The Saint and Mr. Teal

Chapter I

THEY hanged Galbraith Stride at eight o'clock on the morning of the 22nd of November.

They came in and strapped his hands together, and led him out to the narrow whitewashed shed that was to be his last glimpse of the world — walking very fast, like a man who has made up his mind to see an unpleasant appointment through as quickly as possible. They stood him on the chalked T in the centre of the trap, and drew the white cap down over his bald head and his pale frightened eyes, till the only feature of his face that could be seen was the thin twitching mouth under his little grey moustache. They settled the rope round his neck, with the knot just under his left ear; and the executioner stepped back to the lever that would send him into eternity.

They asked him if he had anything to say before he paid the extreme penalty of the law, and the tip of his tongue slipped once over those twitching lips.

"Get it over," he said; and with that they dropped him.

All this was after many other things had happened, and a lady had thanked the Saint for assistance.

Chapter II

LAURA BERWICK came into the Saint's life unasked, uninvited, and unintroduced; which was what one might have expected of her. She had brown hair, brown eyes, and a chin that was afraid of no dragons — not even of an outlaw so notorious and unpopular as Simon Templar. And as far as the Saint was concerned, any girl with her face and figure could have come into his life unasked, uninvited, and unintroduced every day of the week, and he would have had nothing but praise for the beneficence of a Providence that provided surprises of such quality. He was able to frame that appraisement of her physical perfections within a bare few minutes of meeting her for the first time — which in this case happens to be a far more respectable statement than it sounds.

Simon Templar had left London. The wanderlust that would never let him be still for long had filled him again with dreams of wild adventurous voyaging after an exceptionally short rest in the city that was as near home to him as anywhere else in the world. Partly be cause his rest had been so extraordinarily unrestful. In a very few months, London had loaded down his life with such a plentiful supply of excitement that he had made up his mind to take wing again promptly, before the standard of lawlessness and unrest depreciated. The house that he had chosen when he first returned was still in the hands of interior decorators who were struggling to repair the damage that can only be done by a powerful bomb exploded in a small room, and after viewing the progress of their efforts he had decided to terminate his lease and take up residence at the Dorchester for the remainder of his stay. An expensive luxury, but one which he considered he had earned. Or, if he hadn't earned it, he would doubtless contrive to do so before he left… And then — since this was in that memorable year when the sun shone upon England — the thermometer hopped back on top of the ninety mark, and after two days of it the Saint tore off his coat and tie and went forth into the West End swearing a quiet sirocco of wrath whose repercussions were recorded at Kew.

"Civilization be damned," said the Saint, in one of his few lucid moments. "I saw an English Gentleman in Piccadilly yesterday. With great daring he had removed his coat, waistcoat, collar, and tie, and he was walking about in a flannel shirt and a hideous pair of braces striped with his old school colours. Under the neck of his shirt and the roll-up of his sleeves you could see the edges of his abominable woollen vest. I refuse to discuss in detail the occult reasonings which may have made him ever put on the superfluous garments that he was carrying over his arm. But when you consider the abysmal chasms of imbecility personified in that perspiring oaf, and then realize that he was only a pale pink renegade — that a real English Gentleman and Public School Man would have died before he removed a single garment — then you know that the next deluge is long overdue."

He had a lot more to say, much of which would have made certain seaside borough councillors who spend most of their time deliberating on the minimum length of sleeve that may without peril to the public morality be permitted on bathing costumes foam at the mouth with indignation. He said it all very forcefully, using much of the language which by similarly coherent standards is judged to be harmless to an audience of three thousand men, women, and children congregated in a theatre, but definitely corrupting to the same audience if they happen to be congregated in a cinema. Also he travelled as fast and far as he possibly could on the strength of it, which perhaps has more to do with this story.

The Scilly Islands are not quite at the end of the world; but Simon Templar went there because a letter came to him which quite innocently told him something that he could scarcely ignore.

"We have about the usual number of visitors for the time of year," wrote Mr. Smithson Smith. "They disappear just as they always do, and St. Mary's still seems uncrowded… The Scillonian went aground in a fog the other day, but they got her off quite safely at high tide… They caught some Frenchmen picking up their pots inside the three-mile limit on Sunday, and fined them £80… There are a couple of fine yachts anchored over at Tresco — one of them belongs to an Egyptian, a man called Abdul Osman. I've been wondering if he's the man I heard about once when I was in Assuan…"

There were six pages of local gossip and general reminiscence, of the kind that Mr. Smithson Smith felt moved to write about three times a year. They had met in a dispute about a camel many years ago outside Ismailia; and the Saint, who was no letter writer, responded at equally vague intervals. But the name of Abdul Osman was not strange to him, and he had no doubts about its associations.

There was a glint in his eye when he had finished reading.

"We're going to the Isles of Scilly, where the puffins go to breed," he said poetically; and Patricia Holm looked at him with an air of caution.

"I'm not a puffin," she said.

"Nevertheless, we'll go," said the Saint.

It may sound flippant to say that if Simon Templar had not shared some of the dim instincts of the puffin, Laura Berwick would undoubtedly have been drowned; but that is nothing but the truth.

She was sailing much too close to the wind — quite literally. Simon Templar saw it from the beginning, and had wondered whether it was pure daring or sheer foolishness. He was perched up on a comparatively smooth ledge of rock, sunning himself in a sublime vacancy of relaxation, and thinking of nothing in particular. The cool waters of the Atlantic were swishing and gurgling among the boulders a dozen feet below him, countering the pale brazen blue of the sky with a translucent intensity of colour that was as rich as anything in the Mediterranean: he had bathed in them for a few minutes, feeling the sticky heat of his walk dissolving under their icy impact with a gratitude that touched the foundations of utter physical contentment: then he had climbed up to his chosen ledge to let the sun dry his body. He wondered, lazily, whether the R.S.P.C.A. would have its views about the corruptive influence of his costume on the morals of a score of seagulls that were squabbling raucously over a scrap of food that had been left in a rocky pool by the falling tide; and he wondered also, with the same peaceful laziness, what strange discontent it was that had made Man of his own free will turn his back on the life that was always his, and take himself with his futile insatiable ambitions to the stifling cities from which the escape to his own inheritance seemed so fantastic and impossible. And out of lazily half-closed eyes he watched the white sailing dinghy dancing over the swell. Too close to the wind — much too close…

It all happened in a flash, with the suddenness that every experienced yachtsman knows and labours to avoid. The breeze was baffling, switching around six points of the compass in strong gusts that scraped little raw patches of white foam off the tops of the ponderous rollers. The girl stood up and tried to reach something forward, steadying the tiller with one hand as she leaned away from it. The wind shifted round another point and blew a vicious puff at the flapping canvas, and the mainsail swung across with a sharp crack. The boom seemed to catch the girl on the side of the head, and she went over the side with a splash.

Simon stood up, watching for her to come up and swim back to the boat; but she didn't rise again.

It was not a particularly sensational rescue, as rescues go. The dinghy was only about thirty yards from the shore, and the Saint was a fast swimmer. He found her in a few moments and towed her after the boat. The fitful breeze had broken down short-windedly, and it was fairly easy. Simon was able to haul her on board and slacken the sheet before it blew again; then the girl moved, coughing and choking, and the Saint slipped hurriedly over the side again.

She rubbed the side of her head tenderly; and then she opened her eyes and saw his tanned face smiling down at her, with a pair of brown forearms braced over the gunwale.

