less than two inches.
'Tie up the girl,' he ordered in French; and the two nearest Sons of France grabbed Valerie by the arms.
Perhaps she was only acting. Or perhaps her nerve really broke then; perhaps her brain in the stupidity of terror had never quite grasped what the Saint had said while they were alone. But she fought wildly, crazily, even with her hands tied behind her back, bucking and staggering against them as they tried to drag her over to the iron rings in the wall, kicking out madly so that they cursed her until the third Son of France had to go over and help them. And that left only one on guard beside the Saint—the one who had slammed his fist into Simon's face only a little while before.
'You can't do this to me !' she was shrieking deliriously. 'You can't . . . you filthy brutes . . . you can't . . . !'
Perhaps she was only acting. But the shrill shaky intensity of her voice stabbed through the Saint's brain with a rending reminder of how real it might have been.
He had half turned to watch her; and as he stood still no one was paying much attention to him. But in that volcanic immobility his arms hardened like iron columns, strained across the fulcrum of his back like twisted bars of tempered steel. The muscles writhed and swelled over his back and shoulders, leapt up in knotted strands like leathery hawsers from his shoulders down to his raw and bleeding wrists; a convulsion of superhuman power swept over his torso like the shock of an earthquake. And the ropes that held his hands together, weakened by the loss of the strands that he had been able to rub away in the few minutes that had been given him, were not strong enough to stand against it. There was a faint snap as the fibres parted; and his arms sprang apart with the jerk of unleashed tension. He was free.
Free but unarmed—for the few instants in which an unarmed man might move.
The guard beside him must have sensed the eruption that had taken place at his elbow; or perhaps his ears caught the thin crack of separating cords—-too late. He began to turn; and that was his last conscious movement, the last flash of awareness in his little world.
He started to reach for the revolver in its holster on his hip. But another hand was there before his, a hand of lean sinewy fingers that whipped the weapon away from under his belated groping. An ear-splitting detonation crashed out between the cellar walls, and a shattering blow tore through his chest and gave him only one instant's anguish. . . .
Simon Templar turned square to the room as the man folded down to his feet with an odd slowness. The barrel of his revolver swerved over the others in a measured quadrant.
'Any of you can have what your friend got,' he said generously. 'You've only got to ask.'
None of them asked. For that brief precarious spell they were incapable of any movement. But he knew that every passing second was against him. He spoke to the girl, his voice razor edged and brittle.
'Valerie, come over here—behind me. And keep well out of the line of fire.'
She started towards him, staying close against the walls. He didn't watch her. His eyes were darting like wasps over the six men that he had to deal with, probing with nerve-racked alertness for the point where the fight would start. The three remaining members of the escort grouped fairly close together where they had been struggling with the girl. Bravache, further away, with a skeletal grin pinned and forgotten on his face. Colonel Marteau, white lipped and rigid. Luker, heavy and petrified, but with his brain still working behind unblinking eyes.
And in his mind the Saint did ruthless arithmetic. Six men. And unless he was holding a five-chambered gun he should have five shots left. Even if he could drop one man stone cold with every single shot, that would still leave one armed man against him at the end. Even if no other Son of France elsewhere in the building had heard his first shot and would be coming in at any moment to investigate . . . It couldn't be much longer now before other heads made the same calculation. Whatever happened, if they called for a showdown, he couldn't win. The only choice he had left was where he should place his shots—while he had
