The Saint's Getaway

By Leslie Charteris

FICTION PUBLISHING COMPANY • NEW YORK

Copyright 1932, 1933 by Leslie Charteris. Published by arrangement

with Doubleday & Company, Inc. Printed in U.S.A.

AUTHOR'S FOREWORD

This story is virtually the third volume of a trilogy begun by The Saint Closes the Case and The Avenging Saint. Although it was written a few years after them—with, in fact, four or five other books in between—it was still first published as far back as 1933. I was a lot busier in those days.

In it, the Saint concludes his personal feud with Prince Rudolf, his most interesting opponent in the first two rounds. His other arch enemy, Rayt Marius, does not ap­pear in this one, and actually is only heard of again, post­humously, in The Saint in London. As I have had to explain in other prefaces, these were villains out of a mythology which today seems almost as dated as the Ruritanias from which they came. But this book, although the title may seem less appropriate now than the first one, in retrospect, actually winds up a sequence as well as an era.

Some of the more dated notions which motivated the first two books, the themes of mercenary war-makers putting strings behind the international scene, to activate the puppet but ambitious rulers of minor countries such as Prince Rudolfs, play an almost casual part in this story, and do not need elaborate explanation here. This book can stand, better than the first two, purely on its merits as an adventure and a chase.

Needless to say, however, because of its period, it con­tains anomalies which may have to be pointed out to some readers who have met the Saint only in his latest environ­ments.

The Austria in which it begins, and the Germany in which it ends, were not only pre-NATO but pre-Hitler. (Although Adolf was busily on his way at the time, he had still not attained any great power, and was largely written off as a minor crackpot who would never really amount to anything.) The kind of mythical principality ruled by Prince Rudolf was still loosely acceptable to the popular imagination, at least as a nostalgic tradition, even though in fact there were precious few left which anyone could actually name.

It is, perhaps, a timely consolation to the writers of high adventure who would try to survive the present trend towards sordid back-street "realism" that although those fascinating plot-fertile Balkans have long since disap­peared behind the gray shadows of the Iron Curtain, the surge of anti-colonialism and indiscriminate independ­ence elsewhere has led to a proliferation of even more pint-sized and retrograde republics and dictatorships, all over the globe, than anyone but the United Nations secretariat and the most studious amateur geographers can keep track of. Perhaps, after all, these themes may yet have a romantic renaissance, in some new-born African or Asian Graustark.

Meanwhile, this book is offered simply as an adventure. It never aspired to be anything more.

I. HOW SIMON TEMPLAR FELL FROM GRACE

AND STANISLAUS WAS UNFORTUNATE

IT all began to happen with a ruthlessly irresistible kind of suddenness that was as unanswerable as an avalanche. It was like the venomously accurate little explosion that wrecks a dyke and overwhelms a country. The Saint has sworn that he did his level best to get from under—that he communed with his soul and struggled manfully against temptation. But he never had a chance.

On the bridge, scarcely a dozen yards away, the four men swayed and fought; and the Saint stood still and stared at them. He stood with one hand on Monty Hayward's arm and the other on Patricia Holm's, exactly as he had been walking when the astonishing beginning of the fight had halted him in his tracks like the bursting of a bomb, and surveyed the scene in silence. And it was during this silence (if the Saint can be believed) that he held the aforesaid converse with his soul.

The change that had taken place so abruptly in the land­scape and general atmosphere of that particular piece of Inns­bruck was certainly a trifle startling. Just one split second ago, it seemed, the harmless-looking little man who was now the focal point of the excitement had been the only specimen of humanity in sight. The deserted calm of the Herzog Otto Strasse ahead had been equalled only by the vacuous repose of the Rennweg behind, or the void tranquillity of the Hofgarten on the port side; and the harmless-looking little man was paddling innocently across the bridge on their right front with his innocuous little attaché case in his hand. And then, all at once, without the slightest warning or interval for parley, the three other combatants had materialized out of the shadows and launched themselves in a flying wedge upon him. Largely, solidly, and purposefully, they jammed him up against the par­apet and proceeded to slug the life out of him.

The Saint's weight shifted gently on his toes, and he whistled a vague, soft sort of tune between his teeth. And then Monty Hayward detached his arm from the Saint's light grip, and the eyes of the two men met.

"I don't know," said Monty tentatively, "whether we can stand for this."

And Simon Templar nodded.

"I also," he murmured, "had my doubts."

He hitched himself thoughtfully forward. Over on the bridge, the chaotic welter of men heaved and writhed convul­sively to a syncopated accompaniment of laboured breathing and irregularly thudding blows, varied from time to time by a guttural gasp of effort or a muffled yelp of pain. . . . And the Saint became dimly conscious that Patricia was holding his arm.

"Boy, listen—weren't you going to be good?"

He paused in his stride and turned. He smiled dreamily upon her. In his ears the scuffling undertones of the battle were ringing like celestial music. He was lost.

"Why—yes, old dear," he answered vaguely. "Sure, I'm go­ing to be good. I just want to sort of look things over. See they don't get too rough." The idea took firmer shape in his mind. "I—I might argue gently with them, or something like that."

Certainly he was being good. His mind was as barren of all evil as a new-born babe's. Gentle but firm remonstrance—that was the scheme. Appeal to the nobler instincts. The coal-black mammy touch.

He approached the battle thoughtfully and circumspectly, like an entomologist scraping acquaintance with a new species of scorpion. Monty Hayward seemed to have disappeared com­pletely into the deeper intestines of the potpourri, into which his advent had enthused a new and even more violent tempo. In that murderous jumble it was practically impossible to dis­tinguish one party from another; but Simon reached down a thoughtfully probing hand into the tangle, felt the scruff of a thick neck, and yanked forth a man. For one soul-shaking in­stant they glared at each other in the dim light; and it became regrettably obvious to the Saint that the face he was regarding must have been without exception the most depraved and vil­lainous specimen of its kind south of Munich. And therefore, with what he would always hold to be the most profound and irrefragably philosophic justification in the world, he hit it, thoughtfully and experimentally, upon the nose.

It was from that moment, probably, that the ruin of all his resolutions could be dated.

Psychologists, from whom no secrets are hidden, tell us that certain stimuli may possess such ancient and ineradicable asso­ciations that the reactions which they arouse are as automatic and inevitable as the yap of a trampled Peke. A bugle sounds, and the old war horse snorts with yearning. A gramophone record is played, and the septuagenarian burbles wheezily of an old love. A cork pops, and the mouths of the thirsty water. Such is life.

And even so did it happen to the Saint.

After all, he had done nothing desperately exciting for a long time. About twenty-one days. His subconscious was just ripe for the caressing touch of a few seductive stumuli. And then and there, when his resistance was at its lowest ebb, he heard and felt the juicy plonk of his fist sinking home into a nose.

The savour of that fruity squish wormed itself wheedlingly down into the very cockles of his heart. He liked it. It stirred the deepest chords of his being. And it dawned persuasively upon him that at that moment he desired nothing more of life than an immediate repetition of that feeling. And, seeing the nose once more conveniently poised in front of him, he hit it again.

He had not been mistaken. His subconscious knew its stuff. With the feel of that second biff a pleasant kind of glow cen­tred itself in the pit of his stomach and tingled electrically outwards along his limbs, and the remainder of his doubts melted away before its spreading warmth. He was punching the nose of an ugly man, and he was liking it. Life had no more to offer.

The ugly man went sprawling back across the bridge. Then he came in again with his arms flailing, and the Saint wel­comed him joyfully with a crisp half-arm jolt to the ribs. As he fetched up with a gasp, Simon picked a haymaker off the ground and crashed him in a limp heap.

The Saint straightened his coat and looked around for fur­ther inspiration.

The party had begun to sort itself out. A couple of paces away, Monty Hayward was giving the second thug a whole-time job; and right beside him the third hoodlum was kneeling on the inoffensive little man's chest, squeezing his windpipe with one hand and fumbling in his pocket with the other.

Some of which may help to explain why the third hoodlum was so utterly and devastatingly surprised by the next few things that happened to him. Undoubtedly his impression of the events that crowded themselves into the following eight seconds was a trifle hazy. A pair of sinewy hands locked them­selves together beneath his chin, and he was conscious of a tall, lean shape leaning affectionately over him. And then he was hurled backwards into the air with a jerk that nearly dislo­cated his spine. He rolled dizzily over on his knee, reaching for his hip pocket; and the Saint laughed. It was the one move that had not till then been made—the move that Simon had been waiting and hoping for with all the concentrated power of his dismantled virtue—the move that flooded the one miss­ing colour into the angelic beauty of the night.

"Dear heart!" said the Saint, and leapt at him like a pan­ther.

The man was halfway to his feet when the Saint hit him, and his hand was less than halfway out of his pocket. The blow clicked his head back with a force that rocked his cervical ver­tebræ in their sockets, and he slumped blindly up against the parapet.

Simon piled smotheringly on top of him. Over the man's shoulder he caught a fleeting glimpse of the dark waters of the river hurtling sleekly past and breaking creamily against the broad piers of the bridge—for the Inn is none of your dignified and stately streams, it comes pelting down from the Alps like a young tidal wave—and the little fighting smile that played round the Saint's lips slowly widened to an unholy grin. His right arm circled lovingly round the man's legs. After all—why not?

"Saturday night is bath night, brother," said the Saint.

His left hand pushed the man's face down, and his right arm hauled upwards. The parapet was squarely in the small of his victim's back, and it was easy. The man pivoted over the masonry with an airy grace to which he had contributed no effort at all, and disappeared from view with a faint squawking noise. . . .

For a second or two the Saint gazed beatifically down upon the bubbles that broke the surface of the icy torrent, letting the sweetest taste of battle soak lusciously into his palate. The die was cast. The last, least hope of salvation that he might have had was shredded up and scattered to the winds. He felt as if a great load had been lifted from his mind. The old days had come back. The fighting and the fun had come back of their own accord, without his seeking, because they were his allotted portion—the rescuing of small men in distress, and the welting of the ungodly on the boko. And it was very good that these things should be so. It was a beautiful and solemn thought for a man who had been good for three whole weeks.

He turned around with a happy little sigh, nebulously won­dering whether he had by some mischance overlooked any other opportunities of nailing down the coffin of his virtue. But a temporary peace had settled on the scene of strife. The man with the exceptionally villainous face was still in no condi­tion to continue with the argument. The harmless-looking lit­tle man was sitting weakly in the gutter with his head in his hands. And on the head of the remaining tough sat Monty Hayward, licking a skinned set of knuckles. He looked up at the Saint with an air of quiet reflection.

"You know," he said, "I'm not sure that a cold bath would do this bird a lot of harm, either."

The Saint laughed suddenly.

"Let's go," he said.

He stooped and grasped the man's ankles. Monty took the shoulders. The man shot upwards and outwards into space like a clay pigeon from a trap. ...

They turned again. In the middle of the road, the last of the Mohicans was crawling malevolently to his feet; and his hand also, like the hand of his predecessor, was fetching something from his pocket. . . . For the third time, Simon looked at Monty, and Monty looked at the Saint. Their attitudes were sober and judicial; but neither was able to read in the other's eyes the bashfullest suggestion that the good work should go unfinished. . . . The Saint nodded, and they streaked oft the mark as one man. The hoodlum was borne away towards the wall. There was a wild whirl of arms and legs, a splash, and a silence. . . .

Simon Templar dusted his coat.

"Somehow or other," he remarked, after a short interval of contented rumination, "we seem to have disposed of the oppo­sition. Let's have a look at Little Willie."

He walked over and hitched the cause of all the trouble to its feet. In the clear light of one of the standard lamps mounted on the parapet, he saw a thin, sallow face from which two dull brown eyes blinked at him dazedly. Simon studied the little man curiously. On closer inspection, the prize he had col­lected from the lucky dip seemed a rather inadequate reward for the expenditure of so much energy and mental stress; but the Saint had a sublime faith in his good fortune.

"Where were you on your way to, George?" he inquired af­fably.

The little man shook his head.

"Ich verstehe nicht."

"Wohin wollten Sie gehen?" repeated the Saint, translating.

To his surprise, the little man's lips tightened, and a sullen glaze came over his eyes. He almost snarled out his reply.

"Ich will gar nichts sagen."

Simon frowned.

Somewhere a new shrill noise was drifting through the still­ness of the night, and he realized that both Monty and Pa­tricia were standing rather tensely at his side; but he paid no attention. His brain registered the impressions as if it received them through a fog. He had no time to think about them then.

A little pulse was beating deep within him, throbbing and surging up in a breathless fever of surmise. The stubborn rigid-ness of the small man's mouth had started it, and the harsh violence of his voice had suddenly quickened it to a great pounding tumult that welled clamorously up and hammered on the doors of understanding. It was preposterous, absurd, fantastic; and yet with an almost jubilant fatalism he knew that it was true.

Somewhere there was a catch. The smooth simplicity of things as he had seen them till that instant was a delusion and a snare. A child of ten could have perceived it; and yet the deception had been so bland and natural that the un­masking of it had the effect of a battering ram aimed at the solar plexus. And it had all been so forthright and aboveboard. A small and harmless-looking little man is hurrying home with his week's wages in his little bag. Three hairy thugs set on him and proceed to beat him up. Like a good citizen, you inter­vene. You swipe the ungodly on the snitch, and rescue Regin­ald. And then, most naturally, you approach your protégé. You prepare to comfort him and bathe his wounds, what time he hails you as his hero and sends for the solicitors to revise his will. In your role of the compleat Samaritan, you inquire whither he was going, so that you may offer to shepherd him a little further on his way. . . . And then he bites your head off——

The Saint laughed.

"Yes, yes, I know, brother." Very gently and soothingly he spoke, just as before; but way down in the impenetrable un­dertones of his voice that whisper of soft laughter was lilting about like a mirthful will-o'-the-wisp. "But you've got us all wrong. Sie haben uns alles falsch gegotten. Verstehen Sie Espe­ranto? All those naughty men have gone. We've just saved your life. We're your bosom pals. Freunde. Kamerad. Gott mit uns, and all that sort of thing."

The German language has been spoken better. The Saint himself, who could speak it like a native when he chose, would have been the first to acknowledge that. But he computed that he had made his meaning fairly clear. Intelligible enough, at any rate, to encourage any ordinary person to investigate his credentials without actual hostility. And definitely he had given no just cause for the response which he received.

Perhaps the little man's normal nerve had been blown into space by his adventure. Perhaps his head was still muzzy with the painful memory of his recent experience. These questions can never now be satisfactorily settled. It is only certain that be was incredibly foolish.

With a vicious squeal that contorted his whole face, he wrenched one arm free from the Saint's grip and clawed at the Saint's eyes like a tigercat. And with that movement all doubts vanished from Simon Templar's mind.

"Not quite so quickly, Stanislaus," he drawled.

He swerved adroitly past the tearing fingers and pinned the little man resistlessly against the wall; and then he felt Monty Hayward's hand on his shoulder.

"If you don't mind me interrupting you, old man," Monty said coolly, "is that bloke over there a friend of yours?"

Simon looked up.

Along the Rennweg, less than a hundred yards away, a man in an unmistakable uniform was blundering towards them with his whistle screaming as he ran; and the Saint grasped the meaning of the omens that had been drifting blurredly through his senses while he was occupied with other things. He grasped their meaning with scarcely a second's pause, in all its fatal and far-reaching implications; and in the next second he knew, with a reckless certainty, what he was doomed to do.

The Law was trying to horn in on his party. At that very mo­ment it was thumping vociferously towards him on its great flat feet, loaded up to its flapping ears with all the elephantine pomposity of the system which it represented, walloping along to crash the gate of his conviviality with its inept and fa­tuous presence—just as it had been wont to do so often in the past. And this time there were bigger and better reasons than there had ever been why that intrusion could not be allowed. Those reasons might not have seemed so instantaneously con­clusive to the casual and unimaginative observer; but to the Saint they stuck out like the skyline of Chicago. And Simon found that he was no less mad than he had always been.

Under his hold, the little man squirmed sideways like a de­mented eel, and the attaché case which he was still clutching desperately in his right hand smashed at the Saint's head in a homicidal arc. Lazily the Saint swayed back two inches out­side the radius of the blow; and lazily, almost absent-mindedly, he clipped the little man under the jaw and dropped him in his tracks. ...

And then he turned and faced the others, and his eyes were the two least lazy things that either of them had ever seen.

"This is just too soon for our picnic to break up," he said.

He stooped and seized the little man by the collar and flung him over his shoulder like a sack of coals. The attaché case dan­gled from the little man's wrist by a short length of chain; and the Saint gathered it in with his right hand. The discovery of the chain failed to amaze him: he took it in his stride, as a de­tail that was no more than an incidental feature of the general problem, which could be analyzed and put in its right place at a more leisured opportunity. Undoubtedly he was quite mad. But he was mad with that magnificent simplicity which is only a hair's breadth from genius; and of such is the king­dom of adventurers.

The Saint was smiling as he ran.

He knew exactly what he had done. In the space of about two minutes thirty-seven seconds, he had inflicted on his new­est and most fragile halo a series of calamities that made such minor nuisances as the San Francisco earthquake appear posi­tively playful by comparison. Just by way of an hors-d'oeuvre. And there was no going back. He had waltzed irrevocably off the slippery tight wire of righteousness; and that was that. He felt fine.

At the end of the bridge he caught Patricia's arm. Down to the right, he knew, a low wall ran beside the river, with a nar­row ledge on the far side that would provide a precarious but possible foothold. He pointed.

"Play leapfrog, darling."

She nodded without a word, and went over like a schoolboy. Simon's hand smote Monty on the back.

"See you in ten minutes, laddie," he murmured.

He tumbled nimbly over the wall with his light burden on his back, and hung there by his fingers and toes three inches above the hissing waters while Monty's footsteps faded away into the distance. A moment later the patrolman's heavy boots clumped off the bridge and lumbered by without a pause.

2

Steadily the plodding hoofbeats receded until they were scarcely more than an indistinguishable patter; and the inter­mittent blasts of the patrolman's whistle became mere plaintive squeaks from the Antipodes. An expansive aura of peace settled down again upon the wee small hours, and made itself at home.

The Saint hooked one eye cautiously over the stonework and surveyed the scene. There was no sign of hurrying reinforce­ments trampling on each other in their zeal to answer the pa­trolman's frenzied blowing. Simon, knowing that the inhabit­ants of most Continental cities have a sublime and blessed gift of minding their own business, was not so much surprised as satisfied. He pulled himself nimbly over the wall again and reached a hand down to Pat. In another second she was stand­ing beside him in the road. She regarded him dispassionately.

"I always knew you ought to be locked up," she said. "And now I expect you will be."

The Saint returned her gaze with wide blue eyes of Saintly innocence.

"And why?" he asked. "My dear soul—why? What else could we do? Our reasoning process was absolutely elementary. The Law was on its way, and we didn't want to meet the Law. Therefore we beetled off. Stanislaus was just beginning to get interesting: we were not through with Stanislaus. Therefore we took Stanislaus with us. What could be simpler?"

"It's not the sort of thing," said Patricia mildly, "that re­spectable people do."

"It's the sort of thing we do," said the Saint

She fell into step beside him; and the Saint warbled on in the extravagant vein to which such occasions invariably moved him.

"Talking of the immortal name of Stanislaus," he said, "re­minds me of the celebrated Dr. Stanislaus Leberwurst, a bloke that we ought to meet some day. He applied his efforts to the problems of marine engineering, working from the hitherto ignored principle of mechanics that attraction and repulsion are equal and opposite. After eighty years of research he perfected a bateau in which the propelling force was derived from an enormous roll of blotting paper, which was fed into the water by clockwork from the bows of the ship. The blotting paper soaked up the water, and the water soaked up the blot­ting paper, thereby towing the contraption through the briny, the project was taken up by the Czecho-Slovakian Navy, but was later abandoned in favour of tandem teams of trained herrings."