"What happened?" she asked dizzily.

"You jibed," answered a dispassionate Saint. "A bad show — and not to be encouraged in a real wind."

It was obvious that the power of resenting criticism had been temporarily bumped and soaked out of her — an indicative symptom which might profitably be remembered by harassed husbands who take their spouses for holidays by the sea.

"Where did you come from?"

"Off a rock," said the Saint.

She coughed, and choked again with a grimace.

"Excuse me if I spit," she said.

The Saint excused her. She did it to windward, which was not too successful. Simon regarded her sadly.

"You're new to this, aren't you?" he said mildly.

"You've got to begin sometime," she said defiantly.

"I've had a few lessons from one of the men, and I thought I'd like to try it by myself. Nobody was using the dinghy, so I just took it."

"There's only one policeman in the Scilly Isles," murmured Simon, "so if you lie low you may get away with it."

"Oh, I didn't steal it. It belongs to the yacht."

Simon raised his eyebrows.

"Have you got a yacht?"

"My stepfather has. The Claudette. We're lying over at Tresco."

The line of black-etched eyebrows seemed to harden fractionally.

"Near Abdul Osman's?"

"Why — how did you know?"

"Sort of bush telegraph," said the Saint. "It's amazing how the news travels in these wild parts."

It was during some of this conversation that he was able to review the artistic proportions of her body; for she was dressed in nothing more than a bathing costume in the modern style, consisting largely of entrances for the priceless ultra-violet ray.

"Are you determined to stay where you are?" she inquired presently; and the Saint smiled.

"Not permanently," he said. "But my bathing costume is even more modern than yours. You interrupted a lovely sunbath à l'atlemande. However, if you like to stay here for a minute I'll swim back and fetch some clothes."

He slid down into the water without waiting for his suggestion to be accepted, and made for the shore again, cutting a clean line through the water and leaving a wake behind. He returned on his back, one hand holding a bundle of shirt, trousers, and shoes high and dry in the air.

"I was born without shame," he said, heaving the bundle over the stern. "But if you feel bashful you can go forward and talk to the fish while I use your towel."

"I suppose you saved my life," said the girl, staring with intense concentration at a completely empty horizon, while the boat rocked under her as he pulled himself on board.

"There is no charge," said the Saint.

He towelled himself rapidly, and pulled on his trousers; then he set himself to bring the dinghy round and trim her on a straight course back towards Tresco. The girl turned round and watched his easy manoeuvres enviously. It was done with an effortless confidence that seemed no trouble at all; and he settled himself at the tiller and smiled at her again out of that rather reckless brown face. She saw challenging blue eyes gleaming with a ready mockery, wiry muscles that rippled under a skin like brown satin; sensed a personality that had no respect for polite conventions. She knew that the hint of antagonism that had infected her was due to nothing but her own feeling of foolishness, and knew that he knew she knew.

"I shan't tell," he said, and his words fitted in with her thoughts so uncannily that for a moment longer she had to continue looking at him.

"My stepfather might want to know where I picked you up," she said.

"That's true," Simon admitted, and said no more until he had run the dinghy neatly alongside the rather excessively magnificent-looking yacht that was riding in the New Grimsby channel.

He made the boat fast to the gangway and helped the girl out. One of the hands had noticed their arrival, and there was a middle-aged gentleman in white flannels waiting for them on the deck. He wore a yachting cap and a blue reefer jacket with a vague air of uneasiness, as if at every moment he were expecting some rude urchin to utter shrill comments on his pretensions to the uniform.

"Where have you been, Laura?" he demanded unnecessarily.

"Out in the dinghy," said the girl, no less unnecessarily, but with a certain impish satisfaction.

The man looked round at the Saint with a kind of restrained impatience, as though his presence had been imposed as a deliberate obstacle to the development of some plain speaking that was definitely called for.

"This hero has just saved my life," said Laura, also looking at the Saint. "Hero, this is my stepfather, Mr. Stride."

"Ha!" said Mr. Stride intelligently. "Hum!"

His eyes absorbed the Saint's appearance dubiously — they were small eyes, rather surprisingly sharp when they looked at you. Simon was still only wearing his shirt in a haphazard way — he had flung it carelessly over his shoulders and knotted the sleeves loosely under his chin — and he looked quite disreputable and quite happy about it. Mr. Stride groped hesitantly for his notecase.

"I got knocked overboard," said the girl. "I did something silly with the sails, and the boom hit me on the head—"

"It might have happened to anyone," said the Saint airily — he had never blushed over a lie in his life. "A sudden squall can make a lot of trouble for any boat, and you get plenty of them around here."

"Ha!" said Mr. Stride. His sharp eyes ran once up the Saint's lean, poiseful length thoughtfully; but at the sound of the Saint's voice he had let go his wallet as if it had grown red-hot in his fingers. "Ha!" said Mr. Stride. He tugged at his grey moustache. "Very lucky that you saw the accident, Mr.—"

Simon elegantly ignored the invitation to supply his name.

"We were just going to have lunch, Mr. — " said Stride, dangling the bait again. "Won't you stay?"

"That's awfully kind of you," murmured the Saint, and thought that Mr. Stride would have been more cordial if he had refused.

He proceeded to put on his shirt, with a calm indifference to his host's emotions that would have been boorish if it had been a shade less transparently innocent; and as he did so he was glancing over the other ships that were anchored within a hundred yards of the Claudette. There were a couple of French fishing smacks, broad-beamed sea boats, with high bows and low sterns, held idly into the wind by their great rust-red sails. Beyond them was a superb 200-ton Diesel yacht with a sweet line of clipper bow: Simon could read the name painted there — Luxor. Beside the wheel-house Simon could see a man focussing a pair of binoculars, and he knew that it was the Claudette that was the object of his attention.

"A lovely boat," said Stride purringly.

"Lovely," agreed the Saint. "You have to be a very successful man to own a ship like that — or even a ship like yours, Mr. Stride."

The other shot one of his surprisingly sharp glances at the unruffled young man beside him.

"Hum," he assented mechanically; but he was spared the necessity of finding some suitable amplification of his answer by the arrival of a white-coated steward with a tray of glasses, followed by what appeared to be the remainder of his guests.

These consisted of a pleasant-faced youngster of about twenty-five, with a diligently suppressed crinkle in his fair hair, and a sleek and saturnine man of indeterminate age whose coat fitted very tightly to his waist and whose hair waved unashamed in faultless undulations that nature unaided could scarcely have made so symmetrical. The fair-haired youngster's name was Toby Halidom, and his solicitude for Laura Berwick's complete recovery from the effects of her adventure seemed to account satisfactorily for the engagement ring which appeared on her finger when she had powdered her nose and changed for lunch. The sleek and saturnine one was introduced as Mr. Almido, private secretary to Mr. Stride; he spoke little, and when he did so it was with a lisping accent that was certainly no more English than his clothes.

Mr. Stride swallowed his cocktail in silence and led the way below almost abruptly. His lack of festive geniality, remarkable in a man whose stepdaughter had so recently been saved from a watery grave, continued for fully half the meal; but the Saint was unabashed. And then, just as surprisingly for anyone who had begun to accept his taciturnity, he began to thaw. He thawed so much that by the time the dessert was placed on the table he was inquiring into the Saint's plans with something approaching affability.

