Senor Saint by Leslie Charteris

Author:Leslie Charteris [Charteris, Leslie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781258195564
Publisher: Literary Licensing, LLC
Published: 2011-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

V

How Simon Templar walked in the Sun,

and Drank from various Bottles

The Saint's jacket was gone, and his trouser pockets had been emptied of everything except a handful of small change which had been almost contemptuously left. He took out a five-lire piece and dropped it out of the window from arm's length. It vanished into the gloom below, but for as long as he strained his ears he could not hear it strike bottom. Whatever was below the window had to be a long way down.

But the door offered no alternative. It was massively constructed of thick planks bolted together and belted with iron straps; and while the lock would probably have been easy to pick if he had had any sort of tool, there was simply nothing on him or in the bare room that he could use. The window might seem like a kind of Russian roulette with five chambers loaded, but it was the only possible way out. And to remain there was certain death.

Without wasting another instant of precious time, Simon tore the blanket from the cot and began to rip it into usable strips. Knotted together, along with the cord with which he had been tied, they gave him a rope about thirty feet long and of highly speculative strength. He had often read about this standard device, like everyone else, but had had just as few occasions as anyone to try it out in practice. There was no way to test it in advance, other than by strenuous tugging, which appeared to reveal no intrinsic weakness. Less than ten minutes after he had been locked in, he had one end of the rope secured to the frame of the bed, and the bed itself propped up across the window, allowing the greatest possible length of his improvised hawser to hang down the wall.

He sat on the sill, his legs dangling over the void, and studied as much as he could of the situation. Though the details of the gorge below were still concealed by the morning mist, the sky was now rapidly lightening—enough to disclose a broadening range of topographical features.

The cliff on which the house was perched formed part of one side of a narrow valley through which straggled a small village with a fair-sized church spire reaching above the white houses. Beyond the town the hills rose again abruptly, and even higher peaks probed skyward in the distance. To the left, through the clearing haze, he could just make out a thin ribbon of road winding upwards along the opposite slope; to the right, it seemed to descend from the village. Holding on with one hand and leaning as far out as he could, he was rewarded with a glint of sunlight reflected on water, far off in the latter direction. The road to the right, then, led down towards the sea, and that would be the direction of escape. He hadn't the vaguest idea where on the map he was, but

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