"It's a lie!" she protested again, but a chill fear had closed on her heart. "He'll go straight to the police-"
"The police?" Osman's sinister chuckle whispered through the room. "They would be delighted to see him. You little fool! Didn't you know where his money came from? Didn't you know that all his life he's done nothing but trade in women and drugs-that I hold enough evidence to send him to prison for twenty years? You, my dear Laura, are the price of his liberty: you and-er-his retirement from business. A price that he was glad to offer, and that I was very happy to accept."
She could not think properly, could not comprehend the whole hideous significance of what he was saying. She could not believe it; and yet, from the manner in which he said it, either it must be true or he must be mad And neither alternative opened out a gleam of hope. But she remembered the strangeness that she had seen in Galbraith Stride's eyes when he insisted that she must deliver his message herself, and she was frozen with dread before that unspeakable explanation.
Beside her, Toby Halidom was struggling again in a blind fury of helplessness; and Osman looked at him again.
"I shall commence your treatment very soon, my friend," he said; and then he spoke again to Ali. "Take him away and bind him carefully-I shall ring when I wish to see him again."
Almost before he could speak, Halidom was hustled out of the room, with the girl's wild pitiful cry ringing in his ears. Rough brown hands forced him down a dark alleyway, tightened ropes round his wrists and ankles, and hurled him into an evil-smelling unlighted cabin. He heard the door locked on the outside, and was alone with a despair such as he had never dreamed of in his life, a despair haunted with visions that verged on sheer shrieking madness. There was only one hope left for him-a hope so small that it was almost worse than no hope at all. They had not troubled to search him, and there was a penknife in his pocket. If he could reach that, saw at the ropes on his wrists . . . then there would still be the locked door, and a hostile crew to break through unarmed. . . . But he was trying to get at that knife, with strange futile tears burning under his eyelids.
Laura Berwick thought that her reason would break. The last of the swarthy seamen had released her and gone out with Toby-there was no one in the saloon but herself and Abdul Osman, and that ghastly relic of a man cowering in a corner and watching Osman's movements with blubbering hate-filled eyes. Osman did not even seem to be aware of his existence-perhaps he had grown so used to having that thing of his own creation with him that he took no more notice of him than if he had been a dog; or perhaps in the foul depths of his mind there was some spawning idea of heaping humiliation on humiliation both for the girl and his beaten slave. He edged towards her unsteadily, his glittering eyes leering with unutterable things, and she retreated from him as she would have done before a snake, until her back was to the wall and she could retreat no further.
"Come to me, beautiful white rose!"
His arms reached out for her. She tried to slip sideways away from their clawing grasp, keeping her eyes out of sheer terror from looking full into that puffed lecherous face; but he caught her arm and held it with a strength greater than her own. She was drawn irresistibly into his hot embrace-she felt the horrible softness of his paunch against her firm young flesh, and shuddered until mists swam before her eyes. She could not possibly endure it much longer. Her senses reeled, and she seemed to have lost all her strength. . . .
And then, as his greedy lips found her face, her brain went out at last into merciful blackness; and she heard the shot that struck him down only as a dim part of her dream.
CHAPTER VIII
SIMON TEMPLAR slammed the door of the glory hole forward, twisted the key, and snapped it off short in the lock. He heard a babel of shouts and jabbering in heathen tongues break out behind it, and grinned gently. So far as he had been able to discover in a lightning reconnaissance, practically the whole of Osman's crew was congregated up there in the fo'c'sle: he had already battened down the hatch over their heads, and it would take them nothing less than an hour to break out.
It was the moment for a speed of action that could be outdistanced by nothing less nimble than a Morality Squad discovering new vices to suppress-that speed of decision and performance in which the Saint had no equal. With the stillness of the ship still freshly bruised by the sharp thud of that single shot, it was a time when committee meetings and general philosophy had to take second place.
He raced down the alleyway towards the second door under which he had seen a strip of light; it was thrown open as he reached it, and an olive-skinned man in uniform, with his shirt unbuttoned, stared into his face from a range of twelve inches. In the cabin behind him, two others, apparently fellow officers, were frozen statuesquely around a table littered with cards. Just for the sharp-etched half of a second there was an utter immobility; and then Simon's fist crashed into the man's face and sent him staggering. In another second that door also was locked and the key broken.
Simon had located only one other danger point, and that was a few steps farther down the passage. As he opened the door he saw that it was the galley, and the explanation of the light he had seen was provided by a coal-black Kano boy who was placidly peeling potatoes and humming one of his own weird melodies. The song died away in an abrupt minor as the Kano boy looked up at him with rolling eyes: Simon saluted him cheerily and turned the third key on the safe side of the door.
Then he went aft to the saloon; and as he went he saw another door hanging drunkenly open on its mutilated hinges.
Toby Halidom was pillowing Laura's head on one arm, babbling silly incoherent things to her. His other hand covered the doorway with the automatic that had killed Osman, and for one second Simon felt nearer death than he cared to stand at any time.
"Put that down, you ass," he said; and then Toby recognized him and lowered the gun slowly.
"What are you doing here?"
"Getting you out of trouble," said the Saint briskly. "You needn't worry-the crew won't be interfering yet. I've just locked them up to keep them out of mischief."
His gaze swept comprehensively round the room- over the body of Abdul Osman, who lay stretched out on his back, half underneath a table that he had clutched at and brought down with him in his fall, with a slowly widening red stain on his white shirt front; over the unconscious figure of Galbraith Stride; over the enslaved secretary, Clements, who sat without movement on one of the couches, his face hidden in his hands, with an empty hypodermic syringe lying where it had fallen on the dark tapestry beside him. ... He reached out and took the automatic from Halidom's unresisting fingers.
"I don't care if I hang for it!" said the young man hysterically. "He deserved everything he got."
Simon's eyebrows went up through one slow half-centimetre.
"If you hang for it?" he repeated.
"Yes. They can do what they like. I killed him-the swine. I shot him-"
The Saint's smile, that quirk of the lips which could be so gay, so reckless, so mocking, so debonair, so icily insolent, so maddeningly seraphic, as his mood willed it, touched his mouth and eyes with a rare gentleness that transformed him. A strange look, almost of tenderness, touched the chiselled lines of that mad buccaneering face.
"Hang you, Toby?" he said softly. "I don't think they'll do that."
The young man scarcely heard him. For at that moment Laura's eyes opened, full of the horror of her last moment of consciousness, and saw the face of the young man bending over her with a queer little choking sob.
"Toby!"
She clung to him, raising herself against his shoulder, still wild-eyed with lingering nightmares; and then she shrank back as she saw Abdul Osman.
"Toby! Did you"
"It's all right, darling," said Halidom huskily. "He won't trouble us again."