“Me name is Muldoon,” the tinker
said. “And this is
me wife. That’s me boy Sean, and these are
Tessa and
Genevra.”
“I’m Rick Fenton,” Simon said, “and this is Mildred
Kleinschmidt.”
They went to the fire, where the boy, Sean,
was stir
ring the pulpy liquid again. Mildred half closed her eyes
and stepped back as some of the violently odoriferous steam drifted into her
face.
“Delicious-looking stew,” the Saint said solemnly.
“It will be, when it’s finished,”
said Muldoon, winking.
He pulled out the thermometer, looked, and
dropped
it back again.
“How would ye like a little of the
finished product?”
“Fine,” answered Simon politely.
Then he added, with concealed relief, “But I’m afraid we won’t be staying
that
long.”
“Oh, we have a sample here from the last
batch.”
While Muldoon fetched the sample, his wife was ques
tioning Mildred with great concern about her
injuries
and feeling her ankle for
broken bones.
“Ye poor little bit of a thing,”
Mrs. Muldoon mur
mured, with a reproachful glance at Simon. “Runnin’
away to be
wed, and not even a pair o’ decent shoes for
yer feet.”
Muldoon came around the fire with a large
pickle jar. He unscrewed the cap.
“See what ye think of that.”
Simon braced himself, tilted up the jar, and
swallowed
as
little as possible. The effect on his tongue and mouth
combined various qualities of iodine, gasoline, and
molten lava. He was damp-eyed and speechless for a
moment. Finally he found that some small remnant of his
vocal apparatus had miraculously escaped
destruction.
“Delicious,” he said hoarsely, but
with an expression
no different from the one his face would have worn had he
just been treated to a cup of Olympian ambrosia.
Muldoon beamed.
“Here, come on,” Sean said
crossly. “Me arm’s dropping
off.”
Muldoon went to take a turn at stirring the
cauldron.
“Tessa,” he called, “go and
fetch our guests somethin’
to eat.”
Simon unobtrusively separated some bills from the fold
of money in his pocket and offered them to
Muldoon.
“Here you are,” he said, “and many
thanks.”
“Aw, it’s too much,” protested
Muldoon, tucking the
money into his shirt nevertheless. “Now
why don’t you
and yer bride let me wife show ye yer quarters?”
Sean, who had walked off toward the horses and back
again, aggrievedly rubbing his overworked stirring
arm, suddenly stiffened and cried out.
“Hey, Dad!”
There at the edge of the clearing, their faces
menacing in the dancing light, stood Mildred’s hunters.
6
Simon’s response was so prompt and
inspirational that
not even two seconds passed between Sean’s cry and
his own.
“Revenue men!” he yelled.
“The divil and it is!” roared
Muldoon in outraged
agreement.
He snatched his stirring stick out of the pot
of potheen
and charged across the clearing. His son charged too,
grabbing up a makeshift cudgel from the heap of spare
wood by the fire.
Simon’s only worry was that the private
detectives
might have guns, but if they did they had no time to use
them.
Muldoon and Sean sailed in with sticks flying,
and Mrs. Muldoon and her
daughters armed themselves
with cooking pots from a chest beside the
nearest wagon
and ran to join the fray.
Mildred, who had let out a little shriek as
the battle
commenced, stood as if petrified, her hand to her
mouth.
Simon, seeing that the beleaguered detectives
were getting a sound
enough drubbing without any
help from him, ran to prod her into motion.
“It’s time we were on the move
again,” he said, towing her into the woods in a direction opposite the one
from
which they had arrived at the tinker’s camp. “Didn’t a
train pass
over this way?”
“I don’t remember,” panted Mildred.
“Not very observant for a Queen’s
Guide.”
They were out of range of the firelight, hurrying down
hill, and Simon recognized the voice of one of the
detectives above the melee.
“There! They ran over there!”
“I think your friends are after us,” Simon said.
“And the
tinker’s probably wondering
what kind of revenue men
those are,
leaving behind a big pot of potheen to chase
us.”
Mildred had reached the limit of her strength
by the
time they
emerged from the woods and stood on the level
surface
of a railroad embankment. The track came around
a curve on their left and continued through a cut in the
low hill to their right.
“I can’t go on,” Mildred gasped.
“Let’s just give up.
Let them catch me.”
“After all this trouble?” said the
Saint. “Not on your life. I don’t like losing even ridiculous games like
this.”
He held her hand, leading her along the tracks
to the comparative shelter of the cut, where an irregular rocky face of earth
rose up almost straight on either side.
“At least we’re not out in open moonlight
here,” he
said.
“What if a train comes along?”
“Then we’ll be squashed.” He met
her shocked expres
sion with a shrug. “It happens all the time to ants
and
caterpillars.”
Mildred held a finger to her lips.
“Listen,” she whispered. “I
think they’re here.”
