Featuring the Saint (11 page)

He explained his plan to Kelly, and found the Irishman an immediate convert to the Cause.

“Shure, I’ve been thinkin’ for years that it was time somebody threw out their crooked government,” said that worthy, ruffling a hand like a ham through his tousled mop of flaming hair. “I’m just wonderin’ now why I niver did it meself.”

“It’s a desperate chance,” Simon Templar admitted. “But I don’t mind taking it if you’re game.”

“Six years I’ve been here,” mused Kelly ecstatically, screwing up a huge fist, “and I haven’t seen a real fight. Exceptin’ one or two disagreements with the natives, who run away afther the first round.”

The Saint smiled. He could not have hoped to find a more suitable ally.

“We might easily win out,” he said. “It wouldn’t work in England, but in a place like this—”

“The geography was made for us,” said Kelly.

On a scrap of paper he sketched a rough map to illustrate his point.

Pasala is more or less in the shape of a wedge, with the base facing northeast on the seacoast. Near the centre of the base of the wedge is Santa Miranda. In the body of the wedge are the only other three towns worth mentioning-Las Flores, Rugio, and, near the apex, Esperanza. They are connected up by a cart track of a road which includes them in a kind of circular route that starts and finishes at Santa Miranda, for the State of Pasala does not yet boast a railway. This is hardly necessary, for the distance between Santa Miranda and Esperanza, the two towns farthest apart, is only one hundred and forty miles.

It should also be mentioned that the wedge-shaped territory of Pasala cuts roughly into the Republic of Maduro, a much larger and more civilized country.

“Of course, we’re simply banking on the psychology of revolutions and the apathy of the natives,” said the Saint, when they had finished discussing their plan of campaign. “The population aren’t interested-if they’re shown a man in a nice new uniform, and told that he’s the man in power, they believe it, and go home and pray that they won’t be any worse off than they were before. If we take off a couple of taxes, or something like that, as soon as we get in, the mob will be with us to a man. I’m sure the exchequer can stand it-I don’t imagine Manuel Conception de Villega has been running this show without making a substantial profit on turnover.”

“That’ll fetch ‘em,” Kelly averred. “They’re bled dhry with taxes at present.”

“Secondly, there’s the army. They’re like any other army. They obey their officers because it’s never occurred to them to do anything else. If they were faced with a revolution they’d fight it. So instead of that we’ll present the revolution as an accomplished fact. If they’re like any other South American army, they’ll simply carry on under the new government- with a bonus of a few pesos per man to clinch the bargain.”

They talked for a while longer; and then they went out and joined Archie Sheridan, who had not been present at the council, being otherwise occupied with Lilla McAndrew on the veranda.

The Saint had a little leisure to admire the girl. She was rather tall, fair-haired and blue-eyed, superbly graceful. Her sojourn in that sunny climate had coloured her skin a pale golden brown that was infinitely more becoming than mere pink-and-white; but the peachlike bloom of her complexion had not had time to suffer.

It was plain that Archie Sheridan was fatally smitten with the inevitable affliction, and the Saint was mischievously delighted.

“You want to be careful of him, Miss McAndrew,” he advised gravely. “I’ve known him since he was so high, and you wouldn’t believe what a past he’s collected in his brief career of sin. Let’s see… . There was Gladys, the golden-haired beauty from the front row of the Gaiety chorus, Susan, Beryl-no, two Beryls-Ethel, the artist’s model, Angela, Sadie from California, Joan-two Joans-no, three Joans__”

“Don’t believe him, Lilla,” pleaded Archie. “He’s been raving all day. Why, just before lunch he said he was Benito Mussolini!”

The girl laughed.

“It’s all right,” she told Simon. “I don’t take him seriously.”

“There’s gratitude for you!” said Sheridan wildly. “After all I’ve done for her! I even taught her to speak English. When she arrived here she had a Scots accent that would have made a bawbee run for its life. She reeked of haggis—”

“Archie!”

“Haggis,” persisted Sheridan. “She carried one around in her pibroch till it starved to death.”

“What are pibroch?” asked the Saint curiously. “Are they something you wear under a kilt?”

When the girl had recovered her composure:
“Is he really so impossible?” she exclaimed.

