The Saint in Miami (24 page)

Chikees formed a square around the central kitchen. They were similar to the roofed fireplace, except that they had floors of plaited saplings raised several feet above the ground. Blanketed forms roused from the floors at the stopping of the marsh buggy, while others rose from where they had been sitting on the fire logs; and when Simon stepped down and stretched his aching limbs he found himself surrounded by a curious group of them.

Charlie Halwuk spoke quickly, and the circle of faces lightened. A clatter of welcome, which Simon decided was friendly, broke out in the liquid Seminole tongue.

“They give us sofkee,” interpreted Charlie Halwuk, and got down.

Mr Uniatz followed stiffly, and Gallipolis without his gun. One of the Seminoles reached out suddenly and felt the material of Hoppy’s blazer. He made a comment which brought back several excited echoes. More Indians crowded up, chatterring guttural enthusiasm for the screaming colours of the blazer, and formed a guard of honour to escort Hoppy to a log which served as a chair. Charlie Halwuk watched the demonstration with a certain possessive pride.

“Him damn good man,” he said, reverting to a previous impression.

“Boss,” Hoppy said pathetically, “what goes on?”

“They like you,” said the Saint. “You seem to have carried away half of the Seminole nation with your irresistible charm. For God’s sake try to look as if you appreciated it.”

A wizened Indian, whom Charlie Halwuk treated with the deference due to a chief, ceremoniously passed out sofkee in coconut bowls. It proved to be ground cornmeal mush, undoubtedly wholesome enough, but a dish which any gourmet could have spared from his menu. Fortunately the other items were more appetising. There came turkey stew, sweet potatoes, and cowpeas. There were also oranges. Simon bit into one, and found his mouth suddenly curdled into an acidulous ball.

“Plenty wild, plenty sour,” said Charlie contentedly. “You eatum long time, then like’um.”

Simon decided that that was another exotic taste which he could afford not to acquire.

When the meal was finished, the Greek’s eyelids were drooping and Mr Uniatz was snoring majestically in the shade watched by an immobile circle of worshippers. The Saint felt his own eyes growing heavy. Against all his deeper impulses, he forced himself to let the insidious lethargy take its course. To give time to sleep, in the circumstances, seemed like a kind of treason; and yet he knew that it was as vital as eating. If he were to arrive at the destination where he was going with any of his faculties below their peak, he might almost as well not make the trip at all.

He awoke refreshed after an hour of concentrated oblivion, to find Charlie Halwuk squatting beside him.

“Lostman’s River three miles,” announced the Indian, as if there had been no interruption. He found a stick, and rapidly drew an intricate outline in the soil. “We here now. He made a cross, and indicated the space between the cross and the indentations of the coastline. “In here, quicksand. Plenty bad. No can do. We go this way.” A wide spiralling hook. “Too bad. Twelve miles-maybe more.”

“It’s been about that distance ever since I can remember,” said the Saint.

Charlie Halwuk stared reflectively up towards the red ball of the sun.

“Plenty rain. We go on?”

“You spoke about rain last night,” Simon retorted. “If you could produce some, it might freshen us up. Do we pay your people for the meal?”

“You give chief big boy’s coat. He make you son.”

The Saint chuckled.

“I’ve already got one daddy in Miami. See if you can talk Hoppy into it.”

While the Indian went to his task, Simon found some water and rinsed his face. Gallipolis followed his example. Shaking tepid drops out of his curly hair, the Greek studied Simon with a sort of unwilling perplexity.

“I had you all wrong, mister,” he said. “When I saw you in that monkey suit tonight, I didn’t really think you could take three hours of this. Now I won’t even back Charlie Halwuk to stand up longer than you.”

“Don’t put up your money too quickly,” said the Saint “We haven’t arrived yet”

But he smiled when he said it, in spite of himself. He was taking a new lease of confidence. He had lived soft, by these standards, for a long time; but he knew now that he was the same man that he had always been. With the short rest, strength had flowed back into him. A half-forgotten indomitable resilience picked him up again and loosened his thews with freshness. If he failed, he knew now, it would not be because he had failed himself.

He checked the level of the gas tank again, and found that their fuel was more than half gone. He poured in their reserve supply with a silent prayer that it would be enough.

Then, as he climbed into the driving seat again, he saw a historic sight.

