Free The Saint to the Rescue by Leslie Charteris Page B

enigmati cally, and remembered to wish that he
had brought a gun.
    There had to be some weak point in the
set-up, if he could only find it.
    The Saint came languidly back to life, yawned
and stretched, smoked a cigarette, bathed his face with a cloth ostentatiously
dipped in ice-water from the cooler, hauled out a sheaf of
magazines, and sat down again in the shade to read.
    “You’re crazy,” Mr. Diehl shouted.
    “It just isn’t the time of day to catch
bass,” argued the Saint reasonably. “As a native of. these
parts, you ought to know that. So I’m improving my mind instead of tiring out
my arm. Would you care to join me? I’m renting magazines at only a hundred dollars
a minute for the reading kind, or two hundred for the ones with girlie
photos.”
    Mr. Diehl clenched his teeth to the point of
almost crack ing some expensive bridgework, but managed to suppress an answer
that would have been impractical and unprofit able.
    He was sharply susceptible to hunger, like
any man accus tomed to self-indulgence and a high-calorie diet, but he
also had a cushion of accumulated blubber that could absorb temporary
deprivations without acute distress. Mr. Diehl felt miserably empty
in the stomach, but in no danger of fainting from it. The thirst was much
harder to bear. His propensity for profuse sweating was always a strain on his fluid resources, and the thought of cold cans of beer nestling in arctic
beds of ice cubes or dripping clean refreshing wet ness as they were
lifted out was a refined anguish that became more acute with the passing of
each unslaked minute. It got so bad that even while his pores were
acting like faucets he could hardly find enough internal moisture for a good spit.
    When the sun began to cooperate by dousing
itself pre maturely behind a high bank of clouds in the west, the
Saint finished another can of beer and began fishing again. After a while he
tied on to a fish that erupted from the water like a stung dervish as it
felt the hook, and fought through several more minutes of
explosive leaps and straining runs before the light tackle
could subdue it. Mr. Diehl watched morosely while the Saint
beached it and unhooked it and held it up with a skillful thumb
under its jaw.
    “Would you like it for supper, Ed? Only
two thousand dollars!”
    “You go to hell,” Mr. Diehl said
hoarsely.
    “Just as you like, Ed,” said the
Saint agreeably.
    He put the bass gently back in the water and
released it. Then he slapped at himself a couple of times, and picked his way
back to the shallow mound where the helicopter stood.
    The word “picked” is not just an
idle choice. At one point he froze abruptly on one foot, and remained
thus grotesquely poised for several seconds, while a water moccasin slowly unwound its thick black coils from around the tuft of grass that he
had been about to step on and slithered off into the muck. Mr. Diehl saw
it, and wondered if the Saint was also equipped with
antivenin, and how much a shot would cost anyone else.
    “The mosquitoes are starting to get
hungry,” Simon observed imperturbably, slapping himself again..
    Mr. Diehl had already noticed that. He
squirmed and fanned himself savagely while the Saint leaned into the cabin and
brought out a bottle of insect repellent.
    “I don’t want to rush you, Ed,”
Simon remarked, rubbing himself liberally with the lotion, “but
we don’t seem to be getting anywhere, and pretty soon I’m going to weaken for
the idea of a nice cold shower, some clean clothes, a tall tinkling
Pimm’s Cup in an air-conditioned bar, a prime steak dinner, and a
comfortable bed. If you haven’t given in be fore I do, I guess
I’ll just have to leave you here and hope I can find you again
tomorrow.” He replaced the cap on the bot tle. “Would you
like some of this gunk? You can have it for only five grand, and before morning
you’ll think it was cheap at the price.”
    Mr. Diehl’s small eyes grew bigger with
horror. The last straw that