“I don’t know you well enough to tell you the whole truth,” said the Saint solemnly. “The only hope I can give you is that you’re the first Lilla in his life. Wait a minute-sorry-wasn’t Lilla the name of the barmaid–”

“Go away,” said Sheridan morosely. “With sudden death staring you in the face, you ought to be spending your time in prayer and repentance. You’ll be shot at dawn to-morrow, and I shall look over the prison walls and cheer on the firing squad.”

He watched Kelly and the Saint retire to the other end of the veranda, and then turned to the girl, with his pleasant face unusually serious.

“Lilla,” he said, “I don’t want to scare you, but it isn’t all quite as funny as we make out. The Saint would still be laughing in the face of the firing squad I mentioned; but that doesn’t make the possibility of the firing squad any less real.”

She looked at him with sober eyes.

“Then it’s easily settled,” she said. “I won’t let you do it.”

Sheridan laughed.

“It isn’t me you’ve got to deal with,” he replied. “It’s the Saint. Nothing you could say would stop him. He’d simply tell me to beat it with you on the Andalusia this evening if I was scared. And I’d rather face the said firing squad than have the Saint say that to me.”

She would have protested further, but something in the man’s tone silenced her. She knew that he was making no idle statement. She had no experience whatever of such things, and yet she realized intuitively what she was up against, recognized the heroic thing when she met it-the blind, unswerving loyalty of a man to his friend, the unshakable obedience of a man to a loved leader. And she knew that any attempt she made to seduce her man from that reality would only lower herself in his eyes.

Perhaps there are few women who could have shown such an understanding, but Lilla McAndrew was-Lilla McAndrew.

She smiled suddenly.“I’ve always wanted to see a revolution,” she said simply.

Moments passed before Sheridan could grasp the full wonder of her sympathy and acquiescence. And then his arms went round her, and her hands tousled his hair.

“Dear Archie!” she said, and found herself unaccountably breathless.

“I admit every girl the Saint mentioned,” said Sheridan defiantly. “And a few more. But that doesn’t alter the fact that I love you, and as soon as this comic revolution’s over I’m going to marry you.”

“I’ll believe that when you do it,” she teased him; but her heart was on her lips when he kissed her… .

Some almost offensively discreet coughing from the Saint interrupted them ten minutes later.

“I tried to save you,” said the Saint, declining to avert his shamelessly quizzical gaze from the girl’s efforts to straighten her hair inconspicuously. “And I’m sorry to have to butt in, but your boy friend and I have work to do. If you look down towards the town you’ll see a file of men advancing up the main street in our direction, led by two men on horseback in the uniform of commissionaires. The entire police force of Santa Miranda, as far as I can make out from this distance, is on its way up here to arrest me for assaulting and battering one of their most prominent citizens, and to arrest Archie as an accessory before, after, and during the fact. They have just woken up from their afternoon snooze and have been put on the job by the aforesaid citizen with commendable rapidity. Will you excuse us if we escape?”

They went to the edge of the veranda and looked down. Below them, about a mile away, Santa Miranda, as yet hardly astir from its siesta, lay bathed in the afternoon sunshine.

The town, indeterminately vignetted at the edges, had a definite core of nearly modem white buildings ranged down its principal streets. These numbered two, and were in the form of a T. The top of the T ran parallel with the waterfront; the upright, halfway down which was the Presidential Palace, ran inland for nearly a mile, tailing off in the mass of adobe huts which clustered round the core of the town.

From where they stood they could look down the length of the street which formed the upright of the T; and the situation was even as the Saint had diagnosed it. …

“One minute for the fond farewell, Archie,” said the Saint briskly, and Sheridan nodded.

Simon Templar drew Kelly inside the bungalow.

“By the way,” he said, “do you happen to have such a thing as a good-looking pot of paint?”

“I’ve got some enamel,” replied the mystified Kelly.

He produced a couple of tins, and the Saint selected one with every appearance of satisfaction.

“The very idea,” he said. “It’s just an idea of mine for dealing with this arrest business.”

Kelly was suspicious.

“I don’t seem to have much to do,” he complained aggrievedly. “It’s hoggin’ the best of the fightin’ yez are. Now, if I had my way, I’d be shtartin’ the throuble with these police men right away, I would.”

