"Make more bangs," she commanded; and the Saint smiled.
"Shall we? I'll see what can be done."
He raced down the passage to the stairs. The men below were on their way up but he gained the half-landing before them with one flying leap. The leading attacker died in his tracks and never knew it, and his lifeless body reared over backwards and went bumping down to the floor below. The others scuttled for cover; and Simon drew a calm bead on the single frosted bulb in the hall and left only the dim glow from the bar and the dance room for light.
A tongue of orange fire spat out of the dark, and the bullet spilled a shower of plaster from the wall a yard over the Saint's head. Simon grinned and swung his legs over the banisters. Curiously enough, the average gangster has standards of marksmanship that would make the old-time bad man weep in his grave: most of his pistol practice is done from a range of not more than three feet, and for any greater distances than that he gets out his sub-machine-gun and sprays a couple of thousand rounds over the surrounding county on the assumption that one of them must hit something. The opposition was dangerous, but it was not certain death. One of the men poked an eye warily round the door of the bar and leapt back hurriedly as the Saint's shot splintered the frame an inch from his nose; and the Saint let go the handrail and dropped down to the floor like a cat.
The front door was open, as the men had left it when they rushed back into the house. Simon made a rapid calculation. There were four men left, so far as he knew; and of their number one was certainly watching the windows at the back, and another was probably guarding the parked cars. That left two to be taken on the way; and the time to take them was at once, while their morale was still shaken by the divers preposterous calamities that they had seen.
He put the girl down and turned her towards the doorway. She was moaning a little now, but fear would lend wings to her feet
"Run!" he shouted suddenly. "Run for the door!"
Her shrill voice crying out in terror, the child fled. A man sprang up from his knees behind the hangings in the dance-room entrance; Simon fired once, and he went down with a yell. Another bullet from the Saint's gun went crashing down a row of bottles in the bar; then he was outside, hurdling the porch rail and landing nimbly on his toes. He could see the girl's white dress flying through the darkness in front of him. A man rose up out of the gloom ahead of her and lunged, and she screamed once as his outstretched fingers clawed at her frock. Simon's gun belched flame, and the clutching hand fell limp as a soft-nosed slug tore through the fleshy part of the man's forearm. The gorilla spun round and dropped his gun, bellowing like a bull, and Simon sprinted after the terrified child. An automatic banged twice behind him, but the shots went wide. The girl shrieked as he came up with her, but he caught her into his left arm and held her close.
"All right, kiddo," he said gently. "It's all over. Now we're going home."
He ducked in between the parked cars. He already knew that the one in which he had arrived was locked: if Ualino's car was also locked there would still be difficulties. He threw open the door and sighed his relief—the key was in its socket. What was it Fernack had said? "He rides around in an armoured sedan." Morrie Ualino seemed to have been a thoughtful bird all round, and the Saint was smiling appreciatively as he climbed in.
A scattered fusillade drummed on the coachwork as he swung the car through a tight arc in reverse, and the bulletproof glass starred but did not break. As the car lurched forward again he actually slowed up to wind down an inch of window.
"So long, boys," he called back. "Thanks for the ride!" And then the car was swinging out into the road, whirling away into the night with a smooth rush of power, with the horn hooting a derisively syncopated farewell into the wind,
Simon stopped the car a block from Sutton Place and looked down at the sleepy figure beside him.
"Do you know your way home from here?" he asked her.
She nodded vigorously. Her hysterical sobbing had stopped long ago—in a few days she would scarcely remember.
He took a scrap of paper from his pocket and made a little drawing on it. It was a skeleton figure adorned with a large and rakishly slanted halo.
"Give this to your daddy," he said, "and tell him the Saint brought you home. Do you understand? The Saint brought you back."
She nodded again, and he crumpled the paper into her tiny fist and opened the door. The last he saw of her was her white-frocked shape trotting round the next corner; and then he let in the clutch and drove on. Fifteen minutes later he was back at the Waldorf Astoria, and Morrie Ualino's armour-plated sedan was abandoned six blocks away.
Valcross in pyjamas and dressing gown, was dozing in the living room. He roused to find the Saint smiling down at him a little tiredly, but in complete contentment.
"Viola Inselheim is home," said the Saint. "I went for a lovely ride."
He was wiping the blade of his knife on a silk handkerchief; and Valcross looked at him curiously.
"Did you meet Ualino?" he asked; and Simon Templar nodded.
"Tradition would have it that Morrie sleeps with his fathers," he said, very gently; "but one can't be sure that he knows who they were."
He opened the bureau and took out a plain white card. On it were written six names. One of them—Jack Irboll's—was already scratched out. With his fountain pen he drew a single straight line through the next two; and then, at the bottom of the list, he wrote another. It was The Big Fellow. He hesitated for a moment and then wrote an eighth, lower down, and drew a neat panel round it: Fay Edwards.
"Who is she?" inquired Valcross, looking over his shoulder; and the Saint lighted a cigarette and pushed back his hair.
"That's what I'd like to know. All I can tell you is that her gun saved me a great deal of trouble, and was a whole lot of grief to some of the ungodly. . . . This is a pretty passable beginning, Bill—you ought to enjoy the headlines tomorrow morning."
His prophecy of the reactions of the press to his exploits would have been no great strain on anyone's clairvoyant genius. In the morning he had more opportunities to read about himself than any respectably self-effacing citizen would have desired.
Modesty was not one of Simon Templar's virtues. He sat at breakfast with a selection of the New York dailies strewn around him, and the general tenor of their leading pages was very satisfactory. It is true that the Times and the Herald Tribune, following a traditional policy of treating New York's annual average of six hundred homicides as regrettable faux pas which have no proper place in a sober chronicle of the passing days, relegated the Saint to a secondary position; but any aloofness on their part was more than compensated by the enthusiasm of the Mirror and the News. SAINT RESCUES VIOLA, they howled, in black letters two and a half inches high. UALINO SLAIN. RACKET ROMEO'S LAST RIDE. UALINO, VOELSANG, DIE. SAINT SLAYS TWO, WOUNDS THREE. LONG ISLAND MASSACRE. SAINT BATTLES KIDNAPPERS. There were photographs of the rescued Viola Inselheim with her stout papa, photographs of the house where she had been held, gory photographs of the dead. There was a photograph of the Saint himself; and Simon was pleased to see that it was a good one.
At the end of his meal, he pushed the heap of vociferous newsprint aside and poured himself out a second cup of coffee. If there had ever been any lurking doubts of his authenticity —if any of the perspiring brains at police headquarters down on Centre Street, or any of the sizzling intellects of the underworld, had cherished any shy reluctant dreams that the Saint was merely the product of a sensational journalist's overheated imagination—those doubts and dreams must have suffered a last devastating smack on the schnozzola with the publication of that morning's tabloids. For no sensational journalist's imagination, overheated to anything below melting point, could ever have created such a story out of unsubstantial air. Simon lighted a cigarette and stared at the ceiling through a haze of smoke with very clear and gay blue eyes, feeling the deep thrill of other and older days in his veins. It was very good that such things could still come to pass in a tamed and supine world, better still that he himself should be their self-appointed spokesman. He saw the kindly grey head of William Valcross nodding at him across the room.