Patricia laughed and tucked her hand through his arm.

In such a mood as that it was. impossible to argue with the Saint—impossible even to cast the minutest drop of dampness on his exuberant delight. And if she had not known that it was impossible, perhaps she would not have said a word. But the puckish mischief that she loved danced in his eyes, and she knew that he would always be the same.

"Where do we make for now?" she inquired calmly.

"The old pub," said the Saint. "And that is where we probe further into the private life of Stanislaus." He grinned boy­ishly. "My God, Pat-—when I think of what life might have been if we'd left Stanislaus behind, it makes my blood bubble. He's the brightest ray of sunshine I've seen in weeks. I wouldn't lose him for worlds."

The girl smiled helplessly. After she had taken a good look at the circumstances, it seemed the only thing to do. When you are walking brazenly through the streets of a foreign city arm-in-arm with a man who is carrying over his shoulder the ab­ducted body of a perfect stranger whom for want of better information he has christened Stanislaus—a man, moreover, who is incapable of showing any symptoms of guilt or agita­tion over this procedure—the respectable reactions which your Auntie Ethel would expect of you are liable to an attack of the dumb staggers.

Patricia Holm sighed.

Vaguely, she wondered if there were any power on earth that could shake the Saint's faith in his guardian angels; but the question never seemed to occur to the Saint himself. Dur­ing the whole of that walk back to "the old pub"—in actual fact it took only a few minutes, but to her it felt like a few hours—she would have sworn that not one hair of the Saint's dark head was turned a millimetre out of its place by the slightest glimmer of anxiety. He was happy. He was looking ahead into his adventure. If he had thought at all about the risks of their route to the old pub, he would have done so with the same dazzlingly childlike simplicity as he followed for his guiding star in all such difficulties. He was taking Stanislaus home; and if anybody tried to raise any objections to that ma­noeuvre—well, Simon Templar's own floral offering would cer­tainly provide the nucleus of a swell funeral. . . .

But no such objection was made. The streets of Innsbruck maintained their unruffled silence, and stayed benevolently bare: even the distant yipping of the patrolman's whistle had stopped. And Simon was standing under the shadow of the wall that had been his unarguable destination, glancing keenly up and down the deserted thoroughfare which it bordered.

"This is indubitably the reward of virtue," he remarked.

Stanislaus went to the top of the wall with one quick heave, and the Saint stooped again. Patricia felt his hands grip round her knees, and she was lifted into the air as if she had been a feather: she had scarcely settled herself on the wall when the Saint was up beside her and down again on the other side like a great grey cat. She saw him dimly in the darkness below as she swung her legs over, and glimpsed the flash of his white teeth; irresistibly she was reminded of another time when he had sent her over a wall, in the first adventure she had shared with him—one lean, strong hand had been stretched up to her exactly as it was stretched up now, only then it was stretched upwards in a flourish of debonair farewell—and a deep and abiding contentment surged through her as she jumped for him to catch her in his arms. He eased her to the ground as lightly as if she were landing in cotton wool. She heard his voice in a blithe whisper: "Isn't this the life?"

Above her, on her right, towered the cubical black bulk of the old pub—the Hotel Königshof, hugest and most palatial of all the hotels in Tirol, which the Saint had chosen just twelve hours ago for their headquarters. There, with a strategic eye for possible emergencies of a rather different kind, he had selected a suite on the ground floor with tall casement win­dows opening directly onto the ornamental gardens; and the fact that it was the only suite of its kind in the building and cost above five pounds a minute could not outweigh its equally unique advantages.

"Straight along in, old dear," spoke the Saint's whisper, "and I'll be right after you with Stanislaus."

She started off, feeling her way uncertainly between con­fusedly remembered flower beds; but he was beside her again in a moment, steering her with an unerring instinct over clear, level turf. The windows of their sitting room were already open, and he found them faultlessly. Inside the room, she heard him opening a door; and when she had found the switch and clicked on the lights the room was empty.

And then he came back through the communicating door of the bedroom, closing it behind him, and gazed at her re­proachfully.

"Pat, was that the way I raised you—to let loose all the limes and invite the whole world to gape at us?"

He went over and drew the curtains; and then he turned back, and her rueful excuses were swept away into thin air with his gay laugh.

"In spite of which," he observed soberly, "it's better to be too careful than too optimistic. The results are likely to be less permanently distressing." He smiled again, and slid an arm along her shoulders. "And now what do you think we could do with a cigarette?"

He pulled out his case and sank luxuriously into a chair. Patricia ranged herself on the arm.

"Are you leaving Stanislaus in the bedroom to cool off?"

Simon nodded.

"He's there. You can go in and kiss him goodnight if you like—he sleeps the sleep of the just. I handcuffed him to the bed and left him to his dreams while we decide what to do with him."

"And what happens if he wakes up and starts yelling his head off?"

The Saint blew out a long, complacent wisp of smoke.

"Stanislaus won't yell," he said. "If there's one thing that Stanislaus won't do when he wakes up, it's yell. He may utter a few subdued bleating cries, but he'll do nothing noisier than that. I've been doing a lot of cerebration over Stanislaus re­cently, and I'm willing to bet that the din he'll make will be so deafening that you could use it for the synchronized accompaniment of a film illustrating a chess tournament in a mon­astery of dumb Trappists. Take that from me."

A gentle knock sounded from the outer door of the suite; and the Saint peeped at his watch as he unrolled himself from his chair and sauntered across the room. It was five minutes to three—just thirty-five clocked minutes since they had detached themselves from the Breinössl and set out to ventilate their lungs before turning in, on that idle stroll beside the river which was to lead them into such strange and perilous paths. The night had wasted no time. And yet, if Simon Templar had had any inkling of the landslide of skylarking and song that was destined to be poured into his young life before that night's work had been fully accounted for, even he might have hesitated.

But he did not know. He opened the door three inches, checked up the pleasantly familiar features that surrounded Monty Hayward's small and sanitary moustache, and pulled him through. Then he slid the bolts cautiously into their sockets and filtered back into the sitting room with his ciga­rette tilting buoyantly up between his lips.

"What-ho, troops!" he murmured breezily. "And how do we all feel after our culture physique?"

"I don't think I want to talk to you," said Monty. "You're not nice to know."

The Saint's eyebrows slanted at him mockingly.

"Scarface Al Hayward will now tell us about his collection of early Woolworth porcelain," he drawled. " 'I never wanted a drag in politics or any other racket,' says Scarface Al. 'Art is the only thing that counts a damn with me. Why can't you guys ever leave me alone?' "

Monty laughed, operating the Saint's cigarette case with one hand and a siphon with the other.

"Surely. But still—this sort of thing's all very well for you, old sportsman, seeing as how you've chosen to make it your job; but why d'you want to boot me into it?"

"My dear chap, I thought it would be good for your liver. Besides, you can run awfully fast."

Monty plugged a cushion at him and went over and sat on the arm of the chair which Patricia had taken.

"Do you allow him to do this sort of thing, Pat?" he asked.

"What sort of thing?" inquired the girl blandly.

"Why—inveigling respectable editors into free fights and kidnappings and what not Haven't you noticed what he's been doing all night? He goes around throwing people into rivers— he grabs people off the streets and runs away with them—he lets his pals be chased all over Europe by hordes of heathen policemen, while he goes and hides—and then he stands around here as happy as a dog with a new flea and can't see anything to apologize for. Is that the way you let him behave?"

"Yes," said Patricia imperturbably.

The Saint picked up a glass and hitched himself onto the table. He blew Patricia a kiss and looked at Monty Hayward thoughtfully.

"Seriously, old lad," he said, "we owe you no small hand. You drew the fire like a blinkin' hero—just as if you'd been trained to it from the kindergarten. But I'm damned sorry if you feel you've been landed in a place where you ought not to be. There's no one I'd rather have with me in a spot of good clean fun, but if you really hear the call of the old hymn book and hassock­——"

Monty flicked ash into the fireplace.

"It's not the hymn book and hassock, you fathead—it's the Consolidated Press. As I told you at dinner, I've done a week's job in a couple of days, so I reckon I've earned five days' holiday. But that's not going to help me a lot if at the end of those five days I'm just beginning a fifteen-year stretch in some beastly German clink. . . . Anyway, what's happened to Stanislaus?"

Simon jerked a thumb towards the bedroom door.

"I dumped him out of the way. When he comes to, he's go­ing to throw a heap of light on some dark subjects. I was wait­ing for you to arrive before I did anything to speed up his awakening, so that you could join the interested audience." He stood up and crushed his cigarette end into an ash tray. "And in the circumstances, Monty, that seems to be the very next item on the programme. We'll get together and hear Stanislaus give tongue, and then we'll have a little more idea of the scheme of events and prizes in this here rodeo."

Monty nodded.

"That seems a fairly sound notion," he said.

The Saint went over and opened the communicating door. He had taken two steps into the room when he felt a distinct draught of cold air fanning his face; and then his eyes had attuned themselves to the darkness, and he saw the rectangle of starlight where the window was. He stepped back without a sound, and his hand caught Monty's fingers on the electric light switch.

"Not for just a moment, old dear," he said quietly. "That was the mistake Pat made."

He vanished into the gloom; and in a little while Monty heard a faint metallic rattle and saw the Saint's figure silhou­etted against the oblong of dim light. Simon was dosing the window carefully—and Simon knew quite well that that win­dow had already been closed when he dropped Stanislaus on the bed and handcuffed him there. But the Saint was perfectly calm about it. He drew the curtains across the window, and turned; and his voice spoke evenly out of the dark.

"The notion was very sound, Monty—very sound indeed," he said. "Only it was a little late. You can put the light on now."

Light came, drenching down in a sudden blazing flood from the central panel in the ceiling and the alabaster-shaded brackets along the walls. It quenched itself in the deep green curtains and the priceless carpet that had been fitted to a queen's bedchamber, and lay whitely over the spotless linen of the carved oak bed. In the middle of that snowy expanse, the little man looked queerly black and twisted.

The ivory hilt of a stiletto stood out starkly from the stained cloth of his shirt, and his upturned eyes were wide and staring. Even as they looked at him, his right hand sagged lower over the side of the bed, and the attaché case that dangled from his wrist settled on the floor with a dull thud.

II. HOW SIMON TEMPLAR WAS UNREPENTANT,

AND THE PARTY WAS CONSIDERABLY

PEPPED UP

SIMON unlocked the handcuffs and dropped them into his pocket. He was far too accustomed to the sight of sudden and violent death to be disturbed in any conventional way by what had happened; but even so, a parade of ghostly icicles was crawling down his spine. Death that struck so swiftly and mer­cilessly was just a little more than he had expected to encounter so early in the festivities. It was a threat and a chal­lenge that could not be misunderstood.

"How did it happen?" Patricia asked, breaking the silence in its sixth second; and the Saint smiled.

"In the simplest possible way," he said. "A member of the ungodly trailed us home, and let himself in here while we were gargling in the next room. Whoever he was, his sleuthing form is alpha plus—I was keeping one ear pricked for him all the way, and I never heard a thing. But if you ask me the reason why Stanislaus was bumped, that'll want a bit more thinking over."

The actual physical demise of the little man left him un­moved. They had not known each other long enough to become devoted comrades; and it was doubtful, in any case, whether the little man would ever have been inclined to permit such an affection to burgeon in his breast. The Saint, whose assess­ment of character was intuitive and instantaneous, judged him to be a bloke whose passing would leave the world singularly unbereaved.

And yet that same unimportant murder wrote a sentence into the story which the Saint could read in any language.

Across the bed, his clear blue gaze levelled into the eyes of Monty Hayward with a glimmer of new mockery, and that reckless half smile still rested on his lips. Onto his last speech he tacked one crackling question:

"Anyone say I wasn't right?"

"Right about what?" Monty snapped.

"About abducting Stanislaus," came the Saint's crisp reply. "You both thought I was crazy—thought I was jumping to conclusions, and jumping a damned sight too far. But since there was nothing else you could do, you gave the jump a trial. Now tell me I haven't given you the goods!"

Monty shrugged.

"The goods are there all right," he said. "But what are we supposed to do with them?"

"Get on with what's left of our sound notion," said the Saint. "Carry on finding out as much as we can about Stanislaus— then we may have some more to talk about."

Already he was examining the little man's attaché case. His first glance showed him that the leather had been half ripped away, doubtless by some other sharp instrument in the hands of the recent visitor; and then he saw what was inside, and grasped the reason for the bag's extraordinary weight. The little attaché case was nothing but a flimsy camouflage: inside it was a blued steel box, and it was to this box itself that the chain was riveted through a neat circular hole cut in the leather covering. A couple of shrewd slits with a penknife fetched the covering away altogether, and the metal box was comprehensively revealed—one of the compactest and solidest little portable safes that the Saint had ever seen.

Simon ran over its smooth surface with an expertly pessi­mistic eye. The lid fitted down so perfectly that it required the perspicacity of a lynx to spot the join at all. The edge of a razor couldn't have sidled into that emaciated fissure—much less the claw of the finest jemmy ever made. The only notable break that occurred anywhere in that gleaming case-hardened rhomboid was the small square panel in one side where the com­bination lock showed narrow segments of its four milled and lettered chrome-steel wheels—and even those were matched and balanced into their aperture so infrangibly that a bacillus on hunger strike would have felt cramped between them.

"Can you open it?" asked Monty; and the Saint shook his head.

"Not with anything in my outfit. The bloke who made this sardine can knew his job."

He snapped open one of his valises, and produced a bulging canvas tool-kit which he spread out on the bed. He slid out a small knife-bladed file, tested it speculatively on his thumb, and discarded it. In its place he selected a black vulcanized rubber flask. With a short rod of the same material he care­fully deposited a drop of straw-coloured liquid on one of the links of the chain, while Monty watched him curiously.

"Quieter and easier," explained the Saint, replacing the flask in his holdall. "Hydrofluoric acid—the hungriest liquor known to chemistry. Eats practically anything."

Monty raised his eyebrows.

"Wouldn't it eat through the sardine can?"

"Not in twenty years. They've got the measure of these gravies now, where they build their strong-boxes. But the chain didn't come from the same factory. Which is just as well for us. I can't help feeling it would have been darned em­barrassing to have to wade through life with a strong-box per­manently attached to the bargain basement of a morgue. It's not hygienic."

He lighted a cigarette and paced the room thoughtfully for a few moments. On one of his rounds he stopped to open the communicating door wide, and stood there listening for a second. Then he went on.

"One or two things are getting clearer," he said. "As I see it, the key to the whole shemozzle is inside that there sardine can. The warriors who tried to heave Stanislaus into the river wanted it, and it's also one of the three possible reasons for the present litter of dead bodies. Stanislaus was bumped, either (a) because he had the can, (b) because he might have made a noise, (c) because he might have squealed—or for a combina­tion of all three reasons. The man who knifed him tried to grab the contents of the attaché case and was flummoxed by the sardine can within. Not having with him any means of open­ing it or separating it from Stanislaus, he returned rapidly to the tall timber. And one detail you can shunt right out of your minds is any idea that the contents of the said can are respect­able enough to be mentioned in law-abiding circles anywhere."

"Bank messengers have been known to carry bags chained to their wrists," Monty advanced temperately.

"Yeah." Simon was withering. "At half-past two in the morn­ing, the streets are stiff with 'em. Diplomatic messengers have the same habits. They're recruited from the runts of the earth; and one of their qualifications is to be so nitwitted they don't know a friend when they see one. When they're attacked by howling mobs of hoodlums, they never let out a single cry for help—they flop about in the thickest part of the uproar and never try to get saved. Stanislaus must have been an ambas­sador!"

Monty nodded composedly.

"I know what you mean," he said. "He must have been a crook."

The Saint laughed and turned back to the bed. After one appraising scrutiny of the link on which he had placed his drop of acid, he twisted the chain round his hand and broke it like a piece of string.

With the steel box weighing freely in his hand, he lounged against a chest of drawers; and once again he looked across at Monty Hayward with that mocking half smile on his lips.

"You hit the mark in once, old lad," he said softly. "Stan­islaus was a crook. And who bumped him off?"

Monty deliberated.

"Well—presumably it was one of the birds we threw into the river. A rival gang."

Simon shook his head.

"If it was, he dried himself quickly enough. There isn't one damp spot on the carpet or the bed, except for Stanislaus's gore. No—we can rule that out. It was a rival gang, all right, but a bunch that we haven't yet had the pleasure of meeting. Their representative was obviously on the set the whole time, unbeknownst, only the Water Babies forestalled him. But who were the Water Babies?"

"Do you know?"

"Yes," said the Saint quietly. "I think I know."

Mechanically Patricia Holm took a cigarette from her case and lighted it. She, who knew the Saint better than anyone else living, saw clearly through the deceiving quietness of his voice—straight through to the glinting undercarry of irrepres­sible mirth that weaved beneath. She caught his eye and read his secret in it before he spoke.

"They were policemen," said the Saint.

The words flicked through the room like a wisk of raptur­ous lightning, leaving the air prickling with suspense. Monty froze up as though his eardrums had been stunned.

"What?" he demanded. "Do you mean——"

"I do." The Saint was laughing—a wild billow of helpless jubilation that smashed the suspense like dynamite. He flung out his arms shakily. "That's just it, boys and girls—I do! I mean no more and nothing less. Oh, friends, Romans, country­men—roll up and sign along the dotted line: the goods have been delivered C. O. D.!"

"But are you sure?"

Simon slammed the strong-box on the chest of drawers.

"What else could they have been? Stanislaus never shouted for help because he knew he wouldn't get it. I thought that was eccentric right from the start, but you can't hold up a first-class rough-house while you chew the cud over its eccentric features. And then, when Stanislaus gave me the air, I knew I was right. Don't you remember what he said? 'Ich will gar nichts sagen'—the conversational gambit of every arrested crook since the beginning of time, literally translated: 'I'm saying nothing.' But what a mouthful that was!"

Monty Hayward blinked.

"Are you telling me," he said, "that all the time I've been risking my neck to save some anaemic little squirt from being beaten up ,by three hairy toughs, and then cheerfully heaving the three toughs into the river—I've actually been saving a nasty little crook from being arrested, and helping you to mur­der three respectable detectives?"

"Monty, old turbot, you have so." Once more the Saint bowed weakly before the storm. "Oh, sacred thousand Camemberts—stand by and fill your ears with this! . . . And you started it! You lugged me into the regatta. You led these timid feet into the mire of sin. And here we are, with the po­lice after us, and Stanislaus's pals after us, and the birds who bumped Stanislaus off after us, and a genuine corpse on the buffet, and an unopenable can of unclaimed boodle on the how's-your-father—and I was trying to be good!"

Monty put down his glass and rose phlegmatically. He was a man in whom the Saint had never in his life seen any signs of serious flustennent, but just then he seemed as dose to the verge of demonstration as he was ever likely to be.

"I never aspired to be an outlaw myself, if it comes to that," he said. "Simon, I simply loathe your sense of humour."

The Saint shrugged his shoulders. He was unrepentant. And already his brain was leaping ahead into a whirlwind of surmise and leaving that involuntary explosion of rejoicing far behind it.

He had summarized for Monty everything that he knew or guessed himself—in a small nutshell. He had divined the situation right from the overture, had been irrevocably confirmed in his suspicion in the first act, and had turned his deductions over and over in his mind during the interval until they had taken to themselves the coherence of concrete knowledge. And in his last sentence he had epitomized the facts with a staccato conciseness that lammed them together like a herd of chort­ling toads.

