The Saint Goes West (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  “Good luck.”

  “You too.”

  They gripped. Then, as the foreman set the brim of his hat and put one hand to the saddle horn, he said, “One day I’m goin’ to know why you remind me of that feller I was talkin’ about—the Saint.”

  That was all. He swung a long leg over the cantle, and the Saint turned away, grinning, and was starting down the slope without waiting to see them get away.

  He figured that he might have a little time to spare, and he was interested to see not only what preparations Max Valmon might have made to carry out his threat to blast the stream out of its course but also what other engineering arrangements might have been initiated in the vicinity.

  He also knew that from there on he was taking risks not only with his own life but also with the entire outcome of that frontier skirmish which were entirely unauthorised by any of the published books of rules. One telephone call to the right number, when he was in Lion Rock, would have taken the whole thing out of his hands and delivered it into the lap of a highly organised team of genial gentlemen with elegant badges and all the resources of the Law at their disposal. But to the Saint there was personal pride in certainty as against wild suspicion, and a delight in danger for its own sake that eliminated all such prosaic solutions. From the beginning this had been his adventure, and if he could drop it now he could have dropped it from the beginning, and there was no clear dividing line. And there would have been nothing to remember. It was all very reprehensible, no doubt, and respectable officials in Washington would get ulcers about it; but if the Saint hadn’t been doing reprehensible things all his life there would never have been a Saint Saga, and this chronicler would have had to devoted his genius to writing a syndicated column of advice and good cheer to lovely hearts.

  It was easy for Simon to find the stream, and he followed it over the boundary line as it traced a wide rising quadrant. Then it turned sharply and came tumbling down over steeply rising boulders in a series of chattering cascades. The Saint climbed beside it, and presently found himself on a high grassy flat across which the brook rustled through a broad ribbon of wild alfalfa. This, then, must have been the place where it could easily have been diverted, for the mesa fell away to his left through a rim of jagged rocks beyond which there must have been plenty of natural channels to lead it clear out to the open acres of the J-Bar-B. In fact, one path had already been cut in that direction, but it was not an aqueduct. It was a wide, nicely graded, soundly surfaced road.

  Simon stood and gazed at it with profound interest. He had studied maps of the district enough to know that there should be no public highway there. And ranchers did not normally build private roads of that quality so that they could drive out to odd corners of their estates and admire the view. This road had been constructed for the efficient movement of heavy loads, and it was still new enough not to have been much scarred by the traffic.

  Turning, the Saint thought that he could look across from there back to the slope where he had found Smoky, and while he looked he saw the red mote of a cigarette-end dance and brighten like a tiny firefly in a patch of shadow, and his lips hardened grimly. The road itself would not have been visible from where Smoky had been, since it lay safely below the raised rim of the plateau, but Smoky might have seen something on it that he should not have seen, and might have betrayed his presence with a carelessly handled cigarette exactly as Jim or Elmer was doing then…

  Simon followed the road up, and the road followed the brook. They turned north together, into the rocky hills on the other side of the mesa where the ground went on climbing in ragged steps towards the general level of the place where the Saint had killed his snake that day and found crystals like blood in a broken stone…He realised that in fact the place where he had picked up the stone could not have been much more than half a mile from where he was going, and must have been part of the same geological outcropping…Then he was at the end of both the brook and the road.

  They separated about a hundred yards before that, towards the foot of a sheer rock cliff where the meadow ended. He followed the stream first. It climbed precipitously up a funnel of steep falls, and abruptly he was at its source where it sprang clean and sparkling out of a natural cleft in the rock. Above there was nothing but the soaring battlements of age-eroded stone.

  The Saint worked westwards along the foot of the escarpment towards the road, and now he practically knew what he would find there. Without any feeling of surprise he saw the angular spidery shapes of machinery that certainly had nothing to do with agriculture, the gaunt utilitarian forms of buildings that were not barns or granaries.

