The Saint Meets His Match (25 page)

“So you’ve got
loose!”

“I have so,”
said the Saint.

He had scrambled up onto one knee when
Essenden’s
rush bowled him over again; and
once more they were
entangled in a mad
battle.

If the Saint had ever fought with the frenzy of
despair, this was that time. It was his second chance. One chance
he had been given, and he had lost out on it. Now
he
was given the second chance which
he had no right to
ask; and if he threw that away, he could not expect
an
other. This time he had to win.

And he heard Jill Trelawney
speak.

“Oh, Simon! Good
man!”

He could not spare the
breath to answer. The bunch
of keys was in his pocket
now; and with Essenden out
of the way, he could
release the girl in a moment. But
to dispose of
Essenden …

The man had the strength
of ten, while the Saint’s
strength had already been
cut down by half by the vari
ous punishings he had
received. The strongest part of the Saint was his fingers, and with these he
strove to take up
again his first grip. He reached up for Essenden’s throat,
found it, circled the windpipe, tightened his hold crushingly
. Essenden’s face went red. His eyes dilated enor
mously, and the air wheezed painfully into his
starved
lungs; but he fought on like
an animal at bay.

Simon dropped his chin on
his chest and tried with
his arms to ward off or at
least break the force of the
blows that Essenden rained
upon him. But when he was
guarding his face,
Essenden drove his fist into his stomach.
In
the ordinary way, he would have made nothing of
the
blow, but at that moment he was weakened and
unprepared
for it. He gasped and rolled over, fighting
down
a flood of nausea that threatened to choke him,
keeping
his stranglehold grimly.

It so happened that the
stone floor jutted up imme
diately under his arm.

It caught him in the
elbow, in such a way that a
twinge of numbing agony
shot up his arm like an electric
shock. The fingers of his
right hand relaxed, and with
a snarl of exultation, Essenden tore both his
hands away
and breathed again.

Hardly knowing what he did, the Saint wrenched
one
arm free and lashed out blindly.

He felt the punch jar a
thinly covered bone, and
Essenden sagged sideways,
suddenly limp.

Simon dragged himself to
his feet and limped over
towards Jill, fumbling in
his pocket.

The stream beside the wall
had been four feet wide
when he had first seen
it. Now it was twice that width, and
there was a
turbulent flurry in its dark waters.

Essenden must have
mistaken the time of the tide. And
it rose with an
appalling speed. While the Saint fought
with
the lock that held Jill’s chains, he felt the cold water creeping up his legs;
and when the chains fell away it was up to his knees. The stream was now a
racing river as many yards wide as it had once been feet,
and one edge of it was still spreading over the floor of
the cave.

And Essenden was getting up
again.

“Look out!” cried
the girl.

Simon turned; and as he did
so his bare foot fell on
a familiar hardness.

Even so, it was a
miscalculation on his part to try to
pick up the gun.

He got it into his hand;
but Essenden kicked his
wrist, and the automatic
fell into the stream again. Essen
den plunged
frantically; and the Saint, with only one
sound
leg to stand on, was sent staggering back against
the
wall. And by some miracle Essenden’s hand found
the
gun without a second’s groping.

With the face of a fiend,
Essenden took deliberate
aim. And the Saint,
flattened against the wall, looked
death in the eyes.

The second chance—thrown
away.

Of course, he ought to have
settled Essenden thorough
ly, when he had the
advantage, instead of relying on a
lasting effect from
the lucky blow he had landed on the
man’s jaw.

The strengthening current
an inch above the Saint’s
knees now, seemed to be
trying to pluck his feet from under him and whirl him away. That underground
tide
must grow in a few more minutes into something with
the power and ferocity of a maelstrom. And the Saint
would be shot, and the tide would carry him away with
it into the unfathomed depths from which it rose. With
out a trace… . And that would be the end… .

With a queer feeling of
carelessness, Simon Templar gathered his muscles for the shock of the bullet.

Then he saw Jill Trelawney
moving.

She was struggling towards
Essenden; and in another
step her movement would
bring her into the line of fire.

With a cry, the Saint
hurled himself forward.

He fell. It was impossible
to hurl oneself effectively
through that swelling
torrent. As
he went down, he heard
the
report of Essenden’s shot go booming and reechoing
through
the cave.

Then his hand closed upon
an ankle.

He jerked, with all his
force; and as he fought up
. through the flood he saw
Essenden spinning into the
water.

One hand especially he
saw—a hand holding a gun,
waving wildly as Essenden
fell.

In shallower water, Simon
caught the hand and the
gun, and twisted the gun
right round so that it aimed
into Essenden’s own body.

“Now shoot!”
gasped the Saint.

Essenden squinted at him.

“You’re another
meddler,” said Essenden, and tight
ened
his finger on the trigger.

