To Mary and Denis Green to whose always welcome interruptions this opus owes so much of its distinctive dizziness

I. Arizona

1

Simon Templar checked the fit of the specially built silencer on his .357 Magnum for the last time, and settled more snugly into the screen of tumbled rocks from which he was watching the road below. The crisp Arizona sun baked down on him out of a sky of such brilliant blue that it would have seemed artificial if it had not been so certain that no artifice on earth could have copied it, and his blue eyes that matched the sky as closely as anything could match it were narrowed slightly against the glare that came up from the open desert. A grey lizard lay and watched him from a little distance with one cold flat eye, its soft stomach pulsing quickly with breaths, but otherwise as motionless and as much a part of the landscape as he had become since he had seen the lazy billow of dust creeping along the twisted ribbon of dirt trail that wound past the foot of the knoll where he was lying.

There were many men in the world who would have been surprised to see him there, much as they had learned to accept Simon Templar’s sudden and disturbing appearances in all kinds of unlikely places: men in the variegated police uniforms of a dozen European and South American countries, as well as a staidly bowler-hatted Chief Inspector of Scotland Yard, and a certain gruff grey-haired detective in New York City, men who could have met at any time and talked lengthily on one common ground apart from their professional interest in the enforcement of the Law — namely, their separate and individual reminiscences of the impudent outlawries which had blazed Simon Templar’s trail around the earth. There were also an even larger number of public enemies from just as many places, who could have joined in the chorus with no less indignation, who would have been equally surprised to find him in a setting so different from the urbane backgrounds against which he was usually tracing his debonair and dangerous saga of adventure. But these surprises would have been purely geographical: there would have been no surprise that he lay there on the threshold of more trouble, for trouble was a thing that clung like an aura to the presence of Simon Templar, whom some imaginative newspaperman had christened the Robin Hood of modern crime, but who was much better known to police files and the unwritten records of the underworld as the Saint.

The dust-cloud lengthened sluggishly towards him, churned up by the wheels of a well-worn car whose labouring engine sent a faint grumble of protest to his ears through the great stillness, and the Saint waited for it with the infinite patience of any Indian who might have lain in the same ambush more than a hundred years before, watching a covered wagon crawl through the scrub-sprinkled valley below his eyes. You might have seen something of the same Indian, too in the intent lines of his tanned reckless face, but that would have been an easy illusion. The same lines would have fitted as naturally into the picture of a conquistador scanning the shore of a new world, or of d’Artagnan mocking the courts of France: they were only the heraldry of a character that would have been the same in any age or place, the timeless brand of the born buccaneer. Perhaps that was another reason also why he seemed as much at home there as he would have been against the shining sophistication of a city boulevard — because it was inevitably right that he should fit in wherever adventure offered, because he himself was the living embodiment of adventure... But the Saint himself would never have thought about it so romantically as that, being strictly concerned at the moment with the mechanical job that he was there to do.

The car rattled around another curve, with the driver nursing it gingerly over ruts and washboard, and then it was as close to where he was hiding as it would ever be. At that, he estimated the range at a little more than a hundred yards, and rested his brown right hand on a rock in front of him as coolly as if he had been trying a trick shot for his own amusement. Judgment of distance, speed, and elevation merged into one imperceptible coordination as he squeezed the trigger. The Magnum jarred in his grip with a discreet flup! but he still held the aim until he saw the car swerve on one flattened front tyre, bump a little way off the road, and come to a grinding stop. It had never had enough speed to be in any danger of overturning, and he had had no such fate in mind for it anyway.

Satisfied that he had done no more and no less than he meant to do, he slid away down the other side of the hillock, straightened up as soon as he was safely below the skyline, and walked quickly to the big Buick parked in the sandy arroyo below the sheltering slope, unscrewing the cumbersome silencer as he went; a few minutes later the long sedan jounced out of the wash on to the dirt road half a mile south, turned back, and battered its way north again over the tracks left by the car which he had just brought to an effective standstill.

Simon braked as he came up with it, and a white-haired man in a neat but incongruous business suit eased his back from a pained and unprofitable scrutiny of the deflated tyre. Simon leaned out and grinned amiably at him.

“Anything wrong?” he inquired.

The white-haired man gazed back at him through silver rimmed spectacles with the peculiarly sadistic tolerance reserved by all right-minded voyagers for those persons who ask futile questions in unspeakable situations.

“We had a blow-out,” he said, with admirable restraint.

“Maybe I can help,” said the Saint cheerfully.

He swung out of his car and inspected the evidence of his marksmanship with concealed satisfaction. His single bullet had done its job as neatly as he could have desired, ripping through tube and casing without leaving any evidence of its transit except for an expert. But the Saint only said, “Do you have a spare?”

“You could help me to get it out,” said the girl.

She backed her head out of the trunk to say it, and Simon placed a cigarette between his lips as he turned to look at her with a casualness that was only another concealment. For this was a part of the encounter which he had irrelevantly looked forward to all day — in fact, since he had first caught a passing glimpse of her the evening before.

She was only a minor character in the business that his mind was on, and yet he had been hoping that the impression he had been saving wouldn’t be destroyed. Now he saw that he need not have worried. Even with her brown hair a little scattered, her face a little flushed, she had the same quality that had caught in his memory. It was not the standard prettiness of blue eyes, of a smiling generous mouth, of a small nose that was still a cameo of classic modelling, but something much more, much rarer, and yet so simple that the only words for it seemed inadequate. You could only say that in one glance at her you knew that without being naive or stupid she was utterly without guile or coquetry or deceit, that her mind was as clean-cut and untrammelled as her sapling figure in its plain white shirt and blue slacks, and that whatever she did would be as real and honest as the friendly hills. But to the Saint, who had known so many other fascinations, this was one of the most arresting certainties that he had ever known.

