Free Saint Overboard by Leslie Charteris Page B

that came instinctively to his lips; the prow
brushed his hair, and he sub merged himself a
fraction of a second before the paddle speared down at him. When he came up again the canoe had vanished as silently as it had come. He caught a glimpse of it
again as it arrowed across the reflected lights of the Casino de la
Vicomt é , and sent a string of inaudible
profanities sizzling across the wa ter at
the unknown pilot, apparently without causing him to drop dead by remote control.
    Then the hull of the Falkenberg loomed
up for undivided at tention. At the very edge of the circle of visibility shed
by its lights, he paused to draw a deep breath; and then even his head disappeared
under the water, and his hands touched the side before he let himself
float gently up again and open his lungs.
    He rose under the stern, and trod water while
he listened for any sound that would betray the presence of a watcher on the deck. Above the undertones of
the harbour he heard the murmur of voices
coming through open portholes in two different direc tions, the dull creak of metal and the seep of the
tide making under the hull; but there was no trace of the sharper sound
that would have been made by a man out in the
open, the rustle of cloth or the
incautious easing of a cramped limb. For a full three minutes the Saint
stayed there, waiting for the least faint dis turbance
of the ether that would indicate the wakefulness of a reception committee prepared to welcome any such
unauthor ised prowler as himself. And
he didn’t hear any such thing.
    The Saint dipped a hand to his belt and
brought it carefully out of the water with a mask which he had
tucked in there be fore he left the Corsair. It was made of black
rubber, as thin and supple as the material of a toy balloon; and when he
pulled it on over his head it covered every inch of his face from the
end of his nose upwards, and held itself in place by its own gentle elas ticity.
If by any miscalculation he was to be seen by any member of the
crew, there was no need for him to be recognised.
    Then he set off again to work himself round
the boat. There were three lighted portholes aft, and he stopped by the first
of them to find a finger-hold. When he had got it he hauled himself up out of the water, inch by
inch, till he could bend one modest eye
over the rim.
    He looked into a large cabin running the whole width of the vessel. A treble tier of bunks lined two of the
three sides which he could see, and
seemed to be repeated on the side from which he was looking in. On two of them half-dressed men were stretched out, reading and smoking. At a table in
the centre four others, miscellaneously attired in shirtsleeves,
jerseys, and singlets, were playing a game of cards, while a fifth was trying
to poach enough space out of one side to
write a letter. Simon ab sorbed their
faces in a travelling glance that dwelt on each one in turn, and mentally ranked them for as tough a
harvest of hard- case sea stiffs as anyone could hope to glean from the
scourings of the seven seas. They came up to
his expectations in every single
respect, and two thin fighting lines creased themselves into the corners of his mouth as he lowered himself
back into the river as stealthily as
he had pulled himself out of it.
    The third porthole lighted a separate smaller
cabin with only four bunks, and when he looked in he had to peer between
the legs of a man who was reclining on the upper berth across the porthole.
By the light brick-red hosiery at the ends of the legs he identified
the sleuth who had trailed him that afternoon; and on the opposite side of
the cabin the man who had been busily doing nothing in the foyer of the Hotel de la Mer, with one
shoe off and the other unlaced, was intent
on filling his pipe.
    He couldn’t look into any of the principal rooms without ac tually climbing out on to the deck, but from the
scraps of con versation that floated out through the windows he gathered
that was where the entertainment