The Saint Meets the Tiger (30 page)

“Melodrama,” replied Bittle, “is a thing for which I have an instinctive loathing. Yet, in a situation such as this, it is very hard to avoid overstepping the bounds of banality. However, I will try to be as precise and to the point as possible.” He fixed his malignant gaze on the Saint. “This man, Templar, whom you see, has elected to interfere in matters which do not concern him. By a succession of miracles, he has so far managed to avoid the various arrangements which we have made for disposing of him; but now, on the open sea, I hardly think he can escape. He has put us to great inconvenience, and I don’t think anyone here has any cause to bear him any good will. While he lives, no one here is safe. I believe I am merely the spokesman of everyone present when I say that he must die.”

He looked from face to face, and there was a mutter of assent. He looked at the Saint again.

“I indorse that verdict,” he said.

“Blatherskite and brickdust!” said the Saint disparagingly.

Bittle continued:

“Then there is this man—Orace. He is also a man against whom some of you will bear a personal grudge. In any case, he is in Templar’s confidence, and therefore I say that he too must die,”

“Pure banana oil,” jeered the Saint.

“Finally,” said Bittle, “there is the girl. I propose to marry her myself, and Maggs will conduct the service as soon as the sentence has been carried out upon Templar and Orace.” He picked up a revolver from the table and waved it meaningly. “If there is anyone here—Maggs included—who objects to that, he can speak now.”

Nobody moved.

“Scat!” remarked the Saint.

“Is that all the protest even our redoubtable Mr. Templar can make?” Bittle sneered. “I’m disappointed—you’ve talked so much about what you were going to do to all of us that I was expecting something interesting.”

Simon yawned.

“Before I die,” he said, “may I tell you my celebrated joke about a man called Carn? I wonder if you’ve heard it before? There was once a physician called Carn, but nobody cared worth a dam—if a man said ‘By heck! That bloke might be a ‘tec!’ the others would simply say ‘Garn!” And yet it happens to be true. Isn’t it odd?”

“Patricia”—Bittle rolled the name out with rel-ish—“has already told me that story. If it is any comfort to you, I can assure you that it will only make me more careful of her health. The same ultimatum which brought you into my power will, I think, discourage Carn. It will certainly be an awkward dilemma for him, but I imagine that his humanity will triumph over his sense of duty.”

“If that is so,” said Simon slowly, “I think he will be sure to give the order to fire—and blow this ship and everyone on board to smithereens.”

Bittle shrugged, and signed to one of the men whom Orace had floored.

“We will start with the servant,” he said.

“Yah!” gibed Orace. “Yer a lotter thunderin’ ‘eroes, you are! Undo me ‘ands, an’ cummaht on the deck, any sixeryer, an’ I’ll showyer wotter rough-‘ouse feels like!”

Beads of perspiration broke out on the man’s face as he slowly raised the revolver.

“Sorlright, sir,” Orace ground out. “Don’t think I care a damn fer wot ennyer these bleedin’ barstids do…. Shoot, yer maggot! Wotcha skeered of? ‘Fraid I’ll bite yer?… Git on wiv it, an’ be blarsted to yer!”

“Wait!”

The Saint’s mildest voice scarcely masked the whiplash crack of his command, and the man lowered his gun. Bittle turned to him.

“Have you, after all, something to say before the sentence is carried out?” he inquired ironically. “Perhaps you would like to go down on your knees and beg me to spare you? Your prayers will not move me, but the spectacle of Mr. Templar grovelling at my feet would entertain me vastly…”

“Not this journey,” said the Saint.

Already he had worked the cigarette case from his pocket and cut through the cords which had bound his hands, though it had been a long and difficult feat. Now he had slid forward in the chair and tucked his legs well back, and he was patiently sawing away at the ropes which pinioned his ankles.

“You see,” said the Saint, in the same leisured tone, “we are all, as you recently observed, liable to make our mistakes, and you have made three very big ones. You must understand, my seraph, that your own loathing for melodrama is only equalled by my love for it, and I think I can say that I staged this little conversazione simply for my own diversion. It seemed to me that this adventure ought to finish off in a worthily dramatic manner, and if all goes well you’ll have to bear the agony of watching enough melodrama concentrated into the next few minutes to fill a book. Things, from approximately now onward, will go with a kick strong enough to set the Lyceum gasping. How does that appeal to you, beloved?”

“I’ll tell you when I hear,” said Bittle brusquely, but the Saint declined to be hurried.

