Vogel lifted his automatic.
Her left hand gripped the weather rail. She was trembling, although her mind was working with a clarity that seemed out side herself. That psychological third degree had accomplished its purpose.
Vogel had got her. Even if she had bluffed him all the evening, even if she had betrayed nothing in that paralysed moment of realisation at the chart table, even if she had kept the mask unmoved on her face when he came back—he had got her now. The story of a man prowling on the ship might be a lie. She might be imagining the shadow out of her own guilty fear; or it might only be a member of the crew put out to play the part and build up the deception—to be aimed at and perhaps shot at by Vogel with a blank cartridge. But she didn't know. There was no way for her to know. She had to choose between letting the Saint be shot down without warning, or——
A dozen crazy thoughts crashed through her head. She might throw a noisy fit of maidenly hysterics. She might sneeze, or cough, or faint on his shoulder. But she knew that that was just what he was waiting for her to do. The first hint of interference that she gave would brand her for all time. He would have no more doubts.
She stared at him in a kind of chilled hopeless agony. She could see his arm extended against the lighter grey of the deck, the dull gleam of the automatic held rigidly at the end of it, his black deepset eyes lined unwinkingly along the sights. Something in the nerveless immobility of his position shouted at her that he was a man to whom the thought of missing had never occurred. She saw the great hungry crook of his nose, the ends of his mouth drawn, back so that the thin lips rolled under and vanished into two parallel lines that were as vicious and pitiless as the smile of a cobra would have been. Her own words thundered through her head in a strident mocking chorus: "When you join Ingerbeck's, you don't sign on for a cocktail party . . . You take an oath ... to do your job . . . keep your mouth shut . . . take the consequences . . ." She had to choose.
So had the Saint.
Moving along the deckhouse roof as silently as a ghost, he had followed everything that happened outside; lying spreadeagled over the wheelhouse, he had leaned out at a perilous angle until he could peer down through one of the windows and see what was happening inside. He had bunched his muscles in a spasm of impotent exasperation when he saw Loretta's hand going out to touch the pencil and spring the trap, and had breathed again when she drew back. Everything that she had endured he had felt sympathetically within himself; and when Vogel came back and took out his automatic, Simon had heard what was said and had understood that also.
Now, gathering his limbs stealthily under him, so close above Loretta's head that he could almost have reached down and touched her, he understood much more. The first mention of a man prowling about the deck had prickled a row of nerve centres all along his spine; then he had disbelieved; then he had seen the shadow that Loretta was staring at, and had remembered the dark speeding canoe which had nearly run him down on his way there. But Loretta hadn't seen that; and he knew what she must be thinking. He could read what was in her mind, could suffer everything she was suffering, as if by some clairvoyant affinity that transcended reason he was identified with her in the stress of that satanically conceived ordeal; and there was a queer exaltation in his heart as he stepped off the wheelhouse roof, out into space over her head.
She saw him as if he had fallen miraculously out of the sky, which was more or less what he did—with one foot knocking down the automatic and the other striking flat-soled at the side of Vogel's head. The gun went off with a crash that echoed back and forth across the estuary, and Vogel staggered against the rail and fell to his knees.
Simon fell across the rail, caught it with his hands, and hung on for a moment. Down at the after end of the deck, the shape that had been lurking there detached itself from the shadows and scurried across the narrow strip of light to clamber over the rail and drop hectically downwards.
Loretta Page stared across six feet of Breton twilight at the miracle—half incredulously, with the breathlessness of indescribable relief choking in her throat. She saw the flash of white teeth in a familiar smile, saw him put his fingers to his lips and kiss them out to her with a debonair flourish that defied comparison; and then, as Vogel began to drag himself up and around with the gun still clutched in his right hand, she saw the Saint launch himself up with a ripple of brown muscles to curve over with hardly a splash into the sea.
He went down in a long shallow dive, and swam out of the Falkenberg's circle of light before he rose. He had judged his timing and his angle so well that the canoe flashed past his eyes as he broke the surface. He put up one hand and caught the gunnel as it went by, nearly upsetting the craft until the man in it leaned out to the other side and balanced it.
"I thought I told you to say goodbye to France," said the Saint.
"I thought I told you I didn't take your orders," said the other grimly.
"They were Loretta's orders, Steve."
Murdoch dug in the paddle and dragged the canoe round the stern of another yacht moored in the river.
"She's crazy, too," he snarled. "Because you've got around her with your gigolo line doesn't mean I don't know what she'll say when she comes to her senses. I'm staying where I like."
"And getting shot where you like, I hope," murmured Simon. "I won't interfere in the next bonehead play you make. I only butted in this time to save Loretta. Next time, you can take your own curtain."
"I will," said Murdoch prophetically. "Let go this boat."
Simon let go rather slowly, resisting the temptation to release his hold with a deft jerk that would have capsized the canoe and damped the pugnaciousness of its ungrateful occupant. He wondered whether Murdoch's aggressiveness was founded on sheer blind ignorance of what might have been the result of his clumsy intrusion, or whether it was put up to bluff away the knowledge of having made an egregious mistake; and most of all he wondered what else would come of the insubordinations of that tough inflexible personality.
One of those questions was partly answered for him very quickly.
He sculled back with his hands, under the side of the yacht near which they had parted company, listening to the low sonorous purr of a powerful engine that had awoken in the darkness. There were no lights visible through any of the portholes, and he concluded that the crew were all on shore. He was on the side away from the Falkenberg, temporarily screened even from the most lynx-eyed searcher. The purr of the engine grew louder; and with a quick decision he grasped a stanchion, drew himself up, and rolled over into the tiny after cockpit.
He reached it only a second before the beam of a young searchlight swept over the ship, wiping a bar of brilliant illumination across the deck in its passing. The throb of the engine droned right up to him; and he hitched a very cautious eye over the edge of the cockpit, and saw the Falkenberg's speed tender churning around his refuge, so close that he could have touched it with a boathook. A seaman crouched up on the foredeck, swinging the powerful spotlight that was mounted there; two other men stood up beside the wheel, following the path of the beam with their eyes. Its long finger danced on the water, touched luminously on the hulls of other craft at their anchorages, stretched faintly out to the more distant banks of the estuary . . . fastened suddenly on the shape of a canoe that sprang up out of the dark as if from nowhere, skimming towards the bathing pool at the end of the Plage du Prieuré. The canoe veered like a startled gull, shooting up parallel with the rocky foreshore; but the beam clung to it like a magnetised bar of light, linking it with the tender as if it were held by intangible cables. At the same time the murmur of the tender's engine deepened its note: the bows lifted a little, and a white streamer of foam lengthened away from the stern as the link-bar of light between the two craft shortened.