Saint Overboard by Leslie Charteris Page A

shadow
out of her own guilty fear; or it might only be a member of the crew put out to play the part and build up the
deception—to be aimed at and perhaps shot at by Vogel with a blank cartridge. But she didn’t know. There
was no way for her to know. She had to choose between letting the Saint
be shot down without warning, or——
    A dozen crazy thoughts crashed through her
head. She might throw a noisy fit of maidenly hysterics. She might sneeze,
or cough, or faint
on his shoulder. But she knew that that was just what he was waiting for her to
do. The first hint of interference that she
gave would brand her for all time. He would have no more doubts.
    She stared at him in a kind of chilled
hopeless agony. She could see his arm extended against the lighter grey of
the deck, the dull
gleam of the automatic held rigidly at the end of it, his black deepset eyes lined unwinkingly along the
sights. Something in the nerveless
immobility of his position shouted at her that he was a man to whom the
thought of missing had never occurred. She
saw the great hungry crook of his nose, the ends of his mouth drawn, back so that the thin lips rolled
under and van ished into two parallel
lines that were as vicious and pitiless as the smile of a cobra would have been. Her own words thundered through her head in a strident mocking chorus:
“When you join Ingerbeck’s, you
don’t sign on for a cocktail party … You take an oath … to do your job … keep your mouth shut … take the consequences …” She
had to choose.
    So had the Saint.
    Moving along the deckhouse roof as silently
as a ghost, he had followed everything that happened outside; lying
spreadeagled over the wheelhouse, he had leaned out at a perilous angle until he could
peer down through one of the windows and see what was happening inside.
He had bunched his muscles in a spasm of impotent
exasperation when he saw Loretta’s hand going out to touch the pencil and
spring the trap, and had breathed again when she drew back.
Everything that she had endured he had felt sympathetically within himself; and
when Vogel came back and took out his
automatic, Simon had heard what was said and had understood that also.
    Now, gathering his limbs stealthily under
him, so close above Loretta’s head that he could almost have reached down and touched
her, he understood much more. The first mention of a man prowling about
the deck had prickled a row of nerve centres all along his spine;
then he had disbelieved; then he had seen the shadow that Loretta
was staring at, and had remembered the dark speeding canoe
which had nearly run him down on his way there. But Loretta
hadn’t seen that; and he knew what she must be thinking. He could
read what was in her mind, could suffer everything she was suffering, as if by
some clairvoyant affinity that transcended
reason he was identified with her in the stress of that satanically conceived ordeal; and there was a queer ex altation in his heart as he stepped off the
wheelhouse roof, out into space over
her head.
    She saw him as if he had fallen miraculously
out of the sky, which was more or less what he did—with one foot knocking
down the automatic and the other striking flat-soled at the side of
Vogel’s head. The gun went off with a crash that echoed back and forth across
the estuary, and Vogel staggered against the rail and fell to his
knees.
    Simon fell across the rail, caught it with his
hands, and hung on for a moment. Down at the after end of the deck, the shape that had
been lurking there detached itself from the shadows and scurried across the narrow
strip of light to clamber over the rail and
drop hectically downwards.
    Loretta Page stared across six feet of Breton
twilight at the miracle—half
incredulously, with the breathlessness of inde scribable relief choking in her throat. She saw the flash of white teeth in a familiar smile, saw him put his fingers
to his lips and kiss them out to her
with a debonair flourish that defied