"Are you staying long?" he asked.

"Until I'm tired of absorbing Vitamin D, probably," said the Saint. "I have no plans."

"I always thought the south of France was the favourite resort of sunbathers," remarked Mr. Stride, with a show of interest in which only an ear that was listening for it could have discerned the veiled point. "I think, if that were my object, I should be inclined to go there rather than risk the uncertainties of the British climate. I'm sure that would be wiser."

"Ah, but even there they make you wear some clothes," said the Saint ingenuously. "It always annoys me to see myself in my bath looking as if I were wearing a ridiculous pair of transparent white pants. Here I can find a nice piece of coast all to myself and acquire the same beautiful colour all over."

Mr. Toby Halidom, who was wearing an Old Harrovian tie, looked faintly shocked; but Mr. Stride was unmoved.

He accompanied Simon onto the deck, with Laura Berwick, when the Saint excused himself as soon as coffee had been served. One of the men, he said, would take Mr. Hum Ha back to St. Mary's in the motor dinghy; and while the boat was being brought round Simon glanced across again to the Luxor. A seaman was standing on the deck, looking towards them, and as Simon came into view the man turned and spoke through a hatch to someone below. A moment later the man who had watched the Saint before came up the companion and adjusted his binoculars again.

"I hope we shall see some more of you," said Mr. Stride, standing by the gangway. "Come and pay us a call whenever you like."

"I should love to," murmured the Saint, just as politely; and then, with such a smooth transition that the effect of it was like a gunshot, he said: "I didn't know Abdul Osman was short-sighted."

Galbraith Stride went white, as if the blood had been drained from his face by a vacuum pump.

"Do you know Mr. Osman?" he asked, with an effort.

"Fairly well," said the Saint casually. "I branded him on both cheeks five years ago, and it must have cost him no end of money in plastic surgeons to put his face right again. If anyone had done that to me I shouldn't have to look at him twice through field glasses to be sure who it was."

"Very interesting," said Galbraith Stride slowly. "Very interesting." He held out his hand. "Well, good-bye, Mr. — er — hum."

"Templar," said the Saint. "Simon Templar. And thanks so much for the lunch."

He shook the proffered hand cordially and went down to the boat; and he was so happy that he wanted to sing to himself all the way back to St. Mary's.

Chapter III

"IF," said Patricia Holm, "that was supposed to be another of your famous Exercises in Tact—"

"But what else could it have been?" protested the Saint. "If I hadn't used extraordinary tact, I shouldn't have been invited to lunch; and that would have meant I'd have missed a display of caviare, lobster mayonnaise, and dry champagne that no man with a decent respect for his stomach could resist — not to mention a first-hand knowledge of the geography of Stride's boat—"

"And by dinnertime," said Patricia, "she'll be fifty miles away, with the Luxor racing her."

Simon shook his head.

"Not if I know Abdul Osman. The surgeons may have refashioned his face, but there are scars inside him that he will never forget… I should have had to scrape an acquaintance with Laura some time, and that accident made it so beautifully easy."

"I thought we were coming here for a holiday," said Patricia; and the Saint grinned and went in search of Mr. Smithson Smith.

Mr. Smithson Smith was the manager of Tregarthen's, which is one of the three hotels with which the island of St. Mary's is provided. Simon Templar, whose taste in hotels could be satisfied by nothing less lavish than palaces like the Dorchester, failing which he usually plunged to the opposite extreme, had declined an invitation to stay there, and had billeted himself in a house in the village, where he had a private sitting room thrown in with the best of home-cooked meals for a weekly charge that would have maintained him in an attic at the Dorchester for about five minutes. At Tregarthen's, however, he could stay himself with draught Bass drawn from the wood, and this was one of the things of which he felt in need.

The other thing was a few more details of local gossip, with which Mr. Smithson Smith might also be able to provide him.

It was then half-past three in the afternoon; but by a notable oversight on the part of the efficient legislators who framed that unforgettable Defense of the Realm Act which has for so long been Britain's bulwark against the horrors of an invasion of foreign tourists, the Scilly Islands were omitted from the broad embrace of that protection, and it is still lawful to drink beer at almost any hour at which a man can reasonably raise a thirst. As Simon entered the long glass-fronted veranda overlooking the bay, he naturally expected to find it packed to suffocation with sodden islanders wallowing in the decadent excesses from which a beneficent government had not been thoughtful enough to protect them; but such (as the unspeakable newspapers say, in what they apparently believe to be the English language) was not the case. In fact, the only occupant of the bar was Mr. Smithson Smith himself, who was making out bills beside an open window.

"Why — good-afternoon, Templar. What can I do for you?"

"A pint of beer," murmured the Saint, sinking into a chair. "Possibly, if my thirst holds, two pints. And one for yourself if you feel like it."

Mr. Smithson Smith disappeared into his serving cubicle and returned with a brimming glass. He excused himself from joining in the performance.

"I'd rather leave it till the evening, if you don't mind," he said with a smile. "What have you been doing today?"

He was a thin, mild-mannered man with sandy grey hair, a tiny moustache, and an extraordinary gentle voice; and it was a strange thing that he was only one of many men in those islands who were more familiar with the romantic cities of the East than they were with the capital of their own country. Simon had been struck by that odd fact on his first call at Tregarthen's, and subsequent visits had confirmed it. There, on those lonely clusters of rock breaking out of the sea forty miles from Land's End, where you would expect to find men who had seen scarcely anything of the world outside the other rocky islands around their own homes, you found instead simple men whose turns of reminiscence recalled the streets of Damascus and Bagdad by their names. And whenever reminiscence turned that way Mr. Smithson Smith would call on his own memories, with a faraway look in his eyes, and the same faraway sound in that very gentle voice, as if his dreams saw the deserts of Arabia more vividly than the blue bay beyond his windows. "I mind a time when I was in Capernaum…" — Simon had heard him say it, and felt that for that man at least all the best days lay in the past. It was the war, of course, that had picked men out of every sleepy hamlet in England and hurled them into the familiarity of strange sights and places as well as the flaming shadows of death, and in the end sent some of them back to those same sleepy hamlets to remember; but there was in that quiet man a mystic sensitiveness, a tenseness of poetry struggling rather puzzledly for the expression he could not give it, that made his memories more dreamy with a quaint kind of reverence than most others.

"I've been over by Tresco," said the Saint, lifting his face presently from the beer.

"Oh. Did you see those yachts — are they still there?"

Simon nodded.

"As a matter of fact, I managed to scrounge lunch on one of them."

"Was it Abdul Osman's?"

"No — Galbraith Stride's. I saw Osman's, though. It's a long way for him to come all the way over here."

He knew that the other would need the least possible encouragement to delve into the past; and his expectations were founded on the soundest psychology. Mr. Smithson Smith sat down and accepted a cigarette.

"I think I said in my letter that I thought I'd heard his name before. I was thinking about it only yesterday, and the story came back to me. He hasn't visited St. Mary's — at least, if he has, I don't think I've seen him — but I should know this Abdul Osman if he was the same man, because he was branded on both cheeks."

The Saint's eyebrows rose in innocent surprise.

"Really?"

The other nodded.

