Thanks to the Saint

The perfect sucker

“Don’t ever run away with the idea that any fool can play the fool,” Simon Templar was heard to say once, without a blush. “To turn in a first-class performance as the ideal chump, the answer to the bunco artist’s prayer, the way I’ve played it sometimes to hook them on their own line, takes more talent than ordinary actors win awards for. If you overdo it and make yourself look too utterly stupid, a con man might pass you up simply because you seem too dumb to have even the rudimentary larcenous instinct which he needs for his routine. If you strike any false note, you’re likely to scare him into a dead run. You have to ad-lib all your own dialog, and you don’t get any rehearsal. And the discouraging thing is that no matter how much you polish your technique, you’ll never do so well as when you aren’t even trying.”

He was certainly not trying when he met Mr Irving Jardane, or Mr Jardane met him, for he had come to the Rogue River in Oregon with no thought of hooking anything more predatory than a few rainbow trout. At such times the Saint had to make no effort to look worthy of his often incongruous nickname. In the complete relaxation which a man can only achieve when solely preoccupied with the leisured assembling of a fly rod and reel in anticipation of a peaceful evening’s fishing, all the bronze and sapphire hardness which could edge the Saint’s face at some other moments was softened to an almost unbelievable innocence, which a more bemused critic than some of the sharks he had gaffed in his lifetime might have claimed was the revelation of a wonderful childishness of heart which he had never really outgrown.

Mr Jardane was a rather stout gentleman of about sixty, with bristly white hair and the florid complexion of one who liked to live well — though perhaps not in the same sense as a dietician might define it. He came by the white frame cottage where Simon was sitting on the stoop and paused to ask, “Been doing any good here?”

The Saint did not delude himself for an instant that his interrogator was eager to know whether he had recently performed any acts of charity or beneficence. In piscatorial circles such a question has only one meaning, and Mr Jardane was very obviously a fellow fisherman. In fact, he was one of the fishingest fishermen Simon had seen for a long time, from the soles of his waders up to the crown of his special hat which was encircled with a string of small magnets to which clung a dazzling assortment of artificial flies. A plastic box of additional flies, with a magnifying lid, hung like a bib from around his neck; a creel was slung by a strap over one shoulder and a spinning tackle box by another strap over the other. He clutched both a fly rod and a spinning rod in one meaty hand, a landing net dangled down his back, and on his belt were holsters containing a hunting knife and a pair of pliers tricked out with half a dozen auxiliary gadgets. All this gear was of the finest quality, but one seldom saw so much of it on one man at one time.

Mr Jardane had the next cabin in the irregular row spread out along the high bank of the river in a parkland of tall pines between Grant’s Pass and Medford which made up the prettiest fishing camp on that stretch of water (and I have to put that in the past tense, because by the time you read this you might search for it in vain). Simon had already noticed him, as he noticed almost everyone who came within his long range of vision. Mr Jardane’s car was a Cadillac of the latest model: combined with his elaborate angling equipment, he gave the almost blatant impression of a man who had plenty of money to spend on anything he liked and who had no inhibitions about doing so. But fishermen are an infinitely varied crew, and the Saint could think of many more foolish or more wicked things for a rich man to splurge on.

“I got a couple this morning,” he said. “Only small ones. And I worked for them.”

“I worked,” grumbled Mr Jardane, “and didn’t get anything. Yes, I had one strike. But I lost him. Fishing’s lousy this year, anyhow. It’s those floods they had last winter. Chewed the bottom of the stream all to hell.”

“So I hear.”

“Anyhow, for me the fishing doesn’t have to be good,” said Mr Jardane defensively. “It’s just supposed to be good for me.”

If he was trying to get a raised eyebrow, he succeeded with that.

“Come again?” Simon murmured politely.

“You think I do this to eat fish? I hate fish. Except when it’s cargo. Me, I could eat steak and potatoes every day of my life. That’s cargo too. But I like cargo. I like work. So the doctors tell me I work too hard and I got to lay off at least a month out of every six and relax. They tell me to go fishing. So I go fishing. Relax? Every time I lose a fish, my blood pressure goes up out of sight. I can feel it. But you can’t argue with doctors. I’d rather try to figure a tight freight schedule any day.”

Simon grinned lazily.

“Is that your job?”

“Yes.” This was where Mr Jardane gave his name. He added, as if the additional explanation shouldn’t really have been necessary, “Transamerican Transport. The yellow trucks with the red lightning flashes painted on ’em. You must’ve seen ’em all over.”

“Oh. Those.”

“What’s wrong with ’em?”

“Aside from clogging the traffic when they’re crawling uphill, or barreling too fast down the other side, and stinking up the whole countryside with diesel fumes, I guess they’re wonderful.”

“They’re more than that. They’re necessary. Any time you eat a Maine lobster in California, or an Oregon pear in Florida, or a good steak most anywhere, as like as not Transamerican hauled it there. Think about that when you’re eating Gulf shrimp in Chicago. And you think we don’t pay for the roads? Listen, how many private individuals d’ye figure could afford to run a car if they had to take over the share of gas and highway taxes and licenses that’s paid by the trucks?”

“I’m sorry,” said the Saint amiably. “I wasn’t trying to start a fight. It’s only that I wonder sometimes if progress is worth all the things it spoils. I’m only a little crazy.”

Mr Jardane sniffed.