They failed lamentably to depress him. Never again would he mourn over his lost virtue. What had to be would be. He had angled for adventure, and it had been handed to him abundantly. Admittedly the violent decease of Stanislaus com­plicated matters to no small extent, but that only piled on proof that here was the authentic article as advertised. Who­ever the gangs were that he was up against, they had already provided prompt and efficient evidence that they were worthy of his steel. His heart warmed towards them. His toes yearned after their posteriors. They were his boy friends.

His brain went racing on towards the next move. The other two were watching him expectantly, and for their benefit he continued with his thoughts aloud.

"If anybody is wanting to get out," he said, "this is the time to go. The birds who bumped off Stanislaus are going to have lots more to say before they're through, and it's only a question of hours before they say it. The guy who did the bumping has gone home to report, and the only thing we don't know is how long they'll take to get organized for the come-back. Even now——"

He broke off and stood listening.

In the silence, the gentle drumming on the outer door of the suite, which had commenced as an almost inaudible vi­bration, rose slowly through a gradual crescendo until they could all hear it quite distinctly; and the Saint's brows levelled over his eyes in a dark line. Yet he rounded off his speech with­out a tremor of expression.

"Even now," said the Saint unemotionally, "it may be too late."

Monty spoke.

"The police—or Stanislaus's pals—or the knife experts?"

Simon smiled.

"We shall soon know," he murmured.

There was a gun gleaming in his hand—a wicked little snub-nosed Webley automatic that fitted snugly and inconspicuously into the palm. He slipped back the jacket and replaced it in his pocket, keeping his hand there, and crossed the room with his swift, swinging stride. And as he reached the door, the knocking stopped.

The Saint halted also, with the furrows deepening in his forehead. Not once since it began had that knocking possessed the timbre which might have been expected from it—either of peremptory summons or stealthy importunity. It had been more like a long tattoo artistically performed for its own sake, with a sort of patient persistence that lent an eerie quality to its abrupt stoppage. And the Saint was still circling warily round the puzzle when the solution was launched at him with a smooth purposefulness that made his heart skip one beat.

"Please do nothing rash," said a mellifluous voice in perfect English.

The Saint spun round.

In the communicating doorway of the sitting room stood a slim and elegant man in evening dress, unarmed except for the gold-mounted ebony cane held lightly in his white-gloved fingers. For three ticked seconds the Saint stared at him in dizzy incredulity; and then, to Monty Hayward's amazement, he sagged limply against the wall and began to laugh.

"By the great hammer toe of the holy prophet Hezekiah," said the Saint ecstatically—"the Crown Prince Rudolf !"

2

The prince stroked his silky figment of moustache, and be­hind his hand the corners of his mouth twitched into the shadow of a smile.

"My dear young friend, this is a most unexpected pleasure! When you were described to me, I could scarcely believe that our acquaintance was to be renewed."

Simon Templar looked at him through a sort of haze.

His memory went careering back over two years—back to the tense days of battle, murder, and sudden death, when that slight, fastidious figure had juggled the fate of Europe in his delicate hands, and the monstrous evil presence of Rayt Marius, the war maker, had loomed horribly across an unsuspecting world; when the Saint and his two friends had fought their lone forlorn fight for peace, and Norman Kent laid down his life for many people. And then again to their second encounter, three months afterwards, when the hydra had raised its head again in a new guise, and Norman Kent had been re­membered. . . . Everything came back to him with a startling and blinding vividness, summed up and crystallized in the superhuman repose of that slim, dominating figure—the man of steel and velvet, as the Saint would always picture him, the stormy petrel of the Balkans, the outlaw of Europe, the man who in his own strange way was the most fanatical patriot of the age; marvellously groomed, sleek as a sword-blade, smil­ing. ...

With a conscious effort the Saint pulled himself together. Out of that maelstrom of reminiscence, one thing stood out a couple of miles. If Prince Rudolf was participating in the spree, the soup into which he had dipped his spoon was liable to contain so little poppycock that the taste would be almost imperceptible. Somewhere in the environs of Innsbruck big medicine was being brewed; the theory of ordinary boodle in some shape or form, which the Saint had automatically ac­cepted as the explanation of that natty little strong-box, was wafted away to inglorious annihilation. And somewhere be­hind that smiling mask of polished ice were locked away the key threads of the intrigue.

"Rudolf—my dear old college chum!" Mirthfully, blissfully, the Saint's voice went out in an expansive hail of welcome. "This is just like old times! . . . Monty, you must let me introduce you: this is His Absolute Altitude, the Crown Prince, Rudolf himself, who was with us in all the fun and games a year or two ago. . . . Rudolf, meet Saint Montague Hayward, chairman of the Royal Commission for Investigating the In­cidence of Psittacosis among Dromedaries, and managing editor of The Blunt Instrument, canonized this very day for assassinating a reader who thought a blackleg was something to do with varicose veins. . . . And now you must let us know what we can do for you—Highness!"

The prince glanced down with faint distaste at the bulge of the Saint's pocket. Grim, steady as a rock, and unmistakable, it had been covering him unswervingly throughout that gay cascade of nonsense, and not one of the Saint's exaggerated movements had contrived to veer it off its mark by the thou­sandth part of an inch.

"I sincerely trust, my dear Mr. Templar," he remarked, "that you are not contemplating any drastic foolishness. One corpse is quite sufficient for any ordinary man to have to account for, and I cannot help thinking that even such an enterprising young man as yourself would find the addition of my own body somewhat inconvenient."

"You guess wrong," said the Saint tersely. "Corpses are my specialty. I collect 'em. But still, we're beginning to learn things about you. From that touching speech of yours, we gather that you belong to the bunch who presented me with the first body. Izzat so?" The prince inclined his head.

"It distresses me to have to admit that one of my agents was responsible. The killing was stupid and unnecessary. Emilio was only instructed to follow Weissmann and report to me immediately he had reached his destination. When Weissmann was first arrested, and then rescued and abducted by yourself, the ridiculous Emilio lost his head. His blunder is merely a typical example of misplaced initiative." The prince dismissed the subject with an airy wave of his hand. "However, the mis­take is fortunately not fatal, except for Weissmann—and Emi­lio will not annoy me again. Is your curiosity satisfied?"

"Not so's you'd notice it," said the Saint pungently. "We're only just starting. Our curiosity hasn't got its bib wet yet. Who was this Weissmann bird, anyway?"

The prince raised his finely pencilled eyebrows. "You seem to require a great deal of information, my dear Mr. Templar."

"I soak up information like sponge, old sweetheart. Tell me more. What is the boodle?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Granted. What is the boodle? You know.The jack—the swag —the loot—the mazuma—the stuff that all this song and dance is about. The sardines in that ingenious little can. Gosh-darn it," said the Saint, with exasperation, "you used to understand plain English. What's the first prize in the sweepstake? We've paid for our tickets. We're inquisitive. Let's hear you tell us what it's all about."

For the merest fraction of a second, a glitter of expression skimmed across the prince's eyes. And then it was gone again, and his sensitive features were once more as impassive as a Si­berian sea.

"You appear," he said suavely, "to be forgetting your posi­tion."

"You don't say."

The prince's stick swung gracefully from his fingertips.

"You forget, my impetuous young friend, that I am the visi­tor—and the dictator of the conversation. You are inquisitive, but you may or may not be so ignorant as you wish me to be­lieve. The point is really immaterial. Except that, if you are honestly ignorant, I can assure you—from nothing but my per­sonal regard for you, my dear Mr. Templar—I can assure you that it will be healthier for you to remain in ignorance." He glanced at his watch. "I think we have wasted enough time. Mr. Templar, when you abducted Weissmann, he was carrying a small steel box. I see that you have detached it from him. That box, Mr. Templar, is my property, and I shall be glad to have it."

The Saint lounged even more languidly against the wall.

"I'll bet you'd love it—Highness."

Simon's voice was dreamy. And right down behind that drawling dreaminess his brain was sizzling with the knowledge that somewhere the interview had sprung a leak.

In no way whatsoever had it taken the line he had subcon­sciously expected of it, and not one of his deliberate discourte­sies had been able to startle it back into the way it should have gone. The Saint felt like a second-rate comedian frantically pumping the old oil into a frosted audience, and feeling all the inclement draughts of Lapland whistling back at him to roost below his wishbone. The badinage was going hideously flat. He caught the prince's gaze on him with a quiet wraith of humour in it

"In a few minutes more, my friend, I shall believe that your ignorance is genuine. Or possibly your intelligence has de­teriorated. Such things have been known to happen. I will ad­mit that, when I decided to call on you myself, I had my doubts about the wisdom of the proceeding. A natural curiosity of my own persuaded me to take the risk. Now the risk has been justi­fied, and I have been disappointed. It is a pity. But perhaps one cannot have everything. . . ."

"Allow me," murmured the Saint genially, "to mention that I'm doing my utmost to oblige. What, after all, is one corpse more or less between friends? Of course, my shooting isn't what it was, and as a matter of fact it never has been, and if you feel like taking a chance on it——"

"I rarely feel inclined to take chances," said the prince calmly. "But perhaps I have been distracting your attention."

He made a slight signal with his right hand.

Just for an instant, the movement seemed to be nothing more than a meaningless gesture; and the Saint was deceived. And then the scales fell from his eyes—just that one instant too late.

He had forgotten that drumming on the front door of the suite. When it had stopped for the arrival of the prince he had thought no more about it. He had taken it for nothing more than an elementary ruse to enable the prince to make his en­trance unobserved through the sitting-room windows; he had cursed himself silently for being so simply taken in, and thereafter had dismissed it from a mind that was fully occupied with other problems. .

And now he grasped his error.

It was literally thrust upon him—jabbed firmly and incon­trovertibly into his spine, and purposefully left there. Before that, in his irregular and energetic life, he had experienced the identical sensation. The feel of a gun muzzle in one's back leaves an indelible imprint on one's memory.

Simon stood quite still.

"Disappointing, in its way," said the prince silkily, "but satisfactory in most respects. I can recall the days when you would have been more troublesome."

Unhurriedly he crossed the room and picked up the strong­box, and the Saint watched him coldly. There were two chips of white-hot sapphire in the Saint's eyes, twin lights of concentrated wrath that blazed through a thin crust of glacial im­mobility. The memory of the old days was seething through his tissues like an elixir of hot gall. The prince was right. Simon Templar had never been so easy.

The Saint's mouth writhed into a grimly tightening line. The softness had gone out of him. He felt as if he had just woken up—as if he had been fumbling feebly through a stifling fog, and suddenly the fog had vanished and he was stretching lim­ber muscles and gulping down great lungfuls of clear moun­tain air. His brain was as pellucid as an Alpine pool. It had room for only one idea: to get his hands on to the contemptu­ous faces of the party that had made a fool of him, and hit them. Hit them, and keep on hitting. . . .

The prince was smiling at him.

"I can only repeat my assurance, Mr. Templar, that there are times when ignorance is bliss and curiosity may be an expen­sive pastime. Particularly in one whose hand has lost its cunning."

Simon Templar drew a deep breath.

Then he fired from his pocket.

His gun, with a half-charged cartridge in the chamber, gave no more than an explosive little cough, which merged into the sharp smack of the bullet crashing home into the single electric light switch by the door; and the room was plunged into impenetrable blackness.

The Saint hurled himself sideways. Right behind him he heard the dull plop of an efficiently silenced gun, but he was untouched. He twisted like an eel, and his hand brushed a pair of legs. They heard his grim chuckle in the darkness. There was a gasp, a strangled cry, and a terrific thud that mingled with the slamming of a door.

And after that there was a queer stillness in the room; and in the stillness someone groaned harrowingly. . . .

Monty Hayward dipped in his pocket and found a box of matches. He struck one circumspectly, and looked about him.

Patricia Holm was standing quietly beside the bed; and on the floor the horse-faced gun-in-the-back guy was giving a life­like imitation of a starfish in its death agony. But the Crown Prince had gone—and so had Simon Templar.

III. HOW SIMON TEMPLAR MADE A JOURNEY,

AND PRINCE RUDOLPH SPOKE OF HIS APPENDIX

THE Saint went through the sitting-room window in a flying leap that landed him on the turf beyond like a crouching puma.

He paused there for a moment with his eyes and ears alert, sifting the shadows for the tell-tale movement which he knew he would find somewhere. And while he paused he felt his spirits soaring upwards till they knocked their heads against the stars.

The bouncing of the gun artist had done him good—more good even than the initial encounter with the thugs who had been heaved in error into the river. On the whole, those three had only been common, or garden, thugs; whereas the gun artist had prodded his gun into the Saint's spinal purlieus, thereby occasioning him considerable discomfort, uneasiness, and inconvenience. Well, things had happened to the gun artist which ought to learn him. The Saint had picked him up by his ankles, bounced him halfway to the ceiling, and al­lowed him to return to earth under his own steam.

And after that, the temptation to repeat the performance with Prince Rudolf had been almost overwhelming. Only an epic triumph of brains over brawn, a positively prodigious magnificence of will, the Saint modestly believed, had made it possible to withstand the succulent allurements of the idea. But his better judgment, borne up on a wave of Saintly inspiration, told him that the time for playing ball with Rudolf was not yet.

Ten yards away, down by the sheer black walls of the hotel, a blurred glimpse of white showed for the twinkling of an eye, a glimpse that was there and gone again, like the pale belly of a shark turning fathoms deep in a midnight lagoon; and the Saint smiled contentedly. He slipped noiselessly into the murk beside the wall, and followed along on toes that hardly seemed to touch the grass.

The figure ahead was not so stealthy. Simon could hear the soft rustle and pad of thin shoes hurrying over the ground, and once he caught the dry rustling of leaves as the prince scraped past a laurel bush. To a man with the Saint's ears, those sounds were of more value than all the sun arcs in Hollywood: they told him everything he wanted to know, without making his own presence so obvious. Flitting inaudibly behind them, he closed in on his quarry until he could actually hear the prince's steady breathing.

A second later, the sudden squeak of a metal hinge fetched the Saint up all standing. Immediately in front of him he could make out an arched opening in the gloom, and for a moment the prince's silhouette was framed in the gap. Then the hinge squeaked its second protest, and the silhouette was gone.

Simon frowned. Laurel bushes he could cope with, dead twigs likewise, and similarly any of the other hazards of night stalking; but squeaking gates were a notch or two above his form. And the Saint knew that when once a gate has made up its mind to squeak it will surely get its squeak in somehow, even though the hand that shifts it has a touch like gossamer.

Thoughtfully he stepped back.

Seven feet up, the wall through which the arch was cut ended in a flat line of deeper blackness against the dense ob­scurity of the sky. That seemed to be the only hope; and the Saint went for it with a quick spring and a supple pull on his fingers that brought him to the top of the wall like an athletic phantom. He drew his feet up after him without a sound—and stopped there motionless.

Right underneath him a big limousine was parked with its lights out and its engine whispering, barely discernible in the faint luminance which filtered down the alley from an invis­ible street lamp somewhere in the road at the far end. A man in some sort of livery was closing the door, and Simon heard the prince murmur a curt order. The chauffeur hurried round and climbed in behind the wheel. There was a dull click as he engaged the gears; and the headlights cut a wide channel of radiance out of the darkness of the lane.

Without a moment's hesitation, the Saint stepped out into space and spreadeagled himself silently on the roof.

He was aware that he was doing the maddest of mad things. For all he knew, that car might be preparing to hustle to the other end of Europe. If it chose to do so, it could easily travel two hundred miles before it made its first stop; and every one of those miles would have its chance of hurling him off to cer­tain injury and possible death—apart from the ever present risk of discovery. And back in the Hotel Königshof he had left Monty and Pat to keep their ends up with a corpse and a pris­oner, and not one clue between them to indicate what he ex­pected them to do.

But they would have to pull their own weights in the boat, even as the Saint was pulling his. Patricia he knew like his own hand; and Monty Hayward was a veritable tower of strength. They would find their own solution to the revised problem— even if that solution consisted of nothing more desperate than a policy of masterly inaction.

Meanwhile, fully three quarters of his own talents were taken up with the business of maintaining his present strate­gic position. At the first trial, the roof of the car had seemed most conveniently proportioned to enable him to curl his toes over the rear corners and his fingers over the front ones, thereby stabilizing his equilibrium over a wide base; but after the first five minutes he discovered that his position was unpleasantly reminiscent of the lunch hour in a mediaeval torture chamber. If he had been able to talk, he would have aired his heartfelt sympathy with the venerable sportsmen who allowed their heights to be increased on the six-inches-while-you-wait machine, while the jailers went round the corner to get gay with a butt of mulled sack. The car dodged and bucked round every available corner, heading eastwards out of the town onto the Salzburg road; and at every corner he had to exert all his strength to avoid being flung into the scenery like a pea off a gyroscope. Even when they were clear of the town he was no better off; for the Inn Valley road, for its own mys­terious reasons, switches over a series of bridges from one side of the river to the other at every conceivable opportunity and a few others which only an engineering genius could have in­vented. Moreover, it is covered to a depth of three inches with a layer of fine white dust; and as the car increased its speed the Saint found himself enveloped in a whirling cloud of pul­verized rock which invaded his nostrils and turned the lining of his throat into a lime kiln—a form of frightfulness which the mediaeval connoisseurs had omitted to include in their syl­labus of entertainment. The Saint clung on like a limpet, breathing through his ears, and dreaming wistfully of feather beds and beer.

After a while he began to get adjusted to the peculiar re­quirements of his position—for what that was worth. At least, he felt sufficiently secure to try and take a peek at what there was to be seen in the de luxe quarters of the vehicle. Locating a merciful straight stretch of road in front of them, he let go one hand and squirmed himself gingerly round to shoot one eyes through the miniature skylight under his belt buckle.

At the four corners of the rear compartment, clusters of tiny frosted bulbs illuminated the interior. By their light Si­mon could see the prince reclining in the sybaritic upholstery with the portable safe balanced on his knee. He was idly twiddling the wheels of the combination, and a tranquil smile was gliding over his face. Presently he put the strong-box down on the cushions beside him and rested his chin on his hand, wrapped in inscrutable contemplation.

The Saint grabbed for a hold and flattened himself out again in time to take the next corner. And he also meditated.

The view he had had of the tableau under his tummy was definitely encouraging. Pondering it between the racking strains on his muscles, he elaborated it into a direct and diag­nostic confirmation of his theory. The facts as he knew them so far had to link up somehow, and the Saint felt that he could do the linking. That was why he was suffering his present martyrdom.

He tacked the dues concisely together in his mind.

"Emilio was tailing Stanislaus to report when he made the home base. When I collared Stanislaus, Emilio didn't try to rescue him; he knifed him instead. After which, Rudolf tools and lifts the sardine can. Simple."

The big car sped on; and time became nothing but a mean­ingless succession of aches. They passed through a jolly-sound­ing place called Pill, swung right at Schwaz, and began to climb into the mountains. Shortly afterwards, the so-called "first-class" road petered out, and they were jolting over a kind of glorified mule track which boxed the compass along the brink of a contorted precipice. The chauffeur, whose nervous system must have been nothing more than an elementary ap­paratus rigged up from a few assorted icicles and bits of string, kept his foot hard down on the accelerator and took the hair­pin corners on two wheels; and after the first mile of it the Saint buried his face in his sleeve and lost interest in the route. Every few minutes he felt the car heel drunkenly over to one side or the other, while the tires skidded horribly over the loose, treacherous surface; and the Saint felt the flesh crawling on the back of his neck and wondered if any art of surgery would ever induce his bones to settle back into their tortured sockets.

Eventually, with a terrific bump which the Saint at first as­sumed to be the inevitable end, the car crabbed onto a com­paratively level driveway and began to slow down.

