Saint Steps In Read Free Page B

to.
    And then he saw her coming around the curve of the bridge, walking with her young steady stride, and everything he had imagined seemed foolish again. For about
five or six seconds.
    A car came crawling up from behind her, passed her, stopped, and backed up into an alley
that branched diagonally off
from the north side of the street. He had instinctively stood still and merged himself into
the shadow of a tree when he
saw her, so the two men who came out of the alley a mo ment later must have thought the block was deserted
except for themselves and the girl. They wore
handkerchiefs tied over the lower part of
their faces, and they closed in on her, one on each side, very professionally, and he was too far away to hear whatever they said, but he saw them turn her into
the alley as he started running
soundlessly towards them.
    He came up on them in such a swift catlike silence that it must have seemed to all of them as if
a shadow materialised before
their eyes.
    “Hullo,
Madeline,” he drawled.   “I was
afraid I’d missed you,
darling.” , Her
face looked pale and vague in the gloom.
    The masked man on her left spoke in muffled accents. He was tall and
wide-shouldered, and he seemed to be of the type that never lost a fist fight when he was a schoolboy.
    “Better stay out of this, bud, if you don’t want to get into trouble.”
    His
voice was a deep hollow rasp, behind the mask. He looked like a man who could provide trouble or cope
with it. The man on the other side had much the same air. He weighed a little more, but he was inches
shorter and carried it chunkily .
    “I like trouble,” Simon said breezily. “What kind have
you got?”
    “FBI
trouble,” said the tall man flatly. “This girl’s—uh— being detained for questioning, Run
along.”
    “Detained?” asked the Saint. “Just why?”
    “Beat
it,” growled the chunky one. “Or we might think of taking you along with us.”
    “You,” said the Saint calmly, “are the first FBI
operatives I’ve ever met who wore
handkerchiefs over your noses and so far forgot their polish that they’d say
anything like ‘beat it’, or call anybody ‘bud’. If you’re posing as G-men, you’re making a horrible mess of it. So, if you show
your credentials, I’ll be happy to go along with the young lady. But I don’t think you will, or can.”
    He was ready for the swing the tall man launched at him, and he swayed
back just the essential six inches and let the wind of it fan his chin. Then he shifted his weight
forwards again and stepped in with
his right forearm pistoning at waist level. The jar of the contact ran all the way up to his
shoulders. The tall man grunted and leaned over from the middle and the Saint’s left ripped up in a
short smash to the mufflered jaw that would have dropped the average citizen in
his tracks. The tall man was somewhat
tougher than the average. He went pedaling back in a slightly ludicrous race with his own center of
gravity, but he still had nothing but his feet on the ground when a large part of his companion’s weight
descended on the Saint’s neck and
shoulders.
    Simon’s eyes were blurred for an instant in a pyrotechnic burst of lights, and his knees began
to bend; then he got his hands locked behind the chunky man’s head, and let his knees sag even lower before he heaved up
again. The chunky man came somersaulting over his shoulder and hit the ground with a thud that a deaf man could have
felt several feet away. He
rolled over in a wild flurry and wound his arms around the Saint’s shins, binding Simon’s legs
together from ankle to knee.
    In a clutch like that, Simon knew that he had no more chance of staying upright than an
inverted pyramid. He tried to come down as vertically as possible, so as to stay on top of the
chunky man, trying to land on him with his weight on his knees and aiming a downward left at him at the same time.
    Neither of those schemes connected. Simon afterwards had a dim impression of