“All right,” he said aggrievedly. “But I made my pile out of the world the way it is, and I’ll bet I’ve done it as honestly as however you make a living.”

“That,” said the Saint mildly, “is certainly more than probable.”

The admission seemed to make Mr Jardane feel better. He watched Simon dextrously tying a tapered leader on the end of his line and asked chattily, “What sort of business are you in?”

“I used to be a sort of business investigator,” Simon told him, without feeling obliged to explain that the only sort of business he had ever investigated very deeply was funny business. “But I’m more or less retired now.”

He had said this so often that he had honestly begun to believe it, in spite of the fact that every month or two something infallibly happened to make a liar out of him.

“Retired already? And you look so much younger than me. But don’t think I envy you,” said Mr Jardane vigorously. “I’ve worked all my life, and I’ll die in harness, if those damfool doctors’ll let me. Wouldn’t know what to do with my time if I quit.”

“I go fishing,” murmured the Saint. “Like you’re doing.”

Mr Jardane blinked at him somewhat dubiously, as though he instinctively sensed a barb somewhere and was trying to locate its point. Failing in the immediate effort, he made a gesture of shrugging himself more purposefully into his manifold accouterments and said firmly, if fatuously, “Well, I guess I’ll give it another whirl. We’ll compare scores later.”

“Good luck,” Simon said pleasantly.

But he didn’t even glance up as Mr Jardane clomped away, being too intent on snipping his knot close and melting the remaining couple of millimeters of nylon into a tiny slip-proof bead with the tip of his cigarette.

When the sun dipped below the hills to the west he went down the bank and began to wade slowly up the riffle, pausing for a number of casts every few yards. There were still at least two hours of daylight left, but the direct sunlight was cut off from the water, and there was no reason why the trout shouldn’t begin biting, except for their own natural orneriness... Which, apparently, was at its worst that evening, for in the first hour the only specimen of salmo gairdnerii that rose to his fly was a fingerling of such immature dimensions that he could only release it and hope that the experience would keep it out of trouble until it grew to more edible size.

He took to a path by the water’s edge to bypass an unpromising stretch of rapids, and it brought him to a floating pier which the owner of the resort had hung some fifteen feet out into the stream to provide a place where anyone who was disinclined to wade could enjoy some limited casting. The outer end of it was already occupied by a small thin man with gold-rimmed glasses who was studiously baiting a spinning line, but Simon stopped on the pier anyway to light a cigarette and lean his rod against the handrail while he changed to the wet fly which he had decided to try next.

The alders and laurels along the bank were still green, but every gust of breeze harvested a flutter of falling leaves, and since the vanishing of the sun there was a perceptible crispness in the air. With the first russet fragrances of autumn blending with the sweet damp smell of the river, and the rush and chuckle of water playing accompaniment to the whispered arias of the treetops, and the softened light from the sky overlaying the landscape with a hint of gauze that a painter would despair of capturing, a poet might have felt that the mere catching of a fish was magnificently unimportant compared with the excuse that the attempt gave a man to enjoy so much beauty and tranquillity, and the Saint might easily have agreed with him. No doubt the relaxed and peaceful mood was even more plainly reflected in his lounging stance as he propped himself beside his rod and carefully wove his knot.

But a fisherman is still a fisherman anywhere, and so he felt no surprise or resentment when the frail man at the end of the pier interrupted his vacuous serenity with the conventional inquiry: “Any luck?”

“Not much yet,” Simon said cheerfully. “How are you doing?”

The other reached down into the water and pulled up a string from which dangled four small but not contemptible fish.

“How’s that?”

“Not bad.”

Simon was inevitably interested — he would have liked to call it envious, but he was human too.

“I see you’re one of the fellows who’d rather do it the hard way,” said the little man sociably, lowering his catch back into its natural cooler. “I’m afraid I’d be a complete duffer at fly casting.” He picked up his rod and held up the line, exhibiting a couple of salmon eggs on the hook with a small sinker a cubit ahead of them. “But I suppose you’d despise this kind of fishing.”

“It seems to catch trout,” Simon conceded.

The little man made a clumsy roundhouse cast but managed to reach out about forty feet. He had sparse mousy hair and an eager bony face; somehow he made one think of a timid schoolteacher.

“There’s a bit of art to it, all the same,” he insisted apologetically. “A lot of people don’t catch anything, even with salmon eggs. They get nibbles, and lose their bait, but they don’t seem to be able to hook the fish. It used to happen to me, till I made a study of it. First, I decided you have to let your egg go to the bottom, and leave it there, so it lies pretty much naturally. There’s no use to keep hauling it in and throwing it out again. If there’s a trout anywhere around, he’ll find it. And if he’s hungry, he’ll take it.”

“I can’t argue — with the theory.”

“But he won’t usually gulp it, the way he might go for a fly. He knows it’s not going to run away. And I think it must taste better than a fly. Why shouldn’t he want to enjoy it? So he takes it in his mouth and swims a little way with it. That’s when most people go wrong. They feel a little tug and jerk their rod, and unless they’re lucky they snatch the egg right out of his lips, or pull the hook out of the egg, but they don’t snag him.”

“What do you do, Professor?”

“I’ve got a lot of extra line off the reel, see, like this, and I’m holding it in the tips of my fingers, just as lightly as I can, only just enough so’s the current won’t take it away, and I can feel a little pull if I get one, but not so tightly that he’ll feel a resistance and get suspicious — Look, something’s playing with it now!”

