The Saint Overboard

By LESLIE CHARTERIS

FICTION PUBLISHING COMPANY • NEW YORK

Copyright, 1935, 1936 by Leslie Charteris.

Published by Arrangement with Doubleday & Co., Inc. Printed in U.S.A.

AUTHOR'S FOREWORD

WHEN this book was first published, it appeared with the fol­lowing preface:

For the diving sequences in this story I am deeply indebted to Messrs. Siebe Gorman & Co., of Westminster Bridge Road, London, the well-known submarine engineers, who most kindly made it possible for me to obtain the first-hand experience of diving without which the latter part of this book could not possibly have been written.

For the idea of the story I am indebted solely to history. I have become so used to seeing the adjective "incredible" regu­larly used even in the most flattering reviews of the Saint's ad­ventures, even when I have taken my plots from actual incidents which may be found in the files of any modern newspaper, that I almost hesitate to deprive the critics of their favourite word. But I have decided, after some profound searchings of heart, that in this case it is only fair to give them warning. For their benefit, therefore, and also for that of any other reader who may be interested, I should like to say that the facts mentioned on pages 18-19 may be verified by anyone who cares to take the trouble; and I submit that my solution of one of the most baffling mys­teries of the sea is as plausible as any.

Obviously, this was long before the invention of the Aqualung brought "skin diving" to replace many of the cumbersome pro­cedures described in some sequences in this story, to say nothing of special kinds of miniature submarines which can now cruise, observe, and perform certain sampling and pick-up operations at depths which seemed fantastic when Professor Yule invented his "bathystol."

That seems to be the trouble with writing any story that hinges on some fabulous invention, in the days we live in. Once upon a time, as with the imaginative predictions of Jules Verne, progress moved with enough dignity and deliberation to allow the book to become a quaint old classic, and the author to pass on to his immortality, before making his incredible creations merely commonplace. Today, the most preposterous contraption a fictioneer can dream up is liable to be on sale in the neighborhood drug store or supermarket while he is still trying to flog his paperback rights.

This is a trap I have fallen into a number of times, and I think I must now resolve to write no more stories of that type. I shall attempt no more adventurous predictions of what some mad (or even sane) scientist will come out with next.

But I am certainly not going to withdraw this story, or any other, simply because technology has outstripped many of the premises and limitations that it was based on. I think it still stands up as a rattling good adventure, and that should be enough for anybody's money. Including my own.

I. HOW SIMON TEMPLAR'S SLEEP WAS DISTURBED,

AND LORETTA PAGE MADE AN APPOINTMENT

SIMON TEMPLAR woke at the shout, when most men would probably have stirred uneasily in their sleep and gone on sleep­ing. It was distant enough for that, muffled by the multiple veils of white summer fog that laid their five prints of mist on the portholes and filled the night with a cool dampness. The habit of years woke him, rather than the actual volume of sound—years in which that lightning assessment and responses to any chance sound, that almost animal awareness of events even in sleep, that instantaneous leap to full consciousness of every razor-edge faculty, might draw the thin precarious hair-line between life and death.

He woke in a flash, without any sudden movement or alteration in his rate of breathing. The only difference between sleep and wakefulness was that his eyes were open and his brain searching back over his memory of that half-heard shout for a more precise definition of its meaning. Fear, anger, and surprise were there, without any articulate expression. . . . And then he heard the sharp voice of a gun, its echoes drumming in a crisp clatter through the humid dark; another fainter yell, and a splash. . . .

He slid from between the blankets and swung his long legs over the side of the bunk with the effortless natural stealth of a great cat. The moist chill of the fog went into his lungs and goosefleshed his skin momentarily through the thin silk of his pyjamas as he hauled himself up the narrow companion, but he had the other animal gift of adapting himself immediately to temperature. That one reflex shiver flicked over him as his bare feet touched the dew‑damp deck; and then he was nervelessly relaxed, leaning a little forward with his hands resting on the weatherboard of the after cockpit, listening for anything that might explain that queer interruption of his rest.

Overhead, according to the calendar, there was a full moon;— but the banks of sea-mist which had rolled up towards midnight, in one of those freakish fits of temperament that sometimes strike the north coast of France in early summer, had blanketed its light down to a mere ghostly glimmer that did no more than lend a tinge of grey luminance to the cloudy dark. Over on the other side of the estuary St. Malo was lost without trace: even the riding lights of the yacht nearest to his own struggled to achieve more than a phosphorescent blur in the baffling obscu­rity. His own lights shed a thin diffused aurora over the sleek sea-worthy lines of the Corsair, and reached no further beyond than he could have spun a match. He could see nothing that would give him his explanation; but he could listen, and his ears shared in that uncanny keenness of all his senses.

He stood motionless, nostrils slightly dilated almost as if he would have brought scent to his aid against the fog and sniffed information out of the dank saltiness of the dark. He heard the whisper of ripples against the hull and the faint chatter of the anchor-chain dipping a link or two as the Corsair worked with the tide. He heard the sibilant creak of a rope as the dinghy strained against the side of a craft moored two berths away, and the clanking rumble of a train rolling over the steel ways some­where behind the dull strip of almost imperceptible luminousness that was Dinard. The mournful hooting of a ship groping to­wards harbour, way out over the Channel towards Cherbourg, hardly more than a quiver of vibration in the clammy stillness, told him its own clear story. The murmur of indistinguishable voices somewhere across the water where the shout had come from he heard also, and could build up his own picture from the plunk of shoe-heels against timber and the grate of an oar slip­ping into its rowlock. All these things delineated themselves on his mind like shadings of background detail on a photographic plate, but none of them had the exact pitch of what he was lis­tening for.

He heard it, presently—an ethereal swish of water, a tiny pit­ter of stray drops from an incautiously lifted head tinkling back into the oily tide, a rustle of swift movement in the grey gloom that was scarcely audible above the hiss and lap of the sea under his own keel. But he heard it, and knew that it was the sound he had been waiting for.

He listened, turning his head slightly, ears pricked for a more precise definition of the sound. Over in the fog where the voices had been muttering he heard the whirr of a lanyard whipped from its coiling, and the sudden splutter and drone of an out­board motor taking life jarred into the fine tuning of his atten­tion. Then he cut it out again, as one tunes out an interfering station on a sensitive radio receiver, and touched on that silent dragging cleave of the water once more, that sluicing ripple of an expert swimmer striving to pass through the water quickly but without noise. Nearer, too. Coming directly towards him.

Still Simon Templar did not move, but his immobility had an electric tension about it, like that of a leopard about to spring. Whatever might be happening out in that steamy darkness was not strictly any concern of his, except in the role of public-spir­ited citizen—which he was not. But it was for just that blithe willingness to meddle in affairs which did not concern him that he had come by the Corsair herself and all his other outward tokens of unlimited wealth, and which made certain persons think it so epically absurd that he should go about with the nick­name of the Saint. Only for that sublimely lawless curiosity, a variegated assortment of people whose habitats ranged from the gutters of Paris to the high spots of Broadway, from the beaches of the South Pacific to the most sanctified offices of Scotland Yard, could see no just reason why he should be taking a million­aire's holiday at Dinard instead of sewing mail-bags in Larkstone Prison or resting in a nice quiet cemetery with a stomach­ful of lead to digest. But the roots of that outlaw vigilance were too deep for cure, even if he had wished to cure them; and out there in the vaporous twilight something odd was happening of which he had to know more. Wherefore he listened, and heard the outboard chuffing around in the murk, and the swimmer com­ing closer.

And then he saw her. A shift of the air moved the mist-cur­tains capriciously at the very limit of his vision, and he saw her suddenly in the down-seeping nimbus of his riding lights.

Her.

It was that realisation of sex, guessed rather than positively asserted by the dimly-seen contour of her features and the glis­tening curve of a green bathing cap, which sent a skin-deep tin­gle of intuition plunging into profound and utter certainty. If it had been a man, he would not have lost interest; but he could have produced half a dozen commonplace theories to assimilate that final fact, with a regretful premonition that the adventure would not be likely to run for long. But a girl swimming stealth­ily through a fogbound sea at three o'clock in the morning could not be associated with yells and shooting in the dark by any prosaic theory; and his pulses, which up to that moment had been ticking over as steadily as clockwork, throbbed a shade faster at the knowledge. Somewhere out there in the leaden haze big medicine was seething up, and inevitably it was ordained that he must dip his spoon in the brew.

He was standing so motionless, half cloaked by the deep shadow of the deckhouse, that she had taken three more long strokes towards the ketch before she saw him. She stopped swim­ming abruptly, and stared up—he could almost read the wild thought tearing through her mind that she was caught in a trap, that in such a situation he could not help challenging her. And then, as the monotonous chugging of the outboard circled round and came closer, he caught in her upturned eyes a frantic for­lorn-hope appeal, a desperate voiceless entreaty that placed the ultimate seal on his destiny in that adventure.

He leaned over the side and grasped her wrist; and her first revelation of his steel-wire strength was the amazing ease with which he lifted her inboard with one hand. Without a word he pushed her down on the floor of the cockpit and unhitched a fender, dipping it in the water to repeat the faint splash she had made as she came out.

At that moment the outboard loomed up through the mist and coughed itself to silence. Dropping the fender to water level once again, so that there should be no doubt left in any interested minds about the origin of whatever noise had been heard from that quarter, he adjusted it under the gunwale of his dinghy and made it fast to the stanchion from which he had slipped it. The other boat was gliding up under its own momentum while he did so, and he was able to make a swift summary of its occupants.

There were three of them. Two, in rough seamen's jerseys, sat in the sternsheets, one of them holding the tiller and the other rewinding the starter lanyard. The third man was sitting on one of the thwarts forward, but as the boat slid nearer he rose to his feet.

Simon Templar studied him with an interest that never ap­peared more than casual. From his position in the boat, his well-cut reefer jacket and white trousers, and the way he stood up, he was obviously the leader of the party. A tallish well-built man with one hand resting rather limply in his coat pocket—a typical wealthy yachtsman going about his own mysterious business. And yet, to the Saint, who had in his time walked out alive from the bright twisted places where men who keep one hand in a side pocket are a phenomenon that commands lightning alertness, there was something in the well-groomed impassivity of him as he rose there to his full height that touched the night with a new tingling chill that was nevertheless a kind of unlawful ecstasy. For a couple of seconds the Saint saw his face as the dinghy hissed under the lee of the Corsair, a long swarthy black-browed face with a great eagle's beak of a nose.

Then the beam of a powerful flashlight blazed from the man's free hand, blotting out his face behind its dazzling attack. For a moment it dwelt on Simon's straightening figure, and he knew that in that moment the dryness of his hair and his pyjamas were methodically noted and reduced to their apparent place in the scheme of things. Then the light swept on, surveyed the lines of the ketch from stern to bow, rested for another moment on the name lettered there, and went flickering over the surrounding water.

"Lost something?" Simon inquired genially; and the light came back to him.

"Not exactly." The voice was clear and dispassionate, almost lackadaisical in its complete emptiness of expression. "Have you seen anyone swimming around here?"

"A few unemployed fish," murmured the Saint pleasantly. "Or are you looking for the latest Channel swimmer? They usually hit the beach further east, towards Calais."

There was a barely perceptible pause before the man chuckled; but even then, to the Saint's abnormally sensitive ears, there was no natural good humour in the sound. It was simply an efficient adaptation to circumstances, a suave getout from a sit­uation that bristled with question marks.

"No—nothing like that. Just one of our party took on a silly bet. I expect he's gone back."

And with that, for Simon Templar, a flag somewhere among the ghostly armadas of adventure was irrevocably nailed to the mast. The mystery had crept out of the night and caught him. For the tall hooknosed man's reply presumed that he hadn't heard any of the other sounds associated with the swimmer; and, presuming that, it stepped carefully into the pitfall of its own surpassing smoothness. More—it attempted deliberately to lead him astray. A swim on a foggy night that included gun-play and .the peculiar kind of shout that had awakened him belonged to a species of silly bet which the Saint had still to meet; and he couldn't help being struck by the fact that it disposed so ade­quately of the obvious theory of an ordinary harbour theft, and the hue and cry which should have arisen from such an explana­tion. Even without the glaring error of sex in the last sentence, that would have been almost enough.

He stood and watched the search party vanishing on their way into the fog, the flashlight in the hooknosed man's hand blinking through the mist until it was lost to sight; and then he turned and slid down the companion into the saloon, switching on the lights as he did so. He heard the girl follow him down, but he drew the curtains over the portholes before he turned to look at her.

2

She had pulled off the green bathing cap, and her hair had tumbled to her shoulders in ,a soft disorder of chestnut rippled with spun gold. Her red mouth seemed to be of the quality that triumphs even over salt water; and the purely perfunctory covering of her attenuated bathing costume left room for no deception about the perfection of her slender sun-gilt figure. Her steady grey eyes held a tentative gleam of mischief, soberly checked at that moment and yet incorrigibly seeking for natural expression, which for one fleeting instant worked unpardonable magic on his breathing.

"A bit wet in the water to-night, isn't it?" he remarked coolly.

"Just a little."

He pulled open a drawer and selected a couple of towels. As an afterthought, he detached a bathrobe from its hook and dropped that also on the couch.

"D'you prefer brandy or hot coffee?"

"Thanks." The impulse of mischief in her eyes was only a wraith of itself, masked down by a colder intentness. "But I think I'd better be getting back—to collect my bet. It was aw­fully good of you to—understand so quickly—and—and help me."

She held out her hand, in a quick gesture of final friendliness, with a smile which ought to have left the Saint gaping dreamily after her until she was lost again in the night.

"Oh, yes." Simon took the hand, but he didn't complete the action by letting go of it immediately as he should have done. He put one foot up on the couch and rested his forearm on his knee; and the quiet light of amusement that twinkled in his sea-blue eyes was suddenly very gay and disturbing. "Of course, I did hear something about a bet——"

"It—it was rather a stupid one, I suppose." She took her hand away, and her voice steadied itself and became clearer. "We were just talking, about how easy it would be to get away with anything on a foggy night, and somehow or other it got around to my saying that I could swim to Dinard and back without them finding me. They'd nearly caught me when you pulled me on board. I don't know if that was allowed for in the bet, but——"

"And the shooting?"

Her fine brows came together for a moment.

"That was just part of the make-believe. We were pretending that I'd come out to rob the ship——"

"And the shouting?"

"That was part of it, too. I suppose it all sounds very idiotic——"

The Saint smiled. He slipped a cigarette out of a packet on the shelf close by and tapped it.

"Oh, not a bit. I like these games myself—they do help to pass away the long evenings. Who did the shooting?"

"The man who spoke to you from the dinghy."

"I suppose he didn't shoot himself by mistake? It was a most realistic job of yelling." Simon's voice expressed nothing but gentle interest and approval; his smile was deceptively lazy. And then he left the cigarette in his mouth and stretched out his hand again. "By the way, that's a jolly-looking gadget."

There was a curious kind of thick rubber pouch strapped on the belt of her swim suit, and he had touched it before she could draw back.

"It's just one of those waterproof carriers for cigarettes and a vanity case. Haven't you seen them before?"

"No." He took his foot down, again from the couch, rather deliberately. "May I look?"

The note of casual, politely apologetic inquisitiveness was perfectly done. They might have been carrying on an idle con­versation on the beach in broad sunlight; but she stepped back before he could touch the case again.

"I—I think I'd better be getting back. Really. The others will be starting to worry about me."

He nodded.

"Perhaps they will," he admitted. "But you can't possibly go swimming about in this mess. You don't know what a risk you're taking. It's a hundred to one you'd miss your boat, and it's cold work splashing around in circles. I'll run you back."

"Please don't bother. Honestly, the water isn't so cold——"

"But you are." His smiling eyes took on the slight shiver of her brown body. "And it's no trouble."

He passed her with an easy stride, and he was on the compan­ion when she caught his arm.

"Please! Besides, the bet doesn't——"

"Damn the bet, darling. You're too young and good-looking to be washed up stiff on the beach. Besides, you've broken the rules already by coming on board. I'll take you over, and you can just swim across if you like."

"I won't go with you. Please don't make it difficult."

"You won't go without me."

He sat down on the companion, filling the narrow exit with his broad shoulders. She bit her lip.

"It's sweet of you," she said hesitantly. "But I couldn't give you any more trouble. I'm not going."

"Then you ought to use those towels and decide about the brandy and/or coffee," said the Saint amiably. "Of course, it may compromise you a bit, but I'm broad-minded. And if this is going to be Romance, may I start by saying that your mouth is the loveliest——"

"No, no! I'm not going to let you row me back."

"Then I take it you've made up your mind to stay. That's what I was talking about. And while we're on the subject, don't you know that it's immoral for anyone to have legs like yours? They put the wickedest ideas——"

"Please." There was a beginning of reluctant anger creeping into her gaze. "It's been nice of you to help me. Don't spoil it now."

Simon Templar inhaled deeply from his cigarette and said nothing.

Her grey eyes darkened with a scrap of half-incredulous fear that clashed absurdly with the careless good humour of his unvarying smile. Then, as if she was putting the ridiculous idea away, she came forward resolutely and tried to pass him.

One of his long arms reached out effortlessly and closed the remainder of the passage. She fought against it, half playfully at first, and then with all her lithe young strength; but it was as immovable as a bar of iron. In a sudden flash of panic savagery she beat at his chest and shoulders with her fists, but it was like hitting pads of toughened rubber. He laughed softly, without resentment; and she became aware that his other hand had been carefully exploring the form of the curious little pouch on her belt while she fought. She fell back quickly, staring at him.

"I thought it clunked," he murmured, "when I pulled you in. And yet you don't look as if you had a cast-iron vanity."

Her breath was coming faster now, and he knew that it was not only from her exertions.

"I don't know what you're talking about. Will you let me out?"

"No."

He liked her spirit. The trace of mischief in her eyes was gone altogether by this time, frozen into a sparkle of dangerous exas­peration.

"Have you thought," she asked slowly, "what would happen if I screamed?"

"I suppose it couldn't help being pretty musical, as screams go. Your ordinary speaking voice——"

"I could rouse half the harbour."

He nodded, without shifting his strategic position on the com­panion. "It looks like being a noisy night."

"If you don't let me go at once——"

Simon Templar extended his legs luxuriously and blew smoke-rings.

"Sister," he said, "have you stopped to consider what would happen if I screamed?"

"What?"

"You see, it isn't as if this was your boat. If I'd swum out and invaded you at this hour, and you'd been wearing pyjamas in­stead of me, and more or less the same argument had taken place —well, I guess you could have screamed most effectively. But there's a difference. This tub is mine, and you're trespassing. Presumably you couldn't put up a story that I kidnapped you, because then people would ask why you hadn't screamed before. Besides, you're wearing a wet bathing costume, which would want a whole lot more explaining. No—the only thing I can see to it is that you invited yourself. And the time is now moving on to half-past three in the morning. Taking it by and large, I can't help feeling that you'd be answering a lot of embarrassing questions about why you took such a long time to get frightened. Besides which, this is a French port, with French authorities, and Frenchmen have such a wonderful grip on the facts of life. I am a very retiring sort of bloke," said the Saint shyly, "and I don't mind telling you that my modesty has been outraged. If you make another attempt to assault me——"

The grey eyes cut him with ice-cold lights.

"I didn't think you were that sort of man."

"Oh, but I am. Now why don't you look at the scenery, dar­ling? We could have quite a chat before you go home. I want to know what this gay game is that starts shooting in the night and sends you swimming through the fog. I want to know what makes you and Hooknose string along with the same crazy story, and what sort of a bet it is that makes you go bathing with a gun on your belt!"

