reason why his left forearm must have been touched? It was a wildly fantastic hope, an improbable possibility. And yet . . . such unlikely things had happened before, and their not wholly improbable possibility was part of the inspiration behind the more unconventional items of his armoury. It might seem incredible that anyone who knew anything of him could fail to credit him with having something up his sleeve in any emergency; and yet . . . Smoking his cigarette in long tranquil inhalations, he contrived to press his left forearm unobtrusively against his thigh; and what he felt put the dawn of a grim and far-fetched buoyancy into his heart.
Quincey got up and pressed his face against one of the port-holes.
'It's about time for you to be goin',' he said unemotionally.
He hauled out a heavy iron weight from under the bunk, and bent a short length of rope to a ring set in it. The other end of the rope he knotted to the cords that bound the Saint's ankles. Then he tore a strip of canvas from the sack which he had been sitting on, and stood waiting with it.
'Finish that cigarette,' he said.
Simon drew a last leisured puff, and dropped it on the floor. He looked Quincey in the eyes.
'I hope you'll ask for your last breakfast, on the day they hang you for this,' he said.
'I'll do that for you,' said Quincey, knotting the canvas across his mouth in a rough but effective gag. 'When they hang me. Stand up.'
He pulled the Saint across his shoulder in a fireman's lift, picking up the weight in his left hand, and moved slowly across to the narrow steep companion which led up from the cabin. Mounting the steps awkwardly under his burden, he lifted the hatch with his head and climbed up till he could roll the Saint off on to the deck.
The craft was a small and shabby single-cabin motor boat.
A man muffled up in a dark overcoat, with a peaked cap pulled down over his eyes until it almost met the top of his turned-up collar, who was apparently the only other member of the crew, stood at the wheel beside the hatch; but he did not look round. Simon wondered if it was Mr. Enderby. The numbers of the gang who actually worked in direct contact with the High Fence would certainly be kept down to the irreducible minimum consistent with adequate functioning, and it might well be that by this time he knew all of them. It was not a racket which called for a large staff, given the original idea and the ingenious leader. His one regret was that he had not been able to make the acquaintance of that elusive quantity: it seemed a ridiculously commonplace problem to take out unanswered into eternity, after solving so many mysteries.
Quincey stepped out over him, picked up the weight again, and rolled him like a barrel towards the stern. As he turned over, the Saint saw the rusty counter of a tramp moored in midstream swing by over his head, punctured with an occasional yellow-lighted port. Over on the Surrey side, a freighter was discharging cargo in a floodlit splash of garish flarelight. He heard the rattle and clank of the tackle, the chuffing of steam winches, the intermittent rise of voices across the water. A tug hooted mournfully, feeling its way across the stream.
He lay on the very edge of the counter, with the wake churning and hissing under his side. Quincey bent over him.
'So long, Saint,' he said, without vindictiveness; and pushed outwards.
IX Simon stocked his lungs to the last cubic millimeter of their capacity, and tensed his muscles involuntarily as he went down. He had a last flash of Quincey's tough freckled face peering after him; and then the black waters closed over his head. The iron weight jerked at his ankles, and he went rolling over and upright into the cold crushing darkness.
Even as he struck the water he was wrenching his wrists round to seize the uttermost fraction of slack from the cords that bound them. The horror of that helpless plunging down to death, roped hand and foot and ballasted with fifty pounds of iron, was a nightmare that he remembered for the rest of his life; but it is a curious fact that while it lasted his mind was uncannily insulated from it. Perhaps he knew that to have let himself realise it fully, to have allowed his thoughts to dwell for any length of time on the stark hopelessness of his position, would have led inevitably to panic.
His mind held with a terrible intensity of concentration on nothing but the essentials of what he had to do. With his hand twisted round till the cords cut into his flesh, he could get the fingers of his right hand a little way up his left sleeve; and under their tips he could feel the carved shape of something that lay just above his left wrist. That was the one slender link that he had with life, the unconventional item of his armoury which the search that must have been made of his clothes had miraculously overlooked: the thin sharp ivory-hilted knife which he carried in a sheath strapped to his forearm, which had saved him from certain death before and might save him again. Somehow, slowly, clumsily, with infinite patience and agonising caution, he had to work it out and get it in his hand-moving it in split shavings of an inch, lest it should come loose too quickly and slip out of his grasp to lose itself in the black mud of the river bed, and yet not taking so long to shift it that his fingers would go numb and out of control from the cutting off of the circulation by the tightening ropes. His flesh crawled in the grip of that frightful restraint, and his forehead prickled as if the sweat was trying to break out on it even under the cold clutch of the water that was pressing in at his eardrums. He could feel his heart thudding hollowly in the aching tension of his chest, and a deadly blackness seemed to be swelling up in his brain and trying to overwhelm him in a burst of merciful unconsciousness: every nerve in his body shrieked its protest against the inhuman discipline, cried out for release, for action, for the frantic futile struggle that would anaesthetise the anguish just as surely as it would hasten on the end-for any relief and outlet, however suicidal, that would liberate them from the frightful tyranny of his will.
Perhaps it lasted for three minutes, from beginning to end, that nightmare eternity in which he was anchored to the bottom of the Thames, juggling finickily for life itself. If he had not been a trained underwater swimmer, he could never have survived it at all. There was a time when the impulse to let out his precious breath in a sob of sheer despair was almost more than flesh and blood could resist; but his self-control was like iron.
He won out, somehow. Trickling the air from his lungs in jealously niggard rations that were just sufficient to ease the strain on his chest, he worked the hilt of the knife up with his finger and thumb until he could get another finger on it ... and another . . . and another . . . until the full haft was clutched in a hand which by that time had practically gone dead. But he was just able to hold it. He forced himself down, bending his knees and reaching forward, until his numbed fingers could feel the taut roughness of the rope by which he was held down to the weight. And then, giving way for the first time in that ghastly ordeal, he slashed at it wildly- slashed again and again, even when his knife met no resistance and he felt himself leaping up through the reluctant waters to the blessed air above....
For a long while he lay floating on the stream, with only his face above the surface, balancing himself with slight movements of his legs and arms, sawing in an ecstasy of leisure through the other ropes on his wrists and ankles, and drinking in the unforgettable glory of the night. Afterwards, he could never remember those moments clearly: they were a space out of his life that was cut off from everything in the past and everything in the future,
