Knight Templar, or The Avenging Saint

cop to walk in and invite me outside.'

Simon grinned and sank into a chair. A waiter was hovering in the background, and the Saint hailed him and ordered a fresh consignment of ale.

'I suppose you pinched the first car you saw,' Roger was saying. 'That'll mean another six months on our sentences. But you might have warned me.'

The Saint shook his head.

'As a matter of fact, I never went to the Waldorf. Marius himself put me onto Saltham, and I came right along.'

'Good lord—how?'

'He talked, and I listened. It was dead easy.'

'At the Ritz?'

Simon nodded. Briefly he ran over the story of the reunion, with its sequel in the bathroom, and the conversation he had overheard; and Conway stared.

'You picked up all that?'

'I did so. . . . That man Marius is the three-star brain of this cockeyed age—I'll say. And by the same token, Roger, you and I are going to have to tune up our gray matters to an extra couple of thousand revs. per if we want to keep Angel Face's tail skid in sight over this course. . . . But what's your end of the story?'

'Three of 'em turned up—one in a police-inspector's uniform. When the bell wasn't an­swered in about thirty seconds they whipped out a jemmy and bust it in. As they marched in, an ambulance pulled into the mews and stopped outside the door. It was a wonderful bit of team work. There were ambulance men in correct uniforms and all. They carried her out on a stretcher, with a sheet over her. All in broad daylight. And slick! It was under five minutes by my watch from the moment they forced the door to the moment when they were all piling into the wagon, and they pulled out before anything like a crowd had collected. They'd doped Sonia, of course . . . the swine ...'

'Gosh!' said the Saint softly. 'She's just great—that girl!'

Roger gazed thoughtfully at the pewter can which the waiter had placed before him.

'She is—just great. ...'

'Sweet on her, son?'

Conway raised his eyes.

'Are you?'

The Saint fished out his cigarette case and selected a smoke. He tapped it on his thumbnail abstractedly; and there was a silence. . . .

Then he said quietly: 'That ambulance gag is big stuff. Note it down, Roger, for our own use one day. . . . And what's the battlefield like at Saltham?'

'A sizeable house standing in its own grounds on the cliffs, away from the village. They're not  much, as cliffs go — not more than about fifty feet around there. There are big iron gates at the end of the drive. The ambulance turned in; and I went right on past without looking round — I guessed they were there for keeps. Then I had to come back here to send you that wire. By the way, there was a bird we've met before in that ambulance outfit — your little friend Hermann. '

Simon stroked his chin.

'I bust his jaw one time, didn't I?'

'Something like that. And he did his best to bust my ribs and stave my head in . '

'It will be pleasant,' said the Saint gently, 'to meet Hermann again. '

He took a pull at his ale and frowned at the table.

Roger said: 'It seems to me that-all we've got to do now is to get on the phone to Claud Eustace and fetch him along. There's Sonia in that house — we couldn't have the gang more red-handed.'

'And we troop along to the pen with them, and take our sentences like little heroes?'

'Not necessarily. We could watch the show from a safe distance.'

'And Marius?'

'He's stung again.'

The Saint sighed.

'Roger, old dear, if you'd got no roof to your mouth, you'd raise your hat every time you hic­coughed,' he remarked disparagingly. 'Are we going to be content with simply jarring Marius off his trolley and leaving it at that —leaving him to get busy again as soon as he likes? There's no evidence in the wide world to connect him up with Saltham. All that bright scheme of yours would mean would be that his game would be temporarily on the blink. And there's money in it. Big money. We don't know how much, but we'd be safe enough putting it in the seven- figure bracket. D'you think he'd give the gate to all that capital and preliminary carving and prospective gravy just because we'd trodden on his toes?'

'He'd have to start all over again—'

'And so should we, Roger—just as it happened a few months back. And that isn't good enough. Not by a mile. Besides,' said the Saint dreamily, 'Rayt Marius and I have a personal argument to settle, and I think—I think, honey-bunch—that that's one of the most important points of all, in this game. ...'

Conway shrugged.

'Then—what?'

'I guess we might tool over to Saltham and get ready to beat up this house party.'

Roger fingered an unlighted cigarette.

'I suppose we might,' he said.

The Saint laughed and stood up.

'There seems to be an attack of respectability coming over you, my Roger,' he murmured. 'First you talk about fetching in the police, and then you have the everlasting crust to sit there in a beer-sodden stupor and suppose we might waltz into as good a scrap as the Lord is ever likely to stage-manage for us. There's only one cure for that disease, sweetheart—and that's what we're going after now. Long before dark, Marius himself and a reinforcement of lambs are certain to be steaming into Saltham, all stoked up and sizzling at the safety valve, and the resulting ballet ought to be a real contribution to the gaiety of nations. So hurry up and shoot the rest of that ale through your face, sonny boy, and let's go!'

3

THEY WENT. ...

Not that it was the kind of departure of which Roger Conway approved. In spite of all the training which the Saint had put into him, Roger's remained a cautious and deliberate temperament. He had no peace of mind about haring after trouble with an armoury composed of precious little more than a sublime faith in Providence and a practised agility at soaking people under the jaw. He liked to consider. He liked to weigh pro and con. He liked to get his hooks onto a complete detail map of the campaign proposed, with all important landmarks underlined in red ink. He liked all sorts of things that never seemed to come his way when he was in the Saint's company. And he usually seemed to be tottering through the greater part of their divers adventures in a kind of lobster-supper dream, feeling like a man who is compelled to run a race for his life along a delirious precipice on a dark night in a gale of wind and a pea-soup fog. But always in that nightmare the Saint's fantastic optimism led him on, dancing ahead like a will-o'-the-wisp, trailing him dizzily behind into hell-for-leather audacities which Roger, in the more leisured days that followed, would remember in a cold sweat.

And yet he suffered it all. The Saint was just that sort of man. There was a glamour, a magnificent recklessness, a medieval splendor about him that no one with red blood in his veins could have resisted. In him there was nothing small, nothing half-hearted: he gave all that he had to everything that he did, and made his most casual foolishness heroic.

'Who cares?' drawled the Saint, with his lean brown hands seeming merely to caress the wheels of the Hirondel, and his mad, mocking eyes lazily skimming the road that hurtled towards them at seventy miles an hour. 'Who cares if a whole army corps of the heathen comes woofling into Saltham to-night, even with a detachment of some of our old friends in support—the Black Wolves, for instance, or the Snake's Boys, or the Tiger Cubs, or even a brigade of the crown prince's own household cavalary—old Uncle Rayt Marius an' all? For it seems years since we had what you might call a one hundred per cent rodeo, Roger, and I feel that unless we get moving again pretty soon we shall be growing barnacles behind the ears.'