"It's quite a story — you could almost put it in a book. An Englishman did it — at least, the rumour said he was an Englishman, although they never caught him. This Abdul Osman was supposed to have a monopoly of various unpleasant things in the East — brothels and gambling dens and drug-trafficking, all that sort of thing. I don't know if it was true, but that was what they told me. He had a fine house in Cairo, anyway, so he must have made plenty of money out of it. I remember what happened distinctly. It was a local sensation at the time… I hope I'm not boring you?"

Mr Smithson Smith was oddly afraid of being boring, as if he felt that any mundane restlessness in his audience would break the fragile glamour of those wonderful things he could remember.

"Not a bit," said the Saint. "What happened?"

"Well, apparently this Abdul Osman disappeared one night. He was supposed to be driving back to Cairo from Alexandria, just himself and his chauffeur. It was a beautiful car he had; I've often seen it driving past Shepheard's Hotel. Well, he didn't arrive when they were expecting him; and as the time went on, and he was three or four hours late and hadn't sent any message to say what had held him up, his household became anxious and went out to look for him. They drove all the way to Alexandria without seeing him, but when they got there they were told by the place where he'd been staying that he'd left about eight hours previously. Then they went to the police, and there was another search. No trace of him was found."

A couple of young men in white open shirts and flannel trousers came in and sat down. Mr. Smithson Smith excused himself to go and take their order, and while he was filling it the Saint lighted a cigarette and glanced at them disinterestedly. They were quiet, very respectable young men; but their faces were sallow and the arms exposed by their rolled-up sleeves were white above the elbows.

"Well," said Mr. Smithson Smith, returning to his chair, "they searched for him half the night, but he seemed to have vanished into thin air. Of course, it wasn't easy to make a thorough search in the dark, so in the morning they tried again. And then they found him. His car was on the road — they found tracks that showed it had been driven off quite a long way into the desert, and brought back again; and out in the desert where it had been turned round there were the remains of a fire. The chauffeur was just recovering consciousness — he'd been knocked on the head and tied up and gagged — and Abdul Osman was in the back of the car with this brand on both his cheeks. Whoever did it had burnt it in almost to the bone with a red-hot iron — it was an Arabic word, and it meant just what this man was."

"Stout piece of work," murmured the Saint, pushing his glass forward for replenishment.

"Probably it was." Mr. Smithson Smith provided another pint of beer, and resumed his seat. "And the only clue they had was a sort of drawing that had been painted on the sides of Osman's beautiful car — the paint was still wet when they found it. It was a sort of figure made out of straight lines, with a round head, like you see kids drawing on walls, only this one had a circle on top like the haloes in those mediaeval church pictures. I've often wondered what it was meant to be. It couldn't have been a picture of Abdul Osman, because he had no right to a halo. Perhaps it was meant for a picture of the man who did it."

"It sounds possible," murmured the Saint.

One of the respectable young men rose and left the bar: idly, Simon watched him going slowly down the sloping path to the gate.

"Yes," said Mr. Smithson Smith thoughtfully… "I mind another time when I heard of him. This was in Beirut. A friend of mine met a girl there in a dance place — it was the sort of dance place that wouldn't be allowed at all in England. She told him a story about Abdul Osman — I don't think I should like to repeat the details to anyone, but if it was true he couldn't be painted any blacker than he is. As a matter of fact, I did tell this story to a man I met on a boat going across to Marseilles, who had just retired from the Egyptian police, and he said it was probably true. It was—"

"Hullo," said the Saint. "Bloke seems to have fallen down."

The respectable young man who had gone out had stumbled as he stepped down to the road, and at that moment he was sprawled in the dust just beyond the gate. He was clutching one ankle, and his face was turned back towards the veranda with a twisted expression of agony.

Mr. Smithson Smith looked out, then round to the respectable young man's companion.

"Your friend seems to have hurt himself," he said. "It looks as if he has sprained his ankle."

The respectable young man came over to their table arid also looked out.

"I'll go and see," he said.

Simon watched him go, inhaling speculatively.

"Staying in the hotel?" he queried.

"Yes," said Mr. Smithson Smith, with his eyes on the developments below. "They're staying here."

"Have they been here long?"

The question was put with perfect casualness.

"About a fortnight," said Mr. Smithson Smith. "I don't know much about them. They're out most of the day — I think they go bathing, but by the look of the basket they take with them you'd think they needed towels enough to dry a regiment."

"They aren't very sunburnt," said the Saint softly, almost as if he were speaking to himself.

He picked up his glass mechanically — and put it down again. The young man with the injured ankle was coming back, limping painfully and leaning on his companion's arm.

"Silly thing to do, wasn't it?" he said; and Mr. Smithson Smith nodded with some concern.

"Would you like me to get you a doctor?"

The young man shook his head.

"I'll just go and bathe it with cold water and rest it for a bit. I don't think it's anything serious."

The three-legged party went on through into the hotel premises; and Simon sat down again and lighted another cigarette. Mr. Smithson Smith's gentle voice was continuing his interrupted anecdote, but the Saint scarcely heard a word. The narrative formed no more than a vague undercurrent of sound in his senses, a restful background to his working thoughts. In a life like the Saint's, a man's existence is prolonged from day to day by nothing but that ceaseless vigilance, that unsleeping activity of a system of question marks in the mind which are never satisfied with the obvious explanations that pass through the torpid consciousness of the average man. To him, anything out of the ordinary was a red light of possible danger, never to be dismissed as mere harmless eccentricity: nine times out of ten the alarm might be proved false, but it could never be ignored. And it seemed odd that two very respectable young men should have attracted attention by carrying an outsize basket of towels; odd, too, that after bathing every day for a fortnight they should still have the soft white bodies of men who have not been free of the muffling protection of clothes for many years… And then the Saint's probing suspicions came to a head in a sudden flash of inspiration, and he pulled himself swiftly out of his chair. He was across the bar in a flash, over to the closed door through which the two respectable young men had disappeared; and Mr. Smithson Smith, startled to silence by his abrupt movement, noticed in an eerie moment of perplexity that the Saint's feet made no sound as they swung over the floor. It was like the charge of a leopard in its smooth powerful noiseless-ness; and then Simon Templar had his hand on the handle of the door, jerking it open, and the young man who had assisted the injured one stumbled and almost fell into the room.

"Come in, brother," said the Saint heartily. "Come in and have a drink."

The young man's face went red, and his mouth opened in a weak grin.

"I–I'm sorry," he stammered. "I must have tripped or something—"

A thin smile cut into the corners of the Saint's mouth.

"Sure you must, brother."

"I'll — I'll have a whisky and soda."

"You'll have beer!"

The Saint caught up his own glass from the table and thrust it out. He was only a yard from the other, on his toes, indefinably dangerous.

"Drink this," he said; and the young man went white.

"I–I don't—"

Simon's free fist caught him on the mouth and knocked him backwards.

"I'll have the police on you for this," blustered the other; and the Saint smiled again.

"Go get him. And don't be too lavish with your plurals, because there is only one. But ask Abdul what he thinks of the idea first, or you may find yourself unpopular. Now amscray — and if you value your beauty, don't damage my beer again!"

He seized the respectable young man by the ear and propelled him deftly and vigorously out of the bar; then he turned back to face the outraged stare of Mr. Smithson Smith. The course of events had been so violently sudden and incomprehensible that the manager had been pardonably nonplussed; but by this point at least his path of duty seemed unmistakable.

"Why — really, Templar!" he said, with his quiet voice shaking. "You can't behave like that here. I shall have to apologize to my guest. I'm afraid you'll have to leave this bar—"

Simon took his arm calmly, and pointed.