Across the clearing, followed by Charlie Halwuk, and at a more respectful distance by the rest of the Seminole village- braves, squaws, and papooses-came Mr Hoppy Uniatz. Arm in arm with him walked the chief, proudly wearing Mr Uniatz’s appalling blazer. In exchange, Mr Uniatz had acquired a ruffle-pleated Seminole shirt with a pattern of vivid rainbow stripes.

The procession reached the marsh buggy, and stopped. The chief put both his hands on Hoppy’s shoulders and made what sounded like a short oration. The rest of the tribe grunted approvingly. The chief stepped back like a French general who has just bestowed a medal.

Hoppy got into the marsh buggy and said hoarsely: “Boss, get me outa here.”

The tribe stood like wooden totem poles, silently watching, as Simon engaged the clutches and the huge wheels rolled again.

“I never knew,” said the Saint, in an awed voice, “that you were a graduate of the Dale Carnegie Institute.”

Mr Uniatz swallowed bashfully.

“Chief say him come back,” interpreted Charlie Halwuk complacently. “Marry chief’s daughter. Damn good.”

The heat beat down until it felt like a tangible weight on Simon’s scalp, and he felt certain that at any moment the shallow patches of water about them would break into a boil. But it hardly seemed to affect him physically any more. He was getting his second wind, and the discomfort was almost welcome because it left him no energy to feed into his imagination. He didn’t want to do too much thinking. There were too many things in the background of his mind that were not good to think about. He wanted to black them out and concentrate on nothing but the grim task of getting to the only place where thinking would do any good.

And then came the rain.

A crackling sound, as sharp as the sound of a brush fire, heralded the foresweep of a blast of humid air. Black storm-clouds drove westwards before it and curtained the brazen sun with palls of gunmetal. For seconds the world seemed to stand motionless under the strain of a supernatural compression. Then the clogged skies burst open and let loose the deluge that Charlie Halwuk had prophesied.

This was no gentle shower greening the fields of England, no light drizzle blending with the sea spray on the coasts of Maine. It was flat and hard and tropically brutal, pounding straight down to gouge a million tiny craters out of the swamp water and blot out all vision beyond a few yards with its grey dripping wall.

They drove on. Their clothes were soaked as suddenly as the storm struck, but each sodden body turned into a ball of steam. It stung their faces like a sort of soggy hail, and smashed in thousands of tiny dancing shell-bursts over the engine cowling. But the marsh buggy kept going, as ponderous and impervious as a great groping tortoise. Time had no more significance; it ceased to exist, smothered under the borderless avalanche of leaden wet.

As the afternoon wore on there was an almost imperceptible change.

“Quit soon now,” said Charlie Halwuk.

Twenty minutes later the beating in the hammocks and bayheads was still, as abruptly as it had begun, and bars of light from the setting sun broke through the vanishing clouds.

The marsh buggy completed the fording of another sluggishly rolling stream, and Simon stopped to squeeze some of the dripping water out of his hair.

And then he was aware of another strange noise.

It was like nothing he had ever heard before. Superficially, it was nothing but a chorus of ferocious squeals and gruntings. But it had a savagery and a blood lust in it that was worse than the roar of a tiger or a panther’s scream-a shrill bestial fury that sent cold trickles crimping up his spine.

“What on earth is that?” he asked.

“Plenty wild porkers,” said Charlie Halwuk. “Plenty bad. They catch somebody. Plenty better we go other way.”

Simon had started the marsh buggy moving when the full meaning of the speech dawned on him. He let go the clutch levers.

“You mean somebody?” he demanded incredulously. “A man?”

The Indian pointed down the stream to the right Simon could see nothing at first; but with a sudden reckless defiance he used opposite brake and clutch to jerk the buggy around and plunge it back towards the stream.

“No can help,” Charlie Halwuk said sharply. “Porkers tear you up plenty quick. Plenty better you stop.”

“To hell with it,” said the Saint grittily. “If wild pigs have caught a man there, I’m not going to run away.”

And then he saw it.

Straight ahead was a mass of tangled roots which might have bordered a mangrove island. A single tree stood up above the level of undergrowth, and a flutter of human clothing moved in its branches. At the base of the tree a clear patch of ground was dappled with darting black evil shadows; and as the buggy ploughed nearer the grunting of slavering tusked mouths swelled in a vicious crescendo.

