Prelude for War Read Free Page A

herded them
together, and a fourth man who strolled up in the background. The reflection of the fire shone redly in their faces as they assembled in a group with an
air of . studied calm which proclaimed their consciousness of behaving
like British aristocrats in an emergency.
    Simon looked them over
without reverence. He knew none of them by sight, and
it was none of his business, but he was the only one present
who seemed to have any coher ent ideas. His voice
stilled their chatter.
    “Well,” he said,
“you ought to know. Are you all here?”
    They glanced at each other
in an awed and scared sort of way and then turned and looked frightenedly at
the blazing house and back again, as though it were the
first time that any of their thoughts had gone beyond their own personal safety.
    Suddenly the voice of the
girl in the nightgown sounded shrilly behind Simon.
    “No! They aren’t all
here! John isn’t here! Where’s Johnny?”
    There was an awful
stillness, in which realization crawled horribly
over chalky faces.
    “B-but where can he
be?” asked the short fat man in a quavering
voice. “He—he must have heard the alarm—— ”
    The military-looking man
turned round and raised his voice in a barrack-square
bawl.
    “Kennet!” he
shouted. “Kennet!”
    He sounded as if he were
bellowing at a slovenly recruit who was late on parade.
    The only answer was the
derisive cackle of the leaping flames.
    The large-bosomed woman
shrieked. She opened her mouth wide and yelled at
the top of her voice, her face contorted with an awful
terror.
    “No! No! It’s too
dreadful. He can’t be still in there! You can’t have—— ”
    Her words broke off in a
kind of gulp. For a couple of seconds her mouth went
on opening and shutting like that of a fish out of
water; then, without another sound, she collapsed like
an empty sack.
    “She’s fainted,”
somebody said stupidly.
    “So she has,”
said the Saint witheringly. “Now we all ought
to gather round and hold her hands.”
    The military man, bending
over her, turned up his purple face.
    “By Gad, sir!” he
burst out cholerically. “Haven’t you—— ” He stopped. Another thought, overwhelming in its enormity, seemed to have erupted under his nose. He straightened up, glaring at the Saint as if he had just really become aware of his presence for the first time. “Anyway,” he said, “what the devil are you doing here?”
    The idea percolated into
the brains of the others and brought them back to gaping
stillness. And while they were staring in vacuous
indignation, the man who had stayed in the background
moved to the front. He was short and very broad shouldered, with a square and
rather flat face and very sunken shrewd dark eyes.
Unlike the others, he was fully dressed. There
was no sign of flurry or alarm about him; with his
powerful chin and thin straight mouth he looked as solid
and impassive as a chunk of granite.
    “Yes,” he said,
“who are you?”
    Simon met his gaze with
cold insouciance. The antago nism was instant and
intuitive. Perhaps it was that that touched the Saint’s
swift mind with the queer itch of dis satisfaction that
was to lead to so many things. Perhaps it
was then that the first wraith of suspicion took nebulous shape in his mind. But there was no time to dwell on the point just
then. He only knew that something like a fine thread
of steel wove through the plastic outlines of his attitude.
    “At the moment,”
he said evenly, “I seem to be the only person
who isn’t behaving like a stuffed owl. Where does this
man Kennet sleep?”
    “I don’t know,”
answered the square-built man. “Some one
else will be able to tell you.”
    His face was
expressionless; his tone was so expressionless as to sound almost ironical.
There seemed to be a stony sort of amusement lurking at the back of his
deep-set eyes. But that might have been an illusion created by the flickering
firelight.
    The girl Valerie supplied
the information.
    “He’s