Thus the Saint came through to the end of the last carriage, and still he had not seen Marcovitch. He stopped there for a moment, drawing the last puff from his cigarette and flattening the butt under his toe. One episode in his last adventure in England was still far from fading out of his memory, and the remembrance of it sent a sudden ripple of anticipation pulsing through his muscles. He knew that he had not lost Marcovitch. On the contrary—he was just going to meet him. And most assuredly there would be trouble. . . .
A gay glimmer of the Saintly fighting smile touched his lips. The pain which had afflicted him during his patient survey of so much unbeautiful humanity was gone altogether. He had forgotten the very existence of those anonymous boils on the universe. Just one more stage south of him was the brake van, and Simon Templar went towards it with a new unlighted cigarette in his mouth and his hands transferred to his coat pockets. He could have reached out and touched the handle when he saw it jerk and twist under his eyes, and leapt back round the corner. He had one glimpse of the man who came stumbling out—a man in the railroad uniform, capless, with a gash over his temple and his face straining to a shout of terror. It didn't require any genius to reconstruct the whole inside history of that frantic apparition: Simon had no time to think about it anyway, but he guessed enough without thinking. The thud of a silenced gun was one of the diverse incidents that tumbled hectically into one crowded second of lightning action in which there was positively no time for meditation. In the same second Simon caught the brakeman by the arm as he flung past.
"Verweile doch—du hist zu schnell," said the Saint gently. They were face to face for an instant of time; and Simon saw the man's eyes wide and staring. "Let's take a walk," said the Saint.
He screwed the wrist he was holding up into the nape of the brakeman's neck, and pushed him back into the van. There was another shot as they came through, and the man flopped forward like a dead weight. Simon let go and let him fall sideways. Then he kicked the door shut behind him and stood with his shoulders lined up square against it, with his feet spaced apart and three quarters of his weight balancing on his toes.
The cigarette slanted up into a filibustering angle as he smiled.
"Hullo, Uglyvitch," he said.
Marcovitch showed his teeth over the barrel of an automatic. There were four other men round him; and the blithe Saintly gaze swept over them in an arc of affectionate greeting.
"Feelin' happy, boys?" drawled the Saint. "It's a grand day for fireworks." He looked past them at the piles of litter on the floor of the van. Every mailbag had been ripped open, and the contents were strewn across the scenery like the landmark of a megalomaniac's paper-chase. Letters had been torn through and parcels slit across and discarded in a search that had winnowed that vanload of mail through a fine-meshed sieve. "Somebody getting married?" asked the Saint interestedly. "Or is the confetti for me?"
There was a tantalizing invitation in the slow lift of his eyebrows that matched the interrogative inflexion of his voice. Quite coolly he sized up the strength of the men before him, and just as coolly he posed himself in the limelight for them to return the compliment. And he saw them hesitate. If he had been blindfolded he could have deduced that hesitation equally well from the one vital fact that he was still alive. The wide smiling insolence of his unblinking candour, the barefaced effrontery of his very artlessness, walled them into that standstill in a way that no other approach could have done. While it lasted, it held them up as effectively as a regiment of Thomson guns. They couldn't bring themselves to believe that there was no more in it than met the eye. It dangled them on red-hot tenterhooks of uncertainty, peeling their eyes sore with suspicion of the trap they couldn't see.
"Well?"
Marcovitch forced the monosyllable out of his throat in a hoarse challenge that indexed his embarrassment to the last decimal point; and the Saint smiled again.
"This is an auspicious occasion, brother," he remarked amiably. "I've always wanted to know just what it feels like to be a slab-faced little squirt of dill-water with a dirty neck and no birth certificate; and here you are—the very man to tell me. Could you unbosom for us, little flower?"
Marcovitch licked his lips. He was still casting around for the one necessary hint that would give him confidence to tighten up on the trigger of his gun and send an ounce of swift and unanswerable death snarling into the easy target in front of him. His knuckle was white for the pull-off, the automatic trembling ever so slightly in the suppressed tension of his hand.
"What else have you got to say, Templar?"
"Lots. Have you heard the one about the old farmer named Giles, who suffered acutely——"
"Perhaps you were looking for something?"
The question came in a vicious monotone that dared a direct reply. And the Saint knew that his margin of time for stalling was wearing thin as a wafer under the impatient rasp of the Russian's overstressed nerves.
"Sure—I was taking a look round."
He flaunted Marcovitch eye to eye, with that heedless little smile playing up uncloudedly to the tilt of his cigarette, and his fingers curling evenly round the grip of his own gun. The twitch of a muscle would have roared finis for Marcovitch in the middle of any one of those sentences; but Simon Templar knew when he was deadlocked. He knew he was deadlocked then, and he had known it ever since he stepped into the van. He could have dropped Marcovitch at his pleasure, but the remaining four men represented just so many odds against any human chance of surviving to boast about it. And the Saint was not yet tired of life. He bluffed the deadlock without turning a hair—smiled calmly at it and asked it to play ball—because that was the only thing to do. Any other line would have sung his requiem without further debate. But he knew that his only way out was along the precarious alleyways of peace with honour—with black italics for the peace, if anything. It was unfortunate, admittedlly, but it was one of the immutable verities of the situation. He had breezed in to take a peek at the odds, and there they were in all their mathematical scaliness. A tactful and strategic withdrawal announced itself as the order of the day.
"I just thought I might find some crown jewels," said the Saint; and Marcovitch steadied his automatic.
"Did you?"
Simon nodded. His level gaze slid down the other's coat and detected a bulge in one pocket that signified as much as he required to know.
"Yeah. Only you got here first." Lower down, he caught a gleam of reflected light from the floor. "Excuse me—I think you missed something."
He took a pace forward stooping as if to pick up the stone.
Then he hurled himself at the knees of the nearest man like the bolt from a crossbow. Marcovitch fired at the same moment, but the Saint's luck held. His impetus somersaulted him clean over the sprawling body of his victim, and he rolled over like a scalded eel and ducked behind the struggling breastwork. His left hand whipped round the man's waist and fastened on the man's gun wrist, holding him in position by the sheer strength of one arm.
"Sorry about this," said the Saint
The others paused for a second, and in that breathing space the Saint got to his feet again, bringing his human shield up with him in a heave of eruptive effort. He backed towards the door, reached it, and got it open; then the man half broke from his hold in a flurry of cursing fight, and Simon flung him away and leapt through the door with a bullet crashing past his ear. Patricia Holm was outside, and the Saint caught her in his arms and spun her round before she could speak.