The last fragment of his speech was not quite accurate. Even as he uttered it, her hand flashed to the waterproof pouch; and he looked down the muzzle of a tiny automatic that was still large enough to be an argument at point-blank range.

"You're quite right about the gun," she said, with a new glacial evenness in her voice. "And, as you say, Frenchmen have such a wonderful grip on the facts of life—haven't they? Their juries are pretty easy on a woman who shoots her lover. . . . Don't you think you'd better change your mind?"

Simon considered this. She saw the chiselling of his handsome reckless face, the bantering lines of devil-may-care mouth and eyebrow, settle for a moment into quiet calculation, and then go back to the same irresponsible amusement.

"Anyway," he remarked, "she does give the fellow his fun first. Stay the night and shoot me after breakfast, and I won't complain."

The magnificent unfaltering audacity of him left her for a moment without words. For the first time her eyes wavered, and he read in them something that might have been an unwilling regret.

"For the last time——"

"Will I let you go."

"Yes."

"No."

"I'm sorry."

"So am I," said the Saint gently. "From the brief gander I had at Hooknose just a little while back, he looked like a man's job to me. I know you've got what it takes, but these games can get pretty tough. Tough things are my job, and I hate being jock­eyed out of a good fight."

"I'm going now," she said. "I mean it. Don't think I'm afraid to shoot, because I'm ready for accidents. I'll count five while you get out of the way."

The Saint looked at her for a second, and shook his head.

"Oh, well," he said philosophically. "If you feel that way about it . . ."

He stood up unhurriedly. And as he stood up, one hand slid up the bulkhead with him and touched the light switch.

For the first instant the darkness in the cabin was absolute. In the sudden contrasting blackness that drenched down across her vision she lost even a silhouette of him in the opening above the companion. And then his fingers closed and tightened on her wrist like a steel tourniquet. She struggled and tripped against the couch, falling on the soft cushions; but he went down with her, and her hand went numb so that she had no power even to pull the trigger while he took the automatic away. She heard his quiet chuckle.

"I'm sorry, kid."

As they had fallen, his lips were an inch from hers. He bent his head, so that his mouth touched them. She fought him wildly, but the kiss clung against all her fighting; and then suddenly she was passive and bewildering in his arms.

Simon got up and switched on the lights.

3

"I'm Loretta Page," she said.

She sat wrapped in his great woolly bathrobe, sipping hot coffee and smoking one of his cigarettes. The Saint sat opposite her, with his feet up and his head tilted back on the bulkhead.

"It's a nice name," he said.

"And you?"

"I have dozens. Simon Templar is the only real one. Some people call me the Saint."

She looked at him with a new intentness.

"Why?"

"Because I'm so very, very respectable."

"I've read about you," she said. "But I never heard anything like that before."

He smiled.

"Perhaps it isn't true."

"There was a Professor Vargan who—got killed, wasn't there? And an attempt to blow up a royal train and start a war which went wrong."

"I believe so."

"I've heard of a revolution in South America that you had something to do with, and a plot to hijack a bullion shipment where you got in the way. Then they were looking for you in Germany about some crown jewels. I've heard that there's a Chief Inspector at Scotland Yard who'd sell his soul to pin some­thing on you; and another one in New York who thinks you're one of the greatest things that ever happened. I've heard that there isn't a racket running that doesn't get cold shivers at the name of a certain freelance vigilante——"

"Loretta," said the Saint, "you know far too much about this life of sin."

"I ought to," she said. "I'm a detective."

The immobility of his face might have been carved in bronze, when the light-hearted mockery left it and only the buccaneer remained. In those subtle transformations she saw half his spell, and the power that must have made him what he was. There was a dance of alertness like the twinkle of a rapier blade, a veneer of flippant nonchalance cored with tempered steel, a fine humour of unscrupulousness that demoralised all conventional criterions.

And then his cigarette was back in his mouth and he was smil­ing at her through a haze of smoke, with blue eyes awake again and both wrists held out together.

"When arrested," he said, "the notorious scoundrel said: 'I never had a chance. My parents neglected me, and I was led astray by bad companions. The ruin of my life is due to Night Starvation.' Where are the bracelets?"

She might not have heard him. She sprang up, stretching her arms so that the sleeves of the bathrobe fell back from her wrists.

"Oh, no! ... It's too perfect. I'm glad!" The mischief was in her eyes again, matching his own, almost eclipsing it for that moment of vibrant energy. "You're telling the truth, I know. The Saint could only have been you. You would go out and take on any racket with your hands. Why didn't you tell me at once?"

"You didn't ask me," answered the Saint logically. "Besides, modesty is my long suit. The threat of publicity makes me run for miles. When I blush——"

"Listen!"

She wheeled and dropped on the berth beside him; and he listened.

"You've stolen, haven't you?"

"With discretion."

"You've tackled some big things."

"I pick up elephants and wring their necks."

"Have you ever thought of stealing millions?"

"Often," said the Saint, leaning back. "I thought of burgling the Bank of England once, but I decided it was too easy."

She stirred impatiently.

"Saint," she said earnestly, "there's one racket working to-day that steals millions. It's been running for years; and it's still running. And I don't mean any of the old things like bootlegging or kidnapping. It's a racket that goes over most of the world, wherever there's anything for it to work on; and it hits where there's no protection. I couldn't begin to guess how much money has been taken out of it since it began."

"I know, darling," said the Saint sympathetically. "But you can't do anything about it. It's quite legal. It's called income tax."

"Have you heard of the Lutine?"

He studied her with his gaze still tantalising and unsatisfied, but the eagerness of her held him more than what she was ac­tually saying. He was discovering something between her soft-lipped beauty and her fire of anger; something that belonged equally to the lurking laughter of her eyes and the sober throb of persuasion in her voice, and yet was neither of these things; something that made all contradictions possible.

"It sank, didn't it?" he said.

"In 1799—with about a million pounds' worth of gold on board. There've been plenty of attempts to salve the cargo, but so far the sand's been too much for them. Then the Lutina Company took over with a new idea: they were going to suck away the silt through a big conical sort of bell which was to be low­ered over the wreck. It was quite a simple scheme, and there's no reason why it shouldn't have worked. The company received a few letters warning them not to go on with it, but naturally they didn't pay much attention to them."

"Well?"

"Well, they haven't tried out their sand-sucker yet. The whole thing was blown sky-high in 1933—and the explosion wasn't an accident."

The Saint sat up slowly. In that supple movement the buffoonery slipped off him as his dressing-gown might have slipped off; and in the same transformation he was listening intently. Something like a breath of frozen feathers strolled up his spine—an instinct, a queer clairvoyance born of the years of inspired filibustering.

"Is that all the story?" he asked, and knew that it was not.

She shook her head.

"Something else happened in the same year. An American salvage ship, the Salvor, went out to search a wreck off Cape Charles. The Merida, which sank in 1911 and took the Emperor Maximilian's crown jewels to the bottom with her—another mil­lion-pound cargo. They didn't find anything. And fish don't wear jewellery."

"I remember the Terschelling Island fireworks—the Lutine. But that's a new one."

"It's not the only one. Two years before that another salvage company went over the Turbantia with a fine comb. She was torpedoed near the Maars Lightship in 1916, and she had seven hundred and fifty thousand pounds' worth of German bullion on her—then. The salvage company knew just where to look for it. But they didn't find it. ... That was quite a small job. But in 1928 the Sorima Company made an official search for a collec­tion of uncut diamonds and other stones worth more than a mil­lion and a quarter, which were on board the Elizabethville when another U-boat got her on her way back from South Africa dur­ing the war. Well, they found a lot of ammunition in the strong­room, and thirty shillings in the safe; which didn't show a big dividend."

"And this has been going on for years?"

"I don't know how long. But just look at those three jobs. They average out at over a million pounds a time. Leave out all the other official treasure hunts that are going on now, and all the other millions that may have been sneaked away before the authorised salvage companies get there. Leave out all the other jobs that haven't been discovered yet. Doesn't it tell you any­thing?"

Simon Templar sat back and let the electric tingles play up his vertebrae and toe-dance airily over the back of his scalp. His whole body felt the pulse of adventure in exactly the same way as a sensitively tuned instrument can detect sounds inaudible to the human ear. And to him the sounds were music.

In that short silence he had a vivid picture of all the far reaches of the sea on which the Corsair cushioned her light weight. He saw the lift of storms and the raw break of hungry rocks and death stealing out of the invisible to give the waters their treasure. He saw the green depths, the ultimate dim places under the spume and sapphire beauty; saw the vast whale-shapes of steel hulls sunk in the jade stillness, and the gaunt ribs of half-forgotten galleons reaching out of the fronds of weed. What unrecorded argosies might lie under those infinite waters, no one would ever know. But those that were known, those that the sea had claimed even in the last four hundred years . . . His imag­ination reeled at the thought. The Almirante Florencia, lost treasure‑house of the Armada, foundering in Tobermory Bay with £2,000,000 in plate and jewels. The Russian flagship Rurik, sunk on the Korean coast with two and a half million pounds in specie. The sixty-three ships of the Turkish Navy sent to the bottom of Navarino Bay in 1827 with £10,000,000 between them. The Chalfont Castle, with her steering carried away and her plates sprung below the waterline in the great storm of that very year, drifting helplessly down on to the Casquets to the west of Alderney, and sinking in twenty fathoms with £5,000,000 of bar gold in her strong-room. Odd names and figures that he had heard disinterestedly from time to time and practically forgotten crept back from the hinterlands of unconscious memory and staggered him . . . And he saw the only possible, the only plausible corollary: the ghost pirate stealing through grey dawns to drop her divers and her steel grabs, the unsuspected gangsters of the sea who had discovered the most pluperfect racket of all time.

He would have thought that he had heard every note in the register of crime, but he had never dreamed of anything like that. The plot to swindle the Bank of Italy by means of one million perfectly genuine 100-lire bills, for his share in which he was entitled to wear the pendant of the Order of the Annunziata in the unlikely event of his ever attending a State function, was mere petty pilfering beside it. Sir Hugo Renway's scheme for pillaging the cross-Channel gold routes was mere clumsy experi­ment in comparison. And yet he knew that the girl who sat look­ing at him was not romancing. She threw up the stark terse facts and left him to find the link; and the supernatural creep of his nerves told him where the link was.

Her grey eyes were on him, tempting and challenging as they had been when he first saw her with the lights striking gold in her hair and the sea's damp on her slim shoulders; and in his mind he had a vision of the black expressionless eyes of the hooknosed man who stood up in the boat and lied to him.

"Why?" he said, with a dreamy rapture in his slow deep breath. "Why didn't I know all this before?"

"Perhaps you were too busy."

"Anything else could have waited," said the Saint, with pro­found conviction. "Except perhaps the Bank of England. . . . And is that what you're detecting?"

She took a cigarette from his pack, and a light from the butt between his fingers.

"Yes. I work for the Ingerbeck Agency—we have a contract with Lloyd's, and we handle a lot of other insurance business. You see, where we work, there's no ordinary police force. Where a ship sinks, the wreck is nominally under the protection of the country that covers the water; but if the underwriters have paid out a total loss the salvage rights belong to them. Which means precisely nothing. In the last fifty years alone, the insurance companies have paid out millions of pounds on this kind of risk. Of course they hoped to get a lot of it back in salvage, but the amounts they've seen would make you laugh."

"Is it always a loss?"

"Of course not. But we've known—they've known—for a long time, that there was some highly organised racket in the back­ground cheating them out of six figures or more a year. It's efficient. It's got to be. And yet it's easy. It has clever men, and the best equipment that money can buy. We went out to look for them."

"You?"

"Oh, no. Ingerbeck's. They've been on it for the last five years. Some of their men went a long way. Three of them went too far—and didn't come back." She met his eyes steadily. "It's that sort of racket. . . . But one of them found a trail that led somewhere, out of hundreds that didn't; and it's been followed up."

"To here?"

She nodded.

"You see, we came to a brick wall. The men could get so far, but they couldn't go on. They couldn't get inside the racket. Two of those who didn't come back—tried. We couldn't take a chance on anything drastic, because we've no official standing, and we hadn't any facts. Only a good guess. Well, there was one other way. Somewhere at the top of the racket there must be a head man, and the odds are that he's human."

He took in the grace of her as she lounged there in the over­sized bathrobe, understanding the rest.

"You came out to be human with him."

The turn of her head was sorcery, the sculpture of her neck merging into the first hinted curve between the lapels of the bathrobe was a pattern of magic that made murder and sudden death egregious intrusions.

"I didn't succeed—so far. I've tried. I've even had dinner with him, and danced at the Casino. But I haven't had an invitation to go on board his boat. To-night I got the devil in me, or something. I tried to go on board without an invitation."

"Didn't you guess there'd be a watch on deck?"

"I suppose so. But I thought he'd probably be sleepy, and I could move very quietly." She grimaced. "He got me, but he let me go when I fired a shot beside his ear—I didn't hurt him—and I dived overboard."

"And thereby hangs a tale," said the Saint.

4

He stood up and flicked his cigarette-end through a porthole, helping himself to another. The lines of his face were lifted in high relief as he drew at a match.

"You didn't tell me all this to pass the time, did you?" he smiled.

"I told you because you're—you." She was looking at him directly, without a trace of affected hesitation. "I've no author­ity. But I've seen you, and I know who you are. Maybe I thought you might be interested."

She straightened the bathrobe quickly, looking round for an ashtray.

"Maybe I might," he said gently. "Where are you staying?"

"The Hotel de la Mer."

"I wish you could stay here. But to-night—I'm afraid there must be a thin chance that your boy friend wasn't quite satisfied with my lines when we exchanged words, and you can't risk it. Another time——"

Her eyes opened wider, and he stretched out his hand with a breath of laughter.

"I'm going to row you home now," he said. "Or do we have another argument?"

"I wouldn't argue," she began silkily; and then, with the cor­ners of her mouth tugging against her will, she took his hand. "But thanks for the drink—and everything."

"There are only two things you haven't told me," he said. "One is the name of this boat you wanted to look at."

She searched his face for a moment before she answered:

"The Falkenberg"

"And the other is the name of the boy friend—the bloke who passed in the night."

"Kurt Vogel."

"How very appropriate," said the Saint thoughtfully. "I think' I shall call him Birdie when we get acquainted. But that can wait. ... I want to finish my beauty sleep, and I suppose you haven't even started yours. But I've got a hunch that if you're on the beach before lunch we may talk some more. I'm glad you dropped in."

The fog was thinning to a pearl-grey vagueness lightening with the dawn when he rowed her back; and when he woke up there were ovals of yellow sunlight stencilled along the bulkhead from the opposite portholes. He stretched himself like a cat, freshen­ing his lungs with the heady nectar of the morning, and lighted a cigarette. For a while he lay sprawled in delicious laziness, taking in the familiar cabin with a sense of new discovery. There she had sat, there was the cup and glass she had used, there was the crushed stub of her cigarette in the ashtray. There on the carpet was still a darkened patch of damp, where she had stood with the salt water dewing her slim legs and pooling on the floor. He saw the ripple of gold in her hair, the shaft of challenge in her eyes, the exquisite shape of her as he first saw her like a shy nymph spiced with the devil's temper; and knew a supreme con­tent which was not artistically rewarded by the abrupt apparition of a belligerent face sheltering behind a loose walrus moustache in the door leading to the galley.

"Lovely morn'n, sir," said the face, and limped struttingly in to plunk down a glass of orange juice beside him. "Brekfuss narf a minnit."

The Saint grinned ruefully and hauled himself up.

"Make it two minutes, Orace," he said. "I had company last night."

"Yessir," said Orace phlegmatically, gathering up cups; and he had retired to the galley again before Simon saw that he had left a second glass of orange juice ostentatiously parked in the mid­dle of the table.

The mist had receded under the sun until it was only a haze on the horizon, and a sky of pale translucent azure lofted over a sea like glass. Simon went up on deck with a towel round his middle and slipped adroitly into the water, leaving the towel behind. He cut away across the estuary in a straight line of hiss­ing crawl, turned and rolled over on his back to wallow in the invigorating delight of cold water sheathing his naked limbs, and made his way back more leisurely to eat bacon and eggs in a deck chair in the spacious cockpit while the strengthening sun warmed his shoulders.

All these things, then, were real—the physical gusto of life, quickened by unasked romance and laced with the wine of dan­ger. Even the privileged cynicism of Orace only served as a touchstone to prove reality, rather than to destroy illusion. It was like the old days—which as a matter of fact were by no means so old. He lighted a cigarette and scanned the other boats which he could see from his anchorage. A cable's length away, towards the Pointe de la Vicomté, he picked a white rakish mo­tor cruiser of about a hundred tons, and knew that this must be the one even before he went down to the saloon for a pair of binoculars and read the name from a lifebelt. Falkenberg. Si­mon's lips twitched in a half-smile that was entirely Saintly. The name of the legendary Flying Dutchman was a perfect baptism for the pirate ship of that hawk-faced black-browed man who called himself Kurt Vogel, and the Saint mentally saluted the antarctic quality of bravado that must have chosen it. Still using his binoculars from the prudent obscurity of the saloon, he took in the high outswept bows and the streamlined angles of the wheelhouse forward, the clean lines of superstructure dipping to the unusually low flat counter, and credited her with twin racing engines and a comfortable thirty knots. Abaft the saloon there was a curious projection neatly shrouded in canvas—for the moment he could not guess what it was.

He stropped his razor and ran water into a basin; and he was finishing his shave when his man came through with the break­fast plates. Simon rounded his chin carefully and said: "Orace, have you still got that blunderbuss of yours—the young howitzer you bought once in mistake for a gun?"

"Yessir," said Orace unemotionally.

"Good." The Saint wiped his razor and splashed water over his face. "You'd better get out my automatic as well and look it over."

"Yessir."

"Put a spot of oil in the works and load up a couple of spare magazines. And grease the cartridges—in case I take a swim with it."

"Yessir."

"We may be busy."

Orace's moustache stirred, like a field of corn under a passing zephyr. His limp was a souvenir of Zeebrugge Mole and days of authorised commotion as a sergeant of His Majesty's Marines, but it is doubtful whether even in those years of international discord he had heard as many different calls to arms as had come his way since he first took service with the Saint.

" 'Ave you bin gettin' in trouble again?" he demanded fiercely.

The Saint laughed behind his towel.

"Not trouble, Orace—just fun. I won't try to tell you how beautiful she is, because you have no soul. But she came out of the sea like a mermaid, and the standard of living went up again like a rocket. And would you mind moving off that bit of the carpet, because the comparison is too hideous. She stood there with the water on her, and she said 'Will you let me out?' And I said 'No!' Just like that."

"Didyer, sir?"

"And she pulled a gun on me."

"Go on, did she?"

"She pulled a gun. Look, you pull a gun. Hold your hand like that. Right. Well, I said 'Ha, ha,'—like that, very sinister. I switched out the lights! I leapt upon her! I grabbed her wrist! We fell on the bunk——"

"Steady on, sir, yer 'urting!"

"You shut up. She was crrrushed against me. Her lips were an inch from mine. For heaven's sake stop whiffling your moustache like that. I felt her breath on my face. I was on fire with passion. I seized her in my arms . . . and . . ." Simon planted a smack­ing kiss on his crew's horrified brow. "I said 'Don't you think Strindberg is too sweet?' Now go and drown yourself."

He picked himself up and erupted out of the cabin, slinging the towel round his neck, while Orace gaped goggle-eyed after him. In a few minutes he was back, tightening the belt of a pair of swimming trunks, and stuffing cigarettes into a waterproof metal case.

