Saint's Getaway Read Free Page A

either of them had ever seen.
    “This is just too soon for our picnic to
break up,” he said.
    He stooped and seized the little man by the
collar and flung him
over his shoulder like a sack of coals. The attach é case dan gled from the little
man’s wrist by a short length of chain; and the Saint gathered it in with his right hand. The discovery of the chain failed to amaze him: he took it in his
stride, as a detail that was no more than an incidental feature of the general problem, which could be analyzed and
put in its right place at a more
leisured opportunity. Undoubtedly he was quite mad. But he was mad with that magnificent simplicity which is only a
hair’s breadth from genius; and of such is the king dom of adventurers.
    The Saint was smiling as he ran.
    He knew exactly what he had done. In the
space of about two minutes thirty-seven seconds, he had inflicted on his
newest and most fragile halo a series of calamities that made such minor
nuisances as the San Francisco earthquake appear posi tively playful by
comparison. Just by way of an hors-d’oeuvre. And there was no going
back. He had waltzed irrevocably off the slippery tight wire of
righteousness; and that was that. He felt fine.
    At the end of the bridge he caught Patricia’s arm. Down to the right, he knew, a low wall ran beside the
river, with a narrow ledge on the far side that would provide a precarious but possible foothold. He pointed.
    “Play leapfrog, darling.”
    She nodded without a word, and went over like
a schoolboy. Simon’s hand smote Monty on the back.
    “See you in ten minutes, laddie,”
he murmured.
    He tumbled nimbly over the wall with his
light burden on his back, and hung there by his fingers and toes three
inches above the hissing waters while Monty’s footsteps faded away into the
distance. A moment later the patrolman’s heavy boots clumped off the bridge and
lumbered by without a pause.
     
    2
     
    Steadily the plodding hoofbeats receded until
they were scarcely more than an indistinguishable patter; and the
inter mittent
blasts of the patrolman’s whistle became mere plain tive squeaks from the Antipodes. An expansive aura of peace settled
down again upon the wee small hours, and made itself at home.
    The Saint hooked one eye cautiously over the
stonework and surveyed the scene. There was no sign of hurrying reinforce ments
trampling on each other in their zeal to answer the patrolman’s frenzied
blowing. Simon, knowing that the inhabit ants of most
Continental cities have a sublime and blessed gift of minding their own
business, was not so much surprised as satisfied. He pulled
himself nimbly over the wall again and reached a hand down to Pat. In another
second she was standing beside him in the road. She regarded him
dispassionately.
    “I always knew you ought to be locked
up,” she said. “And now I expect you will be.”
    The Saint returned her gaze with wide blue
eyes of Saintly innocence.
    “And why?” he asked. “My dear
soul—why? What else could we do? Our reasoning process was absolutely
elementary. The Law was on its way, and we didn’t want to meet the Law. Therefore
we beetled off. Stanislaus was just beginning to get interesting: we were
not through with Stanislaus. Therefore we took Stanislaus
with us. What could be simpler?”
    “It’s not the sort of thing,” said
Patricia mildly, “that re spectable people do.”
    “It’s the sort of thing we do,”
said the Saint
    She fell into step beside him; and the Saint
warbled on in the extravagant vein to which such occasions
invariably moved him.
    “Talking of the immortal name of
Stanislaus,” he said, “reminds me of the celebrated Dr. Stanislaus
Leberwurst, a bloke that we ought to meet some day. He applied his efforts to
the problems of marine engineering, working from the hitherto ignored
principle of mechanics that attraction and repulsion are equal and
opposite. After eighty years of research he per fected a bateau in
which the propelling