“This speechifying,” he remarked, “will now come from the principal shareholder, so please don’t fluster me. Sit down and listen—you’ve had your turn…. Well, here we all are, just like a happy family, and exactly where I wanted you all. I grant you I took a big risk, but I had to do it to get the scene nicely set and the audience all worked up and palpitating in their pews. Also, it happened to be necessary to pass a little time before the moment was ripe for trotting out the big thrill. Now, if you’re ready, I’ll send up the first balloon.” The Saint paused, and smiled from Bloem to Bittle. “Where is Harry the Duke?”

If he had detonated a charge of thermite under their feet he could not have produced a greater sensation. The men looked from one to another, suspicion and rage and fear chasing over their faces deliriously. For a space there was an electric silence, while the Saint leaned back in his chair, smiling beatifically, and felt the last strand of rope break away from his ankles.

Then the storm broke loose. Bittle reached forward and pawed at Bloem’s shoulder frenziedly.

“What’s happened to Harry? he snarled.

Bloem jumped to his feet and struck down Bittle’s hand.

“Leave me alone!” Bloem’s nerves were raw and jagged. “It isn’t my fault—you never asked meť and you’ve been too busy talking yourself for me to tell you.” He glared round at the Saint. “That meddling puppy got me—I was just taking Harry some food—the door was open, and he got me. I know he’d found Harry!”

Bittle sprang at the Boer like a wild beast, his face contorted with demoniac fury, and Bloem reeled back from a vicious blow. In an instant Bit-tie had grabbed a couple of revolvers, and was holding them threateningly in his quivering hands, and Bloem cowered sullenly back from the flaming passion that blazed in Bittle’s eyes. Bittle, in that towering paroxysm, would have murdered the other where he stood, given the slightest provocation, and the Boer knew it.

“Search the ship!” Bittle shrilled. ‘Tou-Vfl of you! Get out and search the ship!”

“Why bother?” asked the Saint in his silkiest manner. “If you want to find Harry the Duke, my little ones, you’ll have to go all the way back to Baycombe!”

Bittle swung round.

“Meaning?” he prompted dangerously.

“Meaning that when I’d dented old Bloem’s cranium, I went into the cabin and found Harry the Duke, alias Agatha Girton,” said Simon. “We had quite a long chat. He told me how Agatha died years and years ago, at Hyeres, and Harry took her place. The Tiger found him out—and that was another bad bloomer. You’d have thought any sane man would have been satisfied with a cool million; but no, the Tiger was so greedy he had to blackmail Harry for Miss Holm’s money, and that made Harry sore. Harry’s a dangerous man when he’s sore, and he tried to kill the Tiger. Then the Tiger saw what a mug he’d been, and decided to take Harry off on the cruise and dump him over the side with a couple of firebars spliced to his feet, which is a very effective way of killing a man and has the advantage that it leaves no incriminating corpses about. Harry was able to tell me quite a lot of interesting things about Tigers and Tiger Cubs. Then I told him a few things he didn’t know, and after that we shook hands—he was really a sportsman, because he did try to put the kibosh on your hanky-panky with Miss Holm, whom he was rather fond of—and I let him slip over the side and swim back to Baycombe on condition he wrote an anonymous letter to Carn telling him all those things about Tigers and Tiger Cubs which we’d discussed.” The Saint looked almost apologetic. “And, therefore, one and only—thank God—Bit-tie, I can assure you that the police will come aboard with the pilot if you so much as show the tip of your bowsprit outside Cape Town harbour, and the Mounted will be camped all round T.T. Deeps in case you manage to sneak in by the back way. Rather upsetting, isn’t it?”

“You, at least, will not laugh much longer,” said Bittle, and put the muzzle of one of his revolvers in the Saint’s face.

“Half a sec.!” Simon’s voice ripped out like a gunshot, and Bittle hesitated with his finger tightening on the trigger. “While I’m being so communicative, you might as well hear the rest of the yarn—it may help you, though I doubt it. Let me tell you your second mistake. I’ve got another stiff one ready to shoot at you! This is mostly Orace’s story, but he won’t mind my cribbing it. Orace, you know, hasn’t been wasting his time. Orace went below and laid out your engineer and put on his clothes. You spoke to him yourself, and never guessed—I’ll bet that makes you hop! Then I arrived, and also mistook Orace for the genuine article, and I’d nearly killed him before I found out my error. Orace and I knew enough about motors to obey the telegraph, and we were the ones took this bateau out for you. After we’d finished I made Orace take off the overalls, so that you wouldn’t suspect anything; but the real engineer is still locked up below, and he must be pretty cramped and peevish by this time! But that’s not the whole yarn—not by a mile!”

