"Pat, when this jaunt is over I think we must go back to England. You've no idea how I miss Claud Eustace Teal and all those jolly games we used to have with Scotland Yard."
She knew that he was perfectly serious—as the Saint understood seriousness. He had never changed. She did not have to look at him to see the sunny glint in his eyes, the careless faith in a joyously spendthrift destiny.
She said: "What about Monty?"
The Saint gazed ahead down the widening lane of trees.
"I should like to have kept him, but I suppose he isn't ours."
Westwards as they walked the trees were thinning out, opening tall windows into a landscape of green fields and homely cottages. The golden daylight broke through the laced boughs overhead and dappled their shady path with pools of luminance. A lark dived out of the clear infinity of blue and drifted earthwards like an autumn leaf. Way over on a distant slope the midget silhouettes of a ploughing team moved placidly against the sky, the tinkle of bells and the crack of the ploughman's whip coming vividly through the still air. It seemed almost unbelievable that that peaceful scene could be overrun with grey-clad men combing inexorably through the hedgerows and hollows for a scent of the irreverent corsair who had tweaked their illustrious beards; but the Saint stopped suddenly at a turn of the path, halting Patricia with him, and she also had seen the road and heard the voices.
"Wait here while I take a look," he murmured.
He flitted in among the trees like a shadow, and the girl stood motionless in the shelter of a clump of bushes with her heart beating a little faster. Monty Hayward and the Evening Gazette were closing up in an interrogative silence; and Patricia had a numbing sense of the magnitude of the feat which Simon Templar had set himself to perform. Escape would have seemed difficult enough for one man alone—a mere modest getaway that was satisfied with a whole skin for its reward—but the Saint was cheerfully booking passengers for the tour and announcing his unalterable intention of collecting a quarter of a million pounds' worth of expenses en route. That was the measure of his genius, the squandered greatness that created its own worlds to conquer.
He came back in a few moments; and he was smiling.
"Down there," he said, "there's a covered wagon. And the crew are having an early tea. I ordered them specially to meet us here, and they look good enough to me. Let's take 'em."
He turned back with a swing of lean, venturous limbs; and Monty Hayward followed him in a mood of unwonted light-headedness. Something inside Monty Hayward was reacting vengefully against the continued impact of circumstance. He felt that he had taken as much dragooning from circumstance as he could stand, and his capacity for meek long-suffering was wearing out. A malicious freak of fate had thrown up an unceremonious slip of a girl to let the Saint acclaim him hilariously as a full-fledged buccaneer, and that was the last straw. Buccaneer he would be—and let the blood flow in buckets.
They reached a narrow gap in the undergrowth, and there the Saint touched Monty's shoulder, pointing down to the road. A six-wheeled lorry was drawn up close to the side, and just below where they had paused two weatherbeaten men in overalls were reclining against the low bank. Each of them held a massive sandwich of bread and sausage in one hand and a steaming cup in the other; and Monty's eyes fastened on one of those cups fascinatedly. It occurred to him that a twentieth-century buccaneer might not necessarily be at such a disadvantage as he had once thought. . . .
"Make it snappy," said the Saint.
He went over the bank in a flying dive, and Monty was only a second behind him. Patricia heard one muffled howl, an eddy of whirling effort, and the smack of bone against bone; then she also came over the bank and saw Simon already starting to strip the overalls from his victim. Monty was dusting his trousers, and in his right hand he held like a captured banner the unspilt cup which he would always estimate as one of the outstanding achievements of his life. He raised it dramatically to Nina Walden as she came through the trees.
"Madam," he said, "your tea."
It was a moment which atoned to him for everything that had gone before; and the girl stepped down smiling into the road and accepted his triumph in the same way as Queen Elizabeth might have accepted the Armada.
"You boys certainly know how to work," she said; and Monty shrugged.
"We do this sort of thing every day," he stated aggressively.
The Saint laughed.
"You're getting the spirit of the business, Monty," he said. "Now if you can hustle into those jeans before anyone else comes along we might call the boat pushed out. Pat, you take a peep under the tarpaulins and find out what the cargo is. They might be carrying some more crown jewels!"
"They're carrying engine castings," Patricia reported.
"O. K., lass. There ought to be room for you girls to pack between them. I'm sorry it wasn't eiderdowns, but, after all, it's a warm day."
The Saint was completing one of those lightning changes which had always been the envious wonder of bis select audiences. The immaculate draperies of Savile Row and St. James's had disappeared under a soiled blue boiler suit as if he had never worn them; the shoes of Lobb were stuffed into his pockets and replaced by the dusty boots of toil; the patent-leather hair was tousled into negligent curls. Those who knew him best had asserted that Simon Templar could parade more miracles in the way of disguise with a dab of treacle and a length of string than most men could have accomplished with the largest make-up box in Hollywood. To him the outward paraphernalia of costume was merely the show case for a perfect cameo of character study—an inimitable transformation of personality in which no living man could equal him.
"What you boys and girls have got to remember, now and for evermore," he said, "is that the bushiest false whiskers on earth won't help you unless you can put on the authentic pride of whiskeredness. The hair has got to enter into your soul."
He was working in front of the open bonnet of the lorry while he talked, rubbing a judicious blend of grease and grime into his hands and finger-nails and smearing artistic stains of it across his face. It seems a simple thing to write, and yet the bare truth of it is that when he turned round again he had literally annihilated Simon Templar—he was a German truckdriver, with a past and a present and a future and an aged aunt in Frankfort to whom he faithfully sent a card every Christmas.
Monty Hayward was just securing the last button of his own overalls, and the Saint lugged him boisterously over and smudged his immaculate face and hands with half a dozen similarly rapid master-strokes.
"Sit quiet and blow your nose on your sleeve occasionally," he said, "and we can't go wrong."
He ran a hawk-like eye over the details of his protégé's attire; and then he grinned boyishly and smote Monty a detonating blow between the shoulder blades.
"C'mon! Let's push these birds out of the way."
They carried the two unconscious men into the wood and hid them in a thicket, after the Saint had bound and gagged them with strips of their own clothing. Simon's departing flourish was to pin a hundred-mark note to each of their shirt-fronts—the assault on their persons had been a regrettable necessity, but it was one of those little debts which the Saint never forgot. And in the corner of each note he sketched the quaint little haloed figure which had been the signature of more rollicking outrages than Scotland Yard could discuss in polite language. It was a long time since the Saint had last used that flippant symbol, and the chance appealed to him as an omen that could not be passed by.