Saint Overboard by Leslie Charteris Page B

compar ison; and then, as Vogel began to drag himself up and around with
the gun still clutched in his right hand, she saw the Saint launch himself up
with a ripple of brown muscles to curve over with
hardly a splash into the sea.
    He went down in a long shallow dive, and
swam out of the Falkenberg’s circle of light
before he rose. He had judged his timing and his angle so well that the canoe
flashed past his eyes as he broke the surface. He put up one hand
and caught the gunnel as it went by, nearly upsetting the craft until the
man in it leaned out to the other side and balanced it.
    “I thought I told you to say goodbye to
France,” said the Saint.
    “I thought I told you I didn’t take your
orders,” said the other grimly.
    “They were Loretta’s orders, Steve.”
    Murdoch dug in the paddle and dragged the canoe round the stern of
another yacht moored in the river.
    “She’s crazy, too,” he snarled.
“Because you’ve got around her with your gigolo line doesn’t mean I
don’t know what she’ll say when she comes to her senses. I’m staying
where I like.”
    “And getting shot where you like, I
hope,” murmured Simon. “I won’t interfere in the next bonehead
play you make. I only butted in this time to save Loretta. Next
time, you can take your own curtain.”
    “I will,” said Murdoch prophetically.
“Let go this boat.”
    Simon let go rather slowly, resisting the
temptation to release his hold with a deft jerk that would have
capsized the canoe and damped the pugnaciousness of its ungrateful
occupant. He won dered whether Murdoch’s aggressiveness was founded on
sheer blind
ignorance of what might have been the result of his clumsy intrusion, or whether it was put up to bluff away
the knowledge of having made an egregious mistake; and most of all he won dered what else would come of the insubordinations
of that tough inflexible personality.
    One of those questions was partly answered
for him very quickly.
    He sculled back with his hands, under the
side of the yacht near which they had parted company, listening to the low
sono rous purr of a powerful engine that had awoken in the darkness. There were
no lights visible through any of the portholes, and he concluded that the
crew were all on shore. He was on the side away from the Falkenberg, temporarily screened even from the most lynx-eyed
searcher. The purr of the engine grew louder; and with a quick
decision he grasped a stanchion, drew himself up, and rolled over
into the tiny after cockpit.
    He reached it only a second before the beam
of a young searchlight swept over the ship, wiping a bar of brilliant
illu mination across the deck in its passing. The throb of the engine droned
right up to him; and he hitched a very cautious eye over the edge of
the cockpit, and saw the Falkenberg’s speed tender churning
around his refuge, so close that he could have touched it with a boathook. A
seaman crouched up on the foredeck, swinging the powerful spotlight that was
mounted there; two other men stood up beside the wheel, following the path of
the beam with their eyes. Its long finger danced on the water, touched
luminously on the hulls of other craft at their anchorages, stretched faintly
out to the more distant banks of the es tuary … fastened
suddenly on the shape of a canoe that sprang up out of the dark as if from
nowhere, skimming towards the bathing pool at the end of the Plage du
Prieur é . The canoe veered
like a startled gull, shooting up parallel with the rocky foreshore;
but the beam clung to it like a magnetised bar of light, linking it with
the tender as if it were held by intangible cables. At the same
time the murmur of the tender’s engine deepened its note: the
bows lifted a little, and a white streamer of foam lengthened
away from the stern as the link-bar of light between the two
craft shortened.
    The canoe turned once more, and headed south again, the man in it paddling with unhurried strokes again, as if
he was trying to