Prelude for War Read Online Free

drew back across the
corridor, braced himself momen tarily and flung himself
forward again. Hurled by the muscles of a trained
athlete, his shoulder crashed into the door
with all the shattering force of one hundred and seventy-five
pounds of fighting weight behind it, in an impact
that shook every bone in his body; but he might just
as well have charged a steam roller. The floor might be
cracking and crumbling under his feet, but that door was
of tough old English oak seasoned by two hundred years
of history and still untouched by the fire. It would have
taken an axe or a sledge-hammer to break it down.
    His eyes swept it
desperately from top to bottom. And as he looked at it,
two pink fingers of flame curled out from underneath
it. The floor of the room was already taking fire.
    But those little jagged
fangs of flame meant that there was a small space between
the bottom of the door and the floor boards. If he could
only push the key through so that it fell on the
floor inside he might be able to fish it out through
the gap under the door. He whipped out his pen knife
and probed at the keyhole.
    At the first attempt the
blade slipped right through the hole without encountering
any resistance. The Saint bent down and brought his eye
close to the aperture. There was enough firelight inside
the room for him to be able to see the whole outline
of the keyhole. And there was no key in it.
    For one dizzy second his
brain whirled. And then his lips thinned out, and a red glint came into his
eyes that owed nothing to the reflections of the
fire.
    Again he fought his way
incredibly through the hellish barrier of flame that shut off the end of the
corridor. The charred boards gave ominously under
his feet, but he hardly noticed it. He had
remembered noticing something through the suffocating murk on the landing. As
he beat out his smouldering clothes again he located it—a huge medieval battle-axe suspended from two hooks on the wall at the top of the stairs. He measured the distance and jumped, snatching
eagerly. The axe came away, bringing the two hooks
with it, and a shower of plaster fell in his face and half blinded him.
    That shower of grit
probably saved his life. He slumped against the wall,
trying to clear his streaming eyes; and that
brief setback cheated death for the hundredth time in its
long duel with the Saint’s guardian angel. For even as he
straightened up again with the axe in his hands, about twenty
feet of the passage plunged downwards with a heart- stopping
crash in a wild swirl of flame, leaving nothing but a gaping chasm through
which fire roared up in a fiendish fountain
that sent him staggering back before its intolerable heat. The last chance of reaching that locked room
was gone.
    A great weariness fell on
the Saint like a heavy blanket pressing him down. There
was nothing more that he could do.
    He dropped the battle-axe
and stumbled falteringly down the blazing stairs. There
was no more battle now to keep him going. It was sheer
blind automatism rather than any conscious effort on his
part that guided him through another inferno to come
reeling out through the front door, an amazing tatterdemalion outcast from the
jaws of hell, to fall on his hands and knees on the
terrace outside. In a dim faraway manner he was
aware of hands raising him; of a remembered voice, low
and musical, close to his ear.
    “I know you like warm
climates, boy, but couldn’t you have got along with a trip
to   Africa ?”
    He smiled. Between him and
Patricia there was no need for the things that other
people would have had to say. They spoke their own
language. Grimy, dishevelled, with his clothes blackened and singed and his
eyes bloodshot and his body smarting from a
dozen minor burns, the Saint smiled
at her with all his old incomparable impudence.
    “I was trying to
economize,” he said. “And now I shall probably
catch my death of cold.”
    Already the cool night air,
flowing like nectar into his parched lungs,