“I’d love to,” he said.

He struck a match and put it to his cigarette as he strolled over, but he didn’t throw the burnt stem away. As he wrestled the spare wheel out, and carried it around the car, he kept working the match-stem into the valve, letting the air escape whenever there were other noises to mask the hiss of it, so that a few minutes later he could press the tyre flat with his hand and say, “It’s too bad, but this seems to be another dead one.”

“Now, that’s perfectly swell,” said the girl.

Simon let the wheel drop, and philosophically revived his cigarette.

“The nearest garage is back at Lion Rock,” he remarked. “I’ll leave word there later if you like. Or could I take you anywhere?”

The man said, “We were heading for the Circle Y — it’s three miles further on, off this road.”

“Visiting?”

“No. I... er... I happen to own it.”

“When were you going to be back at Lion Rock?” asked the girl. “We don’t want to take you out of your way, but it’s getting late. I mean...”

The Saint smiled down at her, rumpling his dark hair with apparent thoughtfulness. It was indeed getting late, as he had hoped it would be: bright as it still was, the sun was already dipping towards the high range to westward, and under the slanting light the barren battlements that ringed three of their horizons were putting on soft chiffons of rose and purple against the promise of an early twilight.

He said, “It might be quite a while before I see Lion Rock again. Perhaps I’d better take you to the Circle Y and you can send in to the garage tomorrow.”

“We hate to trouble you,” said the white-haired man half-heartedly.

“Don’t give it another thought,” said the Saint. “Have you got any parcels or things you want to take along?”

Five minutes later the Buick was rocking and rolling north again with two extra passengers, and the older man was making conversation from the other end of the front seat.

“I suppose we ought to introduce ourselves. My name is Don Morland, and this is my daughter Jean.”

“I’m Simon Templar,” said the Saint.

The name meant nothing immediately to them, and was not meant to. But he had known who they were before he lay down to wait for them not long after breakfast, behind the pulpit of erupted boulders which had already merged into the violet-shaded diorama behind.

“I’m sure glad you happened along,” Morland went on. “I wouldn’t have enjoyed trying to find my way home from there if we’d been caught after dark.”

“That doesn’t sound like a rancher talking,” Simon remarked lightly.

“I’m not really a rancher — of course you could tell that. I just happen to own a ranch. As a matter of fact, we’ve only been here a couple of days. It’s all quite an accident.”

Simon grinned.

“You won the Circle Y in a raffle?”

“It belonged to my brother. He died just recently, and I inherited it. I was a dentist in Richmond, Virginia. I’d been thinking I was about ready to retire, and Jean always wanted to see the West. So we thought we’d give it a trial.”

“Too bad it had to happen that way,” said the Saint. “I mean through your brother.”

Morland began filling a stubby pipe.

“Yes. It was very sudden. His horse threw him and kicked him — fractured his skull. He only bought the place himself about eighteen months ago... Well, if he could turn himself into a rancher I expect I can.”

“You think you’ll keep the place.”

“Probably. Our next-door neighbour from the J-Bar-B made me a rather attractive offer as soon as we got here, but I don’t think I’ll sell. I think I might get to like it here. Jean is going to buy me a big hat and some high-heeled boots and try to make me look like the real thing.”

The Saint’s strong hands worked on the wheel with imperturbable skill, his calm eyes picking the smoothest path over the derelict track as nonchalantly as though his role had actually been as fortuitous and disinterested as it was meant to seem. But into his mind went just a little more information than he had had before, and with it a repetition and revival of one grim question that he had already asked himself a great many times. Yet no one could have guessed that there were such things as murder in his thoughts.

Jean Morland was studying him with straightforward interest, taking in his quietly checkered blue shirt, his well-worn Levis, and coming back again to his lean tanned face with its hint of mockeries and mischief that must have known even wider fields than those traditionally great open spaces.

“I don’t think you’ve lived around here all your life, either,” she said.

He smiled at her.

“That isn’t really very hard to guess. As a matter of fact, I haven’t really been around here for about ten years. But I can still give a working imitation of the genuine article. I was riding herd in the Panhandle when you weren’t any further than the fourth grade. You need a good hand on the Circle Y?”

“You’ve got a nice car to look for work in,” she said.

“That’s part of the build-up. All of us cowboys ain’t bums. We seen ourselves in the pitchers, an’ we know better. Next time I’m going to be a straw boss, at least.”

She laughed.

“Seriously, what are you doing now?”

“You might call it vacationing. Wandering here and there, and seeing what may turn up. I haven’t a plan from one day to the next. But I love this country.”

“So do I,” she said. Then: “What do you think of doing right here?”

The Saint lighted a cigarette, taking his time.

Presently he said, “I thought I might do some hunting.”

It seemed to him that this might be a truthful way to put it, even though she would never guess what a deadly kind of quarry he was thinking of. Even though she might never know that the spoor he was following had been started months before when a certain Dr Ludwig Julius paddled out of his office on the Wilhelmstrasse and set off on an odyssey that had already taken him more than half-way around the world, by way of the Trans-Siberian railroad to Vladivostok, from Vladivostok to Yokohama, from Yokohama to San Francisco, and from San Francisco, after a pause at the Nazi consulate there, to the peaceful Arizona county where Simon Templar was on the trail of bigger game than his state hunting licence had ever been intended to include.

2

They sat on the porch of the ranch house after dinner, listening to the far-off yipping of coyotes and the nearer croaking of frogs down at the spring.

