“You’ve already driven an exploratory shaft. It confirms what I would have guessed from the cinnabar I found. The vein runs clear through. More — the whole mountain is probably fuller of it than a ripe Limburger is full of mould. You might want to cut acres of it away in chunks. But no matter how you work it, you’re practically certain to break through the reservoir that feeds the stream. There’ll be a small but exciting flood, more or less according to how big the source is, and then — no more stream.”
The small pale grey eyes of Dr Julius were like melting marbles behind their thick lenses.
“You must have been a promising student of geology Mr Templar,” he said milkily. “That wasn’t so difficult.”
“Has anything been difficult for you?”
It was dulcet sarcasm of the most treacly kind, but it was also another delicate challenge to go on.
The Saint threw away the stub of his cigarette and lighted another, without hurrying. It was all taking time — time in which Hank Reefe could catch up with his assignment. And that would give the Saint at least one ally within useful distance, and according to his irrepressible arithmetic, leave him almost nothing to cope with himself except four men, a Tommy gun, and a few other items of assorted ordnance.
And there was no reason why he shouldn’t go on talking, as long as Valmon and Julius wanted to listen. He was telling them nothing that they didn’t know already, except how much he knew himself — and they could have used unnecessarily unpleasant methods to try to find that out. But in the circumstances he had no objection to telling them. It was a convenient way of verifying his own deductions — and at the same time he was steadily building up the subtle moral advantage that he had assumed from the first instant, the gnawing doubt in their minds that any man in his position could talk so coolly and cheerfully without having at least one ace up his sleeve. He wanted that idea to germinate in them all by itself...
“It’s all been a most amusing plot,” he murmured. “Valmon makes this strike on his ranch, or somebody makes it for him, but anyway, he’s still a good Heinie under his ten-gallon hat, so the nearest Bund heeler is the first to hear of it — unless Maxie wears that exalted title himself, which is most likely. Anyway, there’s no commotion. There is a little quiet geologising and assaying, and the word goes back to Berlin that this is rich. Awful rich. And one of the things that the Fatherland needs quite badly, to kill a few more un-kultured barbarians with. So badly that the great Dr Julius comes here in person to organise it. Now unfortunately the nasty Jewish-controlled and plutocracketeering United States have passed a lot of unsympathetic embargoes against giving nice little Nazis materials to make fireworks with. But that might be gotten around. This is a pretty deserted part of the world, and a lot of machinery could be quietly brought in, and you could rake up plenty of demobilised Bundsmen with the skill to work it, and get a mine going that nobody else knew anything about — and smuggle the produce out and away to a suitable coast where it could be sneaked on to a freight-carrying submarine and carted off to dear old Deutschland. A very pretty and enterprising scheme, and well worth the trouble when you figure that a lode like this must be good for hundreds of tons of pure mercury. And if I’m not mistaken, mercury is the stuff that makes the detonators that pop off the bombs and shells that your Aryan heroes are distributing to illuminate the beauties of the New Order to the admiring women and children of the world.”
He had all the confirmation he needed in Max Valmon’s fixed ivorine smile, in the softly perspiring pink attentiveness of Ludwig Julius.
He went on after a moment, with the same hibernal confidence that was holding them at arm’s length almost like a sword in his hand, even though he knew that his dialogue was running out and he was coming to the dizzy end of certainty like a downhill skier racing towards a precipice.