Free The Saint on the Spanish Main by Leslie Charteris Page B

happen?”
    “The umbrella would be like a parachute.
It would be like a sort of sky anchor holding the shaft back. The
air resistance would be so great that I’m wondering how anyone,
even a very strong man, could get much momentum into the
thrust. And the more force he put into it, the more likely he’d be to
lift himself off the ground, rather than drive the spike
down.”
    Fanshire digested this, blinking, and took
his full time to do it.
    “That certainly is a thought,” he
admitted. “But damn it,” he exploded, “we know it was done. So
it must have been possible.”
    “There’s something entirely backwards
about that logic,” said the Saint. “Suppose we say, if it
was im possible,
maybe it wasn’t done.”
    “Now you’re being a little
ridiculous,” Fanshire snapped. “We saw—”
    “We saw a man with the sharp iron-tipped
shaft of a beach umbrella through his chest. We jumped to the
natural conclusion that somebody stuck it into him like a sword.
And that may be just what a clever murderer meant us to
think.”
    Then it was Arthur Gresson who shattered the
fragile silence by leaping out of his chair like a bouncing ball.
    “I’ve got it!” he yelped.
“Believe me, everybody, I’ve got it! This’ll kill you!”
    “I hope not,” Major Fanshire said
dryly. “But what is it?”
    “Listen,” Gresson said. “I knew
something rang a bell somewhere, but I couldn’t place it. Now it all
comes back to me. This is something I only heard at the hotel the other
day, but some of you must have heard it before. It happened about a year ago, when
Gregory Peck was visiting here. He stayed at
the same hotel where I am, and one
afternoon he was on the beach, and the wind came up, just like it did today,
and it picked up one of those beach
umbrellas and carried it right to where
he was lying, and the point just grazed his ribs and gave him a nasty gash, but what the people who saw it happen were saying was that if it’d been just a
few inches the other way, it could
have gone smack into his heart, and
you’d’ve had a film star killed in the most sensational way that ever
was. Didn’t you ever hear about that,
Major?”
    “Now you mention it,” Fanshire said
slowly, “I think I did hear something about it.”
    “Well,” Gresson said, “what
if it happened again this afternoon, to someone who wasn’t as lucky as
Peck?”
    There was another of those electric silences
of as similation, out of which Lucy Wexall said: “Yes, I heard about
that.” And Janet said: “Remember, I told you about it! I was visiting
some friends at the hotel that day, and I didn’t see it happen, but I was
there for the commotion.”
    Gresson spread out his arms, his round face
gleaming with excitement and perspiration.
    “That’s got to be it!” he said.
“You remember how Vosper was lying under the umbrella outside the patio when we
started playing touch football, and he got sore because we were
kicking sand over him, and he went off to the other end of
the beach? But he didn’t take the umbrella with him. The wind did that,
after we all went off to change. And this time it didn’t miss!”
    Suddenly Astron stood up beside him; but
where Gresson had risen like a jumping bean, this was like the growth and unfolding of a tree.
    “I have heard many words,” Astron
said, in his firm gentle voice, “but now at last I think I am hearing
truth. No man struck the blasphemer down. The arrow of God smote
him, in his wickedness and his pride, as it was written long ago in
the stars.”
    “You can say that again,” Gresson
proclaimed trium phantly. “He sure had it coming.”
    Again the Saint drew at his cigarette and
created his own vision behind half-closed eyes. He saw the huge umbrella
plucked from the sand by the invisible fingers of the wind, picked up and
hurled spinning along the deserted twilight beach, its great mushroom spread of gaudy canvas no
longer a drag now but a sail for the wind
to get behind, the