Simon raised his head with the feelings of a drowning man who finds himself unexpectedly coming up for the fourth time, and endeavoured to absorb the salient features of the landscape.

Straight in front of him he could see a pitch-black pile rear­ing up its serrated battlements out of the shrouded dark. The headlamps of the car splashed a wide oval of light over the bleak stone entrance flanked by semicircular bastions, and picked out the gaunt figure of the janitor, who was at that mo­ment hurrying to open the huge wrought-iron gates. To left and right of the archway the forbidding walls of the castle stretched sheer and unbroken to the squat round towers at the corners fifty yards away.

The car moved slowly forward again, and the Saint pulled himself cautiously up onto his toes and fingertips. The gate­keeper was temporarily blinded by the headlights; and Simon knew that that was his only chance. Once the car had passed within the walls, the odds on his being spotted would leap up to twenty-five to one; and having travelled so far, he had no urge to gamble his hopes of success on any bet like that.

The gateway was the vulnerable point in the fortifications, with a bare yard of masonry rising over it. As the car passed underneath, Simon set his teeth, gathered his cracking muscles, and jumped. He caught the top of the stonework, and wriggled over with an effort that seemed to split his sinews.

He found himself on a sort of narrow balcony that spanned the archway and disappeared into the turrets on each side. In the courtyard below him he could see the car swinging round to pull up beside a massive door over which a hanging lantern swayed in the slight breeze. The car stopped, and the prince stepped quickly out; as he did so, the door was flung open, and a broad beam of light cast the grotesquely elongated shadow of a footman down the steps. The prince stepped inside, pulling off his gloves; and the door dosed.

Simon's eye roved thoughtfully up the walls above the door. Higher up he could see a narrow streak of light sneaking through a gap in the curtains of a window: while he watched, the window next to it suddenly appeared in a yellow square of radiance.

"Which seems to be our next stop," opined the Saint.

He moved along to the turret on his left, and found a flight of spiral stone stairs running upwards and downwards from the minute landing where he stood. After a second's cogitation, he decided on the upward flight, and emerged onto a broader promenade which ran round the entire perimeter of the walls.

Simon kissed his hand to the unknown architect of that in­valuable veranda, and hustled round it as quickly as he dared. A matter of three minutes brought him to a point which he judged to be vertically over the lighted windows; leaning dizzily over the battlements, he was able to make out a dimly illuminated sill. And right under his hands he could feel the thick, gnarled tendrils of a growth of ivy that must have been digging itself in since the days of Charlemagne.

With the slow beginnings of a Saintly smile touching his lips, Simon flexed his arms, took a firm grip on the nearest tentacles, and swung his legs over the low balustrade.

And it was at that moment that he heard the scream.

It was the most dreadful shriek that he had ever heard. Shrill, quavering, and heart-sickening, it pealed out from beneath him and went wailing round the empty courtyard in horrible strident agony. It was a scream that gurgled out of a retch­ing throat that had lost all control—the shuddering brute cry of a man crucified beyond the endurance of human flesh and blood. It tingled up into the Saint's scalp like a stream of elec­tric needles and numbed his belly with a frozen nausea.

2

For a space of four or five seconds that haunting cadence quivered in the air; and then silence came blanketing down again upon the castle—a silence throbbing with the blood-chilling terror of that awful cry.

The Saint loosed one hand and wiped a smear of clammy perspiration from his forehead. He had never reckoned him­self to be afflicted with an unduly sensitive set of nerves, but there was something about that scream which liquefied the marrow in his bones: He knew that only one thing could have caused it—the pitiless application of a fiendish refinement of torture which he would never have believed existed. Recalling his flippant reflections on the subject of mediaeval dungeon frolics, he found the theme less funny than it had seemed a quarter of an hour ago.

His heart was beating a little faster as he worked his way down the wall. He went down as quickly as he dared, swinging recklessly from hand-hold to hand-hold and praying consistently as he descended.

Down in that lighted room below him things were blowing up an eighty miles an hour for the showdown which he had laboriously arranged to attend in person. Down there was being disentangled the enigma of the sardine can, and he wanted a front fauteuil for the climax. He figured that he had earned it Only with that tantalizing bait in view had be been able to deny himself the pleasure of picking up Rudolf by the hoosits and punting him halfway to Potsdam. And the thought that he might be missing the smallest detail of the unravelling sent him slithering down the scarp at a pace that would have made a monkey's hair turn grey.

A dead strand of creeper snapped under his weight, and for one vertiginous instant he pendulumed over the yawning jaws of death by the fingers of his left hand. Looking down into the Stygian chasm as he swung there, he sighted a nebulous shaft of luminance just underneath his feet and knew that he was only a few inches from his goal. He snatched at a fresh hand­hold, warped himself featly sideways, and went on. A moment later he was steadying his toes on the broad sill of the open window and peeping into the room.

In a high-backed, carved-oak chair, at one end of a long oak table placed in the geometric centre of a luxuriously fur­nished library, sat the prince. A thin jade cigarette holder was clamped between his teeth, and he was sketching an intricate pattern on the table with a slim gold pencil. At the opposite end of the table a big flabbily built man sat in an identical chair: he was clothed only in his trousers and shirt, and his bare wrists were locked to the arms of the chair by shining metal clamps. And the Saint saw with a dumb thrill of horror that his head was completely enclosed in a spherical framework of gleaming steel.

The prince was speaking in German.

"You must understand, my dear Herr Krauss, that I never allow misguided stubbornness to interfere with my plans. To me, you are nothing but a tool that has served its purpose. I have only one more use for you: to open this little box. That must be a very small service for you to do me, and yet you can console yourself with the thought that it will be an exceedingly valuable one. It will relieve me of the trouble and delay of having it opened by force, and it will save you an indefinite amount of physical discomfort. Surely you will see that it is absurd to refuse."

The other twisted impotently in his chair. There was a trickle of blood running down his arm where one of the clamps which held him had cut into the flesh.

"You devil! Is this what you did to Weissmann?"

"That was not necessary. The egregious Emilio—you remember Emilio?—was careless enough to kill him. Weissmann had actually reached Innsbruck when the police waylaid him. He was rescued, curiously enough, by a young friend of mine—an Englishman who used to be extremely clever. Fortunately for us, his powers are declining very early in life, and it was a comparatively simple matter for me to retrieve your property. You should visit my young friend one day—you will find that you have much in common. When a once brilliant man is passing into his second childhood, it must be a great relief to be able to exchange sympathy with another who is undergoing the same unenviable experience."

The prisoner leaned forward rigidly.

"One day," he said huskily, "I will make you sneer with another face. One day when you have learned that the old fox can still be the master of the young jackal——"

Prince Rudolf snapped his fingers.

"These 'one days,' my friend! How often have I listened to prophecies of what the cheated fox would do 'one day'! And it is a day which never comes. No, Herr Krauss—let us confine ourselves to the present, which is so much less speculative. You have been very useful to me—unwittingly, I know; but I appreciate your kindness just the same. I appreciate it so much that the most superficial courtesy on your part would induce me to let you leave this castle alive—after you have performed me this one service. I could even forget your threats and insults, which have done me no great harm. I have no profound desire to injure you. Your dead body would only be an encumbrance; and even the mild form of persuasion which you have compelled me to apply does not amuse me—the noise you make is so distressing. So let us have no more delays. Do what I ask you——"

"Du—du Schweinhund!" The tortured man's voice rose to a tremulous whine. "You will have to wait longer than this——"

"My dear Herr Krauss, I have already waited long enough. Your plot to obtain the contents of this box was known to me three months ago. At first I was annoyed. I regret to say that for a time I even contemplated the advantages of your meet­ing with a fatal accident. And then I devised this infinitely better scheme. Since we both coveted the same prize, I would retire gracefully. You should have the field to yourself. Your own renowned cunning and audacity should pull the chestnuts out of the fire. It was sufficient for me to stand back and admire your workmanship. And then, when your organization had ob­tained the prize, and it had been successfully smuggled across Europe to where you were waiting to receive it—when all the work had been done and all the risks had been survived—why, then it would be quite early enough for any accidents to hap­pen. That was the plan I adopted, and it has been rewarded as it deserved to be." The prince removed the cigarette holder from his mouth and tapped the ash from it with an elegant forefinger. "Only one obstacle now detains us: the secret of the combination which keeps our prize inside this rather cumber­some box which I really do not require. And that secret, I am sure, you will not hesitate to share with me."

"Never!" gasped the man in the opposite chair throatily. "I would die first——"

"On the contrary," said the prince calmly, "you would not die till afterwards. But that eventuality need not concern us. In order to refresh your memory, we will let Fritz turn the little screw again."

He signed to the man who stood behind the other's chair, and leaned back at his ease, lighting another cigarette. His face was absolutely barren of expression, and his unblinking eyes were fixed upon his captive with the dispassionate relent-lessness of frozen agates. As the man Fritz took hold of the steel cage which encircled the prisoner's head, the prince raised one hand.

"Or perhaps," he suggested smoothly, "the redoubtable Herr Krauss would like to change his mind."

The prisoner's breath came through his teeth in a sharp hiss. The knuckles showed white and tense on his clenched hands.

"Nein."

The prince shrugged.

Watching half-hypnotized through the window, Simon Temp­lar saw Krauss stiffen in his chair as the screw control of that foul instrument was slowly tightened. A low groan broke from the man's lips, and his heel kicked spasmodically against the table. The prince never moved.

Simon struggled to fight free from the trance of horrible fascination that held him spellbound. He pulled himself further onto the sill, slipping the automatic from his pocket, and felt his temples throbbing. And then the prince raised his hand again.

"Does your memory return, my dear Herr Krauss?"

The other shook his head slowly, as if he had to call on all his forces to find strength to make the movement.

"Nein."

The whisper was so low that the Saint could scarcely hear it. And the prince smiled, without the slightest symptom of im­patience. He sat forward and pushed the strong-box along the table; and then he leaned back again in his chair and replaced the cigarette holder in his mouth.

"You will find the box within your reach as soon as you are ready for it," he said benevolently. "You have only to say the word, and Fritz will release one of your hands. I should prefer you to do the actual opening, in case the lock should hold some unpleasant surprise for the unpractised operator. And directly the box is open you will be free to go."

Again the man Fritz twisted the screw; and suddenly that dreadful cry of agony rang out again.

The Saint gritted his teeth and balanced himself squarely on the sill. Ordinary methods of "persuasion" he could under­stand; they were part of the grim game, and always would be; but to stand by in cold blood and watch the relentless tighten­ing of that ghoulish machine was more than he could stomach. His finger tightened on the trigger, and he sighted the prince's face through a red haze.

And then he saw the man Fritz step quickly round from the control screw, and Krauss's hand clawed tremblingly at the box on the table. He was fumbling frantically with the wheels of the combination, and his shrieking had died down to a ghastly moaning noise. While the Saint hesitated, the box sprang open with a click; and then Simon vaulted into the room.

The man Fritz spun round with an oath and stepped towards him; and with a feeling akin to holy joy the Saint shot him in the stomach and watched him crumple to the floor.

Then he faced round.

"I should keep very still, if I were you, Rudolf," he stated metallically. "Otherwise you might go the same way home."

The prince had risen to his feet. He stood there without the flicker of an eyelid while the Saint sidled round the table to­wards Krauss, who had fallen limply sideways in his chair; and the smoke went up from the long jade holder in a thin, blue line that never wavered.

Simon found the control wheel of that diabolical mechan­ism and unscrewed it till it fell out of its socket.

"I assure you, my dear Mr. Templar," said the prince's satiny voice, "the device is really most humane. There is no lasting injury inflicted——"

"Is that so?" Simon clipped his answer out of a mouth like a steel trap. "I thought it looked interesting. The opportunity of experimenting with it on the inventor is almost too good to miss, isn't it?"

The prince smiled.

"Was that the object of your visit?"

"It was not, Rudolf—as you know. But maybe you're right. Business is business, as the actress was always having to remind the bishop, and pleasure must come second." A ray of carefree mockery came back into the Saint's inclement gaze. "What a jolly chat you'll be able to have with Comrade Krauss after I've gone, won't you? You will find that you have much in common. When a once brilliant man is passing into his second childhood, it must be a great relief to be able to exchange sympathy with another who is undergoing the same unenvi­able experience—mustn't it?"

The prince inhaled slowly from his cigarette.

"I did not know you spoke German, Mr, Templar," he re­marked.

"Ah, but there are so many things one never knows till it's too late," murmured the Saint kindly. "For instance, you never knew that I'd be listening in to your dramatic little scene, did you? And yet there I was, perching outside your window with the dicky-birds and soaking up knowledge with both tonsils. . . . Well, well, well! We all have our ups and downs, as the bishop philosophically observed when the bull caught him in the thin part of the pants."

"I think I owe you an apology," said the prince quietly. "I underrated your abilities—it is a mistake I have made before."

Simon beamed at him.

"But it was so obvious, wasn't it? There was I with that bonny little box of boodle, and no means of opening it. And there were you announcing yourself as the guy who could open it or get it opened. At first I was annoyed. I regret to say that for a time I even contemplated the advantages of your meet­ing with a fatal accident. Since we both coveted the same prize——"

"Spare me," said the prince, with faint irony. "The point is already clear."

The Saint glanced whimsically at the open strong-box. Then his gaze flicked cavalierly back to the prince's face.

"Should I say—thank you?"

Their eyes clashed like crossed rapiers. Each of them knew the emotions that were scorching through the other's mind; neither of them betrayed one scantling of his own thoughts or feelings. The barrage of intangible steel seethed up between them in an interval of tautening silence. . . . And then the prince looked down at the glowing end of his cigarette.

"Your half-charged cartridges are very useful, Mr. Templar. But suppose I were to cry out—you would gain nothing by killing me——"

"I don't know. I should gain nothing by not killing you. And you'd look rather funny if you suddenly felt a piece of lead taking a walk through your appendix. It's that element of doubt, Rudolf, which is so discouraging."

The prince nodded.

"The psychology of these situations has always interested me," he said conversationally.

He had picked the stub of cigarette out of his holder, and the movement he made was so smooth and natural, so per­fectly timed, that even Simon Templar was deceived. The prince was reaching languidly for the ash tray while he spoke . . . and then his hand shot past its mark. The lid of the open strong-box fell with a slam; and the prince was smiling.

"By the way," he said coolly, "my appendix is in Buda­pest"

He must have known that his life hung by a hair, but not a muscle of his face flinched. There was sudden death in the Saint's eyes, cold murder in the tenseness of his trigger finger; but the prince might have been talking polite trivialities at an Embassy reception. . . . And suddenly the Saint laughed. He couldn't help it. That exhibition of petrified nerve was the most breath-taking thing he had ever witnessed. He laughed, and scooped in the box with his left hand.

"Some day you'll sit on an iceberg and boil," he predicted flintly. "But you don't want to take another chance like that this evening, sweetheart. Get back against that wall and put your hands up!"

The prince obeyed unhurriedly. With his back to a bookcase and the Saint's gun focusing on his waistline, he spoke in the same passionless tone:

"My humane little invention is still at your disposal, my dear Mr. Templar. What a pity it is that it fails to meet with your approval. . . ."

"Believe me," said the Saint.

He hooked a chair round with his foot, and drew the tele­phone towards him. With one elbow propped on the table, and the strong-box parked alongside, he slid one eye onto the combination panel and kept the prince skewered on the other.

"Innsbruck achtundzwanzig neun dreizehn."

The number clacked back at him from the receiver. And a great wide grin of pure beatitude was deploying itself round his inside. Even Rudolf could still make his mistakes; and it seemed to Simon that the exchange of errors was piling itself up beautifully on the side of righteousness and the Public School Code. But for once he deliberately chose to let the op portunity pf chirruping go by. '

And then he was through to his own suite at the Königshof.

"Hullo, Pat, old angel! How's the world? . . . Where have I been? Oh, toddling here and there. Wonderful amount of Alp there is in Austria. The place is simply bulging with it. . . . Well, don't rush me. I've been touring the great open spaces. Pat, where men are men and women wear flannel next the skin. Rudolf has been doing the honours. But that'll keep. Shoot me the news from home, old darling. . . . Whassat? . . . Well, I will be teetotal and let it snow!"

His forehead was crinkling as he listened, while the receiver rattled and spluttered with a recital that began by making his hair stand on end. For fully five minutes his granitic silence was punctuated only by an infrequent monosyllable that siz­zled into the transmitter like a splinter of hot quartz.

And then, as the tale went on, he began to smile. His inter­ruptions wafted through the air on a breath of inward laugh­ter. And the concluding sentence of the story fetched him half out of his chair.

"Did you say that? . . . Oh, Pat, my precious cherub—get me that scaly humbug on the wire!"

He looked at his watch. It was twenty minutes to five, with barely an hour to go before the dawn. Then another familiar accent answered him.

"H'lo, Monty!" The Saint's voice was sparkling. "So you're the man who wanted to be good! . . . Well, I've got something here for you to take back to the Bible class. You couldn't have arranged it better. This is Simon Templar speaking from a Grade A schloss with whiskers on its chest, and he also feels the emigrating urge. Your job is to push out and freeze onto the fastest automobile you can get your fists on, and meet me on the road to Jenbach. All I've got here is the second worst car in Europe, but I ought to get that far. Now jump to it——"

The Saint's gun cracked. He was a second late—his bullet split a thick wedge of wood out of the angle of the dummy bookcase that was closing behind the prince, and then the hid­den door had slammed back into place. He heard Monty's sharp question and laughed shortly.

"That was Rudolf on his way, and I missed him. Don't worry —travel!"

He dropped the receiver on its hook and stood up. The strong-box fitted bulkily into his poaching pocket. He darted out into the empty passage and saw another room on the other side. From the window he could locate an eighteen-inch ledge of stone running just beneath it. He swung himself over the sill and went two-stepping along the brink of sticky death.

IV. HOW MONTY HAYWARD CARRIED ON

THE apotheosis of Monty Hayward did not actually trouble the attention of the Recording Angel until some time after the Saint had catapulted himself through the open windows and batted off into space on his own business.

Displaying remarkable agility for a man of his impregnable sang-froid, Monty Hayward possessed himself of the weapon which had fallen from the disabled gunman's hand, seized its badly winded owner by the collar; and lugged him vigorously into the sitting room, where the lights were still functioning. There he proceeded methodically to handicap the wounded warrior's recovery by dragging up a massive Chesterfield and laying it gently on the wounded warrior's bosom. Then he lighted a cigarette and looked gloomily at Patricia, who had followed him in.

"Why don't you scream or something?" he asked morosely. "It would help to relieve my feelings."

The girl laughed.

"Wouldn't it be more useful to do something about Ethelbert?"

"What—this nasty piece of work?" Monty glanced down at the gunman, whose groans were becoming a fraction less heart­rending as his paralyzed respiratory organs creaked painfully back towards normal. "I suppose it might be. What shall we do—shoot him?"

"We might tie him up."

"I know. You tear the curtains into strips, and blow the expense."

"There's a length of rope in Simon's bag," said Patricia calmly. "If you'll wait a second I'll get it for you."

She disappeared into the bedroom and returned in a few moments with a coil of stout cord. Monty took it from her gin­gerly.

"I suppose there isn't anything of this sort that Simon ever travels without," he commented pessimistically. "If you've got a gallows in the cabin trunk, it may save a lot of mucking about when the police catch us."

The gunman was still in no condition to make any effective resistance. Monty endeavoured to adapt a working knowledge of knots acquired in some experience of week-end yachting to the peculiar eccentricities of the human frame, and made a very passable job of it. Having reduced his victim to a state of blasphemous helplessness, he dusted the knees of his trousers and turned again to Pat.

"I seem to remember that the next item is a gag," he said. "Do you know anything about gags?"