The monofilament was peeling slowly away from his poised fingertips. Two or three feet of it slipped off, and then the movement stopped. The little man lowered his thumb to grip the line again as lightly as a feather.

“Now, he’s really taking it well into his mouth. In a minute he’ll be ready to start swallowing, and then he’ll move on again to look for something else to eat... There he goes... Give him a little more to make sure...” The skinny fingers delicately released more line, then checked it gently. “Now we should have him.”

The handle began cranking, the rod tip nicked up and then bent, and the line sprang straight and taut from it for a second before a galvanized shimmer of silver erupted from an eddy downstream. In a very few seconds more the little man was hoisting his prize bodily onto the decking — it was not much over the legal minimum and couldn’t put up any appreciable struggle.

“But it’s a fish, isn’t it?” said the little man diffidently. “And I was lucky to be able to show you what I mean.”

“You must be a hell of a psychologist,” said the Saint.

“Well, I am about some things.”

The man added the trout to his string but did not put the string back in the water.

“Why don’t you take a turn here?” he said. “It’s a good spot.”

“Thanks, but you had it first.”

“No, really, I’m through. I’ve got all I want for supper, and it’s time I took them home and cleaned them and cooked them.”

He squeezed past the Saint quite decisively, and Simon took his place at the end of the pier and began working out line with false casts. The other stopped as he reached the bank, and out of the corner of an eye Simon saw him put down his rod and his string and squat down to rinse his hands in the river; then the Saint had to concentrate completely on keeping his back cast high and accurately grooved into a narrow gap between the trees behind him, a problem which the salmon-egg psychologist had not had with his spinning tackle. Simon would have been quite childishly delighted if some enchanted trout had risen as if on cue to his first cast and would have settled for any prompt action that would have entitled him to give a return lecture on technique, but by the time he had his fly drifting and sinking where he wanted it, the only audience he was immediately anxious to impress had gone.

About ten minutes and several casts later, on the swing-around, he tied into his best strike of the day. Having dared his luck by coming out with no landing net, he had to beach it after a brief but exhilarating tussle at the shore end of the pier. It was a rainbow which he estimated at almost two pounds — far from a boasting size, but big enough to dwarf anything the egg expert had to show.

After unhooking it and killing it cleanly, he squatted down again to rinse his hands, exactly as the little man had done. And it was as he turned back from this ablution that he saw the wallet.

It lay on the path just a half step off the pier, where anyone who was not purblind, leaving the pier, could hardly have missed it, or if he did could scarcely have failed to trip over it.

Simon Templar picked it up. Of course.

He looked inside it. Inevitably.

It contained remarkably little of the motley miscellanea which most men accumulate in their wallets. There was a driver’s license, an Auto Club card, and an insurance card, all bearing the name of Oliphant Quigg, with an address in San Francisco. The remaining contents were most monotonous, consisting of eleven identical pieces of paper currency, each with a face value of one hundred dollars.

One didn’t have to be a detective to assume that the name of Oliphant Quigg was the private affliction of the Saint’s newest acquaintance, and that the wallet had squeezed out of his hip-pocket when he washed his hands.

Simon Templar suddenly decided that he had done enough fishing for the day. Like Mr Quigg, he had plenty for his own dinner, and the others would keep better in the river than in his icebox, and it would soon be dark anyhow. And to the Saint, much as he might insist that he had retired, people who dropped wallets like that still promised one of the few sports that fascinated him more than fishing.

He stopped by the office to make an inquiry and was not disappointed.

“Yes, he’s staying here,” said the proprietor. “Number fourteen — the end cottage over that way.”

“I found something I think he dropped,” Simon said for explanation.

In the gathering dusk he walked over to the indicated cabin and knocked on the door. When Mr Quigg opened it, Simon was holding up the wallet in front of him. The little man looked blank at first, then appalled. His hand flew to his hip and came back empty and trembling.

“Gosh,” he gasped. “How ever could I — Do come in, won’t you?”

Simon did not need to have his arm twisted. And if the invitation had not been issued he would have doubted his own sanity.

Mr Quigg had taken the wallet and was thumbing shakily through it.

“Your money’s all there, Mr Quigg,” Simon assured him. “I couldn’t help seeing it, of course, when I looked inside to find out who it belonged to. You’re lucky it didn’t fall in the river.”

“Or am I lucky that you’re such an honest man? If you’d kept it, I could never have proved that it didn’t fall in the river.”

“Why didn’t I think of that first?”

The little man fingered out a corner of one of the bills.

“Would you be offended if I—”

“A psychologist like you should know that,” Simon told him reprovingly. “Or do you only know about fish?”

Mr Quigg pushed the bill back and put the wallet away in his pocket.

“Well, at least you won’t refuse a drink?”

“Now you’re talking.”

Mr Quigg went into the tiny kitchen and produced a bottle of Peter Dawson.

“Is this all right?”

“My favorite,” said the Saint, who had followed him in. “Mind if I put this minnow down in your sink while I’m here?”

“Please, make yourself at home, Mr—”

“Tombs.”

“That’s a nice trout, Mr Tombs. Much better than mine. I’m really happy you caught it. Especially happy, now.”

Simon accepted the glass he was handed, lifted it to eye level in a gesture of salute to his host, and said with a smile, “Maybe there’s something to this business about living right, after all.”

