“Not a chance. I’ve just seen the manager. He said as much as he could without insulting me openly — told me he would require my room by seven o’clock if I couldn’t pay him up to date by that time.”
“Distinctly awkward,” remarked Simon judicially.
The girl bit her lip.
“I...I’ve got to do something,” she stammered. “I don’t know how to say it — I hate asking you, after all this — but I’ve got to have something to see me through till the bank gets a reply from Boston, and they can’t do that till after the week-end. Or when Jack gets to Innsbruck about Tuesday — I can send a wire to him there. I... I know I’m practically a stranger, but if you could lend me just enough—”
“My dear,” said the Saint blandly, “I should be delighted. But I haven’t got it to lend.”
Her eyes opened wide.
“You haven’t got it?”
She spread out a brown hand.
“Take a look. My luggage went off in advance this afternoon. All I’m going to need — toothbrush and towel and blankets — is in my rucksack. My bill here is paid, and I’ve got about forty marks in my belt — enough to buy food and beer. I can’t get any more till I get to Bolzano. I couldn’t even send you on to Innsbruck — the third-class fare for one is about fifteen marks, and the remaining twenty-five wouldn’t feed me.”
She stared at him aghast. Her pretty mouth quivered. There was a moistness very close to the tears of sheer hysterical fright in her eyes.
“But what on earth am I going to do?” she wailed.
Simon lighted a cigarette, and allowed his gaze to return to her face.
“You’ll just have to walk to Innsbruck with me,” he said.
2
Simon Templar had been cordially disliked by many different people in his time, but rarely with such a wholehearted simplicity as that which Belinda Deane lavished on him the next morning. On the other hand, unpopularity had never lowered his spirits: he strode along carolling to the skies, and meditating on the infinite variety of the accidents of travel.
He had met Belinda Deane and Jack Boston on the train from Stuttgart a week before. There had been some complication about their tickets, and their knowledge of German was infinitesimal. The Saint, to whom human companionship was the breath of life, and who would seize any excuse to beguile a journey by making the acquaintance of his fellow-travellers, had stepped in as an interpreter. Thereafter they had gone around Munich together, until Easton had separated to join an old friend — “a great-open-space friend,” he described him — on a short walking trip from Garmisch to Innsbruck by way of Oberammergau. This decision had been the subject of a distressing scene at which Simon had been coerced into the position of umpire.
It was not by any means the first he had witnessed. One glance had been sufficient to tell him that Belinda had been blessed with a face and figure that would make even hard-boiled waiters scramble for the privilege of serving her, but one hour in her company had been enough to show him that they must have been doing it ever since she left her cradle, with the inevitable results. Everything that New England and Paris had to give had been endowed upon her — background, breed, education, poise. She could have been taken for the flower of American sophistication at its most perfect. Intelligence, knowledge, charm — she had them all. She knew exactly the right thing to say and do in any circumstances, entirely because she had been trained to circumstances where the same things were always being said and done. Jack Easton, a youngster of less ancient lineage, confessed that there were times when she scared him.
“Sometimes she ought to be spanked,” he said once, when he and Simon were alone together after that last scene.
He was annoyed, because the quarrel had consisted of a healthily stubborn bluntness piling up in competition with an increasingly chilly self-possession, and there was something about the Saint which always drew out confidences.
“What she really needs,” said Easton, “is for somebody to club her and drag her off to a desert island and make her wash dishes and dig up her own potatoes.”
“Why don’t you do it?” murmured the Saint.
“Because I know she’d never forgive me as long as she lived. Besides,” said Easton, morosely practical, “I don’t know any desert islands.”
Simon smoked for a time before he replied. The idea had come to him on the spur of the moment, and the more he thought of it the more it made him smile. The troubles of young love had always seemed more worthwhile to him than most things.
“It wouldn’t matter so much if she never forgave me,” he said. “And it could be done without desert islands.”
Belinda trotted beside him and hated him. The leisurely swing of his long legs was measured to a pace that made her work to keep up with him. His pack rode like a feather on his broad shoulders, and the possibility of fatigue didn’t seem to enter his head. She glanced sidelong at his strong brown profile, down over his check cotton shirt with rolled-up sleeves, his broad leather belt, leather shorts, and bare legs, and hated him still more for the ease of his untrammeled masculinity. She had been moved to sarcasm at the expense of his costume in the hotel, but now she tried not to admit that the curious glances of the few people they passed were centered on her. Her light tweed skirt came from Paris, her green suede golfing jacket was the latest thing from Fifth Avenue: from the rudimentary crown of her jaunty little hat to the welts of her green and white buckskin shoes she was as smart and pretty as a picture, and she knew it. It was unjust that smartness should give her no advantage.
The Saint sang.
Belinda gritted her small white teeth. She had never done much walking, and after the first few miles she was feeling tired. The fact that the man at her side should have been able to allot the major ration of his breath to singing was like a deliberate affront. She began to wonder for the first time why she should ever have considered his fantastic proposition, but it had seemed like the only practical solution. Even now, she could think of nothing else that she could have done. And from the moment when she had wearily accepted, he had taken charge — registered her luggage to Innsbruck, paid the carriage fees, rushed her to the station, almost abducted her while her mind was still numbed by the shock of inconceivable circumstances... The morning grew hotter, and she struggled out of her jacket.
“Could you find room for this somewhere?” she asked, like a queen conferring a favor.
The Saint cocked a clear blue eye at her.
“Lady,” he said, “this pack weighs twenty-five pounds. Are you sure you can’t manage twelve ounces?”
She walked on speechlessly.
The scenery meant nothing to her. Roads were merely the links in an endless trail, which ended tantalizingly at every bend and the crest of every rise, only to lead on again immediately. When he called the first halt, at the end of nearly four hours’ marching, she fell on the dirty grass by the roadside and wondered if she would ever be able to get up again.
“My stockings have got holes in them,” she said.
He nodded.
“There’s nothing like plenty of ventilation to keep your feet in condition.”
She tore her stockings off without a word and threw them away, but her hands trembled. Simon, unmoved, opened his pack and produced food — coarse black bread and butter, cheese, and liver sausage.
“How about some lunch?”
She looked at the bread down her nose.
“What’s that stuff?”