Leslie Charteris - The Saint Overboard

Murdoch's chunky fists knotted up slowly at his sides, and he scowled down at the slim languid figure stretched out on the settee with his eyes slotting down to glittering crevices in the rough-hewn crag of his face.

"Meaning what?" he demanded grittily.

"I'm not so thrilled with your promise to put me out," said the Saint. "And I don't know that we can let you go on getting into trouble indefinitely. Twice is all right, but the third time might be unlucky. I may be a boy scout, but I'm not a nursemaid. One way and another, Steve, it looks as if we may have to shut you up where you won't be able to get into mischief for a while."

Murdoch hunched over him as if he couldn't believe his ears. There was stark pugnacious incredulity oozing out of every pore of him; and his jaw was levered up till his under lip jutted out in a bellicose ridge under his nose. His complexion had gone as red as a turkey-cock's.

"Say that again?"

"I said we may have to keep you where you won't get in the way," answered the Saint calmly. "Don't look so unhappy — there's another bottle of whisky on board, and Orace will bring you your bread and milk and tuck you up at night."

"That's what you think, is it?" grated Murdoch. "Well, you try to keep me here!"

The Saint nodded. His right hand, with the half-smoked cigarette still clipped between the first two fingers, slid lazily into the shelf beside the settee, under the porthole. It came out with the automatic which he had put down there when he began to dress.

"I'm trying," he said, almost apologetically.

Murdoch shied at the gun like a startled horse. His screwed-up eyes opened out in two slow dilations of rabid unbelief.

"Do you mean you're trying to hold me up?" he barked.

"That was the rough idea, brother," said the Saint amiably. "I'm not very well up in these things, but I believe this is the approved procedure. I point a rod at you, like this; and then you either do what I tell you or try to jump on me and get shot in the dinner. Correct me if I'm wrong."

The bantering serenity of his voice lingered on in the air while Murdoch stared at him. The Saint was smiling faintly, and the sheen of sapphire in his eyes was alive with irrepressible humour; but the automatic in his hand was levelled with a perfectly sober precision that denied the existence of any joke.

Murdoch blinked at it as if it had been the first specimen of its kind which he had ever seen. His gaze travelled lingeringly up from it to the Saint's face, and the incredulity faded out of his features before a spreading hardness of cold calculating wrath. He swallowed once, and his chin settled down on his chest.

"You think you can get away with that, do you?"

"I'm betting on it."

Simon met the other's reddened glare as if he hadn't a shadow on his horizon, and wondered what the odds ought to be if it were a betting proposition. And he became reluctantly aware that any prudent layer would consider them distinctly hazardous. There was something consolidating itself on Murdoch's thinned-out lips which stood for the kind of raging foolhardy fearlessness that produces heroes and tombstones in cynically unequal proportions.

And at the same time something quite different was thrusting itself towards the front of the Saint's consciousness. It had started like the hum of a cruising bee away out in the far reaches of the night, a mere stir of sound too trivial to attract attention. While they were talking it had grown steadily nearer, until the drone of it quivered through the saloon as a definite pulse of disturbance in the universe. And now, in the silence while he and Murdoch watched each other, it suddenly roared up and stopped, leaving a sharp void in the auditory scale through which came the clear swish and chatter of settling waters.

Simon felt the settee dip gently under him, and Murdoch's glass tinkled on the table as the wash slapped against the side. And then an almost imperceptible jar of contact ran through the boat, and a voice spoke somewhere outside.

"Ahoy, Corsair!"

The Saint felt as if a starshell had burst inside his head. Understanding dawned upon him in a blinding light that showed him the meaning of that sequence of sounds, the owner of the voice that had hailed them, and everything that had led up to what lay outside, as clearly as if they had been focused under a batten of sun arcs. If he had not been so taken up with the immediate problem that had been laid in front of him, he might have guessed it and waited for it all down to the last detail; but now it came to him as a shock that electrified all his faculties as if he had taken a shot of liquid dynamite.

It could hardly have taken a second to develop, that galvanic awakening of every nerve; but in the latter half of that scorching instant the Saint reviewed the circumstances and realised everything that had to be done. Murdoch was still half arrested in the stillness which the interruption had brought upon him: his head was turned a little to the left, his mouth a little open, his gaze fractionally diverted. At that moment his train of thought was written across him in luminous letters a yard high. He also was considering the interruption, working over its bearing on his own predicament, while the simmer of fighting obstinacy in him was boiling up to outright defiance. The Saint knew it. That chance event was wiping out the last jot of hesitation in the American's mind. In another split second he would let out a yell or try to jump the gun — or both. But his powers of comprehension were functioning a shade less rapidly than the Saint's, and that split second made as much difference as twenty years.

Simon let go the automatic and unfolded himself from the settee. He came up like the backlash of a cracked whip, and his fist hit Murdoch under the jaw with a clean crisp smack that actually forestalled the slight thud of the gun hitting the carpet. Murdoch's eyes glazed mutely over, and Simon caught him expertly as he straightened up on his feet.

"Ahoy, Corsair!"

"Ahoy to you," answered the Saint.

The communicating door at the end of the saloon was opening, and Orace's globular eyes peered over his moustache through the gap. There was no need of words. Simon heaved Murdoch's inanimate body towards him like a stuffed dummy, with a dozen urgent commands sizzling voicelessly on his gaze, and followed it with the glass from which Murdoch had been drinking. And then, without waiting to assure himself that Orace had grasped the situation to the full, he snatched up his gun and leapt for the companion in one continuous movement, slipping the automatic into his hip pocket as he went.

He started with lightning speed, but he emerged into the after cockpit quite leisurely; and everything else had been packed into such a dizzy scintilla of time that there was no undue hiatus between the first hail and his appearance. He turned unhurriedly to the side; and Kurt Vogel, standing up in the speedboat, looked up at him with his sallow face white in the dim light.

"Hullo," said the Saint genially.

"May I come aboard for a moment?"

"Surely."

Simon reached out an arm and helped him up. Again he experienced the peculiar revulsion of the other's strong clammy grip.

"I'm afraid this is a most unseemly hour to pay a visit," said Vogel, in his suave flat voice. "But I happened to be coming by, and I hoped you hadn't gone to bed."

"I'm never very early," said the Saint cheerfully. "Come on below and have a drink."

He led the way down to the saloon, and pushed the cigarette-box across the table.

"D'you smoke?" Vogel accepted; and Simon raised his voice. "Orace!"

"As a matter of fact, I only called in in case you'd made up your mind about to-morrow," said Vogel, taking a light. "Perhaps you didn't take my invitation seriously, but I assure you we'll be glad to see you if you care to come."