“That’s nothing to laugh about,” said the little man earnestly. “If there’s any justice in this world, a truly honest man ought to be specially favored by the gods. There aren’t enough of them so’s it would make a great upset in the ordinary laws of chance. Believe me, sir, I feel quite privileged to have met one like yourself.”

In the Saint’s soul was burgeoning a sensation of bliss almost too ecstatic to be borne. To have encountered a gambit of such classic if corny purity on a New York sidewalk, and to have helped it to develop in some tawdry Broadway bar would have been only a mechanically enjoyable routine. To meet it beside the Rogue River and continue it in a fishing camp cottage gave it the same spice of the miraculous that would have been experienced by a shipwrecked gourmet on discovering that the vessel stranded on the island with him had been laden to the Plimsoll line with a cargo of the finest canned and bottled delicacies that France could export. It gave him a dizzy feeling of being the spoiled pet of a whole brigade of guardian angels to an extent that Mr Quigg’s interpretation did not even begin to justify. But according to the protocol which he had once himself enunciated, he was categorically prohibited from leaping up and down and uttering shrill cries of jubilation. The most he could permit himself at this point was to wriggle modestly. “Oh, hell,” he said, exerting some effort not to ham it into Aw, heck. “Don’t let’s go overboard about this.”

“But I mean it,” said Mr Quigg. “If I only had a friend that I knew was absolutely honest, it’d make all the difference in the world to my life.”

“What sort of highbinders do you have in your circle, Ollie?”

“Just ordinary people. They wouldn’t dream of cheating you out a dollar, but if they had a chance to chisel a few thousands without the slightest risk of getting in trouble I wouldn’t expect them to die before they’d do it.”

Mr Quigg put down his glass and picked up a knife, but it was quickly apparent that the only butchery he intended was to be performed on his fish, which were laid out on a newspaper on the draining board.

“Will you excuse me if I finish this job?” he said, and continued with the cleaning which Simon’s knock had obviously interrupted. He was quick and neat at it. “It’s a crime not to eat trout absolutely fresh.” He pursed his lips in a final survey of his dressed-out catch. “Mmm — this is more than I can eat tonight. I’ve such a small appetite. I think I’ll preserve a couple of them.”

The unorthodox word, combined with the startling contradiction of what he had said only three sentences before, should have been enough to hold anyone’s attention on what he proceeded to do, which proved to be rewardingly extraordinary.

Perched on one of the kitchen chairs was an aluminum coffer which at first sight could have been taken for some kind of portable icebox, roughly cubical in shape and measuring about two feet on any side, until you noticed that it was plugged in to an electric outlet and had a row of dials and switches along a lower panel which suggested a television set with no screen. Then when Mr Quigg opened a door in one side it looked more like an oven. He slipped two trout into a self-sealing plastic bag, and put the bag in the box, and twiddled switches and dials.

Whereupon the cabinet ceased to resemble anything Simon had ever seen except a prop from a Hollywood science-fiction movie. A thin high-pitched humming came from it, and its interior glowed with a weird fluorescence. Violet ribbons of energy like cold, crawling streaks of lightning bridged the inside and writhed up and down between its walls like tortured disembodied snakes. And on the central griddle where Mr Quigg had placed it, the transparent plastic package was bathed in a soft rosy light that seemed to emanate from the trout themselves.

Simon Templar had seen a fine assortment of Contraptions in his time, from transmuters that made gold and diamonds out of a handful of common chemicals, to machines that printed perfect replicas of British banknotes or United States greenbacks as fast as you could turn a handle, but never before had he seen a gizmo that gizzed with such original and soul-satisfying pyrotechnical effects.

“What is that?” he demanded, and did not have to fake a fragment of his yokel’s entrancement.

“It’s my Preservator,” said Mr Quigg matter-of-factly. “I invented it. I couldn’t explain it to you very easily, unless you happen to be very well up on electronics and radiation theory. And then I’d be afraid of telling you too much, perhaps. But it preserves anything you treat with it by total sterilization, without chemicals or refrigeration.” He flicked another switch, the slow fireworks died down, and he withdrew the plastic envelope, from which the pink luminosity had already faded. “You could keep this for months now, anywhere, even in the tropics, and when you opened it those fish would be just as fresh as they are now.”

“No fooling — you’ve tried it?”

“Well, not in the tropics. But here’s something I’ve been keeping just to see how long it would last.” Mr Quigg took from a cupboard another transparent bag in which was sealed a small lettuce cut in half. “This has been down to Los Angeles a couple of times through the San Joaquin Valley, and it was with me in Sacramento for a week, and they were all plenty hot, and it’s never been in a fridge since I treated it. If you didn’t know, wouldn’t you say it could’ve been picked yesterday? But I preserved it last April. Yes, on the eighteenth. Look, you see that strip off the top of a newspaper, with the date on? I sealed that in with it so’s I couldn’t forget.”

Simon could not be so ungracious as to point out that anyone who had thoughtfully hoarded a number of old newspapers could have just as easily sealed a dateline of fifty years ago in with a lettuce packaged yesterday. Instead, he regarded the Contraption again with renewed awe.

“Where could I get one of these?” he asked.

“You couldn’t. It isn’t on the market. As a matter of fact, it isn’t even patented. It probably never will be.”

“But good Lord, man, you’re going to do something about it, aren’t you? Why, an invention like this must be worth a fortune!”

