Nordsten spoke only one revealing sentence.
"I didn't think it would come so soon," he said, speaking aloud but only to himself; and his voice was quiet and almost childlike.
Then he looked at the Saint again with his dispassionate and empty eyes, and the gun in his hand moved slightly.
"Lift up the trap, please… Vickery," he said.
Simon hesitated momentarily; but the gun was aimed on him quite adequately, and Nordsten was too far away for a surprise attack. With a slight shrug he moved the square of parquet aside and locked his hands in the ring bolt of the heavy stone door. He lifted it with a strong quiet heave and laid it back on the floor.
"This is lots of fun," he murmured. "What do we do now — wiggle our ears and pretend to be rabbits?"
The financier ignored him. He raised his voice slightly, and called:
"Erik!"
In the silence that followed, Simon listened to the sounds of stumbling movement in the cave under the floor; and presently he saw the head of the man who looked like Nordsten coming up out of the hole. The man was climbing up some sort of ladder which the Saint had not noticed, taking each rung with a shaky effort such as an old man might have made, as if his limbs had grown pitifully feeble from long disuse. As he appeared under the full open light, Simon was even more amazed at the resemblance between the two men. There was minor differences, it was true; but most of them could be accounted for by the unimaginably frightful years of imprisonment which Erik had endured in that lightless pit. Even in stature they were almost identical. Simon had a moment's recollection of the man's stiff husky voice saying: "I'm you. I know now… I'm you — Nordsten!" And he shivered in the sudden chill of understanding.
The man had climbed out at last. His glazed eyes, tensed painfully in the brilliant light, fell on the black panther, and he swayed weakly, clutching the collar of his ragged shift with a trembling hand. And then he mastered himself.
"All right," he said, with a shuddering gasp. "I'm not afraid. I didn't mean you to see me afraid. But when you opened the door just now — and the thing yelled — I forgot. But I'm not afraid any more. I'm not afraid, damn you!"
Nordsten's faded eyes, without pity, glanced at the Saint.
"So — you had opened the trap," he remarked, almost casually.
"Maybe I had," Simon responded calmly. He was not meeting Nordsten's gaze, and he only answered perfunctorily. He was looking at the man Erik; and he went on speaking to him, very clearly and steadily, trying to strike a spark of recognition from that terribly injured brain. "I was the bloke who said hullo to you just now, Erik. It wasn't Brother Ivar. It was me."
The man stared at him sightlessly; and Nordsten moved nearer to the door. The great black panther rose and stretched itself. It padded after him, watching him with its oblique malignant eyes; and Nordsten took the whip in his right hand. His voice rang out suddenly:
"Sheba!"
The whip whistled through the air and curled over the animal's sleek flanks in a terrific blow.
"Kill!"
The whip fell again. Growling, the panther started forward. A third and a fourth lash cracked over its body like the sound of pistol shots, and it stopped and turned its head.
Simon will never forget what followed.
It was not clear to him at the time, though the actual physical fact was as vivid as a nightmare. He knew that he faced certain death, but it had come on him so quickly that he had had no chance to grasp the idea completely. The man Erik was standing beside him, white-faced, his body rigid and quivering, his lips stubbornly compressed and the breath hissing jerkily through his nostrils. He knew. But the Saint, with his eyes narrowed to slits of steel and his muscles flexed for the hopeless combat, only understood the threat of death instinctively. He saw what was happening long before reason and comprehension caught up with it.
The head of the beast turned; and again the cruel whip cut across its back. And then — it could only have been that the deep-sown hate of the beast conquered its fear, and its raging blood-lust burst into the deeper channel. The twist of its magnificent rippling body was too quick for the eye to follow. It sprang, a streak of burnished ebony flying through the air — not towards the Saint or Erik, but away from them. Nordsten's gun banged once; and then the cry that broke from his lips as he went down was drowned in the rolling thunder of the panther's hate.
VIII
"Say," pleaded Mr. Uniatz bashfully, plucking up the courage to seek illumination on a point which had been worrying him for some hours, "is a nightjar de t'ing—"
"No, it isn't," said Patricia Holm hurriedly. "It's a kind of bird."
"Oh, a boid!" Hoppy's mouth stretched horizontally in a broad grin of overwhelming relief. "I t'ought it couldn't of been what I t'ought it was."
Patricia sighed.
"Why on earth did you have to think about nightjars at all, anyway?"
"Well, it was dis way. Before de Saint scrammed, after he made me a pansy bootlegger, he said my accent reminded him of a nightjar callin' to its mate—"
"He must have been thinking of a nightingale, Hoppy," said the girl kindly.
She lighted a cigarette and strolled over to the window, watching the dusk deepening down the glade of bracken and trees. Annette Vickery gazed after her with a feeling that was oddly akin to awe. Annette herself couldn't help knowing, frankly, that she was pretty; but this slim fair girl who seemed to be the Saint's partner in outlawry had an enchanting beauty like nothing that she had ever seen before. That alone might have made her jealous, after the fashion even of the nicest women; but in Patricia Holm it was only an incidental feature. She had a repose, a quiet understanding confidence, which was the only thing that made hours of waiting tolerable.
She had come in towards midday.
"I'm Patricia," she said; and with that she was introduced.
She heard the story of the night before and the morning after, and laughed.
"I expect it seems like the end of the world to you," she said, "but it isn't very new to me. I wondered what had happened to Simon when I blew into the apartment this morning and found he hadn't been in all night. But he always has been daft — I suppose you've had plenty of time to find that out. How about a spot of sherry, kid — d'you think that would do you good?"
"You talk like a man," said Annette.
It was clearly meant for a compliment; and Patricia smiled.
"If I talk like a Saint," she said softly, "it's only natural."
She had a serene faith in the Saint which removed the last excuse for anxiety. If she had doubts, she kept them to herself. Orace served an excellent cold lunch. They bathed in the swimming pool, sunned themselves afterwards in deck chairs, had tea brought out on the terrace. The time passed; until Patricia stood at the window and watched night creeping down over the garden.
"I'll make some Old Fashioneds," she said.
In the glow of that most insidiously potent of all aperitifs, it was not so difficult to keep anxiety at bay for another hour and more. Presently Orace announced dinner. It was quite dark when the left the table and went into the study.
"I suppose we might telephone now," said Patricia at length.
She took up the telephone and gave the number calmly. It was then nearly nine o'clock. In a short while a man's voice answered.
"Can I speak to Mr. Vickery?" she asked.