Simon could only wait, and at last Vail paid the bill and they went outside. It was one of those cloudless summer nights that England can produce sometimes, in spite of her inclement reputation and the bad luck that dogs her meteorologists on the rare occasions when they venture to predict one, with a full moon that hung overhead like a stage lantern. Vail looked up at it with satisfaction, and said, “It couldn’t be brighter in Kenya. Let’s make the most of it.”
As they approached the car, Iantha said to the Saint, “Would you like to drive?”
Without waiting for an answer, she slipped into the other front seat. Simon got in behind the wheel, and moved his seat back.
“Where to?”
“I’ll have to look at the map.”
She directed him out on A5, the highway historically known by the oddly prosaic name of Watling Street, which runs north-westwards across the countryside almost as straight as the proverbial crow’s flight all the way to Shrewsbury, on foundations laid out by Roman surveyors in the days when Caesar’s legions knew St Albans by the name of Verulam. Simon bore down with his right foot, and the Jaguar responded in a way that reminded him of the mighty Hirondel which had been his beloved chariot in the young days of more uncomplicated adventure. But he was only able to enjoy that reminiscent exhilaration for a few minutes and half again as many miles before Iantha was warning him to slow down for a turning on the left. He saw the signpost as they swung into the secondary road, and had a wild preposterous presentiment that every sober habit of thought tried to reject. But after a couple more turnings in a couple of more crooked miles taken at more sedate speed, he knew that this was going to be a bad night for sober thinking when Russell Vail leaned forward behind him and said, “I think you’d better stop about here, old boy, wherever you can find a good place to park.”
Simon brought the car to a stop, and said, “Is this where you want me to pick a lock?”
“We’re close enough. We’d better walk the rest of the way.”
“To Whipsnade?”
“You guessed it.”
Whipsnade, it must be explained here for the benefit of readers who are not familiar with the British scene, is the pride of England’s zoos — a pack in which an assortment of animals acclimated from every continent on the globe roam in their suitably landscaped enclosures, behind bars and moats as tidily camouflaged as possible, from which sanctuaries they are privileged to study human beings in a seminatural habitat.
The Saint did not move.
“I suppose it might be fun to steal a giraffe,” he said. “But it’ll be hard work getting it in this car.”
“We aren’t going to steal anything.”
“Then you’ll have to tell me what the game is, before we go any farther.”
Elías Usebio stirred and said, “We are going to settle an argument — the argument we began the other night. He has challenged me to try my cape against an animal with horns that he will choose.”
“And what does he do to prove anything?”
“I’ll tackle anything with claws that Elías chooses, just using a native spear,” answered Vail.
“And I thought there ought to be an impartial umpire, like when we picked you at the White Elephant,” said Iantha. “Besides, we couldn’t think of anyone else who could get us in.”
For a few seconds Simon Templar was silent. The idea was as outrageous as anything he had ever heard, but that was not enough to take his breath away. Contemplated as a pure spectacle, it was an invitation that no epicure of thrills could have refused. The impudence of the assumption that he would be a party to its illicit procurement he could shrug off. He hesitated only while he thought of the reasons why it might be an honest and Saintly duty to put a stop to the whole project, and in the same space of time he realized absolutely that the contest would be decided sometime, somewhere, with or without him and that the best thing he could do was to be there.
“All right,” he said. “But we can’t do it by the front gates.”
“You mean you can’t?” said Vail, in the jovially disparaging tone which he used so masterfully, which almost dared you to reveal yourself such a lout as to take offense. “And I’d heard you were the greatest cracksman since Raffles.”
“I’m better,” Simon said calmly. “But the main entrance would just be stupid. There are keepers’ cottages all around there. The only animals we’d be likely to get near would be watchdogs.”
“There speaks the expert. But I’m sure he’d know how to cope with the problem.”
“I was there once, years ago,” said the Saint slowly. “I remember that on the far side of the grounds, that would be to the north-east, there were some enclosures that ran downhill, and you could walk around them, and then you were outside on a long slope with a fine view but only fields and pastures between you and a road I could see at the bottom. I think, since we’ve got to walk anyhow, if we found that road, there wouldn’t be much to stop us hiking up the hill and into the back of the park.”
Iantha handed him the map, and he studied it under the dashboard light.
Then he drove on again.
Nobody spoke another word before he stopped a second time. He got out and studied the skyline over a gate.
“This ought to do it,” he said.
Usebio opened the trunk of the car and took out a folded bundle of cloth, and a short leaf-bladed spear which he handed to Vail. Simon unlatched the gate, and they followed Iantha through.
It was a steady climb of about three-quarters of a mile over rough grass. Simon set a pace which was intentionally geared to his estimate of the legs of Usebio, whom he didn’t want to exhaust before his trial; he figured that no exertion of that kind should bother Vail. Iantha Lamb, who had worn a loose peasant skirt and flat-heeled shoes which he now realized must have been chosen less for modest simplicity than in shrewd preparedness for any eventuality, kept up without complaining. They negotiated three wire fences on the way, without much difficulty: after the first fifty yards, the moonlight seemed bright enough for a night football game.
Then presently it was not so bright as they approached the black shadows of the trees and shrubbery that capped the last acres of the rise, and suddenly, startlingly close, belled out a fabulously guttural warning that reverberated in the deepest chords of the human fear-instinct.
“A lion.” Russell Vail whispered lightly. “We picked a good guide.”
“I got you in,” said the Saint. “Now you take over.”
In a moment they were on a narrow road, one of the painlessly macadamized trails on which safaris of short-winded suburbanites and their spoiled progeny were permitted, for an additional fee, to cruise among the fauna in their own little cars.
“I know where I am now,” said Vail. “I came up this morning to look around.”
He led them briskly along the road and then off to the right on another path that branched off it. The going was slower for a while under the shade of some trees and presently of a building from which came the grunts and rustlings of unseen beasts; then quite soon they were in the open again, and next to them was a fence of massive timber. The fence enclosed a very uncertain oblong about a hundred yards in its greatest length and half of that at its widest, on one side of which was an equally massive rough-hewn structure like a stable.
And standing out in the full glare of the moon, rotund, enormous, glistening, primeval, motionless, but evidently sensing their presence, was the animal.
Vail waved his hand towards it.
“There you are, Elías,” he said. “Let’s see what you can do with him.”
“A rhinoceros,” Iantha breathed.
“A beauty. Just arrived last week, and still not housebroken.”