Simon Templar might easily have passed the “hotel.” For reasons known only to itself, it stood outside the town, perched aloofly on a stony slope that rose above the rudimentary road. But as he went by he saw the girl on the veranda, and admitted to himself that he was thirsty. He climbed the rough path and unslung his pack in the shade.
“If I were a millionaire,” he said, smiling at her, “I might offer you half my fortune for a drink.”
She had a rather pale, thoughtful face, delicately featured, almost too classically oval to have a character of its own, like one of those conventionalized portraits of the Italian seventeenth-century school. The sunlight struck blue-black glints from her hair as she wiped the table.
“What would you like?” she asked.
“What would you recommend?”
“We have some beer.”
“It was revealed to me in a vision,” said the Saint.
He leaned back and lighted a cigarette while he waited for her to bring it, gazing out across the sun-baked vista of granite and sandstone, ramshackle houses slumbering in the midday heat with their boards cracked and scarred and the tinted plaster peeling from their walls like the skin of a Florida sun-worshiper; sage, mesquite, violet-shadowed mesas, sparse trees powdered with dust, and the blue hint of mountains in the far distance. The same dust was thick on his bare brown arms, and the narrowing of his gaze against the glare creased dry wrinkles into the corners of his eyes. His clothes made no attempt to hide the fact that they had seen many weeks of vagabondage, and yet in some indefinable way they still rode his lean, wide-shouldered frame with a swashbuckling elegance that matched the gay lines of his face, for Simon made an adventure of all journeys.
“There you are.” The girl set a beaker of liquid gold before him, and watched while he drank. “Where are you from?” she asked.
Simon gestured toward the south.
“Cuautia,” he said. “Before that, Panama. A long time before that, Paris. And once upon a time I was in a place called Pfaffenhausen.”
“Looking for work?”
He shook his head.
“I’m an outlaw,” he said, with that smiling veracity which sometimes was so immeasurably more deceptive than any untruth. “I steal from the rich and wicked, and give to the poor and virtuous. I’m quite poor and virtuous myself,” he remarked parenthetically. “There has been some talk of making me a Saint.”
She laughed quietly, and left him as a man’s voice called her testily from indoors. Simon took another draught of the cool beer and stretched out his long legs contentedly.
He was in the state of happy vagueness in which an artist may find himself when confronted with a virgin canvas: for a modern privateer who modestly rated himself a supreme technician in the art of living, the situation was almost identical. Anything might take shape — dragons, murder, green hippopotami, bank robbers, damsels in distress, blue moons, or an absconding company promoter. Straight ahead of him as he sat there, if he cared to take that direction, he might come at last to Denver. He could turn east and follow the coast round to New Orleans and Miami. Or, in the fullness of time, he could wake up to the excitements of Chicago, New York, or San Francisco. Or he could stay right where he was with his beer in this forgotten border town of Saddlebag, and as a matter of fact, he was just preparing to discard the last alternative when he was privileged to witness the arrival of Mr Amadeo Urselli.
Urselli came on the bus, which went rattling past in a cloud of dust while Simon sat on over his refreshment. The same cloud of dust, halting to poise itself aridly over the roofs of the houses below, indicated that the bus had stopped somewhere in the village, and a few minutes later Mr Urselli himself came into view, toiling up the road toward the hotel with three or four inquisitive urchins following in his wake and apparently offering comment and counsel. Simon immediately admitted that there was some excuse for them — in his own early youth he would probably have been their ringleader. For Mr Urselli — whose name the Saint had yet to learn — was indeed a remarkable and resplendent sight in that setting.
His gray check suit fitted him so tightly, particularly around the waist, that he would probably have found it necessary to take his coat off in order to tie his shoelaces. His pearly hued felt hat looked as if it had come straight from a shop window; his tie had the gorgeous flamboyance of a tropical sunset; the pigskin suitcase which he carried in his right hand shone with a costly luster. The gesticulations which he made with his left hand in the attempt to rid himself of his juvenile escort flashed iridescent gleams of jewelry on his fingers.
He crested the slope leading up to the veranda and dumped his bag with a sigh. The escort gathered round him in an admiring circle while he mopped his brow with a large silk handkerchief.
“Say, will you sons of bandmasters scram?” he rasped — not, Simon gathered, for anything like the first time.
“Give them their fun, brother,” murmured the Saint. “They don’t get many chances to see the world.”
The newcomer turned toward him, and his sallow face slowly lightened to the gregarious gleam with which the exile in foreign climes recognizes another who speaks the same language.
