Mr Uniatz sucked in his breath with a sound like an expiring soda siphon; and Peter Quentin sighed.
"Nunc dimittis," he said weakly. "I can't stand any more. The rest of my life would be an anticlimax. I always knew you were the luckiest man on earth, but there are limits. I believe if you trod on a toad it'd turn out to be a fairy princess."
"You ought to see what happens when I tread on a fairy," said the Saint.
Actually his thoughts were chasing far ahead of his words. The miracle had happened — if it was a miracle — and the story went on from there. He was too hardened a traveller in the strange country of adventure to be dumbfounded by any of the unpredictable twists in its trails. But he was wondering, with a tingle of inward exhilaration, where this particular twist was destined to lead.
He turned up the edge of his mask to light another cigarette, and his mind went back over the events that had brought him out that night, not for the first time, to make the raid that had culminated in this surprise… The laden trucks thundering northwards from the coast, filled to capacity with those easily marketable goods on which the English duties were highest — wines and spirits, cigars and cigarettes, silks and embroideries and Paris models… The rumours in the press, that leaked out in spite of the efforts of the police, of a supersmuggler whose cunning and audacity and efficient organization were cheating the revenue of thousands of pounds a week and driving baffled detectives to the verge of nervous breakdowns… The gossip in pubs along the coast and the whispers in certain exclusive circles to which no law-abiding citizen had access… The first realization that he had enough threads in his hands to be irrevocably committed to the adventure — that the grand old days of his outlawry had come back, as they must always go on coming back so long as he lived, when his name could be a holy terror to the police and the ungodly alike and golden galleons of boodle waited for his joyous buccaneering forays…
And now he was wondering whether he dared to hope that the clue he had been seeking for many weeks had fallen into his hands at last, in the shape of that slim golden beauty in the oil-stained overalls who lay unconscious under his hands.
He went on thinking without interrupting his examination. She was alive anyway — her pulse was quick but regular, and she was breathing evenly. There was no blood on her head, and her skull seemed to be intact.
"That cap probably helped," he said. "But it only shows you how careful you have to be when you're patting people on the bean, Hoppy."
Mr Uniatz swallowed.
"Chees, boss—"
"It's all right," Peter consoled him. "You wouldn't have missed anything if you had brained her. If there's going to be any more fun he'll have it."
The Saint straightened up and turned to the driver of the lorry, who was standing woodenly behind him with his ribs aching from the steady pressure of a Betsy which in spite of Mr Uniatz's chivalrous distress had never shifted its position.
"Who is she?" Simon asked.
The driver glowered at him sullenly.
"I don't know."
"What happened — did you find her growing on a tree?"
"I was just givin' 'er a lift."
"Where to?"
"That's none o' your muckin' business."
"Oh no?" The Saint's voice was amiable and unruffled. "Pretty lucky she was all dressed up ready to go riding in a lorry, wasn't it?"
The man tightened his jaw and stood silent, scowling at the Saint with grim intensity. He was, as a matter of fact, just starting to experience that incredulity of his own recollections of his recent flight through the air which has been referred to before; he was a big man, and he was thinking that he would like to see an attempt to repeat the performance.
The jar of Hoppy's gun grinding roughly into his side made him half turn with a darkening glare.
"Dijja hear de boss ask you a question?" enquired Mr Uniatz with all the dulcet persuasiveness of a foghorn.
"You ruddy barstard—"
"That '11 do," Simon intervened crisply. "And I wouldn't take any chances with my health if I were you, brother. That Betsy of Hoppy's would just about blow you in half, and he's rather sensitive about his family. We'll go on talking to you presently."
He turned to the others.
"I don't know how it strikes any of you bat-eyed brigands," he said, "but I've got a feeling that this is the best break we've had yet. After all, a lot of weird things happen in this world of sin, but you don't usually find girls in overalls riding on smugglers' trucks with a cargo of contraband stagger soup."
"You do when you hold 'em up," said Peter stoically.
"She didn't know I was going to hold it up, you fathead. So she's here for some other reason. Well, she might be just a girl friend of the Menace here, but I don't think it's likely. Take a look at her, and then look at him. Of course if she turned out to be blind and deaf and half-witted—"
The driver growled viciously, and received another painful prod from Hoppy Uniatz's gun for his trouble.
"Well, if she isn't?" said Peter.
