The Saint Meets His Match (13 page)

This was not quite what he
had expected—he had not credited Donnell with the provision of any such melodra
matic devices as concealed doors and secret passages. And
the look of things seemed to indicate that someone had
recently
passed that way in a hurry—and in such a hurry
that he had forgotten to disguise his retreat by closing
the cupboard doors behind him.

The Saint went quickly
through to the hidden stairway,
his gun in his hand. ‘

He listened there and heard nothing. And then
he went down into the darkness, and came at length upon the tun
nel which Weald had found.

He could see no one
ahead, and his steps quickened. Presently he came to the fork at which Weald
had hesi
tated. As he paused there irresolute, his eye fell on
some
thing that sparkled on the stone flags. He bent and
picked
it up. It was a small drop earring.

And he was putting it in
his pocket when he heard a muffled cry come faintly down the branch on his
right.
The Saint broke into a run.

Stephen Weald, with his
back to the door, and so intent upon the object of his madness that he could
notice noth
ing else, did not hear the Saint’s
entrance; and, indeed,
he knew nothing whatever
of the Saint’s arrival until two steely hands took him by the scruff of the
neck and liter
ally bounced him off his feet.

Then he turned and saw the
Saint, and his right hand
dived for his pocket. But
Simon was much too quick. His fist crashed up under Weald’s jaw and dropped him
in his
tracks.

He turned to find the girl
beside him.
“Did you hear what he said—that
he was Waldstein?”
The Saint nodded.

“I did,” he
said, and bent and seized Weald by the
collar
and jerked him half upright. Then he got his arms
under the man’s limp
body and hoisted him up in a lump,
as he
might have picked up a child. “Where are you going?”

The girl’s voice checked
him on his way to the door,
and Simon glanced back
over his shoulder.

“I’m going to collect
Donnell and fill the party,” he
said. “We
policemen have our jobs to hold down. D’you
mind?”

Then he went on his way. He
seemed totally uncon
scious of having performed any personal service for the
girl, and he utterly ignored the sequel to the
situation
into which a hackneyed
convention might pardonably
have lured any other man. That sublimely
bland indiffer
ence would have been as good
as a blow between the eyes
to anyone but
Jill Trelawney. He went on up the stairs
carrying Weald. He heard the
girl following behind him;
but she did not
speak, and Simon appeared to take no
notice
of her presence.

And thus he stepped
through the open cupboard, and
found Harry Donnell waiting
for him on the other side
of a Colt.

Simon stood quite still.

Then——

“It’s all right,
Donnell,” spoke the girl. “I’ve got him
covered.”

She was standing behind
the Saint, so that Simon and his burden practically hid her. Donnell could not
see the
gun with which she was supposed to be covering the
Saint, for her hand was behind Simon’s back, but Donnell
believed, and lowered his own gun.

The Saint felt only the
gentle and significant pressure
of the girl’s open hand in
the small of his back, and under
stood.

“Go on,” said
Jill Trelawny.

Simon advanced obediently.

The movement brought him
right up to Harry Don
ell, who stood with his
revolver lowered to the full length
of a loose arm.
There was only the width of Weald’s body
between them.

Simon relaxed his hold suddenly and dropped
Weald unceremoniously to the floor; and then he hit Donnell
accurately on the joint of the jaw.

Donnell went down, and the
Saint was on him in a
flash, wrenching the
revolver out of his hand.

And then, as the Saint
rose again, he laughed—a laugh of sheer delight.

“You know, Jill, the
only real trouble about this game
of ours is that it’s
too darned easy,” he said; and there
was
a new note in his voice which she had never heard be
fore,
that made her look at him in a strange puzzlement
and
surprise.
   

3

But still for a moment the
Saint seemed egotistically
oblivious of every angle
on the situation except his own.
The gun he had taken
covered Harry Donnell, who was
crawling dazedly up to his
feet; and the Saint had backed
away to the table and was
propping himself against it.
His cigarette case clicked
open, and a cigarette flicked
into his mouth; his lighter
flared, and a cloud of smoke
drifted up through the
gloom; he had his own private satisfaction. And Jill Trelawney said: “I
suppose I ought
“to thank you
…”

The Saint tilted his head.

“Why?” he
inquired blankly.

“You know why.”

Simon shrugged—an
elaborate shrug.

“I hope it will be a
lesson to you,” he said solemnly.
“You
must be more careful about the company you keep.
Oh,
and thanks for helping me to get Harry,” said the
Saint
incidentally. “What made you do that?”

She looked at him.

“I thought it might go
a little way towards settling
the debt.”

“So that we could
start fighting again—all square? …
Yes,
I should think we can call it quits.”

“I suppose you’d like
to take my gun?”

“Please.”