Simon had stayed, of course. He had always meant to stay, although he had put on a proper show of diffidence. In fact, he had taken quite a little trouble to make sure of becoming a welcome friend at the Circle Y. And with the insidious intimacy of dinner added to his acquaintance with Jean Morland, he was even more sure that it would be no hardship to spend the time that he expected to spend there.

“How much stock do you have here?” Simon asked.

It was one of those desultory conversations full of long pauses and random twists, but rich with warmth and contentment.

Morland said, “About five thousand head. Not very much, but not enough to be too big a headache.”

“Pretty good range?”

“Not so bad as you’d think. Eh, Hank?”

“We go back quite a ways into the hills,” said Hank Reefe. “They do pretty good back there. It’s handy havin’ the stream. They don’t ever need to go short of water.”

Reefe was the foreman. He sat in the fourth chair, on the other side of Jean, rocking himself gently, his long thin legs stretched out. He was probably not much more than thirty, but his weathered face was deeply carved with the lines that a man gets from staring into hot shimmering distances. He had good level eyes and the kind of long sinewy features that are an unmistakable inheritance from the stock that first fought its way through that untamed country.

“There’s no mining in these parts, is there?” Simon asked casually.

“Not right around here. Sometimes the prospectors’ll come through. But they’ll go anywhere.”

He had a slow, rather musical drawl, which to a sensitive ear was the same as a lapel badge would have been to the eye.

“You wouldn’t be a Texan, I suppose,” said the Saint.

“Yes, sir.” Reefe poured Bull Durham into a gutter of thin paper and spread it with his forefingers. “I heard Miss Jean say you worked in the Panhandle yourself.”

“A long time ago.”

The foreman’s deft fingers shaped and rolled. He sealed the cigarette with a flick of his tongue, and said, “Smoke?”

The sack of Bull Durham landed in Simon’s lap. Lazily Simon slid a paper out of the folder, curved it with thumb and fingers of one hand, poured tobacco, and rolled the cigarette while his other hand pulled the string of the sack against his teeth and tossed it back. His eyes met Reefe’s tranquilly over the match that the foreman leaned across with.

Neither of the Morlands would have realised that two men had measured each other, with challenge and answer, like two proud animals. And yet Jean Morland was very clearly a part of that watchful speculation, for Simon had seen something more in Hank Reefe’s manner towards her than the strictly dutiful respect to which her position as the boss’s daughter entitled her.

Reefe dragged on his own cigarette with an expressionless face, and said idly, “I was raised right around Hereford. Worked around two or three ranches up there ’fore I came west.” Smoke curled in the lamplight as he let it out through his nostrils. “There sure used to be some interestin’ characters around there.”

“Quite a few,” said the Saint.

“Was one feller I remember hearin’ about, came from England or somewhere. Everybody thought he was a dude. So when he asks for a job, first off, they put him on an outlaw horse for a laugh. Well, he was the guy who did most of the laughin’, because it turned out he could fork a bronc better ’n ’most any cowboy in that country, an’ he rode the horse out an’ kept him. After that they found out he could throw knives like somebody in a circus, an’ shoot the pips out of a six of spades just as fast as he could pull a trigger... I guess he couldn’t find anything wild enough for him around there, because later on he went south of the border an’ fought in one of those revolutions, an’ got to be a general or something. At least, so I heard. He was quite a young feller then, an’ I was only a kid myself, but I never forgot him because he had such a funny name for a chap like that. They called him the Saint.”

Simon Templar tilted his head back and blew leisured rings at the lamp.

“He must have been quite a guy.”

“Yeah... I’ve often wondered if he turned out to be the same Saint I’ve read about in the papers since. But I never met him myself, so I wouldn’t know.”

“I wonder what a man like that would be doing these days?” Morland said. “Fighting with the RAF or something like that, I suppose.”

“No,” said the girl. “That would be too conventional for him.” She hugged her knees and gazed out in to the dark. “He’d be rescuing prisoners from the Gestapo, or catching spies in London, or something of that sort.”

Simon looked at her thoughtfully.

“You mean, you really believe those stories about him?” he said teasingly, and again he had to encounter the disconcerting calm clearness of her eyes.

“I want to believe in a few things like that,” she said simply.

They went on looking at each other for a while, with the same quiet steadiness, and then Reefe’s chair creaked abruptly as he sat forward.

“Seems as though we have some late visitors,” he said.

The lights of a car were creeping up from the desert, two yellow eyes that quivered under the punishment of the road. They all watched them coming closer, twisting jerkily up the hillside, until the station wagon that carried them jolted to a stop in front of the porch.

The headlights went out and under the porch light Simon could read the words “J — B Ranch” on the door of the station wagon as it opened.

“Our neighbour,” Morland said.

The man who came clumping up the steps with the spurs jingling on his high-heeled boots was big and broad, and everything about him had a heavy swagger that was as aggressive as a clenched fist. Under the brim of his black hat he had thick black brows and a square dark jaw that looked as useful to hit as a chunk of granite. He was dressed with the curious contradictions of a man who liked his western fopperies and was still ready to do a day’s work with any of them. There were rubies and gold flowers in the buckle of his hat-band, ruby eyes in the longhorn steer’s head knotted in his scarf, jewels and gold inlay in the big silver buckle of his belt, but all of them had been smoothed and scarred with service, like the fancy leather trim on his dusty gaberdines. He showed a perfect set of white teeth and said, “Hullo ev’rybody.”

Unexpectedly, his voice was a soft tenor, not quite light enough to be effeminate, and yet light enough to strike a note that set the Saint’s delicate sense of menaces on edge.

Morland said pleasantly, “Hullo Max.” He made the only necessary introduction. “This is Mr... er... Templar. Mr Valmon.”

“Glad to know you, Mr Templar.”

