Leslie Charteris - Knight Templar, or The Avenging Saint

And Roger tried. He tried as he had never before tried anything in his life, for he knew how much depended on him. And the Saint urged him on, speaking all the time in the same tone of quiet encouragement, grimly trying to crowd a month's instruction into a few minutes. And somehow he achieved results. Roger was getting the idea; he was getting that most essential thing, the feel of the machine; and he had started off with the greatest of all blessings—a cool head and an instinctive judgment. It was much later when he found a patch of gray hair on each of his temples. . . .

And so, for the rest of that flight, they worked on together, with the Saint glancing from time to time at his watch, yet never varying the patient steadiness of his voice.

And then the time came when the Saint said that the instruction must be over, hit or miss; and he took over the controls again. They soared up in a swift climb; and, as the fields fell away beneath them, a shaft of light from the shy rim of the sun caught them like a fantastic spotlight, and the aeroplane was turned to a hurtling jewel of silver and gold in the translucent gulf of the sky.

"DOWN THERE, on your right!" cried the Saint; and Roger looked over where the Saint's arm pointed.

He saw the fields laid out underneath them like a huge unrolled map. The trees and little houses were like the toys that children play with, building their villages on a nursery floor. And over that grotesque vision of a puny world seen as an idle god might see it, a criss-cross of roads and lanes sprawled like a sparse muddle of strings, and a railway line was like a knife-cut across the icing of a cake, and down the railway line puffed the tiniest of toy trains.

The aëroplane swung over in a steep bank, and the map seemed to slide up the sky until it stood like a wall at their wing tip; and the Saint spoke again.

"Hermann's about twenty miles away, but that doesn't give us much time at seventy miles an hour. So you've got to get it over quickly, Roger. If you can do your stuff as you were doing it just now, there's simply nothing can go wrong. Don't get excited, and just be a wee bit careful not to stall when my weight comes off. I'm not quite sure what the effect will be."

"And suppose—suppose you don't bring it off?"

They were flying to meet the toy train now.

"If I miss, Roger, the only thing I can ask you to do is to try to land farther up the line. You'll crash, of course, but if you turn your petrol off first you may live to tell the tale. But whether you try it or not is up to you."

"I'll try it, Saint, if I have to."

"Good scout."

They had passed over the train; and then again they turned steeply, and went in pursuit.

And the Saint's calm voice came to Roger's ears with a hint of reckless laughter somewhere in its calm.

"You've got her, old Roger. I'm just going to get out. So long, old dear, and the best of luck."

"Good luck, Simon."

And Roger Conway took over the controls.

And then he saw the thing that he will never forget. He saw the Saint climb out of the cockpit in front of him, and saw him stagger on the wing as the wind caught him and all but tore him from his precarious hold. And then the Saint had hold of a strut with one hand, and the rope that he had fixed with the other, and he was backing towards the leading edge of the wing. Roger saw him smile, the old incomparable Saintly smile. . . . And then the Saint was on his knees; then his legs had disap­peared from view; then there was only his head and shoulders and two hands. . . . one hand .... And the Saint was gone.

Roger put the stick gently forward.

He looked back over the side as he did so, in a kind of sick terror that he would see a foolish spread-eagle shape dwindling down into the unrolled map four thousand feet below; but he saw nothing. And then he had eyes only for the train.

Hit or miss. ...

And Simon Templar also watched the train.

He dangled at the end of his rope, like a spider on a thread, ten feet below the silver and gold fuselage. One foot rested in a loop that he had knotted for himself before they started; his hands were locked upon the rope itself. And the train was coming nearer.

The wind lashed him with invisible whips, bil­lowing his coat, fighting him with savage flailing fingers. It was an effort to breathe; to hold on at all was a battle. And he was supposed to be resting there. He had deliberately taught Roger to fly low, much lower than was necessary, because that extreme was far safer than the possibility of being trailed along twenty feet above the carriage roofs. When the time came he would slip down the rope, hang by his arms, and lei go as soon as he had the chance.

And that time was not far distant. Roger was diving rather steeply, with his engine full on. . . . But the train was also moving. ... At two hundred feet the Saint guessed that they were overtaking the train at about twenty miles an hour. He ought to have told Roger about that. . . . But then Roger must have seen the mistake also, for he throttled the engine down a trifle, and they lost speed. And they were drifting lower. . . .

With a brief prayer, the Saint twitched his foot out of the stirrup and went down the rope hand over hand.

"Glory!" thought the Saint. "If the fool stalls—if he tries to cut his speed down by bringing the stick back. . ."

But they weren't stalling. They were keeping their height for a moment; then they dipped straightly, gaining on the train at about fifteen miles an hour. . . no, ten. . . . And the hindmost carriage slipped under the Saint's feet—a dozen feet under them.

There were only three coaches on the train.

But they were dropping quickly now—Roger was contour-chasing like an ace! He wasn't dead centre, though. . . .A shade to one side. . . . "Just a touch of left rudder!" cried the Saint helplessly; for one of his feet had scraped the outside edge of a carriage roof, and they were still going lower. . . . And then, somehow, it hap­pened just as if Roger could have heard him: the Saint was clear over the roof of the leading coach, and his knees and arms were bent to keep his feet off it. . . .

And he let go.

The train seemed to tear away from under him; his left hand crashed into a projection, and went numb; and the roof became red-hot and scorched his legs. He felt himself slithering towards the side, and flung out his sound right hand blindly. ... He caught something like a handle. . . held on. . . and the slipping stopped with a jar that sent a twinge of agony stabbing through his shoulder.

He lay there gasping, dumbly bewildered that he should still be alive.

For a full minute. . . .

And then the meaning of it filtered into his understanding; and he laughed softly, absurdly, a laughter queerly close to tears.

For the work was done.

Slowly, in a breathless wonder, he turned his head. The aëroplane was turning, coming back towards him, alongside the train, low down. And a face looked out, helmeted, with its big round goggles masking all expression and giving it the appearance of some macabre gargoyle; but all that could be seen of the face was as white as the morning sky.

Simon waved his injured hand; and, as the aëroplane swept by in a droning thunder of noise, the snowy flutter of a handkerchief broke out against its silver and gold. And so the aëroplane passed, rising slowly as it went towards the north, with the sunrise striking it like a banner unfurled.

And five minutes later, in a strange and mon­strous contrast to the flamboyant plumage of the great metal bird that was swinging smoothly round into the dawn, a strained and tatterdemalion figure came reeling over the tender of the swaying locomotive; and the two men in the cab, who had been watching him from the beginning, were there to catch him as he fell into their arms.