Simon obeyed. He was unable to see much of his surroundings, for the truck had been backed up against a crumbling stone doorway, and the torchlights were so concentrated on him that practically everything else was in black shadow.
Two of the men closed in on him as his feet touched the ground, ramming their guns into his sides. He was thrust on through the doorway into what seemed to be a bare and damp and uninhabited hall and halted with his face to one bleak stone wall. Then while a gun was still held against his spine swift and efficient hands went over him again. His pockets were completely emptied, even to his cigarette case, his automatic lighter and his loose change; and one of the investigating hands felt along his sleeve and removed the knife strapped to his forearm. After the demonstration he had given in Bryerby House, thought the Saint, that was only to be expected; but he would have been happier if it had been overlooked as it had been so many times before.
"So!" came the Z-Man's sneering voice. "The knife, it voss somevere, und it we find. Goot! Mit throwings you are through!"
"You've got beyond the Dennis stage now, brother," said the Saint appreciatively, although he was now without a weapon of any kind. "I can only assume that you must have been reading the Katzenjammer Kids."
A rope was pulled tightly around his wrists, pinioning them together in front of him. Again he was told to move, and he found himself ascending a spiral staircase of vertiginous steepness. Most of the treads were broken and rotting and creaked alarmingly under his weight. The staircase wound itself like a corkscrew around the inner wall of a round tower, which rose straight up from what he had first taken for a sort of hall. At one time, no doubt, there had been a guarding balustrade on the off side; but this had long since ceased to exist, and there was nothing between the climber and a sheer drop to the flagstones below. At the top he stepped off the last tread onto the floor of what might once have been a small turret room, but which was now hardly more than an unrailed ledge suspended over the black abyss. The only windows were two narrow embrasures through which he could see nothing but darkness. He was placed against the wall away from the stairs and close to the edge of the floor, and the other end of the rope around his wrists was run through a heavy iron ring set in the masonry above his head and made fast.
"I can still kick," he observed solicitously. "Are you sure you're not taking a lot of chances?"
"That will not be for long," said the Z-Man.
A block of stone weighing about a hundredweight, with a rope round it, was dragged across the floor, and the rope was tied round the Saint's ankles.
"You vill kick now?" asked the Z-Man. "Yess?"
"I fancy — no," answered the Saint.