“Yes, I know,” said the inventor sadly. “All the food growers and packers, the trucking firms, the markets... even all the fishing camps like this could use it; it wouldn’t cost as much as a deep freeze, and they could preserve everything their guests caught, and people could take fish and game home wherever they lived without having to bother about keeping it iced... But it wouldn’t do me any good.”

“You mean you’re already in such a high tax bracket that you don’t care?”

“Oh no. I wouldn’t mind that so much. But I do have a problem. Quite a personal one. Somebody would have to handle the Preservator for me as if it were all his own, and I’d have to trust him to kick back some of the profits. That’s what I meant when I said if I only knew a completely honest man — someone like you... But I do know you!” A strange feverish gleam came into the little man’s wistful eyes. “If I only had time to tell you — I mean, I don’t want to bore you — oh, I know it’s too much to hope, but...

“Well, could I possibly ask you to have dinner with me? If you wouldn’t mind contributing your own trout, and you can have my two extras, as well, and I’ve got lots of vegetables and a bottle of Château Fuissé if you like wine, and if you get tired of my troubles I’ll shut up the minute you tell me.”

The Saint smiled sympathetically. The other’s babbling eagerness could not have struck a more responsive chord from his heartstrings. Already he treasured an affection for Mr Oliphant Quigg not unlike that which a tiger might have conceived for an appealing wolf cub, likewise towards dinnertime.

“You’d have to hire a bouncer to throw me out now,” he said with the utmost sincerity. “I love listening to people’s troubles, especially when they sound as unusual as yours.”

Mr Quigg’s story, he found out presently, was not quite as unusual as its advance build-up. In fact, some cynics might have said that it was not particularly unusual at all, in modern America. Mr Quigg was simply a victim of the twentieth-century philosophy, promulgated by a hard core of embattled suffragettes, and made law by a widespread gaggle of gutless jurists in mortal terror of what their own wives would do to them if they opposed it, which proclaims that any female who makes the supreme sacrifice of marrying a man and thus officially granting him the ineffable favors of her body even for a few months is thereby entitled, if they separate for any reason whatever, not only to walk off with a hog’s share of any fortune he may have been able to accumulate in all his preceding years of toil and thrift, but also to clamp an advance lien on a major percentage of anything he may earn for the rest of his life thereafter.

Mr Quigg, during twenty-five years as professor of electrical engineering at such a humble college that Simon had never heard of it, had patented two or three minor gadgets or improvements on standard equipment and had succeeded in licensing his rights for royalties which eventually attained a volume on which, with the addition of a meager pension, he was able to retire in very modest comfort. He had no plans other than to indulge his passion for fishing and to tinker with a few other scientific ideas which he had been gestating — one of which was an entirely new method of food preservation. But a capable and motherly woman of less than forty whom he met one evening in a hotel on Lake Mead, where he had gone for some bass fishing, soon remedied that deficiency of purpose, and before he fully realized what was happening he was married.

Within a year he had discovered that his wife was so capable that she had taken complete control of their finances, allowing him two dollars a week pocket money, and so motherly that she treated him like a naughty child in need of stern discipline. She considered fishing messy, stupid, and a waste of time and money: when they wanted to eat fish, they could buy it at the market in a minute, and in the long run it wouldn’t cost a fraction of what he’d been spending on tackle, bait, licenses, trips to remote places, lodgings, and boat rentals. The experiments which used to happily clutter his living room were banished to a bleak cellar, but she did not dispute their potential as money-makers and in fact upbraided him for approaching them so casually: she decided that only by putting in a proper working day of eight hours, six days a week, could he expect to get anywhere with his projects and make a real fortune, and she was going to see that he did it.

When at long last he rebelled enough to go into a bar with an old friend he ran into on his way to the store where she had sent him to buy some groceries, and stayed out for more than two hours, and came home without the money or the supplies but drunk enough to tell her that he would as soon be dead as shut up in the basement for six days a week and not even allowed to go fishing on Sunday, she fled sobbing to the nearest neighbor and was next heard from through an attorney, who wanted to know if Mr Quigg was at least prepared to give her her freedom in a gentlemanly way, after all she had done for him. Mr Quigg, who was in a slight haze of hangover, but surprisingly without remorse, agreed that he would chivalrously refrain from contesting charges of persistent drunkenness and mental cruelty. He was too relieved at the prospect of the simple solution offered by this minor sacrifice to pay much attention to the papers he was asked to sign: it was September, and the steelhead were reported thick in Klamath Glen, and he had moved some of the works of the Preservator into the kitchen and had already had a new inspiration about it while waiting for his breakfast eggs to boil.

About a month later Mr Quigg read in the paper that his wife had been granted an interlocutory decree, and that in consideration of her ordeal the judge had awarded her the community property, their savings account, their Government bonds, the car which she had already taken, and Mr Quigg’s patents together with contracts appertaining and royalties accruing thereto, plus fifty per cent of the proceeds of any invention which he might have started to work on at any time prior to the divorce.

“In other words,” said the little man, “I was left with the lease on an old house, a lot of shabby old furniture, my old fishing kit and some tools, and my pension from the college.”

“They can’t do that to you,” Simon protested.

“Oh, but they can. I went to another lawyer, when it was too late, and even he told me they could. And they had. They even get half of anything I may ever do from here on. What chance would I have of proving that anything I might invent tomorrow didn’t have its roots in something I worked at during the first fifty years of my life?”

“All the same, chum, this could be worth millions. And even half a million—”

Mr Quigg shook his head.

