Saint Goes West by Leslie Charteris Read Free Book Online Page A

vanish altogether in a hundred yards, he was sure that no prospective sniper had come within sharp-shooting range of them. Yet…
    He stopped his horse abruptly, after a time, as the broad flat that they had been riding over ended suddenly at the brink of a sharp cliff. At the foot of the bluff, another long column of tall silent palms bordered a rustling stream. He lighted a cigarette, and wondered cynically how many of the spoiled playboys and playgirls who used Palm Springs for their wilder weekends, and saw nothing but the smooth hotels and the Racquet Club, ever realised that the name was not just a name, and that there really were Palm Springs, sparнkling and crystal clear, racing down out of the overshadowing mountains to make hidden nests of beauty before they washed out into the extinction of the barren plain…
    Freddie Pellman reined in beside him, looked the landscape over, and said, tolerantly, as if it were a production that had been offered for his approval: “This is pretty good. Is this where we eat?”
    “If everybody can take it,” said the Saint, “there’s a pool further up that I’d like to look at again.”
    “I can take it,” said Freddie, comprehensively settling the matter.
    Simon put his horse down the steep zigzag, and stopped at the bottom to let it drink from the stream. Freddie drew up beside him again-he rode well enough, having probably been raised to it in the normal course of a millionaire’s son’s upнbringing-and said, still laboring with the same subject: “Do you really think one of the girls could be in on it?”
    “Of course,” said the Saint calmly. “Gangsters have girl friends. Girl friends do things like that.”
    “But I’ve known all of them for some time at least.”
    “That may be part of the act. A smart girl wouldn’t want to make it too obvious-meet you one day, and bump you off the next. Besides, she may have a nice streak of ham in her. Most women have. Maybe she thinks it would be cute to keep you in suspense for a while. Maybe she wants to make an anniversary of it, and pay off for Johnny this Christmas.”
    Freddie swallowed.
    “That’s going to make some things-a bit difficult.”
    “That’s your problem,” Simon said cheerfully.
    Freddie sat his saddle unhappily and watched Ginny and Esther coming down the grade. Ginny came down it in a spectacular avalanche, like a mountain cavalry display, and swept off her Stetson to ruffle her hair back with a bored air while her pony dipped its nose thirstily in the water a few yards downstream. Esther, steering her horse down quietly, joined her a little later.
    “But this is Wunnderful!” Ginny called out, looking at the Saint. “How do you find all these marvelous places?” Without waiting for an answer, she turned to Esther and said in a solicitous undertone which was perfectly pitched to carry just far enough: “How are you feeling, darling? I hope you aren’t getting too miserable.”
    Simon was naturally glancing towards them; He wasn’t looking for anything in particular, and as far as he was concerned Esther was only one of the gang, but in those transient circumstances, he felt sorry for her. So for that one moment he had the privilege of seeing one woman open her soul in utter stark sincerity to another woman. And what one woman said to another, clearly, carefully, deliberately, quietly, with serious premeditation and the intensest earnestнness, was “You bitch.”
    “Let’s keep a-goin’,” said the Saint hastily, in a flippant drawl, and lifted his reins to set his horse at the shallow bank on the other side of the stream.
    He led them west towards the mountains with a quicker sureness now, as the sense of the trail came back to him. In a little while it was a track that only an Indian could have seen at all, but it seemed as if he could have found it at the dead of night. There was even a place where weeds and spindly clawed scrub had grown so tall and dense since he had last