Leslie Charteris - Saint Errant

“Ohmigod,” breathed Mr Melville Rochborne. “He couldn’t have salted it twice... he couldn’t have...”

It was Simon Templar’s perpetual regret that he was seldom able to overhear these conversations. But perhaps that would have made his life too perfect to be borne.

I suppose no feat of cerebration exercises an imaginative person so much as the deathbed speech that he or she would make if he or she (and this ghastly grammar has got to stop somewhere) knew for sure that it was their (oh, goody!) positively final utterance, the crystallization of a life by which posterity would remember it, whatever else it might have lived.

“It is a far, far better thing...”

“Kiss me, Hardy...”

Oh, great!

You know what you’ll probably say?

“Why the hell didn’t that fool dim his lights?”

Or, “The Government should have done something about it!”

A writer who was been writing for a long time may legitimately begin to feel even more apprehension about what might be his last story. And a lot more may well be expected of him. After all, his life has been built on nothing but words. His last ones should give a good account of him. They should summarize, somehow, everything he has thought and learned, every technique he had acquired.

His last story, dramatically, should be his best.

But who knows which will be his last story?

Thus we come to the story in this book, at any rate. And it is certainly one of the latest written. And it is not the best.

But it is placed here because there is an element in it which you will have to read to discover, which in a collection of this kind is almost impossible to top. Anyhow, I am not yet ready to try.

— Leslie Charteris

Simon Templar looked up from the frying pan in which six mountain trout were developing a crisp golden tan. Above the gentle sputter of grease, the sound of feet on dry pine needles crackled through the cabin window.

It didn’t cross his mind that the sound carried menace, for it was twilight in the Sierras, and the dusky calm stirred only with the rustlings of nature at peace.

The Saint also was at peace. In spite of everything his enemies would have said, there actually were times when peace was the main preoccupation of that fantastic freebooter; when hills and blue sky were high enough adventure, and baiting a hook was respite enough from baiting policemen or promoters. In such a mood he had jumped at the invitation to join a friend in a week of hunting and fishing in the High Sierras — a friend who had been recalled to town on urgent business almost as soon as they arrived, leaving the Saint in by no means melancholy solitude, for Simon Templar could always put up with his own company.

The footsteps came nearer with a kind of desperate urgency. Simon moved the frying pan off the flames and flowed, rather than walked, to where he could see through windows in two directions.

A man came out of the pines. He was traveling on the short side of a dead run, but straining with every gasping breath to step up his speed. He came, hatless and coatless, across the pine-carpeted clearing toward the cabin door.

He burst through it, and in spite of his relaxation the Saint felt a kind of simmer of anticipating approval. If his solitude had to be intruded on, this was the way it should happen. Unannounced. At a dead run.

The visitor slammed the door, shot the bolt, whirled around, and seemed about to fold in the middle. He saw the Saint. His jaw sagged, swung adrift on its hinges for a moment, then imitated a steel trap.

After the sharp click of his teeth, he said, “How did you get in here? Where’s Dawn?”

“Dawn?” Simon echoed lazily. “If you’re referring to the rosy-fingered goddess who peels away the darkness each morning, she’s on the twelve-hour shift, chum. She’ll be around at the regular time.”

“I never dreamed you here,” the man said. “Who are you?”

“You dropped a word,” the Saint said. “ ‘I never dreamed you were here’ makes more sense.”

“Nuts, brother. You’re part of my dream, and I never saw you before. You don’t even have a name. All the others have, complete with backgrounds. But I can’t place you. Funny... Look here, you’re not real, are you?”

“The last time I pinched myself, I yelped.”

“This is crazy,” the man muttered.

He walked across the pine floor to within a couple of feet of the Saint. He was breathing easier now, and the Saint examined him impassively.

He was big, only a shade under the Saint’s six feet two, with sandy hair, a square jaw, and hard brown eyes.

“May I?” he said, and pinched the Saint. He sighed. “I was afraid this was happening. When I put my arms around Dawn Winter in my dreams, she—”

“Please,” the Saint broke in. “Gentlemen don’t go into lurid detail after the lady has a name.”

“Oh, she’s only part of my dream.” The stranger stared into space, and an almost tangible aura of desire formed about him. “God!” he whispered. “I really dreamed up something in her.”

“We must swap reminiscences someday,” the Saint said. “But at the moment the pine-scented breeze is laden with threshings in the underbrush.”

“I’ve got to hide. Quick! Where can I get out of sight?”

The Saint waved expressively at the single room. In its four hundred square feet, one might hide a large bird if it were camouflaged as an atlas or something, but that would be about the limit.

The two bunk beds were made with hospital precision, and even a marble would have bulged under their tight covers. The deck chairs wouldn’t offer sanctuary for even an undernourished mouse, the table was high and wide open beneath the rough top, and the small bookcase was made to display its contents. “If we had time,” the Saint mused, “I could candy-stripe you — if I had some red paint — and put on a barber’s smock. Or... er... you say you’re dreaming all this?”

“That’s right.”

“Then why don’t you wake up — and vanish?”

The Saint’s visitor unhappily gnawed his full underlip.

“I always have before, when the going got tough, but — Oh, hell, I don’t know what’s going on, but I don’t want to die — even in my dream. Death is so... so...”

“Permanent?”

“Mmm, I guess. Listen, would you be a pal and try to steer these guys away? They’re after me.”

“Why should I?”

“Yeah,” the man said. “You don’t owe me a damn thing, but I’m trying to help Dawn. She—”

He broke off to fish an object out of his watch pocket. This was a small chamois bag, and out of it he took something that pulsed with incredible fires. He handed it to the Saint.

“That’s Dawn.”

The circular fire opal blazed with living beauty — blue, green, gold, cerise, chartreuse — and the Saint gasped with reverent wonder as he looked at the cameo head carved on the unbelievable gem.

There is beauty to which one can put a name. There is beauty that inspires awe, bravery, fear, lust, greed, passion. There is beauty that softens the savage blows of fate. There is beauty that drives to high adventure, to violence.

That stone, and above all the face cut eternally on its incandescent surface, was beauty beyond belief. No man could look on that face and ever know complete peace again.

She was the lily maid of Astolat, the lost loveliness that all men seek and never find, the nameless desire that haunts the ragged edge of sleep, that curls a lonely smile and sends vacant eyes searching far spaces.

Her face was made for — and of? the Saint asked himself — dreaming.

“Count me in, old boy.”