Read Online The Saint to the Rescue by Leslie Charteris - Free Book Online Page B

let one landmark out of sight
before another could be identified. Whereas the helicopter, after
crossing the split ribbon of the new
turnpike at no more than three hundred feet, had grad ually let down until it was cruising at what might
have been little more than treetop
height, if there had been any trees
important enough to judge by. Mr. Diehl was aware that they made a number of changes of direction, as
the copter obeyed the impulses of
its pilot with some of the irresponsibility
of a mechanical hummingbird; but the noise of the rotors made conversation
difficult, and Mr. Diehl did not
want to seem fussy or uneasy, so he confined himself to grinning occasionally and trying to look as if
he were enjoying every minute.
    When the engine note finally changed a little, and the heli copter tilted to a standstill and settled slowly
to the ground like a rather unsteady
elevator, Mr. Diehl would not even have
bet on which county he was in. His last orientation point had been some distant watery horizon that could
equally well have been the Atlantic
Ocean or the forty-mile diameter of
Lake Okeechobee: he had not been watching the com pass, and in any case he was vague about the turns
they had made since then. But the
Count seemed to know what he was
doing, and when the overhead blades had shuddered to silence Mr. Diehl turned to him in a passable
impersona tion of a man who had gone
along on a dozen or two similar expeditions.
    “You sure know how to drive this
egg-beater, Count,” he said.
    “Luckily for us,” said the Saint, unbuckling his safety
belt and climbing out. “If anything happened
to me, it wouldn’t be any more use to you than a kid’s tricycle for getting out of here, would it?”
    “You can say that again,” grinned
Mr. Diehl.
    “And what chance do you think you’d have
of making it on foot?”
    Mr. Diehl gazed around. They were near the
edge of one of the small lakes or large ponds that were visible
everywhere from the air. The ground where they had landed and imme diately
around where they stood felt firm underfoot, but not far away water
glistened between blades of sedge that would have looked like dry
land from above. And everywhere else was nothing but the endless rippling
expanse of wild grass varied sometimes by a fringe of reeds or a
clump of palmettos, and broken only by an occasional scrawny tree or tuft of
cabbage palm or the bare ghostly trunk of a dead cypress. Mr. Diehl
tried not to let it impress him.
    “I’m glad I won’t have to try.”
    “Then,” said the Saint calmly,
“I guess you won’t care how much I charge for flying you out.”
    Mr. Diehl laughed heartily—not because he saw
the joke, but because he thought he was supposed to.
    “I should say not. What’s your
price?”
    “At this moment, only forty thousand
dollars.”
    Mr. Diehl laughed again, a little more
vaguely.
    “That’s mighty generous of you.”
    “I’m glad you think so,” said the
Saint, and thereupon took his spinning rod out of the cabin and
cautiously ex plored a route to the edge of the open water and began to fish.
    Mr. Diehl watched him somewhat puzzledly for
a few min utes, and then decided that such incomprehensible foreign pleasantries were hardly worth racking his brain over. He fetched his
own rod and tackle box and found a place a little farther along
to try some casting himself.
    It is possible that the bass in that remote
slough were every whit as innocent and unspoiled as the Count of Cristamonte
had theorized, but after a time it began to seem that even if
they had never learned to suspect a hook they had grown up with
much the same dumb instincts and habits as other bass, a species which does
most of its feed ing at dusk and dawn and is inclined to spend the heat of the day
digesting or snoozing or holed up in finny medita tion. At any rate, a
wide variety of lures and retrieves failed to get either of
them a strike, and Mr. Diehl himself could recognize that the only signs of
activity