“This is a helluva place,” he said emotionally.
It may be acknowledged at once that Simon Templar did not like the face, which was thin and pointed like a weasel’s, with flat brown eyes that shifted restlessly in their orbits, but Simon nodded amiably, and the traveler sank into a chair beside him.
“My name’s Urselli,” he volunteered. “I came out here to look at the neck of the woods where I was born. Ain’t there anyone around in this jernt?”
Simon glanced casually round, and was answered by the reappearance of the girl in the doorway. Mr Urselli stood up.
“Where’s Mr Intuccio?”
The girl turned and called, “Papa!” into the dark room behind her, and presently the innkeeper clumped out — a big black-bearded man in grimy shirt sleeves. Urselli held out a white manicured hand.
“You may not remember me, Salvatore,” he said in halting Italian. “I am Amadeo.”
The innkeeper’s sunken eyes surveyed him impassively, and held the hand with a callused paw.
“I remember. You will drink something?”
“Thank you,” said Mr Urselli.
He flopped back in his chair as the other left them after dispersing the enraptured audience with a hoarse “Git outside!” and a menacing lift of his arm which sent the urchins scampering. The girl followed the old man in.
“What I call a royal welcome,” observed Mr Urselli, when they were alone. He winked, craning his neck, “But the girl ain’t so bad, at that. It mightn’t be so dull here. If she calls him Papa she must be some kinda cousin of mine — Intuccio is. Since I’m here I guess I better like it.”
“Are you on a pleasure trip?” asked the Saint, turning his glass reflectively.
“You might call it that. Yes, I thought I might come back and take a rest in the old home town. I haven’t seen it for twenty years, and I guess it ain’t changed at all.” Urselli studied his expensive-looking hands. “I’m in the joolry trade. Look at that piece of ice.”
He slipped a ring from one of his fingers and passed it over. “Very nice,” Simon remarked casually, examining it.
“I’ll say it’s nice,” affirmed Mr Urselli. “There ain’t a flaw in it, and it was a cheap buy at five grand. You gotta know your business with diamonds.”
Simon handed the ring back, and Mr Urselli replaced it on his finger. There was a tinge of mockery in the depths of the Saint’s sea-blue eyes, unperceived by Mr Urselli. It seemed a fantastic place for any practitioner of that ancient spiel to come with his diamonds, and Simon Templar’s curiosity never slept. He debated within himself, lazily interested, whether he should offer some ingenuous lead which would help the sales talk into its next phase, or whether he should leave the whole onus of its development on Mr Urselli’s doubtless capable shoulders, but at that moment the black-bearded innkeeper returned with a bottle and two glasses.
He poured out two drinks in silence, and sat down. Every movement he made was heavy and stolid, as his greeting had been. He raised his glass with a perfunctory mutter, and drank. His daughter came and leaned in the frame of the door. “What brings you home, Amadeo?”
The voice was dull and apathetic, and Urselli seemed to make an effort to retain his full expansiveness of geniality.
“I felt I needed a holiday. After all, there’s no place like home. And what’s home without a woman?” Urselli jerked his thumb slyly towards the girl. “I didn’t know you had a family.”
“There is only Lucia. Her mother died when she was born.”
“Pretty girl,” said Urselli approvingly.
Intuccio drank again, moving only his arm. “This is a long way from Chicago,” he said. “Where do you go now?”
“I thought I’d stay here for a while,” said Urselli comfortably. “It looks restful. Can you find room for me?” He looked at the girl as he spoke.
“There is always room,” she said.
Intuccio raised his deep-set eyes to her face, and lowered them again.
“What we have is yours,” he said formally.
“Then that’s settled,” said Urselli jovially. “It’ll be great to sit around and do nothing, and talk over old times.” He unbuttoned his coat and fanned himself energetically. “Jeez, is it always as hot as this? I’ll have to copy your costume if I’m making myself at home.”
Intuccio shrugged, watching him dispassionately, and Urselli took off his tight-waisted coat and hung it over the back of his chair. Something clunked solidly against the wood as he did so, and the Saint’s eyes turned absently towards the sound. One pocket was gaping under an unusual weight, and Simon looked into it and saw the gleaming metal of a gun butt.
Mr Urselli remembered him as his glass was refilled.
“Are you stayin’ here too?” he asked.
“I think I will,” said the Saint.
