The fat little man was wringing his hands.
"He can't still be there," he wailed. "He must have heard the alarm—"
"Suppose he got the wind up and fainted or something?" suggested the large young man in the striped pajamas helpfully.
Simon almost hit him.
"Do you know where there's a ladder, you amazing oaf?" he demanded.
The young man blinked at him dumbly. Nobody else answered. They all seemed to be in a fog.
Simon swung round to Patricia.
"Do what you can, darling," he said.
He turned away, and for a moment the others seemed to be held petrified.
"Stop him," bleated the little fat man suddenly. "For God's sake, stop him! It's suicide!"
"Hey!" bellowed the puce-faced militarist commandingly. "Comeback!"
The queenly woman screeched indistinguishably and collapsed again,
Simon Templar heard none of these things. He was halfway across the lawn by that time, racing grimly towards the house.
3
The heat from the hall struck him like a physical blow as he plunged through the front door; the air scorched his lungs like a gust from a red-hot oven. At the far end of the hall long sheets of flame were sweeping greedily up a huge pair of velvet curtains. Smaller flames were dancing over a rug and leaping with fiercer eagerness up the blackening banisters of a wide staircase. The paint on the broad beams crossing the high ceiling was bubbling and boiling under the heat, and occasionally small drops of it fell in a scalding rain to take hold of new sections of the floor.
The Saint hardly checked for an instant before he went on. He dodged across the hall like a flitting shadow and leapt up the stairs four at a time. Fire from the banisters snatched at him as he went up, stung his nostrils with the smell of his own scorching clothes.
On the upper landing the smoke was thicker. It made his eyes smart and filled his throat with coughing; his heart was hammering with a dull force that jarred his ribs; he felt an iron band tightening remorselessly around his temples. He stared blearily down the corridor which led in the direction he had to go. Halfway along it great gouts of flame were starting up from the floor boards, waving like monstrous flowers swaying in a blistering wind. It could only be a matter of seconds before the whole passage would plunge down into the incandescent inferno below.
The Saint went on.
It was not so much a deliberate effort as a yielding to instinctive momentum. He had no time to think about being heroic — or about anything else, for that matter. In that broiling nightmare a second's hesitation might have been fatal. But he had set out to do something, knowing what it might mean; and so long as there was any hope of doing it his only idea was to go on. He kept going with nothing to carry him on but the epic drive of a great heart that had never known what it was to turn back for the threat of danger.
He came out in a clear space on the other side of the flames, beating the sparks from his sleeves and trousers. Open doors and glimpses of disordered beds on either side of the passage showed where various rooms had been hastily vacated; but the door of the room at the very end was closed. He fell on the handle and turned it.
The door was locked.
He thundered on it with fists and feet.
"Kennet!" he shouted. "Kennet, wake up!"
His voice was a mere harsh croak that was lost in the hoarse roar of the fire. It brought no answer from behind the door.
He drew back across the corridor, braced himself momentarily and flung himself forward again. Hurled by the muscles of a trained athlete, his shoulder crashed into the door with all the shattering force of one hundred and seventy-five pounds of fighting weight behind it, in an impact that shook every bone in his body; but he might just as well have charged a steam roller. The floor might be cracking and crumbling under his feet, but that door was of tough old English oak seasoned by two hundred years of history and still untouched by the fire. It would have taken an axe or a sledge-hammer to break it down.
His eyes swept it desperately from top to bottom. And as he looked at it, two pink fingers of flame curled out from underneath it. The floor of the room was already taking fire.
But those little jagged fangs of flame meant that there was a small space between the bottom of the door and the floor boards. If he could only push the key through so that it fell on the floor inside he might be able to fish it out through the gap under the door. He whipped out his penknife and probed at the keyhole.
At the first attempt the blade slipped right through the hole without encountering any resistance. The Saint bent down and brought his eye close to the aperture. There was enough firelight inside the room for him to be able to see the whole outline of the keyhole. And there was no key in it.
For one dizzy second his brain whirled. And then his lips thinned out, and a red glint came into his eyes that owed nothing to the reflections of the fire.
Again he fought his way incredibly through the hellish barrier of flame that shut off the end of the corridor. The charred boards gave ominously under his feet, but he hardly noticed it. He had remembered noticing something through the suffocating murk on the landing. As he beat out his smouldering clothes again he located it — a huge medieval battle-axe suspended from two hooks on the wall at the top of the stairs. He measured the distance and jumped, snatching eagerly. The axe came away, bringing the two hooks with it, and a shower of plaster fell in his face and half blinded him.
That shower of grit probably saved his life. He slumped against the wall, trying to clear his streaming eyes; and that brief setback cheated death for the hundredth time in its long duel with the Saint's guardian angel. For even as he straightened up again with the axe in his hands, about twenty feet of the passage plunged downwards with a heart-stopping crash in a wild swirl of flame, leaving nothing but a gaping chasm through which fire roared up in a fiendish fountain that sent him staggering back before its intolerable heat. The last chance of reaching that locked room was gone.
A great weariness fell on the Saint like a heavy blanket pressing him down. There was nothing more that he could do.
He dropped the battle-axe and stumbled falteringly down the blazing stairs. There was no more battle now to keep him going. It was sheer blind automatism rather than any conscious effort on his part that guided him through another inferno to come reeling out through the front door, an amazing tatterdemalion outcast from the jaws of hell, to fall on his hands and knees on the terrace outside. In a dim faraway manner he was aware of hands raising him; of a remembered voice, low and musical, close to his ear.
"I know you like warm climates, boy, but couldn't you have got along with a trip to Africa?"
He smiled. Between him and Patricia there was no need for the things that other people would have had to say. They spoke their own language. Grimy, dishevelled, with his clothes blackened and singed and his eyes bloodshot and his body smarting from a dozen minor burns, the Saint smiled at her with all his old incomparable impudence.
"I was trying to economize," he said. "And now I shall probably catch my death of cold."
Already the cool night air, flowing like nectar into his parched lungs, was beginning to revive him, and in a few minutes his superb resilience would do the rest. He reviewed his injuries more systematically, and realized that comparatively speaking he was almost miraculously unscathed.
The thing that had come nearest to downing him was the smoke and fumes of the fire; and the effects of that were dispersing themselves like magic now that he could breathe again without feeling as if he were inhaling molten ash.