The Saint stumbled and caught his breath as a redhot anguish stabbed through him from the point of impact of that fearful blow; and at the same moment Joe's body kicked convulsively in his. grasp and became a dead weight. Simon's right arm was numb to his fingertips from the shock. He turned further, dragging Joe with him, and heard a dull bump as the dead man's automatic slipped from his nerveless fingers and fell to the ground, but he could not reach it. To have tried to do so, with one arm useless, would have meant letting go his only protection; and he knew he would never have had time to cover the distance and locate the fallen weapon in the dark. He looked up and saw Maxie's pitiless face, a white blotch in the faint light.
'You got two minutes to say your prayers, Saint,' Maxie grated, with the first trace of vindictiveness that he had shown. He tilted his head and spoke louder.
'Hi, Hunk, you damn fool! Where are ya?'
Then Simon remembered the driver of the car and knew that the chance which he thought he had seen was only a chimera, a last sadistic jest on the part of the fortune which had deserted him. Between them, the two men would get him easily. He couldn't watch both at once, or protect himself from the two of them together. One of them would outflank him, as simply as walking round a table, without risk and without effort; and that would be the finish.
The Saint did not pray. He had no deities to call on, except the primitive pagan gods of battle and sudden death who had carried him on a flood tide of favour into that blind alley and left him there to pay the last account alone. But he looked up at the dark sky and saw that the clouds had broken, and a star twinkled millions of miles aloft in the blue rift. A light breeze passed across the common, stirring the fresh scents of the night; and he knew that, whatever the reckoning might be, he would have asked for no other life.
'Hunk!' Maxie called again, raspingly.
He dared not turn his head for fear of taking his eyes off the Saint; but the Saint looked beyond him and saw a strange thing.
The driver was not probing into the vitals of the car, as he had been. He was not even approaching at a lumbering trot to throw his taciturn weight into the unequal scale. It took the Saint a second or two to discover where he was—a second or two longer to realize that the blurred form extended at full length beside the car was the driver, lying as if in sleep.
And then he saw something else—a slender, graceful figure that was coming up behind Maxie on soundless feet. And as he saw it, she spoke.
'The Big Fellow says wait a minute, Maxie.'
Maxie's eyes went wide in hurt surprise, and his jaw sagged foolishly. Only the aim of his automatic did not waver. It clung to its mark as if his brain stubbornly refused to accept the evidence of his ears; and his astounded gaze did not shift away from the Saint.
'Wha—whass that?' he got out.
'This is Fay,' said the girl.
Simon Templar opened his nostrils to a vast lung-easing breath. The cool sweet air of the unwalled fields went down into his lungs like ethereal nectar and sent the blood racing again along his stagnant veins. He lifted his head and looked up at the lone twinkling star in that slim gap in the black canopy of cloud, and over the abyss of a thousand million light-years the star seemed to wink at him. He was alive.
There are no words to describe what he felt at that moment. When a man has been down into the uttermost depths, when the shadow of the dark angel's wings has blotted out the last light and their cold breath has touched his brow, not in sudden accident or the anaesthetic heat of passion, but with a re-morseless deliberation that wrings the last dram of self-control from every second of hopeless knowledge, his return to life is beyond the reach of words. To say that the weight of all mortality is swept from his shoulders, that the snapping of the strain leaves every heroically disciplined nerve loose and inert like a broken thread, that the precious response of every living sense takes away his breath with its intolerably brilliant beauty, is to say nothing. He is like a man who has been blind from birth, to whom the gift of sight has been given in the middle of his life; but he is far more than that. He has been dumb and deaf, without taste or smell or hearing, without mind or movement; and all those things have been given to him at the same time.
As in a dream, the Saint heard Maxie's blank bewildered voice again.
'How did you get here?'
'I walked,' said the girl coldly.