There was something bizarre about the home-coming of Amadeo Urselli. During the afternoon, with no more effort than was called for by attentive listening, Simon learned that both men were the scions of local families, immigrants to the United States at the beginning of the century. Not long afterwards their paths had separated. The Ursellis had taken to the big cities, merging themselves flexibly into the pace and turmoil of a rising civilization; the Intuccios, unyielding peasants for as many generations as the oldest of them could remember, had naturally sent down their roots into the soil, preferring to find their livelihood in the surroundings to which they had been born. The divergence was summed up almost grotesquely in the two men; if the Saint’s hypersensitive intuition had not been startled into alertness by the other oddities that had struck him about Urselli, he might have found himself staying on for nothing but the amusement of the human comedy which they were acting.
It was not until dinner was half finished that Intuccio’s rock-like taciturnity unbent at all. They ate in the smoky oil-lighted kitchen, the four of them together round a stained pine table, in the incense of garlic and charring wood.
Urselli prattled on in a kind of strained desperation, as if the mighty silence that welled in on them whenever he stopped was more than his nerves could stand. The older man answered only with grunts and monosyllables; the girl Lucia spoke very little, whether from shyness or habit Simon could not decide, and the Saint himself felt that he was a spectator rather than a player — at least for those early scenes. It was as a spectator that Simon watched Intuccio wind the last reel of spaghetti dexterously round his fork, and heard him interrupt Urselli’s recital of the delights of Broadway to ask, “You have done well in your business, Amadeo?”
They were speaking in Italian, the language on which Intuccio stubbornly insisted, and which Simon spoke as easily as he.
“Well enough,” Urselli answered. “It was easy for me. I must have been born for it. Buy and sell, the same as any other business — there is only the one secret — and know what you can sell before you buy.” He slapped his waist. “Here in my belt I have twenty thousand good American dollars. And you, Salvatore?”
The other drank from his wineglass and wiped his matted black beard.
“I also have no complaints. Five years ago I have much land and everyone is paying the highest prices, but I have the intelligence to see that it will not always be like that. Ebbene, I sell the farm, and presently when the prices have gone down I buy this place. It is something for me to do, and I like to stay here. I have perhaps thirty thousand dollars, perhaps a little more. We are thrifty people, and we do not have to spend money on fine clothes.”
The meal was completed with some grudging attempts at graciousness on the part of Intuccio at which Urselli gave Simon a covert grimace of relief and turned his attentions more openly to Lucia. When it was over the girl picked up a pail and went out to draw water from the well to wash the dishes, and Urselli followed her out with an offer of help. The old man’s shadowed eyes gazed after them fixedly.
“You have an attractive daughter,” Simon observed, with a touch of humorous significance.
Intuccio’s face turned slowly back to him, and the Saint was surprised by its darkness. There was a hunted flicker of fear and suspicion at the back of the innkeeper’s eyes, the same look that Simon might have expected if he had burst into the solitude of a hermit.
“Perhaps I should not have told that Amadeo that I had so much money,” he said, with an equal significance in the harshness of his reply.
“Why worry,” asked the Saint gently, “when it was not true?”
For the first time the semblance of a smile touched the innkeeper’s grim mouth.
“Amadeo does not know that. But I had to say it. I have not three hundred dollars, signor, but I have pride. Why should I let Amadeo boast against me?”
He raised himself from the table and stumped out of the kitchen. Simon went out and smoked a cigarette in the fresh air on the veranda. Later he found the old man serving the scanty orders of his evening customers in the big gloomy outer room, moving about his work in the same heavy unsmiling manner.
Simon drifted into a place at the long communal table which occupied the center of the room. The four customers were at the other end of it, grouped over a game of poker. Simon ordered himself a drink and listened abstractedly to the scuff of cards and the expressionless voices of the players. Intuccio called for the girl to come out and take over the serving; she came, composed and silent, and the old man joined Simon at the table. He sat there with his brawny arms spread forward and his glass held clumsily between his huge hands, without speaking, and the Saint wondered what thoughts were passing through the dark caverns of that heavy impenetrable mind. There was a sense of menace about that somber immobility, a dreadful inhumanity of aloofness, that sent an eerie ripple of half-understanding up Simon Templar’s spine. Suddenly he knew why so few men came to the inn.
Amadeo Urselli entered jauntily, and pulled out a chair beside them.
“This is a dandy spot,” he said fluently. “You know, when I first dropped in here I nearly got straight back on the bus and went out again. Seemed like a guy would go nuts sittin’ around here with nothing to look at but a lot of mesquite. Well, now I guess movies and cabarets don’t mean so much compared with real home life. I could settle down in a town like this. Say, Salvatore, what’s the hunting around here?”
