Saint and the Fiction Makers Read Online Free PDF Page B

been showing such an extraordinary interest in making the acquaintance of Finlay Hugoson’s gold-ovulating goose might have beaten him to the place and already roared away with the author in a cloud of advance royalty offers. On the other hand, it was just as possible that Klein had gone to bed quite peacefully. Simon’s apprehension about the eventuality of a kidnapping was eased when he quietly tested the front door and found it locked. He rapped and waited. Then he heard an irregular bumping sound coming faintly from the rear of the place. It was not any sort of sound that one would expect to be made by a man alone in the middle of the night, and it did not last long.
    Instantly, the Saint was balanced like an alerted leopard, ready for anything. He moved with the silent stealth of a cat around the sides of the cottage, until he had satisfied himself that there was no one else in the garden. Then the bumping sounds, which clearly came from within the house, began again. Simon started to knock on the back door, near which he was now poised, but something caught his eye which he had not seen before: a razor edge of light at french windows to his left. The apparent darkness of the cottage, then, was due at least in part to thick hangings inside the windows. Simon moved quickly to take a look through the curtains just in time to see what appeared to be the demise of the object of his trip.
    A dark-suited man, seated in front of a typewriter, was slipping slowly forward and to the floor, a long knife projecting from between his shoulder blades.
    The Saint’s automatic was already in his hand. Almost simultaneously with blasting away the lock on the french windows with a single shot, he kicked the windows open and, without making a target of himself, prepared to incapacitate anything hostile. But all he saw was a most unhostile and terrified-looking girl leaning back against the opposite wall. She was standing, her ankles lashed together, her wrists apparently in the same condition behind her. A white towel was tied around her head, restricting her powers of communication to a series of mouselike squeaks.
    The room had only one exit into the rest of the cottage, and Simon dashed to that open door. A glance down the central hall told him that the front entrance was closed and bolted from inside. He had heard no sound of the nearby kitchen door being opened, which could only mean that the wielder of the knife was in all probability still in the house. He did not, however, have time to plan at his own pace what he would do about the situation because suddenly a bullet slammed into the lintel above his head, accompanied by the loud report of a pistol which would have sent a man with nerves of anything less than pure platinum jumping at least five feet.
    Simon whirled, ducking, and saw the captive girl, her back to him, holding a revolver upside down in her roped hands. She was hopping towards the open french windows, the nose of her weapon waving like the nozzle of a garden hose as she fired it again—this time into a picture on the wall at a quite comfortable distance from the Saint.
    ‘Hold it!’ he shouted at her. ‘I’m a friend.’
    Her third shot, remarkably near his feet considering that both he and she were moving and that she was not even looking in his direction, said more about her scepticism than any number of words.
    ‘Cut that out so I can catch the people who did this,’ he yelled at her.
    In his lunge to catch her arm, while at the same time he tried to keep his eye on the hall door for a possible flanking attack, he almost fell over the body of the man who had been seated at the typewriter. Simon’s foot, instead of meeting the solid resistance of bone and flesh, sent the man’s form skidding across the floor as if it had been a mere bag of straw.
    And that was more or less what it was. It was no man. It was a well-dressed dummy.
    The Saint had no time to inspect the oddity for the moment. His attention