The dap of thunder that started from that cataclysmic disruption rolled against Simon's eardrums a split second later.
He caught Patricia's hand and dragged her hastily up the sloping beach to where a fringe of palms and a wall of pinkish stone bordered the lawn. She felt herself lifted effortlessly through the air for an instant, and then he was crouching beside her under the shelter of the wall. For a fleeting indefinable lull, the world seemed to stand still. On nearby Collins Avenue, automobiles had stopped while their drivers stared curiously out to sea. The breeze had gone rustling away across the flats of Florida, but the air was filled with a new and more frightening roar.
'What is it?' she said.
'A small tidal wave from the explosion. Hold everything,' he said, and then it hit.
The piled-up crest of white hissed deliriously as it drove up the beach. It smashed against the sloping sand, gained height as it ploughed on, and broke in one giant comber against the wall. Simon held her as the water fell on them like an avalanche. There was a moment of cold crushing confusion; and then the flood was flattened out and harmless, receding down the beach, leaving no mark except a line of rubble on the lawn.
'And there goes that thousand-dollar Schiaparelli model,' said the Saint, surveying the sodden wreckage of her dress as they stood up. 'Just another casualty to this blitzkrieg business . . '
His eyes ambled grimly over the scene, watching a gamboling rush of figures towards the shore. The nearer sounds of moving traffic churned into a pulsing immobility, and a long distance away some female screamed stupidly . . . And then he looked down directly at his feet, and stood frozen in half incredulous rigidity.
Not more than a yard from him, a round-faced youth stared up at him unseeingly from the ground. Clad in a blue seaman's uniform, he lay on his back in the sprawled limpness of death. The wave that had hurled him in had left a small pile of seaweed against one twisted arm. The wrist of that arm was tangled in the looped cords of an ordinary lifebelt. Simon leaned down and looked closer. The moonlight was strong enough for him to read the ship's name that was painted on the belt, and as he read it his blood turned cold . . .
It seemed to him that he stared at it for a space of crawling minutes, while the letters charred themselves blackly into his brain. And yet with another unshaken sense he knew that it was actually no more than a few seconds by the clock before he was able to spur himself out of the trance of eerie and unbelieving dread that spelled from that simple name.
When he spoke, his voice was almost abnormally quiet and even. There was nothing but the steely fierceness of his grip on Patricia's arm to hint at the chaos of fantastic doubts and questions that were screaming through his brain.
'Give me a hand, darling, he said. 'I want to get him into the house before anyone else sees him.''
There was something in his voice that she knew him too well to question. Obediently but uncomprehending, she bent over and tugged at the sailor's feet while Simon put hands under his shoulders. The man was heavy with water-logged flaccidness.
They were halfway across the lawn with their burden when a shadow moved on the porch of the guest house. Simon let go his end of the load abruptly, and Patricia hurriedly followed his example. The shadow detached itself from the house and stealthily drew nearer.
The moonlight shed itself with pardonable coyness over a pair of white flannels with inch wide stripes surmounted by a five-coloured blazer which might have been tailored for Man Mountain Dean. Above the blazer, and peering at the Saint, was the kind of face which unscientific mothers used to describe when trying to frighten their recalcitrant young.
'Is dat you, boss?' asked the face.
It had a voice that was slightly reminiscent of a klaxon with laryngitis, but at that moment Simon found it almost melodious. The face from which it issued, instead of giving him heart failure, seemed like a thing of beauty. From long familiarity with its abstruse code of expressions, he perceived that the deep furrows in the place where Nature had neglected to put a brow, far from foreboding a homicidal attack, were indicative of anxiety.
'Yes, Hoppy,' he said in quick relief. 'This is us. Don't stand there gawping. Come and help.'
Hoppy Uniatz lumbered forward with the gait of a happy bear. It was not his role to criticise or argue. His was the part of blind and joyful obedience. To him, the Saint was a man who worked strange wonders, who plotted gigantic schemes which did into beautiful fruition with supernatural simplicity, who moved with a godlike nonchalance in those labyrinths of thought and cerebration which to Mr. Uniatz were indistinguishable from the paths of purgatory. Thought, to Hoppy Uniatz was a process involving acute agony in the upper part of the head; and life had really only become worth living to him on that blissful day when he had discovered that the Saint was quite capable of doing all the thinking for both of them. From that moment he had become an uninvited but irremovable attachment, hitching his wagon complacently to that lucky star.
He looked down admiringly at the body on the ground 'Chees, boss,' he got out after a time. 'I hear de bang when you boin him, but I can't figger out what it is. De nerz almost knocks me off de porch. What new kinda cannon is dat?
'There are times, Hoppy,' said the Saint, 'when I fed that you and I should get married. As it happens, it was quite a big kind of cannon; only it wasn't mine. Now help me get this stiff inside. Take him into my room and strip the uniform off him, and make sure that none of the servants see you.'
These were orders of a type that Hoppy could understand. They dealt with simple, concrete things in a manner to which he was by no means unaccustomed. Without further conversation, he picked the youth up in his arms and returned rapidly into the shadows. The lifebelt still dangled from the corpse's wrist.
Simon turned back to Patricia. She was watching him with a quiet intentness.
I expect we could do with a drink,' he said.
'I could.'.
'You know what happened?'
'I'm getting an idea.
The lean planes of his face were picked out vividly for a moment as he lighted a cigarette.
'That ship was torpedoed,' he said. 'And you saw the lifebelt?'
'I only read part of it,' she said. 'But I saw the letters HMS.'
'That was enough,' he said flatly. 'As a matter of fact, it was HMS Triton. And as you know, that's a British submarine.'
She said shakily: 'It can't be true-'
'We've got to find out.' His face was lighted again in the ripening glow of his cigarette. 'I'm going to borrow Gilbeck's speedboat and take a trip out to sea and find out if there's anything else to pick up where the wreck happened. D'you want to see if you can locate Peter while I get it warmed up? He should have got back by now.'
There was no need for her to answer. He watched her go, and turned in the direction of the private dock. As he walked, he looked out over the ocean again. Close down to the horizon he saw a single light, that moved slowly southwards and then vanished.
Lawrence Gilbeck's twin-screw speedboat shuddered protestingly as the Saint drove her wide open to the top of an inbound comber. For a moment she hung on the crest with both whirling propellers free; then they clutched the water again, and she dived into the trough like a toboggan racing down a bank of smooth ice. Curtains of spray leapt six feet into the air on each side of her as she settled down to a steady forty knots. The name painted on her counter said Meteor, and Simon had to admit that she could live up to it From his place on the other side of the boat, crouching behind the slope of the forward windshield, Peter Quentin spoke across Patricia.
'It'll be a great comfort to all the invalids who've come south for the winter,' he said, 'to know that you're here.'
He spoke in a tone of detached resignation, like a martyr who has made up his mind to die bravely so long ago that the tedious details of his execution have become merely an inevitable anticlimax. He hunched his prizefighter's shoulders up around his ears and crinkled his pleasantly pugnacious features in an attempt to penetrate the darkness ahead.
Simon flicked his cigarette-end to leeward, and watched its red spark snap back far beyond the stem in the passing rush of wind.
'After all,' he said, 'the Gilbecks did leave word for us to make ourselves at home. Surely they couldn't object to our taking this old tub out for a spin. She was sitting in the boat-house just rusting away.'
'Their Scotch wasn't rusting away,' Peter remarked, operating skilfully on the bottle clamped between his