Intuccio lifted his eyes under their dense black brows. “Hunting?”
“Yeah. You got a swell rifle hangin’ on the wall outside. I took it down to have a look at it, and it was all cleaned and erled. Or is it in case the bandits come this way?”
The innkeeper sat motionless, as if he had not heard, staring at the glass cupped between his hands. The voices of the poker players muttered a pizzicato background to his stillness: “Two to come in.”
“And four.”
“Make it four more.”
“I’ll raise that ten.” The chips slithered and spilled across the board and hands were turned face downwards and sent spinning over the table to join the discard.
Intuccio, detached as a statue, turned his head as the game fell into the lull of a fresh deal.
“Mr Jupp, have you seen any bandits here?”
One of the players looked up.
“Since Roosevelt became President there have been no more bad men,” he said solemnly.
Another of the men leaned round in his chair.
“Yo’re new to these parts, I guess,” he drawled. “You oughta know that them stories belong back in the days of your grandfather. This is a peaceful country now.”
“By hookey,” erupted the third man, who wore a sheriff’s badge, “it had better be! You won’t see any bad men here while I’m responsible.”
Intuccio nodded. He turned to Urselli again, his eyes dispassionately intent, gleaming motionlessly in their hollow sockets like deep pools of stagnant water in a cave.
“You see, Amadeo?” he said. “At one time there were bad men and bandits here. Even now, sometimes, little things have happened. There are some who believe that the bad men are not altogether stamped out. But the times have changed.” The craglike head, inscrutable as a mask of rugged wax, held itself squarely in the field of Urselli’s shifting eyes. “Today you will find more robbers in the big cities of America than you will find here.”
Simon could still hear every intonation of the slow rough-hewn voice when he went up to bed, and he ran over it again and again in his mind while he smoked the last cigarette of the day. In spite of the recollection he lost no sleep. A glimpse of a pretty girl leads to an inn, and to the same inn comes an Americanized Italian who is not quite everything that an Americanized Italian should be, and all at once there is a mystery; that is how these things happen, but the Saint was still waiting for his own cue. Then he woke up late the next morning, and suddenly it dawned upon him, with dazzling simplicity, that the most elementary and obvious solution would be to lure Amadeo personally into a secluded spot, scratch him tactfully, and see what his subcutaneous ego looked like to the naked eye.
He went down to breakfast in the same exuberant spirits to which any promise of direct action always raised him. Simon Templar’s conception of a tactful approach was one which nobody else had ever been able to comprehend.
The girl asked him what he proposed to do that day.
“You will remember that I am an outlaw,” said the Saint. “I am going to make a raid.”
Through the kitchen window he caught sight of Mr Urselli, an earlier riser, sitting on the edge of the well at the back and filing his nails meditatively. He went out as soon as he had finished his coffee and nailed his fellow guest with every circumstance of affability.
“What cheer, Amadeo,” he said.
Mr Urselli jerked round sharply, identified him, and relaxed. “Morn’n’,” he said.
His manner was preoccupied, but it took more than that to deter Simon once he had reached a decision. The Saint traveled round and sank cheerfully onto a reach of parapet at his victim’s side. In a similar fashion one of Nero’s lions might have circumnavigated a plump martyr.
“Amadeo,” said the Saint, “will you tell me a secret? Why do you carry a gun?”
Urselli stopped filing abruptly. For a couple of seconds he did not move, and then his eyes slewed round, and they were narrowed to brown slits.
“Whaddaya mean?”
“I know you carry a gun,” said the Saint quietly.
Urselli’s gaze shifted first. He looked down at his hands.
“You gotta be able to take care of yourself in my business,” he explained, and if his voice was a shade louder than was necessary, many ears less delicately tuned than the Saint’s might not have noticed it. “Why, it was nothing to travel about the country with fifty grand worth of ice on me. Suppose I hadn’t packed a roscoe — hell, I’d of been heisted once a week!”
Simon nodded.
“But can you shoot with it?”
“I’m telling you I can shoot with it.”
“That tin can up on the slope, for instance,” Simon persisted innocently. “Do you think you could hit that?”
Urselli squinted upward.
“Sure.”
“I’d like to see you do it,” said the Saint airily.
The barb in his words was subtly smooth, but the other shot a quick glance sideways, his underlip jutting.
“Who says I’m a liar?” he questioned aggressively.