"By the way," he said, "we aren't full up on juice for the auxil­iary. As soon as you've cleared up, you'd better take the dinghy and fetch a couple of dozen bidons. Get some oil, too, and see that there's plenty of food and drink. There's another bird mixed up in this who's less beautiful—a guy named Kurt Vogel—and we ought to be ready for traveling."

He went up on deck and looked around. The sun was flooding down on stucco villas and the rise of green behind, and cutting innumerable diamonds from the surface of the water. It was going to be a hot brilliant day. People were well awake on the other yachts near by. A gramophone opened up cheerfully on one, and a loud splash and a shout heralded another of the morn­ing's bathers. The Falkenberg was too far away for him to be able to distinguish its signs of life: a couple of seamen were swabbing down the paint forward, but nothing that resembled the hooknosed man was visible. Simon noticed that besides the outboard dinghy there was now a small speed tender also tied up alongside which had not been there when he made his first survey—it had the air of being part of the Falkenberg's equipment, and probably it had been away on a trip to the shore and re­turned while he was below.

After a while he dived off the side and swam round the Pointe du Moulinet to the beach. He strolled the length of the plage while the sun dried him, and then chose a clear space to stretch himself out opposite the Casino.

He had not seen Loretta Page during his walk, but he knew she would come. He lay basking in the voluptuous warmth, and knew with an exquisite certainty that the kind gods of adventure would take care of that. The story she had told him went through his memory, not in an exuberant riot of comprehension as it had when he first heard it, but in a steady flow, fact by fact, a sequence of fragments of accepted knowledge which strung logically together to make a tale that was breath-taking in its colossal implications. If it was something on a more grandiose scale than anything he had ever dreamed of even in his wildest flights of buccaneering, he was still ready to give it a run. He blew smoke into the sparkling air and considered the profile of Kurt Vogel. Properly worked on by an octet of bunched knuc­kles. . . .

"Hullo, old timer."

He dropped his gaze and saw her. She wore the same ele­mentary swim suit, with a bathrobe that fitted her better than his had done, swept back by her hands on her hips and leaving her long satiny legs to the sun. The grey eyes were dark with devilment.

He rolled up on one elbow.

"Hullo, pardner."

"Did you sleep well?"

"I saw ghosts," he said sepulchrally. "Ghosts of the dead past that can never be undone. They rose up and wiggled their bony fingers at me, and said 'You are not worthy of her!' I woke up and burst into tears."

She slipped out of the striped gown and sat down beside him.

"Wasn't there any hope?"

"Not unless you stretched out your little hand and lifted me out of the abyss. Couldn't you take on the job of saving a lost soul? Of course you might always get lost yourself, but that wouldn't matter. We could always console each other."

"I wonder why Ingerbeck's didn't think of signing you up years ago."

He smiled.

"They might have tried, but I'm afraid I haven't got any sort of affinity for dotted lines. Besides, I'm not naturally honest. You try to recover stolen property for the insurance companies, don't you?"

"That's part of the job."

"Well, I do the same thing, but not for any insurance com­pany."

"Not even on a ten per cent commission?"

"I have worked on that basis, but it was a long time ago. My tastes were a lot more innocent and simple in those days."

"It's not a bad reward, when there are millions to look for," she said temptingly.

He sighed.

"It's so dull to be honest. Nobody else but you could make it even bearable. But I know what you mean. I'm on a holiday, and I can always pick up a few millions some other time. It was your picnic originally, and you let me in on it——"

"I needn't have done that."

There was a cool and rather sad finality in her voice, so much in contrast to the wavering dance of her eyes, that he looked at her keenly for a moment before replying. In that vivid and care­free surround of laughing swimmers and brightly-clad sunbathers he felt a shadow round them, cutting them off in a dynamic isolation of their own from all these thoughtless and ordinary things.

"It was my charm," he explained at length. "My father-con­fessor touch. You just couldn't resist me."

She shook her head. The gold flashed in her hair, and her lips smiled; but the light mockery of her eyes was subdued to an elfin seriousness.

"I mean I needn't have given up hope and gone in for such desperate measures so soon."

"What's happened?" he asked; and the brown smooth-muscled arm on which he was propped up turned so that his hand closed over hers.

She looked down at him steadily, and the shadow around them failed to touch her enchanting face.

"I had a note this morning," she said. "It was delivered at the hotel before I woke up. I've got an invitation to have dinner with Vogel on the Falkenberg."

II. HOW SIMON TEMPLAR ALSO RECEIVED AN INVITATION,

AND A PAIR OF PINK SOCKS HOVE UP ON THE HORIZON

A STOUT gentleman ambled by, with a green eyeshade on his brow and a diminutive slip clinging by some miracle of adhesion to the reentrant curve of his abdomen, looking like a debauched Roman emperor on his way to the bath; a Parisian sylph in a startling lace costume that left nothing except her birthday to the imagination arranged her white limbs artistically under a gaudy sunshade and waited for the rush of art students to gather round; two children disputing the ownership of a bucket opened up on a line of personalities that would have left a couple of bootleggers listening in awe; but these were events that might have been happening on another planet.

He remembered the speedboat tied up alongside the Falk­enberg, which had not been there before.

"You hadn't got some crazy idea of accepting, had you?" he said mechanically.

"It's what I've been waiting for."

"I know, but— What do you think happened last night?"

She took one of his cigarettes.

"I don't think I could have been seen. I didn't see the man who caught me—he came up behind. And it was pretty dark where I was. He caught me round the neck with his arm; then I fired the shot, he let go, and I dived."

"He'd know it was a woman."

"Not necessarily. Don't you remember that Vogel said he was looking for a man?"

"An obvious lie."

"A very stupid one—if it was. But what could it gain him? If you'd already seen a woman, it'd make you think there was something queer going on. If you hadn't, what did it matter?"

"He might have been trying to tempt me to keep up the lie— which would have given me away."

She shrugged her intoxicating shoulders.

"Aren't you rather looking for trouble?" she said.

"That's my job," answered the Saint evenly. "And inciden­tally, it happens to be one of the reasons why I didn't come to a sticky end many years ago. I'll give you something else. Suppose Vogel wasn't quite happy about me last night?"

"Well?"

"It was rather an unusual hour for anyone to be up and about —messing around with fenders. Not impossible, but unusual. And if Vogel's the kind of man we think he is, he keeps alive by sorting out unusual things—like I do. He couldn't make any fuss, because that'd be letting himself in if he was wrong. But he could puff away in that outboard, stop the engine, and paddle back quietly on the oars. He couldn't have seen you—probably he couldn't even have heard what you said—but he could hear that there was a girl on board."

"Which isn't impossible either," she said demurely.

Simon frowned.

"You forget my Saintly reputation. But still, maybe to Vogel, with his low criminal mind, it isn't impossible either. But it's still unusual enough to be worth looking at. And then there's you."

"Without a reputation."

"And not deserving one. You've been making a clear set at him for several days—weeks—whatever it is. That again may not be impossible. It might be his money, or his beauty, or because he sings so nicely in his bath. But if it isn't even unusual, if I were in his place I'd think it was—interesting. Interesting enough, maybe, to try and find out some more about you."

She pressed his hand—she had been letting it rest in his all that time, as if she hadn't noticed.

"Dear man," she said, "don't you think I know all this?"

"And if he only wants to see exactly where you stand in the game?"

"I can pack a gun."

"Like any other ordinary innocent woman."

"Then I'll go without it."

"You wouldn't be much worse off."

"All the same, I'll go."

"Three," he quoted her, "didn't come back."

She nodded. The impish humour still played on her lips and the surface of her eyes, but the depths behind it were clear and still.

"When you join Ingerbeck's, you don't sign on for a cocktail party. You join an army. You take an oath—to do your job, to keep your mouth shut, and to take the consequences. Wouldn't you go?"

"Yes. But there are special risks."

"For a poor defenceless girl?"

"They call it Worse than Death."

"I've never believed it."

He sat up and stared thoughtfully over the water. There was a quality of lightness in her decision that ended argument more finally than any dramatic protestations. She would go; because whatever the risk might be, it was not fact. It was her job to find out, not to guess.

"I take it you've already accepted," he said wryly.

"The messenger was going to call back for my answer. I left a letter when I came out. I said I'd be delighted. Maybe Kurt Vogel isn't so bad as he's painted," she said dreamily. "He left some lovely flowers with the invitation."

"I shouldn't be surprised if you fell for him."

"I might."

"But now and then your conscience would prick you. When you were riding around in your Rolls, half strangled with di­amonds, the memory of lost love would haunt you. I can see you stifling a sob, and pressing a penny into a poor beggar's hand before you hurry on, because he reminds you of me."

"Don't say it," she pleaded tremulously. "I can't bear it. How was I to know you cared like that?"

The Saint scratched his head.

"I must have forgotten to tell you," he admitted. "Never mind." He turned to her with cavalier blue eyes sobered to a thoughtful directness that she had seen before. "But does it leave me out?"

"I don't know," she said steadily. "Have you decided to break off your holiday?"

"Let's have a drink and talk about it."

She shook her head.

"I can't risk it. Vogel may be ashore now—he may be any­where. I've risked enough to talk to you at all. If you've changed your mind since last night, we'll fight over it."

"Did I tell you I'd made up my mind?" Simon inquired mildly.

"You let me think you had. I took a chance when I told you the story. I wanted you to know. I still do." She was facing him without banter now, cool and possessed and momentarily unpossessable, and yet with a shadow of wistfulness deepening in her gaze. "I think Ingerbeck himself would have done the same. We might get a long way together; and if we came through there'd be plenty of commission to split. Just once, it might be fun for you to look at a dotted line."

His eyebrows slanted quizzically.

"Otherwise?"

"I suppose we can still be hung out to dry."

She stood up, dusting the sand from her robe. Simon picked himself up after her, and the grey eyes came back to his face.

"Where should we meet on this—dotted line?" he asked re­signedly.

"I'll be here to-morrow. No, not here—we can't take this risk again. Suppose I swam out and met you, off the Pointe du Moulinet. Halfway house. At eleven." She smiled, as he had seen her smile once before. "Are you looking for your pen?"

"I can't write, Loretta."

"You can make a cross."

"You know what that stands for?"

"If it does," she said, "you signed last night."

He watched her walking up towards the white spires of the Casino Balneum, with all the maddening delight of movement in the swing of her brown body, and searched his vocabulary for words to describe the capriciousness of fortune. Admitted that all the gifts of that immoral goddess had strings harnessed to them—there were strings and strings. There was no real need in adventure for quite such a disturbing complication. And the Saint smiled in spite of that. The beach was empty after she had left it; that is to say, there were about a thousand other people on the Plage de l'Ecluse, but he found all of them sickeningly bovine. Including the Parisian vamp, who by this time was en­joying the devotion of three muscle-conscious young men, the debauched Roman emperor, and a hungry-looking tourist from Egg Harbor, New Jersey, who should have been old enough to know better.

Simon turned away from the repulsive spectacle, and was re­warded by the almost equally unwelcome vision of Orace's mous­tache, through which something more than the sea air was filtering.

"You do break out at the most unromantic moments, Orace," he complained; and then he saw that Orace's eyes were still fixed glassily on the middle distance.

"Is that the lidy, sir?"

Orace's martial voice was hushed with a sort of awe; and the Saint frowned.

"She isn't a lady," he said firmly. "No lady would use such shameless eyes to try and seduce a self-respecting buccaneer from his duty. No lady would take such a mean advantage of a human being." He perceived that his audience was still scarcely following him, and looked round. "Nor is that the wench I'm talking about, anyway. Come on away—you'll be getting off in a minute."

They walked over the sand towards the bend by the swimming pool, where the Promenade des Alliés curves out towards the sea.

"If you arsk me," Orace remarked, recalling the grievance which had been temporarily smoothed over by his anatomical studies, "these Frogs are all barmy. First thing I arsks for petrol, an' they give me paraffin. Then when I says that ain't what I want, they tell me they've got some stuff called essence, wot's just as good. I 'as a smell of this stuff, an' blimey if it ain't pet­rol. 'Ow the thunderinell can they 'elp goin' barmy wiv a lang­widge like that?"

"I don't suppose they can help it," said the Saint gravely. "Did you buy some of this essence?"

"Yessir. Then I tried to get some ice. They 'adn't got no ice, but they tried to sell me some glass. I gave it up an' brought the dinghy rahnd in case yer didn't wanter swim back. Barmy?" said Orace sizzlingly.

It was nearly one o'clock when the fuel tanks had been re­plenished from the cans which Orace had acquired at the cost of so much righteous indignation, and the Saint had cleaned him­self up and put a comb through his hair. Orace produced a drink —freshened, in spite of gloomy prophecies, with ice—and re­quired to know whether he should get lunch.

"I don't know," said the Saint, with unusual brusqueness.

He had no idea what he wanted to do. He felt suddenly rest­less and dissatisfied. The day had gone flat in prospect. They might have lazed through the long afternoon, steeping themselves in sunlight and romping through the light play of words. They might have plunged together through the cool rapture of the sea, or drifted out under spread sails to explore the Ile de Cézembre and picnic under the cliffs of St Lunaire. They might have en­joyed any of a dozen trivial things which he had half planned in his imagination, secure in a communion of pagan understanding that made no demands and asked no promises. Instead of . which . . .

Because gold rippled in a girl's hair, and an imp of sophisti­cated humour lurked Pan-like in the shadows of her eyes; be­cause the same gaze could sometimes hold a serenity of purpose beyond measure—Simon Templar, at thirty-four, with odysseys of adventure behind him that would have made Ulysses look like a small boy playing in a back yard, found himself in the beginning of that halcyon afternoon at a loose end.

It wasn't exactly the amount of money involved. Four million, if that was a minimum estimate of the total submerged wealth which Vogel had plundered from the sea bottoms, was certainly a lot of pounds. So was ten per cent of it. Or even half that. The Saint wasn't greedy; and he had come out of each of his past sorties into the hazardous hinterlands of adventure with a lengthening line of figures in his bank account which raised their own monument to his flair for boodle. He had no need to be avaricious. There were limits—lofty, vertiginous limits, but limits nevertheless—to how much money one could spend; and he had a sublime faith that the same extravagant providence which had held him up all his life so far would keep him near enough to those limits to save him from feeling depressed. It wasn't exactly that. It was a matter of principle.

"You're getting old," he reproached himself solemnly. "At this very moment, you're trying to persuade yourself to work for an insurance company. Just because she has a body like an old man's dream, and you kissed her. An insurance company!"

He shuddered.

And then he turned his eyes to study a speck of movement on the borders of his field of vision. The speed tender was moving away from the side of the Falkenberg, heading towards the Bee de la Vallée. For a moment he watched it idly, calculating that its course would take it within a few yards of the Corsair: as it came nearer he recognised Kurt Vogel, and with him a stout grey-bearded man in a Norfolk jacket and a shapeless yellow Panama hat.

Simon began to get up from his chair. He began slowly and almost uncertainly, but he finished in a sudden rush of decision. Any action, however vague its object, was better than no action at all. He skated down the companion with something like his earlier exuberance, and shouted for Grace.

"Never mind about lunch," he said, scattering silk shirts and white duck trousers out of a locker. "I'm going on shore to take up ornithology."

2

One of the vedettes from St Malo was coming in to the jetty when the Saint scrambled back on deck, and the Falkenberg's tender was still manoeuvering for a landing. Simon dropped into his dinghy and wound up the outboard. Fortunately the Corsair had swung round on the tide so that she screened his movements from any chance backward glances from the quay, and he started off up-river and came round in a wide circle to avoid identifying himself by his point of departure. Not that it mattered much; but he wanted to avoid giving any immediate impression that he was deliberately setting off in pursuit.

He cruised along, keeping his head down and judging time and distance as the Falkenberg's tender squeezed in to the steps and Vogel and his companion went ashore. Looking back, he judged that with any luck no curious watcher on the Falkenberg had observed his hurried departure, and by this time he was too far away to be recognised. Then, as Vogel and the grey-bearded man started up the causeway towards the Grande Rue, the Saint opened up his engine and scooted after them. He shot in to the quay under the very nose of another boat that was making for the same objective, spun his motor round into reverse under a cloudburst of Gallic expostulation and profanity, hitched the painter deftly through a ring-bolt, and was up on land and away before the running commentary he had provoked had really reached its choicest descriptive adjectives.

The passengers who were disembarking from the ferry effec­tively screened his arrival and shielded his advance as he hustled after his quarry. The other two were not walking quickly, and the grey-bearded man's shabby yellow Panama was as good as a beacon. Simon spaced himself as far behind them as he dared when they reached the Digue, and slackened the speed of his pursuit. He ambled along with his hands in his pockets, submerg­ing himself among the other promenaders with the same happy-go-lucky air of debating the best place to take an aperitif before lunch.

Presently the yellow Panama bobbed across the stream in the direction of the Casino terrace, and Simon Templar followed. At that hour the place was packed with a chattering sun-soaked throng of thirsty socialites, and the Saint was able to squeeze himself about among the tables in the most natural manner of a lone man looking for a place—preferably with company. His route led him quite casually past Vogel's table; and at the pre­cise moment when the hook-nosed man looked up and caught his eye, Simon returned the recognition with a perfect rendering of polite interest.

They were so close together that Vogel could scarcely have avoided a greeting, even if he had wished to—which the Saint quietly doubted. For a moment the man's black expressionless stare drilled right through him; and then the thin lips spread in a smile that had all the artless geniality of a snake's.

"I hope you didn't think I was too unceremonious about dis­turbing you last night," he said.

"Not at all," said the Saint cheerfully. "I didn't leave the baccarat rooms till pretty late, so I was only just settling in."

His glance passed unostentatiously over the grey-bearded man. Something about the mild pink youthful-looking face struck him as dimly familiar, but he couldn't place it.

"This is Professor Yule," said the other, "and my name is Vogel. Won't you join us, Mr—er——"

"Tombs," said the Saint, without batting an eyelid, and sat down.

Vogel extended a cigarette-case.

"You are interested in gambling, Mr Tombs?" he suggested.

His tone was courteous and detached, the tone of a man who was merely accepting the obvious cue for the opening of a conventional exchange of small talk; but the Saint's hand hovered over the proffered case for an imperceptible second's pause be­fore he slid out a smoke and settled back.

"I don't mind an occasional flutter to pass the time," he mur­mured deprecatingly.

"Ah, yes—an occasional flutter." Vogel's eyes, like two beads of impenetrable jet, remained fixed on his face; but the cold lipless smile remained also. "You can't come to much harm that way. It's the people who play beyond their means who come to grief."

Simon Templar let a trickle of smoke drift down his nostrils, and that instantaneous instinctive tension within him relaxed into a pervasive chortle of pure glee which spread around his inside like a sip of old brandy. Kurt Vogel, he reflected, must have been taking a diet of the kind of mystery story in which the villain always introduces himself with some lines of sinister innuendo like that—and thereby convinces the perhaps otherwise unsuspecting hero that something villainous is going on. In the same type of story, however, the hero can never resist the temptation to respond in kind—thereby establishing the fact that he is the hero. But the Saint had been treading the fickle tight­ropes of piracy when those same romantic juveniles were cooing in their cradles, and he had his own severely practical ideas of heroism.

"There's not much chance of that," he said lightly, "with my overdraft in its present state."

They sat eye to eye like two duellists baffled for an opening; and the Saint's smile was wholly innocent. If Kurt Vogel had hoped to get him to betray himself by any theatrical insinuations of that sort, there were going to be some disappointed hearts in Dinard that fine day. But Vogel's outward cordiality never wav­ered an iota. He gave away nothing, either—the innuendo was only there if the Saint chose to force it out.

"Are you staying long?"

