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.”
“Did he tell you what he was threatening to do—about the stream?”
“He did say something about trying to cut it off.”
“Which would make this place practically worthless.”
“That would be a great pity. But it might not happen.”
“You must think quite a lot of your drag with Valmon.”
The pink-faced man fluttered a plump deprecating hand. His smile was so unshakably sweet that a baby would have been ashamed not to give him its favourite rattle.
“Perhaps I should have a slight advantage—through my cousin’s business connection. Perhaps I’m just too proud of myself as a psychologist. But I’m quite willing to take my risk. Even if I lost, I should be satisfied to think that you hadn’t suffered.”
“Now I come to think of it,” said the Saint, “my mother did tell me about Santa Claus.”
The pale grey eyes gleamed limpidly.
“Will you give Mr Morland my message?”
The Saint lighted a cigarette, and in doing it confirmed an impression that he had caught out of the corner of his eye. His Buick had just then turned the corner in from the desert, but he did not want to help the other to notice it.
“Sure,” he said. “I’ll talk it over with him, and he’ll do what I advise.”
“Mr Morland must have great confidence in you.”
The probing dubiety was still there, but the man’s saccharine accents made the words sound like a compliment.
“This is Mr Morland’s daughter,” said the Saint easily. “She’ll tell you.”
Without looking at him, the girl said, “My father always does what Mr Templar tells him.”
There was a stillness in which the whole earth took part. It seemed as if no living thing could be moving or breathing anywhere. And yet all of that hush was mental, without any change of expression anywhere to which it could be attached. Jean Morland must even have been unaware that it had taken place at all. The visitor went on looking at Simon with his deferential smile and appealing spaniel eyes, his fingers pulling on his soft lower lip.
He said, almost apologetically, “Then…surely…Mr Templar could tell me now—whether I have any hope—”
“Give me a day or two to think it over,” Simon said.
“But this wild threat of Mr Valmon’s. He said he had given you some sort of ultimatum. It’s absurd, of course, but he’s the type of man who might be capable of carrying it out. Then this property would be spoiled. Then, of course, I shouldn’t have had even a sporting chance to make good with it. So then it wouldn’t be fair to ask me to repeat my offer. I don’t want to rush you, but you must see why my proposition can only be good for tonight.”
Simon Templar gazed at him levelly. The stillness had left him bubbling away before a spring of deep inward laughter that didn’t stir a muscle of his chest. The same laughter seeped into the depths of his eyes, like the shift of something stirring far down in a blue mountain lake, without changing a facet of the surface.
He felt quite unreasonably happy. But to the Saint there was always a reckless delight like no other mirth in the world when the wolves split the first stitch of the first tiny seam of their well-tailored sheepskins, and he knew that the cards were coming on to the table and the fight was going to be on. All the sparring and exploring and the rubber stilettos were great fun in their time, but they were only shadows until those moments of reality touched them like magic wands putting life into a picture…
“I’ll see you tonight, then,” he said.
“With something definite?”
“With something definite.”
The other’s hopeful eyes searched his face, as though they were seeking an innuendo that could have been confirmed there, and yet that hadn’t been hinted by the minutest inflection of a single syllable.
“I hope we shall both be pleased about it,” said the visitor at last, wistfully, and stood up. He bowed obsequiously to the girl. “It’s been a pleasure, Miss Morland.” He put out his hand towards her. There was only the faintest hesitation before she responded, and then his head dipped again infinitesimally over her fingers. He turned at once. “Until tonight, then, Mr Templar.”
His soft white hand hovered persuasively in front of the Saint.
Simon enclosed it in brown steel fingers, in a grip like the caress of a hydraulic press set to crack eggshells. He smiled with incomparable hospitality.
“I’ll be looking forward to it,” he murmured cordially, “Dr Julius.”
The other’s eyes misted at him through thick distorting lenses for an infinite instant, and the pink tonsure bobbed at him with impeccable punctilio before it turned away.
Simon Templar put his cigarette back in his mouth and drew long and deep as he eased his hip carefully on to the porch rail, before he turned to meet the inevitable unwavering challenge of Jean Morland’s calm clear eyes.
5
The green coupe had started away before she spoke. And then her voice had the same inquiring detachment as her gaze.
“He never mentioned his name,” she said. “But you knew it.”
The Saint nodded.
“How did he know mine?” he asked.
“I told him.”
Quite clearly she had no idea of the meaning that he might have placed on the word “know.” She went on, as though she was methodically determined to work through to something: “Why did you tell him you could speak for Daddy?”
“Why did you back me up?”
“I thought you must have something in mind, and I didn’t want to spoil it.”
“You must have great confidence in me,” he said, in smiling mimicry of Dr Julius’s saponaceous lisp.
“But now it isn’t fair to keep me guessing.”
The Saint took one of her hands.
“Did I forget to tell you were perfect, darling? You were. No old campaigner could have done better without a rehearsal. You only made one mistake, and that simply wasn’t your fault.”
“What was it?”
“It doesn’t really matter. Ludwig would probably have found out anyway, in next to no time, and it was fun to see him do his frozen-fish take…But as for the rest of it, I just didn’t have any deep-laid motives. I became your father’s manager to find out what went on. If it was a legitimate visitor I could always back down. If it was the Ungodly, I might be able to draw the fire. In case you still feel there are loose ends, it was the Ungodly.”
“Then Valmon was only bluffing?”
