Read Online Saint's Getaway by Leslie Charteris - Free Book Online Page B

he proceeded methodically
to handicap the wounded warrior’s recovery by dragging up a massive
Chesterfield and laying it gently on the wounded warrior’s bosom. Then he lighted a
cigarette and looked gloomily at Patricia, who had followed him in.
    “Why don’t you scream or
something?” he asked morosely. “It would help to relieve my
feelings.”
    The girl laughed.
    “Wouldn’t it be more useful to do
something about Ethel bert?”
    “What—this nasty piece of work?”
Monty glanced down at the gunman, whose groans were becoming a
fraction less heart rending as his paralyzed respiratory organs creaked
painfully back towards normal. “I suppose it might be. What
shall we do—shoot him?”
    “We might tie him up.”
    “I know. You tear the curtains into
strips, and blow the expense.”
    “There’s a length of rope in Simon’s
bag,” said Patricia calmly. “If you’ll wait a second I’ll
get it for you.”
    She disappeared into the bedroom and returned
in a few moments with a coil of stout cord. Monty took it from her
gin gerly.
    “I suppose there isn’t anything of this
sort that Simon ever travels without,” he commented pessimistically.
“If you’ve got a gallows in the cabin trunk, it may save a lot of mucking about when the police catch us.”
    The gunman was still in no condition to make
any effective resistance. Monty endeavoured to adapt a working
knowledge of knots acquired in some experience of week-end yachting
to the peculiar eccentricities of the human frame, and made a very
passable job of it. Having reduced his victim to a state of blasphemous
helplessness, he dusted the knees of his trousers and turned again to
Pat.
    “I seem to remember that the next item is
a gag,” he said. “Do you know anything about gags?”
    “I have seen it done,” said the girl
unblushingly. “Lend me your handkerchief… . And that other one in
your breast pocket.”
    She bent over the squirming prisoner, and a
particularly vile profanity subsided into a choking gurgle. Monty
watched the performance with admiration.
    “You know, I couldn’t have done that,”
he said. “And I’ve been editing this kind of stuff all my life. The stories never
give you the important details. They just
say: ‘Lionel Strongarm bound and gagged his captive’—and the thing’s done.
Where did you learn it all?”
    Patricia laughed.
    “Simon taught me,” she said simply.
“If there’s anything that makes him see red, it’s inefficiency. He
explains a thing once, and expects you to remember it for the rest
of your life. Your brain’s got to be on tiptoe from the time you get up in
the morning till the time you go to bed at night. He’s like that himself, and
everyone else has got to be the same. It nearly sent me off my rocker
till I got used to it; and then I began to see that I’d been half asleep all my
life, like eighty per cent of other people. He was right, of course.”
    Monty went over and poured himself out a
drink.
    “This is a new line on the private life
of an adventurer,” he murmured. “Did he ever explain what one
should do when stranded in a hotel with a corpse on the bed and a gun
artist under the sofa?”
    “That,” said the girl composedly,
“is supposed to be an ele mentary exercise in initiative.”
    Monty grimaced.
    “Some initiative is certainly called
for,” he admitted. “Simon may be away for a week, and then
Stanislaus will begin to smell.”
    He wandered pensively back into the bedroom
and wished that he felt suitably depressed. Two hours ago he would
have expressed no desire at all to find himself in such a situation. Its
potentialities in the way of local colour would have left him
uninspired. Four years in France had left him with a profound appreciation
of the amenities of peace. On several occasions he had told the Saint that
he was always pleased to hear or read of stirring exploits
anywhere, but that as far as he personally was concerned he could enjoy
enough violence