“I hate to make like a hitch-hiker,” he said, with just the right blend of fellow-American camaraderie combined with undertones of a wartime commission, “but could you drop me off a couple of miles down the valley? I had to bring my car in to be fixed at the garage here, and it won’t be done till this evening.”
While the sergeant hesitated momentarily, from the ingrained suspicion of all professional sergeants, his wife moved over to make room on the front seat.
“Sure,” she said, making up his mind for him like any good American wife. “No trouble at all.”
The Saint got in, and they pulled away. By this time, he figured that Destamio and the first pursuit squad might be debating the possibility that they had not after all headed him where they stopped on the road.
“What you doin’ around here?” asked the sergeant sociably, after a time.
“Spending a vacation with some cousins,” Simon answered casually, knowing that his black hair and tanned complexion would superficially support a fictional Italian ancestry. “They’ve got a farm down the road a piece. First time I’ve ever been here — my folks emigrated before I was born.”
“Where you from, then?”
“New York.”
A trite choice, but one where he knew he could not be caught out on any topographical details, and big enough not to lead into any aquaintance pitfalls of the “Do you know Joe Blow?” pattern.
“We’re from Dallas, Texas. We don’t get out much into the suburbs.”
It was astonishingly easy, and might have tempted anyone to parlay his luck as far as the ride could be stretched. But the Saint had attained his present age mainly because he was not just anyone. Very shortly, his pursuers would extend their search into the town, where they would soon find some loafer in the square who had seen a man answering to Simon’s description getting into an unmistakable American car. With the speed of a couple of telephone calls, the word would be flashed ahead to confreres along the littoral, and before the station wagon even reached the coast the highway in both directions would be alive with eyes that would never let it out of their sight. From that moment there would be nowhere he could leave the car without the probability of being observed and followed, while to stay in it would risk an unthinkable involvement of its innocent occupants in any splashy attempts at his own destruction.
Watching the road ahead for any side tracks that could plausibly lead to a farm, he finally spotted a suitable turning and said: “Right here — don’t try to take me to the door, you’d have a job turning around to get out again. And thanks a million.”
“You’re welcome.”
Simon got out, and the car shot off as he waved good-bye.
Now until they stopped the station wagon and questioned the driver, Destamio’s cohorts would be partially baffled — unless someone realized that a man on foot could travel in any direction, if he was fool enough to climb over a sun-blasted mountain instead of skirting it. Which was precisely the Saint’s intention.
But the plan was not as hare-brained to him as it might have seemed to a less original fugitive. On a previous visit to Sicily he had driven from Messina to Palermo, and had remarked on the numbers of people waiting at bus stops along the highway, who had apparently landed from boats or lived under rocks by the wayside, since they were nowhere near any visible human habitation. His companion, who knew the island, had pointed out the dusty dirt tracks that wound back between the buttresses of the hills, and explained that higher up in most of the valleys, closer to sources of precious water, there was a hidden village. Though they might be only a few miles apart on the map, the normal route from one to another was down to the sea, along the coast, and back up again — a long way around, but much more attractive in a climate that discouraged strenuous exertion. To the Saint, however, to do whatever would be most unexpected was far more important than an economy of sweat.
And sweat, in plain common language, was what his eccentricity exacted, in copious quantities. As he climbed higher, so did the sun, making it clear why Sicily had never become the Mecca of midsummer mountain-hikers. To add to its natural disadvantages for such sport, Simon Templar also had to contend not only with the after-effects of a mild concussion but also with the fact that he had had no breakfast, or any other food or drink since last night’s dinner.
It was good evidence of his mental as well as his physical toughness that he set and maintained a pace which would not have disgraced a week-end hiker over some gentle undulations in an English autumn. His shirt was already sodden when the terraced groves and vineyards gave up their encroachment on a baked and crumbling mountain-side where only straggling shrubs and cacti grew; but the sun only worked harder to imitate the orifice of a blast furnace. More insidious was the temptation to let his mind dwell on thoughts of cool refreshing drinks, which only intensified the craving. The human body can go without food for a month, but dies in a few days without water. Simon was not about to die, but he had never been so thirsty as he was when he reached the summit of the range he had aimed for.
By then it was almost noon, and his brains felt as if they were being cooked inside his skull. The rocks shimmered in the blaze, heat-induced mirages plagued his vision, and the blood pounded in his temples. But if he had chosen the right ridge, he should be able to come down in a valley that would bring him to the sea from a totally different quarter and in a totally different area from where the hunters would be watching for him.
A rustling sound like wind-blown leaves came to him as he rounded a jutting promontory some way below the crest, and he found himself suddenly face to face with three startled goats. They were moth-eaten, dusty, and lean to a point of emaciation which was understandable if their only grazing was the withered herbage of that scorched hillside. Two of them were females with large but not distended udders, and the explanation of that detail dawned on him an instant too late for him to draw back behind the sheltering shoulder of magma. By that time he had seen the goatherd, and seen that the goatherd also saw him.
They stared at each other for a silent moment, the goatherd looking as surprised as his charges. He was a thin youth as dusty and tattered as the goats, in a faded shirt with the sleeves torn off at the shoulders and pants that had been mended so many times that it was difficult to tell which was the original material and which the patches. A knotted rope served him for a belt, and completed the sum of his wardrobe; the soles of his bare feet must have been calloused like hoofs to be able to ignore the abrasive and cauterizing surfaces which were all that his pastures offered them to walk on. He brushed back his uncut mop of hair to get a better view of the extraordinary apparition which had shattered all the precedents of his lonely domain.
“Buon giorno,” said the Saint reassuringly. “A beautiful day for a walk in the hills.”
“Sissignore,” responded the young man politely, to avoid offending an obvious lunatic. He speculated: “You are English?”
Simon nodded, deciding that it was better to accept that assumption than be taken for a mad dog. He sighted a tiny patch of shade under a projecting rock and sat down to rest in it for a minute.
“It was not as hot as this when I started out,” he said, in an attempt to partly explain his irrational behavior.
“You must be thirsty,” the herdboy said.
Something in Simon’s manner had erased his first fear and he came and squatted close by.
“My mouth is so dry that I doubt if I could lick a stamp.”
“You would like a drink?”