Leslie Charteris - Saint Errant

“I suggest you ask your mother, old boy.”

“This ain’t funny. I mean, who do you really suppose I am? Andy Faulks is asleep and dreaming me but I’ve got all his memories, so am I a projection of Andy or am I me and him both? None of these other characters have any more memories than they need.”

Simon wondered if the two men chasing Holbrook were his keepers; he could use a few. In fact, Simon reflected, keepers would fit into the life of Holbrook-Faulks like thread in a needle. But he sipped his brandy and urged the man to continue.

“Well, something’s happened,” Holbrook-Faulks said. “It never was like this before. I never could smell things before. I never could really feel them. You know how it is in a dream. But now it seems like as if you stuck a knife in me I’d bleed real blood. You don’t suppose a... a reiterated dream could become reality?”

“I,” said the Saint, “am a rank amateur in that department.”

“Well, I was too — or Andy was, whichever of us is me — but I read everything I could get my hands on about dreams — or Andy did — and it didn’t help a bit.”

Most men wouldn’t have heard the faint far-off stirring in the forest. But the Saint’s ears, attuned by long practice to detect sound that differed from what should be there, picked up evidence of movement toward the cabin.

“Some one,” he said suddenly, “and I mean one, is coming. Not your pursuers — it’s from the opposite direction.”

Holbrook-Faulks listened.

“I don’t hear anything.”

“I didn’t expect you to — yet. Now that it’s dark, perhaps you’d better slip outside, brother, and wait. I don’t pretend to believe your yarn, but that some game is afoot is so obvious that even Sherlock Holmes could detect it. I suggest that we prepare for eventualities.”

The eventuality that presently manifested itself was a girl. And it was a girl who could have been no one but Dawn Winter.

She came wearily into the cabin, disheveled, her dress torn provocatively so that sun-browned flesh showed through, her cloud of golden hair swirled in fairy patterns, her dark eyes brooding, her mouth a parted dream.

The Saint caught his breath and began to wonder whether he could really make Big Bill Holbrook wake up and vanish.

“Do you belong to the coffee and/or brandy school of thought?” he asked.

“Please.” She fell carelessly into a chair, and the Saint coined a word.

She was glamorous beyond belief.

“Miss Winter, pull down your dress or I’ll never get this drink poured. You’ve turned me into an aspen. You’re the most beautiful hunk of flesh I’ve ever seen. Have your drink and go, please.”

She looked at him then, and took in the steel-cable leanness of him, the height of him, the crisp black hair, the debonair blue eyes. She smiled, and a brazen gong tolled in the Saint’s head.

“Must I?” she said.

Her voice caught at the core of desire and tangled itself forever there.

“Set me some task,” the Saint said uncertainly. “Name me a mountain to build, a continent to sink, a star to fetch you in the morning.”

The cabin door crashed open. The spell splintered into shining shards. Holbrook-Faulks stood stony-faced against the door.

“Hello, Bill,” the girl said, her eyes still on the Saint. “I came, you see.”

Bill’s gaze was an unwavering lance, with the Saint pinioned on its blazing tip.

“Am I gonna have trouble with you too, Saint?”

The Saint opened his mouth to answer, and stiffened as another sound reached his ears. Jockey and weight lifter were returning.

“We’ll postpone any jousting over the fair lady for the moment,” Simon said. “We’re about to have more company.”

Holbrook stared wildly around.

“Come on, Dawn. Out the window. They’ll kill us.”

Many times before in his checkered career the Saint had had to make decisions in a fragment of time — when a gun was leveled and a finger whitening on the trigger, when a traffic accident roared toward consummation, when a ship was sinking, when a knife flashed through candlelight. His decision now was compounded of several factors, none of which was the desire for self-preservation. The Saint rarely gave thought room to self-preservation — never when there was something more important to preserve.

He did not want this creature of tattered loveliness, this epitome of what men live for, to get out of his sight. He must therefore keep her inside the cabin. And there was no place to hide...

His eyes narrowed as he looked at the two bunks. He was tearing out the mattresses before his thought was fully formed. He tossed the mattresses in a corner where shadows had retreated from the candle on the table. Then he motioned to Holbrook.

“Climb up. Make like a mattress.”

He boosted the big man into the top bunk, and his hands were like striking brown snakes as he packed blankets around him and remade the bed so that it only looked untidily put together.

“Now you,” he said to the girl.

She got into the lower bunk and lay flat on her back, her disturbing head in the far corner. The Saint deposited a swift kiss upon her full red lips. They were cool and soft, and the Saint was adrift for a second.

Then he covered her. He emptied a box of pine cones on the mattresses and arranged the whole to appear as a corner heap of cones.

He was busy cleaning the dishes when the pounding came on the door.

As he examined the pair, Simon Templar was struck by the fact that these men were types, such types as B pictures had imprinted upon the consciousness of the world.

The small one could be a jockey, but one with whom you could make a deal. For a consideration, he would pull a horse in the stretch or slip a Mickey into a rival rider’s sarsaparilla. In the dim light that fanned out from the door, his eyes were small and rat-like, his mouth a slit of cynicism, his nose a quivering button of greed.

His heavier companion was a different but equally familiar type. This man was Butch to a T. He was large, placid, oafish, and an order taker. His not to reason why; his but to do — or cry. He’d be terribly hurt if he failed to do what he was ordered; he’d apologize, he’d curse himself.

It crossed the Saint’s mind that a bank clerk such as Andrew Faulks had been described would dream such characters. “So you lied to us,” the little man snarled. The Saint arched an eyebrow. At the same time he reached out and twisted the little man’s nose, as if he were trying to unscrew it.

“When you address me, Oswald, say ‘sir.’ ” The little man sprang back in outraged fury. He clapped one hand to his injured proboscis, now turned a deeper purple than the night. The other hand slid under his coat.

Simon waited until he had the gun out of the holster, then leaped the intervening six feet and twisted it from the little man’s hand. The Saint let the gun swing from his finger by its trigger guard.

“Take him, Mac!” grated the disarmed man. Mac vented a kind of low growl, but did nothing but fidget as the Saint turned curious blue eyes on him. The tableau hung frozen for a long moment before the little man shattered the silence.

“Well? Ya afraid of ’im?”

“Yup,” Mac said unhappily. “Criminy, Jimmy, ’f he c’n get the best uh you, well, criminy, Jimmy.”

Jimmy moaned, “You mean you’re gonna stand there and let just one guy take my gun away from me? Gripes, he ain’t a army.”

“No,” Mac agreed, growing more unhappy by the second, “but he kind of seems like one, Jimmy. Didja see that jump? Criminy, Jimmy.”

The Saint decided to break it up.

“Now, Oswald—”

“Didn’ja hear, Mac? Name’s Jimmy.”

“Oswald,” the Saint said firmly, “is how I hold you in my heart. Now, Oswald, perhaps you’ll pour oil on these troubled waters, before I take you limb from muscle and throw you away.”