"I haven't made any plans," said the Saint nebulously. "I might dart off at any moment, or I might hang around until they make me a local monument. It just depends on how soon I get tired of the place."

"It "doesn't agree with everybody," Vogel assented purringly. "In fact, I have heard that some people find it definitely un­healthy." Simon nodded.

"A bit relaxing, perhaps," he admitted. "But I don't mind that. Up to the present, though, I've found it rather dull."

Vogel sat back and stroked the edge of the table with his finger-tips. If he was disconcerted, the fact never registered on his face. His features were a flat mask of impassively regulated scenery behind that sullen promontory of a nose.

A waiter equilibrating under a dizzy tray of glasses swayed by and snatched their order as he passed. At the same time an ad­joining table became vacant, and another party of thirst-quenchers took possession. The glance of one of them, sweeping round as he wriggled his legs in, passed over the Saint and then became faintly fixed. For a brief second it stayed set; then he leaned sideways to whisper. His companions turned their heads furtively. The name of Yule reached the Saint clearly, but after that the surrounding buzz of conversation and the glutinous strains of the Casino band swallowed up the conversation for a moment. And then, above all interfering undertones, the electric sotto voce of a resplendently peroxided matron in the party stung his eardrums like a saw shearing through tin: "I'm sure it must be! ... You know, my dear—the bathy-something man. ..."

Simon Templar's ribs lifted under his shirt with the deep breath that he drew into his lungs, and the twirtle of bliss within him rose to a sweet celestial singing. He knew now why the name of Professor Yule had seemed familiar, and why he had tried to place that fresh apple-cheeked face over the trim grey beard. Only a few months ago the newspapers had run their stories and the illustrated weeklies had carried special pictures; the National Geographic Magazine had brought out a Yule Expedition num­ber. For Wesley Yule had done something that no man on earth had ever done before. He had been down five thousand feet into the Pacific Ocean, beyond any depth ever seen before by human eyes—not in any sort of glorified diving bell, but in a fantastic bulbous armour built to withstand the terrific pressure that would have crushed an unprotected man like a midge on a window-pane, in which he was able to move and walk about on the ocean floor nearly a mile below the ship from which he was lowered. He was the man who had perfected and proved a deep-sea costume compared with which the "iron men" of previous diving experiments were mere amateurish makeshifts, a combina­tion of metallic alloys and scientific construction that promised to revolutionise the exploring of the last secrets of the sea. . . . And now he was in Dinard, the guest of Kurt Vogel, arch hi­jacker of Davy Jones!

That long pregnant breath floated back through the Saint's lips and carried a feather of cigarette-smoke with it—the pause dur­ing which he had held it in his lungs was the only physical index of his emotion. He became aware that the Professor was joining in with some affable common-place, and that Vogel's black eyes were riveted on him unwinkingly. With a perfectly steady hand he tilted the ash off his cigarette, and schooled every scrap of tension out of his face as he turned his head.

"Of course you've heard about Professor Yule?" said Vogel urbanely.

"Of course. . . ." Simon's rendering of slight apologetic confu­sion was attained with an effort that no one could have felt but himself. "Now I know who he is. ... But I hadn't placed him until that lady said something just now." He looked at Yule with a smile of open admiration. "It must have been an amazing experience, Professor."

Yule shrugged, with a pleasant diffidence.

"Naturally it was interesting," he replied frankly. "And rather frightening. Not to say uncomfortable. . . . Perhaps you know that the temperature of the water falls rapidly when you reach really great depths. As a matter of fact, at five thousand feet it is only a few degrees above freezing point. Well, I had been so taken up with the other mechanical details of pressure and light­ing and air supply that I actually forgot that one. I was damned cold!" He chuckled engagingly. "I'm putting an electrical heating arrangement in my improved bathystol, and I shan't suffer that way next time."

"You've decided to go down again, then?"

"Oh, yes. I've only just started. That first trip of mine was only a trial. With my new bathystol I hope to get down twice as far—and that's nothing. If some of the latest alloys turn out all right, we may be able to have a look at the Cape Verde Basin— over three thousand fathoms—or even the Tuscarora Trough, more than five miles down."

"What do you hope to find?"

"A lot of dull facts about depth currents and globigerina ooze. Possibly some new forms of marine life. There may be some astounding monsters living and dying down there, and never seeing the light of day. We might even track down our old friend the sea serpent."

"There are some marvellous possibilities," said the Saint thoughtfully.

"And some expensive ones," confessed Yule, with attractive candour. "In fact, if it hadn't been for Mr Vogel they might not have been possibilities at all—my first descent just about ruined me. But with his help I hope to go a lot further."

The Saint did not smile, although a sudden vision of Kurt Vogel as a connoisseur of globigerina ooze and new species of fish tempted him almost irresistibly. He saw beyond that to other infinitely richer possibilities—possibilities which had proba­bly never occurred to the Professor.

He knew that Vogel was watching him, observing every mi­croscopic detail of his reactions with coldly analytical precision. To show a poker-faced lack of interest would be almost as suspi­cious as breaking loose with a hungry stream of questions. He had to judge the warmth of his response to the exactest hun­dredth of a degree, if he was to preserve any hope of clinging to the bluff of complete unsuspecting innocence which he had adopted. In the next twenty minutes of ordinary conversation he worked harder than he had done for half his life.

". . . so the next big descent will show whether there's any chance of supporting Wegener's theory of continental drift," concluded the Professor.

"I see," said the Saint intelligently.

A man wandering about the terrace with a large camera pushed his way to their table and presented a card with the in­scription of the Agence Française Journalistique.

"Vous permettez, messieurs?"

Yule grinned ruefully, like a schoolboy, and submitted blush­ingly to the ordeal. The photographer took two snapshots of the group, thanked them, and passed on with a vacuous air of wait­ing for further celebrities to impinge on his autocratic ken. A twice-divorced countess whom he ignored glared after him indig­nantly ; and Kurt Vogel beckoned a waiter for the addition.

"Won't you have another?" suggested the Saint.

"I'm afraid we have an engagement. Next time, perhaps." Vogel discarded two ten-franc notes on the assiette and stood up with a flash of his bloodless smile. "If you're interested, you might like to come out with us on a trial trip. It won't be very sensational, unfortunately. Just a test for the new apparatus in moderately deep water."

"I should love to," said the Saint slowly.

Vogel inclined his head pleasantly.

"It won't be just here," he said—"the water's too shallow. We thought of trying it in the Hurd Deep, north of Alderney. There are only about ninety fathoms there, but it'll be enough for our object. If you think it's worth changing your plans, we're leaving for St Peter Port in the morning."

"Well—that sort of invitation doesn't come every day," said the Saint, with a certain well-timed embarrassment. "It's cer­tainly worth thinking about—if you're sure I shouldn't be in the way. . . ."

"Then we may look forward to seeing you." Vogel held out his hand. He had a firm muscular grip, but there was a curious rep­tilian coldness in the touch of his skin that prickled the Saint's scalp. "I'll give you a shout in the morning as we go by, and see if you've made up your mind."

Simon shook hands with the Professor, and watched them until they turned the corner by the Petit Casino. His blue eyes were set in a lambent glint, like polished sapphires. He had got what he wanted. He had made actual contact with Kurt Vogel, talked with him, touched him physically and experienced the cold-blooded fighting presence of the man, crossed swords with him in a breathless finesse of nerves that was sharper than any bludgeoning battle. He had gained more than that. He had re­ceived a gratuitous invitation to call again. Which meant that he was as good as on the prize list. Or in the coffin.

3

A highly conclusive and illuminating deduction, reflected the Saint grimly. . . . And then all the old reckless humour flickered back into his eyes, and he lighted another cigarette and ordered himself a second drink. So be it. As Loretta Page had said, there were no dividends in guessing. In the fullness of time all uncer­tainty would doubtless be removed—one way or the other. And when that happened, Simon Templar proposed to be among those present.

Meanwhile he had something else to think about. A man came filtering through the tables on the terrace with a sheaf of English and American papers fanned Out in his hand. Simon bought an Express, and he had only turned the first page when a single-column headline caught his eye.

TO SALVE

CHALFONT CASTLE

——————

£5,000,000 Expedition Fits Out

—————

A SHIP will leave Falmouth early in August with a contract for the greatest treasure-hunt ever attempted in British waters.

She is the Restorer, crack steamer of the Liverpool & Glasgow Salvage Association——

Simon skimmed through the story with narrowing eyes. So that was it! If Kurt Vogel was cruising in the vicinity of the Channel Islands on active business, and not merely on a holiday, the Chalfont Castle was his most obvious target. And it seemed likely—otherwise why not take Professor Yule and his bathystol down to some place like Madeira, where there was really deep water close at hand for any number of experiments? The Chal­font Castle could not wait. If an authorised expedition was being organised so quickly, there was not much time for a free-lance to step in and forestall it. Perhaps the underwriters, taught by past experience, had thought of that. But for a man of Vogel's nerve there might still be a chance. . . .

Simon Templar lunched at the Gallic, and enjoyed his meal. The sting of the encounter from which he had just emerged had driven out every trace of the rather exasperated lassitude which had struck him an hour or two before; this providential hint of new movement swept new inspiration in like a sea breeze. The spice of certain danger laced his wine and sparkled through his veins. His brain was functioning like an awakened machine, turn­ing over the urgencies of the moment with smooth and effortless ease.

When he had finished, he went out into the main foyer and collected a reception clerk. "You have a telephone?"

"Oui, m'sieu. A gauche——"

"No, thanks," said the Saint. "This isn't local—I want to talk to England. Let me have a private room. I'll pay for it."

Ten minutes later he was settled comfortably in an armchair with his feet on a polished walnut table.

"Hullo, Peter." The object of his first call was located after the London exchange had tried three other possible numbers which he gave them. "This is your Uncle Simon. Listen—didn't you tell me that you once had a respectable family?"

"It still is respectable," Peter Quentin's voice answered indig­nantly. "I'm the only one who's had anything to do with you."

Simon grinned gently and slid a cigarette out of the package in front of him.

"Do any of them know anything about Lloyd's?"

"I've got a sort of cousin, or something, who works there," said Peter, after a pause for reflection.

"That's great. Well, I want you to go and dig out this sort of cousin, or something, and stage a reunion. Be nice to him—re­mind him of the old family tree—and find out something for me about the Chalfont Castle."

"Like a shot, old boy. But are you sure you don't want an estate agent?"

"No, I don't want an estate agent, you fathead. It's a wreck, not a ruin. She sank somewhere near Alderney about the begin­ning of March. I want you to find out exactly where she went down. They're sure to have a record at Lloyd's. Get a chart from Potter's, in the Minories, and get the exact spot marked. And send it to me at the Poste Restante, St Peter Port, Guernsey— to-night. Name of Tombs. Or get a bearing and wire it. But get something. All clear?"

"Clear as mud." There was a suspicious hiatus at the other end of the line. "But if this means you're on the warpath again——"

"If I want you, I'll let you know, Peter," said the Saint con­tentedly, and rang off.

That was that. . . . But even if one knew the exact spot where things were likely to happen, one couldn't hang about there and wait for them. Not in a stretch of open water where a float­ing bottle would be visible for miles on a calm day. The Saint's next call was to another erstwhile companion in crime.

"Do you think you could buy me a nice diving suit, Roger?" he suggested sweetly. "One of the latest self-contained contrap­tions with oxygen tanks. Say you're representing a movie company and you want it for an undersea epic."

"What's the racket?" inquired Roger Conway firmly.

"No racket at all, Roger. I've just taken up submarine geology, and I want to have a look at some globigerina ooze. Now, if you bought that outfit this afternoon and shipped it off to me in a trunk——"

"Why not let me bring it?"

The Saint hesitated. After all, why not? It was the second time in a few minutes that the suggestion had been held out, and each time by a man whom he had tried and proved in more than one tight corner. They were old campaigners, men with his own cynical contempt of legal technicalities, and his own cool disre­gard of danger, men who had followed him before, without a qualm, into whatever precarious paths of breathless filibustering he had led them, and who were always accusing him of hogging all the fun when he tried to dissuade them from taking the same risks again. He liked working alone; but some aspects of Vogel's crew of modern pirates might turn out to be more than one man's meat.

"Okay." The Saint drew at his cigarette, and his slow smile floated over the wire in the undertones of his voice. "Get hold of Peter, and any other of the boys who are looking for a sticky end. But the other instructions stand. Ship that outfit to me personally, care of the Southern Railway—you might even make it two outfits, if you feel like looking at some fish—and Peter's to do his stuff exactly as I've already told him. You toughs can put up at the Royal; but you're not to recognise me unless I recognise you first. It may be worth a point or two if the un­godly don't know we're connected. Sold?"

"Cash," said Roger happily.

Simon walked on air to the stairs. As he stepped down into the foyer, he became aware of a pair of socks. The socks were partic­ularly noticeable because they were of a pale brick-red hue, and intervened between a pair of blue trousers and a pair of brown and yellow co-respondent shoes. It was a combination of colours which, once seen, could not be easily forgotten; and the Saint's glance voyaged idly up to the face of the man who wore it. He had already seen it once before, and his glance at the physiog­nomy of the wearer confirmed his suspicion that there could not be two men simultaneously inhabiting Dinard with the identi­cally horrible taste in colour schemes. The sock stylist was no stranger. He had sat at a table close to the Saint's at lunch-time, arriving a few moments later and calling for his bill in unison— exactly as he was sitting in the foyer now, with an aloof air of having nothing important to do and being ready to do it at a minute's notice.

The Saint paid for his calls and the use of the room, and saun­tered out. He took a roundabout route to his destination, turned three or four corners, without once looking back, and paused to look in a shop window in the Rue du Casino. In an angle of the plate glass he caught a reflection—of pale brick-red socks.

Item Two. ... So Vogel's affability had not been entirely unpremeditated. Perhaps it had been carefully planned from the start. It would have been simplicity itself for the sleuth to pick him up when he was identified by sitting with Vogel and Yule at the cafe.

Not that the situation was immediately serious. The pink-hosed spy might have discovered that Simon Templar had rented a room and made some telephone calls, but he wasn't likely to have discovered much more. And that activity was not funda­mentally suspicious. But with Vogel already on his guard, it would register in the score as a fact definitely to be accounted for. And the presence of the man who had observed it added its own testimony to the thoroughness with which the fact would doubtless be scrutinised.

The Saint's estimation of Kurt Vogel went up another grim notch. In that dispassionate efficiency, that methodical examina­tion of every loophole, that ruthless elimination of every factor of chance or guesswork, he recognised some of the qualities that must have given Vogel his unique position in the hierarchy of racketeers—the qualities that must have been fatally underestimated by those three nameless scouts of Ingerbeck's, who had not come home. . . .

And which might have been underestimated by the fourth.

The thought checked him in his stride for an almost imper­ceptible instant. He knew that Loretta Page was ready to be told that she was suspected, but was she ready for quite such an inquisitorial surveillance as this?

He turned into the next tobacconist's and gained a breathing space while he purchased a pack of cigarettes. To find out, he had to shake off his own shadow. And it had to be done in such a way that the shadow did not know he was being intentionally shaken off, because an entirely innocent young man in the role Simon had set himself would never discover that he was being shadowed anyway.

He came out and walked more quickly to the corner of the Rue Levasseur. A disengaged taxi met him there, almost as if it had been timed for the purpose, and he stopped it and swung on board without any appearance of undue haste, but with a move­ment as swift and sure as an acrobat's on the flying trapeze.

"À la gare," he said; and the taxi was off again without having actually reached a standstill.

Looking back through the rear window, he saw the pink socks piling into another cab a whole block behind. He leaned forward as they rushed into the Place de la République.

"Un moment," he said in the driver's ear. "Il faut que j'aille premièrement à la Banque Boutin."

The driver muttered something uncomplimentary under his breath, trod on the brakes, and spun the wheel. By his limited lights, he was not without reason, for the Banque de Bretagne and Travel Agency of M. Jules Boutin are at the eastern end of the Rue Levasseur—in exactly the opposite direction from the station.

They reeled dizzily round the corner of the Rue de la Plage, with that sublime abandon of which only French chauffeurs and suicidal maniacs are capable, gathered speed, and hurtled around another right-hand hairpin into the Boulevard Féart. Simon looked back again, and saw no sign of the pursuit. There were three other possible turnings from the hairpin junction which they had just circumnavigated; and the Saint had no doubt that his pink-socked epilogue, having lost them completely on that sudden swerve out of the Place de la République, and not ex­pecting any such treacherous manoeuvre, was by that time franti­cally exploring routes in the opposite direction.

They turned back into the Rue Levasseur; and to make abso­lutely certain the Saint changed his mind again and ordered an­other twist north to the post office. He paid off the driver and plunged into a telephone booth.

She was in. She said she had been writing some letters.

"Don't post 'em till I see you," said the Saint. "What's the number of your room?"

"Twenty-eight. But——"

"I'll walk up as if I owned it. Can you bear to wait?"

4

She was wearing a green silk robe with a great silver dragon crawling round it and bursting into fire-spitting life on her shoul­ders. Heaven knew what she wore under it, if anything; but the curve of her thigh sprang up in a sheer sweep of breath-taking line to her knee as she turned. The physical spell of her wove a definite hiatus in between his entrance and his first line.

"I hope I intrude," he said.

The man who was with her scowled. He was a hard-faced, hard-eyed individual, rather stout, rather bald, yet with a solid atmosphere of competence and courage about him.

"Loretta—how d'ya know this guy's on the rise?"

"I don't," she said calmly. "But he has such a nice clean smile."

"Just a home girl's husband," murmured the Saint lightly. He tapped a cigarette on his thumb-nail, and slanted his brows side­long at the objector. "Who's the young heart's delight?"

She shrugged.

"Name of Steve Murdoch."

"Of Ingerbeck's?"

"Yes."

"Simon to you," said the Saint, holding out his hand.

Murdoch accepted it sullenly. Their grips clashed, battled in a sudden straining of iron wrists; but neither of them flinched. The Saint's smile twitched at his lips, and some of the sullenness went out of the other's stare.

"Okay, Saint," Murdoch said dourly. "I know you're tough. But I don't like fresh guys."

"I hate them, myself," said the Saint unblushingly. He sat on the arm of a chair, making patterns in the atmosphere with ciga­rette-smoke. "Been here long?"

"Landed at Cherbourg this morning."

"Did you ask for Loretta downstairs?"

"Yeah."

"Notice anyone prick up his ears?"

Murdoch shook his head.

"I didn't look."

"You should have," said the Saint reprovingly. "I didn't ask, but I looked. There was a bloke kicking his heels in a corner when I arrived, and he had watchdog written across his chest in letters a foot high. He didn't see me, because I walked through with my face buried inside a newspaper; but he must have seen you. He'd 've seen anyone who wasn't expecting him, and he was placed just right to hear who was asked for at the desk."

There was a short silence. Loretta leaned back against a table with her hands on the edge and her long legs crossed.

"Did you know Steve was here?" she asked.

"No. He only makes it more difficult. But I discovered that a ferret-faced bird with the most beautiful line in gent's half hose was sitting on my tail, and that made me think. I slipped him and came round to warn you." Simon looked at her steadily. "There's only a trace of suspicion attached to me at the moment, but Vogel's taking no chances. He wants to make sure. There's probably a hell of a lot of suspicion about you. so you weren't likely to be forgotten. And apparently you haven't been. Now Steve has rolled up to lend a hand—he's branded himself by asking for you, and he'll be a marked man from this moment."

"That's okay," said Murdoch phlegmatically. "I can look after myself without a nurse."

