The Saint Closes the Case

He was wasting no more time looking for a way through the hedge. His first survey had already shown that it was planted and trained as an effective palisade. But there was always the gate.

On the road. A perfectly ordinary gate.

That, of course, was the way they would expect him to come.

Pity to disappoint them!

He hardly spared the gate a glance. It was probably elec­trified. It was almost certainly wired with alarms. And it was covered by a rifleman somewhere, for a fiver. But it remained the only visible way in.

The Saint took a short run and leapt it cleanly.

Beyond was the gravel of the drive, but he only touched that with one foot. As he landed on that one foot, he squirmed aside and leapt again—to the silent footing of the lawn and the cov­ering shadow of a convenient shrub. He stooped there, thumb­ing back the safety-catch of the automatic he had drawn, and wondering why no one had fired at him.

Then wondering went by the board; for he heard, through the silence, faintly, very far off, but unmistakable, the rising and falling drone of a powerful car. And he had barely attuned his hearing to that sound when another sound slashed through it like a sabrecut—the scream of a girl in terror.

He knew it wasn't the real thing. Hadn't he directed it him­self? Didn't he know that Patricia Holm wasn't the kind that screamed? Of course. . . . But that made no difference to the effect that the sound had upon him. It struck deep-rooted chords of fierce protectiveness, violently reminding him that the cause for the scream might still be there, even if Pat would never have released it without his prompting. It froze some­thing in him as a drench of icy water might have done; and, again as a drench of icy water might have done, it braced and stung and savaged something else into a fury of reaction, some­thing primitive and homicidal and ruthless, something out of an age that had nothing to do with such clothes as he wore, or such weapons as he carried, or such a fortress as lay before , his storming.

The Saint went mad.

There was neither sanity nor laughter in the way he covered the stretch of lawn that separated him from the house and the lighted ground-floor window which he had marked down as his objective directly he had cleared the gate. He was even unable to feel astonished that no shots spat at him out of the darkness, or to feel that the silence might forebode a trap. For Simon Templar had seen red.

Eight men, Patricia's note had told him, were waiting to oppose his entrance. . . . Well, let 'em all come. The more the bloodier. . . .

He who had always been the laughing cavalier, the man who would always exchange a joke as he exchanged a blow, who never fought but he smiled, nor greeted peril without a song in his heart, was certainly not laughing at all.

He went through that window as surely no man ever went through a window before, except in a film studio. He went through it in one flying leap, with his right shoulder braced to smash through the flimsy obstacle of the glass, and his left arm raised to shield his face from the splinters.

That mad rush took him into the room without a pause, to land on the floor inside with a jolt, stumbling for an instant, which gave the six men who were playing cards around the table time to scramble to their feet.

Six of them—meaning that the other two were probably dealing with the scream. It ought to have been possible to dis­tract more of their attention than that; but since it had so fallen out. . . .

And where, anyway, were the defences that he should have to break through? As far as that window, he had an easy course to cover. And these men had none of the air of men prepared to be attacked.

These thoughts flashed through the Saint's mind in the split second it took him to recover his balance; and then he was concerned with further questions.

The gun was ready in his hand; and two who were swift to draw against him were not swift enough, and died in their tracks before the captured automatic jammed and gave the other four their chance.

Never before had the Saint attacked with such a fire of mur­derous hatred; for the cry from the upper room had not been repeated, and that could only mean that it had been forcibly stifled—somehow. And the thought of Patricia fighting her fight alone upstairs, as she would have to go on fighting alone unless Simon Templar won his own fight against all the odds. . . . The first hint of a smile came to his lips when the first man fell; and when the gun froze useless in his hand he looked at it and heard someone laugh, and recognised the voice as his own.

Then Anna flicked from her sheath and whistled across half the room like a streak of living light, to bite deep of the third man's throat.

If the Saint had thought, perhaps he would never have let Anna go, since she could only have been thrown once against the many times she could have stabbed. But he had not thought. He had only one idea, clear and bright above the swirl of red, murderous mist that rimmed his vision, and that was to work the most deadly havoc he could in the shortest possible space of time.

And the first man he met with his bare hands was cata­pulted back against the wall by a straight left that packed all the fiendish power of a sledge-hammer gone mad, a blow that shattered teeth in their sockets and smithereened a jawbone as if it had been made of glass.

And then the Saint laughed again—but this time he knew that he did it The first outlet of his blind fury, the first taste of blood, that first primevally ferocious satisfaction in the battering contact of flesh- and bone, - had cleared his eyes and steadied down his nerves to their old fighting coolness.

'Come again, my beautifuls,' he drawled breathlessly, and there was something more Saintly in the laugh in his voice, but his eyes were still as cold and bleak as two chips of blue ice. . . . 'Come again!'

The remaining two came at him together.

Simon Templar would not have cared if they had been twenty-two. He was warmed up now, and through the glacial implacability of his purpose was creeping back some of the heroic mirth and magnificence that rarely forsook him for long.

'Come again!'

They came abreast; but Simon, with one lightning spring sideways, made the formation tandem. The man who was left nearest swung round and lashed out a mule-kick of a punch at the Saint's mocking smile; but the Saint swerved a matter of a mere three inches, and the blow whipped harmlessly past his ear. Then, with another low laugh of triumph, Simon pivoted on his toes, his whole body seeming to uncoil in one smooth spasm of effort, and flashed in an uppercut that snapped the man's head back as if it had been struck by a pneumatic riveter, and dropped him like a poleaxed steer.

Then the Saint turned to meet the second man's attack; and at the same moment the door burst open and flopped the odds back again from evens to two to one against.

In theory. But actually this new arrival was fresh life to the Saint. For this man must have been one of those who had been busy suppressing the scream, who had laid his hands on Patricia. . . . And against him and his fellow the Saint had a personal feud. . . .

As Simon saw him come, the chips of blue ice under Simon's straight-lined brows glinted with an unholy light.

'Where have you been all my life, sonny boy?' breathed the Saint's caressing undertone. 'Why haven't you come down before—so that I could knock your miscarriage of a face through the back of your monstrosity of a neck?'

He wove in towards the two in a slight crouch, on his toes, his fists stirring gently. And from the limit of his reach he snaked in a long, swerving left that only a champion could have guarded; and it split the man's nose neatly, for the Saint was only aiding to hurt—sufficiently—before he finished off the job.

And he should have won the fight on his head, according to plan, from that point onwards. Lithe, strong as a horse, swift as a rapier, schooled in the toughest schools of the fight­ing game ever since the day when he first learned to put up his hands, and always in perfect training, the Saint would never have hesitated to take on any two ordinary men. And in the mood in which they found him that night he was super­man.

But he had forgotten his wound.

The nearest man was swinging a wild right at him—the kind of blow for which any trained, cool-headed boxer has a supreme contempt. And contemptuously, almost lazily, and certainly without thinking at all about a guard which approxi­mated to a habit, Simon put up his shoulder.

The impact should have been nothing to a bunched pad of healthy muscle; but the Saint had forgotten. And it shot a tear­ing twinge of agony through him which seemed to find out every nerve in his system.