“I’m a funny guy. I don’t get mad very easily, but when I get mad I can stay mad for a long time. I know now that I was taken for a sucker. And I’m just sore enough that I’ll never write it off to experience and let bygones be bygones. That woman and her shyster lawyer took me for everything I had when she left me, and I can’t do a thing about it. But I can see to it that she doesn’t get half a million more. I’d rather scratch along on a pittance for the rest of my life than give her another nickel. Were you wondering about the eleven hundred dollars in my wallet?”

“Well—”

“They’re what’s left of fifteen hundred I sold another little invention for. If I’d handled it properly, it’d probably have paid me five thousand a year for life. But then there’d’ve been contracts, and checks, and records, and I couldn’t’ve kept from giving her half of it. I preferred to give the idea away, let someone else take the credit for inventing it, and settle for fifteen hundred dollars cash under the table. Do you blame me?”

“If that’s the way you feel about it, it’s your privilege,” said the Saint. “But it seems a shame about the Preservator.”

Mr Quigg poured himself another glass of wine. They had finished eating by then, and he had become progressively less inhibited with each sip that washed down the meal.

“It is. You don’t know the offers I’ve turned down. Why, only the other day... But it’s out of the question. That’s one invention she always knew I was working on. I could never get away with it. Unless — so we’re back where we started — unless I had a completely honest friend.”

“What could he do?”

“I’d sell him all rights to the Preservator,” said Mr Quigg. “It’d have to be a bona fide deal, for something that might look like a genuine price. Say ten thousand dollars. All right, she’d get her half of that. But this friend would make a fortune. And I’d have to trust him to slip a fair share of it back to me, without any contract or lien or anything, in cash handouts when I asked for it, so’s there’d be no record and she couldn’t get her claws on it.”

“I see,” said the Saint. “You’d be absolutely at his mercy.”

“And how many people could you be sure wouldn’t fall for a temptation like that? Unless it was someone like yourself. Now you know what I was getting at. I can’t presume on our few hours’ acquaintance, I know. I’m pipe-dreaming. But if only you were interested, what a difference it would make to my life!”

Simon reached for what was left of the Château Fuissé with a smile that did not have to worry about how thinly it veiled its excitement.

“Don’t throw that pipe away yet, Ollie,” he said. “I’m going to think it over.”

It was another hour before he could plausibly take his leave, on the valid excuse that he had been up since before dawn and wanted to be out on the river at dawn again the next morning, but the truth was that he was desperately afraid of casting some inadvertent damper on Mr Quigg’s pathetically incoherent optimism, and after a while his facial muscles began to ache.

The fishing was still slow at the start of the next day, but he took two nice eating-size trout before the sun was high enough to strike the water and he decided that he might as well knock off for breakfast. As he was walking back along the higher ground towards his cabin, Mr Irving Jardane came blundering up the bank, looking more than ever like a piscatorial pack mule, and trudged beside him.

“I see you’re still doing okay,” observed the transport tycoon aggrievedly. “And I’m still skunked. I don’t get it. What the hell do these trout want, anyway?”

“What are you offering them?” Simon asked.

“Nothing but the best. I had a chap who makes ’em design ’em specially for me.” Mr Jardane tore off his trick hat and stared at its multi-colored adornments with baffled indignation. “Did you ever see anything prettier? What do you catch ’em on?”

Simon reversed his rod and exhibited the drab and tattered fly on the end of his leader, hooked into a keeper ring near the butt.

“This.”

“That?” The other peered at the relic with barely concealed disgust. “What d’you call that?”

“A Gray Hackle — much the worse for wear.”

“You mean they bite on that? If I were a fish—”

“But you aren’t,” Simon pointed out gently. “Those hat trimmings of yours look beautiful to you, but to the trout around here they just don’t suggest anything edible. This tattered piece of fuzz makes its mouth water — if a fish’s mouth can do that. You have to see it through the eyes of a trout.”

“Dad blast it,” growled Mr Jardane, “you must be another fish psychologist. Like a fellow I got talking to on the pier the other day.”

“A little wispy guy with a theory about salmon eggs?”

“That’s him. Name of Quigg. A genius, too. But crazy. Got an invention that couldn’t help making millions, but he won’t do a thing about it.”

“He showed you his Preservator?”

“You too? Sure he did. We got talking about my business, and some of my problems, and it came up. I tell you, it’s sensational. Revolutionary. If anyone else was working on anything like it, I’d know. I have to keep up with these things in my business. Hell, I offered him three thousand dollars just for the right to test it myself for three months, with an option to take it over on a royalty basis with a twenty-thousand-a-year minimum guarantee, and he turned me down flat.”

“I got the impression that I could make a deal with him,” Simon said.

By then they had walked as far as the Saint’s cabin, but this could not have been responsible for bringing Mr Jardane to such an abrupt halt. He scrutinized the Saint with a cold deliberation that was supremely unconcerned with its rudeness.

“If you can, you’re a lot better talker than I am,” he said. “But if you do, I’ll make you the same offer.”

“What would you do with the Preservator?”

“Make it, man! Make it and sell it. I manufacture my own truck refrigeration equipment already. I’m set up. I’ll change over to this. And after I’ve outfitted my own fleet, I’ll expand. I’ve got all the contacts. Let me worry about the merchandising. You just send in your auditor every year to make sure I haven’t short-changed you.”

