The Saint's Getaway

The Saint gazed down at him steadily. In fewer years than the other man had lived, he had come to know the game from every angle, and grown used to its insidious allurements. Its seductive charms held him no less than they had always done; but he knew their treachery. Even then, he hesitated to take advantage of Monty's surrender.

'There's no need for you to come inside,' he said. 'This isn't quite like anything we've done before. We may be running into a trap. If you'd like to hang on here for a bit——'

'Why not get on with it?' said Monty Hayward shortly. 'I wouldn't miss a show like this for a thousand pounds.'

The Saint smiled ruefully.

'On your own head be it,' he said; but his hand rested on Monty's shoulder for a moment.

And then he turned and walked across the road.

He had no illusions about what he was trying to do. Before it was finished there might easily be a miniature war storming in that peaceful street. He had to take the risk. And if neces­sary, he'd have to fight the war. It was the only way. Patricia Holm was inside that police station, irreparably meshed in the ponderous dragnet of the Law; and even if he had been a free man, that would have seemed hopeless enough—to sit scheming with lawyers, pulling the sticky threads of bail and remand, pitting miserable atoms of truth against the massed batteries of intrigue and influence that Rudolf could command, know­ing that the scales were weighted against him from the begin­ning. With the police offering rewards for his own capture it couldn't be thought of. He was taking the one chance that the fall of the cards gave him—a clean fighting chance to win the game as he had fought it from the start, as he had won such games before, with the honest steel of a gun butt in his hands, clearing the tangled chess board with a challenge of death.

He ran up the station steps and entered the bare vestibule. On his left was a corridor; farther down he came to a pair of glass doors opening into a microscopic space where the com­mon citizen could stand and lean over a counter to hold con­verse with the Law. Beyond the counter was an untidy sort of office, in which he could see one bald-headed policeman writ­ing laboriously at a desk and another thoughtfully picking his teeth.

Simon burst in unceremoniously, with one quick glance backwards to make sure that Monty was following. The game had to be played fast—taken at a rush that would allow the enemy no time to ponder over details or gaze too closely at his own charming features. He fell breathlessly on the counter with his face a mask of agitation under the grime.

'Machen Sie schnell!' he panted. 'Ein Kind ist von einem Motorrad angefahren worden!'

The toothpicking officer might not have been sentimentally moved by the thought of a child being knocked down by a motor-bicycle, but he had a commendable devotion to duty.

He picked up his cap and came through a flap in the coun­ter, buttoning the neck of his tunic. Simon stood aside to let him pass. As the policeman stepped out of sight of his colleague in the office, Simon hit him twice on the back of the neck—two slaughterous ju-jitsu blows delivered with the edge of his hand. The policeman slumped forward soundlessly— straight into Monty's arms.

'Hold him up and talk to him!' rapped the Saint. 'You can be seen from outside. I'll just get the other one. . . .'

Monty propped the policeman against the wall and clung to him dazedly. He had never been called upon to do anything like that, even in his wildest dreams of buccaneering. But the daylight lamps in the vestibule were beating down on him like a battery of limes, and he knew that to anyone glancing in from outside he was as conspicuous as the central figure on a lighted stage. In a kind of stage fright he began to recite 'The Wreck of the Hesperus,' with violent gesticulations. . . .

Simon raced back into the office, and the clerkly constable looked up. The Saint gave him no more time to think than he had given the first man.

'Wollen Sie hinauskommen, bitte? Der andere Schupo bedarf Hilfe——'

The scribe rose from his chair grumbling. Simon caught him with the same blow as he came through the counter, and left him where he fell.

He went back and found Monty returning hoarsely to the first stanza, having lost his memory after three verses.

'And the skipper had taken his little daughter to bear