Knight Templar, or The Avenging Saint

gardens, trellises and terraces, shrubberies and outbuildings, dimly visi­ble in the gloom. On his left, crowning a steady rise of ground, a kind of balustraded walk cut a clean black line against the sky, and he guessed that this marked the edge of the cliffs.

In this direction he moved, keeping in the shel­tering obscurity of the border of trees for as long as he could, and then breaking off at right angles, parallel with the balustrade, before he had mount­ed enough of the gentle slope for his silhouette to be marked against the skyline. He felt certain that his entrance upon the estate was not yet public knowledge, and he was inclined to stay cagey about it: the number and personal habits of the household staff were very much of an unknown quantity so far, and the Saint was not tempted to run any risk of provoking them prematurely. Swiftly as he shifted through the faint starlight, his sensitive ears were alert for the slightest sound, his restless eyes scanned every shadow, and the fingers of his right hand were never far from the chased ivory hilt of Belle. He himself made no more sound than a prowling leopard, and that same leopard could not have constituted a more deadly menace to any member of the opposition gang who might have chanced to be roaming about the grounds on Simon Templar's route.

Presently the house was again on his right, and much nearer to him, for he had travelled round two sides of a rough square. He began to move with an even greater caution. Then, in a moment, gravel grated under his feet. He glanced sharply to his left, to see where the path led, and observed a wide gap in the balustrade at the cliff edge. That would be the top of a flight of steps running down the cliff face to the shore, he figured; and beside the gap he saw a tree that would provide friendly cover for another peep at the developments on the water below.

He turned off the path and melted into the blackness beneath the tree. This grew on the very edge of the scarp; and the break in the balustrade meant what he had thought it meant—a rough stairway that vanished downwards into the dark­ness.

Looking out, Simon saw a thin paring of new moon slithering out of the rim of the sea. It wouldn't be much of a moon even when it was ful­ly risen, he reflected, with a voiceless thanksgiving to the little gods that had made the adventure this much easier. For all felonious purposes, the light was perfect—nothing but the soft luminance of a sky spangled with a thousand stars—light enough for a cat-eyed shikari like Simon Templar to work by, without being bright enough to be embarrass­ing.

He switched his eyes downwards again, and saw, midway between the anchored ship and the thin white ribbon of sand at the foot of the cliff, a tiny black shape stealing over the waters. Motion­less, instinctively holding his breath and parting his lips—the Saint's faculties worked involuntari­ly, whether they were needed or not—he could catch shreds of the sound of grating rowlocks.

And then he heard another sound, behind him, that was much easier to hear—the gritting of heavy boots on the gravel he had just quitted.

2

HE MERGED a little deeper into the blackness of his cover, and looked round. A lantern was bobbing down the path from the house, and three men tramped along by its light. In a moment their voices came to him quite plainly.

'Himmel! I shall vant to go to bet. Last night— to-night—it iss never no sleep for der mans.'

'Aw—ya big skeezicks! What sorta tony outfit d'ya think ya've horned in on?'

'Ah, 'e will-a always be sleeping, da Gerraman. He would-a make-a all his time, sleeping and-a drinking—but I t'ink 'e like-a best-a da drinking.'

'Maybe he's gotta toist like I got. Ya can't do nuth'n about dat kinda toist....'

The Saint leaned elegantly against his tree, watching the advancing group, and there was a hint of genuine admiration in his eyes.

'A Boche, a Wop, and a Bowery Boy,' he mur­mured. 'Gee—that man Marius ought to be run­ning the League of Nations!'

The three men marched a few more yards in si­lence; and they were almost opposite the Saint when the Bowery Boy spoke again.

'Who's bringin' down de goil?'

'Hermann'—the Boche answered with guttural brevity.

'She is-a da nice-a girl, no?' The Wop took up the running sentimentally. 'She remind-a me of-a da girl in Sorrento, 'oo I knew—'

'She sure is a classy skoit. But us poor fish ain't gotta break—it's de big cheese fer hers, sure....'

They passed so close by the Saint that he could have reached out and knifed the nearest of them without an effort—and he did actually meditate that manoeuvre for a second, for he had a forth­right mind. But he knew that one minor assassina­tion more or less would not make much difference, and he stood to lose more than he could hope to gain. Besides, any disturbance at that juncture would wreck beyond redemption the plan which he had just formed.

The League of Nations was descending the cliff stairway, the mutter of their voices growing fainter as they went. Simon took another look at the sea and saw that the ship's boat had halved its distance from the shore. And then, after one quick glance round to see if anyone was following on immedi­ately behind the three who had passed on, he slipped out of his shelter and flitted down the steps in the wake of the voices.

He could have caught them up easily, but he hung well behind. That cliff path was trickier country to negotiate than the smooth turf above; and a single loose stone, at close range, might tell good-night to the story in a most inconvenient and disastrous fashion. Also, one of the three might for some reason take it into his head to return, and the Saint thought he would like warning of that tergiversation. So he saw to it that they kept their lead, and walked with a delicacy that would have made Agag look like a rheumatic rhinoceros.

Then he found himself on the turn of the last zigzag, while the party below were debouching onto the sands. At the same moment, the ship's boat ran alongside a little jetty, which had been screened from his view when he looked down from the top of the cliff.

He paused there, thinking rapidly, and survey­ing the scenery.

The shore itself was destitute of cover for the twenty yards of sand that lay between the end of the path and the jetty; but the miscellaneous grasses and shrubs which grew thickly over the sloping cliff extended right down to the beginning of the sands, without any bare patches that he could see, and appeared to become even thicker before they stopped altogether. This was certainly helpful, but ... He looked out towards the ship and stroked his chin thoughtfully. Then he gazed again at the jetty, where a man from the ship's boat was being helped up into the light of the lan­tern. Near that boat, alongside the wharf, but more inshore, something else rode gently on the water. ... The Saint stiffened slowly, straining his eyes, with a kind of delirious ecstasy stealing through him. He was not quite sure—not quite— and it seemed too good to be true. . . . But, while he stared, the man who had got out of the boat, and the man with the lantern, and one other of the three who had come down from the house began to walk slowly towards the cliff path; and the man with the lantern walked on the outside by the edge of the jetty, and the light of the lantern turned speculation into certainty in the matter of the sec­ond craft which was moored by the wharf. It was, by the beard of the Prophet, an indisputable and incontrovertible outboard motorboat....

The Saint drew a long lung-easing breath. . . . Too good to be true, but—'Oh, Baby!' sighed the Saint.

He was even able to ignore, for a short space, the disconcerting fact that this heaven-sent wind­fall coincided in the moment of its manifestation with a remarkably compensating disadvantage. For the third member of the reception committee was squatting on the wharf, talking to the boat's crew; and the other two were escorting the boat's passenger to the cliff stairway; and, at the same time as he perceived the movement of these events, Simon heard the sounds of a small party descend­ing that same cliff stairway towards him.

Then he looked round and saw the lantern of the descending party bobbing down the second flight above him; he could distinguish two figures, one of them tall and the other one much shorter.

Slightly annoying. But not desperate....

Reviewing the ground, he stepped lightly off the path, rounded a shrub, caught the stem of a young sapling, and drew himself silently up into the shadows. And it so happened that the two parties met directly beneath him; and he saw, as he had guessed, that the two who had descended after him were the man Hermann and Sonia Delmar.

The five checked their progress and gathered naturally into a little group, talking in an under­tone. Sonia Delmar was actually outside the group, temporarily ignored. There was no need for her custodian to fear that she