  The entrance of the mine was a square patch of blackness in the side of the bluff. Simon picked his way over to it, and reached for the flashlight in the hip pocket of his Levis. He was still a few steps from the opening when a voice that was not at all western spoke out of the darkness.

  It said, “Reach for some stars, buddy, and keep coming.”

  7

  The Saint raised his hands slowly, and walked the last four paces to the mouth of the mine.

  The voice said, “Drop the flashlight.”

  Simon dropped it.

  He stood in front of the pitch-black gap, trying uselessly to penetrate its inky opacity.

  “Take out your rod,” ordered the voice. “Put it on the ground. Then turn around and go back six steps.”

  The Saint obeyed. There was nothing else for it. Out there in the open, bathed in the moonlight, he was a perfect target while the Voice was only cold words out of utter emptiness. He could have been dropped where he stood before he even knew what to shoot at.

  He stood where he had been told to stop, feeling cold ripples inching up his spine, not knowing when the tearing smash of a bullet would blast through his chest and hurl him forward into eternal nothingness. Behind him he heard crunching steps—it sounded like two men. They paused momentarily, picking up the Magnum, and came on. Something hard and blunt prodded his back.

  “Walk to that first building on your right.”

  Simon walked, with the hard bluntness in his back all the time. He was steered to a door, and told to open it and go in. When he had taken three or four steps into blackness, a switch clicked behind him and a dim bare bulb lit up over his head. He saw that he was in a corner of some sort of ore mill, but he didn’t know enough about it to identify any of the machines that loomed away beyond the limits of the little patch of light where he stood.

  The gun muzzle ceased pressing against him for the first time.

  “Okay, buddy,” said the voice. “You can turn around now.”

  Simon turned.

  He saw two men, both in dirty blue overalls. One, who was unmistakably the owner of the Voice, was big and square, very broad-shouldered and a little paunchy. He carried a sub­machine gun. He had a close-cropped sandy head and small crinkly eyes and a heavy stubbly chin. The other, who held the Saint’s Magnum, was smaller and thinner. He had brown hair and big black eyes with a moist flat look to them, and a very pale narrow face gashed with a pink slit of a mouth.

  The big man studied Simon’s face with satisfaction.

  “It’s him,” he announced to his companion. “I thought so.”

  “Well, I’m surprised,” said the Saint reprovingly. “If you were expecting me I should think you’d have hung out flags and ordered a brass band.”

  The big man ignored this.

  “Better call Valmon,” he said over his shoulder.

  The thin man nodded, and went over to a corner where there was an old-fashioned wall telephone. He took off the receiver and cranked it.

  Presently he said, “This is Eberhardt. The Saint is here. He came to the mine, and Neumann and I caught him.”

  His voice was as thin as he was, with a strongly accented whine. He listened for a while and said “Ja.” Then he said “Okay,” and hung up the receiver and came back.

  “They’ll be right up,” he said.

  Simon gazed
at the two men pleasantly.

  “It’s rather an unusual way to announce a visitor,” he remarked, “but I suppose you have the real welcoming spirit underneath it all. By the way, will you offer me a cigarette or shall I smoke my own?”

  “You can smoke,” Neumann said stolidly. “But don’t try any funny business.”

  The Saint took out a pack of cigarettes, and took a cigarette from the pack. He flicked a match with his thumb-nail and lighted it.

  “Incidentally,” he went on, in the same easy conversational tone, “how is the good old Bund making out these days? You must feel sort of lost with your Gauleiter in the sneezer and so many new laws everywhere about your marching around and heiling Hitler.”

  “Can it,” said Neumann coldly. “Or I won’t wait till Valmon gets here.”

  “Maybe you could fool them by saying ‘Heil Schickelgruber,’ ” Simon suggested helpfully.

  The other glowered at him without movement, and Simon smiled faintly and turned to pick himself a seat on a packing case against the wall. He leaned back and enjoyed his cigarette, while Neumann and Eberhardt watched him like wooden sentries. They were certainly not the most convivial company he had ever been with, but he could console himself with the expectation that Max Valmon would soon introduce a brighter note.

