Simon had one compensation. The opposition had not waited to search him thoroughly or to bind his wrists and ankles in the approved style. The truck was evidently considered to be secure enough as a temporary prison. Which, in fact, it was. When the Saint heaved against the closed doors he soon came to the conclusion that they were sufficiently strong to hold him in for some time. Wherefore, with his characteristic philosophy, he made himself as comfortable as he could and set out to relieve the tedium of the journey with a cigarette. At least he had gone into the trap with his eyes open, so he had no valid grounds for whining.
He judged that the truck had driven through a hidden path between the trees and had then bumped across a field. After that it had gained a road, and now it was bowling along more smoothly. The journey proved to be comparatively short. Within ten or fifteen minutes there was no longer any sound of other traffic, and the road surface over which the truck was travelling became more rutty and uneven. Then with a giddy swing to the near side the truck left the road again and ran evenly for a few seconds on a level drive before it stopped. For a little while it backed and manoeuvred; and then the sound of the engine died away. There was a slight delay, in which he heard occasional murmurs of voices without being able to detect any recognizable
words. It was just possible that a red carpet was being laid down for him, but somehow he doubted it. Then there was a rattle at the doors, and they were flung open. Three powerful electric flashlights blazed on him.
"If I make the slightest resistance I suppose I shall be converted into a colander?" Simon remarked calmly. "I'm just trying to save you the trouble of giving the customary warnings—"
"Get out," Raddon's voice ordered shortly.
Simon obeyed. He was unable to see much of his surroundings, for the truck had been backed up against a crumbling stone doorway, and the torchlights were so concentrated on him that practically everything else was in black shadow.
Two of the men closed in on him as his feet touched the ground, ramming their guns into his sides. He was thrust on through the doorway into what seemed to be a bare and damp and uninhabited hall and halted with his face to one bleak stone wall. Then while a gun was still held against his spine swift and efficient hands went over him again. His pockets were completely emptied, even to his cigarette case, his automatic lighter and his loose change; and one of the investigating hands felt along his sleeve and removed the knife strapped to his forearm. After the demonstration he had given in Bryerby House, thought the Saint, that was only to be expected; but he would have been happier if it had been overlooked as it had been so many times before.
"So!" came the Z-Man's sneering voice. "The knife, it voss somevere, und it we find. Goot! Mit throwings you are through!"
"You've got beyond the Dennis stage now, brother," said the Saint appreciatively, although he was now without a weapon of any kind. "I can only assume that you must have been reading the Katzenjammer Kids."
A rope was pulled tightly around his wrists, pinioning them together in front of him. Again he was told to move, and he found himself ascending a spiral staircase of vertiginous steepness. Most of the treads were broken and rotting and creaked alarmingly under his weight. The staircase wound itself like a corkscrew around the inner wall of a round tower, which rose straight up from what he had first taken for a sort of hall. At one time, no doubt, there had been a guarding balustrade on the off side; but this had long since ceased to exist, and there was nothing between the climber and a sheer drop to the flagstones below. At the top he stepped off the last tread onto the floor of what might once have been a small turret room, but which was now hardly more than an unrailed ledge suspended over the black abyss. The only windows were two narrow embrasures through which he could see nothing but darkness. He was placed against the wall away from the stairs and close to the edge of the floor, and the other end of the rope around his wrists was run through a heavy iron ring set in the masonry above his head and made fast.
"I can still kick," he observed solicitously. "Are you sure you're not taking a lot of chances?"
"That will not be for long," said the Z-Man.
A block of stone weighing about a hundredweight, with a rope round it, was dragged across the floor, and the rope was tied round the Saint's ankles.
"You vill kick now?" asked the Z-Man. "Yess?"
"I fancy — no," answered the Saint.
He moved his hands experimentally. His wrists were only held by a slipknot. If he could drag a little slack out of the rope where it was tied to the ring he might be able to get them free. He wondered why he had been tied so carelessly; and the next moment he knew. As if in answer to a prearranged signal, Rad-don stepped forward and with an effort pushed the rock tied to the Saint's feet off the ledge. It dragged the Saint's legs after it; and the slipknot came tight again instantly as the pull came on it. Simon hung there, excruciatingly stretched out, with only the cord on his wrists to save him from being dragged over the edge.
The Z-Man came closer.
"You know why you are here?" he asked. "You haff interfered with my affairs."
"Considerably," Simon agreed.
In that confined space the light of the torches was reflected from the walls sufficiently to show the men behind them. Besides the Z-Man and Raddon, the third member of the party, as Simon had suspected, was Welmont, of taxicab fame. The two minor Z-Men stood a little behind and to either side of their leader.
The Z-Man put away his torch and took the Saint's own knife out of his pocket.
"You vill tell me how much you know," he said. "Tell me this, my Saint, und your fine looks vill still be yours."
He caressed the knife in his gloved hand and brought it suggestively forward so that the light glinted on the polished blade.
"So we now attempt to make the victim's blood run cold, do we?" said the Saint amusedly, although his joints felt as if they were being torn apart on the rack. "I take it that you're in the mood for one of your celebrated beauty treatments. Why don't you operate on yourself first, laddie? You look as if it would improve you."
"Tell me vot you know!" shouted the Z-Man furiously. "I giff you just one minute."
"And after I've done the necessary spilling I suppose you slit my gizzard with the grapefruit cutter and then bury my remains deeply under the fragrant sod," said the Saint sardonically. "Nothing doing, slug. It's not good enough. I've made myself a hell of a nuisance to you, and you won't be satisfied until I'm as dead as — Mercia Landon."
"You fool," screamed the Z-Man. "I mean vot I say!"
