Knight Templar, or The Avenging Saint

'Only for a little while.'

'Then you've got about half an hour to learn to handle them as if you'd been born in the air!'

Roger Conway said things—naughty and irrel­evant things, which do not belong here. And the Saint smiled.

'Come on,' he said. 'Let's see you do a gentle turn.'

After a pause, the machine heeled over drunkenly. . . .

'Verminous,' said the Saint scathingly. 'You're too rough on that rudder. Try to imagine that you're not riding a bicycle. And don't use the stick as if you were stirring porridge. . . . Now we'll do one together.' They did. 'And now one to the left. . . .'

For ten minutes the instruction went on.

'I guess you ought to be fairly safe on that,' said the Saint at the end of that time. 'Keep the turns gentle, and you won't hurt yourself. I'm sorry I haven't time to tell you all about spins, so if you get into one I'm afraid you'll just have to die. Now we'll take the glide.'

Then Roger was saying, unhappily: 'What's the idea of all this, Saint?'

'Sorry,' said the Saint, 'but I'm afraid you'll be in sole charge before long. I'm going to be busy.'

He explained why; and Roger's gasp of horror came clearly through the telephones.

'But how the hell am I going to get down, Saint?'

'Crash in the Thames,' answered Simon succinctly. 'Glide down to a nice quiet spot, just as you've been taught, undo your safety belt, flatten out gently when you're near the water, and pray. It's not our aeroplane, anyway.'

'It's my life,' said Roger gloomily.

'You won't hurt yourself, sonny boy. Now, wake up and try your hand at this contour chasing. ...'

And the nose of the machine went down, with a sudden scream of wires. The ground, luminous now with the cold pallor of the sky before sunrise, heaved up deliriously to meet them. Roger's head sang with a rush of blood, and he seemed to have left his stomach about a thousand feet behind. ... Then the stick stroked back between his legs, his stomach flopped nauseatingly down towards his seat, and he felt slightly sick. . . .

'Is it always as bad as that?' he inquired faintly.

'Not if you don't come down so fast,' said the Saint cheerfully. 'That was just to save time. . . . Now, you simply must get used to this low flying. It's only a matter of keeping your head and going light on the controls.' The aeroplane shot between two trees, with approximately six inches to spare beyond either wing, and a flock of sheep stampeded under their wheels. 'You're flying her, Roger! Let's skim this next hedge. . . . No, you're too high. I said skim, not skyrocket.' The stick went forward a trifle. 'That's better. . . . Now miss this fence by about two feet. . . . No, that was nearer ten feet. Try to do better at the next, but don't go to the other extreme and take the undercarriage off. . . . That's more like it! You were only about four feet up that time. If you can get that distance fixed in your eye, you'll be absolutely all right. Now do the same thing again. . . . Good! Now up a bit for these trees. Try to miss them by the same distance—it'll be good practice for you. ...'

And Roger tried. He tried as he had never before tried anything in his life, for he knew how much depended on him. And the Saint urged him on, speaking all the time in the same tone of quiet encouragement, grimly trying to crowd a month's instruction into a few minutes. And somehow he achieved results. Roger was getting the idea; he was getting that most essential thing, the feel of the machine; and he had started off with the greatest of all blessings—a cool head and an instinctive judgment. It was much later when he found a patch of gray hair on each of his temples. . . .

And so, for the rest of that flight, they worked on together, with the Saint glancing from time to time at his watch, yet never varying the patient steadiness of his voice.

And then the time came when the Saint said that the instruction must be over, hit or miss; and he took over the controls again. They soared up in a swift climb; and, as the fields fell away beneath them, a shaft of light from the shy rim of the sun caught them like a fantastic spotlight, and the aeroplane was turned to a hurtling jewel of silver and gold in the translucent gulf of the sky.

3

'DOWN THERE, on your right!' cried the Saint; and Roger looked over where the Saint's arm pointed.

He saw the fields laid out underneath them like a huge unrolled map. The trees and little houses were like the toys that children play with, building their villages on a nursery floor. And over that grotesque vision of a puny world seen as an idle god might see it, a criss-cross of roads and lanes sprawled like a sparse muddle of strings, and a railway line was like a knife-cut across the icing of a cake, and down the railway line puffed the tiniest of toy trains.

The aeroplane swung over in a steep bank, and the map seemed to slide up the sky until it stood like a wall at their wing tip; and the Saint spoke again.

'Hermann's about twenty miles away, but that doesn't give us much time at seventy miles an hour. So you've got to get it over quickly, Roger. If you can do your stuff as you were doing it just now, there's simply nothing can go wrong. Don't get excited, and just be a wee bit careful not to stall when my weight comes off. I'm not quite sure what the effect will be.'

'And suppose—suppose you don't bring it off?'

They were flying to meet the toy train now.

'If I miss, Roger, the only thing I can ask you to do is to try to land farther up the line. You'll crash, of course, but if you turn your petrol off first you may live to tell the tale. But whether you try it or not is up to you.'

'I'll try it, Saint, if I have to.'

'Good scout.'

They had passed over the train; and then again they turned steeply, and went in pursuit.

And the Saint's calm voice came to Roger's ears with a hint of reckless laughter somewhere in its calm.

'You've got her, old Roger. I'm just going to get out. So long, old dear, and the best of luck.'

'Good luck, Simon.'

And Roger Conway took over the controls.

And then he saw the thing that he will never forget. He saw the Saint climb out of the cockpit in front of him, and saw him stagger on the wing as the wind caught him and all but tore him from his precarious hold. And then the Saint had hold of a strut with one hand, and the rope that he had fixed with the other, and he was backing towards the leading edge of the wing. Roger saw him smile, the old incomparable Saintly smile. . . . And then the Saint was on his knees; then his legs had disap­peared from view; then there was only his head and shoulders and two hands. . . . one hand .... And the Saint was gone.

Roger put the stick gently forward.

He looked back over the side as he did so, in a kind of sick terror that he would see a foolish spread-eagle shape dwindling down into the unrolled map four thousand feet below; but he saw nothing. And then he had eyes only for the train.

Hit or miss. ...

And Simon Templar also watched the train.

He dangled at the end of his rope, like a spider on a thread, ten feet below the silver and gold fuselage. One foot rested in a loop that he had knotted for himself before they started; his hands were locked upon the rope itself. And the train was coming nearer.

The wind lashed him with invisible whips, bil­lowing his coat, fighting him with savage flailing fingers. It was an effort to breathe; to hold on at all was a battle. And he was supposed to be resting there. He had deliberately taught Roger to fly low, much lower than was necessary, because that extreme was far safer than the possibility of being trailed along twenty feet above the carriage roofs. When the time came he would slip down the rope, hang by his arms, and lei go as soon as he had the chance.

And that time was not far distant. Roger was diving rather steeply, with his engine full on. . . . But the train was also moving. ... At two hundred feet the Saint guessed that they were overtaking the train at about twenty miles an hour. He ought to have told Roger about that. . . . But then Roger must have seen the mistake also, for he throttled the engine down a trifle, and they lost speed. And they were drifting lower. . . .

With a brief prayer, the Saint twitched his foot out of the stirrup and went down the rope hand over hand.

'Glory!' thought the Saint. 'If the fool stalls—if he tries to cut his speed down by bringing the stick back. .