Max Valmon’s grip was as hard as his voice was soft. Simon was expecting that. He smiled gently, and used some of the strength of his own right hand. It gave the encounter an air of rather excessive cordiality, and made Valmon’s eyes harden a little under his heavy brows.

“Glad to know you, Max,” said the Saint affably.

Valmon’s glance held another moment of suspicious calculation, and then he turned away and tossed his hat in to a chair. He sat on the arm of the chair and said, “Well, Don — got any news for me?”

Morland knocked out his pipe and began to refill it.

“I don’t think so. We haven’t done very much. Went into town this morning and got stuck with a blow-out coming home. Luckily Mr Templar came along, and—”

“I don’t mean that sort of news.”

“Well, really, there isn’t—”

“I mean, haven’t you made up your mind to accept my offer for the Circle Y?”

Morland blinked.

“Why no, Max. I told you the other day I wasn’t planning to sell. Jean and I like it here.”

“But I told you I was planning to buy.” Valmon’s voice was still soft and friendly. “I’m obstinate. And I was here first. Why don’t you face it? You don’t know much about this country, Don. It won’t feed both of us.”

The older man frowned in a sort of innocent puzzlement, his thumb poised over the bowl of his pipe. Reefe’s chair became still, as if chilled into suddenly watchful waiting, but Morland didn’t seem to be ready with a lead. It was as though he had just begun to sense something in Valmon’s undertones that was so foreign to his experience that he was afraid of being mistaken about it.

It was the Saint who hooked a leg over the arm of his chair and said diffidently, “Not that it’s particularly my business, but you make it sound like peculiar country. What makes it that way?”

Valmon turned with his flashing smile.

“Water,” he said. “I’ve got a spring on my side of the hills, but it goes dry every summer.”

“We do all right,” Reefe said quietly.

“I know.” Valmon’s smile was untouched. “But your stream rises on my land. Only it doesn’t stay there long enough to do me much good, especially when it runs low. To do any good, I’d have to blast a new channel — turn it around that shoulder up there, and let it run down my way to where I could build a dam. Of course, that’s the same as starving you out.”

“The law won’t let you do that,” Reefe said.

Valmon shrugged.

“I don’t know. The water comes from my property. The law couldn’t say much after I’d done it, and it wouldn’t take much doing. Just a few sticks of dynamite in the right places, and you’d be dry. Then I suppose you could go to court and try to get an order to make me blast it the other way again. But before you could do that, and make me do it, you wouldn’t have any stock. So where does it get you?”

He had divided his words between Reefe and Morland, and he was looking at Morland when he finished, but then his eyes went back to the Saint, as if somehow Simon was the only one that he was in doubt about. And curiously, the others seemed to wait for the Saint too, as though without any assertion he had become felt as the man who was the most natural match for Valmon.

And yet the Saint hadn’t moved. He only seemed to become longer and lazier in his chair as he lighted another cigarette with his eyes narrowed but still casual against the smoke.

“You make it all sound so much like the plot of any western picture,” he remarked, “that I can only think of what the answer would be in any western. If I were Don, I guess I’d just cut down your fence and drive my cattle right through to your beautiful new dam.”

“And you know what happens in westerns when somebody does that,” Valmon said in the same tone.

“I don’t want any fighting,” Morland said, with the slightest jerkiness in his voice. “If you’re really in trouble, and you come to me properly, we’ll see if we can work something out. Perhaps I could let you water your cattle over here. I just don’t like you pretending to threaten me.”

“It’s the ham in him,” murmured the Saint, so lightly that for a second he didn’t seem to have said anything, and then calmly, astonishingly, so unpredictably that somehow it was not instantly believable, he began to sing something to himself to the tune of “Home on the Range”:

“Oh give me a ham

With a lovely new dam

Where the skunks and the coyotes can play—”

Valmon snapped to his feet, and his smile was gone.

“All right,” he said. “I’ve made you a fair offer. I’ll give you just twenty-four hours to take it. You can come and tell me tomorrow night. If you think I’m pretending, don’t come. You’ll find out when I start blasting the next morning.”

Morland stood up also, more slowly, his face a little paler.

“I think you’d better go, Valmon,” he said tightly.

Valmon picked up his hat and clapped it on at an insolent slant.

“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll go — while there are three of you telling me. But I’ll be back here after you’ve gone. And then we’ll see who makes the funniest cracks.”

His voice was still soft and well-modulated, but instead of taking the sting out of his words, that incongruous dulcetness gave them the malignance of a snake’s hiss. It whipped a dull flush into Morland’s face, but his lip quivered with the uncertainty of a man unused to violence. Hank Reefe started forward with a low growl, but Simon caught his arm and stepped ahead of him. Very courteously the Saint bowed Valmon towards the steps.

“Good night, Maxie dear,” he cooed, and Valmon gave him a long stare.

“I’ll know more about you before that,” he said.

“Maybe.”

Simon leaned on the porch rail and concluded his improvisation while Valmon strode across to his car and slammed the door.

“Where nothing is heard

But the Razz and the Bird,

And the boss can make faces all day...”

The line ended in a vicious rasp of angrily meshed gears, and the station wagon’s engine roared as Valmon jarred in the clutch and pulled away.

Simon watched the lights bumping down the trail, and turned back with a little of the humorous mischief fading from his eyes.

“So,” he said slowly. “That seems to have done it.”

Jean Morland was hugging her father’s arm.

“Did you see?” she said wonderingly. “He looked really — wicked. Did you see, Daddy?”

“I’m afraid it’s my fault,” said the Saint. “I knew just how to get under his skin, and I couldn’t resist it. I’ve got an evil gift for that sort of thing. You’re right, Jean — he’s bad. But I suppose it still wasn’t my business. Now I’ve blown everything up for you. I’m sorry.”

