The Saint's Getaway

with him, and she also had seen the road and heard the voices.

'Wait here while I take a look,' he murmured.

He flitted in among the trees like a shadow, and the girl stood motionless in the shelter of a clump of bushes with her heart beating a little faster. Monty Hayward and the Eve­ning Gazette were closing up in an interrogative silence; and Patricia had a numbing sense of the magnitude of the feat which Simon Templar had set himself to perform. Escape would have seemed difficult enough for one man alone—a mere modest getaway that was satisfied with a whole skin for its reward—but the Saint was cheerfully booking passengers for the tour and announcing his unalterable intention of col­lecting a quarter of a million pounds' worth of expenses en route. That was the measure of his genius, the squandered greatness that created its own worlds to conquer.

He came back in a few moments; and he was smiling.

'Down there,' he said, 'there's a covered wagon. And the crew are having an early tea. I ordered them specially to meet us here, and they look good enough to me. Let's take 'em.'

He turned back with a swing of lean, venturous limbs; and Monty Hayward followed him in a mood of unwonted light-headedness. Something inside Monty Hayward was reacting vengefully against the continued impact of circumstance. He felt that he had taken as much dragooning from circumstance as he could stand, and his capacity for meek long-suffering was wearing out. A malicious freak of fate had thrown up an un­ceremonious slip of a girl to let the Saint acclaim him hilari­ously as a full-fledged buccaneer, and that was the last straw. Buccaneer he would be—and let the blood flow in buckets.

They reached a narrow gap in the undergrowth, and there the Saint touched Monty's shoulder, pointing down to the road. A six-wheeled lorry was drawn up close to the side, and just below where they had paused two weatherbeaten men in overalls were reclining against the low bank. Each of them held a massive sandwich of bread and sausage in one hand and a steaming cup in the other; and Monty's eyes fastened on one of those cups fascinatedly. It occurred to him that a twen­tieth-century buccaneer might not necessarily be at such a disadvantage as he had once thought. . . .

'Make it snappy,' said the Saint.

He went over the bank in a flying dive, and Monty was only a second behind him. Patricia heard one muffled howl, an eddy of whirling effort, and the smack of bone against bone; then she also came over the bank and saw Simon already starting to strip the overalls from his victim. Monty was dust­ing his trousers, and in his right hand he held like a captured banner the unspilt cup which he would always estimate as one of the outstanding achievements of his life. He raised it dra­matically to Nina Walden as she came through the trees.

'Madam,' he said, 'your tea.'

It was a moment which atoned to him for everything that had gone before; and the girl stepped down smiling into the road and accepted his triumph in the same way as Queen Elizabeth might have accepted the Armada.

'You boys certainly know how to work,' she said; and Monty shrugged.

'We do this sort of thing every day,' he stated aggressively.

The Saint laughed.

'You're getting the spirit of the business, Monty,' he said. 'Now if you can hustle into those jeans before anyone else comes along we might call the boat pushed out. Pat, you take a peep under the tarpaulins and find out what the cargo is. They might be carrying some more crown jewels!'

'They're carrying engine castings,' Patricia reported.

'O. K., lass. There ought to be room for you girls to pack between them. I'm sorry it wasn't eiderdowns, but, after all, it's a warm day.'

The Saint was completing one of those lightning changes which had always been the envious wonder of bis select audi­ences. The immaculate draperies of Savile Row and St. James's had disappeared under a soiled blue boiler suit as if he had never worn them; the shoes of Lobb were stuffed into his pockets and replaced by the dusty boots of toil; the patent-leather hair was tousled into negligent curls. Those who knew him best had asserted that Simon Templar could parade more miracles in the way of disguise with a dab of treacle and a length of string than most men could have accomplished with the largest make-up box in Hollywood. To him the out­ward paraphernalia of costume was merely the show case for a perfect cameo of character study—an inimitable transforma­tion of personality in which no living man could