“Nobody I heard.” The Saint was as suave as velvet. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Intuccio standing in the door of the kitchen, watching them in silence, but he had no aversion to an audience. He put a hand in his pocket. “All the same, I’ve got a double saw that wonders whether you can.”
“And I’ve got a century that says I’m telling you I can.”
“Call it a bet.”
Urselli drew out his automatic fumblingly, as though he had started to regret his rashness, and then he caught the Saint’s blue gaze resting on him in gentle mockery, and snapped back the jacket with vicious resolution. He aimed carefully, and his first shot kicked up a spurt of dust six inches to the left of the target. His second was three inches to the right. Urselli cursed under his breath, and the third shot fell short. Intuccio drew nearer, and stood behind them with folded arms.
At that range it was reasonably good shooting, but the Saint smiled, and covered the weapon with a cool hand before Urselli could fire again.
“I mean like this,” he said.
He took the gun and fired without appearing to aim, but the tin leaped like a grasshopper; the third shot caught it in the air and spun it against the side of the hill. Urselli stared at him while the echoes rattled and died, and the can rolled tinkling down toward them till an outcrop of stone checked it.
“By the way,” Simon said, recalling the other’s peculiarly localized pronunciation of jernt and erled, “I thought you came from Chicago.”
“Well?”
“You wouldn’t have noticed it,” Simon said kindly, “but your accent betrays you. You spent some time in the East, didn’t you — on your jewelry business?” He was casually slipping the empty magazine out of the automatic while he talked, and then he suddenly let out an exclamation of dismay and peered anxiously down into the well. A faint splash came up from far below. “It slipped right through my fingers,” he said, looking at Urselli blankly.
The other sprang up, swiftly tearing the now useless weapon out of Simon’s hands.
“You did that on poipose!” he grated.
The Saint seemed to ponder the accusation.
“I might have,” he conceded. “You handle that rod just a little too well, and you wouldn’t want to be tempted to commit murder, would you? Now suppose you happened to run into the guy who told you that that white sapphire in your ring was a real diamond, and charged you five grand for it?”
Urselli’s eyes dilated incredulously towards the scintillation on his left hand.
“Why, the son of a—” He pulled himself together. “What’s the idea?” he snarled. “Are you tryin’ to put me on the spot?”
Simon shook his head.
“No,” he answered. “But maybe you left Chicago because you were already on it.”
Intuccio came up between them.
“You like shooting?” he said in his deep harsh voice.
“I’m always ready for a bit of fun,” said the Saint lightly. “Maybe Amadeo would like some hunting, too. D’you think we could find anything worth shooting around here?”
The innkeeper nodded hesitantly.
“Yesterday morning I saw the tracks of a mountain lion. If you like, we will go out and see what we can find.”
An hour later Intuccio halted his horse in an arroyo two miles away. He laid a rifle across Urselli’s saddlebow. “You will wait here,” he said. “We go round the other side of the mountain and drive him down.”
Urselli’s glance flickered at him.
“How long do I wait?”
The innkeeper shrugged.
“Perhaps three hours, perhaps four. It is a long way. But if we find him, he will come down here.” He turned calmly to the Saint. “Andiamo, signor!”
Simon was contented enough to follow him. Intuccio set a tiring trot, but it was easy for the Saint, who was as iron-hard as he had ever been. A coppery sun baked the air out of a sky of brilliant unbroken blue, one of those subtropical skies that are as flat and glazed as a painted cyclorama. Little whirls of dust floated up behind them as they rode, dancing a phantom veil dance to the irregular tom-tom of swinging hoof beats. Intuccio made no conversation, and Simon was left to ruminate over his own puzzle. To be out under the blazing daylight in that ridged and castled wilderness of mighty boulders piled against steep scarps of rock, with such an enigma on his mind, gave him the exact opposite of the feeling which he had had the night before. Then he had been a spectator; now he was an actor, and he was ready, as he always was, to enjoy his share in the play.
Three hours later, as they rode down the barren slopes again toward the place where they had left Urselli, he felt very much at peace. He had settled quite a number of things in his own mind during the ride, and about Amadeo Urselli’s own exact position in the cosmic scale he had removed all doubts even before they set out. He knew the rats of the big cities too well to be mistaken about Amadeo.
But the setting for the encounter was what made it so ineffably superb. To have met him in the city would have been ordinary enough, but to meet the city gunman out here in the great open spaces was a poem which only the Saint’s impish sense of humor could realize to the full.