A fly was crawling down the inside of the half-emptied glass of beer which he had just replaced on the table. It was quite unhurried about the journey, after the impudent fashion of flies: perhaps its thirst was of no great dimensions, or perhaps it had been reared in scrupulously well-mannered circumstances. It moved downwards in short little runs, pausing once to wash its hands and once to rub its feet together, in a genteel ecstasy of anticipation. Mr. Smithson Smith's eye followed it because it was the only moving object in the direction which the Saint had indicated, and there seemed to be nothing else to look at.

Even so, it seemed an extremely trivial spectacle, and he moved his arm restlessly in the Saint's grasp. But Simon Templar continued to point at it, and there was something dynamic about the immobility of that extended finger. Mr. Smithson Smith watched, and saw the fly reach the level of the beer. It looked around cautiously, and lowered its proboscis delicately into the liquid. For two or three seconds after that it was motionless. And then, without any kind of struggle, it pitched over in a limp somersault and floated quietly on its back, with its legs stretched stiffly upwards…

Chapter IV

MR. SMITHSON SMITH blinked and wiped his forehead. His arm relaxed slowly, as if it required a conscious effort to loosen the involuntary contraction of his muscles. He had no idea why the miniature drama that he had seen enacted should have had such an effect on him. It might have been the utter stillness in which it was played out, the unexplanatory silence of the man beside him — anything. But it seemed as if for the last few seconds he had forgotten to breathe, and when it was finished he expanded his chest with an inaudible sigh.

Then the Saint spoke; and his voice jarred the other's ears by sheer contrast with the silence.

"Don't tell me your beer's as potent as all that!"

The manager stared at him.

"Do you mean — do you mean it was drugged?"

"No less, and possibly even some more. We'll soon see." With unruffled calm, the Saint fished out the fly with a matchstick and laid it in an ashtray to cool off. "But I don't somehow think it was sudden death — that would probably be considered too good for me."

"But — but — damn it!" Mr. Smithson Smith felt queerly shaken under his instinctive incredulity. "You can't tell me that Mr. Trape—"

"Is that his name?" The Saint was as cool as an ice pack. "I can't tell you much about him, but I can tell you that. My dear chap" — he put his hand on the manager's shoulder for a moment — "can you be expected to guarantee the morals of everyone who stays at your hotel? Can you demand a budget of references from anyone who asks for a room? Of course you can't. You have to take them at their face value, and so long as they behave themselves while they're here you aren't expected to ask them whether their fingerprints are registered at Scotland Yard. No — they just had to find somewhere to stay, and you were unlucky."

The manager frowned.

"If what you say is true, Templar, I shall have to ask for their room," he said; and the Saint had to laugh.

"You've got your room now, old lad. But whether they've left money to pay the bill is another matter."

He sat on the table with a glance at the fly, which was still sunken in its coma. He found it difficult to think that it could be dead — although, of course, a drug that a man would survive might be fatal to an insect. But his summary of Abdul Osman's character didn't fit in with such a clean conclusion. The hot irons that had scored their insult on the Egyptian's face would call for something much more messy in the way of vengeance — Abdul Osman would not forget, nor would he be so easily satisfied when his chance came. Then why the drug? And why, anyway, the very presence of those two respectable young men, who on Smithson Smith's own statement had been staying at the hotel for the past fortnight? It seemed improbable that Abdul Osman claimed any of the gifts of necromantic clairvoyance which popular novelists attribute to the "mysterious East." And yet…

All at once he recognized a slim figure in wide blue trousers walking up from the harbour towards the hotel, and waved to it joyfully out of the window. He was in a state of puzzlement in which he wanted to think aloud, and he could not have hoped for a better audience. But it struck him, while he was waiting for her to arrive, that it was a remarkable thing that he had not seen the two respectable young men making their way hastily towards the harbour, even as he had seen her coming in the opposite direction.

"Look here, Templar," began Mr. Smithson Smith worriedly; but the Saint interrupted him with a smile of seraphic blandness.

"Excuse me — I'll be back in a sec."

He went out and met Patricia at the gate.

"What about a spot of tea, boy?" she suggested; and then the electric gaiety of him opened her eyes, and she stopped.

"Sit down here — this is a conference, but since we aren't politicians we can't fix a date for it next year on the other side of the world." The Saint pulled open the gate, seated himself on the step, and drew her down beside him. "Pat, a very respectable-looking young man, name of Trape, has just put a sleeping draught in my beer."

"Good Lord — you haven't drunk it, have you?"

The Saint laughed.

"I certainly haven't. In fact, I punched the face of Mr. Trape, just to learn him, and kicked him out of the bar — to the pardonable indignation of our friend Mr. Smith. But I think he's beginning to understand — probably more than I wanted him to. I dropped a line about Abdul Osman while interviewing Mr. Trape that must have made Smith think a bit… I'll tell you how it happened. I was having my drink, and these two harmless-looking birds rolled in. They ordered lemonade, or something; and then one of them went out. He walked down the path, tripped on this very spot where we're sitting, and appeared to sprain his ankle. I saw it happen, and Smith called his pal over to the window. That was when he did it, of course. He wanted an excuse to come over to our table, with both of us looking outside, so he could slip in the dope. That's what the whole plant was for — and damned well done it was, too. I didn't see it at all until the injured warrior had been helped back to the hotel and away to his room, and then only because I'm naturally suspicious. I'll tell you the things that struck me as odd later — never mind them now. But all at once it dawned on me that there was something in my beer that hadn't been there when I started it, and also that Mr. Trape might be listening outside the door to see what happened. I opened the door, and there he was — so I pushed his teeth in. Episode over."

"But what was the idea?"

"That's just what I want to get — and I want it quick." He was speaking so rapidly that it wasn't easy for her to pick the facts and deductions out of that vital rush of vivid sentences. "I want to reconstruct what might have happened if I'd drunk the beer. Make holes in it anywhere you can."

"Go ahead."

"Right. I drink the beer. I appear to go groggy. Smith registers alarm. Trape hears, and walks innocently in — probably requesting brandy for wounded comrade. Apparently I've fainted. Cold water, keys, feathers, smelling salts — all tried and found wanting. Smith departs to summon doctor, leaving me with Trape. Whereupon I'm rushed out of the place—"

"But what happens when Smith comes back?"

"Exactly… No, that's easy enough. Trape returns to bewildered Smith, explains that I revived and pushed off. Maybe I saw a man I had to talk to about a dog, or anything like that. Apologies, thanks, and so forth… Well, where do they take me? Answer: the Luxor, of course — Abdul was watching me through field glasses all the time I was on Stride's deck. That's all right till—"

"But there are holes everywhere!" she protested. "Suppose anyone saw him carrying you away?"

The Saint's keen blue eyes flicked round the scene.

"Abdul's a clever man — he doesn't forget much. There's a donkey and jingle two yards away, isn't there? And probably Trape hired it for the occasion. He could also have a sack — and I become cold potatoes. Down to the harbour — into a boat — there'd be no hurry. Once he had me in the cart he could leave me there for hours if it was good dope. And even when I was missing for good, his alibi would hold water. I don't say there was no risk, but it could have been done. And Abdul would be the man to do it. What I want to know is what the scheme is now that I haven't drunk the beer. Those two birds have been here a fortnight, so they were put here for some other job. Have they finished that job, and are they free to get away? I expect they'd have to consult Abdul, and Abdul wouldn't approve of bungling. I haven't seen them come out of the hotel, though I expect they could work round the back of the town—"

He was still trying to frame his thoughts aloud, but actually the thread of them was racing away ahead of his voice. And a new light dawned on him at the same moment. His fingers clamped on Patricia's wrist.

