Featuring the Saint (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

The Saint huddled the man back against the wall, and tipped his sombrero over his eyes as if he was asleep—which, in fact, he was. Then he scrambled over the gates, and dropped cat-footed into the dust of the cart-track of a road outside.

  The prison of Santa Miranda lies to the east of the town, near the sea, among the slums which closely beset the bright main streets, and the Saint set himself to pass quickly through the town by way of these dirty, narrow streets where his disreputable condition would be most unnoticed, avoiding the Calle del Palacio and the chance of encountering a guardia who might remember him.

  Santa Miranda had not yet awoken. In the grass-grown lanes between the rude huts of the labourers a child in rags played here and there, but paid no attention to his passing. In the doorway of one hut an old and wizened Indian slept in the sun, like a lizard. The Saint saw no one else.

  He threaded the maze quietly but with speed, steering a course parallel to the Calle del Palacio. And then, over the low roofs of the adobe hovels around him, he saw, quite close, a tall white tower caught by the slanting rays of the sun, and he changed his plans.

  That is to say, he resolved on the spur of the moment to dispense with making plans. His original vague idea had been to make for Kelly’s bungalow, get a shave, a bath, some clean clothes, and a cigarette, and sit down to deliberate the best way of capturing the town. So far, in spite of his boast, the solution of that problem had eluded him, though he had no doubts that he would be given inspiration at the appointed time.

  Now, looking at that tower, which he knew to be an ornament of the Presidential Palace, only a stone’s throw away, the required inspiration came, and he acted upon it at once, branching off to his left in the direction of the tower.

  It was one of those gay and reckless, dare-devil and foolhardy, utterly preposterous and wholly delightful impulses which the Saint could never resist. The breath-taking impudence of it was, to his way of thinking, the chief reason for taking it seriously; the suicidal odds against success were a conclusive argument for having a fling at bringing off the lone hundred-to-one chance; the monumental nerve that was plainly needed for turning the entertaining idea into a solemn fact was a challenge to his adventurousness that it was simply unthinkable to ignore. The Saint took up the gauntlet without the faintest hesitation.

  For this was the full effrontery of his decision.

  “Eventually,” whispered the Saint, to his secret soul, “why not now?”

  And the Saintly smile in all its glory twitched his lips back from his white teeth…

  His luck had been stupendous, and it augured well for the future. Decidedly it was his day. A clean getaway from the prison, with no alarm. And he reached the high wall surrounding the palace grounds unobserved. And only a dozen feet away from the walls grew a tall tree.

  The Saint went up the tree like a monkey, to a big straight branch that stuck out horizontally fifteen feet from the ground. Measuring the distance, he jumped.

  The leap took him on to the top of the wall. He steadied himself for a moment, and then jumped again, twelve feet down into the palace gardens.

  He landed on his toes, as lightly as a panther, and went zigzagging over the lawn between the flower-beds like a Red Indian. The gardens were empty. There was no sound but the murmuring of bees in the sun and the soft rustle of the Saint’s feet over the grass.

  He ran across the deserted gardens and up some steps to a flagged terrace in the very shadow of the palace walls. Eight feet above the terrace hung a low balcony. The Saint took two steps and a jump, hung by his finger-tips for a second, and pulled himself quickly up and over the balustrade.

  An open door faced him, and the room beyond was empty. The Saint walked in, and passed through to the corridor on the other side.

  Here he was at a loss, for the geography of the palace was strange to him. He crept along, rather hesitantly, without a sound. In the space of a dozen yards there was another open door. Through it, as he passed, the Saint caught a glimpse of the room beyond, and what he saw brought him to a sudden standstill.

  He tiptoed back to the doorway, and stood there at gaze. It was a bathroom.

  Only a year ago that bathroom had been fitted up at enormous cost for the delectation of the Saturday nights of His Excellency the President and the Minister of the Interior. A gang of workmen specially sent down by a New York firm of contractors had affixed those beautiful sky-blue tiles to the walls, and laid those lovely sea-green tiles on the floor, and installed that superlative pale green porcelain bath with its gleaming silver taps and showers and other gadgets. Paris had supplied the great crystal jar of bath salts which stood on the window-sill, and the new cakes of expensive soap in the dishes.

