The Saint vs Scotland Yard (The Holy Terror)

ought to land you somewhere near Birmingham—if you travel far enough. You might make that your next stop.'

One of the men took a pace towards him.

'You just listen a minute——'

'To what?' asked the Saint politely.

'I'm telling yer——'

'A bad habit,' said the Saint disapprovingly. 'You must try and break yourself of that. And now I'm sorry, but I can't stop. I hope you'll wash the back of your neck, see that your socks are aired, say your prayers every night, and get your face lifted at the first opportunity. . . . Now push your ears back, my cherubs, and let your feet chase each other.'

His right hand moved significantly in his pocket, and there was an instant's perilous silence. And then the man who had spoken jerked his head at the other.

'Come on,' he said.

The two men turned and lurched slowly away, looking back over their shoulders.

And the Saint put one foot on the running-board.

And somewhere, far away, he heard the sound of his own head being hit. It was as extraordinary an experience as any that had ever happened to him. Patricia was looking ahead down the road, while her hand eased the gears quietly into mesh; and the Saint himself had not heard the slightest move­ment that might have put him on his guard. And the premoni­tory crawling of his nerves which he had felt a few seconds earlier had performed what it considered to be its duty, and had subsided. . . . He could have believed that the whole thing was an incredibly vivid hallucination—but for the sicken­ing sharp stab of sudden agony that plunged through his brain like a spurt of molten metal and paralysed every milligram of strength in his body.

A great white light swelled up and exploded before his eyes; and after it came a wave of whirling blackness shot with rocketing flashes of dizzy, dazzling colour, and the blackness was filled with a thin high singing note that drilled into his eardrums. His knees seemed to melt away beneath him. . . .

And then, from somewhere above the vast dark gulf into which he was sinking, he heard Patricia's voice cry out.

'Simon!'

The word seemed to spell itself into his dulled brain letter by letter, as if his mind read it off a slowly uncoiling scroll. But it touched a nerve centre that roused him for one frac­tional instant of time to fight back titanically against the numbing oblivion that was swallowing him up.

He knew that his eyes were open, but all he could see was one blurred segment of her face, as he might have seen her picture in a badly-focused fade-out that had gone askew. And to that isolated scrap of vision in the overwhelming blackness he found the blessed strength to croak two words:

'Drive on.'

And then a second surge of blackness welled up around him and blotted out every sight and sound, and he fell away into the infinite black void.

Chapter VII

'So even your arrangements can break down, Templar— when your accomplice fails you,' Kuzela remarked silkily. 'My enterprising young friend, when you are older you will realise that it is always a mistake to rely upon a woman. I have never employed a woman myself for that reason.'

'I'll bet that broke her heart,' said the Saint.

Once again he sat in Kuzela's study, with his head still throbbing painfully from the crashing welt it had received, and a lump on the back of it feeling as if it were growing out of his skull like a great auk's egg. His hair was slightly dis­arranged, and straps on his wrists prevented him from rearranging it effectively; but the Saintly smile had not lost one iota of its charm.

'It remains, however, to decide whether you are going to be permitted to profit by this experience—whether you are going to live long enough to do so. Perhaps it has not occurred to you that you may have come to the end of your promising career,' continued the man on the other side of the desk dispassionately; and the Saint sighed.

'What, not again?' he pleaded brokenly, and Kuzela frowned.

'I do not understand you.'

'Only a few months ago I was listening to those very words,' explained the Saint. 'Alas, poor Wilfred! And he meant it, too. 'Wilf, old polecat,' I said, 'don't you realise that I can't be killed before page three hundred and twenty?' He didn't believe me. And he died. They put a rope round his neck and dropped him through a hole in the floor, and the consequences