“Perhaps it’s just as well,” Morland said quietly. “At least we’ve seen him in his true colours... I’ll go in to town tomorrow and see the sheriff, or whoever you have to see.”

The Saint shook his head slightly.

“You’re going to have trouble,” he said. “Maybe you’ll need some extra help. I kind of brought this to a head, so my offer still goes.”

Morland fumbled with his matches, trying to get his pipe going again. His hands were just a trifle clumsy, not quite so steady as they would otherwise have been.

“It’s very nice of you, but — we haven’t any right to bother you. I’m not going to worry.”

“But we can’t turn Mr Templar out at this hour of the night,” Jean said quickly. “At least we can find a bed for him.”

“We... we don’t have any room to offer him dear.”

Simon smiled at the girl.

“I can put up with the bunkhouse,” he said, “if you can put up with me. I’d like to stay.”

“There’s a spare bed in my room,” Reefe said detachedly. “He’s welcome to that.”

Half an hour later Simon Templar sat on the spare bed in Hank Reefe’s room, pulling off his boots and watching the foreman silently roll another cigarette. With the smoke going, Reefe dug under his bed and pulled out a well-worn suitcase. Out of it he extracted an almost as well-worn cartridge belt, from which the holster hung heavy with a Colt.45. He took the revolver out, sprung out the cylinder and spun it, checking the load.

“At least you didn’t think I was kidding,” said the Saint.

Reefe looked at him with his lean poker face.

“I’ve seen trouble build up before,” he said. “My father saw a lot more of it, when he wore this belt all the time. Things don’t change very much, out here.”

Simon Templar peeled off his socks and sat rubbing one instep, developing his own estimates.

3

They were drinking coffee after breakfast at the long communal table outside the kitchen with the four cowboys, Jim and Smoky and Nails and Elmer, and Don Morland said, “How far can Valmon really go?”

Jim drained his cup and got up, hitching his belt, and as if he was the spokesman for the others he said, “Well, you can go as far as you like, an’ if he wants to fight we’ll be right there with you.”

The others nodded and grinned in the slow slight way of their kind, as they also got to their feet, and Nails said, “You bet.”

“Let’s git goin’,” said Jim, with the speechmaking finished.

Hank Reefe watched them go, dawdling to roll a cigarette.

“They’re good boys,” he said.

“But what can Valmon do?” Morland protested.

“He can do enough.”

“But there’s still some law and order here, isn’t there?” The older man seemed to be arguing with himself. “There must be something about water rights in the title to this property. Valmon can’t do just what he likes and get away with it.”

“You heard what he said last night,” Reefe persisted woodenly. “He can do what he likes on his own land. If that damages you, you can sue him. Dunno if that does you much good, after the damage is done. An’ if we go in on his land to interfere with him, that’s trespassin’, an’ maybe he can sue you. Guess that wouldn’t help him so much either, if we had him stopped.”

“So he wouldn’t let us stop him,” said Jean. “He’d fight.”

“Sure,” Reefe agreed. “But he’s not the only one who can do that.”

“It’s ridiculous,” Morland said. “Things like that just don’t go on any more. I’m going to town and talk to the sheriff.”

Reefe nodded.

“You can try that,” he said expressionlessly, and shaped the brim of his hat as he straightened up. “I’ll get on with my job.”

They watched him walking away down towards the corral, the well-worn cartridge belt drooping under his right hip and the holstered Colt purposefully tied down to his thigh. He could so easily have looked melodramatic, and yet the stoical naturalness of him made that word impossible.

Morland turned to the Saint with a little bewildered gesture, as if all these things were too much for him.

“What does he mean? Does he think the Sheriff would be on Valmon’s side?”

“You can never tell,” said the Saint philosophically. “Such things have happened.”

Morland’s lips tightened.

“Well, I’m going to find out!” He stuck his pipe in his mouth at a stubborn angle which to Simon had the ironic pathos of unconscious futility. “If... if I could borrow your car, I could pick up my wheels on the way in and have them fixed, and then someone could fetch the station wagon in this evening.”

“Help yourself,” said the Saint cordially, and held out his keys.

Jean Morland came slowly back to the porch after she had seen her father start. She turned again beside the Saint, who was smoking a cigarette there with one hip hitched on the rail, and looked down the canyon where Morland’s dust was creeping down towards the desert.

One of her hands curled into a small fist, but it was much longer than that before her eyes moved. And then suddenly she turned on him, almost savagely, and said, “Why are you all so cruel to him?”

“Nobody’s been cruel, Jean,” he said steadily. “The boys are ready to fight for him. Hank Reefe is toting the old family six-shooter for him. They just don’t talk a lot.”

She brushed back her hair helplessly.

“Oh, I know. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t ever have said that. But it seems cruel. As if you were all laughing up your sleeves at everything he says.”

“We could be, in a sort of way. If he had some of these boys back on his home ground in Richmond, Virginia, he could probably make them look pretty naive. Well, out here he looks pretty naive to them. But it isn’t unkind. He seems to have a lot of ideas of his own, so they figure the best thing is to leave him to it and let him find out for himself. Then he’ll get it out of his system. You see, they know.”

“And you think you know, too.”

“I don’t know much. I’ve only just arrived. But if I have to take somebody for an authority, I’ll take Hank and the boys. After all, they’ve been here for a while... I only want to do the best I can for you.”

He smiled, and the Saint’s smile could be as quietly irresistible as it could be quietly deadly. Quite naturally he touched her arm.

“Why don’t you show me around this morning,” he said, “and let me get my bearings on the battlefield?”