Glancing down at the rifle carried ready across his pommel, the Saint even asked himself the wild question whether Amadeo Urselli might conceivably be mistaken in a moment of well-staged excitement for a mountain lion. Almost regretfully he dismissed the idea, but when a turn of the trail brought him a sight of Urselli sitting disconsolately on a rock slapping at the indefatigable flies, he felt genuinely distressed to think that such an ideal opportunity had to be passed by. They rode down into the gulch, and Intuccio leaned over in the saddle with his forearm on his thigh.
“You have seen nothing, Amadeo?”
“Nothing but flies,” said Urselli sourly.
He was pinkly sun-broiled and very bad-tempered, and the sight of his misery almost made up for the fact that they had not seen so much as a toe print of the mountain lion which they had set out to look for.
They arrived back at the hotel a few minutes after four. Urselli was the first to dismount, moving stiffly from the exertion of the day. He stopped to read a message that was nailed to the door; Simon, coming up behind him, saw the conventional black hand at the head of the letter before he could distinguish the words, and then Intuccio’s arm drove between them and ripped it down.
Urselli spoke from the side of a thin hard mouth.
“I thought there were no more bad men.”
Intuccio did not answer. The paper crumpled in his grasp, and without a word he thrust them both aside and crashed through the door. He stumbled over an upturned chair in the gloom as he went in, and then they stood on either side of him surveying the wreck of the kitchen. The center table was tilted drunkenly against the range of the far end, and two other chairs were flung into different corners, one of them broken. A saucepan lay at their feet, and little splashes of shattered china and glass winked up at them from the floor.
Intuccio dragged himself across the room and detached a fragment of gaily printed cotton stuff from the back of the broken chair. He stared at it dumbly. Then, without speaking, he held out the message from the door.
Simon took it and smoothed it out.
If you wish to see your daughter again, bring $20,000 in cash to the top of Skeleton Hill by midnight tonight. Come alone and unarmed. We shall not send a second warning. Death pays for treachery.
“You gotta pay, Salvatore,” Urselli was saying. “I’m tellin’ ya. You can’t fool with kidnappers. A gang that snatches a girl won’t stop for nothin’. Say, I remember when Red McLaughlin put the arm on Sappho Lirra—”
Intuccio straightened up lifelessly, like a stunned giant.
“I must find the sheriff,” he said.
The Saint’s hand crossed his path, barring it, in a gesture as lithe and vivid as the flick of a sword.
“Let me go.”
He went down the short road to the town with a light step. This was adventure as he understood it, objective and decisive, like a blast of music, and the Saint smiled as he went. Far might it be from him to deny the home-coming of Amadeo Urselli any of its quintessential poetry. He walked into the sheriff’s office and found Saddlebag’s solitary representative of the law at home.
“Lucia Intuccio has been kidnapped,” he said. “Will you come up?”
The man’s eyes bulged.
“Kidnapped?” he repeated incredulously.
“There was a note calling for twenty thousand dollars ransom nailed to the door,” said the Saint, and the sheriff took down his gun belt.
“I’ll be right along.”
Simon went with him. The news spread like an epidemic, and a dozen men had gathered in the back room when they arrived.
Intuccio told the story. He seemed to have shaken off some of his first numbness, and at intervals his eyes veered towards Urselli with an ugly soberness. When he had finished, the sheriff’s gaze leveled in the same direction.
“So,” he said slowly, “while Urselli knew that you’d be gone at least three hours, there wasn’t anybody to see what he was up to.”
“What of it?” protested Urselli grittily. “You got no—”
Simon interposed himself.
“We’re wasting time,” he said coolly. “I guess we ought to make a search.”
“Mebbe we will.” The sheriff’s gaze did not shift. “You’ll come as well, Urselli — and stay with me.”
The group of men filed out quickly, splitting up outside into two and threes, for there were less than five hours of daylight left — an almost hopeless time in which to find and follow a cold trail in that wild country. Simon joined them.
The sun went down in a riot of gold and crimson, and the search parties began to filter back through the gray-blue dusk. By ten o’clock, when the night was a vaulted bowl of dark glass studded with silver pin points, they were all gathered together at the inn, and the sheriff, with Intuccio and Urselli, came in last while they were all waiting.
There was no need for questions. A silence that was its own answer hung in the room, mirroring itself in the glazed tension of the yellow highlights smeared by the single oil lamp on the circle of leathery faces. The angles of black shadow in the far corners held the strained heaviness of a mounting thunderstorm.
The sheriff read through the ransom notice again, and raised his eyes to Intuccio’s face. The nervous scrape of a man’s feet on the bare floor rasped a nerve-stabbing discord into the stillness before he spoke.