“Those hogs are meaner than wildcats,” said Gallipolis, rising with his machine gun. “Better let me use this on ‘em.”

“Wait a minute,” said the Saint, and turned to the Indian. “How far are we from the lodge now, Charlie?”

“Maybe mile. Maybe little more.”

“Could you hear shooting that far in this country?”

“Hear it more. Shooting no good anyhow. Porkers worse than wild boar.”

Simon’s mouth set in a stubborn line. If he had behaved as he perhaps should have behaved on that mission, he would have shut his eyes and gone on. But to leave any innocent human being to that horrible squalling doom was more than the flesh he was built out of could have done. Besides, any human being who was found so close to March’s secret hideaway might be a more important rescue than he could guess.

He reversed the buggy and watched the course of the stream for a few seconds. It rippled deep into the roots along the shore of the islet …

Before anyone could have forestalled his intention, Simon grabbed a wrench and opened the drain plug under the gasoline tank.

“What the hell!” yelled Gallipolis; and the Saint smiled at him satanically.

“Get tough about it and I’ll let it all go,” he said gently, and the Greek sank back as Mr Uniatz crowded the muzzle of a warning Betsy into his sacro-iliac.

Simon dumped about two gallons, and then tightened the plug again while the floating oil spread into smudged rainbows as the moving water carried it downstream.

He flicked lighted matches into it until it flashed into flame. Burning brightly, it floated down to the rain-soaked island and seeped its fire in among the knotted roots. The feet of the savage pigs were suddenly enveloped in a sheet of fire, and their ravening grunts turned into ear-splitting shrieks of terror. There was a wild rush into the water, where their lean black bodies churned frantically away from the searing blaze. Most of them reached the opposite shore and went on without stopping through the rustling underbrush like a frenzied herd of Gadarene swine.

The blazing gas smoked blackly, and died out without having been able to set fire to the freshly sodden mangroves. Simon nosed the marsh buggy into the island, grasped an overhanging bough, and pulled himself up on to relatively dry land in time to catch the slight limp figure that fell more than it climbed down out of the tree in which it had found precarious sanctuary.

The reddening sun that was slipping down under the horizon struck a last flare of even more vivid red from the tousled mane of her hair. Incredibly, it was Karen Leith.

2
“I was just wondering where you’d got to,” murmured the Saint, in classical understatement.

In place of the billowy white dress of the night before, she wore a blue slack suit that might once have been trickily cut in a stylish travesty of a labourer’s dungarees. Now, muddy and torn and bedraggled, it was something that no self-respecting labourer would have been seen in. And yet he discovered with a little surprise, that she had a quality which could transcend even those detractions. The wet clinging clothes only revealed new harmonies in her figure, and the grime on her tired face seemed if anything to enhance the fairness of its modelling. It was something that Simon took in at this time without letting it sway the icy detachment that was creeping into him.

Hoppy Uniatz was impressed for a different reason. His eyes had a somewhat crustacean aspect as they goggled at the girl.

“Boss,” he said earnestly as though he were trying to argue the apparition away. “I leave you wit’ dis wren in de clip jernt.”

“That’s right, Hoppy,” said the Saint
“You don’t bring her out here witcha.”

“No, Hoppy.”

“Den how,” demanded Mr Uniatz logically, “can she be sittin” up in dat tree?”

Gallipolis mopped his steaming forehead with a wet bandanna and said: “This whole damn business is getting too much for me.”

“Have any of you got a cigarette?” asked the girl calmly.

Simon took out his case. The contents were on the damp side, but the metal had saved them from total dissolution. He offered it to her, and helped himself. He noticed that her slim hands were soiled and scarred, and yet their unsteadiness was so rigidly controlled that he had to look closely for it.

“Well,” he said, after he had given her a light, “I know that this life of sin is full of mysteries, but for once I think Hoppy has got something.”

Her deep violet eyes studied the Martian contours of the marsh buggy, and then deliberately went over the four men -Hoppy, Gallipolis, Charlie Halwuk, lastly the Saint. Simon realised that none of them could have looked much more civilised than she did, and wondered if she saw the same stony purposefulness in all of them that he saw in her. He had to hand that to her also. In spite of the ordeal that she had just been through she was keyed with the same delicate inner core of steel that he had sensed in her once before.