The Saint's Getaway

Simon looked up.

Along the Rennweg, less than a hundred yards away, a man in an unmistakable uniform was blundering towards them with his whistle screaming as he ran; and the Saint grasped the meaning of the omens that had been drifting blurredly through his senses while he was occupied with other things. He grasped their meaning with scarcely a second's pause, in all its fatal and far-reaching implications; and in the next second he knew, with a reckless certainty, what he was doomed to do.

The Law was trying to horn in on his party. At that very mo­ment it was thumping vociferously towards him on its great flat feet, loaded up to its flapping ears with all the elephantine pomposity of the system which it represented, walloping along to crash the gate of his conviviality with its inept and fa­tuous presence—just as it had been wont to do so often in the past. And this time there were bigger and better reasons than there had ever been why that intrusion could not be allowed. Those reasons might not have seemed so instantaneously con­clusive to the casual and unimaginative observer; but to the Saint they stuck out like the skyline of Chicago. And Simon found that he was no less mad than he had always been.

Under his hold, the little man squirmed sideways like a de­mented eel, and the attache case which he was still clutching desperately in his right hand smashed at the Saint's head in a homicidal arc. Lazily the Saint swayed back two inches out­side the radius of the blow; and lazily, almost absent-mindedly, he clipped the little man under the jaw and dropped him in his tracks. ...

And then he turned and faced the others, and his eyes were the two least lazy things that either of them had ever seen.

'This is just too soon for our picnic to break up,' he said.

He stooped and seized the little man by the collar and flung him over his shoulder like a sack of coals. The attache case dan­gled from the little man's wrist by a short length of chain; and the Saint gathered it in with his right hand. The discovery of the chain failed to amaze him: he took it in his stride, as a de­tail that was no more than an incidental feature of the general problem, which could be analyzed and put in its right place at a more leisured opportunity. Undoubtedly he was quite mad. But he was mad with that magnificent simplicity which is only a hair's breadth from genius; and of such is the king­dom of adventurers.

The Saint was smiling as he ran.

He knew exactly what he had done. In the space of about two minutes thirty-seven seconds, he had inflicted on his new­est and most fragile halo a series of calamities that made such minor nuisances as the San Francisco earthquake appear posi­tively playful by comparison. Just by way of an hors-d'oeuvre. And there was no going back. He had waltzed irrevocably off the slippery tight wire of righteousness; and that was that. He felt fine.

At the end of the bridge he caught Patricia's arm. Down to the right, he knew, a low wall ran beside the river, with a nar­row ledge on the far side that would provide a precarious but possible foothold. He pointed.

'Play leapfrog, darling.'

She nodded without a word, and went over like a schoolboy. Simon's hand smote Monty on the back.

'See you in ten minutes, laddie,' he murmured.

He tumbled nimbly over the wall with his light burden on his back, and hung there by his fingers and toes three inches above the hissing waters while Monty's footsteps faded away into the distance. A moment later the patrolman's heavy boots clumped off the bridge and lumbered by without a pause.

2

Steadily the plodding hoofbeats receded until they were scarcely more than an indistinguishable patter; and the inter­mittent blasts of the patrolman's whistle became mere plaintive squeaks from the Antipodes. An expansive aura of peace settled down again upon the wee small hours, and made itself at home.

The Saint hooked one eye cautiously over the stonework and surveyed the scene. There was no sign of hurrying reinforce­ments trampling on each other in their zeal to answer the pa­trolman's frenzied blowing. Simon, knowing that the inhabit­ants of most Continental cities have a sublime and blessed gift of minding their own business, was not so much surprised as satisfied. He pulled himself nimbly over the wall again and reached a hand down to Pat. In another second she was stand­ing beside him in the road. She regarded him dispassionately.

'I always knew you ought to be locked up,' she said. 'And now I expect you will be.'

The Saint returned her gaze with wide blue