Bittle had lowered his gun as the Saint talked on, for it was dawning upon Bittle that the Saint had an even bigger trump card yet to play. Prince of bluffers though the Saint might be, Bittle could not believe that he could bluff for his life in such a casual manner. The Saint smiled all the time, and he was smiling in such a way as almost to invite the others to doubt his word, yet every now and then he handed them out one perfect gem of verifiable fact to shatter their illusions and force them back as to credulity. He used his facts as pegs on which to hang the decorations with which his egotism compelled him to embellish the tale, but for all that those facts stuck out as stark and uncontrovertible as a forest of spears. And all the time Bittle could sense that the Saint, in his mild and lingering way, was working up to an even more devastating bombshell. What that bombshell was going to be Bittle could not divine, but the conviction was borne in upon him that a mine of some sort was going to be exploded somewhere in his vicinity. And therefore he waited for the Saint to have his say, for he was hoping to minimize his danger by letting the Saint forearm him against it.

Simon was gazing through a porthole at the dark horizon, and something that he saw there seemed to please him. His smile trembled on the verge of laughter, as at some secret jest, and when he went on there was a trace of excitement creeping into his voice.

“Orace and I,” said the Saint, “have brains, and Orace used to be a Sergeant of Marines, so he was able to provide the raw material for our ingenuity to work on. Before we started the picnic, we put your bilge pump out of action and opened up one of the scuttles in the keel. My nautical knowledge is very scanty, and I’m not sure if that’s the way a sailor would describe the gadgets, but I expect Maggie will tell you what I mean. Anyway, a lot of water started pouring in, and we legged it out of the way without waiting to see what happened next. Still, I notice that we seem to have lost a lot of speed, and unless my eyes are failing I should say that we had developed what I understand is called a list to starboard, so I suppose the old tub really is going down. Check me up if I’m wrong….”

Maggs started up, and the others looked wildly about them. The Saint had spoken the truth. The list had developed very slowly at first, so that no one had noticed it in their absorption in more tempestuous things, but now that the Saint had called their attention to it the fact was indisputable.

Suddenly there was a stampede for the door.

Bittle leaped forward, raving like a maniac, and quelled the panic. He fought in between the ter-. rified mob and the door, and held them off at revolver point. Then he himself opened the door and looked out.

The ship had lost way considerably, and was now heeling over so much that it was difficult to walk on the sloping decks.

Bloem was swaying drunkenly toward the door.

“The gold!” he blubbered. “The gold! … It’ll sink! … Bittle, make them get the gold into the boats!”

“You’re a fool!”

Bittle pushed the man back—he was easily the calmest of them all. His rage had simmered down, now, out of visibility, but it gleamed behind his small pale blue eyes like the molten lava which oozes down the sides of a volcano when the eruption has died down. Both his guns went up.

“You beat me in the end. Templar!” he shouted. “But I can see that you never enjoy it.” Like one possessed, he kicked aside a man who stood in his line of fire. “Laugh now, Templar!” he babbled. “It’s your last laugh!”?

And the Saint chuckled, throwing back his head joyously, for he had seen the final shock which he had allowed for dovetail in according to schedule.

“Put up your hands, Bittle!”

The voice cracked into the room like a bared sabre.

Bittle turned and saw the man who had appeared in the doorway, and his revolvers thudded to the carpet from his nerveless fingers.

He shrank away into the farthest corner, and his face had gone gray and horrible.

Algy took a step into the room, a heavy automatic in each hand, and the men retreated before him. He swept them with hard, merciless eyes.

“I think you all know me,” said Mr. Lomas-Coper, in the same metallic voice,

He looked at the girl, and read bewilderment in her face.

“I am the Tiger,” said Algy.

Chapter XX

THE LAST LAUGH

“Things have gone very badly,” said the Tiger. “As Bittle said, Mr. Templar, you have beaten us. I bear you no malice. Perhaps it was ordained that it should end like this. You need not be afraid that I shall kill you, as that man would have done—that would be profitless. I might still have won, if I had had a fair chance, but the men I trusted double-crossed me. Now the ship is going down, and all my work is lost. I can fight no more. Fate has been against me from the beginning, and I am very tired.”