  The Saint’s glistening eyes swept the room.

  It was not Saturday, but it seemed as if someone was making a departure from the usual habits of the palace household. On a rack above the wash-basin were laid out razor, shaving-soap, and brush. On a chair beside the bath were snowy towels. On another chair, in a corner, were clothes—a spotless silk shirt, a sash, wide-bottomed Mexican trousers braided with gold, shoes…

  For a full minute the Saint stared, struck dumb with wonder at his astounding good fortune. Then, in fear and trembling, he stole into the room and turned on a tap.

  The water ran hot.

  He hesitated no longer. War, revolution, battle, murder, and sudden death meant nothing to him then. He closed the door, and turned the key.

  Blessings, like misfortunes, never come singly. There was even a packet of Havana cigarettes and a box of matches tucked away behind the bath salts…

  Ten minutes later, already shaved, the Saint was stretched full length in a steaming bath into which he had emptied the best part of the Presidential jar of bath salts, innocently playing submarines with the sponge and a cake of soap.

  A cigarette was canted jauntily up between his lips, and he was without a care in the world.

  8

  Archie Sheridan mopped his moist forehead and smacked viciously at a mosquito which was gorging itself on his bare forearm.

  “Thank the Lord you’re back,” he said. “This blistered place gives me the creeps. Have you fixed anything?”

  Kelly settled ponderously on the spread groundsheet.

  “I have arranged the invadin’ army,” he said. “Anything come through while I’ve been away?”

  “Nothing that matters. One or two private messages, which I duly acknowledged. I wonder what they’re thinking at the Ondia end of the line.”

  “There’ll be a breakdown gang along—some time,” pronounced Kelly. “It’s now the second day of the wire bein’ cut. Within the week, maybe, they’ll wake up and send to repair it. What’s the time?”

  Sheridan consulted his watch.

  “A quarter-past eleven,” he said.

  They sat under a great tree, in a small clearing in the jungle near the borders of Maduro, some ten miles east of Esperanza. A mile away was the rough track which led from Esperanza across the frontier to Maduro, and which formed the only road-link between the two countries; and there Kelly’s Ford, in which they had made most of the journey, waited hidden between the trees at a little distance from the road.

  But for all the evidence there was to the contrary they might have been a thousand miles from civilisation. At the edge of the tiny clearing colossal trees laced together with vines and creepers hemmed them in as with a gigantic palisade; high over their heads the entangled branches of the trees shut out the sky, and allowed no light to pass but a ghostly, grey twilight, in which the glaring crimsons and oranges and purples of the tropical blooms which flowered here and there in the marshy soil stood out with a shrieking violence.

  Now and again, in the stillness of the great forest, there would be a rustle of the passing of some unseen wild thing. Under some prowling beast’s paw, perhaps, a rotten twig would snap with a report like a rifle-shot. Sometimes the delirious chattering of a troop of monkeys would babble out with a startling shrilln
ess that would have sent a shudder up the spine of an impressionable man. And the intervals of silence were not true silence, but rather a dim and indefinable and monotonous murmur punctuated with the sogging sound of dripping water. The air was hot and steamy and heavy with sickly perfumes.

  “You get used to it,” said Kelly with a comprehensive wave of the stem of his pipe.

  “Thanks,” said Sheridan. “I’m not keen to. I’ve been here two days too long already. I have nightmares in which I’m sitting in an enormous bath, but as soon as I’ve finished washing a shower of mud falls on me and I have to start all over again.”

  Now this was on the morning of the day in the afternoon of which the Saint escaped from prison.

  On Sheridan’s head were a pair of radio headphones. On the ground-sheet beside him was a little instrument, a Morse transmitter, which he had ingeniously fashioned before they left Santa Miranda. Insulated wires trailed away from him into the woods.