"I have seen it done," said the girl unblushingly. "Lend me your handkerchief. . . . And that other one in your breast pocket."

She bent over the squirming prisoner, and a particularly vile profanity subsided into a choking gurgle. Monty watched the performance with admiration.

"You know, I couldn't have done that," he said. "And I've been editing this kind of stuff all my life. The stories never give you the important details. They just say: 'Lionel Strongarm bound and gagged his captive'—and the thing's done. Where did you learn it all?"

Patricia laughed.

"Simon taught me," she said simply. "If there's anything that makes him see red, it's inefficiency. He explains a thing once, and expects you to remember it for the rest of your life. Your brain's got to be on tiptoe from the time you get up in the morning till the time you go to bed at night. He's like that himself, and everyone else has got to be the same. It nearly sent me off my rocker till I got used to it; and then I began to see that I'd been half asleep all my life, like eighty per cent of other people. He was right, of course."

Monty went over and poured himself out a drink.

"This is a new line on the private life of an adventurer," he murmured. "Did he ever explain what one should do when stranded in a hotel with a corpse on the bed and a gun artist under the sofa?"

"That," said the girl composedly, "is supposed to be an ele­mentary exercise in initiative."

Monty grimaced.

"Some initiative is certainly called for," he admitted. "Si­mon may be away for a week, and then Stanislaus will begin to smell."

He wandered pensively back into the bedroom and wished that he felt suitably depressed. Two hours ago he would have expressed no desire at all to find himself in such a situation. Its potentialities in the way of local colour would have left him uninspired. Four years in France had left him with a profound appreciation of the amenities of peace. On several occasions he had told the Saint that he was always pleased to hear or read of stirring exploits anywhere, but that as far as he personally was concerned he could enjoy enough violence to keep his glands active from an armchair. And if he had to be decoyed into that sort of thing, he most unequivocally wanted it to be gradual. A minor job of shop-lifting, if neces­sary, or an evening out with a pickpocket, would have satis­fied his craving for excitement for a long time.

But since he had been blamelessly landed up to his neck in a kind of thieves' picnic in which the disposal of corpses and gagged gunmen was supposed to be merely an elementary exercise in initiative, he found himself taking an interest in the affair which he tried to persuade himself was purely mor­bid. He frisked Weissmann's clothes with an almost professional callousness and brought a selection of papers back with him to the sitting room.

"While you're getting your initiative tuned up," he said, "it might be helpful if we knew something more about Stanis­laus."

Patricia came and looked over his shoulder as he ran through the meagre supply of documents. There were a couple of letters on heavily scented pink notepaper, addressed to Heinrich Weissmann at the Dome, Boulevard Montpar­nasse, Paris, which disclosed nothing of interest to anyone wishing to have the strength of ten; a letter of credit for two thousand marks, issued by the Dresdner Bank in Köln; the counterfoil of a sleeping-car ticket from Zurich to Milan; and a receipted bill from a hotel in Basle.

"He certainly did his best to shake off the hue and cry," said Monty; "but does it tell us anything else?"

"What about that?" asked Patricia, turning over one of the pink envelopes.

On the flap was a pencilled line of writing:

Zr 12 H Königshof

"Room Twelve, Hotel Königshof," Monty translated promptly. "Looks as if this was the very place he was making for."

The girl bit her lip.

"It'd be a frightful coincidence——"

"I don't know. Those squiggly marks in the corner—they're just the sort of pattern a fellow draws at the telephone. Stanislaus would naturally have some note of the place where he was supposed to deliver the boodle. And there's no reason why it shouldn't be here. This is the most slap-up hotel for miles around—the very place that a super crook would make his headquarters——" Monty slewed round in his chair and regarded her expectantly. "Suppose the Big Noise was sitting right over our heads?"

Patricia jumped up.

"But that's just what he is doing, if that address is right!

Room Twelve is on the first floor. When we came here they offered us Eleven, but Simon wouldn't have it. He tried to get Twelve, which has a fire escape outside, but it was taken yesterday——"

"I don't see that it's anything to get excited about, anyway," said Monty soothingly. "If it's true, it only means that another bunch of toughs may be crashing in here at any moment to commit a few more murders."

"I'm going to run up the fire escape and see if I can see any­thing."

Monty looked at her in frank amazement.

For the first instant he thought she was bluffing. He had in­stinctively salted down her laconic description of the Saint's inexorable training. And then he saw the recklessness of the smile that parted her fresh lips, the eager vitality of her slim body, the devil-may-care light in her blue eyes; and the ban­tering challenge that trembled on the tip of his tongue went unuttered. There was a living embodiment of Saintliness in her that startled. He smiled.

"If you don't mind my saying so," he remarked soberly, "Simon's a damned lucky man. And you won't run up the fire escape, because I'm going to."

He went out onto the lawn, located the stairway on his left, and groped his way up the narrow iron steps. There was only one window on the first floor which could possibly answer the vague description he had been given, and no light showed through it. He paused on the grating beside it and wondered what on earth he should do next. To scale an awkward species of ladder at that hour of the morning in order to inspect a room, and then to return with the information that it pos­sesses a window constructed of square panes of glass, struck him as being an extraordinarily inane procedure. And he could see nothing inside from where he was. There seemed to be only one alternative, and that was to insert himself sur­reptitiously into the room.

Fortunately one of the casements was ajar, and he opened it wide and clambered over the sill with a silent prayer that he might be able to pretend successfully that he was drunk.

Every movement he made appeared to shake the hotel to its foundations. The loose change clinked in his pockets like a dozen sledge hammers knocking the hell out of a cracked an­vil, his clothes rustled like a forest in a gale, and the sound of his breathing seemed loud enough to wake the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. The jaws of the prison yawned on every side. He could hear them.

Then his right shin collided with something hard. He felt around for the offending object, and presently discovered it to be a chair lying on its side. Peering puzzledly into the gloom, he made out the white outline of the bed. He strained his eyes at it for some seconds; and then, with a sudden inspiration, he walked straight across the room and switched on the light. ...

Three minutes later he was back in the suite below.

"I don't profess to understand anything that's happening to­night," he said, "but the bird upstairs has flown. Flown in a hurry, too, because he's gone without his coat and tie."

Patricia stared.

"But—surely he must have gone to the bathroom."

"Not unless he intends to spend the night there. His door was shut, and the key was on the table by the bed. That's what they call deduction."

The girl sat down on the arm of the Chesterfield with a frown of perplexity wrinkling her forehead. The development required some thinking over.

One thing was as plain as a pikestaff, and she phrased it undemonstratively:

"If we sit around here doing nothing, we're just asking to be shot at."

"Look here, Pat," said Monty Hayward, buttressing himself against the mantelpiece, "we're between several fires. Don't forget that the police have got it in for us as well. And one of the chief essentials in a mess like this seems to be to have the door open for a clean getaway. Now, what would be the Saint's idea about that?"

"He'd say that the main thing was to leave no evidence."

"Right. Then the only serious piece of evidence is that stiff in the next room. Whatever happens, we can't leave him lying about. And since we know where he was going, and the coast is clear, I should think the best thing we could do is to help him finish his journey."

Patricia looked at him thoughtfully.

"You mean, plant him in the room upstairs——"

"Exactly. And let the gang he belongs to take care of him. It's about time they had some worries of their own."

"And what about Ethelbert?"—she indicated the prisoner with a movement of her cigarette.

"Put a knife beside him and let him do the best he can.

Even if they catch him, I don't think he'll have anything to say. For one thing, Stanislaus seems to have been no friend of his; and besides, if he wanted to clear up the mystery, he'd have to give an account of what he was doing in here, which wouldn't be too easy for him."

The argument seemed flawless. Patricia herself could offer no improvements on the scheme; and she realized that every wasted minute increased the danger.

She led the way into the bedroom and produced an electric flashlamp to light Monty on his gruesome task. Luckily the external bleeding had been comparatively slight, and no blood had penetrated to the bedclothes. Monty picked up the rigid body in his arms and went out without another word, and she stayed behind to straighten the sheets and coverlet.

The feelings of Monty Hayward as he climbed the fire escape for the second time were somewhat disordered. He in­sisted to himself, on purely logical grounds, that he was scared stiff; but the emotion somehow failed to connect amicably with another stratum of his immortal soul which was having the time of its life. He began to ask himself whether perhaps he had been missing something by steadfastly burying himself in a respectable existence; and immediately he reflected that the prospect of being hanged by the neck for other people's murders was a damned good thing to miss anyway. He solemnly vowed that the next time he saw a harmless-looking little man being set on by a gang of thugs, he would raise his hat politely and pass by on the other side; and simultaneously he felt rather pleased with himself for the efficiency with which he had laid out his opponent. It was all very difficult; and he pushed himself and his grisly luggage through the first-floor window with some doubts of whether he was really the same man who had been placidly quaffing Pilsener at the Breinössl two hours ago.

After a moment's deliberation, he laid the little man artisti­cally down beside the overturned chair, rubbed the chair with his sleeve to remove any fingerprints, and stood back to exam­ine his handiwork. It looked convincing enough. . . . And it was then that the Recording Angel shuddered on his throne and upset the inkpot; for Monty Hayward gazed at his handi­work and grinned. ...

Then he switched out the light. He hopped over the window sill and trotted down the escape with a briskness that was al­most rollicking. The glorious company of the Apostles held their breath.

He was three steps from the bottom when he saw a shadow move in the darkness just below, and a hoarse voice chal­lenged him:

"Wer da?"

Monty's stomach took a short stroll round his interior.

Then he stepped down to the ground.

"Hullo, ole pineapple," he hiccoughed. "Ishnit lovely night? Are you the lighthoushkeeper? Becaush if you are——"

A light was flashed in his face, and he heard a startled excla­mation:

"Gott im Himmel! Der Engländer, der mich in den Fluss geworfen hat——"

Monty understood, and gasped.

And then, even as it had happened earlier to Simon Temp­lar, the tattered remnants of his virtue were swept into anni­hilation like chaff before a fire. If he were destined for the scaffold, so let it be. His boats had been burned for him.

He flung up his arm and knocked the light aside. As it flew into the air, he had a fleeting glimpse of the battered face of the man he had tackled on the bridge, with his one undam­aged eye bulging and his bruised mouth opening for a shout. He crowded every ounce of his strength into a left hook to the protruding chin, and heard the man drop like a poleaxed ox.

Monty picked him up and carried him into the sitting room. Monty was smiling. He considered that that left hook was a beauty.

"We were only just in time," he said. "This hotel is getting unhealthy."

The girl looked at him open-mouthed.

"Where was he?"

"Standing at the bottom of the fire escape, waiting for me. He's one of the blokes we threw into the river. I think I can guess what happened. If the police were waiting to pinch Stanislaus, they may have been nearly as hot on the trail of the man upstairs. They came dashing along here as soon as they'd reported to headquarters and borrowed a change of clothes —you can see this chap's uniform is too tight for him. The other two are probably interviewing the management and prepar­ing to break in the door. This one was posted in the garden to see that their man didn't make a getaway through the win­dow."

Patricia took a cigarette from her case and lighted it with a steady hand.

"If that bloke's uniform is too tight for him," she remarked evenly, "it should just about fit you."

Monty raised one eyebrow.

After a moment's silence he bent a calculating eye on the unconscious policeman. When he looked up again there was a twinkle in his gaze.

"Is that what the Saint would do?" he asked quizzically.

She nodded.

"I can't see any other way out."

"Then I expect I could manage it."

He knelt down and began to strip off the policeman's uni­form and accoutrements. The trousers went on over his own, with his coattails inside—he foresaw possible difficulties in the way of parting permanently with his own garments—and then Patricia was ready for him with the tunic. Tailored for the more generous figure of a Teutonic gendarme, it fitted him perfectly over his own clothes. Monty was transformed.

He was buckling on the cumbersome sword belt when the telephone began to ring.

"If that's the Saint," he said, "tell him I never want to speak to him again."

Patricia threw herself at the instrument.

"Hullo. . . . Simon—where have you been? . . . Oh, don't play the fool, boy. We must know quickly. . . . Well, the police are here. . . . The police—the men you and Monty threw in the river. Keep quiet and let me tell you."

V. HOW SIMON TEMPLAR CHASED HIMSELF,

AND MONTY HAYWARD DID HIS STUFF

SIMON TEMPLAR deposited himself neatly on the roof of the car as it flashed underneath him and settled himself down to wallow in the side-splitting aspects of the ride. The humour of the situation struck him as being definitely rich. To have first induced a wily old veteran like Prince Rudolph to transport you personally to his secret lair, and then, after you have butted violently into an up-and-coming conversazione, plugged his gentleman's gentleman in the lower abdomen, pulled His Elegant Elevation's leg, shot a hole in the air an inch from his elevated ear, snaffled a large can of boodle, and made yourself generally unpopular in divers similar ways, to be taking precisely the same route back to the long grass was an achievement of which any man might have been justly proud. And yet that was exactly what the Saint was doing.

The inspiration had come to Simon while he was listening to Patricia's story on the telephone, and he had put it into ef­fect without a second's hesitation. Sprawling tenaciously on his unstable perch, he reviewed the dazzling casualness with which he had scattered all the necessary bait—the mythical car which he had waiting for him, and the rendezvous on the road to Jenbach—and marvelled at his own astounding bril­liance. And after that had been done the elopement of Prince Rudolf mattered not at all. In fact, it saved a certain amount of trouble. The Saint had scarcely reached his point of vantage over the archway of the castle when he saw the prince's car pulling out for the pursuit; and one minute later he was be­ing bowled along on the most hilarious getaway of his event­ful life.

It was the very first time in his tempestuous career that he had ever tacked himself to the lid of an unfriendly limousine and helped enthusiastically to chase himself; and the overpowering Saintliness of the idea made him so weak with laugh­ter that he was barely able to save himself from being bucked off into the surrounding panorama when the car jolted over the ridge that placed it on the mountain road.

If the voyage to the castle had been hectic, the return jour­ney was the most delirious peregrination in which the Saint ever wanted to take part. How the car itself managed to hold the road at all was more than the Saint could account for by any natural laws. The only conclusion he could come to was that it had been born and bred in a circus and had subsequently been fitted with tires manufactured from a hitherto unknown form of everlasting glue. Half the time, it seemed to be running with two of its wheels skating about on the loose scree and the other two gyrating airily over the unfathomable abyss. The fact that it would probably have done the very same thing if the Saint had been driving it himself was a con­solation that could be ignored. The difference between one's own masterly manoeuvres at the wheel and the hare-brained antics of a total stranger is one which no practical motorist has ever been able to misunderstand. Besides which, a com­fortably upholstered seat inside a vehicle, however suicidally driven, is not and never can be quite so awe-inspiring as a smooth and slippery roof on which you have to maintain your crucified posture largely by the adhesive qualities of your eye­lids. For Simon Templar there ensued an interval of fifteen or twenty minutes in which he had no further leisure to enjoy the gorgonzolan ripeness of the jest.

The only merit he could see in that breakneck pace was that it approximately halved the duration of the agony. And by some miracle he found himself still breathing and alive when the precipitous track began to level itself out for the run down to Schwaz.

With a wry grin of triumph, the Saint moistened his dry lips and eased the tension on his crippled thews.

The car was slowing up doubtfully. Simon squeezed his ear against the roof, and heard the prince speaking impatiently.

"Go on further, blockhead! He drives like the devil, but we must be close behind him. The road to Jenbach­——"

Simon crooked his toes and fingers and clung on, and the car lurched round a corner and raced on towards the east.

On another furlong of straight road he convoluted himself round again to peep in at the prince, and what he saw made him flop limply down in a renewed paroxysm of mirth.

The prince was sitting tensely forward in his seat, staring fixedly along the road ahead. One hand was clutching some­thing in his pocket, while the other beat a monotonous tattoo on his left knee. Apart from that regular tapping of his fingers he was as motionless as a painted statue, and his pale, finely modelled face was as expressionless as ever; and yet the con­trast between him as he was sitting then, and the inscrutable exquisite whom the Saint knew so well, was as inconsistent a transfiguration as the Saint had ever seen. It was not really funny—it was perhaps the most ominous possible reminder of the dour realities that had been glossed over so smoothly with the sheen of airy badinage—but it was only the fantastic bathos of the whole performance which appealed to him.

"Oh, go down, Moses!" he hallooed. "That's the stuff to give 'em. Stamp on the gas, Adolphus—don't let him get away! Yoicks!"

He restrained himself with difficulty from thumping the roof in his excitement, and turned his mind to the amazing awakening of Monty Hayward.

Monty had acquitted himself like an old stager, but the breaks had been against him. In spite of everything he had done, a malicious fluke had dented the polish of their alibi. Their reputations were tarnished beyond repair. The thwarted spleen of the entire Austrian police force would be thrown into the international ill will that trailed behind them. The righteous wrath of one more country would be thirsting for their blood. . . . And strangely enough the Saint laughed again.

He took the time from his watch and made a rapid mental calculation. If Monty had wasted no unnecessary minutes, he should be less than a quarter of an hour behind them—so long as the car he had chosen hadn't elected to break down. Given luck and a warm engine, he might be even closer than that; and it was essential for the Saint to be waiting for him when he caught up. Simon looked at the road on either side hurtling beneath him at sixty miles an hour, and decided against any attempt to step quietly off and send the prince his compli­ments by post. But he glimpsed a milestone skimming by which indicated only two kilometers more to Jenbach; and he realized that, much as he was still enjoying his little joke, the time had come to share its beauties with the prince.

He drew the gun from his pocket, wriggled to the edge of the roof, and took leisurely aim at the centre of the near-side rear mudguard. The rap of his gun was drowned in the explo­sive flattening of the tire, and the car listed over and lost speed bumpily.

Simon dropped lightly off behind it just before it stopped. He coiled himself down in the shadow of the hedge two yards away, and watched the chauffeur run round and peer at the pancaked wheel. The chauffeur felt it and prodded it, and went back to describe its devastating flatness to the prince. The prince climbed out. He also peered at the wheel and prodded it. It was indubitably flat.

"It must have been a nail in the road, Hoheit," said the chauffeur.

The prince stood absolutely still, looking down the road along the bright beam of the headlights. For a time he made no answer. It was in that time that a lesser man would have been fuming and cursing impotently, but the prince might have been a man carved in stone. There was something terrify­ing in his inhuman immobility.

When he spoke, his voice was perfectly level—as level and measured a flow of molten lava.

"Change the wheel."

The words fell through the air like glistening globules of acid; and then the Saint judged that a few lines of cheery chat­ter might relieve the tenseness of the dialogue.

He stepped out into the dim glow of the tail light, with his automatic ostentatiously displayed, and cleared his throat.

The two men by the car whirled round as if they had been stabbed with electric needles. And the Saint smiled his most winning smile.

"Dear me!" he murmured. "Isn't it odd how we keep run­ning up against each other? You know, if we go on like this, you'll begin to think I'm following you about."

Slowly the prince relaxed. For the moment even his tem­pered nerves must have been shaken by the uncanny prompt­ness of the Saint's return. But even while he relaxed, his face remained set in a stony mask in which only the eyes seemed alive.

"I cannot think how we missed you, my dear Mr. Templar," he said quietly. "Has your car also met with an accident?"

"My car is yours," said the Saint lavishly. He grinned gently at the prince's moveless puzzlement. "To tell you the truth, old dear, it always was. And while we're on the subject, in case you should be thinking of giving me a lift some other time, I wish you'd have something done about that roof. A couple of good strong coffin-handles would make a heap of difference; and if you had enough money left after that to stand me an air-cushion——"

"So!" There was a gleam like the lustre of white-hot metal in the prince's narrowed eyes, and the same lustrous malig­nity in his soft utterance of that trenchant syllable. "Do I understand that you have been with us all the time?"