“I’ll see if I can talk to Quigg again after breakfast,” said the Saint.

He found Mr Quigg contentedly reading a science-fiction magazine, but cordially willing to be interrupted, and came to his point without much ado.

“Certainly I meant it,” Mr Quigg said. “Why should I have changed my opinion of you overnight? But I’m a little overwhelmed. It’s so much more than I ever really dared to hope for. You are serious?”

“I’ll give you exactly what you asked for,” said the Saint most seriously. “Would you care to put it in writing?”

“By all means.”

The little man bumbled around the cottage, found some paper in a drawer, and sat down and wrote thoughtfully but decisively. Then he handed the sheet to Simon.

“Will that do?”

(signed)

“It should take care of everything for now,” said the Saint.

“Mr Jardane might want something much more elaborate,” said the little man calmly. “But whatever you need to satisfy anyone’s lawyers, I’ll sign it.”

Simon’s eyebrows went up.

“How did you know I’d talked to Jardane?”

“Oh, so you have? I was guessing. But I’m not surprised. And believe me, I don’t mind a bit. You ought to be able to make a good deal with him. And I’d rather make you a present of half the profits than pay them to that greedy woman and her conniving lawyer. Besides, you’ll be doing something to earn your share. I think Mr Jardane is a pretty hardboiled business man, which is why I couldn’t be at all ready to trust him with the same proposition that I made to you. But you strike me as being well able to take care of yourself. Good luck to you!”

Simon went back to Mr Jardane’s cottage and displayed the paper. The haulage hot-shot glared at it for long enough to have read it four times and then transferred his incredulous scowl directly to the Saint.

“D’you mind if I ask Quigg if he really signed this?” he demanded. “Because I’m going to, whatever you say.”

“Go ahead,” said the Saint generously.

Mr Jardane went out like a fire-eating lion and came back in less than ten minutes like a somewhat dyspeptic lamb.

“Okay,” he grumbled, handing back the document. “You must be a terrific operator. Wish I had you working for me. But I know when I’m licked. All right. So you’ve got this Preservator sewed up. My offer still goes. Yes or no?”

“Mr Quigg put his offer in writing,” said the Saint mildly, laying down the magazine with which he had been passing the time. “Would you do the same?”

“Certainly. I was leaving this afternoon, anyhow. I’ll see my attorney first thing tomorrow and put him to work drawing up a contract.”

Simon looked disappointed.

“Fine. But I was thinking of calling a friend of mine at Westinghouse this evening—”

“But before I go,” Mr Jardane continued firmly, “I’ll rough out a preliminary agreement myself that we can sign.”

“If you insist,” said the Saint, looking more unsubtle every minute. “But then some money would have to change hands, to make it legal, wouldn’t it?”

“I’ll give you my check for three thousand dollars at the same time.”

Simon stood up.

“To return the compliment you paid me when you verified that Ollie had actually signed this offer, would you mind if I said I’d be much more impressed with cash? After all, I don’t really know anything about you except what you’ve told me. But there should be someone in Grant’s Pass that your trucks do business with, or you could go to a bank and have them call your bank back home for authority to cash you a check.”

Mr Jardane glowered at him for a second or two, a picture of grudging admiration.

“I bet you were a tough and nasty investigator,” he said. “But I can take it. Business is business, God bless it. I’ll get you your cash. Don’t go away — and don’t call Westinghouse, or anyone else.”

Shortly afterwards, through a window of his own cottage, Simon saw the Cadillac drive away. After it had gone, he made unhurried but efficient preparations for his own departure. He packed all his personal things and a box of such supplies that were not immediately expendable. He moved his car around to the back of the cabin, and loaded his suitcase and the box into the trunk through the back door, where his activity was cut off from chance observation from almost any angle, including that of Mr Quigg’s cottage at the other end of the scattered colony. When he had finished, there was nothing he would have to take out of the cabin except the fishing tackle that was still picturesquely littered around the living room. It saddened him somewhat to have to cut his stay so abruptly short. But business was business, as Mr Jardane had observed, and even a Saint couldn’t be sanctimonious enough to snub it when it jumped into his lap; there were immediate compensations, and there would be other rivers to fish.

Presently he fried the last of his bacon and cooked his remaining trout in the fat, with a squeeze of lemon and a sprinkling of chopped almonds which he had left out. He was finishing a glass of Dry Sack and getting ready to feast when Mr Jardane drove by again and almost at once was knocking on the door.

“You’re just in time,” Simon said hospitably. “Would you care to join me in some truite amandine? Save me from being a glutton.”

“Thanks, but I’ve got to be on my way if I want to get home tonight. I had a sandwich in town while I was waiting for a public stenographer to type this up. I dictated it to her while I was waiting for this bank to get in touch with my bank.” Mr Jardane flourished a thin sheaf of papers. “Read it, sign it, and I’ll give you your money.”

Simon turned the oven on at its lowest and put his lunch away to keep warm while he read one of the copies of his prospective partner’s composition. He had to admit that there was nothing slipshod about Irving Jardane. This was no second-class operator who would risk botching a good thing by skimping on some detail, no matter how tiresome the chore might be. The “preliminary agreement” that he had drafted was well thought out, comprehensive, and painstakingly phrased in the language of a man who had made some study of contracts: it had a competent and authentic ring that would have impressed even a genuine business man. At the same time, perhaps even more skillfully, it avoided any legalistic hedging which might have seemed to conceal pitfalls and thus could have led to prolonged argument.

