"Well?"
"We made up our minds," said the Saint unhurriedly,"that besides the barrel organ you might do well with ice cream as a side line."
Luker's expression did not change. It only became glassy and lifeless, as if it had been frozen into place.
He moved one of his hands less than two inches.
"Tie up the girl," he ordered in French; and the two nearest Sons of France grabbed Valerie by the arms.
Perhaps she was only acting. Or perhaps her nerve really broke then; perhaps her brain in the stupidity of terror had never quite grasped what the Saint had said while they were alone. But she fought wildly, crazily, even with her hands tied behind her back, bucking and staggering against them as they tried to drag her over to the iron rings in the wall, kicking out madly so that they cursed her until the third Son of France had to go over and help them. And that left only one on guard beside the Saint — the one who had slammed his fist into Simon's face only a little while before.
"You can't do this to me!" she was shrieking deliriously. "You can't… you filthy brutes… you can't…!"
Perhaps she was only acting. But the shrill shaky intensity of her voice stabbed through the Saint's brain with a rending reminder of how real it might have been.
He had half turned to watch her; and as he stood still no one was paying much attention to him. But in that volcanic immobility his arms hardened like iron columns, strained across the fulcrum of his back like twisted bars of tempered steel. The muscles writhed and swelled over his back and shoulders, leapt up in knotted strands like leathery hawsers from his shoulders down to his raw and bleeding wrists; a convulsion of superhuman power swept over his torso like the shock of an earthquake. And the ropes that held his hands together, weakened by the loss of the strands that he had been able to rub away in the few minutes that had been given him, were not strong enough to stand against it. There was a faint snap as the fibres parted; and his arms sprang apart with the jerk of unleashed tension. He was free.
Free but unarmed — for the few instants in which an unarmed man might move.