The Saint Closes the Case

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