"Organization — that's what it is! Gee, I'm as slow as a village concert today!"

In another second he was on his feet and sprinting back to the bar. He entered it from the path as Mr. Smithson Smith came in at the other end.

"What have you decided to do about all this unpleasantness?" asked the Saint; and the manager put his hands on his hips.

"Well, I've just seen the young fellow with the sprained ankle—"

The Saint's smile was fast and thin.

"I thought you would. And if you hadn't gone to see him, he'd have sent for you. Meanwhile the most extraordinary things go on happening to my beer. First a sleeping draught — then it grows legs!"

Mr. Smithson Smith looked down at the table rather blankly. The fly still reclined in the ashtray, oblivious of all excitement in its rigid stupor; but the glass of beer from which oblivion had overtaken it was gone.

"Someone may have been in here and moved it," began Mr. Smithson Smith hazily, and Simon showed his teeth.

"Someone has been in here and moved it — you can write that down in the family Bible. That sprained ankle was good enough for another stall. Did you go up and see the bloke off your own bat?"

"As a matter of fact, he asked me to go up—"

"And naturally you had to go. Organization, that's what it is. What did he say?"

"He said that his friend had told him what happened, and he couldn't understand it. He wanted to know if I should be asking them to leave."

"Did you say anything about doped beer?"

"No."

"Or flies?"

"No."

"Then that lets you out," said the Saint, with some relief. "If they think you don't know anything they won't worry about you. What did you say?"

"I said I should have to consider the matter."

"That," said the Saint grimly, "will be all right so long as you don't consider it too deeply."

Mr. Smithson Smith looked at him. The events he had witnessed, and that rattle of cross-examination, had left that gentle-voiced man utterly bewildered without shifting the foundations of his practical standpoint.

"Look here, Templar," he said directly. "I don't know what you or these two young men are playing at, but I'm in a responsible position. I can't take any risks with this hotel. Unless one of you can give me a satisfactory explanation, I think I shall have to tell the sergeant as much as I know, and leave him to deal with it."

Simon pondered for a moment; and then he nodded.

"That's obviously your duty, and I think it would be better from every point of view if you did it. May I go up to Trape's room and see if he'll speak to me? I don't know if he'll accept an apology, but if he did it might save a little scandal."

He knew that he was taking rather an unfair advantage, but the idea was one that he had to follow. The bait was tempting; and Mr. Smithson Smith, with the interests of his employers at heart and no conception of the depths of duplicity to which Simon Templar could sink when it was necessary, could scarcely refuse it. Simon obtained permission, and the number of the room which the two respectable-looking young men were sharing, and went upstairs with as much consolation as he could derive from the knowledge that if his plan went through successfully the victims would be most unlikely to complain to the management. If he were caught in the act, of course, he would find himself ten times more unpopular with the controlling powers of that respectable hotel than he was already; but the Saint had an unshakable faith in his guardian angels.

He knocked on the door and went in with the forefinger of his right hand prodding out the shape of his trouser pocket in an ostentatious untruth. Both the respectable-looking young men were there.

"Put your hands up, and don't even think of shouting," he said genially. "You'd only give the chambermaids hysterics."

For a moment the two young men were speechless.

"Sorry to arrive so late, boys," Simon went on in the same friendly tone. "I should have been here long ago, but your organization was so slick it took me a little while to catch up with you. I congratulate you on getting rid of the evidence of that doped beer so smartly. We gather that you haven't yet told Abdul about our mutual misunderstanding. I guess you were wise — he wouldn't have been very sympathetic, and you had lots of time to take a second shot at me."

Their faces gave him confirmation. And then Mr. Trape, who was nearest, brought himself a couple of paces nearer, with his head twisted viciously on one side.

"Why not, Templar?" he said. "You wouldn't dare to shoot here."

"Maybe you're right, Eric," admitted the Saint, with astonishing meekness, and removed his hand from his empty pocket. "But then it mightn't be necessary-considering the evidence you've got on your ceiling."

He glanced upwards as he spoke; and Mr. Trape would not have been human if he had not followed that compelling gaze. He also glanced upwards, and in so doing he arranged his chin at an angle that could not have been posed better. Simon's fist shot up to the inviting mark, and impacted with a crisp click…

The Saint had been long enough in the game to know that even a modest two to one is bigger odds than any sane man takes on for his health, and at that moment he was feeling more hurried than heroic. Mr. Trape was sinking limply towards the carpet before his companion realized that he was left to carry the banner alone, and by that time it was a bit late for realizations. The second respectable-looking young man was only beginning to scramble up off the bed when the Saint's flying leap caught him irresistibly round the shoulders and hurled his face mufflingly back into the pillow; then Simon aimed his fist in a scientifically merciless jolt to the nape of the exposed neck.

The Saint returned coolly to the floor and smoothed his hair. The second respectable-looking young man would not recover from the effects of that blow for several minutes; but it was the aggressive Mr. Trape whom Simon selected automatically for his experiment. There was a large gunny sack and a coil of manila under the bed — Simon could not have deduced the plans for his own transportation better if he had been in the know from the beginning like any story-book detective — and in a few seconds he had Mr. Trape inside the sack and the sack fastened. Then he went to the window and looked out. It was only a short drop to a small garden at the rear of the hotel, which was built on a steep slope; and Simon dumped Mr. Trape over the sill unceremoniously. That was the greatest risk he took, but a searching glance round before he did it revealed a landscape apparently bare of watchers. Then he followed himself, and went back to Patricia.

"Let's exercise the donkey," he said.

The ensacked Mr. Trape was loaded into the cart, and they were moving placidly down towards the harbour, before Patricia asked the inevitable question.

"I'm giving Abdul a visitor," said the Saint cheerfully. "He's expecting one, and why should he be disappointed? If you want another reason, write it down as my everlasting love of exasperating the ungodly. I have no other mission in life… You'd better stay back here — I'm banking on the sea gang not knowing the land operators, but they'd certainly ask questions about you."

The girl fell back, and Simon led the donkey out onto the jetty, For a very brief space he wondered if he would be able to locate the tender that awaited him; and then he saw a glistening white speedboat moored by some steps running down to the water. Its crew was dark-complexioned and swarthy, and to remove all doubt it flew a red burgee with the name Luxor woven into it.

Simon hitched the sack onto his shoulder and walked brazenly down the steps.

"Here he is," he said.

Not one of the crew raised an eyebrow. Simon lowered his burden into the boat, saw the engine started, and went back along the causeway in an anguish of noiseless laughter.

Chapter V

IT HAD been a simple gesture of a kind that Simon Templar could never resist, and it gave him exactly the same unfathomably primitive satisfaction that an urchin derives from putting his thumb to his nose and extending his fingers outwards. It was a moral catharsis that touched the well-springs of all unsophisticated human bliss. And if he could have witnessed the reception of his jest his pleasure would have been almost too ecstatic to be borne.

