was developing a profound respect for Ivar Nordsten's thoroughness------
"Vickery."
It was Nordsten's voice; and the Saint stopped, and saw the financier standing at the foot of the stairs.
"I'd like to see you again for a moment, if your arm can wait."
There was no real question of whether his arm could wait; and Simon turned with a smile.
"Of course."
He went down the stairs again. Trusaneff halted on the last flight, and Simon crossed the hall alone.
Nordsten was standing by the desk when the Saint entered the library, and the panther was crouching at his feet. Simon saw that the carpet was rolled back from the trapdoor, and the financier was holding his gun in his hand. He realized that he had been exceedingly careless; but he allowed nothing but a natural puzzlement to appear on his face.
"You tell me that Sheba started chasing you when you were on the stairs, and you tried to get in here to escape," Nordsten said, with a curious flat timbre in his voice.
"That's right," Simon answered.
"Then can you explain this?"
Nordsten pointed his whip at the floor; and Simon looked down and saw the stub of a cigarette lying beside the trapdoor--that same cigarette which his tingling nerves had forced him to light when he got inside the room, and which he had unconsciously trodden out when the demoniac snarl of the panther disturbed him in his investigations--and a few little splashes of grey ash around it.
"I don't understand," he said, with a frown of perfect bewilderment.
The financier's faded bright eyes were fixed on him steadily.
"None of my servants smoke, and I smoke only cigars."
"I still don't know why you should ask me," Simon said.
"Is your name Vickery?"
"Of course it is."
Nordsten stared at him for a few seconds longer.
"You're a liar," he said at length, with absolute calm.
Simon did not answer, and knew that there was no answer to make. He admitted nothing, continuing to gape at Nordsten with the same expression of helpress perplexity which the real Tim Vickery would have worn; but he knew that he was only carrying on mechanically with a bluff that had long since been called. It made no difference.
The thing which surprised him a little was Nordsten's complete restraint. He would have expected some show of emotion, some manifestation of nerves, fear, anger, even insensate viciousness; but there was none of those. The financier was as rock-still as if he had been contemplating an ordinary obstacle which had arisen in the course of a normal and respectable business campaign-- almost as if he had already envisaged the obstacle and sketched out a rough plan of remedy, and was simply considering the remedy again in detail, to make sure that it contained no flaws. And Simon Templar, remembering the poor half-crazy wretch under the trap, had an eerie presentiment that perhaps this was only the barest truth.
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 Nord-sten 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."