An hour later Intuccio halted his horse in an arroyo two miles away. He laid a rifle across Urselli’s saddlebow. “You will wait here,” he said. “We go round the other side of the mountain and drive him down.”
Urselli’s glance flickered at him.
“How long do I wait?”
The innkeeper shrugged.
“Perhaps three hours, perhaps four. It is a long way. But if we find him, he will come down here.” He turned calmly to the Saint. “Andiamo, signor!”
Simon was contented enough to follow him. Intuccio set a tiring trot, but it was easy for the Saint, who was as iron-hard as he had ever been. A coppery sun baked the air out of a sky of brilliant unbroken blue, one of those subtropical skies that are as flat and glazed as a painted cyclorama. Little whirls of dust floated up behind them as they rode, dancing a phantom veil dance to the irregular tom-tom of swinging hoof beats. Intuccio made no conversation, and Simon was left to ruminate over his own puzzle. To be out under the blazing daylight in that ridged and castled wilderness of mighty boulders piled against steep scarps of rock, with such an enigma on his mind, gave him the exact opposite of the feeling which he had had the night before. Then he had been a spectator; now he was an actor, and he was ready, as he always was, to enjoy his share in the play.
Three hours later, as they rode down the barren slopes again toward the place where they had left Urselli, he felt very much at peace. He had settled quite a number of things in his own mind during the ride, and about Amadeo Urselli’s own exact position in the cosmic scale he had removed all doubts even before they set out. He knew the rats of the big cities too well to be mistaken about Amadeo.
But the setting for the encounter was what made it so ineffably superb. To have met him in the city would have been ordinary enough, but to meet the city gunman out here in the great open spaces was a poem which only the Saint’s impish sense of humor could realize to the full.
Glancing down at the rifle carried ready across his pommel, the Saint even asked himself the wild question whether Amadeo Urselli might conceivably be mistaken in a moment of well-staged excitement for a mountain lion. Almost regretfully he dismissed the idea, but when a turn of the trail brought him a sight of Urselli sitting disconsolately on a rock slapping at the indefatigable flies, he felt genuinely distressed to think that such an ideal opportunity had to be passed by. They rode down into the gulch, and Intuccio leaned over in the saddle with his forearm on his thigh.
“You have seen nothing, Amadeo?”
“Nothing but flies,” said Urselli sourly.
He was pinkly sun-broiled and very bad-tempered, and the sight of his misery almost made up for the fact that they had not seen so much as a toe print of the mountain lion which they had set out to look for.
They arrived back at the hotel a few minutes after four. Urselli was the first to dismount, moving stiffly from the exertion of the day. He stopped to read a message that was nailed to the door; Simon, coming up behind him, saw the conventional black hand at the head of the letter before he could distinguish the words, and then Intuccio’s arm drove between them and ripped it down.
Urselli spoke from the side of a thin hard mouth.
“I thought there were no more bad men.”
Intuccio did not answer. The paper crumpled in his grasp, and without a word he thrust them both aside and crashed through the door. He stumbled over an upturned chair in the gloom as he went in, and then they stood on either side of him surveying the wreck of the kitchen. The center table was tilted drunkenly against the range of the far end, and two other chairs were flung into different corners, one of them broken. A saucepan lay at their feet, and little splashes of shattered china and glass winked up at them from the floor.
Intuccio dragged himself across the room and detached a fragment of gaily printed cotton stuff from the back of the broken chair. He stared at it dumbly. Then, without speaking, he held out the message from the door.
Simon took it and smoothed it out.
If you wish to see your daughter again, bring $20,000 in cash to the top of Skeleton Hill by midnight tonight. Come alone and unarmed. We shall not send a second warning. Death pays for treachery.
“You gotta pay, Salvatore,” Urselli was saying. “I’m tellin’ ya. You can’t fool with kidnappers. A gang that snatches a girl won’t stop for nothin’. Say, I remember when Red McLaughlin put the arm on Sappho Lirra—”
Intuccio straightened up lifelessly, like a stunned giant.
“I must find the sheriff,” he said.
The Saint’s hand crossed his path, barring it, in a gesture as lithe and vivid as the flick of a sword.
“Let me go.”
He went down the short road to the town with a light step. This was adventure as he understood it, objective and decisive, like a blast of music, and the Saint smiled as he went. Far might it be from him to deny the home-coming of Amadeo Urselli any of its quintessential poetry. He walked into the sheriff’s office and found Saddlebag’s solitary representative of the law at home.
“Lucia Intuccio has been kidnapped,” he said. “Will you come up?”
The man’s eyes bulged.
“Kidnapped?” he repeated incredulously.
“There was a note calling for twenty thousand dollars ransom nailed to the door,” said the Saint, and the sheriff took down his gun belt.
“I’ll be right along.”
Simon went with him. The news spread like an epidemic, and a dozen men had gathered in the back room when they arrived.
Intuccio told the story. He seemed to have shaken off some of his first numbness, and at intervals his eyes veered towards Urselli with an ugly soberness. When he had finished, the sheriff’s gaze leveled in the same direction.
“So,” he said slowly, “while Urselli knew that you’d be gone at least three hours, there wasn’t anybody to see what he was up to.”
“What of it?” protested Urselli grittily. “You got no—”
Simon interposed himself.
“We’re wasting time,” he said coolly. “I guess we ought to make a search.”
“Mebbe we will.” The sheriff’s gaze did not shift. “You’ll come as well, Urselli — and stay with me.”
The group of men filed out quickly, splitting up outside into two and threes, for there were less than five hours of daylight left — an almost hopeless time in which to find and follow a cold trail in that wild country. Simon joined them.
The sun went down in a riot of gold and crimson, and the search parties began to filter back through the gray-blue dusk. By ten o’clock, when the night was a vaulted bowl of dark glass studded with silver pin points, they were all gathered together at the inn, and the sheriff, with Intuccio and Urselli, came in last while they were all waiting.
There was no need for questions. A silence that was its own answer hung in the room, mirroring itself in the glazed tension of the yellow highlights smeared by the single oil lamp on the circle of leathery faces. The angles of black shadow in the far corners held the strained heaviness of a mounting thunderstorm.
The sheriff read through the ransom notice again, and raised his eyes to Intuccio’s face. The nervous scrape of a man’s feet on the bare floor rasped a nerve-stabbing discord into the stillness before he spoke.
“You wasn’t aimin’ to pay this money, was you, Salvatore?”
The old man stared back at him haggardly. Before he came in, the alternatives had been discussed by the reassembled search parties in measured low-pitched voices that scarcely ruffled the texture of the air. Organized help could not come from the nearest big town before midnight — it might not come before morning. What would the sophisticated city police think of Black Hand threats?