The Saint Closes the Case (25 page)

One glance round the room the Saint took, and
it showed
him the eighth man coming off the floor with a mixture of
rage and
fear in his eyes, and Patricia bound to the bed by
wrists and ankles.

Then, as the leader of the pursuit crashed
against the door
the Saint whipped round again like a whirlwind, and, with
one terrific heave, hurled a huge chest of drawers across the
room from
its place on the wall.

It stopped short of the door by a couple of
feet; and, as
Simon sprang to send it the rest of the way, the eighth
man
intercepted him with a knife.

The Saint caught his wrist, Wrenched …
and the man
cried out with pain and dropped the knife.

He was strong above the average, but he could
not stand for
a moment against the Saint’s desperation. Simon took him
about the
waist and threw him bodily against the door, knocking most of the breath out of
him. And before the man could
move again, the Saint had pinned him where he
stood with
the whole unwieldy bulk of the chest of drawers. A moment
later the massive wardrobe followed, toppled over to reinforce
the
barricade, and the man was held there, fluttering feebly,
like an
insect nailed to a board.

The Saint heard the cursing and thundering
beyond the
door, and laughed softly, blessing the age of the house.
That door was of solid oak, four inches thick, and set like a rock;
and the
furniture matched it. It would be a long time before
the men outside would
be able to force the barrier. Though
that might only be postponing the
inevitable end.
…

But the Saint wasn’t thinking of that. He
could still laugh, in that soft and Saintly way, for all his pain and
weariness.
For he was beside Patricia again, and no harm could come
to
her while he still lived with strength in his right arm. And he
wanted her
to hear him laugh.

With that laugh, and a flourish with it, he
swept up the
fallen knife from the floor. It was not Anna, but for one
pur
pose, at least, it would serve him every whit as well. And with it, in
swift, clean strokes, he slashed away the ropes that held
Patricia.

“Oh, Simon, my darling. …”

Her voice again, and the faith and
unfaltering courage in it that he loved! … And the last rope fell away
before the
last slash of the knife, and she was free, and he gathered
her
up into his arms as if she had been a child. ,

“Oh, Pat, my sweet, they haven’t hurt you, have they?”

She shook her head.

“But if you hadn’t come …”

“If I’d come too late,” he said,
“there’d have been more dead men downstairs than there are even now. And
they
wouldn’t have cleared a penny off the score. But I’m here!”

“But you’re hurt, Simon!”

He knew it. He knew that in that hour of need
he was a
sorry champion. But she must not know it—not while there
remained
the least glimmer of hope—not while he could still
keep on keeping on… . And he laughed again, as gay and
as devil-may-care a laugh as had ever
passed his lips.

“It’s nothing,” he said cheerfully.
“Considering the damage
I’ve done to them, I should say it works out
at about two thousand per cent clear profit. And it’s going to be two hundred
thousand per cent before I go to bed to-night!”

13. How Simon Templar was besieged,

and
Patricia Holm cried
for help

Simon held her very close to him for a moment
that was worth
an eternity of battle; and then, very gently, he released
her.

“Stand by for a sec, old dear,” he
murmured, “while I im
prove the fortifications.”

The room was a narrow one, fortunately, and it
held a large
mass of furniture for its size. By dragging up the bed,
the
washstand, and another chest, it was just possible to extend the
barricade
in a tight jam across the room from the door to the
opposite wall, so that
nothing short of a battering-ram could
ever have forced the
door open. On the other hand, it was
impossible to extend the barricade
upwards in the same way
to the height of the door. The Saint had been
able to topple
the wardrobe over; but even his. strength, even if he had
been
fresh and uninjured, could not have shifted the thing to cover
the doorway
in an upright position. And if axes were
brought
…

But that again was a gloomy probability, which
it wouldn’t help anyone to worry about.

“They’ve got something to think about,
anyway,” said the
Saint, standing back to view the result of his labours.

He had the air of listening while he talked;
and when the
sentence
was finished he still listened.

The tumult outside had died down, and one voice
rose
clearly and stood alone out of the fading confusion.

Simon could not understand what it said, but
he had no doubt who it was that spoke. No one could have mistaken
that
high-pitched, arrogant tone of command.

“Hullo, Marius, my little lamb!” he
sang out breezily.
“How’s
life?”

Then Marius spoke in English.

“I should stand well away from the door,
Templar,” he re-
marked suavely. “I am about to shoot out
the lock.”

The Saint chuckled.

“It’s all the same to me, honeybunch,”
he answered, “but I
think you ought to know that one of your
bright boys is stuck
against the door, right over the lock, and I’m
afraid he can’t
move—and I can’t get him away without busting the
works.”

“That will be unlucky for him,” said
Marius callously; and
the man pinned against the door shrieked once,
horribly.