“It seems very straightforward,” said the Saint, and quickly signed all four copies.

Mr Jardane countersigned one of them, gave it back, and put the other three in his pocket. Then he produced a roll of currency and counted off thirty hundred-dollar bills.

“That ought to make it legal enough for you,” he remarked, perhaps a trifle sarcastically. “Now, you’ve got my address in your copy of our agreement. Let me hear from you as soon as you’ve got Quigg’s signature on a proper sales contract. An outright sale like that is simple enough that any local lawyer could write it. Get it done before he changes his mind or some men in white coats pick him up. And send me a notarized copy of his receipt for the money you pay him — before I go any further. I want to be sure you’ve made it legal with him.”

“I’ll get rolling right after lunch, Irving old chum,” Simon promised him.

He ate his meal with leisured enjoyment, and during the course of it he watched Mr Jardane stuff the Cadillac with his impedimenta from the next cottage and drive away. The Cadillac, he thought, had been a nice touch too — there was no other car that conveyed such an air of solid affluence to the sucker type who forgot that all the best U-Drive outfits had them for rent by the day for that very reason.

He washed up tidily and then openly carried his fishing tackle out to his own less ostentatious wagon. He was still wearing the morning’s shabby but comfortable fishing togs, and to anyone who might have been keeping watch on him — such as Mr Quigg — he would only have looked as if he were preparing to wet a line farther up or down the river that evening, not to remove himself indefinitely from those parts. But beyond any dispute, he reasoned as he let off the handbrake and toed the accelerator, he was getting rolling. It had always given him a perversely puerile delight to look certain overconfident individuals squarely in the eye and tell them a literal truth which they were incapable of appreciating. He was pleased to think that he had been especially scrupulous throughout this episode.

A more conventional courtesy, however, obliged him to stop at the camp office on his way out.

“I’m on my way, Ben,” he told the proprietor. “I know I’m paid up through next weekend, but forget it, with my compliments. Maybe I’ll take it out on you next time I stop here.”

“There may not be another time,” said the other glumly. “If that new highway goes through as it’s supposed to, we mightn’t be here next year. It’s only a question of time, anyway. What’s the matter? Is anything wrong?”

“Everything is gorgeously perfect,” said the Saint. “I’ve had a wonderful old-fashioned workout, and there’s nothing I like better. Aside from letting you know you’ve got an unexpected vacancy, I wanted to thank you for keeping quiet about my real name. I hope you didn’t have to tell too many lies about Sebastian Tombs. That really is a ridiculous name.”

“Mr Quigg did ask me a few questions, but I told him I didn’t know any answers. You must have made a big hit with him.”

“He may be disillusioned next time you talk to him. And if he is, please let him in on my secret. The same goes for a white-haired slob with a hired Cadillac, using the name of Irving Jardane and claiming to be the head man of Transamerican Transport. If I may drop a friendly flea in your ear, I’d suggest that you didn’t cash any of his checks, if he ever comes here again — which may be unlikely.”

The owner frowned sharply.

“You’re talking about Irv Jardane — the fellow in the next cottage to yours?”

“None other. A postgraduate psychologist, although maybe not quite so smooth as Brother Quigg.”

“I don’t quite get you, but I know he can be pretty gruff at times—”

“What else do you know about him — aside from what he wrote on the card when he registered?”

The proprietor blinked in a shocked but rather puzzled way.

“He was a classmate of mine in college. Worked his own way through — the real hard-driving kind. I watched him start with one truck that he drove himself, and build up that Transamerican Transport system, while I was in business in Portland. He’s been coming here for the last five years, ever since I retired and bought this place.”

An oddly empty sensation lodged in Simon Templar’s stomach like a bullet and expanded hollowly. He lighted a cigarette, moving rather slowly and stiffly, while a clammy chill stroked his skin into goose-pimples.

“Thanks, Ben,” he said at length. “You just saved me from pulling the most fabulous boner of all my life. Some day I may tell you both how gorgeously ghastly it could have been, but right now I don’t feel strong enough. However, I just changed my mind again, and I’m going to stay out the week in the cottage.”

“Whatever you say,” answered the other agreeably, if in some pardonable fog.

Simon drove back to his cabin, unloaded his gear again, and took from his suitcase the checkbook of a Swiss bank in which, for many obvious reasons, he had for some time found it convenient to carry an account in the name of Sebastian Tombs. He wrote a check for ten thousand dollars and made another pilgrimage to the cottage at the other end of the camp.

“Your bank should be able to get this cleared by airmail and cable within three days,” he said. “Meanwhile we’ll get some professional to draw up whatever you ought to sign, and as soon as you can give me a valid receipt, I’ll take everything to Portland myself and get Jardane started. The sooner he gets going, the sooner you start collecting. For the time being, here’s the three thousand option money he was talking about.”

The little man peered at the crumpled cash mistily through his bifocals.

“But according to our verbal agreement, half of this is yours.”

“You know how you feel about your ex-wife?” said the Saint lightly. “That’s how I feel about tax collectors. I’m going to do this for free. Call it my contribution to the cause of the downtrodden male, which wouldn’t normally be a deductible item. Or a sop to my own conscience. Just do me a favor and stop dropping your wallet and telling the story of your life to anyone who picks it up. You might make some innocent con man feel like a perfect sucker.”

“I don’t understand this at all,” said Mr Quigg.