Abdul Osman himself came out on deck to supervise the hoisting up of the sack, and the leer on his face did not improve his beauty. Mr. Trape was beginning to recover by that time, and the sack was squirming vigorously to an accompaniment of hoarse grunts and indistinguishable words.

"He must have a head of iron, that Englishman," muttered Osman. "He should have slept for many hours."

The thought crossed his mind that a man with a constitution like that would stand much torture, and his mouth watered at the prospect. He lifted his foot and kicked the sack cold-bloodedly, and it yelped at each thump of his shoe.

"Before you die you shall have much more to shout for," said Osman gloatingly. "Take him to the saloon."

Rough hands dragged the sack below, and Abdul Osman followed. Then it was cut open, and the storm broke.

Osman, it must be admitted, had never been considered even attractively ugly. He was a short, potbellied man with a fat sallow face and black hair that covered his head in tight curls. Out of his own hearing, it was said that much of his family tree was as black as his hair, and certainly he had a squat nose and a yellowish tinge in the whites of his pig-like eyes that supported the theory. A closely clipped black moustache curved in a broad arch over his thick, pouting lips and gave his face, even in repose, an expression of sensual bestiality that was nauseating.

And his rage at the sight of Mr. Trape emerging from the sack put him right out of comparison with anything human. His face resembled nothing so much as the fat end of a bloated and malignant slug. His eyes almost disappeared in the rolls of unhealthy-looking fat that creased down on them. Clearly marked circles of bright red sprang up and burned on his cheeks, plainly revealing the edges of the skin-grafting operations that had obliterated the Saint's brands; the rest of his jowl was blotched yellow and grey. And out of his distorted mouth flowed a stream of shrill profanity that was horrible to hear.

Nor was his wrath purely vocal. He kicked Trape again, and kicked and tore at the men who had carried in the sack until they fled from the room. And then, with the most lasting and concentrated malignance, he kicked his secretary, who had played no part in the proceedings at all.

But that was nothing unusual. Mr. Clements was there to be kicked. He was kicked whenever anything went wrong, and just as impartially when everything went right. Abdul Osman kicked him, cuffed him, and spat in his face; and his secretary cringed. There was something hideous about his quivering submission.

For Clements was a white man. His hair was almost ash-blond, his shrinking eyes grey.

"Swine!" Osman hissed.

His sunken eyes glittered with the vindictive pleasure that soothed his senses whenever he heaped humiliations on that cowering travesty of a man. Even in that paroxysm of fury the sensation was like balm to his uncontrolled nerves — perhaps it was the very thing that finally turned the tide of his unleashed savagery and began to restore him to reason. For that crawling servile thing that had once been a man was the most permanently soothing monument to Abdul Osman's vanity in the world. Simon Templar, as a helpless prisoner, might supplant him; but until the day came when Osman could look down and spit in the face of that ultimate triumph the degradation of Clements reigned as his supreme achievement.

Less hastily, ten times more malignantly, Osman reached out a hand, grasped his secretary by the nose, and forced him to his knees. He stared at him contemptuously for a moment; then he put a foot in his face and sprawled him over.

"Get up, pig."

Clements obeyed.

"Look at me."

The white man raised his eyes slowly. Abdul Osman saw the red sparks of futile hate glowing in their depths like hot embers, and laughed.

"You know that I always have my revenge, don't you?" His almost perfect English had a sibilant accent, as if a snake had spoken. "How unfortunate it was that my misguided parents should have sent me to an English school! Unpleasant for me, perhaps; but how much more enduringly regrettable for you! I was a dirty nigger then, wasn't I? And it seemed so humorous to you to humiliate me. I trust you look back on those days with satisfaction, Clements?"

The man did not answer.

"It was such a pity that you began to try the needle, and then found you couldn't live without it. And then that you committed that indiscretion which finally put you at my mercy… You were so strong and healthy once, weren't you? — so proud and brave! You would never have let me strike you. You would have struck me yourself, like this."

His flat hand smacked the other's face from side to side — once, twice.

"You would like to strike me again, wouldn't you? But then there is always the certainty that you would have to bare your back to my little whip. It's wonderful how hunger for the needle, and the entertainment of my little whip, have curbed your spirits." He was playing with the man now, drugging his disordered vanity again with the sadistic repetition of a scene that he had played hundreds of times and never tired of. "Pah! I've crushed you so much that now you haven't even the courage to kill yourself and end your misery. You're mine, body and soul — the idol of the school fawning on the dirty nigger. Doesn't that reflection please you, Clements?" He was watching the silent man with a shrewdness in his slow malevolence. "You'll be wanting the needle again about now, won't you? I've a good mind to keep you waiting. It will amuse you to have to come crawling round my feet, licking my shoes, pleading, weeping, slobbering — won't it, Clements?"

The secretary licked his lips. It looked for a moment as if at last the smouldering fires in him would flare up to some reply, and Osman waited for it hopefully. And then came voices and footsteps on the deck over their heads, feet clattering down the companion, and the door was opened by a smart-uniformed Arab seaman to admit a visitor.

It was Galbraith Stride.

"Did you get him?" he demanded huskily.

There were beads of perspiration on his face, and not all of them were due to the heat of the day. Osman's puffy lips curled at the sight of him.

"No, I didn't," he said shortly. "A fool bungled it. I have no time for fools."

Stride mopped his forehead.

"It's on my nerves, Osman. He's been on the Claudette, admitted who he was — who knows what he'll do next? I tell you—"

"You may tell me all you want to in a few minutes," said Osman suavely. "I have some business to attend to first — if you will excuse me." He turned to the seaman. "Ali, send Trape to me."

The Arab touched his forehead and disappeared, and Osman elbowed his secretary aside and helped himself from an inlaid brass cigarette box on the table. All his self-possession had returned, and somehow his heavy tranquillity was more inhuman than his raving anger.

Presently the Arab came back with Trape. Osman gazed at him unwinkingly for some seconds, and then he spoke.

"I have no time for fools," he repeated.

Young Harry Trape was sullen and frightened. The ways of violence were not new to him — he had been in prison three times, and once they would have flogged him with a nine-thonged lash if the doctors had not said he was too weak to endure the punishment. Young Harry had a grievance: he had not only been knocked out by the Saint and tied up in a stuffy sack, but he had been viciously kicked both unknowingly and knowingly by the man he had tried to serve, and he felt he had much to complain about. He had come to the saloon prepared to complain, but the snake-like impassiveness of the unblinking stare that fastened on his face held him mute and strangely terrified.

"You are a fool, Trape," said Osman, almost benevolently, "and I don't think I require your services any longer. Ali will take you back to St. Mary's in the speedboat. You will give up your room at Tregarthen's, make a parcel of all the cocaine you have and post it to the usual address, and then you will take yourself, your friend, and your luggage back to the speedboat, which will take you both to Penzance immediately. Your money will be waiting for you in London. You may go."

"Yes, sir," said Trape throatily.

He left the saloon quickly. The seaman was about to follow him, but Osman stayed him with a gesture.

"It will not really be necessary to go to Penzance, Ali," he remarked deliberately; and the man nodded and went out.

Stride's bloodshot eyes stared at the Egyptian.

'''My God — you're a cold-blooded devil!" he half gasped.

Osman chuckled wheezily.

"Oh, no, not cold-blooded, my dear Stride! You ought to know that. Far from it. But a dead fool is a safe fool, and I believe in safety first. But not coldblooded. There are times when my flesh burns like fire — have I not told you?"