Simon nodded.

"Sweetheart, I hope you do." He smiled again, with capti­vating sweetness. "Well, well, well—we none of us grow younger, do we? But how the old Borstal boys will chortle over this! Turn round, Rudolf, and let me have your gun—there's a nasty look in your eye which makes me think you might do something foolish at any moment."

He whizzed the prince's automatic neatly from his pocket and went on to disarm the chauffeur in the same way. With their artillery transferred to his own person, he leaned on the side panel of the limousine and regarded the two men affec­tionately.

"This has been what I call a really jolly little evening," he drawled. "I suppose we've all lost a certain amount of sleep, but you can't have it both ways." He tapped the strong-box which he carried under his left arm. "Would you like me to send you a priced catalogue of the boodle when I've had time to look it over? You might like to buy one of the items as a souvenir."

For a while the prince stared at him in silence. And then he also smiled.

"You win, my dear Mr. Templar. Accept my congratula­tions." After a moment's hesitation, he drew a crocodile-skin case from his breast pocket. "If I were not afraid you would laugh at me," he said apologetically, "I should ask you to ac­cept a cigar as well."

"Don't tempt me, Rudolf," said the Saint amiably. "You know my sense of humour."

The prince laughed.

"All the same," he said, "I wish you could believe that there are depths of childishness to which even I have not yet de­scended." He extended the case diffidently. "In the circum­stances, this is the only sporting gesture I can make."

Simon glanced down disparagingly.

And at that instant, before he could make a movement to protect himself, a jet of liquid ammonia struck him squarely between the eyes, and everything was blotted out in an agon­izing intensity of blindness. It seared his eyeballs like the ca­ress of red-hot irons, and his gasp of pain sucked the acrid fumes chokingly down into his lungs. He staggered sideways and fired twice as he did so; and then the gun was torn out of his hand and he was flung to the ground under a crushing weight

A vise-like constriction of thick, powerful fingers fastened on his windpipe. He struck out savagely and tore at the throttling hands; but he was half paralyzed with pain, and his chest seemed to be filled with nothing but the stinging vapour of ammonia. The blood roared in his ears, and he felt everything receding from him. . . .

And then he heard the prince's infinitely distant voice.

"That will be sufficient, Ludwig."

Almost imperceptibly, it seemed, the pressure was loosened from his throat, and the air flowed back into his lungs. The weight lifted from his chest, and he rolled away with his hands covering his eyes.

Presently, out of the spangled darkness, he heard the prince speaking again.

"An unfortunate necessity, my dear young friend. I have never felt comfortable in such a position as the one in which you placed me. But your distress, I assure you, is only temporary."

Simon lay still, with his lungs heaving. He heard the strik­ing of a match and thought he could distinguish the light of it from the pungent flashes of colour that kaleidoscoped across his optic nerves.

"I think you had better enter the car," said the prince ur­banely—and Simon could visualize him vividly, with his ciga­rette glowing in the long jade holder and his dark eyes satiri­cally veiled. "I fear that your present attitude might provoke undue curiosity."

It was the chauffeur who dragged Simon to his feet and hus­tled him into the limousine.

The Saint went without resistance. He knew the futility of squandering any more of his strength at that moment, while he was still half blinded and unarmed. He allowed himself to be bundled roughly into a comer, and felt the prince's weight sinking onto the cushions beside him, and the muzzle of the prince's gun thrusting into his ribs. And then the Saint managed to open one of his twingeing eyes, and saw the lights of a car coming down the road.

2

"I need not bother to tell you," murmured the prince's vel­vety intonation, "what would happen if you were so unwise as to endeavour to attract attention."

Simon said nothing.

The headlights of the approaching car shone straight into the limousine, bathing the tableau in a garish blaze. Cer­tainly there was nothing whatever about it to arouse suspicion. Prince Rudolf and the Saint, two amicable orphans of the storm, were patiently waiting to continue their fraternal jour­ney; what time their chauffeur, diligently bent double over the hind quarters of the chariot, was working to repair the mishap that had delayed them. A mournful and pathetic scene, no doubt, but by no means so uncommon that it should have im­bued the innocent wayfarer with anything but thankfulness for his own better fortune. . . . And yet the other car was slowing up as it went past them, and through the rear window of the limousine they could see it pull in to the side of the road a few yards further on. . . .

Prince Rudolf looked at the Saint again, and spilled a short cylinder of ash deliberately into the tray beside him.

"If this should be your friend," he said, "your actions will have to be extraordinarily discreet."

A man was walking towards them from the other car. As he drew nearer, a glint of light shimmered on his helmet and flickered over the trappings of his uniform. He came to the side of the limousine and opened the door, standing stiffly in the opening. His face was in the shadow.

"Entschuldigen Sie mich, mein Herr——"

The Saint never moved a muscle; and yet the whole of his inside was singing. For the stilted accent was impeccable, but the voice was Monty Hayward's.

"Excuse me, sir, but do you know this man?"

He addressed the prince, and indicated Simon with a curt movement of his head.

The prince smiled faintly.

"I cannot say," he answered, "that he is a friend of mine."

"Your name, please?"

The prince took out his wallet and extracted a card. Monty carried it to one of the side lamps and studied it. When he came back, he clicked his heels.

"I beg your Highness's pardon. Perhaps your Highness does not know the identity of his guest?"

"I should like to be informed."

"He is a desperate criminal who calls himself the Saint. He is wanted on many charges. He has already to-night thrown three detectives into the river."

For a fraction of a second the prince paused.

And then, with a deprecatory shrug, he showed his gun,

"I am not surprised," he said calmly. "As a matter of fact, he has also attempted to rob me." He placed one hand on the strong-box which lay on the seat beside him. "I have some family heirlooms with me which would naturally attract a thief of his calibre. But happily my chauffeur and myself were able to overpower him. We were about to take him to the Po-lizeiamt; but possibly you could save us the trouble."

Simon had to admire the consummate skill with which the part was played. It was an accomplished feat of impromptu histrionics which won the unstinted applause of his artistic soul. The prince was a past master. His unruffled frankness, his engaging modesty, his felicitous rendering of the whole poise of royalty accidentally embroiled in the sordid excitements of common lawlessness—every delicate touch was irreproachable.

Again Monty clicked his heels. The Saint knew that he had had three years at Bonn in which to perfect his German; but this performance revealed a new Monty Hayward, in the guise of yet another gifted actor lost to the silver screen.

"I shall be honoured to relieve your Highness of further inconvenience."

And then the Saint pushed himself forward.

"It is nothing but lies!" he protested furiously. "His Highness is attempting to rob me. That box is mine. I can take you to his Highness's castle and show you things that will make you believe me——"

"Silence!" thundered the policeman magnificently. "It will not help you to insult the nobly born." He turned to the prince. "Your Highness shall not be troubled any longer."

The prince produced a couple of notes from his wallet.

"Yon will understand," he said, "that I do not wish for any vulgar publicity."

The policeman bowed.

"It is understood. Your Highness's name need not be men­tioned. I am proud to have assisted your Highness." He turned again to the Saint. "Outside, you scum!"

"But, for God's sake, listen!" cried the Saint desperately. "Will you not understand that if you let his Highness go, I shall never see my property again? At least you must take him to the Polizeiamt with me, so that the ownership of the box can be properly settled——"

"The ownership of the box is settled to my satisfaction," said the policeman stoically.

Simon clenched his fists.

"But that is only right!" he said, with savagely direct empha­sis. "You cannot take me without the box. I have risked every­thing to keep it!"

"It will be no use to you in the prison," replied the police­man imperviously. "Will you come outside or must I take you?"

"I refuse—"

Simon stopped short. The policeman's revolver was pointed menacingly at his chest

"Heraus!"

The Saint grabbed the gun and hurled the policeman back. And then the chauffeur's muscular arms wound round his own below the elbows. While they swayed and struggled in the road, he felt two bands of steel snapped on his wrists. Then he was released. He stood wrestling with the handcuffs while the policeman went back to the door of the limousine.

"Your Highness's servant."

The policeman returned. He seized the Saint by the shoul­der and pushed him roughly onwards. Fuming and cursing, the Saint suffered himself to be manhandled back to the waiting automobile. He was forced into the front seat. The police­man stepped in beside him and took the wheel. The car, with its engine still running, went into gear and gathered speed.

They had travelled a mile before the Saint spoke.

"The hell of a fine partner in crime you are," he said sourly.

Monty kept his eyes on the road.

"And a hell of a fine crook you are," he said acidly. "If this is your usual form, it beats me why there's ever been any fuss about you at all. It's a wonder they didn't lock you up the day after you stole your first sixpence. That's what I think about you. You prance about and get into the most hopeless messes, and expect me to get you out of 'em——"

Patricia leaned over from the back seat.

"Don't you see, boy? We had to get you away somehow, and Monty did the only thing he could. I think he worked it mar­vellously."

Simon hammered the handcuffs on his knee in a frenzy.

"Oh, Monty was wonderful!" he exploded bitterly. "Monty was Mother's Angel Child! Make your getaway at any cost— that's Monty. Throw up every stake in the game except your own skin. Damn the boodle that we've all been chancing our necks for——"

"It'll do you good," said Monty. "Next time, you won't be in such a hurry to get your friends into trouble."

"But—damn your daft eyes! We had the game in our hands!"

"What game? What is this boodle that all the shindy's about, anyway? You keep us up all night chasing that wretched little box, and I don't suppose you've any more idea what's inside it than I have. For all you know, it's probably a couple of float­ing kidneys."

Simon sank back in his corner and closed his eyes.

"I can tell you what they were. I've seen 'em. They're the larger half of the Montenegrin crown jewels. They disap­peared on their way to Christie's six weeks back. I was think­ing of having a dart at them myself. And we could have had 'em for the asking!"

"They wouldn't be any use to me," said Monty, unmoved. "I've given up wearing a crown." He locked the car round a corner and drove on. "What you ought to be doing is thank­ing God you're sitting here without a bullet in you."

Simon sighed.

"Oh, well," he said—"If you don't want any boodle, that's O. K. with me."

He twisted his hands round and gazed moodily upwards at the stars.

"You know," he said meditatively, "it's extraordinary what bloomers people make in moments of crisis. Take dear old Rudolf, for example. You'd think he'd have remembered that even when you shut a combination lock that's just been opened, you still have to jigger the wheels round to seal it up. Otherwise the combination is still set at the key word. . . . But he didn't remember, which is perhaps as well."

And Simon Templar took his hands from his coat pocket; and the car swerved giddily across the road as Monty Hayward stared from the scintillating jumble of stones in the Saint's hands to the laughing face of the Saint.

VI. HOW MONTY HAYWARD SLEPT UNEASILY,

AND SIMON TEMPLAR WARBLED ABOUT WORMS

"NEXT on the left is ours," said the Saint mildly. "I don't think we'll take the corner till we get there, if it's all the same to you."

Monty straightened the car up viciously within a thumb's breadth of the ditch, and slackened the pressure of his foot on the accelerator. His eyes turned back to the road and stayed there ominously.

"Let me get this clear," he said. "Are you telling me that you've still got the whole total of the boodle?"

"Monty, I am."

"And the Crown Prince is chasing back to his schloss with an entirely empty box."

"You said it."

"So that apart from the police being after us for assault, battery, murder, and stealing a car, your pal Rudolf will be turning round to come after us and slit our throats——"

"And with any luck," supplemented the Saint cheerfully, "Comrade Krauss will also be raising dust along the warpath. I left him with a pretty easy getaway in front of him; and if he roused up at any time while the complete garrison was occupied with the business of hallooing after me, the odds are that he made it. Which ought to keep the entertainment from freezing up."

This third horn on the dilemma was new to Monty and Pa­tricia. Simon Templar explained. He gave a vigorously graphic account of his movements since he had left them to paddle their own canoes at the Königshof, and threw in a bald description of the mediaeval sports and pastimes at the Crown Prince's castle which sent a momentary squirm of horror creep­ing over their scalps. It took exactly five lines of collocution to link up Comrade Krauss with the man who had vanished from the fateful Room Twelve above the Saint's own suite; and then the whole tangled structure of the amazing web of circumstance in which they were involved became as vividly apparent to the other two as it was to the Saint himself. And the Saint chuckled.

"Boys and girls, my idea of a quiet holiday is just this!"

"Well, it may be your idea of a quiet holiday, but it isn't mine," said Monty Hayward morosely. "I've got a wife and three kiddies in England, and what are they going to think?"

"Wire 'em to come out and join you," said the Saint dispas­sionately. "We may be wanting all the help we can get"

Monty glowered along the track of the headlights, holding the car steadily on its northward course. They had whizzed through Maurach while Simon was talking, and now they were speeding up the eastern shore of the Achensee. The moon had come up over the mountains, and its strengthening light bur­nished the still waters of the lake with a sheen like polished jet. Far beyond the lake, behind the black hump of the nearer slopes, an ice-capped peak reared its white head like an enor­mous beacon, towering in lonely magnificence against a vivid gun-metal sky, so brilliant and luminous that the six forlorn lights that burned in Pertisau looked like ridiculous yellow pin-points beneath it, and their trailing reflections in the water seemed merely niggling impertinences. The night had put on a beauty that was startling, a splendour that only comes to the high places of the earth. The Saint was filling his eyes. It was a night such as he had seen high up in the Andes above Encan­tada, or again on the Plateau d'Alzo in the heart of Corsica, where the air may be so clear that the mountains ten miles away seem to be leaning over to fall upon you on the broad ridge that will bring you presently to the Grotto des Anges. The queer streak of paganism in him that took no count of time or occasion touched him with its spell. Patricia was un­locking the handcuffs from his wrists; as they fell away, she found her hands caught in one of his.

"The crown of the world," he said.

And, knowing her man, she understood. The clear blue of the night was in his eyes, the gorgeous madness that made him what he was thrilled in his touch. His words seemed to hold nothing absurd, nothing incongruous—only the devil-may-care attar of Saintliness that would have stopped to admire a view on the way to its own funeral.

She smiled.

"I love you when you say things like that," she said.

"I never have loved him," said Monty Hayward cold-blood­edly; "but I might dislike him a little less if he left off gaping at the scenery and told us where we're supposed to be making for."

Simon lighted a cigarette and inspected his watch under the shielded bulb on the dash. He leaned forward, with his face chiselled out in lines of gay alertness, and his mouth curved to a smile.

"The frontier, of course," he said. "That's the first move, any­way; and praise the Lord there's only a few miles to go. Be­sides, it might have the practical advantage of keeping the cops a little way behind. You wouldn't believe how I'm devoted to the police, but I don't think we want to get intimate with them to-day."

He had begun to work away on the jewels while he talked. With the blade of his pocketknife he was prising the stones loose from their settings and spilling them into a handkerchief spread out on his lap. Under his swift fingers, rubies, pearls, sapphires, and diamonds cascaded down like drops of frozen fire, carelessly heaping themselves into a coruscating little molehill of multicoloured crystals which the Saint's expert eye valued at something in the neighbourhood of a cool quarter of a million. The Maloresco emeralds flopped solidly onto the pile, ruthlessly ripped from their pendant of gold filigree— five flawless, perfectly matched green lozenges the size of pig­eons' eggs. A couple of dozen miscellaneous brilliants and three fifty-carat sapphires trickled down on top of them. The Ullsteinbach blue diamond, wedding gift of the Emperor Franz Josef to the Archduke Michel of Presc, slumped into the cluster with a shimmer of azure flame. It went on until the handkerchief was sagging under the weight of a scintillating pyramid of relucent wealth that made even Simon Templar blink his eyes. Shorn of their settings, the stones seemed to take on a lustre that was dazzling—the sheer lambent effulgence of their own naked beauty.

But these things he appreciated only transitorily, much as a surgeon can only transitorily appreciate the beauty of a woman on whom he has been called to perform an urgent operation. And the same unswerving professional thoroughness was vis­ible in the way he wielded his knife, deftly twisting and cut­ting away the priceless metal-work and flicking it nonchalantly over the side of the car. Every setting was a work of art, but that very quality made each one too distinctive to be trusted. The size and perfection of the jewels themselves were more than hall mark enough for the Saint's unobtrusive taste in articles of vertu; and, besides, the settings were three times as bulky as the gems they carried. With the frontier only a few minutes distant, Simon Templar felt in his most unobtrusive mood. The speed and skill with which he worked were amaz­ing: he had scarcely finished his cigarette when the last scrap of fretted gold vanished into the darkness, and the accumula­tion was complete.

He looked up to find Patricia staring at the stones over his shoulder.

"What are they worth, boy?" she whispered.

The Saint laughed.

"Enough to buy you a new pair of elastic-sided boots and an embroidered nightcap for Monty," he said. "And then you could write two cheques for six figures, and still have enough change left to stand yourself two steam yachts and a Rolls. That is, if you could sell the loot in the open market. As things are, Van Roeper'll probably beat me down to a lousy couple of million guilders, which means we shall have to pass up one of those cheques and Monty's nightcap. But all the same, lass, it's Boodle with the peach of a B!"

He knotted the corners of his handkerchief diagonally over the spoils, tested the firmness of the bundle, and tossed it ef­fervescently into the air. Then it vanished into his pocket, and he helped himself to another cigarette and settled down in his corner to enjoy the drive.

Monty Hayward was the only one who seemed to have es­caped the Saint's own contagious exhilaration. He concen­trated his eyes on the task of guiding the car and thought that it was all a pretty bad show. He said so.

"If you'd only left that jewellery as it was, you chump," he said—having only just thought of it himself—"we might have been able to tell the police we'd found it on the road and were on our way to return it."

Simon shook his head.

"We couldn't have told them that, Monty."

"Why not?"

"Because it wouldn't have been true," answered the Saint, with awful solemnity.

"You owl!" snarled Monty Hayward; and relapsed into his nightmare.

It was a nightmare in which he had been groping about for so long that he had lost the power of protesting effectively against anything that it required him to do. Presently, at the Saint's bidding, he stopped the car for a moment while he re­moved his police uniform, which went into the nearest clump of bushes. Then he suffered himself to be told to drive unhesitatingly up to the frontier post which showed up in the glare of their headlights a few minutes later, where he obediently applied his brakes and waited in a kind of numb resignation while the guards stepped up and made their formal inquisi­tions. Every instinct that he possessed urged him to turn tail and fly—to leap out of the car and make a desperate attempt to plunge unseen into Germany through the darkness of the woods on their left—even, in one frantic moment, to let in the clutch again and smash recklessly through the flimsy barrier across the road into what looked like unassailable security be­yond. That he remained ungalvanized by all these natural im­pulses was due solely to the paralytic inertia of the nightmare which had him inextricably in its grip. His, it appeared, not to reason why; his but to sit still and wait for somebody to clout him over the bean—and a more depressing fate for anyone who had passed unscathed through the entire excitement of the last war he found it difficult to imagine. He sat mute behind the wheel, endeavouring to make himself as invisible as pos­sible, while the Saint exhibited passports and answered the usual questions. The Saint was as cool as a cucumber. He chat­tered affably throughout the delay, with an impermeable absence of self-consciousness, and smiled benignly into the light that was flashed over them. The eternity of prickling suspense which Monty Hayward endured passed over the Saint's unruffled head like a soothing zephyr; and when at last the signal was given and they moved on, and the Saint leaned back with a gentle exhalation of breath and searched for his cigarette case, his immutable serenity seemed little less than a deliberate affront.

"I suppose you know what you're doing, brother," said Monty Hayward, as quietly as he could, "but it seems pretty daft to me."