"I'm sure you can, dear old skunk," said the Saint amiably. "But that's not the point. Loretta, at least, isn't supposed to be looking after herself. She's the undercover ingenue. She isn't supposed to have anything to look after except her honour. Once she starts any Mata Hari business, that boat is sunk."

"Well?"

Simon flicked ash on to the carpet.

"The only tune is the one I'm playing. Complete and childlike innocence. With a pan like yours, Steve, you'll have a job to get your mouth round the flute, but you've got to try it. Because any sucker play you make is going to hit Loretta. The first thing is to clean yourself up. If you've got a star or anything like that of Ingerbeck's, flush it down the lavatory. If you've got anything in writing that could link you up, memorise it and burn it. Strip yourself of every mortal thing that might tie you on to this party. That goes for you too, Loretta, because sooner or later the ungodly are going to try and get a line on you from your lug­gage, if they haven't placed you before that. And then, Steve, you blow."

"What?"

"Fade. Waft. Pass out into the night. Loretta can go down­stairs with you, and you can take a fond farewell in the foyer, with a few well-chosen lines of dialogue from which any listeners can gather that you're an old friend of her father's taking a holi­day in Guernsey, and hearing she was in Dinard you hopped an excursion and came over for the day. And then you beetle down to the pier, catch the next ferry to St Malo, and shoot on to the return steamer to St Peter Port like a cork out of a bottle. Vo­gel will be there to-morrow."

"How do you know that?" asked Loretta quickly.

"He told me. We got into conversation before lunch." Simon's gaze lifted to hers with azure lights of scapegrace solemnity play­ing in it. "He was trying to draw me out, and I was just devilling him, but neither of us got very far. I think he was telling me the truth, though. If I chase him to St Peter Port, he'll be able to put my innocence through some more tests. So when you're say­ing goodbye to Steve, he might ask you if you're likely to take a trip to Guernsey, and you can say you don't think you'll be able to—that may make them think that you haven't heard anything from me."

Murdoch took out a cigar and bit the end from it with a bull­dog clamp of his jaws. His eyes were dark again with distrust.

"It's a stall, Loretta," he said sourly. "How d'ya know Vogel isn't capable of having an undercover man, the same as us. All he wants to do is get me out of the way, so he can take you alone."

"You flatter yourself, brother," said the Saint coldly "If I wanted to take her, you wouldn't stop me. Nor would you stop Vogel."

"No?"

"No."

"Well, I'm not running."

Loretta glanced from one man to the other. The animosity between them was creeping up again, hardening the square obstinacy of Murdoch's jaw, glittering like chips of elusive steel in the Saint's eyes. They were like two jungle animals, each superb in his own way and conscious of his strength, but of two different species whose feud dated back too far into the grey dawns of history for any quick forgetting.

"Yes, you are, Steve," said the girl.

"When I start taking orders from that——"

"You aren't." Her voice was quiet and soothing, but there was a thread of calm decision under the silky texture. "You're taking orders from me. The Saint's right. We'd better break off again, and hope we can alibi this meeting."

Murdoch was staring at her half incredulously.

"Orders?" he repeated.

"That's right, Steve. At present I'm running this end of it. Until Martin Ingerbeck takes me off the assignment, you do what I tell you."

"I think you're crazy."

She didn't answer. She took a cigarette from a bos on the table and walked to the window, standing there with her arms lifted and her hands on either side of the frame. The silver dragon lifted on her waist.

Murdoch's lips flattened the butt of his cigar. His hands clutched the arms of his chair, and he started to get up slowly. With a sudden burst of vicious energy he grabbed for his hat and thumped it on his head.

"If you put it that way, I can't argue," he growled. "But you're going to wish I had!" He transferred his glare from her unconscious back to the Saint's face. "As for you—if anything happens to Loretta through my not being here——"

"We'll be sure to let you know about it," said the Saint, and opened the door for him.

Murdoch stumped through with his fists clenched; and the Saint half closed it as Loretta turned from the window and came across the room. He took her hands.

"I shall be gone while you're seeing Steve off," he said. "I can't risk the foyer again, but I spotted a fire escape."

"Must you?" The faint irony of her voice was baffled by the enigma of her smiling mouth.

He nodded.

"Not because I want to. But they ought to see me going back to the Corsair before there's too much excitement about my shadow having lost me. You're still sure you mean to go to‑night?"

"Quite sure."

"Did I dream the rest of it, after you'd gone last night?"

"I don't know, dear. What did you have for dinner?"

"Lobster mayonnaise. I dreamt that you came back from the Falkenberg. Safe. And always beautiful. To me."

"And then the danger really started."

"I dreamt that you didn't think it was too dangerous."

Her eyes searched his face, with the laughter stilled in them for a moment. The tip of the dragon's tongue stirred on her shoulder as she drew breath. One hand released itself to trace the half-mocking line of his mouth.

"But I am afraid," she said.

Suddenly he felt her lips crushed and melting against his, and her body pressed against him, for one soundless instant; and then, before he could move, she had brushed past him and gone.

Orace was waiting for him anxiously when he got back.

"Yer bin a long time," Orace remarked shatteringly.

"Thousands of years," said the Saint.

He sat out on deck again after he had taken his last daylight swim, and sipped a glass of sherry, and dined on one of Orace's superlative meals. The speed tender had set out again from the Falkenberg and returned about half-past seven with Vogel, in evening dress, sitting beside Loretta. Through the binoculars, from one of the saloon portholes, he had seen Vogel smiling and talking, his great nose profiled against the water.

He sat out, with a cigarette clipped and half-forgotten between his lips and his eyes creased against the smoke, as motionless as a bronze Indian, while the water turned to dark glass and then to burnished steel. There was no fog that night. The river ran blue-black under the wooded rocks of the Vicomté and the ramparts and granite headland of St Malo. Lights sprang up, multiplying, on the island, and were mirrored in St Servan and Dinard, and spread luminous rapiers across the river. The hulls of the craft anchored in the Ranee sank back into the gloom until the night swallowed them, and only their winking lights remained on the water. The lighthouses of the inlet were awake, green and red flashes stabbing irregularly across the bay and twinkling down from Grand Larron. A drift of music from one of the Casinos lingered across the estuary; and the anchorage where the Falk­enberg should be was a constellation of lights.

Loretta was there; but Simon saw no need for her to be alone.

The idea grew with him as the dark deepened and his imagina­tion worked through it. In his own way he was afraid, impatient with his enforced helplessness. . . . Presently he sent another cigarette spinning like a glow-worm through the blackness, and went below to take off his clothes. He tested the working of his automatic, brought a greased cartridge into the breech, secured the safety-catch, and fastened the gun to the belt of his trunks. The dark water received him without a sound.

Curiously enough, it was during that stealthy swim that he had a sudden electric remembrance of a news photographer who had been so unusually blind to the presence of all celebrities save one. Perhaps it was because his mind had been unconsciously revolving the subject of Vogel's amazing thoroughness. But he had a startlingly vivid picture of a camera aiming towards him— fully as much towards him as towards Professor Yule—and a sudden reckless smile moved his lips as he slid through the water.

If that news photographer was not a real news photographer, and the picture had been developed and printed and rushed across to England by air that evening, a correspondent could show it around in certain circles in London with the virtual cer­tainty of having it identified within forty-eight hours . . . And if the result of that investigation was cabled to Kurt Vogel at St Peter Port, a good many interrogation marks might be wiped out with deadly speed.

III. HOW KURT VOGEL WAS NOT SO CALM, AND

OTTO ARNHEIM ACQUIRED A HEADACHE

A CEILING of cloud had formed over the sky, curtaining off the moon and leaving no natural light to relieve the blackness. Out in the river it was practically pitch dark, except where the riding lights of anchored craft sprang their small fragments of scattered luminance out of the gloom.

The Saint slid through the water without sound, without leav­ing so much as a ripple behind him. All of the rhythmic swing of his arms and legs was beneath the surface, and only his head broke the oily film of the still water; so that not even as much as the pit-pat of two drops of water could have betrayed his passing to anyone a yard away. He was as inconspicuous and unassertive as a clump of sea-weed drifting up swiftly and si­lently with the tide.

He was concentrating so much on silence that he nearly al­lowed himself to be run down by some nocturnal sportsman who came skimming by in a canoe when he was only a stone's throw from the Falkenberg. The boat leapt at him out of the darkness so unexpectedly that he almost shouted the warning that came instinctively to his lips; the prow brushed his hair, and he submerged himself a fraction of a second before the paddle speared down at him. When he came up again the canoe had vanished as silently as it had come. He caught a glimpse of it again as it arrowed across the reflected lights of the Casino de la Vicomté, and sent a string of inaudible profanities sizzling across the wa­ter at the unknown pilot, apparently without causing him to drop dead by remote control.

Then the hull of the Falkenberg loomed up for undivided at­tention. At the very edge of the circle of visibility shed by its lights, he paused to draw a deep breath; and then even his head disappeared under the water, and his hands touched the side before he let himself float gently up again and open his lungs.

He rose under the stern, and trod water while he listened for any sound that would betray the presence of a watcher on the deck. Above the undertones of the harbour he heard the murmur of voices coming through open portholes in two different direc­tions, the dull creak of metal and the seep of the tide making under the hull; but there was no trace of the sharper sound that would have been made by a man out in the open, the rustle of cloth or the incautious easing of a cramped limb. For a full three minutes the Saint stayed there, waiting for the least faint disturbance of the ether that would indicate the wakefulness of a reception committee prepared to welcome any such unauthor­ised prowler as himself. And he didn't hear any such thing.

The Saint dipped a hand to his belt and brought it carefully out of the water with a mask which he had tucked in there be­fore he left the Corsair. It was made of black rubber, as thin and supple as the material of a toy balloon; and when he pulled it on over his head it covered every inch of his face from the end of his nose upwards, and held itself in place by its own gentle elasticity. If by any miscalculation he was to be seen by any member of the crew, there was no need for him to be recognised.

Then he set off again to work himself round the boat. There were three lighted portholes aft, and he stopped by the first of them to find a finger-hold. When he had got it he hauled himself up out of the water, inch by inch, till he could bend one modest eye over the rim.

He looked into a large cabin running the whole width of the vessel. A treble tier of bunks lined two of the three sides which he could see, and seemed to be repeated on the side from which he was looking in. On two of them half-dressed men were stretched out, reading and smoking. At a table in the centre four others, miscellaneously attired in shirtsleeves, jerseys, and sin­glets, were playing a game of cards, while a fifth was trying to poach enough space out of one side to write a letter. Simon ab­sorbed their faces in a travelling glance that dwelt on each one in turn, and mentally ranked them for as tough a harvest of hard-case sea stiffs as anyone could hope to glean from the scourings of the seven seas. They came up to his expectations in every single respect, and two thin fighting lines creased themselves into the corners of his mouth as he lowered himself back into the river as stealthily as he had pulled himself out of it.

The third porthole lighted a separate smaller cabin with only four bunks, and when he looked in he had to peer between the legs of a man who was reclining on the upper berth across the porthole. By the light brick-red hosiery at the ends of the legs he identified the sleuth who had trailed him that afternoon; and on the opposite side of the cabin the man who had been busily doing nothing in the foyer of the Hotel de la Mer, with one shoe off and the other unlaced, was intent on filling his pipe.

He couldn't look into any of the principal rooms without ac­tually climbing out on to the deck, but from the scraps of con­versation that floated out through the windows he gathered that was where the entertainment of Loretta Page was still pro­ceeding. Professor Yule appeared to be concluding some anec­dote about his submarine experiences.

". . . and when he squashed his nose against the glass, he just stayed there and stared. I never imagined a fish could get so much indignation into its face."

There was a general laugh, out of which rose Vogel's smooth toneless suavity: "Wouldn't even that tempt you to go down, Otto?"

"Not me," affirmed a fat fruity voice which the Saint had not heard before. "I'd rather stay on top of the water. Wouldn't you, Miss Page?"

"It must be awfully interesting," said Loretta—and Simon could picture her, sitting straight and slim, with the light lifting the glints of gold from her brown head. "But I couldn't do it. I should be frightened to death. . . ."

The Saint passed on, swimming slowly and leisurely up to the bows. He eeled himself round the stem and drifted down again, close up in the shadow of the other side. As he paddled under the saloon windows on the return journey, Vogel was offering more liqueurs. The man in the pink socks was snoring, and his companion had lighted his pipe. The card game in the crew's quarters finished a deal with a burst of raucous chaff, the letter-writer licked his envelope, and the men who had been reading still read.

Simon Templar edged one hand out of the water to scratch the back of his ear. During the whole of that round tour of inspec­tion he hadn't collected one glimpse or decibel of any sight or sound that didn't stand for complete relaxation and goodwill towards men. Except the faces of some of the crew, which may not have been their faults. But as for any watch on deck, he was ready to swear that it simply didn't exist.

Meaning . . . Perhaps that Loretta had been caught the night before by accident, through some sleepless mariner happening to amble up for a breath of fresh air. But even if that was the explanation, a watch would surely have been posted afterwards to frustrate any second attempt. Unless . . . and he could only see that one reason for the moment . . . unless Loretta had been promoted from a suspect to a certainty—in which case, since she was there on board, the watch could take an evening off.

The Saint gave it up. By every ordinary test, anyhow, he could find nothing in his way; and the only thing to do was to push on and search further.

He hooked his fingers over the counter and drew himself up until he could hitch one set of toes on to the deck. Only for an instant he might have been seen there, upright against the dark water; and then he had flitted noiselessly across the dangerous open space and merged himself into the deep shadow of the su­perstructure.

Again he waited. If any petrified watcher had escaped detec­tion on his first tour, and had seen his arrival on board, no alarm had been raised. Either the man would be deliberating whether to fetch help, or he would be waiting to catch him when he moved forward. And if the Saint stayed where he was, either the man would go for help or he would come on to investigate. In either of which events he would announce his presence unmis­takably to the Saint's tingling ears.

But nothing happened. Simon stood there like a statue while the seconds ticked into minutes on his drumming pulses, and the wetness drained down his legs and formed a pool around his feet, hardly breathing; but only the drone of conversation in the sa­loon, and a muffled guffaw from the crew's quarters under his feet, reached him out of the stillness.

At last he relaxed, and allowed himself to glance curiously at his surroundings. Over his head, the odd canvas-shrouded con­trivance which he had observed from a distance reached out aft like an oversized boom—but there was no mast at the near end to account for it. The Falkenberg carried no sail. He stretched up and wriggled his fingers through a gap in the lacing, and felt something like a square steel girder with wire cables stretched inside it; and suddenly the square protuberance, likewise covered with tarpaulin, on which the after end of the boom rested took on a concrete significance. At the end up against the deckhouse he found wheels, and the wire cables turned over the wheels, and ran down close beside the bulkhead to vanish through plated eyes in the deck at his feet ... He was exploring a nifty, well-oiled, and up-to-date ten-ton grab!

"Well, -well, well," murmured the Saint admiringly, to his guardian angel.

And that curiously low flattened stern ... It all fitted in. Divers could be dropped over that counter with the minimum of difficulty; and the grab could telescope out or swing round, and run its claw round to be steered on to whatever the divers offered it. While, forward of all those gadgets, there were a pair of high-speed engines and a super-stream-lined hull to facilitate a lightning getaway if an emergency emerged. . . . Which, how­ever priceless a conglomeration of assets, is not among the amen­ities usually advertised with luxurious pleasure cruisers.

A slow smile tugged at the Saint's lips; and he restrained him­self with a certain effort from performing an impromptu horn­pipe. The last lingering speck of doubt in his mind had been catastrophically obliterated in those few seconds. Loretta Page hadn't been pulling his leg, or raving, or leading him up the garden. He wasn't kidding himself to make the book read accord­ing to the blurb. That preposterous, princely, pluperfect racket did exist; and Kurt Vogel was in it. In it right up to the blue cornice of his neck.

If someone had been wearing a hat, he would have raised it in solemn salute to the benign deities of outlawry that had poured him into such a truly splendiferous tureen of soup.

And then a door opened further up the deck, and footsteps began to move down towards him. Where he was standing, there wasn't cover for a cat, except what was provided by the shadow of the deckhouse. In another second even that was taken from him, as a switch was clicked over somewhere and a pair of bulk­head lights behind frosted panels suddenly wiped out the dark­ness in. a glow of yellowish radiance.

The Saint's heart arrived in his mouth, as if it had soared up there in an express elevator; and for a moment his hand dropped to the gun in his belt.

And then he realised that the lights which had destroyed his hiding-place hadn't been switched on with that intention. They were simply a part of the general system of exterior illumination of the boat, and their kindling had doubtless been paralleled by the lighting up of other similar bulbs all around the deck. But the footsteps were drawing close to the corner where they would find him in full view, and he could hear Vogel discoursing proprietorially on the details of beam and draught.

Simon looked up speculatively, and his hands reached for the deckhouse roof. In another second he was up there, spread out flat on his stomach, peeping warily down over the edge.

2

All the evening Kurt Vogel had been studiously affable. The dinner had been perfectly cooked and perfectly served; the wine, presented with a charming suggestion of apology, just dulcet enough to flatter a feminine palate, without being too sweet for any taste. Vogel had set himself out to play the polished cosmo­politan host, and he filled the part brilliantly. The other guest, whom he called Otto and who had been introduced to Loretta as Mr Arnheim, a fat broad-faced man with small brown eyes and a moist red pursed-up mouth, fitted into the play with equal correctness. And yet the naïve joviality of Professor Yule, with his boyish laugh and his anecdotes and his ridiculously premature grey beard, was the only thing that had eased the strain on her nerves.

She knew that from the moment when she set foot on board she was being watched like a mouse cornered by two patient cats. She knew it, even without one single article of fact which she could have pointed out in support of her belief. There was nothing in the entertainment, not the slightest scintilla of a hint of an innuendo, to give her any material grounds for discomfort. The behaviour of Vogel and Arnheim was so punctilious that without their unfailing geniality it would have been almost em­barrassingly formal.

The menace was not in anything they said or did. It was in their silences. Their smiles never reached their eyes. Their laughter went no deeper than their throats. All the time they were watching, waiting, analysing. Every movement she made, every turn of a glance, every inflection of her voice, came under their mental microscope—was wafered down, dissected, scrutin­ised in all its component parts until it had given up its last parti­cle of meaning. And the fiendish cleverness of it was that a per­fectly innocent woman in the role she had adopted wouldn't have been bothered at all.

She had realised halfway through the meal that that was the game they were playing. They were merely letting her own imag­ination work against her, while they looked on. Steadily, skilfully, remorselessly, they were goading her own brain against her, keying her millimetre by millimetre to the tension of self-con­sciousness where she would make one false step that would be sufficient for their purpose. And all the time they were smiling, talking flatteringly to her, respecting her with their words, so cunningly that an outside observer like Professor Yule could have seen nothing to give her the slightest offence.

She had clung to the Professor as the one infallible lodestar on the tricky course she had to steer, even while she had realised completely what Vogel's patronage of scientific exploration meant. Yule's spontaneous innocence was the one pattern which she had been able to hold to; and when he remained behind in the saloon she felt a cold emptiness that was not exactly fear.

Arnheim had engineered it, with a single sentence of irre­proachable and unarguable tact, when Vogel suggested showing her over the ship.

"We'll stay and look after the port," he said, and there was not even the suspicion of a smirk in his eyes when he spoke.

She looked at staterooms, bathrooms, galleys, engines, and refrigerators, listening to his explanations and interjecting the right expressions of admiration and delight, steeling herself against the hypnotic monotone of his voice. She wondered whether he would kiss her in one of the rooms, and felt as if she had been let out of prison when they came out on deck under the open sky.

His hand slid through her arm. It was the first time he had touched her, and even then the touch had no more than an avun­cular familiarity.

