'Will you?'
No more than two seconds ticked away into eternity before he held out his hand.
Chapter XV
SPURS FOR ALGY
It was then ten o’clock.
'The boat should be coming in now,' said Patricia, and she and Algy went outside to look round.
They lay on the grass at the edge of the cliff, gazing out to sea. It was a cloudless night, and although there was as yet no moon, the stars shone brightly and covered the world with a dim silvery radiance. Starlight is the most deceptive and baffling of lights, but water is the easiest thing on earth to see over in the dark. The starlight etched in the tiny ripples over the sea, making it a wide, smooth expanse of glistening black and luminous gray; the island called the Old House sheered up from the calm flatness like some fabulous swarthy beast rising from the depths of the ocean.
'I can see the jolly old tub,' breathed Algy excitedly.
The girl's hand closed over his arm like a vise.
'The Saint was right,' she said.
But it was not so much seeing the ship as detecting a shadowy mast silhouetted against the sleek darkness of the waters. The hull could be picked out in a profile of blurred outline, where there showed no flicker of reflected luminosity from the facets of the wrinkled sea. The Tiger's bark must still have been six miles out from the coast, if not more.
Patricia watched it till her eyes ached.
'They must be coming in very slowly,' she said. 'They hardly seem to have moved in the last five minutes. Right under the Saint's bedroom window, they'd have to be careful.'
'Smugglers and pirates all up to date — what?' remarked Algy. 'Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of Bass....'
He was as eager as a schoolboy.
They returned to the Pill Box, and Patricia consulted her watch and made a rough calculation.
'They should be in about eleven, at this rate,' she reckoned. 'You'd better go home and slip on a bathing costume. And do you happen to have any firearms about the place?'
'I believe Uncle Hans stocks one.'
She smiled, and took the automatic from her pocket.
'He doesn't now — Simon relieved him of it last night.'
'Perhaps he's got another. I've an idea there used to be quite an armoury. I'll do my best.'
'How long will it take you?'
He thought.
'I'll be back at eleven.'
'Don't be later,' she ordered. 'It'd make it a longer swim if we went from the quay, but the tide's only just turned, so we can't get along the beach. We'll have to go over the cliff here — could you find enough strong rope?'
'I'll knock up a bloke in the village. He's got miles and miles of it — sells it to the stout mariners, y'know.'
She nodded.
'Go ahead, then, Algy. I'll expect you back sharp at eleven.'
'Oh, most frightfully rather!' promised Mr. Lomas-Coper. 'Cheer-screamingly-ho, wuff, wuff!'
He pranced off in a realistically Wodehousian manner, and the girl smiled. Algy was the goods, under his superficial fatuousness, and even if he were not noticeably blessed with superfluous quantities of gray matter he was at least a very willing horse. In the miasma of dark suspicion which lay over most of the population of Baycombe, it was a relief to find a man who was too foolish to be dangerous and simple enough to be loyal. She had always suspected that Algy cherished a fluffy and sentimental affection for her — he would call at the Manor on romantically moonlit nights and try to make her stroll in the garden with him, and, on these occasions, unless she exerted herself to keep up an uninterrupted flow of idle impersonal chatter, he was wont to become inarticulate and calf-eyed. Now, if never before, she felt grateful for his incoherent adoration,
But with the departure of the effervescent and devoted Algy, and the intervention of a blank reign of tenterhooks before the next move could be made and the next rush of action and danger could sweep her up in its course, the leering black devils that had been pushed back out of sight for the time being came round her again, grinning and gibing to torment her. She could think other man again, and with the clarity of a vision he seemed to stand before her. Her hands went out to him, and then he vanished, and at her feet,, in the floor of the Pill Box, opened the square trap-door that she had seen in that room of the Old House. She started back, covering her eyes, and dropped into a chair....
Resolutely she bent to the conquest of her mind. It was no use going to pieces — that would be fatal, when the reins of the adventure had come into her hands and victory or defeat must come under her leadership. To fail now would be an unforgivable treachery to the Saint: to succeed would be a last tribute to his memory.
And once again she achieved the mastery of herself. Taut and quivering like a bow drawn to the shaft in the hands of an archer, Patricia Holm sat in the Saint's chair with her head in her arms for a long time. The effort was as much physical as mental, and every muscle ached. There were hot unshed tears in her eyes, but they did not fall. 'Soldiers' wives!' he had said to her, last thing before they parted, and she knew that that was the only heroic game to play.
She lost track of time. She must have sunk into a kind of trance, perhaps from sheer nervous weariness, for the sound of someone, tiptoeing about the room roused her with a jar, and it seemed as if she had slept.
It was Orace, clad in an amazingly striped swimming suit, with a broad leather belt about his waist. From the belt his mammoth revolver dangled by a length of stout cord.
'Ain't that thunderin' flop-ears come back yet?' he demanded scornfully, seeing that the girl was awake. 'Well 'ave ta go wivaht 'im — I spect 'e's lorst 'is bedsocks an' carn't find the 'otwaterbol. I'm orl ready when yer sy 'Go,' miss.'
She was stunned to find that it was ten past eleven.
'Go and have another look,' she said. 'Go a little way down the hill and see if he's coming.'
Oraee went, as though he thought it was a waste of energy.
Patricia went out and looked down from the cliff edge again. Her calculation had been a good one. The tip of the moon had just peeped up over the rim of the sea, and that made the visibility an infinitesimal fraction of a candlepower better. In an hour or two there would be as much light as they wanted, and probably rather more. And the Tiger's motor ship was riding right under her eyes, quite easy to see now, about three cables' lengths off the island. Two black midgets, which she recognized as the ship's boats, were sculling toward the Old House; she could hear, very faintly, the almost imperceptible rattle of a smooth-running donkey engine. It was not for some time after that she observed a third boat cruising diagonally across the water toward the big ship. From its course she knew that it must have come from the direction of the quay.
Was that Carn, possibly supported by other detectives, ferrying out to catch the Tiger? If so, she was too late, and the law would have to deal with the Tiger after its own protracted and quibbling fashion.... But would Carn have been so foolish as to imagine that he could approach the Tiger like that without being spotted by the lookout on board? She knew that detectives were popularly judged by the standards of fiction, according to which all police officials have big feet and small intelligence, but she could hardly believe that even the flat-footed kind of oaf depicted by the novelist could be such a flabbergasting imbecile.
Suddenly she saw the solution. The Tiger was in Baycombe, but with the removal of his gold the reason for his stay was also taken away. That boat must have been sent over to fetch him. The Tiger was even then being rowed out to his ship — the ship they were to capture.
Patricia drew a deep breath. Things were clearing up. All the widespread threads of the tangled web of mystery and terror that had cast its shadow so unexpectedly over her life and her home had been obligingly gathered up and dumped down in the few hundred square yards of shining water below. The gold was there; the
