vigilance of his companions had never relaxed, and if he made the slightest threatening move it would hardly inconvenience them at all to shoot him where he sat and fling his body out of the car without slackening speed.
They could have done that anyhow, might even be preparing to do it. He did not know why he had assumed that he was being taken to a definite place of execution, to be slain there according to a crude gangland ritual; but it was on that expectation that he had based his only hopes of escape.
He stole a glance at Maxie. The gunman was lounging nonchalantly in his corner, the backward tilt of his hat serving to emphasize the squat impassivity of his features, twirling an unlighted cigar in one side of his thick mouth. To say that he was totally unimpressed by the enormity of the thing he was there to do would convey only the surface of his attitude. He was, if anything, rather bored.
Simon fought to maintain his outward calm. The length of the journey, the forced inaction under the strain of such a deadly suspense, was slowly wearing down his nerves; but at all costs he had to remain master of himself. His chance would be thin enough even if it ever came, he knew; and the faintest twitch of panic, the very slightest disordering of the swift, cold precision and coordination of brain and arm, would eliminate that chance to vanishing point. And all the time another aloof and wholly dissociated threat in his mind, akin to the phlegmatic detachment of a scientist who notes his own symptoms on his deathbed, was weaving the fact that Maxie might still go on talking to a man whom he believed to be helpless. ...
The Saint cleared his throat and tried to resume the conversation in the same tone of innocent puzzlement as before —as if it had never been broken off. He had to go on trying to learn those things which he might never be able to turn to advantage, had to do something to occupy his mind and ease the strain on his aching self-control.
'How do you mean, the Big Fellow came along?' he said. 'If he wasn't even in the racket, if you'd never heard of him before and haven't even seen him yet—how did you know you could trust him? How did you know he'd be any use to you?'
'How did we know he'd be any use to us? Say, he showed us. Ya can't get around facts. He had it all worked out.'
'Yes, I know; but he must have started somewhere. How did he get in touch with you? What was the first you heard of him?'
Maxie grunted and peered ahead through the windshield.
'I guess you'll have to figure that out yourself—you'll have plenty of time,' he said; and Simon looked out and saw that the car was slowing down.
Chapter 7
At first the Saint could see nothing but a stretch of deserted highway that seemed to reach for endless miles into the distance; and then the driver spun the wheel sharply to the right, and the car bounced off the road into a narrow lane.
Simon was not surprised that he had failed to spot it. The sweeping branches of trees almost met over the bumpy disused bypath: their foliage scraped the top of the sedan and brushed with a slithering sound against the sides as they went down the side road at a considerably reduced speed. Before they had gone five yards they were effectively screened from the view of any car that might be travelling along the main thoroughfare.
With both hands clinging to the wheel, which leapt and shuddered in his grasp like a live thing, the driver headed deeper and deeper along the narrow track. If the combined bulks of Joe and Maxie had not formed a system of human wedges pinning him tightly to the cushions, the Saint would have been bumped clear of the seat each time the tires caromed off the boulders that studded the roadbed.
Simon Templar was aware of the quickened beating of his heart. There was a dryness in his throat and a vague feeling of constriction about his chest that made him breathe a little deeper than normally; but the breathing was slow, steady, and deliberate, not the quick, shallow gasps of fear. The tension of his nerves had passed the vibrating point—they were strung down to a terrific immobility that was as impermanent as the stillness of a compressed spring. The waiting and suspense was over; now there was nothing but the end of the ride to see, and a chance for life to be taken if fate offered it. And if the chance did not offer, that was the end of adventures.
The lane was growing even narrower as they went on; the trees and bushes that lined its sides closed in upon them. Plainly it had been derelict for years: the march of macadamized arteries had swept by and left it for no other service but for such journeys as they were on, and its destination, if it had ever had one, had long since found other and faster communications with the outside world. At last, when the streamlined body of the sedan could make no further headway, the driver jammed