"You bet I knew," said the Saint, and to Monty's surprise he said it just as quietly. "It was simply a matter of taking a chance on the clock. If you hadn't hit that cop at the Königshof quite so hard, it wouldn't have been so easy; but we had to hope we were still a length or two in front of the hue and cry. There's no point in jumping your fences before you come to them. But, believe me, I had that patrol covered from my pocket the whole time, and what might have happened if we'd been unlucky is just nobody's business."

Monty Hayward readjusted his impressions slowly and reluc­tantly. And then suddenly he shot one of his extraordinarily keen glances at the sober face of the man beside him—a glance that was tempered with the ghost of a smile.

"If we kept straight ahead and drove in relays," he said, "we might make the Dutch frontier to-day. But one gathers that it wouldn't be quite so simple as that."

"Solomon said it first," assented the Saint bluntly. "We shan't take any more frontiers in our stride, and I don't think we shall enjoy much more friendly flapjaw with the constabulary. That was just our break. But there won't be a policeman in Central Europe who doesn't know our horrid histories by lunch-time; and if our pals among the ungodly can't raise a fleet of cars with the legs of this one you may call me Archi­bald. You were thinking we'd finished—and we've only just begun!" All at once the Saint laughed. "But shall I tell you?"

Monty nodded.

"I'll give you a new angle on the life of crime," said the Saint lavishly. "I'll hand it you for nothing, Mont—the angle that your bunch of footling authors never get. Every one of 'em makes the same mistake, just like you made yourself. Take this: Any fool can biff a policeman on the jaw. Every other fool can swipe a can of assorted bijouterie that's simply dropped into his lap. And any amount of mutts can throw a bluff that'll get by—once, for a ten-minute session. Believe it or not. And then you think it's all over bar the anthem. But it isn't. It's only just started on its way."

Monty accepted the proposition without comment. After a moment's consideration, the uncompromising accuracy of it was self-evident.

He drove on in silence, squeezing the last possible kilometer per hour out of the powerful engine. From time to time he stole a glimpse at the driving mirror, momentarily expecting to see the darkness of the road behind bleached with the first fault nimbus of pursuing headlights. It was strange how the intoxication of the chase, following on the turbulent course of that night's unsought adventure, had sapped his better judg­ment—stranger still, perhaps, how the foundations of his cau­tious common sense had been undermined by so much event­ful proximity to a man whom in normal times he had always regarded as slightly, if quite pleasantly, bugs. The rush of the wind stroked his face with a hypnotic gentleness; the hum of the machine and the lifting sense of speed soothed his con­science like an insidious drug. For one dizzy moment it seemed to him that there must be worse ways of spending a night and the day after it—that there were more soul-destroying things in a disordered world than biffing policemen on the jaw and flying from multiple vengeance on the hundred horses of a modern highwayman's Mercedes Benz. He thought like that for one moment of incredible insanity; and then he thought it again, and decided that he must be very ill.

But a tincture of that demoralized elation stayed with him and lent an indefinable zest to the drive, while the sky paled for the dawn and the stolen car slid swiftly down the long slopes of the Bavarian hills toward Munich. Beside him, Si­mon Templar calmly went to sleep. ...

The rim of the sun was just topping the horizon, and the air was full of the unforgettable sweet dampness of the morning, when the first angular suburbs of the city swam towards them out of the bare plain; and the Saint roused and stretched him­self and felt for the inevitable cigarette. As the streets narrowed and grew gloomier, he picked up his bearings and began to direct the edging of their route eastward. It was full daylight when they pulled up before the Ostbahnhof, and an early street car was disgorging its load of sleepy workmen towards the portals of the station. Simon swung himself over the side and piled their light luggage out on the pavement. He touched Monty on the shoulder.

"I think we're a bit conspicuous as a trio," he said. "But if you hopped that street car it'd take you to the Hauptbahnhof, and the Metropole is almost opposite. We'll see you there."

And once again Monty Hayward found himself alone. He made his way to the hotel as he had been instructed, and found Patricia and the Saint waiting for him. Monty felt a little bit too tired to argue. Left to himself, he would have kept moving till he dropped, with the one idea of setting as many miles as possible between his own rudder and the wrath to come. And yet, when he rolled into bed half an hour later, he had a com­fortable feeling that he had earned his rest. There is something about the lethargy of healthy physical fatigue, allied with the appreciation of dangers faced and survived, a sense of omnipo­tence and recklessness, which awakes the springs of an unfathomable primitive contentment; something that can stupefy all present questions along with all past philosophic doubts; something that can wipe away the strains of civilized complex­ity from a man's mind, and give him the peace of an animal and the sleep of a child.

Monty Hayward would have slept like a child if it had not been for the endless stream of street cars, which thundered beneath his window, rattling in every joint, clanging enor­mous bells, blowing hooters, torturing their brakes, crashing, colliding, spraying their spare parts onto large sheets of tin, and generally straining every bolt to uphold the standard of nerve-shattering din of which, the continent of Europe is so justly proud.

He surrendered the unequal contest towards midday and went in search of a bathroom. Shaved and dressed, and feeling a little better, he descended on the dining room in the hope of finding some relics of breakfast with which to complete the restoration of his tissues; and his apologetic order had scarcely been executed when the Saint sauntered in and joined him, looking so intolerably fresh and fit that Monty could have as­saulted him.

"Get those Spiegeleier inside you quickly, old lad," he said, "and we'll be on our way again."

"Have you pinched another car?" asked Monty resignedly. "And if so, what was wrong with the last one?"

Simon laughed.

"Nothing. Only stolen cars are notified, and that never makes things easier. Besides which, it isn't every day that you knock off a car complete with its tryptique and general docu­ments of identity, and if you hadn't pulled off that fluke yes­terday we should have had a long walk from the frontier. No —I've been over to the station and unearthed a pretty good train, and I don't see why we should turn it down."

Monty carved an egg.

"Where's Pat?"

"Having breakfast in bed. She was asleep when I went out."

"She must be stone deaf," said Monty, glumly. "No one who wasn't could sleep here in the daytime. There were four thou­sand trams outside my room, and they took every one of them to pieces. I think they used several large hammers and a buzz-saw. Then they threw all the bits through the window of a china-shop and laughed like hell." Monty Hayward sliced a rasher of bacon with meditative brutality and finished the dish in silence. "Where do we go to-day?" he inquired.

"Cologne," said the Saint. "Where they make the Eau." He was lighting a cigarette and gazing into the mirror on the wall above Monty's head, watching the two men who had just en­tered the room. They were, in their way, a brace of the most flabbergasting phenomena that he had seen for a long while; and yet they oiled into the inexorable scheme of things with a smoothness that was almost wicked. And the Saint's face was utterly sterile of emotion as he tacked onto his opening an­nouncement the one sweeping qualification that the arrival of those two men implied. "If we get away at all," he said.

2

With the cigarette slanting between bis lips and a slow drift of smoke sinking thoughtfully down into his lungs, Simon Templar lounged back in his chair and watched the two detec­tives coming up behind him.

The convex surface of the ornamental glass condensed their imposing figures into the vague semblance of two trousered sausages seen through the wrong end of a telescope; but even so, the grisly secret of their calling was blazoned across their bosoms in letters that the Saint could read five hundred yards away with his eyes closed. That was the one disastrous certainty which emerged unchallenged from the chaotic fact of their arrival. Not once since the first instant when they had bulked ponderously through the doors of the deserted Speisezimmer had the Saint allowed himself to luxuriate in any sedative de­lusions about that. When one has played ducks and drakes with the Law for ten hectic years, and, moreover, when one has been fully occupied for the last three of those years with the business of being the most coveted fox in the whole western hemisphere, one's nose becomes almost tediously fa­miliar with the scent of hounds. And if ever the Saint had sniffed that piquant odour, he could smell it then—one breast-high wave of it, which spumed aromatically past his nostrils with enough pungency to make a salamander sneeze.

How those detectives had got there was still an inch or two beyond him. Granted that in the last twelve hours the purlieus of Innsbruck had been the location of no small excitement, in the course of which a quite unnecessary little man had been violently shoved on out of this world of woe, and an unfortu­nate misunderstanding had caused the three policemen who should have arrested him to be dumped painfully into the cold waters of the Inn—granted, even, that the estimable Monty Hayward was most unjustly suspected of having personally shoved on the aforesaid little man, and was most accurately known to have taken part in the assault and bathing of the po­lice, to have subsequently assaulted one of them a second time, to have appropriated his uniform, and to have stolen a large car—well, a few minor disturbances like these were a small price to pay for the quarter of a million pounds' worth of gen­uine crown jewels. And the Saint had most emphatically done his best to avoid any superfluous unpleasantness. His mind flashed back over the details of the getaway; and at the end of the flash he had to admit that the Law was playing a fast ball. Their passing had been reported from the frontier, of course, as soon as the alarm was raised: that was inevitable; but after that the trail should have petered out—for several hours, anyway. A police organization which, in the short time that had been at its disposal, could discover an abandoned car, and then, by an essentially wearisome system of exhaustive inquir­ies, could trace its fugitive passengers through the separate and devious routes which they had taken to the hotel, argued that somewhere in Munich there were a few devoted souls with no little energy left over from the more important busi­ness of assimilating large quantities of Löwenbräu. It argued a strenuous efficiency that was as upsetting as anything the Saint had seen for many years.

Across the table, Monty Hayward was staring at him puz­zledly, with the last fork-load of egg and bacon poised blankly in midair. And then, for a second, his gaze veered over the Saint's shoulder; and he began to understand.

The Saint's eyes tore themselves away from the queer fasci­nation of the mirror. On its surface the figures of the men be­hind had swollen in grotesque distortion, until he knew that they were only a yard or two away. He felt their presence even more vividly after he had ceased to watch them, in an infinitely gentle little shiver that twitched up his back as if a couple of spiders had performed a rapid polka along his spine. It slith­ered coldly along his ganglions in a tingle of desperate alert­ness, an instinctive tautening of nerves that was beyond all hu­man power to control.

He took the cigarette from his mouth and looked Monty Hayward squarely in the face. Within that yard or two of where they sat, the menace of the Law had loomed up again, with a suddenness that took the breath away—a menace which it had always been so fatally easy to forget, even if the Saint himself had never quite forgotten. And Monty Hayward looked back at a man who, in some guises, still seemed a stran­ger to him. The Saint's eyes were as hard as flints, cold and blue and mercilessly clear; and yet somewhere in their grim depths there was a tiny glitter like shifting sunlight, a momentary twinkle of mockery that loved the wild twists of the game for their own sake.

"For many years, Monty," said the Saint very quietly and distinctly, "I've been meaning to tell you the Illuminating History of Wilbraham, the Wonderful Worm. Wilbraham was in the very act of becoming the high tea of a partridge named Theobald, when the cruel bird was brought down by a lucky shot from the gun of a certain Mr. Hugglesboom, who was a water-diviner by profession and generally considered to be eccentric. I said a lucky shot, because Mr. Hugglesboom believed that he was aiming his weapon at a rabbit that was nibbling his young lettuces. On retrieving the bird, Mr. Hugglesboom discovered Wilbraham in its beak. Being a kind-hearted gentleman, he released the unhappy reptile; and he would have thought nothing more about it, if Wilbraham had not had other views. Wilbraham, in fact, being overcome with gratitude to his deliverer, followed Mr. Hugglesboom home, and showed such symptoms of devotion that Mr. Hugglesboom's heart was touched. A lonely man, he adopted the small creature, and found much companionship on his solitary travels, in which Wilbraham would follow him like a faithful dog. Shortly afterwards Wilbraham thought that he might assist Mr. Hugglesboom in his work. He took it upon himself to spy out, by tireless burrowing, the land which his master was commissioned to survey; with the result that in course of time Mr. Hugglesboom attained such eminence in his vocation ——"

Monty Hayward's face had run through a sequence of ex­pressions that would have made a movie director skip like a young ram with joy; and then it had gone blank. The meaning and purpose of that astonishing cascade of imbecility were utterly beyond him. There came to him the hysterical belief that Simon Templar must have gone suddenly and irrevocably haywire. The strain of recent happenings had been too much for a brain that had never in its life been truly stable.

He looked up dumbly at the two men who were now stand­ing by the Saint's oblivious shoulder, and in their faces he saw the beginnings of an answering blankness that fairly kicked him between the eyes. It was so staggering that for a space of time he doubted the evidence of his own senses.

And then it dawned upon him that the two men were also listening, and at the same time running through a gamut of emotions similar to his own. As the Saint's beautifully articu­lated phrases reached their ears, their heavy-footed and pur­poseful advance had waned away. They had ended up behind the Saint's chair as if they were walking over pins; and there they stood, with their mouths hanging open, sucking in his drivelling discourse with both ears. Their awed entrancement was so obvious that for an awful interval Monty Hayward be­gan to wonder whether after all it was his own brain that had slipped its trolley.

"The climax came," said the Saint, with that flute-like clarity which did every single thing in its power to render the words comprehensible to anyone whose knowledge of English might leave much fluency to be desired, "at a garden party organized by Lady Tigworthy, at which Mr. Hugglesboom was to give a demonstration of his art by finding a receptacle of water which had been carefully hidden in the grounds. Keeping his usual rendezvous behind the refreshment tent, Mr. Huggles­boom was duly accosted by a worm who gave him explicit in­structions; and shortly afterwards, being a dim-sighted man, he faithfully made his find directly over a shiny pink globe which showed on the lee side of a grassy knoll. This was discov­ered to be the head of Lord Tigworthy, who was enjoying an afternoon siesta. Mr. Hugglesboom was expelled from the fête in disgrace; and the worm, which was reclining in an intoxi­cated condition under the tap of a barrel of mild ale, was thrown after him. It was not until he reached home that Mr. Hugglesboom perceived that this worm was not Wilbraham"— the Saint was looking Monty rigidly in the eyes—"but Wil­braham's twin brother, who, filled with jealousy of his luckier relation, had gone out of his way to discredit an unblemished record of unselfish service. Mr. Hugglesboom——"

Behind him, one of the detectives cleared his throat apolo­getically, and the Saint glanced round.

He glanced round absolutely at his leisure, as if he were no­ticing the presence of the detectives for the first time. He did it as if they meant nothing whatever in his life, and never could—with a smilingly interrogative composure which cost him perhaps more effort than anything he had done in the last twenty-four hours.

The detective coughed.

"Excuse me, gentleman," he said, in excellent English. "I am a police officer, and I have to ask you to give an account of yourselves."

Monty Hayward had an insane desire to laugh. The contrast between the detectives' confident march across the room, and the almost ingratiating tone of that opening remark, was so comical that for a moment it made him forget the tightness of the corner from which they had still to make their getaway.

Coolly the Saint shifted his chair round, and waved an oblig­ing hand.

"Sit down, Sherlock," he murmured, "and tell us all your troubles. What's the matter—has somebody declared war, or something?"

Somewhat uncertainly the detective lowered himself into a seat, and after a second's hesitation his companion followed suit They looked at one another dubiously, and at length the spokesman attempted to explain.

"It is in the matter of a crime that was committed in Inns­bruck last night, mein Herr. We received proof that the crim­inals had reached Munich, and afterwards we believed that we had traced them to this hotel. Their descriptions were tele­graphed to us from Innsbruck. You will pardon me, gentle­men, but the resemblance . . ."

Simon raised his eyebrows.

"Good Lord! D'you mean we're going to be arrested?"

His startled innocence was beyond criticism. Every line of it was etched into his face and his voice with the touch of a consummate artist. And the detective shrugged.

"Before I spoke to you, I permitted myself to listen to your conversation. I hoped to learn something that would help us. But after I had listened——"

"As far as I remember," said the Saint puzzledly, "I was beguiling the time with a highly moral and uplifting anecdote about a worm named——"

"Vilbraham?" suggested the detective, with a tinge of hu­mour in his homely features. "I admit I did not appreciate all the—the——die Bedeutung—the what-do-you-say of the story?"

He looked appealingly at the Saint, but Simon shook his head. "It is not important. But it is my experience that a man who had committed a crime so soon ago, and who would expect every minute to be arrested, would not talk like that. His mind is too worried. Also you did not translate die Bedeutung for me, which would have been very clever of you if you were one of the criminals, because both of them speak German like I do."

Simon gazed at him with admiration.

"That was cunning of you," he said ingenuously. "But I suppose that's part of your job." He dropped his cigarette into a coffee cup and beckoned a passing waiter. "Have a spot of Schnapps and let's see if there's anything we can do to clear up the difficulty."

The detective nodded.

"You have your passports?"

The Saint took a blue booklet from his pocket and dropped it on the table. The detective turned courteously to Monty Hayward. Something hard was jabbing into the side of Monty's thigh: he slipped his hand quite naturally under the table and grasped it. He was wide awake now; the whole purpose of the Saint's two-edged bluff was plain to him, and his brain was humming into perfect adaptation.

He slid the passport round behind him and produced it as if from his hip pocket. Where it had come from he had no idea, and he had even less idea what information it contained; but he watched it across the table while the detective turned the pages, and gathered that he was George Shelston Ingram, marine architect, of Lowestoft. The photograph was undoubt­edly his own—he recognized it immediately as the one from his own passport, and the evidence of the Saint's inexhaustible thoroughness amazed him. The Saint must have put in an hour's painstaking work before breakfast on that job alone, faking up the missing part of the Foreign Office embossments which linked the photograph with the new sheet on which it had been pasted.

The examination was concluded in a few minutes, and the detectives returned the passports to their respective claimants with a slight bow.

"I have apologized in advance," he said briefly. "Now, Mr. Ingram, will you please tell me your recent movements? One of our men saw you at the Ostbahnhof this morning, besides the one who happened to see you arrive at the hotel. They re­membered you when the descriptions were received; and it was near the Ostbahnhof that the car in which our criminals escaped was found."

"I think I can explain that," Monty answered easily. "I've been walking around the country in this neighbourhood, and last night I ended up at Siegertsbrun. After dinner I had a telegram from my brother asking me to meet him in Munich this morning, and saying it was a matter of life and death. So after thinking it over I caught a very early train and came straight here."

"Your brother?"

The detective seemed suddenly to have gone out of control. He sat forward as if he could scarcely contain his excitement. And Monty nodded.

"Yes. He's my twin. If you didn't grasp the point of my friend's story, I can tell you that he was being extremely rude."

"Donnerwetter! And where would he meet you—Ihr Heir Bruder?" "He said he'd meet me here at ten o'clock; but he hasn't turned up yet——"

"You have this telegram?"

"No—I didn't keep it. But——"

"From where was it despatched?"

"From Jenbach." Monty's resentment had plainly been boil­ing up against the hungry rattle of questions, and at that point he exploded. "Damn it, are you suggesting that my brother is a crook?"

The detective hunched his shoulders. An inscrutable hard­ness had crept in under the amiable fleshiness of his face. He retorted with the dehumanized bluntness of official logic.

"It is a matter of probability. You are so much alike. Also this telegram was sent from Jenbach, where the criminals have last been seen. For them it is certainly a matter of life and death."

In the silence that followed, the waiter returned and set up the drinks which had been ordered. Simon flicked a note onto bis tray and dismissed him with curt gesture. He slid the glasses round in front of the detectives and looked from them to Monty and then back again.

"This is serious," he said. "Are you quite sure you haven't made a mistake?"

"That is to be discovered. But it is strange that Mr. Ingram's brother has not yet arrived."

The reply was unexceptionably polite. And just as incontest­ably it declined to be drawn into abstract argument. It slammed up one stark circumstance, and invited explanations that would convince a jury—nothing less.

Simon took a fresh cigarette from the packet on the table and slouched back in his pew, watching the two detectives like a hawk. There was not an atom of tension in his poise, not one visible quiver of a muscle to flash hints of danger to a sus­picious man, and under the smooth, level brows bis eyelids drooped no more than thoughtfully against the smoke; but behind that droop the eyes were alive with frozen steel. His right arm was crooked lazily round the chair back, but the hand hung less than an inch from his gun pocket.

