looking back, the Saint could see shadows that moved. He counted four of them.
He went to meet them, creeping like a snake in the dry ditch. They were separated. Avoiding the dull gleam of that strip of road, as if afraid that a shot from the car in front might greet their approach, they slunk along in the gloom at the sides of the road, two on one side and two on the other.
It was no time for soft fighting. There was that punctured front wheel to be changed, and those four men in the way. So the four men had to be eliminated—as quickly and definitely as possible. The Saint was having no fooling about.
The leader of the two men on Simon's side of the road almost stepped on the dark figure that seemed to rise suddenly out of the ground in front of him. He stopped, and tried to draw back so that he could use the rifle he carried, and his companion trod on his heels and cursed.
Then the first man screamed; and the scream died in a choking gurgle.
The man behind him saw his leader sink to the ground, but there was another man beyond his leader—a man who had not been there before, who laughed with a soft whisper of desperate merriment. The second man tried to raise the automatic he carried; but two steely hands grasped his wrists, and he felt himself flying helplessly through the air. He seemed to fly a long way—and then he slept.
The Saint crossed the road.
A gun spoke from the hand of one of the two men on the other side, who had paused, irresolute, at the sound of the first scream. But the Saint was lost again in the shadows.
They crouched down, waiting, watching, intent for his next move. But they were looking down along the ditch and the grass beside the road, where the Saint had vanished like a ghost; but the Saint was above them then, crouched like a leopard under the hedge at the top of the embankment beside them, gathering himself stealthily.
He dropped on them out of the sky; and the heels of both his shoes impacted upon the back of the neck of one of them with all the Saint's hurtling weight behind, so that the man lay very still where he was and did not stir again.
The other man, rising and bringing up his rifle, saw a spinning sliver of bright steel whisking towards him like a flying fish over a dark sea, and struck to guard. By a miracle he succeeded, and the knife glanced from his gun-barrel and tinkled away over the road.
Then he fought with the Saint for the rifle.
He was probably the strongest of the four, and he did not know fear; but there is a trick by which a man who knows it can always take a rifle or a stick from a man who does not know it, and the Saint had known that trick from his childhood. He made the man drop the rifle; but he had no chance to pick it up for himself, for the man was on him again in a moment. Simon could only kick the gun away into the ditch, where it was lost.
An even break, then.
They fought hand to hand, two men on that dark road, lion and leopard.
This man had the advantage of strength and weight, but the Saint had the speed and fighting savagery. No man who was not a Colossus, or mad, would have attempted to stand in the Saint's way that night: but this man, who may have been something of both, attempted it. He fought like a beast. But Simon Templar was berserk. The man was not only standing in the way: he was the servant and the symbol of all the powers that the Saint hated. He stood for Marius, and the men behind Marius, and all the conspiracy that the Saint had sworn to break, and that had caused it to come to pass that at that moment the Saint should have been riding recklessly to the rescue of his lady. Therefore the man had to go, as his three companions had already gone. And perhaps the man recognised his doom, for he let out one sobbing cry before the Saint's fingers found an unshakable grip on his throat.
It was to the death. Simon had no choice, even if he would have taken it, for the man fought to the end; and even when unconsciousness stilled his struggles Simon dared not let him go, for he might be only playing 'possum, and the Saint could not afford to take any chances. There was only one way to make sure. . . .
So presently the Saint rose slowly to his feet, breathing deeply like a man who has been under water for a long time, and went to find Anna. And no one else moved on the road.
As an afterthought, he commandeered a loaded automatic from one of the men who had no further use for it.
Then he went to change the wheel.
It should only have taken him five minutes; but he could not have foreseen that the spare tyre would settle down to a futile flatness as he slipped the jack from under the dumb-iron and lowered the wheel to the road.
There was only the one spare.
It was a very slight consolation to remember that Norman Kent, the ever-thoughtful, always carried an outfit of tools about twice as efficient as anything the ordinary motorist thinks necessary. And the wherewithal to mend punctures was included.
Even so, with only the spotlight to work by, and no bucket of water with which to find the site of the puncture, it would not be any easy job.
Simon stripped off his coat with a groan.
