Simon wondered if the two men chasing Holbrook were his keepers; he could use a few. In fact, Simon reflected, keepers would fit into the life of Holbrook-Faulks like thread in a needle. But he sipped his brandy and urged the man to continue.
“Well, something’s happened,” Holbrook-Faulks said. “It never was like this before. I never could smell things before. I never could really feel them. You know how it is in a dream. But now it seems like as if you stuck a knife in me I’d bleed real blood. You don’t suppose a... a reiterated dream could become reality?”
“I,” said the Saint, “am a rank amateur in that department.”
“Well, I was too — or Andy was, whichever of us is me — but I read everything I could get my hands on about dreams — or Andy did — and it didn’t help a bit.”
Most men wouldn’t have heard the faint far-off stirring in the forest. But the Saint’s ears, attuned by long practice to detect sound that differed from what should be there, picked up evidence of movement toward the cabin.
“Some one,” he said suddenly, “and I mean one, is coming. Not your pursuers — it’s from the opposite direction.”
Holbrook-Faulks listened.
“I don’t hear anything.”
“I didn’t expect you to — yet. Now that it’s dark, perhaps you’d better slip outside, brother, and wait. I don’t pretend to believe your yarn, but that some game is afoot is so obvious that even Sherlock Holmes could detect it. I suggest that we prepare for eventualities.”
The eventuality that presently manifested itself was a girl. And it was a girl who could have been no one but Dawn Winter.