Knight Templar, or The Avenging Saint

added.

There was the faintest tremor of triumph in his voice, and for an instant the Saint felt a qualm of desperate fear. It was not for himself, or for Roger. But Hermann had been promised a Re­ward. ...

And then Simon pulled himself together. His head was clear—Hermann's savage attack had been too unscientific to do more than superficial damage—and his brain had never seemed to func­tion with more ruthless crystalline efficiency in all his life. Over the giant's shoulder he could see the clock; and that clock face, with the precise posi­tion of the hands, printed itself upon the forefront of the Saint's mind as if it had been branded there with red-hot irons. It was exactly twenty-eight minutes past two. Four hours clear, and a hundred and fifteen miles to go. Easy enough on a quiet night with a powerful car—easy enough for Her­mann. But for the Saint. ... for the Saint, every lost minute sped the world nearer to a horror that he dared not contemplate. He saw every facet of the situation at once, with a blinding clarity, as he might have seen every facet of a pellucid jewel sus­pended in the focus of battery upon battery of thousand-kilowatt sun arcs—saw everything that the slightest psychological fluke might mean— heard, in imagination, the dry, sarcastic welcome of his fantastic story. . . . Figures blazed through his brain in an ordered spate—figures on the speedometer of the Hirondel, trembling past the hairline in the little window where they showed— seventy-five—eighty—eighty-five. . . . Driving as only he could drive, with the devil at his shoulder and a guardian angel's blessing on the road and on the tires, he might average a shade over fifty. Give it two hours and a quarter, then—at the forlorn minimum. . . .

And once again the Saint looked Marius in the eyes, while all these things were indelibly graven upon a brain that seemed to have been turned to ice, so clear and smooth and cold it was. And the Saint's smile was very Saintly.

'I hope,' he drawled, 'that you've invented a really picturesque way for me to die.'

CHAPTER TWELVE How Marius organized an accident and Mr. Prosser passed on

1

IT IS CERTAINLY necessary for you to die, Tem­plar,' said Marius dispassionately. 'There is a score between us which cannot be settled in any other way.'

The Saint nodded, and for a moment his eyes were two flakes of blue steel.

'You're right, Angel Face,' he said softly. 'You're dead right. . . . This planet isn't big enough to hold us both. And you know as surely as you're standing there that if you don't kill me I'm going to kill you, Rayt Marius!'

'I appreciate that,' said the giant calmly.

And then the Saint laughed.

'But still we have to face the question of method, old dear,' he murmured, with an easy return of all his old mocking banter. 'You can't wander round England bumping people off quite so airily. I know you've done it before— on one particular occasion—but I haven't yet discovered how you got away with it. There are bodies to be got rid of, and things like that, you know—it isn't quite such a soft snap as it reads in story books. It's an awful bore, but there you are. Or were you just thinking of running us through the mincing machine and sluicing the pieces down the kitchen sink?'

Marius shook his head.

'I have noticed,' he remarked, 'that in the stories to which you refer, the method employed for the elimination of an undesirable busybody is usually so elaborate and complicated that the hero's escape is as inevitable as the reader expects it to be. But I have not that melodramatic mind. If you are expecting an underground cellar full of poisonous snakes, or a trap-door leading to a subterranean river, or a man-eating tiger imported for your benefit, or anything else so con­ventional—pray disillusion yourself. The end I have designed for you is very simple. You will simply meet with an unfortunate accident—that is all.'

He was carefully trimming the end of his cigar as he spoke; and his tremendous hands moved to the operation with a ruthless deliberation that was more terrible than any violence.

The Saint had to twist his bound hands together until the cords bit into his wrists—to make sure that he was awake. Vengeful men he had faced often, angry men a thousand times; more than once he had listened to savage, triumphant men luxuriously describing, with a wealth of sadistic detail, the arrangements that they had made for his demise: but never had he heard his death discussed so quietly, with such an utterly pitiless cold­bloodedness. Marius might have been engaged in nothing but an abstract philosophical debate on the subject—the ripple of vindictive satisfaction in his voice might have passed unnoticed by an inattentive ear. . . .

And as Marius paused, intent upon his cigar, the measured tick of the clock and Lessing's stertorous breathing seemed to assault the silence deaf­eningly, mauling and mangling the nerves like the tortured screech of a knife blade dragged across a plate. . . .

And then the sudden scream of the telephone bell jangled into the tenseness and the torture, a sound so abruptly prosaic as to seem weird and unnatural in that atmosphere; and Marius looked round.

'Ah—that will be Herr Dussel.'

The Saint turned his head in puzzled surprise, and saw that Roger Conway's face was set and strained.

And then Marius was talking.

Again he spoke in German; and Simon listened, and understood. He understood everything— understood the grim helplessness of Roger's stillness—understood the quick compression of Roger's lips as Marius broke off to glance at the clock. For Roger Conway's German was restricted to such primitive necessities as Bahnhof, Speisewagen, and Bier; but Roger could have needed no German at all to interpret that renewed interest in the time.

The Saint's fingers stole up his sleeve, and Belle slid gently down from her sheath.

And Simon understood another reason why Roger had been so silent, and had played such an unusually statuesque part in the general exchange of genial persiflage. Roger must have been waiting, hoping, praying, with a paralyzing in­tentness of concentration, for Marius to overlook just the one desperate detail that Marius had not overlooked. ...

The Saint leaned very lazily against the wall. He tilted his head back against it, and gazed at the ceiling with dreamy eyes and a look of profound boredom on his face. And very carefully he turned the blade of Belle towards the ropes on his wrists.

'An unfortunate accident,' Marius had said. And the Saint believed it. Thinking it over now, he didn't know why he should ever have imagined that a man like Marius would indulge in any of the theatrical trappings of murder. The Saint knew as well as anyone that the bloodcurdling inventions of the sensational novelist had a real foundation in the mentality of a certain type of crook, that there were men constitutionally incapable of putting the straightforward skates under an enemy whom they had in their power—men whose tortuous minds ran to electrically fired revolvers, or tame al­ligators in a private swimming bath, as inevitably as water runs downhill. The Saint had met that type of man. But to Rayt Marius such devices would not exist. Whatever was to be done would be done quickly. . . .

And the same applied to the Saint—con­sequently. Whatever he was going to do, by way of prophylaxis, he would have to do instantly. Whatever sort of gamble it might be, odds or no odds, handicaps or no handicaps, Bowery Boys and miscellaneous artillery notwithstanding, hell-fire and pink damnation inasmuch and herein­after— be b-blowed. . . . Simon wondered why he hadn't grasped that elementary fact before.

'Gute Nacht, mein Freund. Schlafen Sie wohl ...'

Marius had finished. He hung up the receiver; and the Saint smiled at him.

'I trust,' said Simon quietly, 'that Heinrich will obey that last instruction—for his own sake. But I'm afraid he won't.'

The giant smiled satirically.

'Herr Dussel is perfectly at liberty to go to sleep—after he has followed my other in­structions.' He turned to Roger. 'And you, my dear young friend—did you also understand?'

Roger stood up straight.

'I guessed,' he said; and again Marius smiled.

'So you realize—do you not—that there is no chance of a mistake? There is still, I should think, half an hour to