It was more than half an hour before the Hirondel was ready to take the road again. Nearly three-quarters of an hour wasted altogether. Precious minutes squandered, that he had gambled life and limb to win. . . .
But it seemed like forty-five years, instead of forty-five minutes, before he was able to light a cigarette and climb back into the driver's seat.
He started the engine and moved his hand to switch on the headlights; but even as his hand touched the switch the road about him was flooded by lights that were not his.
As he engaged the gears, he looked back over his shoulder, and saw that the car behind was not overtaking. It had stopped.
Breathless with the reaction from the first foretaste of battle, he was not expecting another attack so soon. As he moved off, he was for an instant more surprised than hurt by the feel of something stabbing through his left shoulder like a hot spear-point.
Then he understood, and turned in his seat with the borrowed automatic in his hand.
He was not, as he had admitted, the greatest pistol shot in the world; but on that night some divine genius guided his hand. Coolly he sighted, as if he had been practising on a range, and shot out both the headlights of the car behind. Then, undazzled, he could see to puncture one of its front wheels before he swept round the next corner with a veritable storm of pursuing bullets humming about his ears and multiplying the stars in the windscreen.
He was not hit again. The same power must have guarded him as with a shield.
As he straightened the car up he felt his injured shoulder tenderly. As far as he. could discover, no bone had been touched: it was simply a flesh wound through the trapezius muscle, not in itself fatally disabling, but liable to numb the arm and weaken him from loss of blood. He folded his handkerchief into a pad, and thrust it under his shirt to cover the wound.
It was all he could do whilst driving along; and he could not stop to examine the wound more carefully or improvise a better dressing. In ten minutes, at most, the chase would be resumed. Unless the pursuers were as unlucky with their spare as he had been. And that was tod much to bank on.
But how had that car come upon the scene? Had it been waiting up a side turning in support of the four men, and had it started on the warning of the first man's scream or the fourth man's cry? Impossible. He had been delayed too long with the mending of the puncture. The car would have arrived long before he had finished. Or had it been on its way to lay another ambush further along the road, in case the first one failed?
Simon turned the questions in his mind as a man might flick over the pages of a book he already knew by heart, and passed over them all, seeking another page more easily read.
None was right. He recognised each of them, grimly, as a subconscious attempt to evade the facing of the unpleasant truth; and grimly he choked them down. The solution he had found when that first shot pinged through the window-screen still fitted in. If Marius had somehow escaped, or been rescued, or contrived somehow to convey a warning to his gang, the obvious thing to do would be to get in touch with agents along the road. And warn the men in the house on the hill itself, at Bures. Then Marius would follow in person. Yes, it must have been Marius. . . .
Then the Saint remembered that the fat man and the lean man had not been tied up when he left Roger. And Roger Conway, incomparable lieutenant as he was, was a mere tyro at this game without the hand of his chief to guide him.
"Poor old Roger," thought the Saint; and it was typical of him that he thought only of Roger in that spirit.
And he drove on.
He drove with death in his heart and murder in the clear, cold blue eyes that followed the road like twin hawks swerving in the wake of their prey. And a mere wraith of the Saintly smile rested unawares on his lips.
For, figured out that way, it meant that he was on a foredoomed errand.
The thought gave him no pause.
Rather, he drove on faster, with the throbbing of his wounded shoulder submerged and lost beneath the more savage and positive throbbing of every pulse in his body.
Under the relentless pressure of his foot on the accelerator, the figures on the speedometer cylinder, trembling past the hairline in the little window where they were visible, showed crazier and crazier speeds.
Seventy-eight.
Seventy-nine.
Eighty.
Eighty-one . . . two . . . three . . . four, . . .
Eighty-five.
"Not good enough for a race-track," thought the Saint, "but on an ordinary road—and at night ..."
The wind of the Hirondel's torrential passage buffeted him with almost animal blows, bellowing in his ears above the thunderous fanfare of the exhaust.
For a nerve-shattering minute he held the car at ninety.
"Patricia! ..."
And he seemed to hear her voice calling him: "Simon!"
"Oh, my darling, my darling, I'm on my way!" cried the Saint, as if she could have heard him.
As he clamoured through Braintree, with thirteen miles still to go by the last signpost, two policemen stepped out from the side of the road and barred his way.
