If you wish to see your daughter again, bring $20,000 in cash to the top of Skeleton Hill by midnight tonight. Come alone and unarmed. We shall not send a second warning. Death pays for treachery.
“You gotta pay, Salvatore,” Urselli was saying. “I’m tellin’ ya. You can’t fool with kidnappers. A gang that snatches a girl won’t stop for nothin’. Say, I remember when Red McLaughlin put the arm on Sappho Lirra—”
Intuccio straightened up lifelessly, like a stunned giant.
“I must find the sheriff,” he said.
The Saint’s hand crossed his path, barring it, in a gesture as lithe and vivid as the flick of a sword.
“Let me go.”
He went down the short road to the town with a light step. This was adventure as he understood it, objective and decisive, like a blast of music, and the Saint smiled as he went. Far might it be from him to deny the home-coming of Amadeo Urselli any of its quintessential poetry. He walked into the sheriff’s office and found Saddlebag’s solitary representative of the law at home.
“Lucia Intuccio has been kidnapped,” he said. “Will you come up?”
The man’s eyes bulged.
“Kidnapped?” he repeated incredulously.