". . . This open piece of deck is rather pleasant for sitting out when it's hot. We rig an awning over that boom if the sun's too strong."

"It must be marvellous to own a boat like this," she said.

They stood at the rail, looking down the river. Somewhere among the lights in the broadening of the estuary was the Cor­sair, but there was nothing by which she could pick it out.

"To be able to have you here—this is pleasant," he said. "At other times it can be a very lonely ownership."

"That must be your own choice."

"It is. I am a rich man. If I told you how rich I was you might think I was exaggerating. I could fill this boat hundreds of times over with—delectable company. A generous millionaire is always attractive. But I've never done so. Do you know that you're the first woman who has set foot on this deck?"

"I'm sorry if you regret it," she said carelessly.

"I do."

His black eyes sought her face with a burning intensity. She realised with a thrill of fantastic horror that he was absolutely sincere. In that cold passionless iron-toned voice he was making love to her, as if the performance was dragged out of him against his will. He was still watching her; but within that inflexible vigilance there was a grotesque hunger for illusion that was an added terror.

"I regret it because when you give a woman even the smallest corner of your mind, you give her the power to take more. You are no longer in supreme command of your destiny. The building of a lifetime can be betrayed and broken for a moment's foolish­ness."

She smiled.

"You're too cynical—you sound as if you'd been disappointed in love."

"I have never been in love——"

The last word was bitten off, as if it had not been intended to be the last. It gave the sentence a curiously persistent quality, so that it seemed to reverberate in the air, repeating itself in ghostly echoes after the actual sound was gone.

She half turned towards him, in a natural quest for the conclu­sion of that unfinished utterance. Instead she found his hands pinning her to the rail on either side, his great predatory nose thrust down towards her face, his wide lipless mouth working under a torrent of low-pitched quivering words.

"You have tempted me to be foolish. For years I shut all women out of my life, so that none of them could hurt me. And yet what does wealth give without women? I knew that you wanted to come and see my boat. For you it might only have been a nice boat to look at, part of your holiday's amusement; for me it was a beginning. I broke the rule of a lifetime to bring you here. Now I don't want you to go back."

"You'll change your mind again in the morning." Somehow she tore her gaze away, and broke through his arms. "Besides, you wouldn't forget a poor girl's honour——"

She was walking along the deck, swinging her wrap with an affectation of sophisticated composure, finding a moment's es­cape in movement. He walked beside her, speaking of emotion in that terrifying unemotional voice.

"Honour is the virtue of inferior people who can't afford to dispense with it. I have enough money to ignore whatever any­one may think or anyone may say. If you shared it with me, nothing need hurt you."

"Only myself."

"No, no. Don't be conventional. That isn't worthy of you. It's my business to understand people. You are the kind of woman who can stand aside and look at facts, without being deluded by any fogs of sentimentality. We speak the same language. That's why I talk to you like this."

His hand went across and gripped her shoulder, so that she had to stop and turn.

"You are the kind of woman with whom I could forget to be cold."

He drew her towards him, and she closed her eyes before he kissed her. His mouth was hard, with a kind of rubbery smooth­ness that chilled her so that she shivered. After a long time he released her. His eyes burned on her like hot coals.

"You'll stay, Loretta?" he said hoarsely.

"No." She swayed away from him. She felt queerly sick, and the air had become heavy and oppressive. "I don't know. You're too quick. . . . Ask me again to-morrow. Please."

"I'm leaving to-morrow."

"You are?"

"We're going to St Peter Port. I hoped you would come with us."

"Give me a cigarette."

He felt in his pockets. The commonplace distraction, thrust at him like that, blunted the edge of his attack.

"I'm afraid I left my case inside. Shall we go in?"

He opened the door, and her hand rested on his arm for a moment as she passed him into the wheelhouse. He passed her a lacquer box and offered her a light.

"You didn't show me this," she said, glancing round the room. was one curved panel of plate glass in the streamlined shape of the most attractive living-rooms on the ship. At the after end there were shelves of books, half a dozen deep long armchairs invited idleness, a rich carpet covered the floor. Long straight windows ran the length of the beam sides, and the forward end was one curved panel of plate glass in the streamlined shape of the structure. There were flowers in chromium wall brackets, and concealed lights built into the ceiling. The wheel and instrument panel up in one corner, the binnacle in front of it and the lit­tered chart table filling the forward bay, looked almost like prop­erty fittings, as if a millionaire's whim had played with the idea of decorating a den in an ordinary house to look like the interior of a yacht.

"We were coming here," said Vogel.

He did not smoke, and he had an actor's mastery over his unoccupied hands which in him seemed to be only the index of an inhuman restraint. She thought he was gathering himself to recover the mood of a moment ago; but before he spoke again there was a knock on the door.

"What is it?" he demanded sharply—it was the first time she had seen a crack in the glassy veneer of his self-possession.

"Excuse me, sir."

The steward who had served dinner stood at the door, his saturnine face mask-like and yet obsequiously expressive. He stood there and waited, and Vogel turned to Loretta with an apologetic shrug.

"I'm so sorry—will you wait for me a moment?"

The door closed on the two men, and she relaxed against the back of a chair. The cigarette between her fingers was held quite steadily—there wasn't a crease or an indentation in the white oval paper to level a mute accusation at the mauling of unstead­ied fingers. She regarded it with an odd detached interest. There was even a full half-inch of ash built out unbroken from the end of it—a visible reassurance that she hadn't once exposed the nervous strain that had keyed up inside her almost to breaking pitch.

She dragged herself off the chair-back and moved across the room. This was the first time she had been left alone since she came on board. It was the chance which had forced her through the ordeal of dinner, the one faint hope of finding a shred of evidence to mark progress on the job, without which anything she suffered would have been wasted—and would have to be gone through again.

She didn't know exactly what she was looking for. There was no definite thing to find. She could only search around with an almost frantic expectancy for any scrap of something that might be added to the slowly mounting compilation of what was known about Kurt, Vogel—for something that might perhaps miracu­lously prove to be the last pointer in the long paper-chase. Others had worked like that before, teasing out fragments of knowledge with infinite patience and at infinite risk. Fragments that had been built up over many months into the single clue that had brought her there.

She ran her eyes over the titles of the books in the cases. There were books on philosophy, books on engineering and nav­igation, books on national and international law in various languages. There were works on criminology, memoirs of espio­nage, a very few novels of the highly mathematical detective type. They didn't look like dummies. She pulled out a couple at random and flicked the pages. They were real; but it would have taken twenty minutes to try them all.

Her fingers curled up and tightened. Nothing in the books. The littered chart table, perhaps . . . She crossed the room quickly, startled by the loud swish of her dress as she moved, her heart throbbing at a speed which surprised her even more. Funny, she thought. Three weeks ago she would have sworn she didn't pos­sess a heart—or nerves. A week ago. A day ago. Or a century.

She was staring down at the table, at a general chart of the Channel Islands and the adjacent coast of France, spread out on the polished teak. But what was there in a chart? A course had been ruled out from Dinard to St Peter Port, with a dog's-leg bend in it to clear the western end of the Minquiers. There was a jotted note of bearings and distances by the angle of the thin pencilled lines. Nothing in that . . . Her glance wandered helplessly over the scattered smudges of red which stood for light­houses and buoys.

And then she was looking at a red mark that wasn't quite the same as the other red marks. It was a distinct circle drawn in red ink around a dot of black marked to the east of Sark. Beside it, also in red ink, neat tiny figures recorded the exact bearing.

The figures jumbled themselves before her eyes. She gripped on her bag, trying to stifle the absurd pulse of excitement that was beginning to work under her ribs. Just like that. So easy, so plain. Perhaps the last clue, the fabulous open sesame that had been tormenting her imagination. Whatever those red marks meant—and others would soon find that out.

There was a pencil lying on the table; and she had opened her bag before she remembered that she had nothing in it to write on. Lipstick on a handkerchief, then . . . but there were a dozen scraps of torn-up paper in an ashtray beside the pencil, and a square inch of paper would be enough.

Her hand moved out.

Suddenly she felt cold all over. There was a feeling of night­mare limpness in her knees, and when she breathed again it was in a queer little shuddering sigh. But she put her hand into her bag quite steadily and took out a powder box. Quite steadily she dabbed at her nose, and quite steadily she walked away to an­other table and stood there turning the pages of a magazine— with the thrum of a hundred demented dynamos pounding through her body and roaring sickeningly in her brain.

Those scraps of inviting paper. The pencil ready to be picked up at the first dawn of an idea. The chart left out, with the red bearing marked on it. The excuse for Vogel to leave the room. The ordeal on the deck, before that, which had sabotaged her self-control to the point where the finest edge of her vigilance was dulled ... to the point where her own aching nerves had tempted her on to the very brink of a trap from which only the shrieked protest of some indefinable sixth sense had held her back ...

She stood there shivering inside, although her hand was quite steady—scanning a meaningless succession of pictures which printed themselves on her retinas without ever reaching her brain. For several seconds she hadn't the strength to move again.

She fought back towards mastery of herself. After an eternity that could scarcely have lasted a quarter of a minute, she let the magazine fall shut on the table and strolled idly back to the chair from which she had started. She sat down. She could feel that her movements were smooth and unhurried, her face calm and untroubled in spite of the tumult within her. Before that, her face and hands might have betrayed her—it only depended on the angle from which she must have been watched. But when Vogel came back, the smile with which she looked up to greet him was serene and artless.

He nodded.

"Please excuse me."

The smile with which he answered her was perfunctory and preoccupied—he didn't even make the mistake of looking closely at her. He went straight across to a folding bureau built into the panelling on one side of the room, and pulled out a drawer.

"I don't want you to be alarmed," he said in his cold even voice, "but I should like you to stay here a few minutes longer."

She felt the creep of her skin up towards the nape of her neck, and searched for the voice that had once been her own.

"I'm quite comfortable," she said.

"I think you'd better stay," he said, and turned round as he slipped the jacket of a big blued automatic in his hand. "The stewards have seen someone prowling about the ship again, just like that mysterious person I told you about who was here last night. But this time he isn't going to get away so easily."

3

Something as intangible as air and as vicious as a machinegun began hammering at the pit of Loretta's stomach. The cohort of ghostly dynamos sang in her ears again, blotting out her precarious instant of hard-won peace in a din that was twice as bad as anything before it. She felt the blood draining down from her head until only a dab of powder and the sea-tan on her skin were left to save her from ultimate disaster.

"Not really?" she said.

Her voice seemed to come from four or five miles away, a mere hollow echo of itself. She knew that by some miracle of will-power she had kept the smile steady on her face; but even that wasn't enough. The disaster was not dispelled—it was barely checked.

A queer glimpse of desperate humour was the only thing she could cling to. She, who had met case-hardened men on their own ground, who had faced death as often as dishonour, and with the same poised contempt and unfaltering alertness—she, Loretta Page, who was ranked at Ingerbeck's as the coolest head on a roster of frost-bitten intellects which operated in the perpetual bleakness of temperatures below zero—was being slowly and inevitably broken up. The rasps of a third degree more subtle and deadly than anything she had ever dreamed of were achieving what mere violence and crude terrorism could never have achieved. They were working away as implacably and untiringly as fate, turning her own self into her bitterest enemy.

Vogel's jet-black eyes were fixed on her now. They had moved on to her face like the poles of a magnet from which she would have had to struggle transparently to get away; and yet his aquiline features were still without positive expression.

"You've nothing to worry about," he said, in a purr of caress­ing reassurance.

"But I'm thrilled." She met his gaze unflinchingly, with the same smile of friendly innocence. "What is it that makes you so popular?"

He shrugged.

"They're probably just some common harbour thieves who think the boat looks as if she might have some valuables on board. We shall find out."

"Let me come with you."

"My dear——"

"I'm not a bit frightened. Not while you've got that gun. And I'll be awfully quiet. But I couldn't bear to miss anything so exciting. Please—would you mind?"

He hesitated for a moment only, and then opened the door on the starboard side.

"All right. Will you keep behind me?"

He switched out the lights, and she followed him out on to the deck. Under the dim glow of the masthead light she caught sight of his broad back moving forward, and stepped after him. In the first shock of transition from the bright illumination of the wheelhouse there was no difference in quality between the black­ness of the air and the sea, so that the night seemed to lie all around them, above and below, as if the Falkenberg was sus­pended in a vast bowl of darkness sprinkled with tiny twinkling lights. Vogel was almost invisible in his black evening clothes as he tiptoed round in the half-solid shadow to the other side of the deck; and when he halted she could hardly have been a pace behind him—his shape swam up before her eyes so suddenly that she touched him as she stopped.

"He's still there."

His voice touched her eardrums as a mere bass vibration in the stillness. From where she stood she could look down the whole length of the deck, a grey pathway stencilled with the yellow windows of the saloon where Yule and Arnheim were still presumably discussing the port. The deckhouse profiled itself in black and slanted black banks of shadow across the open space. Away aft there was another shadow merging into the rest, a thing that distinguished itself only by its shorter and sharper curves from the long cubist lines of the others—something that her eyes found and froze on.

Vogel lifted his automatic.

Her left hand gripped the weather rail. She was trembling, although her mind was working with a clarity that seemed out side herself. That psychological third degree had accomplished its purpose.

Vogel had got her. Even if she had bluffed him all the evening, even if she had betrayed nothing in that paralysed moment of realisation at the chart table, even if she had kept the mask unmoved on her face when he came back—he had got her now. The story of a man prowling on the ship might be a lie. She might be imagining the shadow out of her own guilty fear; or it might only be a member of the crew put out to play the part and build up the deception—to be aimed at and perhaps shot at by Vogel with a blank cartridge. But she didn't know. There was no way for her to know. She had to choose between letting the Saint be shot down without warning, or——

A dozen crazy thoughts crashed through her head. She might throw a noisy fit of maidenly hysterics. She might sneeze, or cough, or faint on his shoulder. But she knew that that was just what he was waiting for her to do. The first hint of interference that she gave would brand her for all time. He would have no more doubts.

She stared at him in a kind of chilled hopeless agony. She could see his arm extended against the lighter grey of the deck, the dull gleam of the automatic held rigidly at the end of it, his black deepset eyes lined unwinkingly along the sights. Something in the nerveless immobility of his position shouted at her that he was a man to whom the thought of missing had never occurred. She saw the great hungry crook of his nose, the ends of his mouth drawn, back so that the thin lips rolled under and van­ished into two parallel lines that were as vicious and pitiless as the smile of a cobra would have been. Her own words thundered through her head in a strident mocking chorus: "When you join Ingerbeck's, you don't sign on for a cocktail party . . . You take an oath ... to do your job . . . keep your mouth shut . . . take the consequences . . ." She had to choose.

So had the Saint.

Moving along the deckhouse roof as silently as a ghost, he had followed everything that happened outside; lying spreadeagled over the wheelhouse, he had leaned out at a perilous angle until he could peer down through one of the windows and see what was happening inside. He had bunched his muscles in a spasm of impotent exasperation when he saw Loretta's hand going out to touch the pencil and spring the trap, and had breathed again when she drew back. Everything that she had endured he had felt sympathetically within himself; and when Vogel came back and took out his automatic, Simon had heard what was said and had understood that also.

Now, gathering his limbs stealthily under him, so close above Loretta's head that he could almost have reached down and touched her, he understood much more. The first mention of a man prowling about the deck had prickled a row of nerve centres all along his spine; then he had disbelieved; then he had seen the shadow that Loretta was staring at, and had remembered the dark speeding canoe which had nearly run him down on his way there. But Loretta hadn't seen that; and he knew what she must be thinking. He could read what was in her mind, could suffer everything she was suffering, as if by some clairvoyant affinity that transcended reason he was identified with her in the stress of that satanically conceived ordeal; and there was a queer exaltation in his heart as he stepped off the wheelhouse roof, out into space over her head.

She saw him as if he had fallen miraculously out of the sky, which was more or less what he did—with one foot knocking down the automatic and the other striking flat-soled at the side of Vogel's head. The gun went off with a crash that echoed back and forth across the estuary, and Vogel staggered against the rail and fell to his knees.

Simon fell across the rail, caught it with his hands, and hung on for a moment. Down at the after end of the deck, the shape that had been lurking there detached itself from the shadows and scurried across the narrow strip of light to clamber over the rail and drop hectically downwards.

Loretta Page stared across six feet of Breton twilight at the miracle—half incredulously, with the breathlessness of inde­scribable relief choking in her throat. She saw the flash of white teeth in a familiar smile, saw him put his fingers to his lips and kiss them out to her with a debonair flourish that defied compar­ison; and then, as Vogel began to drag himself up and around with the gun still clutched in his right hand, she saw the Saint launch himself up with a ripple of brown muscles to curve over with hardly a splash into the sea.

He went down in a long shallow dive, and swam out of the Falkenberg's circle of light before he rose. He had judged his timing and his angle so well that the canoe flashed past his eyes as he broke the surface. He put up one hand and caught the gunnel as it went by, nearly upsetting the craft until the man in it leaned out to the other side and balanced it.

"I thought I told you to say goodbye to France," said the Saint.

"I thought I told you I didn't take your orders," said the other grimly.

"They were Loretta's orders, Steve."

Murdoch dug in the paddle and dragged the canoe round the stern of another yacht moored in the river.

"She's crazy, too," he snarled. "Because you've got around her with your gigolo line doesn't mean I don't know what she'll say when she comes to her senses. I'm staying where I like."

"And getting shot where you like, I hope," murmured Simon. "I won't interfere in the next bonehead play you make. I only butted in this time to save Loretta. Next time, you can take your own curtain."

"I will," said Murdoch prophetically. "Let go this boat."

Simon let go rather slowly, resisting the temptation to release his hold with a deft jerk that would have capsized the canoe and damped the pugnaciousness of its ungrateful occupant. He won­dered whether Murdoch's aggressiveness was founded on sheer blind ignorance of what might have been the result of his clumsy intrusion, or whether it was put up to bluff away the knowledge of having made an egregious mistake; and most of all he won­dered what else would come of the insubordinations of that tough inflexible personality.

One of those questions was partly answered for him very quickly.

He sculled back with his hands, under the side of the yacht near which they had parted company, listening to the low sono­rous purr of a powerful engine that had awoken in the darkness. There were no lights visible through any of the portholes, and he concluded that the crew were all on shore. He was on the side away from the Falkenberg, temporarily screened even from the most lynx-eyed searcher. The purr of the engine grew louder; and with a quick decision he grasped a stanchion, drew himself up, and rolled over into the tiny after cockpit.

He reached it only a second before the beam of a young searchlight swept over the ship, wiping a bar of brilliant illu­mination across the deck in its passing. The throb of the engine droned right up to him; and he hitched a very cautious eye over the edge of the cockpit, and saw the Falkenberg's speed tender churning around his refuge, so close that he could have touched it with a boathook. A seaman crouched up on the foredeck, swinging the powerful spotlight that was mounted there; two other men stood up beside the wheel, following the path of the beam with their eyes. Its long finger danced on the water, touched luminously on the hulls of other craft at their anchor­ages, stretched faintly out to the more distant banks of the es­tuary . . . fastened suddenly on the shape of a canoe that sprang up out of the dark as if from nowhere, skimming towards the bathing pool at the end of the Plage du Prieuré. The canoe veered like a startled gull, shooting up parallel with the rocky foreshore; but the beam clung to it like a magnetised bar of light, linking it with the tender as if it were held by intangible cables. At the same time the murmur of the tender's engine deepened its note: the bows lifted a little, and a white streamer of foam lengthened away from the stern as the link-bar of light between the two craft shortened.