"Then she's something a hell of a lot more important. She's one of nobs — or she knows 'em pretty well. It'd fit in, wouldn't it? Remember that last consignment we hijacked? All silk dresses and lace and crepe-de-Chine underwhatsits. I always thought there might be a woman in it; and if this is her—"
"She," said Peter helpfully.
The Saint laughed.
"The hell with your grammar," he said. "Let's get going — it'd spoil everything if somebody else came scooting over this blasted heath just now."
He turned away and picked the girl up in his arms like a baby — her body was still limp and lifeless, and it would save a certain amount of trouble if she remained in that state for a little while. So long as Hoppy hadn't struck hard enough for her to be unconscious too long…
He put her down in the car, in the seat beside his own, and closed the door. He had left the engine running in case of the need for a quick getaway, and he knew that in waiting so long he had already tempted the Providence that had sent him such a windfall. He straightened up briskly and strolled to meet the others who were following him.
"This means that we change our plans a bit," he said. "I like my beauty sleep as much as any of you, even if I don't need it so much; but I've got to know where this is getting us before we go to bed. You can follow along with the lorry to the Old Barn, Peter, and Hoppy can take it up to town from there while we see if the fairy princess knows any new fairy tales."
Mr Uniatz cleared his throat. It sounded like the waste pipe of a bath regurgitating, but it was meant to be a discreet and tactful noise. Almost the whole of the intervening conversation had been as obscure to him as a recitation from Euripides in the original Greek, but one minor omission stood out in front of him with pellucid clarity. Mr Uniatz was no genius, but he had an unswerving capacity for detail which many more brightly coruscating brains might have envied.
"Boss," he said, compressing philosophical volumes into their one irreducible nutshell, "dis mug."
"I know," said the Saint hurriedly. "I was exaggerating a bit, I'm afraid. It isn't as bad as all that, really. I don't believe anyone would actually die of heart failure if they saw it. I've looked at it myself several times—"
"I mean," said Mr Uniatz shyly, emphasizing his objective with another rib-splitting thrust of his Betsy, "dis mug here."
"Oh, him. Well—"
"Do I give him de woiks?" asked Mr Uniatz, condensing into six crystalline monosyllables the problem which dictators of every age and clime have taken thousands of words to propound.
Simon shrugged tolerantly.
"If he gets obstreperous I should say yes," he murmured. "But if he behaves himself you can put it off for a while. We will have words with him first. If he can put us wise about whether the sleeping beauty is one of the first strings in this racket—"
"Or even the first string," said Peter Quentin thoughtfully.
The Saint put his cigarette to his mouth and drew it to a bright spark of light. For a few moments he was silent. It was a thought that had already occurred to him, long before; but he had been content to let the answer produce itself in its own good time. Even stranger things than that had happened in the cockeyed world of which Simon Templar had made himself the uncrowned king, and when they did occur they were usually the forerunners of even more trouble than he had set out to ask for, which was plenty. But complications like that had to take care of themselves.
"Who knows?" said the Saint vaguely. "It might just as well have been the secretary of the Women's Temperance League, who isn't nearly so good looking. On your way, Peter—"
"Hey!" bawled Mr Uniatz.
His voice, which could never at any time have rivalled the musical accents of a radio announcer, blared into the middle of the Saint's words with a bloodcurdling intensity of feeling that made even Simon Templar's iron nerves wince. For a moment the Saint was paralyzed, while he searched for some sign of the stimulus that was capable of drawing such a response from Mr Uniatz's phlegmatic throat.
And then he became aware that Hoppy was staring straight ahead with a frozen rigidity that was not even conscious of the sensation it had caused. A little to the Saint's left the driver of the lorry was looking in the same direction with a glitter of evil satisfaction in his small eyes.
Simon swung round the other way and saw that Peter Quentin also was gazing past him with the same petrified immobility. And as the Saint turned round further he had a feeling of dizzy unreality that made his scalp creep.
As he remembered it he had only taken a couple of steps away from his car when Peter Quentin and Hoppy Uniatz and the driver of the lorry had met him. But as he turned he couldn't see the car at all where it should have been. The road all around him looked empty in the dull gleam of their torches, apart from the black bulk of the van which overshadowed them. It was another second before he saw where his car was. It had swung off onto the heath in a wide arc in order to straighten up; and while he watched it, it bumped back onto the macadam and went skimming away up the road to the northeast with no more than a soft flutter of gas from the exhaust to announce its departure.