The Saint's Getaway

'It's much too deep for me,' Monty confessed. 'But I've given up worrying about it. I don't look like a desperate character, do I?'

She contemplated him with a renewal of the detached curi­osity with which she had estimated his first advance. Her an­cestry might have been German, but her quiet self-possession belonged wholly to the American tradition. Monty would have counted the day well spent if he had been free to take her under his wing; but his ears were straining through the con­tinuous clatter of the train for the first warnings of the violent and unlawful things that must soon be happening somewhere in the south, and he knew that that pleasant interlude could not last for long. He returned her gaze without embarrass­ment, wondering what she would say if she knew that he was wanted for murder.

'You look fairly sane,' she said.

'I used to think so myself,' said Monty amusedly. 'It's only when I come out in a rash and find myself biting postmen in the leg that I have my doubts.'

'Then you might let me share the joke.'

'My dear, I'd like to share lots of things with you. But that one isn't my own property.'

The full blaze of her unaffected loveliness would have daz­zled a lesser man.

'Weren't you ever warned that it's dangerous to tease an inquisitive woman?'

Monty laughed.

'Why not have half my shirt instead?' he suggested cheer­fully; and then the sudden check of the train as the brakes came on literally threw her into his arms.

He restored her gently to her balance, and found himself abstractedly fingering the butt of the gun in his pocket while she apologized. He needed the concrete reminder of that cold, metallic contact to fetch him back to the outlook from which he had been trying to escape—the view of his corner of the world as a place where murder and sudden death were commonplaces, and freedom continued only as the reward of a ceaseless vigilance.

'That's all right,' he said absently. 'You didn't have to help yourself to it. If you'd asked me for it I'd have given it to you.'

He kept his hand in his pocket and stared out of a window at the finest angle that he could manage. Instinct alone told him that the stoppage had nothing to do with any ordinary incident of the journey—it was the hint that he had been wait­ing for, the zero signal that strung up his nerves to the last brittle ounce of expectation. Beside him, the girl was saying something; but he never had the vaguest idea what it was. He was listening for an intimation of how the typhoon would burst, knowing beyond all possibility of evasion that the break-up was as inevitable as the collapse of a house of cards. For a moment he felt like a man who has just seen the tail of a slow fuse vanishing into a cask of gunpowder: the uncanny hush that had settled down after the train pulled up seemed to span out to the cracking brink of eternity. He heard the sibi­lant hiss of the Westinghouse valves, the subdued mutter of voices from a dozen compartments, the distant clank of a coupling shaking down into equilibrium; but his brain was striving to tune through those normal sounds to the first whis­per of the abnormal—speculating whether it would come as a babel of enraged throats or the unequivocal stammer of artil­ lery.

Then a door was flung open up at the northward end of the carriage, and the heavy tread of official-sounding boots made his heart miss a beat. Out of the corner of his eye he saw two men in uniform advancing down the passage. They stopped at the first compartment and barked a question; and the chattering of the group of Italians farther up died away abruptly. A deeper stillness lapped down on the perspective, and through it Monty heard the question repeated and the boots moving on.

He felt the girl gripping his arm and heard her speaking again.

'Say, don't you Englishmen ever get excited? Somebody's pulled the communication cord. Boy, isn't that thrilling?'

Monty nodded. The officials came nearer, interrogating each compartment as they reached it. One of them turned aside to accost him with the same standardized inquiry, and Monty schooled his features to the requisite expression of sheep-like repudiation.

'Nein—ich habe nichts gehort.'

The inquisition passed on, and the group of Italians trailed gaping after them. A fresh buzz of conversation broke out along the carriage.

Monty found the girl eyeing him indignantly.