“God bless my soul!” ejaculated the Saint mildly.
The inconceivable good luck which had stood by him throughout his lawless career, and which had been prodigiously attentive to him in this adventure, was still working overtime. There he was, alive and more or less well, when he ought by rights to have been drowned in the underground stream or lost in the interminable blackness of the caves—and no sooner had his little guiding star picked him out of that mess, and given him a few minutes to get his wind, than he was handed out this incredible gift! It seemed to him that he was streets ahead of the mortal for whom manna falls from Heaven: to the Saint, for no reason that he could cudgel out of his brains, Heaven seemed to spend all its spare time despatching perfectly cooked eight-course dinners with a selection of appropriate wines complete, what time he did nothing more than providing the silver and cutlery. His gods had landed him up in pretty good order at exactly the place where he wanted to be, at exactly the hour he wanted to arrive, and had thoughtfully thrown in the fact that by then the Tiger would be working his gang overtime patting himself on the back for having so slickly annihilated the thorn which for so long had been playing the devil with their ugly hides!
That was certainly an unhoped-for blessing. The Tiger thought Mr. Templar was dead. Well, Mr. Templar decided to let the Tiger cherish that harmless little delusion for a space. Being theoretically dead, the Saint was going to stay dead till it suited his book to stage a resurrection.
There were, of course, contrary considerations. By that time Orace and Pat and Carn would have turned Baycombe inside out, and they would have found only that gaping hole in the floor of the inn. Wherefore at least two of that party, and one of them especially, would be—— But that had got to stand aside. They’d have presumed him dead for some hours now, and it would only mean delaying the homecoming a few more hours. Against that he could set the help it gave him to know that Patricia would be safely out of the fireworks, though he would feel the absence of Orace. All the same, taking it by and large, he reckoned that debit and credit weren’t so far off balancing. With a continuance of his miraculous luck, the curtain could be rung down a lot sooner, now that everything was arranged for him to catch the Tiger on the hop. . . .
“The Saint versus the Tiger,” murmured Simon. “This is where all the early Christian martyrs will look down from Heaven and see the old game played under rules they’d never heard of in Rome—and, we hope, with a surprise ending that Nero never saw.”
It was the Saint himself who spoke. All his bubbling optimism was sparkling up through his system again. He was tired, naturally, but he still felt fit enough to tackle anything the Tiger Cubs were prepared to hand out to him, and he had never reviewed an impending struggle more eagerly, for by all the omens it was going to be the last of his exploits, and his sense of theatre demanded that he should finish up in a blaze of glory.
He searched for his weapons, and found them securely in their places. The cigarettes in his case, which might have been useful, had been ruined by the wet; but the case itself, with the fine steel blade running along one edge of it, was a tried asset in emergencies, and this went into the hip pocket of his trousers. His coat he left in the cave.
Looking down, he saw that there were only a dozen yards to climb down to the beach. With the moon to help him, this was no difficult task. He swung over the edge at once, and in a few minutes he stood on the crunching shingle with the water lapping round his ankles. There was a longish swim yet to get through, but by now he felt capable of all that and more. He waded out up to his waist and then slithered forward into the ripples without a splash, like an otter, and struck out for the Tiger’s ship with clean, powerful strokes.
His arms rose and fell rhythmically, making not the least sound as they cleared the water and then dived back at full stretch. The Saint could keep up that graceful over-arm for hours, but on this occasion he had no need for such a display of stamina. His trained muscles drove him forward tirelessly at a pace that ate up distance. He steered a wide circling course to keep well out of the danger zone between the Old House and the ship, where he might have been spotted by a pair of keen eyes in one of the rowboats or by anyone who happened to be looking across that reach of water from either side, for the moonlight was strengthening with every minute—an act of cussedness on the part of Nature which made the job in hand a more ticklish proposition for both Saint and Tiger alike. Even so, it was not very long before he came up under the motor ship’s cruiser stern, after covering the last hundred yards under water with only three cautious floatings-up for breath.
He clung there for a moment’s rest, and then worked his way along the seaward side, where would be safest, forward to the bows, hugging close in to the hull. It then occurred to him that the climb up the anchor chain, in full view of the island and the ship’s bridge, would be a very chancey method. Yet the vessel’s sides rose sheer and unbroken for six feet before they were cut by the lowest row of portholes.