The Saint's Getaway

'Wouldn't it be more useful to do something about Ethelbert?'

'What—this nasty piece of work?' Monty glanced down at the gunman, whose groans were becoming a fraction less heart­rending as his paralyzed respiratory organs creaked painfully back towards normal. 'I suppose it might be. What shall we do—shoot him?'

'We might tie him up.'

'I know. You tear the curtains into strips, and blow the expense.'

'There's a length of rope in Simon's bag,' said Patricia calmly. 'If you'll wait a second I'll get it for you.'

She disappeared into the bedroom and returned in a few moments with a coil of stout cord. Monty took it from her gin­gerly.

'I suppose there isn't anything of this sort that Simon ever travels without,' he commented pessimistically. 'If you've got a gallows in the cabin trunk, it may save a lot of mucking about when the police catch us.'

The gunman was still in no condition to make any effective resistance. Monty endeavoured to adapt a working knowledge of knots acquired in some experience of week-end yachting to the peculiar eccentricities of the human frame, and made a very passable job of it. Having reduced his victim to a state of blasphemous helplessness, he dusted the knees of his trousers and turned again to Pat.

'I seem to remember that the next item is a gag,' he said. 'Do you know anything about gags?'

'I have seen it done,' said the girl unblushingly. 'Lend me your handkerchief. . . . And that other one in your breast pocket.'

She bent over the squirming prisoner, and a particularly vile profanity subsided into a choking gurgle. Monty watched the performance with admiration.

'You know, I couldn't have done that,' he said. 'And I've been editing this kind of stuff all my life. The stories never give you the important details. They just say: 'Lionel Strongarm bound and gagged his captive'—and the thing's done. Where did you learn it all?'

Patricia laughed.

'Simon taught me,' she said simply. 'If there's anything that makes him see red, it's inefficiency. He explains a thing once, and expects you to remember it for the rest of your life. Your brain's got to be on tiptoe from the time you get up in the morning till the time you go to bed at night. He's like that himself, and everyone else has got to be the same. It nearly sent me off my rocker till I got used to it; and then I began to see that I'd been half asleep all my life, like eighty per cent of other people. He was right, of course.'

Monty went over and poured himself out a drink.

'This is a new line on the private life of an adventurer,' he murmured. 'Did he ever explain what one should do when stranded in a hotel with a corpse on the bed and a gun artist under the sofa?'

'That,' said the girl composedly, 'is supposed to be an ele­mentary exercise in initiative.'

Monty grimaced.

'Some initiative is certainly called for,' he admitted. 'Si­mon may be away for a week, and then Stanislaus will begin to smell.'

He wandered pensively back into the bedroom and wished that he felt suitably depressed. Two hours ago he would have expressed no desire at all to find himself in such a situation. Its potentialities in the way of local colour would have left him uninspired. Four years in France had left him with a profound appreciation of the amenities of peace. On several occasions he had told the Saint that he was always pleased to hear or read of stirring exploits anywhere, but that as far as he personally was concerned he could enjoy enough violence to keep his glands active from an armchair. And if he had to be decoyed into that sort of thing, he most unequivocally wanted it to be gradual. A minor job of shop-lifting, if neces­sary, or an evening out with a pickpocket, would have satis­fied his craving for excitement for a long time.

But since he had been blamelessly landed up to his neck in a kind of thieves' picnic in which the disposal of corpses and gagged gunmen was supposed to be merely an elementary exercise in initiative, he found himself taking an interest in the affair which he