“Of course,” she said, and she went on looking at him with that open-eyed straightforwardness that was more baffling than any coquetry. “Yes, I’d like that.” And there was nothing but the sincere direct statement of fact in her voice. But it was as if she was realising, with a little surprise and puzzlement, that they were not new acquaintances any more. Or had they ever been strangers?... “You could go on ahead and saddle the horses, and I’ll be ready as soon as I’ve cleared up some of these dishes. Mine is a pinto — the only one in the corral. You can choose your own.”

“Okay,” he said.

After he had saddled the pinto his own choice was immediate — a beautiful golden palomino with lines that would have stood out in any company. He was just tightening the cinch when he heard the girl’s step behind him, and turned to find her standing with her eyes fixed on the horse in an uncertain kind of stillness.

“I should have known you’d pick Sunlight,” she said slowly.

Simon unhooked the stirrup from the horn and returned her gaze innocently.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“He’s the horse that killed my uncle. Nobody else has ridden him since then.”

The Saint paused to light a cigarette, and then he deliberately put his foot in the near stirrup and swung lightly into the saddle. The palomino didn’t stir. Simon stroked its sleek neck.

“It seems like an awful waste of a good horse,” he murmured.

“Let’s follow the brook up to Valmon’s boundary and see what the scenery’s like around there.”

The stream crossed the boundary line near the north-west corner of the Morland ranch. For a full mile around that corner the country was a cluster of tall rolling hills, but it seemed to Simon from where they halted to survey it, with Jean Morland pointing out the landmarks, that all the higher crests were on the Circle Y. She confirmed this.

“But the spring starts lower down,” she explained. “It rises on Valmon’s side. Then it does a horseshoe turn back on to our land.”

“Which I suppose makes it easier for Max to turn it back again,” said the Saint.

He gazed thoughtfully at the painted grandeur of the landscape, wishing that he had nothing else to look for than the beauty which Nature had squandered there in a riot of heroic sculpture. He had a passing notion that with water established in that sort of formation it should have been possible to tunnel or drill on Morland’s side of the hills and bring a new stream gushing from the same buried reservoir, but he was not much of a geologist, and anyway the point was not instantly constructive or even closely related to his original quest. He wished too that he had been free to share the spell of the scene, with no other consideration on his mind, with the girl who had so simply and so unaccountably, in less than a day’s span, become one of his oldest friends, but that also was just an unprofitable dream, so long as Dr Ludwig Julius was in Arizona. His face was a tanned mask studying the terrain, and his right hand rested unconsciously on the butt of the Magnum that he had belted on that morning as automatically as Reefe had put on his Colt.

“Let’s ride on some more,” he suggested.

He turned the palomino into a trail that looked as if it might find a way to the top of one of the higher slopes from which there should be a fair panorama of Valmon’s property. As they climbed, the wild brush-pocked hills opened and spread below them, pushing back the rugged horizon to let broad tablelands press up to the north-west. The trail, if it had ever really been a trail, petered out unobtrusively, until the Saint was breaking new ground all the time and his eyes were kept busy in search of ways to circumvent steeper slopes and increasing obstacles of tumbled rock. Presently he was on a spoon-shaped ledge from which at first sight all progress seemed to be blocked by a precipitous mass of broken boulders.

He reined his horse there and turned cross-saddle to estimate the view, as Jean Morland urged the pinto’s nose up to his knee. Below and to the left, near the foot of the hills which they were climbing, he could now see some of the scattered buildings of the J-Bar-B, looking like toy models at the distance of two miles or more. There was one section of shallow canyon behind him where he could see a stretch of water sparkling in the sun, but he couldn’t locate the rest of its course.

Then something said BOOM! in a thick throaty cough like the bursting of a giant drum, and the sound went echoing and rippling through the hills in a thinner diminuendo of repetitions. The horses started and moved nervously, their ears rigidly cocked, and Simon’s face hardened.

“Max isn’t wasting any time,” he said.

But Jean Morland was frowning at the settling cloud of dust that had mushroomed from behind one of the rock castles some way to the north.

“The stream doesn’t go there,” she said.

“Maybe that’s where Max is planning for it to go,” said the Saint. “He’d get his new channel ready in advance, but he won’t set off the last blast that would turn the stream until his ultimatum has run out.”

The girl turned to him with her lips and eyes divided between fight and pleading.

“But why do we have to let him do it — get everything so that he only has to press one button to ruin us?”

“It won’t hurt him or his men to put in an honest day’s hard work,” said the Saint calmly. “They haven’t pressed that last button yet, and what makes you think that we’re going to let them?” He reached for her hand, and took her fingers lightly into his. “Let’s go on a bit and see if we can’t see some more.”

“There might be a way over there—”

She urged her horse on to squeeze past him, and forced it out on to a narrow shelf that looked as if it might sneak around the barrier. It was foolhardy riding, for if the shelf had proved to be a blind alley there would have been no chance to turn round and come back, and he wondered whether she did it in ignorance or recklessness. But he followed her because it was too late to argue, and was relieved to find that in a few yards the sheer drop that fell away from the ledge eased into a less perpendicular slope of rubble — still dangerous enough to navigate, but not offering the same prospects of instant and irrevocable disaster. He kept close behind her, skirting a pile of smaller boulders; she seemed quite unperturbed, and she kept looking off the trail towards the point where the blast had been, as if there was much more on her mind than any casual risk of the route.