She was fumbling in her
bag, and the Saint was not
watching her. He was
smoking his cigarette and beaming
with an infuriating
smugness at Harry Donnell. About
two seconds ago, his own
weird intuition had raised an
eyelid and wrinkled a thin
hairline of clairvoyant light
across his brain; and he
knew exactly what was going to
happen. There was just one
little thing left that had to
happen before the adventure
took the twist that it had
always been destined to
take. And the Saint was not
bothered about it at all, for he had his
immoral views on
these matters of private
business. He had taken no further
notice
of Weald since he had dropped him to the floor.
He had not even troubled to search Weald’s pockets. And
when he
turned his head at the sound of the shot, he saw
the automatic half-out of Weald’s pocket, and the man
lying still, and turned again to smile at another
gun.

“Don’t move,”
said Jill Trelawney quietly, and the
Saint shook his
head.

“Jill, you really
mustn’t commit murder in the presence
of respectable
policemen. If it happens again——
”

“Never mind
that,” said the girl curtly.

“Oh, but I do,” said the Saint.
“May I smoke, or would
you prefer to
dance?”

The girl leaned against
the wall, one hand on her hip,
and the shining little
nickelled automatic in the other.

“Your nerves are
good, Simon Templar,” she remarked
coolly.

“I can say the same
for yours.”

She regarded him with a
certain grim amusement.

“I suppose,”
she said, “it wouldn’t be any use pleading
that
I shot Weald to save trouble? You can see that he
was
drawing when I fired. And saving the life of a valu
able
detective… . Would it be any use?”

“Not much, I’m
afraid,” answered the Saint, in the
same
tone. “You see, I’ve got a gun myself, and there
wasn’t
really any call for you to butt in. You just had to
say
‘Oi!’—and I would have done the work. Besides, Harry
would
just love to be a witness for the Crown—wouldn’t
you, Harry?”

He saw the venomous
darkening of Donnell’s eyes, and laughed.

“I’m sure you would,
Harry—being the four-flushing
skunk you are.”

He had not moved from the
table, and his right hand,
holding Donnell’s revolver,
still rested loosely on his
knee.

“You aren’t going to
be troublesome, Templar?” asked the girl gently, and Simon shrugged.

“You don’t get me,
Jill. Personally, I’m never trouble
some.” He held
her eyes. “Others may be,” he said.

The silence after he spoke was significant; and
the girl
listened on. And she also heard,
outside, the sound of
heavy hurrying
footsteps on the stairs.

“Excuse me,”
said the Saint.

He stepped quickly to the
door, and turned the key in
the lock. Then he picked
the table up and jammed it
into the defense for
ballast, with one edge under the
handle of the door and the
other slanting into the floor.

“That’ll hold Donnell’s boys for three or
four minutes,”
he said.

She smiled.

“While I slip out
through the tunnel?”

“While we slip out
through the tunnel.”

He saw the perplexity that
narrowed her eyes, the
hesitant parting of her
lips, but he saw these things only
in a sidelong
glimpse as he crossed to the side of Harry
Donnell.
And he saw the vindictive resignation that twist
ed
Donnell’s mouth, and laughed.

“Sorry to trouble you
again,” said the Saint.

His fist shot up like the
hoof of a plunging cayuse. But
this time the Saint had had
one essential fraction of a
second more in which to
meditate his manoeuvre—and
that made all the difference in the world. And
this time Donnell went down and stayed down in a peaceful sleep.

“Which is O. K.,” drawled the Saint,
after one profes
sional glance at the
sleeper.

He turned briskly.

“Are you all set for
the fade-away, Jill? Want to powder
your nose or
anything first?”

She was still staring at
him. The new atmosphere that
had crept into his
personality from the moment of his
first swipe at
Donnell’s jaw had grown up like the
strengthening light
of an incredible dawn, and the inter
vening interlude had merely provided
circumstances to
shape its course without
altering its temper in the least. And the gun that she had been levelling at
him half the
time had made no
difference at all.

“Aren’t you going to
try to arrest me?” she asked, with a faint rasp of contempt laid like the
thinnest veneer on
the bewildering beginnings of preposterous understand
ing that lay beneath.

And Simon Templar smiled
at her.

“Arrest you for
ferreting out and bumping off the
bloke I’ve been
wanting to get at myself for years? Jill,
darling,
you have some odd ideas about me! … But
there
really is a posse around this time—they’re waiting at
the
other end of that there rat’s hole, with the assistant
commissioner
himself in command, and you wouldn’t
have a hope in hell of getting through
alone. D’you mind
if I take over the
artillery a moment?”

He detached the automatic
from her unresisting hand,
dropped it into his
pocket, and swept her smoothly
through the open door of
the dummy cupboard. It was
all done so calmly and
quietly, with such an effortless ease of mastery, that all the strength seemed
to ebb out
of her. It was impossible to resist or
even question him:
she suffered herself to be steered down the stairs without
a word.

“On the other
hand,” said the Saint, as if there had
been
no interruption between that remark and the con
clusion of his last
speech, “you’ll have to consider your
self
temporarily under arrest, otherwise there might be a
spot of trouble which we shouldn’t be in a position
to
deal with effectively.”