16 The Saint Overboard

outlandish strong-room; and down there must lie the stupendous booty for which so much had been risked and suffered—for which three men had already set out on a quest from which they never returned, for which Wes­ley Yule had gone down into the silence and died without know­ing why, for which Loretta and himself had stood under the sentence of death and more than death. Having fought his way to it so far, at such a cost, it was almost as much as he could do to hold himself back from the last step.

And then he realised that the step could wait. The murky smokiness under his feet was settling down, and he could see Vogel's helmet gleaming below him. The boulder which had just been lifted away was protection enough for the treasure. There would be no more doors to open. . . .

A vague bulk swaying into the margins of his vision made him turn with a start. The grab had released the boulder and gone up, and now it was descending again with a stack of bullion cases clutched in its giant grip.

'Steady!' snapped the Saint into his telephone, and heaved himself unwieldily towards it.

The descent stopped; and he got his hands to the load and pushed it towards the hole. It was hard work against the resist­ance of the water, and he needed all his strength. At last it was in position, and he ventured to give the order for it to go on.

'Lower slowly.'

The grab descended again, while he strained against it—the Falkenberg was not quite vertically overhead, and the five or six feet which the load had to be held out seemed like a hundred yards. He kept his weight thrusting against it till it was below the lip of the hole, and presently Vogel gave the order to stop. Simon recovered his balance with an effort. He could feel a pric­kle of sweat breaking out over his body, and his vision seemed to have become obscured. He realised that a film of steam had con­densed inside the glass panel of his helmet; and he opened the air cock on the left of his helmet and sucked in a mouthful of water, blowing it out over the glass as Ivaloff had told him to do that afternoon. It ran down into the collar of the dress, and he could see better.

The claw opened when Vogel gave the word, and presently came up again empty. Simon helped it over the edge of the hole and let it go by. He tried to estimate how much had gone down on its first voyage. Half a million? A million? It was difficult to calculate, but even the roughest guess staggered the imagination. It is one thing to talk airily in such astronomical figures; it is something else again to see them made concrete and tangible, to push and toil against a load of solid wealth which even a million­aire himself might never see. It dawned upon the Saint that he had always been too modest in his ambitions. With all his fame and success, with all the amazing coups which he had engineered and seen blazoned across the front pages of the world's press, he had never touched anything that was not beggared by this prodi­gious plunder of which the annals of loot might never see the like again.

But he could judge time better than he could judge the value of bar gold. About four minutes, he concluded, was all that went by between the time when the grab vanished empty out of the light and the time when it came sinking down again with the second load. Therefore it would be wise to prepare the setting for the last scene at once.

Again he toiled and struggled to steer the laden grab over the hole. But this time, as soon as it had gone below his reach, he groped round for Vogel's life-line and drew down a fathom of slack from the hands that held it up on the deck.

Then he took the keen heavy-bladed diver's knife out of its sheath on his belt.

He knew exactly what he was doing; but he was without pity. He thought of Professor Yule, with the winch inactive and the oxygen failing, waiting for death in the grey-green darkness of the Hurd Deep, while his voice spoke through the loud speaker in the blessed light and air without fear. He remembered himself standing in the wreck of the Chalfont Castle, waiting with a cold and cynical detachment for the monotonous chuffing of the air driving into his helmet to give place to the last silence in which death would come. He remembered Loretta, and the price for which he had done Vogel's work—a price which she had chosen, he knew now, a different way to pay. And he was without pity. In his own way, in all his buccaneering, he had been just; and it seemed to him that this was justice.

He began to cut through the fibres of Vogel's life-line.

Load after load of gold came down, and he had to put his knife away while he fought it over to the hold and held it clear while it went down to Vogel; but in the four-minute intervals between those spasms of back-breaking labour he sawed away at the tough manila with his heart cold and passionless as iron. He cut through Vogel's life-line until only the telephone wires were left intact. Then he cut through his own line till it only hung together by the same slender link. When he had finished, either line could be severed completely with one powerful slash of the knife-blade. It had to be done that way; because while the loud speaker would not