Free Trust the Saint by Leslie Charteris

choose.”
    “And what does he do to prove anything?”
    “I’ll tackle anything with claws that Elias chooses, just using a native spear,” answered Vail.
    “And I thought there ought to be an impartial umpire, like when we picked you at the White Elephant,” said Iantha. “Besides, we couldn’t think of anyone else who could get us in.”
    For a few seconds Simon Templar was silent. The idea was as outrageous as anything he had ever heard, but that was not enough to take his breath away. Contemplated as a pure spectacle, it was an invitation that no epicure of thrills could have refused. The impudence of the assumption that he would be a party to its illicit procurement he could shrug off. He hesitated only while he thought of the reasons why it might be an honest and Saintly duty to put a stop to the whole project; and in the same space of time he realized absolutely that the contest would be decided sometime, somewhere, with or without him, and that the best thing he could do was to be there.
    “All right,” he said. “But we can’t do it by the front gates.”
    “You mean you can’t?” said Vail, in the jovially disparaging tone which he used so masterfully, which almost dared you to reveal yourself such a lout as to take offense. “And I’d heard you were the greatest cracksman since Raffles.”
    “I’m better,” Simon said calmly. “But the main entrance would just be stupid. There are keepers’ cottages all around there. The only animals we’d be likely to get near would be watchdogs.”
    “There speaks the expert. But I’m sure he’d know how to cope with the problem.”
    “I was there once, years ago,” said the Saint slowly. “I remember that on the far side of the grounds, that would be to the northeast, there were some enclosures that ran downhill, and you could walk around them, and then you were outside on a long slope with a fine view but only fields and pastures between you and a road I could see at the bottom. I think, since we’ve got to walk anyhow, if we found that road, there wouldn’t be much to stop us hiking up the hill and into the back of the park.”
    Iantha handed him the map, and he studied it under the dashboard light.
    Then he drove on again.
    Nobody spoke another word before he stopped a second time. He got out and studied the skyline over a gate.
    “This ought to do it,” he said.
    Usebio opened the trunk of the car and took out a folded bundle of cloth, and a short leaf-bladed spear which he handed to Vail. Simon unlatched the gate, and they followed Iantha through.
    It was a steady climb of about three-quarters of a mile over rough grass. Simon set a pace which was intentionally geared to his estimate of the legs of Usebio, whom he didn’t want to exhaust before his trial; he figured that no exertion of that kind should bother Vail. Iantha Lamb, who had worn a loose peasant skirt and flat-heeled shoes which he now realized must have been chosen less for modest simplicity than in shrewd preparedness for any eventuality, kept up without complaining. They negotiated three wire fences on the way, without much difficulty: after the first fifty yards, the moonlight seemed bright enough for a night football game.
    Then presently it was not so bright as they approached the black shadows of the trees and shrubbery that capped the last acres of the rise; and suddenly, startlingly close, belled out a fabulously guttural warning that reverberated in the deepest chords of the human fear-instinct.
    “A lion,” Russell Vail whispered lightly. “We picked a good guide.”
    “I got you in,” said the Saint. “Now you take over.”
    In a moment they were on a narrow road, one of the painlessly macadamized trails on which safaris of short-winded suburbanites and their spoiled progeny were permitted, for an additional fee, to cruise among the fauna in their own little cars.
    “I know where I am now,” said Vail. “I came up this morning to look around.”
    He led them