The Saint had Patricia away in a corner,
covering her with
his own body, when Marius fired. But, looking over his
shoul
der, he saw the man at the door bare his teeth dreadfully be
fore he
slopped limply forwards over the chest of drawers and
lay still. The Saint’s
nerves were of pure tungsten, but the
inhuman deliberateness of that murder
made his blood run
cold for an instant.

“Poor devil,” he muttered.

But, outside, Marius had barked an order, and
the assault
was being renewed.

Simon went to the window; but one look at the
bars told
him that they had been too well laid for any unaided human
effort to dislodge them. And there was nothing in the room
that might
have been used as a lever, except, perhaps, one of
the bedposts—to obtain which would have
meant disorganising
the whole of the
barricade.

The trap was complete.

And no help could be expected from outside,
unless
Roger … But the mere fact that Marius was there ruled
Roger
Conway out.

“How did you get here?” the girl was asking.

Simon told her the whole story, with his mind
on other
things. Perhaps because his attention was so divided, he
forgot
that her quick intelligence would not take long to seize upon
the
salient deduction; and he was almost startled when she
interrupted him.

“But if you left Roger with Marius——”

The Saint looked at her and nodded ruefully.

“Let’s face it,” he said. “Old
Roger’s dropped a stitch. But
he may still be knitting away somewhere.
Roger isn’t our star
pupil, but he has a useful knack of tumbling
out of trouble.
Unless Teal’s chipped in——
”

“Why Teal?”

Simon came back to earth. So much had happened
since he
last saw her that he had overlooked her ignorance of it.

He told her what she had missed of the
story—the adven
ture at Esher and the flight to Maidenhead. For the first
time
he fully understood all that was involved, and understood
also why
she had been taken to the house on the hill.

Quietly and casually, with flippancy and jest,
in his own
vivid way, he told the story as if it were nothing but a
trivial
incident. And a trivial incident it had become for him, in
fact: he
could no longer see the trees for the wood.

“So,” he said, “you’ll see that
Angel Face means business, and you’ll see why there’s so much excitement in
Bures to
night.”

And, as he spoke, he glanced involuntarily at
the lifeless figure sprawled over the chest of drawers, a silent testimony
to the
truth of his words; and the girl followed his gaze.

Then Simon met her eyes, and shrugged.

He made her sit down on the bed, and sat down
himself
beside her; he took a cigarette from his case and made her take
one also.

“It won’t help us to get worked up about
it,” he said lightly.
“It’s unfortunate about Sam
Stick-my-gizzard over there; but
the cheerful way to look at it is to think
that he makes one
less of the ungodly. Let’s be cheerful… . And while
we’re
being cheerful, tell me how you came into this mess from
which I’m
rescuing you at such great peril.”

“That was easy. I wasn’t expecting
anything of the sort, you
see. If you’d said more when you rang me up… . But I fell for it like a child. There was hardly anyone on the train, and
I had a
compartment to myself. We must have been near Read
ing when a man came
along the corridor and asked if I had a
match. I gave him
one, and he gave me a cigarette.
…
I
know I was a fool to
take it; but he looked a perfectly ordi
nary man, and I had
no reason to be suspicious——
”

Simon nodded.

“Until you woke up in a motor-car somewhere?”

“Yes… . Tied hand and foot, with a
bag over my head.
… We drove for a long time, and then I was brought in
here. That was only about an hour before you threw the
stones at my window… . Oh, Simon, I’m so glad you came!”

The Saint’s arm tightened about her shoulders.

“So am I,” he said.

He was looking at the door. Clearly, the
efficiency of his
barricade had been proved, for the attack had paused.
Then
Marius gave another order.

For a while there was only the murmur of
conversation;
and then that stopped with the sound of someone coming
heavily
down the corridor. And Simon Templar caught his
breath, guessing that
his worst forebodings were to be realised.

An instant later he was justified by a
rendering crash on the
door that was different from all the other
thundering that had
smashed upon it before.

“What is it?” asked Patricia.

“They’ve brought up the meat-axe,”
said the Saint carelessly;
but he did not feel careless at heart, for the
noise on the door
and the crack that had appeared in one panel told him
that
an axe was being employed that would not take very long
to damage even four inches of
seasoned oak.

The blow was repeated.

And again.

The edge of a blade showed through the door
like a thin
strip of silver at the fourth blow.

A matter of minutes, now, before a hole was
cut large
enough for the besiegers to fire into the room—with an
aim.
And when that was done
…

The Saint knew that the girl’s eyes were upon
him, and tried
desperately to postpone the question he knew she was fram
ing.

“Marius, little pal!”

There was a lull; and then Marius answered.

“Are you going to say,” sneered the
giant, “that you will
save us the trouble of breaking in the
door?”

“Oh no. I just wanted to know how you
were.”

“I have nothing to complain of, Templar.
And you?”
  
.