  The whole picture was complete now, so simply and comprehensively that the only surprise was in the amount of insolent audacity that had laid out its composition. If he had only known just how the disappearance of Don Morland fitted in, he wouldn’t have had one question left to ask. And it wasn’t likely to be much longer before he had that final answer.

  The only real problem was, what good his knowledge was going to do him. He hadn’t expected to be caught so suddenly, if at all. And Hank Reefe wouldn’t have had time to ride back with Smoky and drive over to Valmon’s estancia yet. It was a situation that would have been more than slightly discouraging to most men, but to the Saint it was a tightening of nerve and sinew, the firing spark to an unquenchable fighting recklessness that had never yet admitted that any corner was hopeless. At that moment he had no idea what miracle he could possibly perform to equalise the reversal that had so catastrophically placed him where he was, but until that last and perhaps inevitable exception when The End would be written unarguably and for ever, he would always have his ridiculous and magnificent faith that if the tables could be turned once they could be turned again…

  There was the sound of a car purring up outside and stopping. Then footsteps. Then the door opened, and Valmon came in.

  After him, almost apologetically, came Dr Ludwig Julius.

  Simon stood up in his own easy-going time. He gave them a smile so casual and carefree that it was hard to believe that he was not himself the host of the interview, instead of a prisoner at the mercy of four men, a Tommy gun, and a few other items of assorted ordnance.

  “Hullo, Maxie dear,” he drawled. “I know you asked me to drop in tonight, but I didn’t think it was going to be such a formal affair. Comrades Neumann and Eberhardt have been frightfully zealous about turning themselves into a guard of honour—in fact, if I wasn’t so well up in these military traditions I might have been afraid I was being kidnapped.”

  Valmon stood looking at him with that dark heavy swagger, his thumbs hooked in his carved and jewelled belt, his black brows drawn down unsmilingly.

  “You should have come to the house,” he said. “I was waiting for you.”

  “I thought I’d take a stroll around first,” said the Saint. “It was such a lovely night, and I knew there’d be lots of interesting things to see.”

  “What made you so sure of that?”

  “It sort of dawned on me gradually. But I suppose I was really quite sure when I picked up a chunk of cinnabar this morning, about half a mile from here, on the Circle Y.”

  Neumann and Eberhardt had drawn back unobtrusively towards the shadows. They were still on watch there, but they had left Simon with Valmon and Julius grouped under the dim spotlight like the principals in a theatrical stage setting.

  Valmon and Julius looked at each other, and Julius moved in a little from his self-effacing place a little behind Valmon.

  Simon beamed at him encouragingly.

  “Of course,” he admitted, “I’d started to get a few ideas before that. I suppose I really got the first one when I happened to find out that Dr Ludwig Julius, the great mining expert and one of dear Adolf’s Deputy Kommissars of Supply, was taking a personal trip to Arizona for a nice healthy vacation.”

  “How did you know that?” Julius asked gently.

  “My spies,” said the Saint, “are everywhere. It sounds awfully funny, I know, but it’s quite true. All kinds of people tell me things—people I’ve never met and probably never will meet. They just think I might be interested and do something. That’s what happens when you get to be such a notorious character. You must try another purge in your Department, Ludwig—that is, if you ever have the chance.”

  Julius’s bald head shone like smooth wet coral.

  “How very interesting!” he said softly. “Do you wish to tell us anything more?”

  “Anything you like…Of course, when I knew you were here I wanted to snoop around. So I took a little trouble to get into the next-door ranch. I didn’t know at the time that they were so very closely connected. But when I heard about the previous owner’s unfortunate accident, I did begin to wonder.”

  “And then?”

  Valmon’s modulated tenor was a melodic organ-note of challenge. His lips had drawn apart in a set way that bared his glistening teeth.

