Leslie Charteris: The Saint Goes West

“Now, that’s perfectly swell,” said the girl.

Simon let the wheel drop, and philosophically revived his cigarette.

“The nearest garage is back at Lion Rock,” he remarked. “I’ll leave word there later if you like. Or could I take you anywhere?”

The man said, “We were heading for the Circle Y — it’s three miles further on, off this road.”

“Visiting?”

“No. I... er... I happen to own it.”

“When were you going to be back at Lion Rock?” asked the girl. “We don’t want to take you out of your way, but it’s getting late. I mean...”

The Saint smiled down at her, rumpling his dark hair with apparent thoughtfulness. It was indeed getting late, as he had hoped it would be: bright as it still was, the sun was already dipping towards the high range to westward, and under the slanting light the barren battlements that ringed three of their horizons were putting on soft chiffons of rose and purple against the promise of an early twilight.

He said, “It might be quite a while before I see Lion Rock again. Perhaps I’d better take you to the Circle Y and you can send in to the garage tomorrow.”

“We hate to trouble you,” said the white-haired man half-heartedly.

“Don’t give it another thought,” said the Saint. “Have you got any parcels or things you want to take along?”

Five minutes later the Buick was rocking and rolling north again with two extra passengers, and the older man was making conversation from the other end of the front seat.

“I suppose we ought to introduce ourselves. My name is Don Morland, and this is my daughter Jean.”

“I’m Simon Templar,” said the Saint.

The name meant nothing immediately to them, and was not meant to. But he had known who they were before he lay down to wait for them not long after breakfast, behind the pulpit of erupted boulders which had already merged into the violet-shaded diorama behind.

“I’m sure glad you happened along,” Morland went on. “I wouldn’t have enjoyed trying to find my way home from there if we’d been caught after dark.”

“That doesn’t sound like a rancher talking,” Simon remarked lightly.

“I’m not really a rancher — of course you could tell that. I just happen to own a ranch. As a matter of fact, we’ve only been here a couple of days. It’s all quite an accident.”

Simon grinned.

“You won the Circle Y in a raffle?”

“It belonged to my brother. He died just recently, and I inherited it. I was a dentist in Richmond, Virginia. I’d been thinking I was about ready to retire, and Jean always wanted to see the West. So we thought we’d give it a trial.”

“Too bad it had to happen that way,” said the Saint. “I mean through your brother.”

Morland began filling a stubby pipe.

“Yes. It was very sudden. His horse threw him and kicked him — fractured his skull. He only bought the place himself about eighteen months ago... Well, if he could turn himself into a rancher I expect I can.”

“You think you’ll keep the place.”

“Probably. Our next-door neighbour from the J-Bar-B made me a rather attractive offer as soon as we got here, but I don’t think I’ll sell. I think I might get to like it here. Jean is going to buy me a big hat and some high-heeled boots and try to make me look like the real thing.”

The Saint’s strong hands worked on the wheel with imperturbable skill, his calm eyes picking the smoothest path over the derelict track as nonchalantly as though his role had actually been as fortuitous and disinterested as it was meant to seem. But into his mind went just a little more information than he had had before, and with it a repetition and revival of one grim question that he had already asked himself a great many times. Yet no one could have guessed that there were such things as murder in his thoughts.

Jean Morland was studying him with straightforward interest, taking in his quietly checkered blue shirt, his well-worn Levis, and coming back again to his lean tanned face with its hint of mockeries and mischief that must have known even wider fields than those traditionally great open spaces.

“I don’t think you’ve lived around here all your life, either,” she said.

He smiled at her.

“That isn’t really very hard to guess. As a matter of fact, I haven’t really been around here for about ten years. But I can still give a working imitation of the genuine article. I was riding herd in the Panhandle when you weren’t any further than the fourth grade. You need a good hand on the Circle Y?”

“You’ve got a nice car to look for work in,” she said.

“That’s part of the build-up. All of us cowboys ain’t bums. We seen ourselves in the pitchers, an’ we know better. Next time I’m going to be a straw boss, at least.”

She laughed.

“Seriously, what are you doing now?”

“You might call it vacationing. Wandering here and there, and seeing what may turn up. I haven’t a plan from one day to the next. But I love this country.”

“So do I,” she said. Then: “What do you think of doing right here?”

The Saint lighted a cigarette, taking his time.

Presently he said, “I thought I might do some hunting.”

It seemed to him that this might be a truthful way to put it, even though she would never guess what a deadly kind of quarry he was thinking of. Even though she might never know that the spoor he was following had been started months before when a certain Dr Ludwig Julius paddled out of his office on the Wilhelmstrasse and set off on an odyssey that had already taken him more than half-way around the world, by way of the Trans-Siberian railroad to Vladivostok, from Vladivostok to Yokohama, from Yokohama to San Francisco, and from San Francisco, after a pause at the Nazi consulate there, to the peaceful Arizona county where Simon Templar was on the trail of bigger game than his state hunting licence had ever been intended to include.

They sat on the porch of the ranch house after dinner, listening to the far-off yipping of coyotes and the nearer croaking of frogs down at the spring.

Simon had stayed, of course. He had always meant to stay, although he had put on a proper show of diffidence. In fact, he had taken quite a little trouble to make sure of becoming a welcome friend at the Circle Y. And with the insidious intimacy of dinner added to his acquaintance with Jean Morland, he was even more sure that it would be no hardship to spend the time that he expected to spend there.

“How much stock do you have here?” Simon asked.

It was one of those desultory conversations full of long pauses and random twists, but rich with warmth and contentment.

Morland said, “About five thousand head. Not very much, but not enough to be too big a headache.”

“Pretty good range?”

“Not so bad as you’d think. Eh, Hank?”

“We go back quite a ways into the hills,” said Hank Reefe. “They do pretty good back there. It’s handy havin’ the stream. They don’t ever need to go short of water.”

Reefe was the foreman. He sat in the fourth chair, on the other side of Jean, rocking himself gently, his long thin legs stretched out. He was probably not much more than thirty, but his weathered face was deeply carved with the lines that a man gets from staring into hot shimmering distances. He had good level eyes and the kind of long sinewy features that are an unmistakable inheritance from the stock that first fought its way through that untamed country.

“There’s no mining in these parts, is there?” Simon asked casually.

“Not right around here. Sometimes the prospectors’ll come through. But they’ll go anywhere.”

He had a slow, rather musical drawl, which to a sensitive ear was the same as a lapel badge would have been to the eye.