  The telegraph line, for most of its length, followed the roads, but at that point, for some inexplicable reason, it took a shortcut across country. They had decided to attack it at that point on grounds of prudence, for, although the road between Esperanza and the Maduro frontier was not much used, there was always the risk of someone passing and commenting on their presence when he reached his destination.

  The afternoon before, they had cut the line and sent through to Esperanza, to be relayed to Santa Miranda, the ultimatum purporting to come from the President of Maduro. Since then, night and day, one of them had sat with the receivers upon his ears, waiting for a reply. The arrangement was complicated, for Kelly could not read Morse, while Sheridan’s Spanish was very haphazard, but they managed somehow. Several times when Archie had been resting Kelly had roused him to take down a message, but the translation had had no bearing on the threat of war, except occasionally from a purely private and commercial aspect. There had been no official answer.

  Sheridan looked at his watch again.

  “Their time’s up in half an hour,” he said. “What do you say to sending a final demand?—the ‘D’ being loud and explosive, as in ‘Income Tax.’”

  “Shure—if there’s no chance of ‘em surrenders,’” agreed Kelly. “But we can’t let anything stop the war.”

  The message they sent was worded with this in view:

  Understand you refuse to release Quijote. Our armies will accordingly advance into Pasala at noon.

  While they waited for zero hour, Kelly completed the task of breaking camp, strapping their tent and equipment into a workmanlike bundle. He finished this job just before twelve, and returned to his prostrate position on the ground-sheet.

  “I wonder what that blackguard Shannet is doin’?” he said. “I only hope he hasn’t missed the news by takin’ a thrip to the concession. It’d be unlucky for us if he had.”

  “I think he’ll be there,” said Sheridan. “He was in Santa Miranda when we left, and he’s likely to stay there and supervise the hunt for the Saint.”

  “He’s a good man, that,” said Kelly. “It’s a pity he’s not an Irishman.” Sheridan fanned himself with a handkerchief.

  “He’s one of the finest men that ever stepped,” he said. “If the Saint said he was going to make war on Hell, I’d pack a fire extinguisher and go with him.” Kelly sucked his pipe, and spat thoughtfully at an ant.

  “That’s not what I call your duty,” he remarked. “In fact, I’m not sure that yez should have been in this at all, with a girl like Lilla watchin’ for yez to come back, and worryin’ her pretty head. And with a crawlin’ sarpint like Shannet about…”

  “He’s tried to bother her once or twice. But if I thought…”

  “I’ve been thinkin’ a lot out here,” said Kelly. “I’m not sayin’ what I’ve thought. But it means that as soon as we’ve done what we’re here to do we’re goin’ to hurry back to Santa Miranda as fast as Tin Lizzie’ll take us. There’s my missus an’ Lilla without a man to look afther them, an’ the Saint…”

  Sheridan suddenly held up a hand for silence. He wrote rapidly on his little pad, and

  Kelly leaned over to read. “What’s it mean?”

  “The war’s on!” yelled Kelly ecstatically, “Don Manuel ain’t the quitter I thought he was or maybe he didn’t see how he could get out of it. But the war’s on! Hooroosh! There’s goin’ to be fightin’! Archie, me bhoy, the war’s on!”

  He seized Sheridan in a bear-hug of an embrace, swung him off the ground, dropped him, and went prancing around the clearing uttering wild Celtic cries. It was some minutes before he could be sobered sufficiently to give a translation of the message.

  It was short and to the point:

  The Armies of Pasala will resist aggression to the death.

  Manuel Concepcion de Villega, being a civilian official, had thought this a particularly valiant and noble sentiment. In fact, he was so pleased with it that he used it to conclude his address to the Army when, with the President, he reviewed it before it rode out of Santa Miranda to meet the invaders. Of course the speech should have been made by the President, but His Excellency had no views on the subject.

  At lunch-time the news came through from Esperanza that the enemy were attacking the town.

  Although there had been ample warning, few of the inhabitants had left. The bulk of the population preferred to stay, secure in the belief that wars were the exclusive concern of the professional soldiers and had nothing to do with the general public, except for the inconvenience they might cause.

