The Saint's Getaway

to return the compliment. And he saw them hesitate. If he had been blindfolded he could have deduced that hesitation equally well from the one vital fact that he was still alive. The wide smiling insolence of his unblinking candour, the bare­faced effrontery of his very artlessness, walled them into that standstill in a way that no other approach could have done. While it lasted, it held them up as effectively as a regiment of Thomson guns. They couldn't bring themselves to believe that there was no more in it than met the eye. It dangled them on red-hot tenterhooks of uncertainty, peeling their eyes sore with suspicion of the trap they couldn't see.

'Well?'

Marcovitch forced the monosyllable out of his throat in a hoarse challenge that indexed his embarrassment to the last decimal point; and the Saint smiled again.

'This is an auspicious occasion, brother,' he remarked ami­ably. 'I've always wanted to know just what it feels like to be a slab-faced little squirt of dill-water with a dirty neck and no birth certificate; and here you are—the very man to tell me. Could you unbosom for us, little flower?'

Marcovitch licked his lips. He was still casting around for the one necessary hint that would give him confidence to tighten up on the trigger of his gun and send an ounce of swift and unanswerable death snarling into the easy target in front of him. His knuckle was white for the pull-off, the automatic trembling ever so slightly in the suppressed tension of his hand.

'What else have you got to say, Templar?'

'Lots. Have you heard the one about the old farmer named Giles, who suffered acutely——'

'Perhaps you were looking for something?'

The question came in a vicious monotone that dared a di­rect reply. And the Saint knew that his margin of time for stall­ing was wearing thin as a wafer under the impatient rasp of the Russian's overstressed nerves.

'Sure—I was taking a look round.'

He flaunted Marcovitch eye to eye, with that heedless little smile playing up uncloudedly to the tilt of his cigarette, and his fingers curling evenly round the grip of his own gun. The twitch of a muscle would have roared finis for Marcovitch in the middle of any one of those sentences; but Simon Templar knew when he was deadlocked. He knew he was deadlocked then, and he had known it ever since he stepped into the van. He could have dropped Marcovitch at his pleasure, but the re­maining four men represented just so many odds against any human chance of surviving to boast about it. And the Saint was not yet tired of life. He bluffed the deadlock without turn­ing a hair—smiled calmly at it and asked it to play ball—because that was the only thing to do. Any other line would have sung his requiem without further debate. But he knew that his only way out was along the precarious alleyways of peace with honour—with black italics for the peace, if any­thing. It was unfortunate, admittedlly, but it was one of the immutable verities of the situation. He had breezed in to take a peek at the odds, and there they were in all their mathemati­cal scaliness. A tactful and strategic withdrawal announced it­self as the order of the day.

'I just thought I might find some crown jewels,' said the Saint; and Marcovitch steadied his automatic.

'Did you?'

Simon nodded. His level gaze slid down the other's coat and detected a bulge in one pocket that signified as much as he re­quired to know.

'Yeah. Only you got here first.' Lower down, he caught a gleam of reflected light from the floor. 'Excuse me—I think you missed something.'

He took a pace forward stooping as if to pick up the stone.

Then he hurled himself at the knees of the nearest man like the bolt from a crossbow. Marcovitch fired at the same mo­ment, but the Saint's luck held. His impetus somersaulted him clean over the sprawling body of his victim, and he rolled over like a scalded eel and ducked behind the struggling breastwork. His left hand whipped round the man's waist and fastened on the man's gun wrist, holding him in position by the sheer strength of one arm.

'Sorry about this,' said the Saint

The others paused for a second, and in that breathing space the Saint got to his feet again, bringing his human shield up with him in a heave of eruptive effort. He backed towards the door, reached it, and got it open; then the man half broke from his hold in a flurry of cursing fight, and Simon flung him away and leapt through the door with a bullet crashing