“You wasn’t aimin’ to pay this money, was you, Salvatore?”
The old man stared back at him haggardly. Before he came in, the alternatives had been discussed by the reassembled search parties in measured low-pitched voices that scarcely ruffled the texture of the air. Organized help could not come from the nearest big town before midnight — it might not come before morning. What would the sophisticated city police think of Black Hand threats?
“ Buon Dio! ” said Intuccio, in a terrible voice, “I have not so much money in the world.”
Urselli started.
“But you said yesterday—”
“I lied.”
The innkeeper’s great fists were clenched at his sides, his powerful shoulders quivering under his soiled shirt.
“I have always failed. Everything I touched has been under a curse. You all know how the farm ate up my money until it was nearly all lost, and the land was sold for the mortgages. You all know how I bought this inn to try and make a living, but none of you came here. Perhaps you were afraid of me because I never laughed with you. Dio mio, as if a man who has suffered as much as I have could laugh! You thought I had the evil eye, some black secret that made me unfit to be one of you. Yes, I had. But the only secret was one which you all knew — that I had failed... But when that cousin of mine came back from Chicago, with his fine clothes and his jewels, and boasted of the money he made — I lied. I did not want to see him despise me. I told him I had thirty thousand dollars. I have not got five hundred.”
Urselli lighted a cigarette mechanically.
“That looks bad,” he said. “I tell you, those guys mean business.”
“You know a great deal about them, Amadeo? You speak from experience?”
The innkeeper’s burning eyes were bent rigidly on the smaller man’s face. There were red notes glinting in them, hot swirling sparks from a fire that was breaking loose deep within them. In the core of the soft voice was a deep vibrant note like the premonitory rumble of a volcano. “Perhaps you know more than any of us?”
Urselli looked right and left, with a sudden widening of his rat-like eyes. Not one of the ring of faces painted in the lamplight moved an eyelash. They waited.
He sucked at his cigarette, the tip flickering abruptly to the uncertain inhalation.
“In the cities, you hear things,” he gabbled shakily. “You read newspapers. I’m only tellin’ you—”
“Now I will tell you!”
Intuccio’s restraint broke at last; the fire that was in him seethed through in a jagged roar. His iron hands crushed into the other’s shoulders, half lifting, half hurling him round.
“I said last night that you would find more robbers in the big cities of America than you would find here. I was right. Here is one of them! A dog who has come back to the home where he does not belong any longer!”
The voice sank again, only momentarily. “This very morning you were exposed. The stranger here did it. He challenged you. I was listening. He made you show your gun. Does an honest man need a gun? And you could shoot. I watched. He told you that you were a liar when you said you traded in jewelry — because you did not know that the diamond on your finger was not real. And he said that perhaps the true reason why you left Chicago was because you were — on the spot. Perhaps you thought I did not understand. But we are not so ignorant. We also read newspapers. I know you, Amadeo! You are a gunman!”
He turned to the Saint.
“Is that not so?”
Simon nodded.
“That would be my guess.”
“So you thought you could swindle me,” Intuccio went on mercilessly. “But then you were exposed. You knew that after what I had seen and heard I should never trust you. You had to be quick, before I denounced you to the sheriff. This afternoon you were alone. You came back here. You! You took Lucia away! You wrote that letter! You are the man we want!”
Urselli’s gasp of fright as he was shaken as if he were a doll in the convulsive grasp of the huge hands that held him sobbed out against the fearful low-pitched growl of wrathful men. As the innkeeper’s voice rose uncontrollably, the murmur beat upwards like an angry sea. Other voices clanged against it, echoing clearer and louder in the vengeful cry of a wolf pack, soaring to drown every other sound, shouting against each other. The circle narrowed in, creeping out of the shadows into the full yellow of the smoking lamp, hands reaching out, throats snarling gutturally. “Lynch him! Lynch the swine!”
“Stop!”
The sheriff’s command boomed like a gunshot through the din. He turned to Urselli grimly.
“Reckon you better say something quick, friend,” he drawled.
Urselli’s face twisted and twitched, his hunted eyes swiveling frantically over the bank of remorseless faces. He shrank away like a cornered animal.
“It’s not true!” he blubbered. “I ain’t done nothing. Ya can’t frame this on me! This won’t help ya. That ransom’s gotta be paid by midnight — an’ if it ain’t there—”
The clamor which had been hushed began again. Fingers plucked at him. Red eyes glowered into his whichever way he turned. And all the time the innkeeper’s inexorable hands held him as helpless as a struggling child. Urselli screamed.