“Oh, no. Valmon would always be effective in an emergency. You heard the subtle way the threat and the ultimatum were repeated? But Ludwig Julius is smarter than Valmon. He’ll go a long way to avoid trouble, because when there’s trouble you never know what may blow off. He’ll even go so far as to double the ante, which is a long way for a guy like that to go. I give you my word, if he were sure of getting away with it, Comrade Julius could play so much rougher than Valmon that he’d make Max look like a squeamish school-teacher.”
Her eyes still held him.
“You still haven’t told me how you know so much about him.”
Simon’s glance switched off the verandah again. His car was just pulling up in front of the house.
“There isn’t time now,” he said. “I’ll tell you presently. Just for now, it’d be so much better if your father didn’t know anything about it. He’s a swell guy and everything else, but he just doesn’t know these games. You’ve backed me so far. Will you back me some more?”
She took a long quiet breath. She was aloof in a dispassionate appraisal that few other women he had ever known could have simulated, let alone made sincere. Yet it all died in the helpless quirk of her shoulders and the surrendering downward turn of her lips.
“I’m nuts,” she whispered. “But I’d back you to hell and back.”
“One way is enough,” he said. “There are no bets on the return journey.”
But his eyes said everything else that there was no time to speak.
And then he was rising to greet Don Morland as he came up the porch steps, as though nothing at all had happened since they had parted.
The old man’s step was quick and nervous, and he asked the obvious question in the most obviously conventional way.
“Who was that fellow I passed on the road?”
“He was working his way through correspondence college,” Simon replied gravely, “with a line of hogwash and fertiliser. I told him we didn’t keep hogs and we weren’t farming, and he went away.”
Morland nodded as if he had scarcely heard. His face looked lined and fretful with worry.
The girl took his arm.
“We want to know how you got on,” she said.
“I didn’t get on at all,” Morland said flatly, and her shoulders drooped.
“Then—”
“The sheriff wasn’t there. The sheriff wasn’t in town. The sheriff was away. Nobody knew where he was. The sheriff was busy on some case. Nobody knew anything about the case or how to get in touch with him. Nobody knew when he’d be back.”
“But didn’t he have any deputies?”
“Oh, yes, there was a deputy in the office. He’d be glad to do anything he could for me. But this was a bit too much. He didn’t rightly know what the law was in a case like this. He reckoned this was too much responsibility for him to take on his own. He’d have to talk to the sheriff about it. But he didn’t know exactly how to get hold of the sheriff. Of course, he’d be back. Maybe tomorrow. Or the next day. Certainly before the end of the week…And that was all I could do.”
The pounding of clipped bitter sentences died away with the last one into a dull hopelessness. Morland gave his daughter’s hand a little squeeze and turned towards a chair. She looked at the Saint, and he gave a faint tight-lipped shrug.
He said, “What is technically known as the good old runaround. It might be a coincidence, but it’s a hundred to one the sheriff has been got at. Only he couldn’t come out in the open and refuse to do anything—that’d be as good as putting a rope round his neck. So he just can’t be found. When he can be found it’s too late, and then it’s just too goddam bad. You can go on from there.”
&
nbsp; Morland sat with his hands clasped and his forearms on his knees; not fuming or fidgeting, and Simon realised that he was not really weak and foolish. He was just stumbling in a new language.
Then he looked up suddenly, and his eyes were hard and bright.
“Now I know what you all meant this morning,” he said. “You must have thought I was very stupid. I was. But I won’t be any more. If I’ve got to fight to keep this place, I’ll fight. I don’t care what happens. I’ll get a gun and fight for it with every one of you who’ll stand by me.”
A slow smile came to the Saint’s lips.
“That’s the kind of talk the boys are waiting to hear, Don,” he said, and took himself off the porch rail. “Tell ’em ’bout it when they come in. They’ll cheer you.” He flipped the end of his cigarette away on to the drive. “Now I’m going into town and attend to a couple of little things myself.”
Jean Morland said slowly, as if she was asking for a new hope to be kindled, “Perhaps you could find the sheriff—”
The Saint shook his head.
“I’m not even going to try. This is something much more important. I’ll be back in time for supper, and I may be able to tell you about it then.”
Morland stood up.
“That wheel is still in your car—I had to buy a new tyre,” he said. “If you’re going out again you might as well drop me by the station wagon and I can bring it back. I’d rather have something to do than sit here waiting.”
“Good enough.”
The three of them went back to the Buick together. The girl took her father’s arm again, but she took the Saint’s arm as well. He tightened his arm against his side in answer to the pressure of her fingers…
Besides some important research in the county records, he had a couple of purchases to make in Lion Rock, and the dusk was deepening as he drove back towards the Circle Y. It had been a profitable trip, and he was humming idly to himself as he nursed the big Buick over the unsuccessful imitation of a road. He felt it as one of those happy intermissions of adventure, the twilight between the cold daylight and exciting darkness, the empty stage between the acts, the gathering pause that was platitudinously called the calm before the storm. But to him it was only in those moments that the full flavour of an episode could be savoured in anticipation, like the bouquet of a rare wine before tasting, before it had changed for ever into retrospect. This one had been a little slow to grow upon the senses, but now he knew that all the analyses had been worked out and the vintage would prove to belong with the most distinguished aristocracies of such brews. Even his wordless understanding with Jean Morland belonged with it—but he didn’t want to think about that too much yet, when thinking only brought back too many questions that would have to be answered before the end Just then he only wanted to be glad that they had met and talked a little, without saying anything. It would have been enough to leave it like that, perhaps; and yet he was aware of a moment’s absurd contentment as he drove up in front of the ranch house and switched out his lights, and saw her coming to the head of the porch steps, with the lamplight behind her limning the eager cleanness of her silhouette.
The Saint Goes West (The Saint Series) Page 4