The canoe turned once more, and headed south again, the man in it paddling with unhurried strokes again, as if he was trying to undo the first impression he had given of taking flight. The Falk­enberg's tender turned and drifted up alongside him as the en­gine was shut off; and at that moment the spotlight was switched out.

Simon heard the voices clearly across the water.

"Have you seen anyone swimming around here?"

And Murdoch's sullen answer: "I did see someone—it was over that way."

"Thanks."

The voice of the tender's spokesman was the last one Simon heard. And then, after the very briefest pause, the engine was cut in again, and the tender began to slide smoothly back towards the Falkenberg, while the canoe went on its way to the shore. In that insignificant pause the only sound was a faint thud such as a man might have made in dumping a heavy weight on a hard floor. But Simon Templar knew, with absolute certainty, that the man who paddled the canoe on towards the shore was not the man who had been caught by the spotlight, and that the man who had been in the canoe was riding unconsciously in the speedboat as it turned back.

4

The tender slid in under the side of the Falkenberg, and the man on the foredeck who had been working the spotlight stood up and threw in the painter. Vogel himself caught the rope and made it fast. Under the natural pallor of his skin there was a curious rigidity, and the harsh black line of his brows over that great scythe of a nose was accentuated by the shadows that fell across his face as he leaned over the rail.

"Did you find anything?"

"No." The man at the wheel answered, standing up in the cockpit. He looked up at Vogel intently as he spoke, and his right hand fingered a rug that seemed to have been thrown down in a rather large bundle on the seat beside him. His phlegmatic voice, with a thick guttural accent, boomed on very slowly and deliberately: "We asked a man in a boat, but he had seen no­body."

"I see," answered Vogel quietly.

He straightened up with a slight shrug; and Professor Yule and Arnheim, on his right, turned away from the rail with him.

"That's a pity," said Yule enthusiastically. "But they can't have searched very far. Shall we go out and have another look?"

"I'm afraid we shouldn't be likely to have any more success, my dear Professor," replied Vogel. "There is plenty of room in the river for anyone to disappear quite quickly, and we were slow enough in starting after them." He turned to Loretta. "I'm very sorry—you must have had rather a shock, and you're more im­portant than catching a couple of harbour thieves."

In some way the quality of his voice had altered—she could feel the change without being able to define it. She felt like somebody who has been watching a fuse smouldering away into a stack of lethal explosive under her feet, and who has seen the fuse miraculously flicker and go out. The sensation of limpness in her muscles was no longer the paralysis of nightmare; it was the relaxation of pure relief. She knew that for that night at least the ordeal was over. Vogel had shot his bolt. In a few hours he would be as balanced and dangerous as ever, his brain would be working with the same ruthless insistence and ice-cold de­tachment; but for the moment he himself was suffering from a shock, intrinsically slight, and yet actual enough to have jarred the delicately calculated precision of his attack. Something told her that he realised what he had lost, and that he was too clever to waste any more effort on a spoiled opportunity.

"I'm perfectly all right," she said; and her nerves were so steady again that she had to call on acting for the vestiges of trepidation which she felt were demanded.

"All the same, I expect you would like a drink."

"That wouldn't do any of us any harm," agreed Arnheim.

In his own way he had altered, although his broad flat face was as bland as ever, and his wet little red mouth was pursed up to the same enigmatic sensual bud that it had been all the eve­ning. He took it on himself to officiate with the decanter, and swallowed half a tumbler of neat whisky in two methodical gulps. Vogel took a very modest allowance with a liberal splash of soda, and sipped it with impenetrable restraint.

But even the artificial film of lightness had gone murky. Vo­gel's unshaken suavity, with Arnheim's solid co-operation, elimi­nated any embarrassing silences; but a curious heavy tenseness like the threat of thunder had crept into the atmosphere, a tense­ness so subtle and well concealed that at any other time she might have been persuaded that it was purely subjective to her own fatigue. When at last she said that she had had too many late nights already that week, and asked if they would excuse her, she detected a tenuous undercurrent of relief in their pro­testations.

"I'm sorry all this should have happened to upset the evening," said Vogel, as they left the saloon.

She laid her hand on his arm.

"Honestly, it hasn't upset me," she said. "It's been quite an adventure. I'm just rather tired. Do you understand?"

In that at least she was perfectly truthful. A reaction had set in that had made her feel mentally and physically bruised, as if her mind and body had been crushed together through machine rollers. Sitting beside him again in the cockpit of the speed ten­der, with a light sea breeze stirring refreshingly through her hair, it seemed as if a whole week of ceaseless effort had gone by since she set out to keep that dangerous appointment.

She felt his arm behind her shoulders and his hand on her knee, and steeled herself to be still.

"Will you come with us to-morrow?"

She shook her head, with a little despairing breath.

"I've been through too much to-night . . . You don't give a girl a chance to think, do you?"

"But there is so little time. We go to-morrow——"

"I know. But does that make it any easier for me? It's my life you want to buy. It mayn't seem very much to you, but it's the only one I've got."

"But you will come."

"I don't know. You take so much for granted——"

"You will come."

His hand on her shoulder was weighting into her flesh. The deep toneless hypnotic command of his voice reverberated into her ears like an iron bell tolling in a resonant abyss; but it was not his command which scarred itself into her awareness and told her that she would have to go. There had been danger, ordeal, respite; but nothing accomplished. She would still have to go.

"Oh, yes . . . I'll come." She turned her face in to his shoul­der; and then she broke away. "No, don't touch me again now."

He left her alone; and she sat in the far corner of the cockpit and stared out over the dark water while the tender came in alongside the quay. He walked up to her hotel with her in the same silence, and she wondered what kind of superhumanly im­mobilised exaltation was pent up in his obedience. She turned at the door, and held out her hand.

"Goodnight."

"Will half-past ten be too early? I could send a steward down before that to do your packing."

"No. I can be ready."

He put her fingers to his lips, and went back to the jetty. On the return journey he took the wheel himself, and sent the speedboat creaming through the dark with her graceful bows lifting and the searchlight blazing a clear pathway over the wa­ter. The man who had been in charge of the hunt a little while before stood beside him.

"Where did you put him, Ivaloff ?" Vogel asked quietly.

"In No. 9 cabin," answered the man in his sullen throaty voice. "He is tied up and gagged; but I think he will sleep for a little while."

"Do you know who he is?"

"I have not seen him before. Perhaps one of the men who has been watching on shore will know him."

Vogel said nothing. Even if the captive was a stranger, it would be possible to find out who he was. If he carried no papers that would identify him, he would be made to talk. It never occurred to him that the prisoner might be innocent: Ivaloff made no mistakes, and Vogel himself had seen the canoe's significant swerve and first instinctive attempt to dodge the searchlight. He threw the engine into neutral and then into re­verse, bringing the tender neatly up to the companion, and went across the deck to the wheelhouse.

Professor Yule was there. He glanced up from a newspaper.

"I wish I knew what these gold mining shares were going to do," he remarked casually. "I could sell now and take a profit, but I'd like to see another rise first."

"You should ask Otto about it—he is an expert," said Vogel. "By the way, where is he?"

"I don't know. He went out to look for part of a broken cuff­link. Didn't you see him on deck?"

Vogel shook his head.

"Probably he was on the other side of the ship. Do you hold very many of these shares?"

He selected a cigar from a cedarwood cabinet and pierced it carefully while Yule talked. So Arnheim hadn't been able to wait more than a few minutes before he tried to find out something about the man they had captured. Otto had always been impa­tient—his brain lacked that last infinitesimal milligram of poise which gave a man the power to possess himself indefinitely and imperturbably. He should have waited until Yule went to bed.

Not that it was vitally important. The Professor was as unsus­pecting as a child; and No. 9 cabin was the dungeon of the ship —a room so scientifically soundproofed that a gun fired in it would have been inaudible where they were. Vogel drew steadily at his cigar and discussed the gold market with unruffled compo­sure for a quarter of an hour, until Yule picked himself up and decided to retire.

Vogel stood at the chart table and gave the Professor time to reach his stateroom. In front of him was the chart with that lone position marked in red ink, the scraps of torn paper in the ashtray, the pencil lying beside it ... untouched. Loretta Page had stood over those things for a full minute, but from where he was watching he could not see her face. "When she turned away she had seemed unconcerned. And yet . . . there were more things than that to be explained. Kurt Vogel was not worried—his pas­sionlessly efficient brain had no room for such a futile emotion— but there had been other moments in his career, like that, when he knew that he was fighting for his life.

He left the chart table without a shrug, and left the wheelhouse by the door at the after end. Between him and the saloon a com­panion ran down to the lower deck. He went aft along the alley­way at the bottom—the door of the Professor's cabin was close to the foot of the companion, and he paused outside it for a couple of seconds and heard the thud of a dropped shoe before he went on. His cigar glowed evenly, gripped with the barest necessary pressure between his teeth, and bis feet moved with a curious soundlessness on the thick carpet.

No. 9 cabin was the last door in the passenger section. Just beyond it another companion sloped steeply up to the after deck, and abaft the companion a watertight door shut off the continua­tion of the alleyway on to which the crew's quarters opened. Vogel stopped and turned the handle, and a faint frown creased in between his eyebrows when the door did not move.

He raised his hand to knock; and then for some reason He glanced downwards and saw that the key was in the lock on the outside. At the same time he became conscious of a cool damp­ness on his hand. He opened it under the light, and saw a glisten of moisture in the palm and on the inside of his fingers.

For an instant he did not move. And then his hand went down slowly and touched the door-handle again. He felt the wetness of it under the light slide of his finger-tips, and bent down to touch the carpet. That also was damp; so were the treads of the com­panion.

Without hesitation he turned the key silently in the lock, slipped an automatic out of his pocket, and thrust open the door. The cabin was in darkness, but his fingers found the switch in­stantaneously and clicked it down. Otto Arnheim lay at his feet in the middle of the floor, with his face turned whitely up to the light and his round pink mouth hanging vacuously open. There were a couple of lengths of rope carelessly thrown down beside him—and that was all.

IV. HOW STEVE MURDOCH REMAINED OBSTINATE,

AND SIMON TEMPLAR RENDERED FIRST AID

IF THE quality of surprise had ever been a part of Orace's emo­tional make-up, the years in which he had worked for Simon Templar had long since exhausted any trace of its existence. Probably from sheer instinctive motives of self-preservation he had acquired the majestically immutable sang-froid of a jellied eel; and he helped Simon to haul his prize out on to the deck of the Corsair as unconcernedly as he would have lent a hand with embarking a barrel of beer.

"How d'you like it?" asked the Saint, with a certain pardona­ble smugness.

He was breathing a little deeply from the effort of life-saving Steve Murdoch's unconscious body through the odd half-mile of intervening water, and the shifting muscles glistened over his torso as he filled his chest. Murdoch, lying in a heap with the water oozing out of his sodden clothes, was conspicuously less vital; and Orace inspected him with perceptible distaste.

"Wot is it?" he inquired disparagingly.

"A sort of detective," said the Saint. "I believe he's a good fellow at heart; but he doesn't like me and he's damned stub­born. He's tried to die once before to-night, and he didn't thank me when I stopped him."

Orace sucked his moustache ghoulishly over the body.

"Is 'e dead now?"

"Not yet—at least I don't think so. But he's got a lump on the back of his head the size of an apple, and I don't expect he'll feel too happy when he wakes up. Let's try him and see."

They undressed Murdoch out on the deck, and Simon wrung out his clothes as best he could and tied them in a rough bundle which he chucked into the galley oven when they took the still unconscious man below. He left Orace to apply the usual re­storatives, and went back into the saloon to towel himself vigorously and brush his hair. He heard various groans and thumps and other sounds of painful resuscitation while he was doing this; and he had just settled into a clean shirt and a pair of comfortable old flannel trousers when the communicating door opened and the fruit of Orace's labours shot blearily in.

It was quite obvious that the Saint's prophecy was correct. Mr Murdoch was not feeling happy. The tender imprint of a skilfully wielded blackjack had established at the base of his skull a high-powered broadcasting station of ache from which messages of hate and ill-will were radiating in all directions with throbbing intensity, while the grinding machinery of transmission was set­ting up a roaring din that threatened to split his head. Taking these profound disadvantages into consideration, Mr Murdoch entered, comparatively speaking, singing and dancing; which he is to say that he only looked as if he would like to beat some­body on the head with a mallet until they sank into the ground.

"What the hell is this?" he demanded truculently.

"Just another boat," answered the Saint kindly. "On your left, the port side. On your right, the starboard. Up there is the forward or sharp end, which goes through the water first——"

Murdoch glowered at him speechlessly for a moment; and then the team of pneumatic drills started work again under the roof of his skull, and he sank on to a bunk.

"I thought it would be you," he said morosely.

Orace came in like a baronial butler, put down a tray of whisky and glasses, sniffed loudly, and departed. Murdoch stared at the door which closed behind him with the penumbras of homi­cide darkening again on his square features.

"I could kill that guy twice, and then drown him." Murdoch grabbed the whisky-bottle, poured three fingers into a glass, and swallowed it straight. He compressed his lips in a grimace, and looked up at the Saint again. "Well, here I am—and who the hell asked you to bring me here?"

"You didn't," Simon admitted.

"Didn't you tell me you'd keep out of the way next time?"

"That was the idea."

"Well, what d'ya think I'm going to do—fall on your neck and kiss you?"

"Not in those trousers, I hope," said the Saint.

The trousers belonged to Orace, who was taller but not so bulky. As a result, they were stretched dangerously across the seat, and hung in a graceful concertina over the ankles. Murdoch glared down at them venomously, and they responded with an ominous rending squeak as he moved to get hold of the whisky again.

"I didn't ask you to pull me out, and I'm not going to thank you. If you thought I'd fall for you, you're wrong. Was that the idea, too? Did you think you might be able to get under my skin that way—make the same sort of monkey outa me that you've made outa Loretta? Because you won't. I'm not so soft. You can slug me again and take me back to the Falkenberg, and we'll start again where we left off; and that's as far as you'll get."

Simon sauntered over to the table and helped himself to a measured drink.

"Well, of course that's certainly a suggestion," he remarked. He sat down opposite Murdoch and put up his feet along the settee. "I've always heard that Ingerbeck's was about the ace firm in the business."

"It is."

"Been with them long?" asked the Saint caressingly.

"About ten years."

"Mmm."

Murdoch's eyes narrowed suspiciously.

"What the hell d'you mean?"

"I mean they can't be so hot if they've kept you on the over­head for ten years."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah—as we used to say in the movies. Stay where you are, Steve. If you try to start any rough stuff with me I shall hit your face so hard that you'll have to be fed from behind. Besides which, those pants will split."

"Go on."

Simon flicked open the cigarette-box and helped himself to a smoke. He slipped a match out of the ashstand and sprung it into flame with his thumb-nail.

"Now and for the last time," he said, with the caress in his voice smoothed out until it was as soothing as a sheet of ice, "will you try to understand that I don't give a good God-damn how soon you have your funeral. Your mother may miss you, and even Ingerbeck's may send a wreath; but personally I shall be as miserable as a dog with a new tree. The only reason I interfered on the Falkenberg was because Vogel wasn't half so interested in shooting you as in seeing how Loretta would like it. The only reason I pulled you out again——"

"Was what?"

"Because if you'd stayed there they'd have found out more about you. You're known. Thanks to your brilliant strategy in tearing into the Hotel de la Mer and shouting for Loretta at the top of your voice, the bloke who was sleuthing her this after­noon knows your face. And if he'd seen you to-night on an identification parade—that would have been that. For Loretta, anyway. And that's all I'm interested in. As it is, you may have been recognised already. I had to take a chance on that. I could only lug you out as quickly as possible, and hope for the best. Apart from that, you could have stayed there and been massaged with hot irons, and I shouldn't have lost any sleep. Is that plain enough or do you still think I've got a fatherly interest in your future?"

Murdoch held himself down on the berth as gingerly as if it had been red hot, and his chin jutted out as if Ms fists were itch­ing to follow it.

"I get it. But you feel like a father to Loretta—huh?"

"That's my business."

"I'll say it is. There are plenty of greasy-haired dagoes making big money at it."

"My dear Steve!"

"I know you, Saint," Murdoch said raspingly. His big hands rolled his glass between them as if they were playing with the idea of crushing it to fragments with a single savage contraction, and the hard implacable lights were smouldering under the sur­face of his eyes. "You're crook. I've heard all about you. Maybe there aren't any warrants out for you at the moment. Maybe you kid some people with that front of yours about being some kind of fairy-tale Robin Hood trying to put the world right in his own way. That stuff don't cut any ice with me. You're crook—and you're in the racket for what you can get out of it."

Simon raised his eyebrows.

"Aren't you?"

"Yeah. I get one hundred bucks a week out of it; and the man who says I don't earn 'em is a liar. But that's the last cent I take."

"Of course, that's very enterprising of you," murmured the Saint, in the same drawl of gentle mockery. "But we can't all be boy scouts. I gather that you think I wouldn't be content with one hundred bucks a week?"

"You?" Murdoch was viciously derisive. "If I thought that, I'd buy you out right now."

"Where's your money?"

"What for?"

"To buy me out. One hundred dollars a week—and that's more than I thought I was going to get out of it."

The other stared at him.

"Are you telling me you'll take a hundred a week to get out?"

"Oh, no. But I'll take a hundred a week to get in. You'll have the benefit of all my brains, which you obviously need pretty badly; and I shall get lots of quiet respectable fun and a beautiful glow of virtue to keep me warm for the winter. I'm trying to convince you that I'm a reformed character. Your loving sympathy has made me see the light," said the Saint brokenly, "and from now on my only object will be to live down my evil past——"

"And I'm trying to convince you that I'm not so dumb that a twister like you can sell me a gold brick!" Murdoch snarled vio­lently. "You came into this by accident, and you saw your chance. You greased around Loretta till she told you what it was about, and you've made her so crazy she's ready to eat outa your hand. If I hadn't come along you'd of played her for a sap as long as it helped you, and ditched her when you thought you had a chance to get away with something. Well, you bet you're going to get out. I'm going to find a way to put you out—but it ain't going to be with a hundred dollars!"

The Saint rounded his lips and blew out a smoke-ring. For a moment he did actually consider the possibilities of trying to convince Murdoch of his sincerity; but he gave up the idea. The American's suspicions were rooted in too stubborn an antagonism for any amount of argument to shake them; and Simon had to admit that Murdoch had some logical justification. He looked at Murdoch thoughtfully for a while, and read the blunt facts of the situation on every line of the other's grim hard-boiled face. Oh, well . . . perhaps it was all for the best. And that incorrigible imp of buffoonery in his make-up would have made it difficult to carry the argument to conviction, anyway . . .

The Saint sighed.

"I suppose you're entitled to your point of view, Steve," he conceded mildly. "But of course that makes quite a difference. Now we shall have to decide what we're going to do with you."

"Don't worry about me," retorted Murdoch. "You worry about yourself. Give me my clothes back, and I'll be on my way."

He dumped his glass on the table and stood up; but Simon Templar did not move.

"The question is—will you?" said the Saint.

His voice was pleasant and conversational, coloured only with the merest echo of that serene and gentle mockery which had got under Murdoch's toughened hide at their first encounter; and yet something behind it made the other stand momentarily very still.

Murdoch's chunky fists knotted up slowly at his sides, and he scowled down at the slim languid figure stretched out on the settee with his eyes slotting down to glittering crevices in the rough-hewn crag of his face.

"Meaning what?" he demanded grittily.

"I'm not so thrilled with your promise to put me out," said the Saint. "And I don't know that we can let you go on getting into trouble indefinitely. Twice is all right, but the third time might be unlucky. I may be a boy scout, but I'm not a nurse­maid. One way and another, Steve, it looks as if we may have to shut you up where you won't be able to get into mischief for a while."