“Don’t touch me!” he gasped, writhing away from them. “You’re all wrong. You don’t know what you’re doing. Gimme a break. Don’t touch me! Salvatore — you wouldn’t let them do this to me? I’ll do anything — anything. Here, look. I told you I had twenty thousand bucks. You can have them. I’ll give them to you. Take them and pay the ransom!”
“What do you think. Salvatore?” asked the sheriff steadily.
Silence came down again, raw-edged and expectant. Intuccio turned. He shrugged, and the slobbering object in his grip rose and fell like a puppet with the heave of his shoulders.
“It is easy enough to pay ransom to oneself,” he said skeptically. “But I can take his money. If they will give Lucia back to me — if she is safe — afterwards we shall see.”
“We can all go with you,” spoke up one of the bystanders, and there was a chorus of assent. “If we can catch one o’ them thar coyotes—”
Others chimed in.
“Fools!” cried the old man bitterly. “If it were as easy as that, should I not have asked your company long ago? Lucia will not be there. They will keep her until the money is paid.” The fire smoldered again in his dark eyes. “But when I return, you, Amadeo, will still be here. And death pays for treachery. If Lucia does not come home, I will kill you myself.”
He tore off Urselli’s belt and flung it to the sheriff. Pack after pack of new crisp bills came from it, and the sheriff counted the pile and stacked it together.
“It is my duty to forbid this,” he said gravely. “But it’s — your daughter.”
Intuccio nodded stonily.
“Yes,” he said. “It is my daughter.”
He scanned their faces once, his eyes resting last on the trembling figure of Urselli held by two pairs of strong hands, and then he passed through them to the door, with the circle opening to let him through. And again the stillness began to be broken, voice by voice.
“I have an idea,” said the Saint.
He stood by the wall, a little apart from them, cigarette poised between lean brown fingers. The very quiescence of his lounging suppleness had the electric quality of a smoothly humming dynamo, but the light was too dim for them to see the reckless blue twinkle of his eyes. Yet they all looked at him.
“All of you couldn’t go,” he said quietly. “But one man might. I’ve done plenty of night hunting. I could follow — and see where the money was taken.”
“Could you be sure no one would know?” asked the sheriff, and Simon smiled.
“Anyone who heard me, or saw me, would be a living miracle.”
He had a way about him.
They listened to him.
He went through the night toward Skeleton Hill with a blithe softness. The country before him and on either side was an earthly sleeping wilderness, ragged and obscure in the shrouded darkness of a night without a moon. The cry of a hunting coyote somewhere in the distance wailed faintly through the veiled space, and the Saint smiled again. Presently, ahead of him, he heard the monotonous scrunch of plodding boots going down the dirt road. He came up swiftly with the sound, till he could see the ghostly bulk of the walker blotting out the stars.
He himself made no sound. He came up until his hand could stretch out and grip the man’s shoulder, and he spoke in a sudden gentle whisper of Italian.
“One moment, Salvatore. You know as well as I do that there is no hurry to reach Skeleton Hill.”
The man halted with a jerk, and turned. His black-bearded face bent forward till he could recognize the Saint in the vague starlight. Then the shaggy black head bowed.
“ Lai fatto molto bene,” said the old man gruffly. “I thought we should meet here.”
For a moment even Simon was startled. “You guessed, did you?”
“I knew that Amadeo could never have been so stupid as to try anything like that immediately after you had shown him up. And the hunting trip that left him alone for nearly four hours was your idea. Also you knew that I had no money, so I knew that I had nothing to fear from you. Where is Lucia?”
“She went and hid in the woodshed as I told her to,” answered the Saint shamelessly. “I told her to slip out as soon as it was dark and come along here. You’ll probably find her a little way along the road. But if you knew, why did you help me?”
“I did not see why that Amadeo should have so much money,” said Intuccio calmly. “You will be content with half?”
Simon laughed softly.
“From the very beginning,” he said, “I always meant you to have three quarters.”
Intuccio took out the money and divided it.
“Do we go back?” he asked.
“I think we shall have to make some ingenious explanations,” said the Saint. “If Lucia says it was Amadeo, he will probably be lynched. As far as I’m concerned, the probability leaves me unmoved, but since he’s still your cousin you may feel differently. If she says it was me, I’m not likely to have such a good time either. Perhaps she had better invent somebody.”
“Let us decide about that on the way,” agreed Salvatore Intuccio, and they walked on, arm in arm.