Leslie Charteris - The Saint Goes West

“Let’s face it,” said the Saint evenly. “The question is whether anything could have happened to him.”

His bluntness hit her with a kind of chilling shock that only lasted for a fraction of a second. And then it was as if a light had been turned on in a haunted room. Whatever had to be faced could be seen and estimated, and no matter how it looked it could never be worse than the creation of imagination feeding upon fear. She had had many thoughts about the Saint already, but never before had she sensed the quality of power that gave life to every other impression that could be caught from him. All at once, with a curiously calm relaxation, she had a ridiculous feeling that he was a man who could never fail, because he would never know when to be afraid of failure.

He smiled at her as he crushed out his cigarette.

“I’m going to eat, anyway,” he said. “It won’t do your father any good for us to starve ourselves, and we won’t be able to do nearly as much to help him with our stomachs sticking to our spines like punctured balloons.”

He ate thoughtfully for a while, without talking, as if nothing could disturb his appetite or his enjoyment of the food, but his face was intent, and his brain was coldly sorting one speculation after another, as dispassionately as though they were moves in a casual chess game. Yet he avoided looking at Jean Morland while he was thinking, because he was not certain whether the fine edge of his detachment would stand up to that.

Presently he said, “We can start working from this: Don Morland hasn’t been killed, and won’t be — barring accidents. But for that matter he could always fall down in a bath tub and break his neck. The Ungodly certainly wouldn’t encourage that.”

Jean said, “But they’re trying to get the ranch—”

“How would that get it for them? They aren’t his nearest relatives. The odds are that if anything drastic happened to him, you’d inherit it. If they used... various persuasions to force him to sign a new will before he had an accident, you’d probably contest it and the estate would be tied up for years before they got anything, if they ever did. And there’d also be a lot more publicity than they want.”

“They might think Jean’d be easier to deal with than the old man,” said Reefe.

“Then it would’ve been much more practical to kidnap her. Look, this way, the old man first has to die, and then either they’ve made him sign a new will leaving the ranch to them, which could be fought through every court in the country, or Jean inherits it and they have to start all over again working on her. Either way, the deal would be held up till there were whiskers on it that you could weave into blankets. They don’t want that. They want quick results. See their ultimatum. Any plot of that kind is much too complicated — it takes too long to work out, and it could spring leaks in too many places. Therefore they certainly wouldn’t kill Don Morland.”

The girl bit her lip.

“But if they just... tortured him and tried to make him sell—”

“Why go to all that trouble when there’s an easier way? Maybe they could break him — almost anybody can be broken if he doesn’t die on you first — but they’d have to kill him afterwards so he couldn’t tell about it. And that still wouldn’t keep the rest of us quiet. These people aren’t amateurs. If they’d wanted to work that angle they’d have tried to take Jean; then they could have had anything they wanted from her father, and the rest of us wouldn’t have dared to say a word.”

Reefe studied the Saint unexpressively over his spoon.

“You kept on saying ‘they,’ ” he observed. “You figure there’s somebody else in on this with Valmon?”

“I’m sure of it.”

“I figured you were,” the Texan said placidly, “from the way you talk. You seem to know quite a bit about them. You know they aren’t amateurs. You know they’re pretty clever. You knew this man Julius who was here this afternoon, Jean told me. An’ he seemed to know something about you. If we knew some of these things ourselves maybe we could’ve done quite a bit of figurin’ ourselves.”

His tone was reserved and sensible, exactly the same as he might have used to call a hand of poker. There was no belligerence or animosity in it. He was inquisitive and he could be wrong, but he had a right to find out what was sitting across the table, in a polite and impersonal way.

Simon Templar gazed back at him appreciatively, but still with flakes of steel resting in his eyes to match the challenge that was almost imperceptible in the foreman’s courteous simplicity.

“Yes, I know quite a bit about them,” he said. “I know that they don’t want any more commotion than they’ve got to have — which is why Valmon’s performance last night, when I made him mad enough to be stupid, must have been worrying Comrade Julius no little. I know why Comrade Julius must be even more worried since he was here this afternoon, I know that they may be able to make a small county sheriff play ball, but that there are other departments that they couldn’t even begin to talk to — which is why they’d much rather not get involved with kidnappings and killings.”

“All right,” said Reefe. “Then wouldn’t it help if we all knew?”

Simon pushed away his plate and took out a cigarette.

“Maybe it would,” he said at last. “I wouldn’t have told you any sooner because it’s kind of dangerous to know. But by this time they’re liable to think I’ve told you anyhow. So just for fun you could start worrying about this—”

He got no further, because at that moment they were all aware of quickened footsteps scuffling up the hill from the lower mesa where the other ranch buildings were.

The girl stiffened and checked her breath. Hank Reefe, with a different instinctive reaction, turned and began to stretch out a long arm towards the chair where he had shed his gun belt. The Saint crossed his legs and dragged quietly and deeply on his cigarette; Don Morland’s footsteps couldn’t have had that weight, and the Ungodly would have been much stealthier.

The dark shape of a man loomed into the aura of lamplight beyond the porch, and his upturned face showed as a suddenly lighter patch picked out of the night.

“What is it, Elmer?”

Jean Morland said it. She was already at the porch rail as Simon got to his feet.

The cowboy came to a stop, catching his voice after the haste of his climb.

“It’s Smoky, miss,” he said. “He stayed out to watch the cows tonight so we wouldn’t have to round ’em up again in the mornin’. His horse just come home alone — an’ there’s blood on the saddle!”

It seemed like a crazy thing to attempt — to set out to look for a man’s body at night, in wild broken country, with several square miles of it to cover. But they did it.

They belted on guns and picked up flashlights and rode out in a reckless cavalcade. But it was possible only because the moon was bright and clear, brilliant enough to throw hard black shadows against the ground that it washed with luminous grey, so bright that for any ordinary observation the flashlights were less than unnecessary. It was one of those amazing subtropical desert moonlights which are unknown to any other parts of the earth, which seem to have been designed expressly and solely for soft music and romance, and the Saint rode beside Jean Morland and reflected that this sort of thing always seemed to be happening to a lot of good moments in his life. Perhaps it was part of the price you paid for living that way: the same trail of adventure that led towards romance just as inevitably had to lead on and lead away again...

They headed for the canyon where they had had lunch, and found Smoky’s camp fire still burning; his bed-roll was opened beside it, but hadn’t been slept in. There was no sign of any disturbance. Apparently he had just mounted his horse and gone on a late patrol, or gone to investigate something that had aroused his attention or his suspicion.