Chapter IX

HOW SIMON TEMPLAR KISSED JILL TRE
LAWNEY,

AND MR. TEAL WAS RUDE TO
MR. CULLIS

E
SSENDEN
was gone. As his body went limp, the rising
mill-race
fury of the stream whipped him up and swept
him
away into the dark depths of the cave, further than
the
ineffectual light at the entrance could penetrate.

The water was coming up
higher. It was thigh-deep
now, and against its
tearing speed it was difficult to
stand upright. In
fact, the Saint, with one useless leg,
would
probably never have escaped if it had not been
for
Jill Trelawney. When one would have thought that
she
needed all her own reserve of strength to escape her
self,
she yet managed to find enough strength to spare
to
help the Saint along beside her. Stumbling and splashing desperately, often on
the verge of falling where one
false step would have
meant certain death, they reached
the end of the
passage by which they had come.

There they found some sort
of haven, with calmer
waters lapping up to their
waists. If they had been in the full force of the stream at that point they
could
scarcely have got out alive. As it was, it was hard
enough
to scale the precipitous slope at the end of the
passage.
Somehow they dragged themselves up, and
lay gasping
on the dry stone above the level of the water.

Minutes later, Jill pulled
herself to her feet.

“Feeling better?”
she asked.

“Miles,” said
the Saint.

He pulled himself up after
her; and they covered the
rest of the passage
together, Simon leaning some of his
weight on an arm
placed round her shoulders.

When they had reached the
wine cellar, the girl locked
the door through which they
had come and carefully
replaced the key on its
nail.

The Saint’s shoes and
socks had been swept away
by the tide in the cave.
He limped into the library, and
there, after comparing the
size of his feet with those of
the four tough guys, proceeded, without
apology, to re
move the footwear of Flash
Arne and put it upon himself.
The
pattern of the socks offended his aesthetic princi
ples, and he would have preferred to ask for shoes
of a
less violently lemon colour, but
a beggar could not be
a chooser.

More or less comfortably
shod, he stood up again.

“You boys,” he
said, “may stay here as long as you like.
Make yourselves at
home, and spend your spare time
thinking out
the story you’re going to tell when the servants come back and find you
here.”

The replies he received
have no place in a highly
moral and uplifting story
like this.

He went out with Jill, and
limped down the drive
beside her.

“The water’s got into
my watch and stopped it,” he said, “but we ought to be just about on
time.”

They were on time. As they
reached the lodge gates the
lights of a car came up
the road.

Jill Trelawney had sent
the chauffeur off to buy a
bottle of brandy in a neighbouring village; and
the prob
able time he would take on the
errand—with necessary
refreshment for
himself
en route—
had been carefully calculated.

“And that
bottle,” said the Saint, “may easily turn
out
to be one of the greatest inspirations either of us has
ever had—if you feel anything like as cold as I do.”

In the darkness, their drenched and draggled
condition
could escape notice. They climbed
into the car, and
Simon took
delivery of the Courvoisier and directed the
chauffeur.

“And so—the tumult
and the shouting dies, the sinners
and the Saints
depart.”

The cork of the bottle
popped under his expert manip
ulation, and the luxurious
fittings of the car provided
glasses. The liquor gurgled
out in the dimness.

“An inferior poison, as compared to beer,
but perhaps
more warming,” he said.

They drank gratefully, and
felt the cold recede from
the radiant trickle of
Three Star. And then the Saint
gave her a cigarette and
lighted one for himself.

“Where did you tell
the chauffeur to drive?” she asked.

“Reading. We can go
on to London from there in the
morning: I don’t want too
many people to know all our
movements. Teal found my
Sloane Street address quickly
enough, but it was never
my best hidey-hole. I’ve got another little place in Chelsea that I’ll swear
he’s never
even dreamed about. You can make that your home, and
I’ll go back to Upper Berkeley Mews quite openly,
just to annoy Claud Eustace. I might even ring him up and
ask him to toddle over and chew some gum with
me.”

He could see her face in
the faint glow as she drew at
her cigarette.

“I suppose the Saints
have to depart?” she said.

He struck a match to see
her better, and his eyebrows
went up with the trickle
of smoke exhaled.

“Why?”

She hesitated. Then—

“I thought you meant
you were cutting out.”

“Jill, you should know
me better than that!”

“But I never knew that this kind of thing
was in your
line.”

“The righting of injustice, the strafing
of the ungodly,
and the succouring of a damsel
in distress? Oh, Jill! … Did you never hear of Galahad?”

“Ye-es.”

“My stage name,”
said the Saint.

The match went out, and he leaned back on the
cush
ions. His strength was sweeping back
into him like a
steady stream. He
had already made certain that his ankle
was not broken, and that was all
that had really worried
him. In a couple of
days he would be prancing around
like
a puppy off the leash. He was almost satisfied.