"Oi beg your pardon, sir. ..."
"That," murmured the Saint affably, "is O.K. by me."
He replaced the little book in his pocket with a silent prayer of thanksgiving, while the policeman squared his shoulders importantly and began to disperse the crowd; and the dispersal was still proceeding when the Saint went into the telephone booth.
He should have been feeling exultant, for everything should have been plain sailing now. . . . And yet he wasn't. As he took up the receiver he remembered the veiled sneer that he had seen—or imagined—in the face of Marius. And it haunted him. He had had a queer intuition then that the giant had foreseen something that the Saint had not for seen; and now that intuition was even stronger. Could it be that Marius was expecting the prince, or some ally, due to arrive about that time, who might take the others by surprise while the Saint was away? Or might the household staff be larger than the Saint had thought, and might there be the means of a rescue still within the building? Or what? . . . "I'm growing nerves," thought the Saint, and cursed all intuitions categorically.
And he had been listening for some time before he realized that the receiver was absolutely silent— there was none of the gentle crackling undertone that ordinarily sounds in a telephone receiver. . . .
"Gettin' on all roight, sir?"
The crowd had gone, and the policeman had returned. Simon thrust the reciever into his hand.
"Will you carry on?" he said. "The line seems to have gone dead. If you get a reply, ask for Victoria six eight two seven. And tell them to make it snappy. I'm going to telegraph."
"There's noo telegraph, sir."
"What's that?"
"There's noo telegraph, sir."
"Then how do they send and receive telegrams? or don't they?"
"They doo coom through on the telephoon, sir, from Saxmundham." The constable jiggered the receiver hook. "And the loine doo seem to be dead, sir," he added helpfully.
Simon took the receiver from him again.
"What about the station?" he snapped. "There must be a telephone there."
The policeman scratched his head.
"I suppose there is, sir. . . . But, now Oi coom to think of it, Oi did 'ear earlier in the day that the telephoon loine was down somewhere. One o' they charrybangs run into a poost on Saturday noight ——"
He stopped, appalled, seeing the blaze in the Saint's eyes.
Then, very carefully, Simon put down the receiver. He had gone white to the lips, and the twist of those lips was not pleasant to see.
"My God in heaven!" said the Saint huskily. "Then there's all hell let loose tonight!"
3
"IS IT AS BAD as that, sir?" inquired the constable weakly; and Simon swung round on him like a tiger. "You blistered boob!" he snarled. "D'you think this is my idea of being comic?"
And then he checked himself. That sort of thing, wouldn't do any good.
But he saw it all now. The first dim inkling had come to him when Marius had hurled that telephone at him in the house; and now the proof and vindication was staring him in the face in all its hideous nakedness. The telegraph post had been knocked down on Saturday night; being an unimportant line, nothing would be done to it before Monday; and Marius had known all about it. Marius's own line must have followed a different route, perhaps joining the other at a point beyond the scene of the accident. . . .
Grimly, gratingly, the Saint bedded down the facts in separate compartments of his brain, while he schooled himself to a relentless calm. And presently he turned again to the policeman.
"Where's the station?" he asked. "They must have an independent telegraph there.''
"The station, sir? That'll be a little way oover the bridge. But you woon't foind anyone there at this toime, sir ——"
"We don't want anyone," said the Saint. "Come on!"
He had mastered himself again completely, and he felt that nothing else that might happen before the dawn could possibly shake him from the glacial discipline that he had locked upon his passion. And, with the same frozen restraint of emotion, he understood that the trip to the station was probably a waste of time; but it had to be tried. . . .
The crowd of villagers was still gathered outside the shop, and the Saint strode through them with out looking to the right or left. And he remembered what he had read about the place before he came there—its reputed population of 3,128, its pleasure grounds, its attractions as a watering-place—and at that moment he would cheerfully have murdered the author of that criminal agglomeration of troutspawn and frogbladder. For any glories that Saltham might once have claimed had long since departed from it: it was now nothing but a forgotten seaside village, shorn of the most elementary amenities of civilization. And yet, unless a miracle happened, history would remember it as history remembers Serajevo. . . .
The policeman walked beside him; but Simon did not talk. Beneath that smooth crust of icy calm a raging wrathlike white-hot lava seethed through the Saint's heart. And while he could have raged, he could as well have wept. For he was seeing all that Hermann's mission would mean if it succeeded, and that vision was a vision of the ruin of all that the Saint had sworn to do. And he thought of the waste—of the agony and blood and tears, of the squandered lives, of the world's new hopes crushed down into the mud, and again of the faith in which Norman Kent had died. . . . And something in the thought of that last superb spendthrift sacrifice choked the Saint's throat. For Norman was a link with the old careless days of debonair adventuring, and those days were very far away— the days when nothing had mattered but the fighting and the fun, the comradeship and the glamour and the high risk, the sufficiency of gay swashbuckling, the wine of battle and the fair full days of quiet. Those days had gone as if they had never been.
So the Saint came soberly to the station, and smashed another window for them to enter the station master's office.
There was certainly a telegraph, and for five minutes the Saint tried to get a response. But he was without hope.
And presently he turned away and put his head in his hands.
"It's no use," he said bitterly. "I suppose there isn't anyone listening at the other end."
The policeman made sympathetic noises.
"O' course, if you woon't tell me wot the trouble is ——"
"It wouldn't help you. But I can tell you that I've got to get through to Scotland Yard before six-thirty—well before. If I don't, it means— war."
The policeman goggled.
"Did you say war, sir?"
"I did. No more and no less. . . . Are there any fast cars in this blasted village?"
"Noo, sir—noon as Oi can think of. Noon wot you moight call farst."
"How far is it to Saxmundham?"
" 'Bout twelve moile, sir, Oi should say. Oi've got a map 'ere, if you'd loike me to look it up."
Simon did not answer; and the constable groped in a pocket of his tunic and spilled an assortment of grubby papers onto the table.
In the silence Simon heard the ticking of a clock, and he slewed round and located it on the wall behind him. The hour it indicated sank slowly into his brain, and again he calculated. Two hours for twelve miles. Easy enough—he could probably get hold of a lorry, or something else on four wheels with an engine, that would scrape through in an hour, and leave another hour to deal with the trouble he was sure to meet in Saxmundham. For the bluff that could be put over on a village cop wouldn't cut much ice with the bulls of a rising town. And suppose the lorry broke down and left them stranded on the road. . . . Two lorries, then. Roger would have to follow in the second in case of accidents.
The Saint stood up.
"Will you push off and try to find me a couple of cars?" he said. "Anything that'll go. I've got another man with me—I'll have to fetch him. I'll meet you. ..."