"It does seem odd," he drawled.

The keen gaze of the detective who had done all the talk­ing searched his face.

"Were you travelling with Mr. Ingram?" he inquired.

"Yeah."

The Saint picked up his glass and turned the stem between his fingers. The hand that held it was rock-firm, and he re­turned the chief detective's direct stare without a tremor; and yet his heart was putting in perhaps two extra beats per min­ute above its normal rhythm. He knew to the millionth part of an inch how slender was the thread by which their getaway still hung. The crisis of their bluff was pelting into them with less than a handful of split seconds left to run—and he had known all the time that it was coming. It had been on its way from the first word with all the inevitablity of an inrushing tide. Simon had expected nothing else. He had won the only stakes it had been played for—the fifteen minutes' grace which had been given, the awakening of doubts in the detectives' minds, the vital cue to Monty and the two police officers sit­ting there quietly at the table.

"You came here from Siegertsbrun together?"

The eyes had never wavered from the scrutiny. Neither had Simon Templar's.

The Saint raised his glass.

"Cheerio," he said.

Almost mechanically the other groped around and took up his own drink. His colleague did the same. Both of them were looking at the Saint. He could see the ideas that were working simultaneously through their minds. They had recovered from the first stunning confusion of the bluff, and now in the reac­tion they were thinking on top gear—turning the defense over under the searchlights of habitual incredulity, probing re­morselessly into its structure, reading behind it into the bal­ance of probabilities.

And yet they drank. They ignored the customary clinking of glasses, and their perfunctory bows were so slight as to be al­most imperceptible.

"Ihre Gesundheit!"

Simon put down his glass and drew thoughtfully on his ciga­rette. At that moment he could have laughed.

"No, brother," he said gently. "We missed Siegertsbrun. But we had a swell time in Innsbruck." He smiled sweetly at the startled bulging of the detectives' eyes, and on the tablecloth their empty glasses seemed to rise on tiptoe and cheer for him. "It's been lovely meeting you, and I hope this chat won't get you into trouble at headquarters."

The nearest man half rose from his chair, and the Saint stepped swiftly up and caught him as he went limp.

Simon wrung him affectionately by the hand. He slapped him on the back. He gripped him by the shoulders and bade him an exuberantly cordial farewell. And in so doing he set­tled the man carefully back into his chair, lumped him for­ward, propped his chin up on his hand, and left him huddled in a lifelike pose of contemplation.

"Be good, brother," said the Saint, "and remember me to auntie. Give my love to Rudolf"—out of the corner of his eye the Saint saw that Monty had arranged the other detective in a similar position—"and tell him I hope it chokes him. Tootle pip."

They walked quickly across the dining room and paused to glance backwards from the door. The two detectives at the far corner table, with their backs turned to the room, appeared like a couple of Bavarian Buddhas wrapped in immortal meditations.

Simon smiled again.

"Such is life," he whispered.

Then he moved out into the vestibule. As they emerged into the hall the Saint glanced casually about him, and in that same casual way his glance rested for a long moment on the back of a man who was leaning over the janitor's desk by the main doors. He was talking earnestly to the head porter, and a long jade cigarette holder was tilted up in the fingers of one sensitive white hand.

VII. HOW SIMON TEMPLAR BORROWED A CAR

AND AGREED TO BE SENSIBLE

SIMON'S long arm shot out and grabbed Monty by the shoul­der, halting him in his stride and spinning him half round. The Saint's eyes were debonair.

"Steady, old scout," murmured the Saint blithely. "This is where you go home!"

Monty's brow crinkled. And the Saint laughed. The laugh was almost silent; and not one syllable of what he said could have been heard a yard away.

"Buzz up and collect Pat and all the luggage," said the Saint quietly. "Get down by the fire escape—you're good at that. And I'll see you at the station." He jerked a thin sheaf of reservations from his pocket and thrust them neatly into Monty's hand. "If you want to know why, you can peep back on your way up the stairs. You might even listen for a bit—but I shouldn't wait too long. The train goes in fifteen minutes. Happy landings!"

The same shoulder-hold sped Monty on; and the Saint cir­cled slowly on his heel and continued his stroll across the floor.

Looking back from a flight of stairs that was partly screened by the iron grille of the elevator shaft, Monty had an angle view of him coming up behind the man who was still standing by the porter's desk. The Saint's hands were in his pockets, and his step was airy. He stopped just one pace from the desk, and his voice floated softly up across the hall.

"What ho!" said the Saint.

The man at the desk turned.

It was typical of his iron self-restraint that he placed the tip of the long cigarette holder between his teeth before he moved. He turned round without a trace of hurry or excitement, and his recognition of the Saint was the merest flutter of a pencilled eyebrow.

"My dear Mr. Templar!"

The Saint's hands sank deeper into his pockets.

"My dear Rudolf!" There was a suggestion of sardonic mimi­cry in the Saint's reply. "Are you staying here?"

The cigarette glowed evenly in its jade setting.

"I was looking for a friend," said the Crown Prince.

Simon gazed at him mockingly. He had hardly expected to renew his acquaintance with the prince quite so soon; and yet the conversation he had had with the detectives who now slept peacefully in the dining room had illuminated many mysteries. It had indicated, amongst other things, that Rudolf was a worker with a classic turn of speed in his own class—if the Saint had required any enlightenment on that subject. Certain facts had been mentioned in that conversation which could never have been known to the police without Rudolf's assist­ance. And Simon was wondering what new subtleties were be­ing corkscrewed into the delicate tangle—what new stratagems were unwinding themselves behind the statuesque placidity of the smiling chevalier opposite him. But the Saint's face showed nothing.

"Have you any friends?" he asked guilelessly.

The prince laughed. He took Simon engagingly by the arm.

"There is a quiet corner over there where we can talk. It would be worth your while."

"D'you think so?" drawled the Saint.

He sauntered indulgently towards an alcove adorned with three glass-topped tables and a litter of old newspapers, and the prince stayed beside him. As they went, the Saint sidled an eye up the stairway and saw that Monty had disappeared. In the same glance, the hands of a clock hanging on one wall came into his field of view; and the position of them printed itself on his memory in a sector of remorseless warning. Two minutes had ticked by since he left the dining room, which gave him six minutes more at the outside before the effects of the dope which had splashed a lurid semicolon into the pur­plest passage of the official pursuit would be wearing off—even if no interfering waiter uncovered the deception before that. Six hazardous minutes in which to squeeze what he had to learn out of the brain of that man of polished marble, and to select his own riposte. . . . And then Simon felt the light hand of the prince stroking up inside his arm into his armpit and slipping back to his elbow just as lightly, and he knew that the possible hiding-places for jewels on his own person had been comprehensively investigated. Rudolf also had much to learn. It would be a cake-walk of a race with a whirlwind sprint at the finish, but the Saint could find nothing to complain about in that. He chuckled and sank into an armchair.

"Must you do these things?" he inquired mildly. "You know, I'm rather ticklish, and I might scream."

The prince settled down and crossed his legs.

"You must not let me detain you too long," he remarked solicitously. "Your time must be valuable."

"Have you anything really interesting to say?" murmured the Saint bluntly.

The prince looked at him.

"This is the third time that you have chosen to meddle in my affairs, Mr. Templar. I have told you before that your persistence might compel me to think of methods of perma­nent discouragement Believe me, my dear friend, it will only be your own obstinacy which may cause me to take steps which I should genuinely regret."

"Such as—handing over the vendetta to a couple of overfed policemen? You don't know how disappointed I am about you, Rudolf."

"That was an unfortunate necessity. You had to be found without delay, and the police have facilities which are denied to ordinary people like ourselves."

The Saint smiled.

"I see. While you hang around in the offing as the righteous citizen what's been robbed. Well, well, Rudolf," said the Saint tolerantly, "the notion was passably sound, though I won't say I hadn't heard of it before. And what would you have done if I'd actually been collared with the boodle—gone home and burst into tears?"

"That possibility had been considered," admitted the prince calmly. "In fact, I had anticipated it. You may have forgotten that my name carries some weight in this country. I do not think I should have found my task difficult." He shrugged. "But you were always enterprising, my dear Mr. Templar."

"That past tense makes me feel all Tolstoy," said the Saint plaintively.

The prince fingered his moustache.

"You are the unknown quantity which is always disconcert­ing," he said; and Simon blew out two leisured smoke rings.

"Have you lost your voice, Rudolf?"

"Why?"

"There must be some more policemen in Munich. From what I've seen I shouldn't think there was room for many, but you might find one or two. You could try yodelling for 'em."

"I doubt whether that would be so expedient," said the prince, tapping a length of ash from his cigarette—"now that we know that the jewels are no longer in your possession."

Simon sat up. That was a new one on him—straight from the bandbox and dolled out with ribbons. It caught him slap in the middle of his complacency and made him blink.

"Yeah?" he said automatically. "I haven't seen any corpses carried out"

"Would that be a corollary?"

"It would be if any of your birds tried to go scratching round my room. There's not only two guns in it—there's a girl who can shoot the pips out of a razzberry keeping 'em warm, and she doesn't sleep on her feet. Now think up something else that'll cure hiccoughs!"

The prince showed a glimmer of pearly teeth.

"In that case," he said imperturbably, "we must feel thank­ful that the porter is an observant man with a good memory."

"Meaning exactly?"

"You went out at eleven o'clock this morning with a parcel, and you came back without it."

Simon raked him with crystalline blue eyes. He had an in­stant recollection of the scene in which he had surprised the prince, and in the same flash he understood the significance of it. The very words that must have been spoken trickled almost verbatim through his imagination. His Sublime Eminence's dear young friend had promised to deliver a small package for him. It was vitally important that it should be sent off before midday. Had anything been done about it? The package would be about so big. His dear young friend was inclined to be forgetful. Could the porter remember if he had seen the gentleman leaving the hotel with such a package as had been described? . . . The interrogation would have been simplicity itself to a man of the Crown Prince's magnetic geniality, once he had realized that such a contingency was on the cards. And if it had proved fruitless there would have been no harm done. Mentally the Saint raised his hat to that effort of induc­tive speculation.

"I won't deceive you," said the Saint. "We have ceased to hold the baby."

"Others have also found it dangerous," murmured the prince.

"That's just how it struck me," said the Saint with equanim­ity. "So I got rid of it. I went out and bought three fat packets of German cigarettes. I came home and loaded the swag into 'em, and jammed it tight with cotton wool. I tied the boxes up in brown paper and stuck on a label. And then I went out and shoved the whole works into the post office across the way —just ordinary parcel post, and no registration or anything. It'll be waiting for me where I want it." The Saint pushed his hands back in his pockets and stared at the prince seraphically through a veil of smoke. "Got any more to say?" he purred.

Up on the wall the clock gathered its creaking springs and chimed the quarter. The margin of time was dosing in; and Simon had learned nearly everything he required to know. There was only one thing more to come—an inkling of the counter attack which must have been spinning its swift web between the lines of that entertaining little chat. And the Saint was keyed up for it like a tiger crouching for the kill.

The Crown Prince leaned forward.

"My friend, we are in danger of cutting our own throats. You have disposed of the jewels temporarily, but you will have still to recover them. It would be awkward for you if you were arrested—and I admit that it would be inconvenient for me. For the time being we have your interests in common. And yet you must acknowledge that you have not one chance in ten thousand of making your escape."

"That sounds depressing," said the Saint.

"It is a matter of fact. In England you have your Scotland Yard, which is the model of the whole world. Perhaps you are tempted to think that our European police organizations are inferior. You would be foolish—very foolish. You have many hundreds of miles still to travel, and every frontier will be watched for you. Every mile, every minute, will see the dice loaded more heavily against you. You have temporarily dis­posed of the detectives who were sent here; I do not ask how you accomplished it, but I assure you they were only a begin­ning. Our police do not easily forget being made to look stupid. Your arrest will be a point of honour with every de­tective in Germany."

"Well?"

Simon's prompting monosyllable rapped into the prince's silence like the crack of an overstrained fiddle string.

The prince, tapped his cigarette holder thoughtfully on a pink-tinted thumbnail. He met the Saint's eyes with a survey of deliberate appraisal.

"I offer you an alliance. I offer you protection, hiding, in­fluence, a practical certainty of escape. I have told you that in this country I am a person of some importance. Mr. Templar, we have been enemies too long. I offer you friendship and security—at the price of a division of the spoils."

The Saint's eyes never moved; but his lips smiled.

"And how would this partnership begin?" he queried.

"My car is outside. It is at your disposal. I promise you safe conduct out of Munich—for yourself and your friends."

For two seconds the Saint gazed at the red tip of his cigar­ette, with that tentative half-smile playing round his mouth.

And then he screwed the cigarette into an ash tray and stood up.

"I think I should like to use your car," he said.

He drifted towards the street doors with his quick, swinging stride, and the prince went beside him. As they stepped out into the blazing sunshine of the Bayerstrasse the Saint's hardened vigilance scanned the street, left and right, expertly dis­secting the appearance of every loiterer within sight. He elimi­nated them all. There was a man selling newspapers, another sweeping the street, a one-armed beggar with a tray of toys, a weedy specimen idling in front of a shop window—no one who could by any stretch of imagination be invested with the aura of bull-necked innocence which to the initiated observer fizzles like a mantle of damp squibs around the elaborately plain-clothed man in every civilized corner of the globe. It was just a little more than the Saint had seriously hoped for: it showed that the full measure of his iniquity had not yet been fully revealed to the phlegmatic myrmidons of the German police, and in any other circumstances he would have felt that the fact paid him no compliments. He had been ready for further opposition—squads of it—and his right hand had never left the gun in his pocket. The risk had to be taken.

"You are very wise," said the prince suavely.

Simon nodded curtly, without turning his head.

His eyes swept the car that was drawn up by the curb with its engine pulsing almost inaudibly—an open, cream-coloured Rolls, upholstered in crimson leather, with the Crown Prince's coat of arms displayed prominently on the coach work. A liveried chauffeur held the door open—Simon recognized him as the man who had done his best to strangle him in the dark hours of that morning, and favoured him with a ray of that slight, sweet smile.

"Let me drive," said the Saint.

He twitched the door from the man's hand and slammed it shut. In one more smooth movement he whipped open another door and dropped into the driving seat.

As he flicked the lever into gear, the man's hand clutched his shoulder. For an instant Simon let go the steering wheel. With the faintest widening of that Saintly smile, the Saint's steely fingers bracketed themselves lovingly round the man's prominent nose and flung him squealing back into the prince's arms. A second later the car was skimming down the street under the flanks of the most startled tram in Munich.

2

The journey which Monty Hayward made from the hotel to the station was one which he ranked ever afterwards as an entirely typical incident in the system of unpleasantness which had enmeshed him in its toils.

It would have made his scalp crawl uneasily even if nothing had happened to disturb his breakfast; but now the certain knowledge that his description had been circulated far and wide, and that it was graphic enough for him to have been identified from it three times already, made any excursion into the great outdoors seem tantamount to a lingering mortifica­tion of the flesh. He was certain to be hanged anyway, he felt, and it seemed painfully unnecessary to have to keep pushing his head into a series of experimental nooses just to get the feel of the operation.

Patricia laughed at him quietly. She produced one of the Saint's razors.

"You'll look quite different without your moustache," she said, "and horn-rimmed glasses are a wonderful disguise."

Monty scraped off his manhood resignedly. He went out into the brightness of the afternoon with many of the sensations of a man who dreams that he is rushing through a crowded street with no trousers on. Every eye seemed to ferret out his guilt and glare ominously after him; every voice that rang out a semitone above normal pitch seemed like a yell of denunci­ation. His shirt clung to him damply.

If there were no detectives posted anywhere along the short route they had to take, there were two at the platform barrier. They stood beside the ticket inspector and made no attempt to conceal themselves. Monty surrendered the suitcases he car­ried into the keeping of a persistent porter and looked hope­lessly at the girl. With their hands free, they might stand a chance if they cut and run. . . . But the girl was stone blind to his mute entreaty. She dumped her bag on the porter's bar­row and strode on. A touch of black on her eyebrows, and an adroit use of lipstick, had created a complete new character. She walked right up to the ticket inspector and the two detec­tives, and stood in front of them with one arm akimbo and her legs astraddle, brazening them through tortoise-shell spectacles larger even than Monty's.

"Say, you, does this train go to Heidelberg?"

"In Mainz umsteigen."

"Whaddas that mean, Hiram?"

Her accent would have carved petrified marrow-bones. It was actually one of the detectives who volunteered to inter­pret.

"In Mainz—exchange trains."

"Bitte, die Fahrkarten," said the inspector stolidly.

Monty swallowed, and delved in his pocket for the reserva­tions.

They were passed through without a question. Monty could hardly believe that it had been so simple. He stood by and watched the amused porter stowing their bags away in the compartment, tipped him extravagantly, and subsided weakly into a corner. He mopped his perspiring forehead and looked at Patricia with the vague embryo of a grin.

"Do you mean to tell me this is a sample of your everyday life?" he asked.

"Oh, no," said the girl carelessly. "Somtimes it's very dull. You just happen to have dropped into one of the high spots."

"It must be an acquired taste."

Patricia laughed, and passed him her cigarette case.

"You're having the time of your life, really, if you'd only admit it. It's a shame about you, Monty—you're wasted in an office. Simon would give you a partnership for the asking. Why don't you stay in with us?"

"I think I am staying in with you," said Monty. "We shall probably go on staying together—in the same clink. Still, I'm always ready to listen to any proposals you have to make." He struck a match and held it out for her. "Are you included in the goodwill of the business?"

She smiled.

"I might let you hold my hand sometimes."

"And I suppose as a special treat I could kiss your toes when I'd murdered someone you didn't approve of."

"Maybe you might even do that."

"Well," said Monty definitely, "I don't think that's nearly good enough. You'll have to think of something much more substantial if you want me to be tempted."

The girl's blue eyes bantered him.

"Aren't you a bit mercenary?"

"No. It's the Saint's fault for leaving us alone together so often. I assure you, Patricia, I'm not to be trusted for a min­ute."

"We'll ask Simon about it," said the girl wickedly, and stood up.

She went over to the window and glanced up and down the platform. Her watch showed less than a minute to the time they were scheduled to start: already the crowd was melting into its compartments, doors were being slammed, and the late arrivals were scurrying about to find their seats. . . . Behind her, a benevolent old clergyman with a pink face and white side-whiskers stopped in the doorway and peered round be­nignly: Monty leered at him hideously, and he departed. . . . An official came in and checked their tickets without paying them the least attention. . . .

Patricia was tapping one sensibly rounded brogue on the low heel of the other. She turned and spoke over her shoul­der:

"Any idea what can have kept him?"

"I could think of several," said Monty, with a callousness which scarcely attempted to ring true. "The silly mutt ought to have got away with us instead of hanging around talk­ing to Rudolf. Personally I'd rather sit down and talk to a rattlesnake."

"He had to find out what game Rudolf was playing," said the girl shortly; and at that moment a shadow fell across them and they both turned round.

Simon Templar stood before them—the Saint himself, with one long arm reaching to the luggage rack and his feet braced against the preliminary jolting of the train, gazing down at them with a wide, reckless grin. Even so it was a second or two before they recognized him. A white straw hat was tilted onto the back of his head, and a monocle in his right eye completed the amazing work of wiping every fragment of character from his face and reducing the features to amiable vacuity. A large carnation burgeoned in his buttonhole, and his tie was pulled into a tight knot and sprung foppishly forward from his neck. Patricia had actually seen him at the far end of the platform and dismissed him without further thought