2

Murdoch hunched over him as if he couldn't believe his ears. There was stark pugnacious incredulity oozing out of every pore of him; and his jaw was levered up till his under lip jutted out in a bellicose ridge under his nose. His complexion had gone as red as a turkey-cock's.

"Say that again?"

"I said we may have to keep you where you won't get in the way," answered the Saint calmly. "Don't look so unhappy— there's another bottle of whisky on board, and Orace will bring you your bread and milk and tuck you up at night."

"That's what you think, is it?" grated Murdoch. "Well, you try to keep me here!"

The Saint nodded. His right hand, with the half-smoked ciga­rette still clipped between the first two fingers, slid lazily into the shelf beside the settee, under the porthole. It came out with the automatic which he had put down there when he began to dress.

"I'm trying," he said, almost apologetically.

Murdoch shied at the gun like a startled horse. His screwed-up eyes opened out in two slow dilations of rabid unbelief.

"Do you mean you're trying to hold me up?" he barked.

"That was the rough idea, brother," said the Saint amiably. "I'm not very well up in these things, but I believe this is the approved procedure. I point a rod at you, like this; and then you either do what I tell you or try to jump on me and get shot in the dinner. Correct me if I'm wrong."

The bantering serenity of his voice lingered on in the air while Murdoch stared at him. The Saint was smiling faintly, and the sheen of sapphire in his eyes was alive with irrepressible humour; but the automatic in his hand was levelled with a per­fectly sober precision that denied the existence of any joke.

Murdoch blinked at it as if it had been the first specimen of its kind which he had ever seen. His gaze travelled lingeringly up from it to the Saint's face, and the incredulity faded out of his features before a spreading hardness of cold calculating wrath. He swallowed once, and his chin settled down on his chest.

"You think you can get away with that, do you?"

"I'm betting on it."

Simon met the other's reddened glare as if he hadn't a shadow on his horizon, and wondered what the odds ought to be if it were a betting proposition. And he became reluctantly aware that any prudent layer would consider them distinctly hazardous. There was something consolidating itself on Murdoch's thinned-out lips which stood for the kind of raging foolhardy fearlessness that produces heroes and tombstones in cynically unequal pro­portions.

And at the same time something quite different was thrusting itself towards the front of the Saint's consciousness. It had started like the hum of a cruising bee away out in the far reaches of the night, a mere stir of sound too trivial to attract attention. While they were talking it had grown steadily nearer, until the drone of it quivered through the saloon as a definite pulse of disturbance in the universe. And now, in the silence while he and Murdoch watched each other, it suddenly roared up and stopped, leaving a sharp void in the auditory scale through which came the clear swish and chatter of settling wa­ters.

Simon felt the settee dip gently under him, and Murdoch's glass tinkled on the table as the wash slapped against the side. And then an almost imperceptible jar of contact ran through the boat, and a voice spoke somewhere outside.

"Ahoy, Corsair!"

The Saint felt as if a starshell had burst inside his head. Un­derstanding dawned upon him in a blinding light that showed him the meaning of that sequence of sounds, the owner of the voice that had hailed them, and everything that had led up to what lay outside, as clearly as if they had been focused under a batten of sun arcs. If he had not been so taken up with the im­mediate problem that had been laid in front of him, he might have guessed it and waited for it all down to the last detail; but now it came to him as a shock that electrified all his faculties as if he had taken a shot of liquid dynamite.

It could hardly have taken a second to develop, that galvanic awakening of every nerve; but in the latter half of that scorch­ing instant the Saint reviewed the circumstances and realised everything that had to be done. Murdoch was still half arrested in the stillness which the interruption had brought upon him: his head was turned a little to the left, his mouth a little open, his gaze fractionally diverted. At that moment his train of thought was written across him in luminous letters a yard high. He also was considering the interruption, working over its bearing on his own predicament, while the simmer of fighting obstinacy in him was boiling up to outright defiance. The Saint knew it. That chance event was wiping out the last jot of hesitation in the American's mind. In another split second he would let out a yell or try to jump the gun—or both. But his powers of comprehen­sion were functioning a shade less rapidly than the Saint's, and that split second made as much difference as twenty years.

Simon let go the automatic and unfolded himself from the settee. He came up like the backlash of a cracked whip, and his fist hit Murdoch under the jaw with a clean crisp smack that actually forestalled the slight thud of the gun hitting the carpet. Murdoch's eyes glazed mutely over, and Simon caught him ex­pertly as he straightened up on his feet.

"Ahoy, Corsair!"

"Ahoy to you," answered the Saint.

The communicating door at the end of the saloon was opening, and Orace's globular eyes peered over his moustache through the gap. There was no need of words. Simon heaved Murdoch's inanimate body towards him like a stuffed dummy, with a dozen urgent commands sizzling voicelessly on his gaze, and followed it with the glass from which Murdoch had been drinking. And then, without waiting to assure himself that Orace had grasped the situation to the full, he snatched up his gun and leapt for the companion in one continuous movement, slipping the automatic into his hip pocket as he went.

He started with lightning speed, but he emerged into the after cockpit quite leisurely; and everything else had been packed into such a dizzy scintilla of time that there was no undue hiatus between the first hail and his appearance. He turned unhurriedly to the side; and Kurt Vogel, standing up in the speedboat, looked up at him with his sallow face white in the dim light.

"Hullo," said the Saint genially.

"May I come aboard for a moment?"

"Surely."

Simon reached out an arm and helped him up. Again he exper­ienced the peculiar revulsion of the other's strong clammy grip.

"I'm afraid this is a most unseemly hour to pay a visit," said Vogel, in his suave flat voice. "But I happened to be coming by, and I hoped you hadn't gone to bed."

"I'm never very early," said the Saint cheerfully. "Come on below and have a drink."

He led the way down to the saloon, and pushed the cigarette-box across the table.

"D'you smoke?" Vogel accepted; and Simon raised his voice. "Orace!"

"As a matter of fact, I only called in in case you'd made up your mind about to-morrow," said Vogel, taking a light. "Per­haps you didn't take my invitation seriously, but I assure you we'll be glad to see you if you care to come."

"It's very good of you." Simon looked up as Orace came in, "Bring another glass, will you, Orace?"

He put the match to his own cigarette and lounged back on the opposite berth while Orace brought the glass. He rested his finger-tips on the edge of the table and turned his hand over with a perfectly natural movement that brought his thumb downwards. With his back turned to Vogel, Orace set down the glass. His face was always inscrutable, and the fringe of his luxu­riant moustache concealed any expression that might ever have touched his mouth; but without moving another muscle of his features he drooped one eyelid deliberately before he retired, and the Saint felt comforted.

"I would rather like to come," said the Saint frankly, as he poured out the whisky.

"Then we'll expect you definitely. Loretta is coming, too."

"Who's coming?"

"You know—Miss Page——"

Simon eased a drop of liquid from the neck of the bottle on to the rim of the glass with a hand as steady as a rock, and looked up with a smile.

"I'm afraid I don't," he murmured. "Who is the lady?"

"She was with us—— I beg your pardon," Vogel said quickly.

"My memory is playing me tricks—I had an idea she was with us when we met this morning. Perhaps you will meet her in Guernsey."

"If she's as pretty as her name, I hope I do," said the Saint lightly.

He passed the glass over and sat down again, feeling as if his stomach had been suddenly emptied with a vacuum pump.

"We shall be sailing about eleven," proceeded Vogel urbanely. "But we shan't take long on the trip—we marine motorists have rather an advantage in speed," he added deprecatingly. "I don't wonder you thorough-going yachtmen despise us, but I'm afraid I'm too old to learn your art."

Simon nodded vaguely. But there was nothing vague in his mind. Every fibre of his being seemed to have been dissected into an individual sentience of its own: he was conscious of the vitality of every cell and corpuscle of his body, as though each separate atom of him was pressed into the service of that super­charged aliveness. His whole intellect was waiting, cat-like, for Vogel to show his hand.

Vogel gave him no sign. His smooth aggressively profiled face might have been moulded out of wax, with its appearance of hard and uniform opacity under the thin glaze of skin. The Saint's keenest scrutiny could find no flaw in it. He had watched Vogel working up through a conspiracy of intricate and marvel­lously juggled tensions towards a climax of cunning that had been exploded like a soap-bubble at the very instant of crisis; he knew that even after that Vogel must have taken a re-staggering shock when he discovered the vanishment of their prisoner and the slumber of Otto Arnheim; he could guess that even Vogel's impregnable placidity must have felt the effect of a cumulation of reverses that would have shaken any other man to the beginnings of fear; and yet there was not a microscopical fissure in the sleek veneer of that vulturine face. Simon admitted after­wards that the realisation of all that was implied by that im­movable self-command gave him a queer momentary supersti­tious feeling of utter helplessness, like nothing else that he had ever experienced in the presence of another human being.

He took hold of the feeling with a conscious effort and trod it ruthlessly down. Vogel was holding his drink up in one steady hand, imperturbably surveying the details of the saloon, with the eyelids drooping under the shadow of his black overhanging brows; and Simon watched him without a tremor in the careless good humour of his gaze.

"But this is a charming boat," Vogel remarked idly. "What is her tonnage?"

"About twenty-five."

"Delightful . . ." Vogel got up and began to wander around, studying the panelling, touching the fittings, investigating the ingenious economy of space with all the quiet pleasure of an enthusiast. "I envy you, really—to be able to have something like this all to yourself, without bothering about crews and for­malities. If I were twenty years younger . . . Did you have her fitted out yourself?"

"Yes."

"Of course. And are all the other rooms as attractive as this one?"

So that was how it was coming. The Saint felt a tiny pulse beginning to beat way back in the depths of his brain, like the frantic ticking of a distant clock racing with time.

"They're pretty comfortable," he said modestly; and Vogel caught him up without a second's hesitation.

"I wish I could see them. I'm tremendously interested—I had no idea a small boat could be so luxurious. You might even con­vert me!"

Simon, brought the tip of his cigarette to a red glow, and feathered a fading cloud of smoke through his lips.

He was for it. The fuse was lighted. There was no excuse, however plausible, no tactful way of changing the subject, how­ever fluent, from which Vogel would not draw his own conclu­sions. Vogel had got him, exactly as he had got Loretta a few hours before. He had paid that belated call, transparently, with the one object of discovering whether the Corsair would yield any connecting link with the night's disturbances, and he would not be prepared to go home satisfied after one brief confined session in the saloon. Simon could see the man's black unswerv­ing eyes fixed on him intently, outwardly with no more than the ingenuous eagerness which made the granting of his request a favour that it would be difficult in any circumstances to refuse— inwardly with a merciless insistence of which no one without the Saint's knowledge would have been conscious. The fuse was lighted; and how soon the mine would go up depended only on Orace's perception of the secondary uses of keyholes.

Now that the die was cast, Simon felt a curious contented relaxation.

"By all manner of means," he said amicably. "Let me show you the works."

3

He stood up, lighting a second cigarette from the stub of the first. The movement gave a few seconds' grace in which Orace, if he had been listening, might prepare for the emergency as best he could. But it could not be prolonged a moment beyond the requirements of the bare physical facts; and with an inaudible prayer to the hardworked gods of all good buccaneers, the Saint flattened his discarded butt in the ashtray and opened the com­municating door.

Simon Templar could rake over his memory at any time and comb out an impressive crop of moments which he had no desire to live over again. In spite of the ultimate balance of success that showed on the books of his meteoric career, his life had contained its full quota of occasions that definitely looked their best in distant retrospect. But of all that collection of unenjoya­ble contingencies there were very few to which he would so fer­vently have refused an encore as those hectic instants during which the vista beyond the saloon unrolled itself before the opening door. The spectacle of Orace sitting curled up in the diminutive galley, alone, with a paper-covered detective story on his knee, was such a dizzy anti-climax that it made the Saint feel somewhat lightheaded. He could have raised the protective cur­tain of Orace's moustache and kissed him.

Fortunately the presence of Kurt Vogel precluded any such regrettable demonstration. Simon cleared his throat and spoke almost hesitatingly through the ecstatic glow which enveloped him.

"This is the kitchen, where we heat the tins and open the bot­tles. On the right, the refrigerator, where we keep the beer warm ..."

He exhibited all the features of the galley with feverish pride; and Vogel, as flatteringly impressed as any proud owner could want a guest to be, admired them all in turn—the cunningly fitted glass and crockery racks, the planned compartments for all kinds of provisions, the paraffin geyser that provided hot water at the turn of a tap, the emergency stove slung in gimbals for use when the weather was too rough for a kettle to stand on the ordinary gas cooker, and all the other gadgets which had been installed to reduce discomfort to the vanishing point. All the time Simon was casting hopeful glances at Orace, searching for a hint of what his staff had done to meet the situation; but the staff had returned phlegmatically to its volume of blood, and its battle-scarred face offered as many clues as a boiled pudding.

Eventually they had to move on. Beyond the galley there was a short alleyway, and Simon led the way briskly down it.

"That's the bathroom and toilet," he explained casually, indicating the first door on the left as he went by; and he would have gone quickly on, but Vogel stopped.

"A bathroom—really? That's even more remarkable on a boat this size. May I look at it?"

Simon turned, with the glow of relief on him dying down again to a cold resignation. Of all the places where Orace might have been expected to dump his charge in a hurry, the bathroom seemed the most probable. Simon looked innocently at Vogel; and the edge of his gaze, overlapping his guest, sought frantically for inspiration over Vogel's shoulder. But Orace was deep in his sanguinary literature: only the back of his head could be seen, and he had not moved.

"There's nothing much to see," began the Saint diffidently; but Vogel had already turned the handle.

Simon leaned sidelong against the bulkhead and very deliber­ately estimated the chances of a shot going unheard by the sea­man whom Vogel had left outside in charge of his speedboat. He also gave some consideration to the exact spot on Vogel's anat­omy where a bullet could be made to do a regulated amount of damage without leaving any margin for an outcry to add itself to the noise. His left thumb was tucked loosely into his belt; his right hand was a little behind his hip, the fingers hovering on the opening of the pocket into which he had slipped his gun. The cigarette between his lips slanted out at a rakish angle that would have made certain people who knew him well stand very still while they decided what scrap of cover they were going to dive for when the storm broke loose. And yet there was the ghost of a smile lingering on his mouth, and a shifting twinkle in his blue eyes, which might have misled those who were not so well informed.

"But that's almost luxurious!" came Vogel's bland ingratiating accents. "And a shower, too ... I certainly am learning a les­son—I almost wish I could find something that you've forgotten."

Simon prised himself off the bulkhead and let his right hand fall to his side. He didn't take out a handkerchief and mop his brow, but he wished he could have indulged in that sedative gesture. His shirt felt damp in the small of his back.

"I hope you won't do that," he said earnestly. "Now, this is just a small single cabin——"

The tour went on. Vogel praised the small single cabin. He studied the berth, the lockers under it, and peeped inside the wardrobe.

The Saint began to wonder if he was simply undergoing one of Vogel's diabolically clever psychological third degrees. There was something as nightmarish as a slow-motion avalanche about Vo­gel's patient thoroughness, a suggestion of feline cruelty in his velvety smoothness, that burred the edges of Simon's nervous system into crystals of jagged steel. He felt an almost irresistible temptation to throw guile to the winds—to say: "Okay, brother. I have got Steve Murdoch here, and he is the bird who paid you a call earlier this evening; and so what?"—to do any foolish thing that would wipe that self-assured smirk off the other's face and bring the fencing match to a soul-satisfying showdown. Only the knowledge that that might very well be what Vogel was play­ing for eased the strain of holding himself in check.

On the starboard side there was one double cabin. Vogel ad­mired this also. There were two fitted wardrobes for him to peer into, and also a large recessed cupboard for storing blankets and other dry gear, besides the usual lockers under the berths. As Vogel methodically opened each door in turn, to the accompa­niment of a tireless flow of approbation, the Saint felt himself growing so much older that it wouldn't have surprised him to look down and see a long white beard spreading over his shirt.

"This is the most perfect thing I've ever seen." Vogel was positively purring by then: his waxen skin shone with a queer gloss, as if it had been polished. "You should have made this your profession—I should have been one of your first clients . . . And that door at the end?"

Simon glanced up the alleyway.

"The fo'c'sle? That's only Orace's quarters——"

And at the same time he knew that he might just as well save his breath. Vogel had already declared himself, at the bathroom door and since then, as a sightseer who intended to see every sight there was; and it would have been asking a miracle for him to have allowed himself to be headed off on the threshold of the last door of all.

The Saint shrugged.

At any rate, the gloves would be off. The nibbling and niggling would be finished, and the issue would be joined in open battle; and the Saint liked to fight best that way. Behind that door lay the showdown. He knew it, as surely as if he could have seen through the partition, and he faced it without illusion. Even at that transcendental moment the irrepressible devil in him came to his aid, and he was capable of feeling a deep and unholy glee of anticipation at the thought of the conflicting emotions that would shortly be chasing each other across Vogel's up-ended universe.

He opened the door and stood aside, with a sense of peace in the present and a sublime faith in the exciting future.

Vogel went in.

Perhaps after all, Simon reflected, his gun could stay where it was. A clean sharp blow with the edge of his hand across the back of the other's neck might achieve the same immediate effect with less commotion, and with less risk of letting him in for the expenses of a high-class funeral later. Of course, that would still leave the loyal mariner outside, but he would have had to be dealt with anyhow . . . And then what? The Saint's brain raced through a hectic sequence of results and possibilities . . .

And then he heard Vogel's voice again, through a kind of giddy haze that swept over him at the sound of it.

"Excellent . . . excellent . . . Why, I've seen a good many boats in which the owner's accommodation was not half so good. And this is all, is it?"

If a choir of angels had suddenly materialised in front of him and started to sing a syncopated version of Christmas Day in the Workhouse, Simon Templar could hardly have had a more devastating reason to mistrust his ears. If the Corsair had sud­denly started to spin round and round like a top, his insides couldn't have suffered a more cataclysmic bouncing on their moorings. With a resolute effort he swallowed his stomach, which was trying to cake-walk up into his mouth, and looked into the fo'c'sle.

Vogel was coming out; and his cordial smile was unchanged. If he had just suffered the crowning disappointment of his unfortu­nate evening, there was no sign of it on his face. And behind him, quite plainly visible to every corner, Orace's modest cabin was as naked of any other human occupancy as the icebound fastnesses of the North Pole.

The Saint steadied his reeling brain, and took the cigarette from between his lips.

"Yes, that's all," he answered mechanically. "You can't get much more into a fifty-footer."

"And that?" Vogel pointed upwards.

"Oh, just a hatchway on to the deck."

Forestalling any persuasion, he caught the ladder rungs screwed to the bulkhead, drew himself up, and opened it. After all he had been through already, his heart was too exhausted to turn any more somersaults; but the daze deepened round him as he hoisted himself out on to the deck and found no unconscious body laid neatly out in the lee of the coaming. They had been through the ship from stern to stem, and that hatchway was the last most desperate door through which Murdoch's not inconsid­erable bulk could have been pushed away. If Orace hadn't dumped the man out there, he must have melted him and poured him down the sink, or ordered a fiery chariot from Heaven to take him away: the Saint was reaching a stage of blissful delir­ium in which any miracle would have seemed less fantastic than the facts.

He stretched down a hand and helped Vogel to follow him out. They stood together under the dimly luminous canopy of the masthead light, and Vogel extended his cigarette-case. There were only the ordinary shadows on the deck, and the one seaman sat patiently smoking his pipe in the cockpit of the speed tender tied up astern.