The Saint in Miami

And then it began to be transmuted into something totally different, something too exquisite and precious that the blood in his veins seemed to turn into liquid music.

'I told you he was a bastard,' said Gallipolis philosophi­cally. 'What do we do now?'

Simon slid in behind the wheel. His eyes were sparkling.

'We take a March buggy anyhow.' He turned to Hoppy. 'You get out and stay here by the porch. I'm going to move on down and start a little work on the garage door. I don't know how many men there are in that bungalow, but I don't expect there are more than two. They'll come out in a hurry when they hear me breaking in the lock. You take care of them.'

'Do I give 'em de woiks?' asked Mr Uniatz hopefully.

'No,' said the Saint. 'No shooting. We don't want to wake up the rest of the town. Don't be any rougher than you have to.'

'Okay, boss.'

Mr Uniatz vanished into the shadowy mist; and Simon started the car and turned it through an arc that ended close to the garage with the headlights flooding the corrugated-iron door. Simon got out and examined the fastenings.

And the rich beauty of the situation continued to percolate through his system with the spreading recalescence of a flagon of mulled ale. He had no belief that this oil prospecting outfit had any connection with March's more nefarious activities-otherwise the manager would certainly have been a much smoother customer-but the coincidence of its ownership lent a riper zest to what had to be done anyway. Even with everything else that was on his mind, the Saint's irrepressible sense of humour savoured the situation with an epicurean and unhallowed glee. To set out on that desperate sortie in a marsh buggy that belonged to Randolph March had a poetic perfection about it that no connoisseur of the sublimely ridiculous could resist . . .

Nor did there seem to be any great obstacle in the way. The door was secured with a padlock that could have moored a battleship; but the hasp and staple through which it had to function, as in most cases of that kind, were not of the same stuff. Simon went back to the Cadillac and found the jack handle. He slipped one end of it under the lock and levered skilfully. With a mild crash, one half of the rig tore com­pletely out of its attachments.

In the bungalow, an apoplectic voice yowled: 'What the hell do you think you're doing?'

A light came on, and the irate manager burst from his dwelling, pounded across the porch, and charged valiantly towards the depredator who was destroying his garage.

He was a brave man, and he had a shotgun, and moreover he considered himself quite athletic. It therefore filled him with some confusion to find his avenging rush checked by a single arm that appeared from nowhere and encircled his body, clamping the shotgun against his own chest. The man­ager struggled frenziedly, but the arm seemed to have the im­personal solidity of a tree that had suddenly grown round him. His fluent cursing made up for his physical restriction for a couple of brief moments, until a large portion of the road seemed to heave up in the most unfriendly manner to smack him on the back of the head and turn the whole of his brain into a single shooting star that floated off like a dying rocket into a dark void . . .

Mr Uniatz ambled up with the man over his shoulder as Simon finished sliding back the doors.

'Boss, dis must be de only one.'

'Tie him up and gag him,' said the Saint.

With the aid of the headlights which now shone into the garage he was inspecting the nearest of the fabulous machines that were stabled there.

It looked like an automobile engineer's nightmare, but there was no doubt that it also looked highly utilitarian. For coachwork, a boatlike body, blunt at both ends, hung be­tween the four gigantic wheels. There was no luxurious upholstery, but it had an encouraging air of being ready to go places. The huge balloon tyres would serve the dual purpose of flattening out to lay their own road through mud and sand and buoying up the contraption when it was in the water, while in its aquatic manoeuvres the deep flanges on the rear tyres would continue to propel it after a fashion by turning them into a pair of extempore paddle wheels. He recognised the steering controls as being of the tractor type, and hoped that he had not forgotten a lesson in their manipulation which he had once been given by a friendly farmer.

He found a yardstick on the wall and measured the gaso­line in the tank. It was nearly full, but he located an extra five-gallon can and put it in the back. He found a switch that kindled the two powerful high-slung headlights. He squeezed into the driving seat, and the starter unhesitatingly twisted the engine into a clattering roar of life. He took hold of the two clutch levers, put his feet on the two brake pedals, and gingerly worked the thing out of the garage.

He stopped it again in the road, and drove the Cadillac into the space that it left vacant. Hoppy by that time had made a compact bundle of the unconscious manager, which under Simon's direction he jammed into the back of the car. They closed the garage doors and returned to the marsh buggy, in which Gallipolis and Charlie Halwuk were already installing themselves.

The Indian appeared to be quite unconcerned by the short spell of violence which he had witnessed.

'Too much plenty can happen,' he said stoically, as Simon and Hoppy got in. 'Better take food.'

The Saint turned, settling beside him.

'I thought we'd be there by morning.'

'Maybe morning,' said Charlie Halwuk noncommittally. 'Maybe night Plenty damn big country. Plenty too much trouble maybe. Maybe two-three day.'

'Maybe plenty damn glad I bring some shine,' contributed Gallipolis.

Simon lighted a cigarette. The check frayed at the tightly drawn fibres of his nerves, but he could hardly dispute its sober sanity.

'Where can we get food at this time of night?' he queried steadily.

'There's a general store a short way down the road,' said Gallipolis. 'Of course, they don't keep open all night, but I don't suppose that will bother you.'

'We'll open it.'

The marsh buggy started off again, and warped itself into the main street like some grotesque clumsy insect picking its course with great fiery eyes.

Simon stopped a short distance from the store that Gallipo­lis indicated, and switched out the lights. He moved through the mist like a wraith to the back of the building, and went to work on a flimsy window more stealthily than he had worked on the garage door. It took him less than two minutes to mas­ter it; and for the next ten minutes he was tracking down canned goods, an opener, a coffee pot, and a frying pan, and passing them out for Hoppy Uniatz to porter back to the buggy. He pinned two ten-dollar bills to the broken window with an ice pick, selected two bottles of Scotch and a bottle of brandy to complete the provisioning, and prudently took those to the buggy himself.

They rolled westwards, scattering wisps of fog.

Driving the buggy was not so easy as driving a car. The lever-and-pedal system necessitated by the obvious impossi­bility of applying conventional steering to wheels of that size was tricky to handle. To make a left-hand turn, for instance, you fed more power to the right-hand wheels, and discon­nected and braked the left-hand ones, the sharpness of the turn being governed by the relative violence of both manipu­lations, up to the point where the buggy would practically whip round on its own axis. Keeping a straight course at any speed was much harder to do. The Saint was able to nurse it up to about thirty miles an hour, and found the pace more hair-raising than any driving he could ever remember having done.

A warm breeze laden with dampness beat across his face and ruffled his hair. In addition to the mechanical difficulties of control, he had to follow the road by clairvoyance rather than sight, for both sides were swallowed up in the mist. It seemed endless hours, endless leagues more than the esti­mated thirty miles on the map, before Charlie Halwuk touched his shoulder with an arresting hand and said: 'Turn off road here.'

Simon eased off the throttle and swung to the right. There was a fleeting moment of instinctive panic when the buggy nosed over the graded banking and felt as if it was rolling off the edge of the world. Then the headlights picked up a nar­row unrailed bridge of logs which led across the broad ditch.

This was your idea,' Simon told Charlie and Gallipolis im­partially, and set his teeth as he sent their crazy chariot bucketing down.

The lights dipped woozily and rose slowly again towards the sky. When they levelled again, the way was barred with a solid curtain of sickly green that glittered with an unearthly luminescence. It took him some moments