Their intention was plain, though he had no idea why they should wish to stop him. Surely his mere defiance of a London constable's order to stop would not have merited such a drastic and far-flung effort to bring him promptly to book! Or had Marius, to make the assurance of his own ambushes doubly sure, informed Scotland Yard against him with some ingenious and convincing story about his activities as the Saint? But how could Marius have known of those? And Teal, he was certain, couldn't. ... Or had Teal traced him from the Furillac more quickly than he had expected? And, if so, how could Teal have known that the Saint was on that road?
Whatever the answers to those questions might be, the Saint was not stopping for anyone on earth that night. He set his teeth, and kept his foot flat down on the accelerator.
The two policemen must have divined the ruthlessness of his defiance, for they jumped to safety in the nick of time.
And then the Saint was gone again, breaking out into the open country with a challenging blast of klaxon and a snarling stammer of unsilenced exhaust, blazing through the night like the shouting vanguard of a charge of forgotten valiants.
11. How Roger Conway told the truth, and Inspector Teal believed a lie
Inspector Teal set Hermann down in the sitting-room, and adroitly snapped a pair of handcuffs on his wrists. Then he turned his slumbrous eyes on Roger.
"Hullo, unconscious!" he sighed.
"Not quite," retorted Roger shortly. "But darn near it. I got a good crack on the head giving you that shout."
Teal shook his head. He was perpetually tired, and even that slight movement seemed to cost him a gargantuan effort.
"Not me," he said heavily. "My name isn't Norman. What are you doing there?"
"Pretending to be a sea-lion," said Roger sarcastically. "It's a jolly game. Wouldn't you like to join in? Hermann will throw us the fish to catch in our mouths."
Mr. Teal sighed again, slumbrously.
"What's your name?" he demanded.
Roger did not answer for a few seconds.
In that time he had to make a decision that might alter the course of the Saint's whole life, and Roger's own with it—if not the course of all European history. It was a tough decision to take.
Should he give his name as Simon Templar? That was the desperate question that leapt into his head immediately. ... It so happened that he never carried much in his pockets, and so far as he could remember there was nothing in his wallet that would give him away when he was searched. The fraud would certainly be discovered before very long, but he might be able to bluff it out for twenty-four hours. And in all that time the Saint would be free—free to save Pat, return to Maidenhead, deal with Vargan,
complete the mission to which he had pledged himself.
To the possible, and even probable, consequences to himself of such a course, Roger never gave a thought. The sacrifice would be a small one compared with what it might achieve.
"I am Simon Templar," said Roger. "I believe you're looking for me."
Hermann's eyes widened.
"It is a lie!" he burst out. "He is not Templar!"
Teal turned his somnambulistic gaze upon the man.
"Who asked you to speak?" he demanded.
"Don't take any notice of him," said Roger. "He doesn't know anything about it. I'm Templar, all right. And I'll go quietly."
"But he is not Templar!" persisted Hermann excitedly. "Templar has been gone an hour! That man——"
"You shut your disgusting mouth!" snarled Roger. "And if you don't, I'll shut it for you. You——"
Teal blinked.
"Somebody's telling a naughty fib," he remarked sapiently. "Now will you both shut up a minute?"
He locomoted fatly across the room, and stooped over Roger. But he based his decision on the tailor's tab inside Roger's coat pocket, and Roger had not thought of that.
"I'm afraid you're the story-teller, whoever you are," he sighed.
"That's my real name," said Roger bitterly. "Conway— Roger Conway."
"It sounds more likely."
"Though what that fatherless streak of misery——"
"A squeal," explained Teal patiently. "A time-honoured device among crooks to get off lightly themselves by helping the police to jump more heavily on their pals. I suppose he is your pal?" added the detective sardonically. "You seem to know each other's names."
Roger was silent.
So that was that. Very quickly settled. And what next?
Hermann, then, had patently decided to squeal. Which seemed odd, considering the type of man he had made Hermann out to be. But. . . .
Roger looked at the man, and suddenly saw the truth. It wasn't a squeal. The protest had been thoughtless, instinctive, made in a momentary access of panic lest his master should be proved to have made a mistake. Even at that moment Hermann was regretting it, and racking his brains for a lie to cover it up. Racking his brains, also, for his own defence. . . .
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