  The Saint inhaled and blew out a leisured drift of curling smoke.

  “Then, you were so anxious to buy the Circle Y. In fact, you were more than anxious—you insisted. Quite rudely. I thought your technique was rather crude at the time, and I didn’t see why you had to be so corny. And there was all that yawp about damming the stream, with all the trimmings straight out of Hopalong Cassidy. There had to be something phony about that but I couldn’t get it at first.”

  “And now you know all about it,” suggested Julius.

  “I think so—since I came this way tonight.”

  “We are waiting breathlessly.”

  “You’ve already driven an exploratory shaft. It confirms what I would have guessed from the cinnabar I found. The vein runs clear through. More—the whole mountain is probably fuller of it than a ripe Limburger is full of mould. You might want to cut acres of it away in chunks. But no matter how you work it, you’re practically certain to break through the reservoir that feeds the stream. There’ll be a small but exciting flood, more or less according to how big the source is, and then—no more stream.”

  The small pale grey eyes of Dr Julius were like melting marbles behind their thick lenses.

  “You must have been a promising student of geology Mr Templar,” he said milkily. “That wasn’t so difficult.”

  “Has anything been difficult for you?”

  It was dulcet sarcasm of the most treacly kind, but it was also another delicate challenge to go on.

  The Saint threw away the stub of his cigarette and lighted another, without hurrying. It was all taking time—time in which Hank Reefe could catch up with his assignment. And that would give the Saint at least one ally within useful distance, and according to his irrepressible arithmetic, leave him almost nothing to cope with himself except four men, a Tommy gun, and a few other items of assorted ordnance.

  And there was no reason why he shouldn’t go on talking, as long as Valmon and Julius wanted to listen. He was telling them nothing that they didn’t know already, except how much he knew himself—and they could have used unnecessarily unpleasant methods to try to find that out. But in the circumstances he had no objection to telling them. It was a convenient way of verifying his own deductions—and at the same time he was steadily building up the subtle moral advantage that he had assumed from the first instant, the gnawing doubt in their minds that any m
an in his position could talk so coolly and cheerfully without having at least one ace up his sleeve. He wanted that idea to germinate in them all by itself…

  “It’s all been a most amusing plot,” he murmured. “Valmon makes this strike on his ranch, or somebody makes it for him, but anyway, he’s still a good Heinie under his ten-gallon hat, so the nearest Bund heeler is the first to hear of it—unless Maxie wears that exalted title himself, which is most likely. Anyway, there’s no commotion. There is a little quiet geologising and assaying, and the word goes back to Berlin that this is rich. Awful rich. And one of the things that the Fatherland needs quite badly, to kill a few more un-kultured barbarians with. So badly that the great Dr Julius comes here in person to organise it. Now unfortunately the nasty Jewish-controlled and plutocracketeering United States have passed a lot of unsympathetic embargoes against giving nice little Nazis materials to make fireworks with. But that might be gotten around. This is a pretty deserted part of the world, and a lot of machinery could be quietly brought in, and you could rake up plenty of demobilised Bundsmen with the skill to work it, and get a mine going that nobody else knew anything about—and smuggle the produce out and away to a suitable coast where it could be sneaked on to a freight-carrying submarine and carted off to dear old Deutschland. A very pretty and enterprising scheme, and well worth the trouble when you figure that a lode like this must be good for hundreds of tons of pure mercury. And if I’m not mistaken, mercury is the stuff that makes the detonators that pop off the bombs and shells that your Aryan heroes are distributing to illuminate the beauties of the New Order to the admiring women and children of the world.”

  He had all the confirmation he needed in Max Valmon’s fixed ivorine smile, in the softly perspiring pink attentiveness of Ludwig Julius.

  He went on after a moment, with the same hibernal confidence that was holding them at arm’s length almost like a sword in his hand, even though he knew that his dialogue was running out and he was coming to the dizzy end of certainty like a downhill skier racing towards a precipice.