“And wreck the whole show,” said the Saint. “No, it’s too soon for that. And if you call being fifty percent of an invading army ‘having nothing to do’ I can’t agree. You’re one of the most important members of the cast. Besides, if your bus doesn’t break down, you’ll be back here just when the rough stuff is warming up. You get it both ways.”

He adjusted his hat to an appropriately rakish and revolutionary angle on his head, and went out to collect Archie Sheridan.

They shook hands with the still grumbling Kelly; but the Saint had the last word with Lilla McAndrew.

“I’m sorry I’ve got to take Archie,” he said. “You see, he’s the one man I can trust here who can tap out Morse fluently, and I sent him out from England for that very reason, though I didn’t know it was going to pan out as it’s panning out now. But I’ll promise to get him back to you safe and sound. You needn’t worry. Only the good die young. I wonder how you’ve managed to live so long, Lilla?”

He smiled; and when the Saint smiled in that particularly gay and enchanting manner, it was impossible to believe that any adventure he undertook could fail.

“Archie is marked ‘Fragile-With Care’ for this journey,” said the Saint, and went swinging down the veranda steps.

He walked back arm-in-arm with Sheridan to the latter’s bungalow at a leisurely pace enough, for it was his last chance to give Sheridan his final instructions for the opening of the campaign.

Archie was inclined to voice much the same grievance as Kelly had vented, but Templar dealt shortly with that insubordination.

“I’m starting off by having the most boresome time of any of you,” he said. “If I could do your job, I promise you I’d be making you do mine. That being so, I reckon I deserve a corresponding majority ration of excitement at the end. Anyway, with any luck we’ll all be together again by Thursday, and we’ll see the new era in in a bunch. And if you’re going to say you’ve thought of another scheme that’d be just as effective, my answer is that you ought to have spoken up before. It’s too late to change our plans now.”

At the bungalow the Saint made certain preparations for the arrival of the police posse which to some extent depleted Archie Sheridan’s travelling athletic outfit. That done, he sent Sheridan to his post, and himself settled down with a cigarette in an easy chair on the veranda to await the coming of the Law.

4
The guindillas came toiling up the last two hundred yards of slope in a disorderly straggle. The hill at that point became fairly steep, they were in poor condition, and, although the sun was getting low, the broiling heat of the afternoon had not yet abated; and these factors united to upset what might otherwise have been an impressive approach. The only members of the squad who did not seem the worse for wear were the two comisarios, who rode in the van on a pair of magnificent high-stepping horses, obvious descendants of the chargers of Cortes’s invading Spaniards, the like of which may often be seen in that part of the Continent. The Saint had had an eye for those horses ever since he spied them a mile and a half away, which was why he was so placidly waiting for the deputation.

He watched them with a detached interest, smoking his cigarette. They were an unkempt and ferocious-looking lot (in Pasala, as in many other Latin countries, Saturday night is Gillette night for the general public), and every man of them was armed to somewhere near the teeth with a musket, a revolver, and a sabre. The Saint himself was comparatively weaponless, his entire armoury consisting of a beautifully fashioned little knife, strapped to his left forearm under his sleeve, which he could throw with a deadly swiftness and an unerring aim. He did not approve of firearms, which he considered messy and noisy and barbarous inventions of the devil. Yet the opposition’s display of force did not concern him.

His first impression, that the entire police force of Santa Miranda had been sent out to arrest him, proved to be a slight overestimate. There were, as a matter of fact, only ten guardias behind the two mounted men in resplendent uniforms.

The band came to a bedraggled and slovenly halt a few yards from the veranda, and the comisarios dismounted and ascended the short flight of steps with an imposing clanking of scabbards and spurs. They were moustached and important.

The Saint rose.

“Buenas tardes, senores,” he murmured courteously.

“Seńor,” said the senior comisario sternly, unfolding a paper overloaded with official seals, “I regret that I have to trouble a visitor illustrious, but I am ordered to request your honour to allow your honour to be taken to the prevencion, in order that in the morning your honour may be brought before the tribunal to answer a charge of grievously assaulting the Seńor Shannet.”