A little pulse was beating deep within him, throbbing and surging up in a breathless fever of surmise. The stubborn rigid-ness of the small man's mouth had started it, and the harsh violence of his voice had suddenly quickened it to a great pounding tumult that welled clamorously up and hammered on the doors of understanding. It was preposterous, absurd, fantastic; and yet with an almost jubilant fatalism he knew that it was true.
Somewhere there was a catch. The smooth simplicity of things as he had seen them till that instant was a delusion and a snare. A child of ten could have perceived it; and yet the deception had been so bland and natural that the unmasking of it had the effect of a battering ram aimed at the solar plexus. And it had all been so forthright and aboveboard. A small and harmless-looking little man is hurrying home with his week's wages in his little bag. Three hairy thugs set on him and proceed to beat him up. Like a good citizen, you intervene. You swipe the ungodly on the snitch, and rescue Reginald. And then, most naturally, you approach your protégé. You prepare to comfort him and bathe his wounds, what time he hails you as his hero and sends for the solicitors to revise his will. In your role of the compleat Samaritan, you inquire whither he was going, so that you may offer to shepherd him a little further on his way. . . . And then he bites your head off——
The Saint laughed.
"Yes, yes, I know, brother." Very gently and soothingly he spoke, just as before; but way down in the impenetrable undertones of his voice that whisper of soft laughter was lilting about like a mirthful will-o'-the-wisp. "But you've got us all wrong. Sie haben uns alles falsch gegotten. Verstehen Sie Esperanto? All those naughty men have gone. We've just saved your life. We're your bosom pals. Freunde. Kamerad. Gott mit uns, and all that sort of thing."
The German language has been spoken better. The Saint himself, who could speak it like a native when he chose, would have been the first to acknowledge that. But he computed that he had made his meaning fairly clear. Intelligible enough, at any rate, to encourage any ordinary person to investigate his credentials without actual hostility. And definitely he had given no just cause for the response which he received.
Perhaps the little man's normal nerve had been blown into space by his adventure. Perhaps his head was still muzzy with the painful memory of his recent experience. These questions can never now be satisfactorily settled. It is only certain that be was incredibly foolish.
With a vicious squeal that contorted his whole face, he wrenched one arm free from the Saint's grip and clawed at the Saint's eyes like a tigercat. And with that movement all doubts vanished from Simon Templar's mind.
"Not quite so quickly, Stanislaus," he drawled.
He swerved adroitly past the tearing fingers and pinned the little man resistlessly against the wall; and then he felt Monty Hayward's hand on his shoulder.
"If you don't mind me interrupting you, old man," Monty said coolly, "is that bloke over there a friend of yours?"
Simon looked up.
Along the Rennweg, less than a hundred yards away, a man in an unmistakable uniform was blundering towards them with his whistle screaming as he ran; and the Saint grasped the meaning of the omens that had been drifting blurredly through his senses while he was occupied with other things. He grasped their meaning with scarcely a second's pause, in all its fatal and far-reaching implications; and in the next second he knew, with a reckless certainty, what he was doomed to do.
The Law was trying to horn in on his party. At that very moment it was thumping vociferously towards him on its great flat feet, loaded up to its flapping ears with all the elephantine pomposity of the system which it represented, walloping along to crash the gate of his conviviality with its inept and fatuous presence—just as it had been wont to do so often in the past. And this time there were bigger and better reasons than there had ever been why that intrusion could not be allowed. Those reasons might not have seemed so instantaneously conclusive to the casual and unimaginative observer; but to the Saint they stuck out like the skyline of Chicago. And Simon found that he was no less mad than he had always been.
Under his hold, the little man squirmed sideways like a demented eel, and the attaché case which he was still clutching desperately in his right hand smashed at the Saint's head in a homicidal arc. Lazily the Saint swayed back two inches outside the radius of the blow; and lazily, almost absent-mindedly, he clipped the little man under the jaw and dropped him in his tracks. ...
And then he turned and faced the others, and his eyes were the two least lazy things that either of them had ever seen.
"This is just too soon for our picnic to break up," he said.
He stooped and seized the little man by the collar and flung him over his shoulder like a sack of coals. The attaché case dangled from the little man's wrist by a short length of chain; and the Saint gathered it in with his right hand. The discovery of the chain failed to amaze him: he took it in his stride, as a detail that was no more than an incidental feature of the general problem, which could be analyzed and put in its right place at a more leisured opportunity. Undoubtedly he was quite mad. But he was mad with that magnificent simplicity which is only a hair's breadth from genius; and of such is the kingdom of adventurers.
The Saint was smiling as he ran.
He knew exactly what he had done. In the space of about two minutes thirty-seven seconds, he had inflicted on his newest and most fragile halo a series of calamities that made such minor nuisances as the San Francisco earthquake appear positively playful by comparison. Just by way of an hors-d'oeuvre. And there was no going back. He had waltzed irrevocably off the slippery tight wire of righteousness; and that was that. He felt fine.
At the end of the bridge he caught Patricia's arm. Down to the right, he knew, a low wall ran beside the river, with a narrow ledge on the far side that would provide a precarious but possible foothold. He pointed.
"Play leapfrog, darling."
She nodded without a word, and went over like a schoolboy. Simon's hand smote Monty on the back.
"See you in ten minutes, laddie," he murmured.
He tumbled nimbly over the wall with his light burden on his back, and hung there by his fingers and toes three inches above the hissing waters while Monty's footsteps faded away into the distance. A moment later the patrolman's heavy boots clumped off the bridge and lumbered by without a pause.
2
Steadily the plodding hoofbeats receded until they were scarcely more than an indistinguishable patter; and the intermittent blasts of the patrolman's whistle became mere plaintive squeaks from the Antipodes. An expansive aura of peace settled down again upon the wee small hours, and made itself at home.
The Saint hooked one eye cautiously over the stonework and surveyed the scene. There was no sign of hurrying reinforcements trampling on each other in their zeal to answer the patrolman's frenzied blowing. Simon, knowing that the inhabitants of most Continental cities have a sublime and blessed gift of minding their own business, was not so much surprised as satisfied. He pulled himself nimbly over the wall again and reached a hand down to Pat. In another second she was standing beside him in the road. She regarded him dispassionately.
"I always knew you ought to be locked up," she said. "And now I expect you will be."
The Saint returned her gaze with wide blue eyes of Saintly innocence.
"And why?" he asked. "My dear soul—why? What else could we do? Our reasoning process was absolutely elementary. The Law was on its way, and we didn't want to meet the Law. Therefore we beetled off. Stanislaus was just beginning to get interesting: we were not through with Stanislaus. Therefore we took Stanislaus with us. What could be simpler?"