Saint's Getaway Read Free

Three
hairy thugs set on him and proceed to beat him up. Like a good
citizen, you inter vene. You swipe the ungodly on the snitch, and rescue
Regin ald. And then, most naturally, you approach your prot é g é . You
prepare to comfort him and bathe his wounds, what time he hails you as his hero and sends for the
solicitors to revise his will. In your role
of the compleat Samaritan, you inquire whither
he was going, so that you may offer to shepherd him a little further on his way… . And then he
bites your head off——
    The Saint laughed.
    “Yes, yes, I know, brother.” Very
gently and soothingly he spoke, just as before; but way down in the
impenetrable un dertones of his voice that whisper of soft laughter was
lilting about like a mirthful will-o’-the-wisp. “But you’ve got us all wrong. Sie haben uns alles
falsch gegotten. Verstehen Sie Espe ranto? All those naughty men have gone. We’ve just saved your life. We’re your bosom pals. Freunde.
Kamerad. Gott mit uns, and all that sort of thing.”
    The German language has been spoken better.
The Saint himself,
who could speak it like a native when he chose, would have been the first to acknowledge that. But he computed that he had made his meaning fairly clear. Intelligible
enough, at any rate, to encourage any
ordinary person to investigate his credentials
without actual hostility. And definitely he had given no just cause for
the response which he received.
    Perhaps the little man’s normal nerve had
been blown into space by his adventure. Perhaps his head was still muzzy
with the painful memory of his recent experience. These questions can never
now be satisfactorily settled. It is only certain that be was incredibly
foolish.
    With a vicious squeal that contorted his whole
face, he wrenched one arm free from the Saint’s grip and clawed at
the Saint’s eyes like a tigercat. And with that movement all doubts vanished
from Simon Templar’s mind.
    “Not quite so quickly, Stanislaus,”
he drawled.
    He swerved adroitly past the tearing fingers
and pinned the little man resistlessly against the wall; and then he
felt Monty Hayward’s hand on his shoulder.
    “If you don’t mind me interrupting you,
old man,” Monty said coolly, “is that bloke over there a friend of
yours?”
    Simon looked up.
    Along the Rennweg, less than a hundred yards
away, a man in an unmistakable uniform was blundering towards them with
his whistle screaming as he ran; and the Saint grasped the meaning of
the omens that had been drifting blurredly through his senses while he was
occupied with other things. He grasped their meaning with scarcely a second’s pause, in all its fatal and far-reaching implications; and in the next second
he knew, with a reckless certainty, what he was doomed to do.
    The Law was trying to horn in on his party. At
that very mo ment it was thumping vociferously towards him on its
great flat feet, loaded up to its flapping ears with all the elephantine pomposity
of the system which it represented, walloping along to crash the
gate of his conviviality with its inept and fa tuous presence—just as
it had been wont to do so often in the past. And this time
there were bigger and better reasons than there had ever been
why that intrusion could not be allowed. Those reasons might not have seemed so
instantaneously con clusive to the casual and unimaginative observer; but to
the Saint they stuck out like the skyline of Chicago. And Simon found that
he was no less mad than he had always been.
    Under his hold, the little man squirmed
sideways like a demented eel, and the attach é case which he was still clutching desperately in his right hand smashed at the
Saint’s head in a homicidal arc. Lazily the Saint swayed back two inches out side the
radius of the blow; and lazily, almost absent-mindedly, he clipped
the little man under the jaw and dropped him in his tracks. …
    And then he turned and faced the others, and
his eyes were the two least lazy things that