The Saint stumbled and caught his breath as a redhot anguish stabbed through him from the point of impact of that fearful blow; and at the same moment Joe's body kicked convulsively in his. grasp and became a dead weight. Simon's right arm was numb to his fingertips from the shock. He turned further, dragging Joe with him, and heard a dull bump as the dead man's automatic slipped from his nerveless fingers and fell to the ground, but he could not reach it. To have tried to do so, with one arm useless, would have meant letting go his only protection; and he knew he would never have had time to cover the distance and locate the fallen weapon in the dark. He looked up and saw Maxie's pitiless face, a white blotch in the faint light.
"You got two minutes to say your prayers, Saint," Maxie grated, with the first trace of vindictiveness that he had shown. He tilted his head and spoke louder.
"Hi, Hunk, you damn fool! Where are ya?"
Then Simon remembered the driver of the car and knew that the chance which he thought he had seen was only a chimera, a last sadistic jest on the part of the fortune which had deserted him. Between them, the two men would get him easily. He couldn't watch both at once, or protect himself from the two of them together. One of them would outflank him, as simply as walking round a table, without risk and without effort; and that would be the finish.
The Saint did not pray. He had no deities to call on, except the primitive pagan gods of battle and sudden death who had carried him on a flood tide of favour into that blind alley and left him there to pay the last account alone. But he looked up at the dark sky and saw that the clouds had broken, and a star twinkled millions of miles aloft in the blue rift. A light breeze passed across the common, stirring the fresh scents of the night; and he knew that, whatever the reckoning might be, he would have asked for no other life.
"Hunk!" Maxie called again, raspingly.
He dared not turn his head for fear of taking his eyes off the Saint; but the Saint looked beyond him and saw a strange thing.
The driver was not probing into the vitals of the car, as he had been. He was not even approaching at a lumbering trot to throw his taciturn weight into the unequal scale. It took the Saint a second or two to discover where he was—a second or two longer to realize that the blurred form extended at full length beside the car was the driver, lying as if in sleep.
And then he saw something else—a slender, graceful figure that was coming up behind Maxie on soundless feet. And as he saw it, she spoke.
"The Big Fellow says wait a minute, Maxie."
Maxie's eyes went wide in hurt surprise, and his jaw sagged foolishly. Only the aim of his automatic did not waver. It clung to its mark as if his brain stubbornly refused to accept the evidence of his ears; and his astounded gaze did not shift away from the Saint.
"Wha—whass that?" he got out.
"This is Fay," said the girl.
Simon Templar opened his nostrils to a vast lung-easing breath. The cool sweet air of the unwalled fields went down into his lungs like ethereal nectar and sent the blood racing again along his stagnant veins. He lifted his head and looked up at the lone twinkling star in that slim gap in the black canopy of cloud, and over the abyss of a thousand million light-years the star seemed to wink at him. He was alive.
There are no words to describe what he felt at that moment. When a man has been down into the uttermost depths, when the shadow of the dark angel's wings has blotted out the last light and their cold breath has touched his brow, not in sudden accident or the anaesthetic heat of passion, but with a re-morseless deliberation that wrings the last dram of self-control from every second of hopeless knowledge, his return to life is beyond the reach of words. To say that the weight of all mortality is swept from his shoulders, that the snapping of the strain leaves every heroically disciplined nerve loose and inert like a broken thread, that the precious response of every living sense takes away his breath with its intolerably brilliant beauty, is to say nothing. He is like a man who has been blind from birth, to whom the gift of sight has been given in the middle of his life; but he is far more than that. He has been dumb and deaf, without taste or smell or hearing, without mind or movement; and all those things have been given to him at the same time.
As in a dream, the Saint heard Maxie's blank bewildered voice again.
"How did you get here?"
"I walked," said the girl coldly. "Did you hear what I told you? The Big Fellow says to lay off him."
"But—but——" Maxie was floundering in a bottomless morass of incredulity that had taken the feet from under him."But he killed Joe," he managed, in a sudden gasp.
The girl had advanced coolly until she was at his side. She gazed across at the limp form gripped in the Saint's left arm.
"Well?"
The monosyllable dropped from her lips with a pellucid serenity that was void of the faintest tinge of interest She did not care what had happened to Joe. She was at a loss to find any connection whatsoever between his death and the object of her arrival. Maxie struggled for speech.
And the Saint realized that Joe's automatic was still on the ground close by, where it had fallen.
His arm was beginning to ache with the dead weight on it, and he heaved the body up and got a fresh grip while his keen eyes probed the darkness. There was a throbbing pain growing up in his wound that turned to a sharp twinge in his chest every time he breathed, but he scarcely noticed the discomfort Presently he found a dull gleam of metal in the grass somewhere to his left front.
He edged himself towards it, inch by inch, with infinite patience. Every instinct urged him to drop his encumbering load and make a swift, desperate dive for it, but he knew that the gamble would have been hopelessly against him. With every muscle held relentlessly in check, he worked himself across the intervening space with movements so smooth and minute that they could never have been noticed. There was only about a yard and a half to go, but it might have been seven miles. And at last Maxie recovered his voice.
"What does the Big Fellow want us to do?" he demanded harshly. "Kiss him?"
"The Big Fellow says to let him go."
The dull gleam of metal was only six inches away then. Simon extended a cautious toe, touched it here and there, drew it gently towards him. It was the gun he was looking for. His right arm was still useless; but if he could drop Joe and dive for it with his left—the instant Maxie's attention was distracted, as it must be soon. . . .
"Let him go?" Maxie's eyes were wild, his mouth twisted. "Like hell I'll let him go! You must be nuts. He killed Joe." Maxie's forearm stiffened, and the gun in his hand moved slightly. "You're too late, Fay—we'd done the job before you got here. This is how we let him go, the dirty double-crossing ——"
"Don't be a fool!"
In a flash the girl's hands were on his wrist, dragging his arm down; and in that moment the Saint had his chance. With a swift jerk of his sound shoulder he flung the body of his shield away, well away to one side, and his hand plunged downwards to the automatic that he was still marking with his toe. His fingers closed on the butt, and he straightened up again with it in his hand.
"I think that's pretty good advice, Maxie," he said gently.
There was a trace of the old Saintly lilt in his voice, a lilt of triumphant mockery that was born in the surge of new power and confidence which went through him at the feel of gun metal in his hands again. Maxie stared at him frozenly, with his right arm still stretched downwards in the girl's grasp, and the muzzle of his automatic pointed uselessly into the ground. Simon's finger itched on the trigger. He had sworn to be without mercy. The indifference of his executioners had hardened the last dregs of pity out of his heart.