The Saint Closes the Case

Suddenly he felt very sick; and for a second he could see nothing through the haze which whirled over his eyes.

In that second's blindness he took a high-explosive left cross to the side of the jaw from the man with the split nose.

Simon reeled, crumpling, against the wall.

For some reason, perhaps because they could not both con­veniently reach him at once, the two men held back for a moment instead of charging in at once to finish him off. And for that moment's grace the Saint sagged where he leaned, titanically scourging numbed and tortured muscles to obey his will, wrestling with a brain that seemed to have gone to sleep.

And through the singing of a thousand thrumming dyna­mos in his head, he heard again the song of the Hirondel: 'Patricia! . . . Patricia! ...'

Suddenly he realised how much he had been exhausted by loss of blood. The first excitement, the first thrill and rapture of the fight, had masked his own weakness from him; but now he felt it all at once, in the dreadful slowness of his recovery from a punch on the jaw. And the blow he had taken on the shoulder had re-opened his wound. He could feel the blood coursing down his back in a warm stream. Only his will seemed left to him, bright and clear and aloof in the paralysing darkness, a thing with the terrible power of a cornered giant, fighting as it had never fought before.

And then, through the mists that doped his senses, he heard what all the time he had dreaded to hear—the sound of a car slowing up outside.

Marius.

Through the Saint's mind flashed again, like a long, shining spear, the brave, reckless, vain-glorious words that he had spoken, oh, infinite ages ago: 'Let 'em all come. . . .'

And perhaps that recollection, perhaps anything else, perhaps the indomitable struggle of his fighting will, snapped the slender fetters of weary dizziness that bound him, so that he felt a little life stealing back into his limbs.

As the two men stepped in to end it, the Saint held up one hand in a gesture that could not be denied.

'Your master is here,' he said. 'Perhaps you'd better wait till he's seen me.'

They stopped, listening, for their hearing would have had to be keen indeed to match the Saint's; and for Simon that extra second's breadier was the difference between life and death.

He gathered himself, with a silent prayer, for the mad gamble. Then he launched himself off the wall like a stone from a sling, and in one desperate rush he had passed between them.

They awoke too late; and he was at the door.

On the stairs he doubled his lead.

At the top of the stairs a corridor faced him, with doors on either side; but he would have had no excuse for hesitation, for, as he set foot in the corridor, the eighth man looked out of a door halfway along it.

The eighth man, seeing the Saint, tried to close the door again in his face; but he was too slow, or the Saint was too fast. The Saint fell on the door like a tiger, and it was the man inside who had it slammed in his face— literally slammed in his face, so that he was flung back across the room as helplessly as a scrap of thistledown might have been flung before a cyclone. And the Saint followed him in and turned the key in the lock.

One glance round the room the Saint took, and it showed him the eighth man coming off the floor with a mixture of rage and fear in his eyes, and Patricia bound to the bed by wrists and ankles.

Then, as the leader of the pursuit crashed against the door the Saint whipped round again like a whirlwind, and, with one terrific heave, hurled a huge chest of drawers across the room from its place on the wall.

It stopped short of the door by a couple of feet; and, as Simon sprang to send it the rest of the way, the eighth man intercepted him with a knife.

The Saint caught his wrist, Wrenched . . . and the man cried out with pain and dropped the knife.

He was strong above the average, but he could not stand for a moment against the Saint's desperation. Simon took him about the waist and threw him bodily against the door, knocking most of the breath out of him. And before the man could move again, the Saint had pinned him where he stood with the whole unwieldy bulk of the chest of drawers. A moment later the massive wardrobe followed, toppled over to reinforce the barricade, and the man was held there, fluttering feebly, like an insect nailed to a board.

The Saint heard the cursing and thundering beyond the door, and laughed softly, blessing the age of the house. That door was of solid oak, four inches thick, and set like a rock; and the furniture matched it. It would be a long time before the men outside would be able to force the barrier. Though that might only be postponing the inevitable end. ...

But the Saint wasn't thinking of that. He could still laugh, in that soft and Saintly way, for all his pain and weariness. For he was beside Patricia again, and no harm could come to her while he still lived with strength in his right arm. And he wanted her to hear him laugh.

With that laugh, and a flourish with it, he swept up the fallen knife from the floor. It was not Anna, but for one pur­pose, at least, it would serve him every whit as well. And with it, in swift, clean strokes, he slashed away the ropes that held Patricia.

'Oh, Simon, my darling. ...'

Her voice again, and the faith and unfaltering courage in it that he loved! . . . And the last rope fell away before the last slash of the knife, and she was free, and he gathered her up into his arms as if she had been a child. ,

'Oh, Pat, my sweet, they haven't hurt you, have they?'

She shook her head.

'But if you hadn't come . . .'

'If I'd come too late,' he said, 'there'd have been more dead men downstairs than there are even now. And they wouldn't have cleared a penny off the score. But I'm here!'

'But you're hurt, Simon!'

He knew it. He knew that in that hour of need he was a sorry champion. But she must not know it—not while there remained the least glimmer of hope—not while he could still keep on keeping on. . . . And he laughed again, as gay and as devil-may-care a laugh as had ever passed his lips.

'It's nothing,' he said cheerfully. 'Considering the damage I've done to them, I should say it works out at about two thou­sand per cent clear profit. And it's going to be two hundred thousand per cent before I go to bed to-night!'

13. How Simon Templar was besieged, and Patricia Holm cried for help

Simon held her very close to him for a moment that was worth an eternity of battle; and then, very gently, he released her.

'Stand by for a sec, old dear,' he murmured, 'while I im­prove the fortifications.'

The room was a narrow one, fortunately, and it held a large mass of furniture for its size. By dragging up the bed, the washstand, and another chest, it was just possible to extend the barricade in a tight jam across the room from the door to the opposite wall, so that nothing short of a battering-ram could ever have forced the door open. On the other hand, it was impossible to extend the barricade upwards in the same way to the height of the door. The Saint had been able to topple the wardrobe over; but even his. strength, even if he had been fresh and uninjured, could not have shifted the thing to cover the doorway in an upright position. And if axes were brought ...

But that again was a gloomy probability, which it wouldn't help anyone to worry about.

'They've got something to think about, anyway,' said the Saint, standing back to view the result of his labours.

He had the air of listening while he talked; and when the sentence was finished he still listened.

The tumult outside had died down, and one voice rose clearly and stood alone out of the fading confusion.

Simon could not understand what it said, but he had no doubt who it was that spoke. No one could have