Simon heard the voices of two men in the woods
not
far away. Apparently the tinker and his tribe had been
content to
chase the detectives out of their camp, and
then
probably—confused as to whether they had been
spotted by revenue
agents or not—they would pack up
and move on as soon as possible.
As Mildred and the Saint faced the track,
their backs
to the face of the cut, the detectives were searching
along
the edge of the forest to their left.
“Let’s move away from them,” Simon
whispered. “Here —through the cut.”
He and Mildred, keeping their bodies inconspicuously
flattened against
the low cliff, edged along the side of the
track.
The detectives’ voices sounded louder. They had
come out of the woods.
“Oh, no,” moaned Mildred.
“What?” Simon asked.
“I think I hear a train.”
“Yes. Exactly what I hoped!”
“Hoped? You said we’d be squashed!”
“Not if we’re clever, agile … and
lucky.”
He was quiet as one of the detectives called
to the
other.
“I think they’re hiding here somewhere.
We’d have
heard them running.”
“Right!” replied the other.
“You go on toward the cut. I’ll check this way. Wish we could just shoot
the bloody
pair of them and have done with it. I’m fed up, even
for a
hundred thousand quid.”
“I’ll
shut
you up, Finch, if you
keep flapping your lip
like that.”
Simon looked at Mildred with slightly raised eyebrows.
“A hundred thousand?” he whispered.
“Your father
must love you very much.”
“He’s despicable. And … and I don’t
even know
what anybody’s talking about.”
Simon mused aloud as he continued moving
toward
the other end of the cut.
“This case gets more interesting every
minute.”
“And that train’s getting closer every
second,” said
Mildred.
What had shortly before been a distant rumble
be
yond the curve to their left was now such a growing
noise that
it was no longer necessary to whisper.
“We’d better hurry,” the Saint
said.
Just at that moment, the fat man, nosing
along near
the rails outside the cut, spotted them and shouted the
news to his
partner. But just as he started to run in after
them the sound of the
train mounted toward a roar and
the blazing, unsteady light of the engine
swept around
the curve a quarter of a mile away. The detective back
tracked
and ran up the hill along the edge of the cut, peering down to keep his eye on
the Saint and Mildred.
“This way,” said Simon.
No longer making any effort to hide what he
was
doing, he grabbed Mildred’s hand and ran with her
through
the cut as the brilliant headlight of the train
caught them in its
beam. The fat detective saw that they
were heading across the tracks to the
opposite side of
the cut. He screamed to the thin one, who was still on
the ground
which was level with the tracks.
“Get across there! They’re going up the
other side!”
The thin one made a dash toward the tracks,
then
leaped back as he calculated that the engine would ar
rive
abreast of his present location just as he arrived in
front of the engine.
The engineer, seeing people running
along the rails, applied brakes, but
with no chance of
even slowing appreciably before he was well past the
cut.
The Saint had no intention of ending his
shining ca
reer in so messy or pointless a way as being flattened
by the
Dublin-Galway express while helping a fluff-
brained girl run
away from her father—or whatever it was
she was really doing.
He made certain that they got to
the end of the cut ahead of the train, and
then as the
engine roared past, blaring infuriated warnings on its
whistle, he
dragged her up the lip of the cut opposite
the fat detective,
who could only watch, shouting and
waving his arms.
He probably could scarcely even hear his own
words,
which were
hopelessly swallowed in the click-clacking
thunder
of the passing carriages. The Saint waved at him
pleasantly, bowed and tapped a greeting from his forehead. Then he took
Mildred’s hand.
“Get ready to jump,” he said.
She stared at him, appalled.
“Jump?”
“Of course. This couldn’t have been
handier if we’d
had it planned by a travel agent.”
It was only three feet down to the moving
tops of the
cars and the train had just reached its minimum of speed
brought on
by the brakes.
“We’ll stand back a little bit, then
take a running
jump,”
Simon said. “There’ll be nothing to it—as long as
you don’t jump short and fall down between the train
and the wall.”
“I won’t do it!” cried Mildred.
“Yes, you will. Remember dear Rick. Get
ready now.
Last car.”
The detectives, who were now together on the
other side of the cut, sensed the Saint’s intention and were
getting
ready to jump in case he did. That was why he
waited until the last
carriage was passing—and the last
half of that—until he grasped
Mildred’s hand more firmly
than ever, ran forward, and leaped.
When they landed, the Saint, like a cat, kept
his bal
ance, and for an instant was able to see the frustrated
faces of
the detectives not eight feet from his. Then they
were left helplessly
behind, watching the red warning
lights on the rear of the train, like mocking
eyes, disap
pear toward the southwest.
Simon sat down and made himself comfortable
on the
roof of the carriage. Mildred was lying down on her
stomach,
but once she caught her breath and got over
the first fear of
perching on top of a swaying, incredibly
jolting train which
appeared in danger of toppling off
its rails at any moment, she also sat
up cautiously and
looked
around.