Perhaps that was why she never saw the rattlesnake curled sleepily on a rock that rose waist-high from the slope as she rode past it. The Saint saw it, and his hand went like lightning to his gun, but from the start of that movement everything seemed to happen at once. He saw the rattler’s tail dissolve into a quivering blur of warning, but before the sound even reached his ears the pinto had heard it and lurched sideways, losing its foothold on the treacherous scree. Simon thought that he fired at the same moment as the snake struck, but he had no chance to meditate about it just then. He had had no time to wonder whether the horses were gun-broke, and it would probably have made very little difference if he had. It turned out that they weren’t. His palomino reared up on its hind legs like a tidal wave, twisted wildly as its rear hoofs skidded and took a half-sideways leap into space that landed it twenty feet down the slope. Through some incredible agility it remained upright, but there were seconds of frantic scrambling and sliding after that before the Saint had a chance to realise that he was still definitely in the saddle. It was a feat of horsemanship that an audience of bronc riders and mountain cavalry could have stood together and cheered, but he was less concerned with that than with the slim figure clinging to the slope above him.

“Jean — are you all right?”

It sounded to him like particularly stupid dialogue, but it was the only thing to shout as he drove the trembling palomino back up a ladder of precarious zigzags. Then as he reached her he saw that she was shaking half with laughter.

“I can’t help it, Simon! You floated gracefully through the air on a flying horse, while I was landing on my behind... Oh God, the romance of the great open spaces!”

He lowered himself from the saddle beside her, and helped her to sit up.

“You’re sure you aren’t hurt?”

“Only some undignified bruises.”

But she looked at the rattlesnake writhing and lashing a few feet away, its back almost cut through by the Saint’s bullet. He edged over and crushed its head with a stone, and looked at her more closely when he came back.

“ ‘I’m hoping it didn’t touch you,” he said.

The tone of his voice made her raise her right arm slowly to see where his eyes were fixed. There was a tear in her shirt — two tears, actually, close together and parallel, near the firm swell of her breast. Simon knelt beside her and opened one of the rents with steady impersonal fingers. He saw golden skin, softly rounded, unmarked.

“Another half-inch would probably have done it,” he said. “You’re going to make me believe you haven’t got any nerves.”

She met his eyes with sober directness.

“I just didn’t want to be sloppy about saying thank you.”

That was when it seemed so natural to kiss her.

He stood up abruptly.

“Hold on a minute and I’ll get your horse,” he said.

He led the palomino up the slope first, to a more level stretch of firmer ground. Then he went back for the pinto which by some other miracle seemed to have also avoided rolling over or breaking a leg. He stroked the animal’s nose and talked to it until he had calmed it down enough to struggle back up the incline with the reins in his hand.

Beside Jean Morland again, he gave her his other hand and got her to her feet. She stumbled at once, almost into his arms, as another patch of loose surface slid from under her, but as he steadied her, somehow, he was not looking at her but over her shoulder at the ground behind her, where the weathered surface was freshly scarred and churned up by the varied scuffles of feet and hoofs. Then, quietly, he bent and picked up a broken chunk of red rock and squeezed it into his pocket before he gave her his hand again and helped her up on to where the palomino was waiting.

Even after he had turned the pinto loose there, it still seemed spontaneously inevitable for their hands to stay linked together until they sat side by side on a bench of rock and he had to light cigarettes for both of them. There was nothing to say about it. All their lives it had been certain that this would happen if they ever met.

With the smoke from his mouth curling and vanishing in the lazy air, Simon Templar took out the piece of rock he had picked up and turned it in his hands, while the girl glanced at it curiously.

“What is it?” she asked. “A souvenir? Or are you going to find gold in these hyar hills?”

He shook his head.

“No, darling. Not gold. That would have been rather corny, somehow. But some people would give a lot of gold for it. It’s more useful, in certain ways... I think I’m beginning to get somewhere.”

He turned the rock this way and that. It was heavier than one would have expected for its size. One face was caked with brown limestone, that matched many of the surrounding formations. But the rest of it was a hard greenish-grey, quartz-like stone, faintly dappled with darker shadows. And in this quartz ran veins and beads of bright magenta.

The Saint, as had been admitted, was no great geologist, but there were a useful few ores which he could recognise at a glance, and he knew now why Dr Julius must be greatly interested in Max Valmon’s feud with the Circle Y.

4

“They’ve rounded up some cattle for branding in a canyon a couple of miles over that way,” Jean Morland said. “I think I can find it, and we can have lunch with them.”

They had found another way down through the hills without any more accidents.

“Just one thing,” said the Saint. “Don’t say anything about my mineral studies yet. I’d like to get a few more ideas and do some figuring first.”

Her eyes were clear and level.

“Okay.”

Hank Reefe straightened up from untying a calf and held her horse while she dismounted. Away from the branding fire, there was another fire where three pots stood steaming, and Nails was stirring one of them experimentally with a large ladle. Reefe’s tanned face was lighted with a quiet smile of pleasure when he saw her, and just as quietly the smile went away when he saw the rent in her shirt which she had roughly pinned together. His glance shifted evenly to the Saint.

“A rattlesnake did that,” Jean explained, and told the story.

The foreman’s steady gaze only left her again when she had finished. Then it went back to the Saint and he smiled again, but differently.

“That was nice shootin’, Simon,” he said. It was as if he had shaken hands. The Saint grinned and said, “We’re starving.”

“We were just goin’ to have a bite.”

When they were sitting on a rock with fragrant bowls of stew balanced on their knees, Reefe said, “I thought I heard a shot once, but they’ve been blastin’ too, so I wasn’t sure.”

“They’ve been blasting, all right,” said the Saint. “We saw one charge go off. But they haven’t touched the stream yet, and until they do that we’ll have to be careful how we interfere. Max Valmon can blast holes all over his property if he wants to, and we haven’t any right to stop him until he does us some harm. In fact, if he’s got the sheriff in his pocket it’d only make things worse for us. We might give them an excuse to lock us up legally and keep us out of the way until the damage was all done. Valmon might even be playing for that.”