"That makes us even," said the Saint. "But I'm not a film actress, remember. Carving your alphabetical ornamentations on my face won't decrease my earning capacity by a cent. I'm surprised at your moderation. Now that you've got me in your ker-lutches I wonder you don't flay the skin off my back."
His utter indifference to the peril he was in was breath-taking. The mockery of his blue eyes and the cool insolence of his voice had something epic about it, as if he had turned back the clock to days when men lived and died with that same ageless carelessness. And yet even while he spoke his ears were listening. Events had moved faster than he had anticipated. The Z-Man's lofty eyrie, too, was a factor of the entertainment that Simon had not allowed for. Those crumbling stairs couldn't be climbed easily and quietly… Time was the essential factor now; and the Saint was beginning to realize that the support upon which he was relying was not at hand — while he was not so much at the mercy of a man as of a homicidal maniac.
The Z-Man was within arm's length of him now.
"No, I do not slit your gizzard," he said huskily. "I tell you vot I do. I only cut der rope vot hold you up. Und then der stone pulls you down, und we take off der ropes, und you haf had an accident und fallen down. Do you understand?"
The Saint understood very well. He could feel the dizzy emptiness under his dangling toes. But he still smiled.
"Well, why don't you get on with it?" he said tauntingly. "Or have you lost your nerve?"
"You crazy fool! You think you are funny! But if I take you at your word—"
"You're getting careless with that beautiful accent," mocked the Saint. "If you say 'vot', you ought to say 'vord.' The trouble with you is that you're such a lousy actor. Now if you'd been any good—"
"You asked for it," said the other in a horrible whisper and slashed at the rope from which the Saint hung.
And at the same moment the Saint made his own gamble. The fingers of his right hand strained up, closed on the iron ring from which he was suspended, tightened their grip and held it. The strain on his sinews shot red-hot needles through him; and yet he had a sense of serene confidence, a feeling of seraphic inevitability, that no pain could suppress. He had goaded the Z-Man as he had anticipated; and he had been waiting with every nerve and muscle for the one solitary chance that the fall of the cards offered — a game fighting chance to win through. And the chance had come off.
The rope no longer held him from plunging down to almost certain death, but the steel strength of his own fingers did. And as the rope parted the slipknot had loosened so that he could wrench his left hand free.
"Thanks a lot, sweetheart," said the Saint.
A hawk would have had difficulty in following the movements that came immediately afterwards. As the Z-Man gasped with sudden fear a circle of wrought steel whipped across his shoulder, swung him completely round and placed him so that his back was towards the Saint. Then the Saint's left hand snaked under his opponent's left arm, flashed up to his neck and secured a half nelson that was as solid as if it had been carved out of stone.
"We can now indulge in skylarking and song," said the Saint. "I'll do the skylarking, and you can provide the song."
To some extent he was right; but the Z-Man's song was not so much musical as reminiscent of the shriek of a lost locomotive. Some men might have got out of that half nelson, particularly as the Saint was still crucified between his precarious grip on the ring and the weight that was trying to drag him down into the black void; but the Z-Man knew nothing about wrestling, and all the strength seemed to have gone out of him. Moreover, the Saint's thumb on one side of his captive's neck and his lean brown fingers on the other were crushing with deadly effect into his victim's carotid arteries. Scientifically applied, this treatment can produce unconsciousness in a few seconds; but Simon was at a disadvantage, for half his strength was devoted to fighting the relentless drag on his ankles.
Raddon and Welmont started forward too late. The Saint's wintry laugh met them at their first step.
"If anything happens," he said with pitiless clarity, "your pal goes over first."
They checked as if they had run into an invisible wall; and Raddon's Gumpish face showed white as his torch jumped in his hand.
"For God's sake," he gasped hoarsely. "Wait—"
"Is dat you, boss?" bawled a foghorn voice far below; and the Saint's smile became a shade more blissful in spite of the wrenching agony in his right shoulder.
"This is me, Hoppy," he said. "You'd better come up quickly — and look out for someone coming down." He looked over the shuddering bundle of the Z-Man at Raddon and Welmont, still frozen in their tracks.
"There's no way out for you unless you can fly," he said. "How would you like to be a pair of angels?"
They made no attempt to graduate into a pair of angels. They stood very still as Hoppy Uniatz crashed off the stairs onto the ledge, followed by Patricia, and briskly removed their guns. A moment later an arm like a tree trunk took the weight off the Saint's hand and hauled him back to the safety of the floor.
Patricia was touching the Saint as if to make sure that he was real.
"Are you all right, boy?" she was asking tremulously. "I was afraid we'd be too late. They'd locked the outside door, and Hoppy was afraid of making a noise—"
The Saint kissed her.
"You were in plenty of time," he said and yanked the Z-Man clear of the edge of the floor. "Think you could hold him, Hoppy?"
"Wit' one finger," said Mr Uniatz scornfully.
With one swift hop that was in itself a complete justification of his nickname he heaved the Z-Man to his feet from behind and held him in a gorilla grip. The Z-Man's struggles were as futile as the wrigglings of a fly between the fingers of a small boy. And the Saint retrieved his knife and tested the point on his thumb.
"Hold him just like that, Hoppy," he said grimly, "so that his tummy occupies the centre of the stage. I want to do some surgery of my own."
With a swift movement that made Patricia catch her breath and shut her eyes quickly he thrust the knife deeply and forcefully into the Z-Man's protruding stomach. There was a loud squealing hiss, and the patient deflated like a punctured tire.
"I just wanted to see whether it would make a squashy noise or merely explode," said the Saint placidly. "You can open your eyes, darling. There's no mess on the floor. Mr Vell is mostly composed of air."
With a swift movement he yanked off his victim's hat, wig, glasses and beard.
"Miss Sheila Ireland, I believe," murmured the Saint courteously.