  There was a small garrison stationed in the town, and they had barricaded the streets and settled down to await the attack. It came at about one o’clock.

  The “invading armies” which Kelly had prepared had been designed by Archie Sheridan, who was something of a mechanical genius.

  In the woods on the east, three hundred yards from the front line of improvised fortifications, had been established a line of ten braziers of glowing charcoal, about twenty yards apart. Above each brazier was suspended a string of cartridges knotted at intervals of a few inches into a length of cord. The cord passed over the branch of a tree into which nails had been driven as guides. All these cords were gathered together in two batches of five each at a point some distance away, in such a way that one man, using both hands, could slowly lower the strings of cartridges simultaneously into all ten braziers, and so give the impression that there was firing over a front of two hundred yards. If they had had fireworks they could have saved themselves much trouble, but they had no fireworks, and Archie Sheridan was justly proud of his ingenious substitute.

  Sheridan worked the “invading armies,” while Kelly lay down behind a tree some distance away, sheltered from any stray bullets, and loaded his rifle. To complete the illusion it was necessary that the firing should seem to have some direction.

  Sheridan, with a low whistle, signalled that he was ready, and the battle began.

  The cartridges, lowered one by one into the braziers and there exploded by the heat, provided a realistic rattle up and down the line, while Kelly, firing and reloading like one possessed, sent bullets smacking into the walls of the houses and kicking up spurts of dust around the barricades. He took care not to aim anywhere where anyone might be hit.

  The defence replied vigorously, though no one will ever know what they thought they were shooting at, and there were some spirited exchanges. When another whistle from Sheridan announced that the strings of cartridges were exhausted, Kelly rejoined him, and they crawled down to the road and the waiting Ford, and drove boldly towards the town, Kelly waving a nearly white flag.

  The car was stopped, but Kelly was well known.

  “They let me through their lines,” he explained to the officer of the garrison. “That is why the firing has ceased. I was in Ondia when war was declared, and I came back at once.”

  He told them that he was on his way to Santa Miranda.

  “Then travel quickly, and urge them not to delay sending help,” sa
id the officer, “for it is clear that we are attacked by a tremendous number, I have sent telegraphs, but you can do more by telling them what you have seen.”

  “I will do that,” promised Kelly, and they let him drive on.

  As soon as the car was clear of the town he stopped and assisted Sheridan to unearth himself from under the pile of luggage, for, being now an outlaw, Sheridan had had to hide when they passed through the towns on the journey up, and it was advisable for him to do the same for most of the return.

  A little farther down the road they stopped again, and Sheridan climbed a tree and cut the telegraph wires, so that the news of the fizzling out of the attack should not reach Santa Miranda in time for the troops that had been sent out to be recalled. Instead of organizing the “invasion” they might have tapped the wire there and sent on messages from the commander of the garrison describing the progress of the battle, and so saved themselves much labour and thought, but the short road between Esperanza and Las Floras (the next town) was too well frequented for that to be practicable in broad daylight.

  The Minister of the Interior was informed that it was no longer possible to communicate with Esperanza, and he could see only one explanation.

  “Esperanza is surrounded,” he said. “The garrison is less than a hundred. The town will fall in twenty-four hours, and the advancing armies of Maduro will meet our reinforcements at Las Floras. It will be a miracle if we can hold the invaders from Santa Miranda for five days.”

  “You should have kept some troops here,” said Shannet. “You have sent every soldier in Santa Miranda. Once that army is defeated there will be nothing for the invaders to overcome.”

  “Tomorrow I will recruit the peónes,” said Don Manuel. “There must be conscription. Pasala requires the services of every able-bodied citizen. I will draft a proclamation tonight for the President to sign.”

  It was then nearly five o’clock, but none of them had had a siesta that afternoon. They were holding another of many unprofitable conferences in a room in the palace, and it was significant that Shannet’s right to be present was undisputed. The President himself was also there, biting his nails and stabbing the carpet nervously with the rowels of his spurs, but the other two took no notice of him. The President and de Villega were both still wearing the magnificent uniforms which they had donned for the review of the troops that morning.