“All the same,” said Reefe, “that feller I was talkin’ about last night — the Saint — he wouldn’t ’ve sat around doin’ nothing.”

“Too bad we can’t send for him,” said the Saint. “He might be handy to have around.”

He went on eating without saying any more about it, and Reefe seemed to draw back into himself in a disappointed way, as if Simon had let him down. Presently he began to talk to Jean in a rather strained manner, making stiff and trivial conversation. The girl answered him more easily, but every now and again her eyes turned back to the Saint in silent puzzlement.

Simon was too preoccupied with his own speculations to do much about it. They finished eating, and one of the cowboys brought mugs over and poured them coffee. The conversation of Reefe and Jean dried up again, and again they seemed to be waiting for the Saint’s lead. Simon lighted a cigarette and stared frowning at the tinted hills.

At last Reefe got to his feet.

“You want to try your hand at helpin’ us rope some of these calves?” he asked stolidly.

Simon shook his head. He finished his coffee and stood up.

“I think I’ll ride back to the house. Mr Morland should be back with my car before long, and I want to drive into town.”

Hank Reefe considered him lengthily. Then he spoke with deliberation, as if he had finally made up his mind and was satisfied to go through with his decision.

“You ain’t figurin’ on doin’ anything about Valmon at all?”

Simon looked him in the eyes, with the faintest glimmer of a smile.

“Hell no,” he said. “It wouldn’t be legal. In fact, I might even think of taking some dynamite over and helping him a bit... Of course, I couldn’t do that now, though — not in broad daylight. I think that Max has a proud and sensitive nature, and he wouldn’t be happy if he knew about it. But if you and I rode over very quietly after dinner, we might be able to do a couple of little things for him... Of course, that’d just be a little secret between us.”

Reefe’s face relaxed so slowly that there was not a movement of a muscle which could have been identified, and yet the change was so profound that he no longer looked like the same man.

“Why, sure,” he agreed. “It’s nice ridin’ around here after the moon’s up.”

“I’ll go back with you and show you the way,” said the girl.

Simon knew how Reefe looked at her without watching. He said, “You don’t really need to. It won’t be any trick to find.”

“It’s time I was getting back, anyhow. I want to know how Daddy made out.”

The Saint shrugged.

On the way back he said, “Hank is good people.”

She said, “Yes.”

It was all there. He didn’t have to say, “You know he’s in love with you, of course. But how do you feel?” And she didn’t have to answer, “I don’t know now, since you came here. So what about you?” And that saved him from having to say, “We should be afraid of this. It’s got to be something we’re both imagining. It musn’t be anything else.” But those words were all there, intuitively, unspoken, so that it was as though he knew she was reading it all out of his mind just as her mind couldn’t deceive his, and he knew it and couldn’t stop it, and didn’t want to, only it was not so cold that way as it would have been in words. And so they talked idly about everything else, and this was all they said all the time.

It was soon after two when they rode down to the ranch house. There was an unfamiliar car parked outside, a green coupe, and an unfamiliar man rose from a chair on the porch as they stepped up, and bowed with insinuating politeness.

“Good afternoon,” he said.

He wore a greenish speckled tweed suit, conventionally cut on city lines and complete right down to the waistcoat with a gold watch-chain strung across the stomach, and he carried a green felt hat with a feather in it, so that he looked rather as if he had been outfitted to correspond with a Bronx tailor’s specifications for a country gentleman’s costume. He was of medium height and soft in the middle. His face was round and pink and a little shiny, and his smooth brow extended back over the top of his head, like a polished atoll surrounded by a surf of sandy grey hair. His eyes were pale gunmetal, and looked like small marbles behind the thick lenses of his gold-rimmed spectacles. They anatomised the girl rather completely, and turned back to Simon.

“Are you Mr Don Morland?”

“Mr Morland isn’t here,” said the Saint coolly. “But I’m his manager. Can I help you?” The other pursed his small red lips.

“Of course. Of course. Mr Morland would be an older man.” He spoke English perfectly, yet he could have been neither American nor English. His accent was faultless, but his voice was pitched in the wrong part of his mouth. “So you’re his manager. Yes. You mean you are in absolute charge of all his affairs?”

“Just that,” said the Saint pleasantly.

It is only a matter of history that he never even paused to wonder whether Jean Morland would fail to back him up, but without looking at her he could sense that she hadn’t betrayed him by the flick of an eyelid.

“I see.” The tone was much too ingratiating to be sceptical, but the cautious advance was there just the same. “So that any business proposition he received would have to be referred to you?”

There were ethereal emphases and question marks in just the right places.

“Exactly.”

“Even quite a private matter?... Such as... if I were interested in buying this ranch?”

“Even that,” said the Saint cheerfully. “But as a matter of fact, the ranch isn’t on the market.”

“Of course not. No. But I could be permitted to wonder whether a sufficiently attractive price — let us say, perhaps, double Mr Valmon’s offer...”

Simon looked at him unhelpfully.

The visitor sat on the arm of a chair and dabbed his pink forehead with a large silk handkerchief.

“Perhaps I should make a fuller explanation. I’ve always wanted to own a place of this kind. It so happens that I’m a temporary guest of Mr Valmon’s — he used to have business connections with a cousin of mine, who sent me to him with an introduction. I had never met him before. Naturally, I heard about what happened last night. I hate to say it, but I feel that Mr Valmon’s behaviour must have been very bad. And yet of course I have no control over him. But I do feel that his attitude absolves me from some of my ordinary obligations as a guest.”

“So that you’re free to go behind his back and bid for a place that he’s interested in?” Simon suggested politely.

“Indeed, no. I don’t see it that way. I feel rather that I’m trying to make some amends, by proxy, for his bad manners.”