Galbraith Stride shuddered in spite of himself, for he knew what Osman meant.

"I came to see you about that," he said jerkily.

"Ah! You have decided?"

Stride nodded. He sat down at the table, helped himself with nervous fingers from the inlaid cigarette box. The secretary stood by, ignored by both.

It was a strange venue for a peace conference, but that was what it was — and it explained also the terror which had come to Galbraith Stride that afternoon on the sunny deck of his yacht, the terror that had looked at him out of two cold reckless eyes that were as blue as the sea. Each of those two men was a power in an underground world of ugly happenings, though in their personal contact there was no question about which was the dominating personality. Even as Abdul Osman's tentacles of vice reached from Shanghai to Constantinople, so did Galbraith Stride's stretch from London south to the borders of the Adriatic and out west across the ocean to Rio.

Looking at Abdul Osman, one could build about him just such a mastery, but there was nothing about Galbraith Stride to show the truth. And yet it was true. Somehow, out of the restless cunning that evolved from the cowardice of his ineffectual physique, Stride had built up that subterranean kingdom and held it together, unknown to his stepdaughter, unknown to the police, unknown even to the princelings of his noisome empire, who communicated with him only through that silent Ramón Almido who passed as Stride's secretary. And thus, with the growth of both their dominions, it had come to a conference that must leave one of them supreme. Abdul Osman's insatiable lust for power dictated it, for Stride would have been content with his own boundaries. And with it, in the first meeting between them, had come to Abdul Osman the knowledge that he was Stride's master, that he need not be generous in treating for terms. The spectacle of Stride's uneasiness was another sop to Osman's pride.

"What a different conclusion there might have been if we had not both simultaneously thought of depositing the same letters with our solicitors!" said Osman reflectively. "To think that if either of us died suddenly there would be left instructions to the police to investigate carefully the alibi of the. other! Quite a dramatic handicap, isn't it?"

Stride licked his lips.

"That's the only part of the bargain you've kept," he said. "Why, I've just heard you admit that your men have been landing cocaine here."

"I took the liberty of assuming our agreement to be a foregone conclusion," said Osman smoothly. Then his voice took on a harsher tone. "Stride, there's only one way out for you. For the last two years my agents have been steadily accumulating evidence against you — evidence which would prove absorbing reading to your good friends at Scotland Yard. That is the possibility for which you were not prepared, and it's too late now for you to think of laying the same trap for me. In another month that evidence can be brought to the point where it would certainly send you to prison for the rest of your life. You see, it was so much easier for me than for the police — they did not know whom to suspect, whereas I knew, and only had to prove it."

Stride had heard that before, and he did not take much notice.

"And so," continued Osman, "I make you the very fine offer of your liberty; and in return for that you retire from business and I marry Miss Laura."

Stride started up.

"That's not what you said!" he blurted. "You said if I — if I gave you Laura — you'd retire from Turkey and—"

"I changed my mind," said Osman calmly. "Why should I give? I was foolish. I hold all the cards. I am tired of arguing. As soon as this Simon Templar is on board I wish to leave — the year is getting late, and I can't stand your winters. Why should I make concessions?" He spat — straight to the priceless carpet, an inch from his visitor's polished shoes. "Stride, you were a fool to meet me yourself. If you had dealt with me through your clever Mr. Almido I might have had some respect for you. You are not sufficiently important to look at — it shows me too plainly which of us is going to get his own way."

He spoke curtly, and, oddly enough for him, with a lack of apparent conceit that made his speech deadly in its emphasis. And Stride knew that Osman spoke only the truth. Yet, even then, if certain things had not happened…

"You are afraid of the Saint, Stride," said Osman, reading the other's thoughts. "You are more afraid of him perhaps than you are of prison. You did not know that he knew you, but now that you know, you want nothing more than to run away and hide in some place where he can't find you. Well, you can go. I shouldn't stand in your way, my dear Stride."

The other did not answer. Something had broken in the core of his resistance — a thing which only a psychologist who knew the workings of his mind, and the almost superstitious fear which the name of the Saint could still drive into many consciences, could have understood. He sat huddled in a kind of collapse; and Osman looked at him and chuckled again.

"I shall expect a note to tell me that you agree by ten o'clock tonight. You will send it across by hand — and who could be better employed to deliver it than Miss Laura?"

Galbraith Stride stood up and went out without a word

Chapter VI

SIMON TEMPLAR saw young Harry Trape and his com panion carrying their suitcases down to the quay and thought they were trying to catch the Scillonian, which was scheduled to sail for the mainland at 4:15. He watched their descent rather wistfully, from the hillside where he was walking, for it was his impression that they had got off much too lightly. He was not to know that Abdul Osman had himself decided to dispense with their existence according to the laws of a strictly oriental code by which the penalty of failure was death; but if he had known, the situation would have appealed to his sense of humour even more than the memory of his recent treatment of young Harry.

At the same time, their departure solved at least one problem, for it definitely relieved Mr. Smithson Smith of further anxiety about the good name of has hotel.

It was past six o'clock when the Saint came back to the village, for the solution of the mystery of an overloaded basket of towels had suddenly dawned on him, and he had set out to visit a few likely spots on the coast in the hope of finding further evidence. He had failed in that, but he remained convinced that his surmise was right.

"It was an ingenious method of smuggling dope," he told Patricia. "Nobody's thinking about anything like that here — if they see a strange ship loafing around, their only suspicion is that it may be another French poacher setting lobster pots in forbidden waters, and if the boat looked ritzy enough they simply wouldn't think at all. The sea party would dump sacks of it somewhere among the rocks, and the Heavenly Twins would fetch it home bit by bit in their basket without attracting any attention. Then they pack it in a suitcase and take it over to Penzance with their other stuff, and there isn't even a customs officer to ask if they've got a bottle of scent. Which is probably what they're doing now — I wish we could have arranged a sticky farewell for them."

He had been much too far away to think of an attempt to intercept the evacuation, and the idea of telegraphing a warning to the chief of police at Penzance did not appeal to him. Simon Templar had no high idea of policemen, particularly provincial ones. And as a matter of fact his mind was taken up with a graver decision than the fate of two unimportant intermediaries.

He walked along from the lifeboat station with the details of his plan filling themselves out in his imagination; and they were just about to turn into Holgate's, the hotel at the other end of the town, when his ruminations were interrupted by a figure in uniform that appeared in his path.

"I've been looking for you, sir," said the law.

The law on the Scilly Islands was represented by one Sergeant Hancock, a pensioner of the Coldstream Guards, who must have found his rank a very empty honour, for there were no common constables to salute him. In times of need he could call upon a force of eight specials recruited from among the islanders, but in normal times he had nothing to make him swollen-headed about his position. Nor did he show any signs of ever having suffered from a swollen head — a fact which made him one of the very few officers of the law whom Simon had ever been able to regard as even human. Possibly there was something in the air of the islands, that same something which makes the native islanders themselves the most friendly and hospitable people one could hope to meet, which had mellowed the character of an ex-sergeant-major to the man who had become, not only the head, but also the personal body and complete set of limbs, of the Scilly Islands Police; but certainly the Saint liked him. Simon had drunk beer with him, borrowed his fishing line and fished with it, and exchanged so many affable salutes with him that the acquaintance was in danger of becoming an historic one in the Saint's life.

"What is it, Sergeant?" asked the Saint cheerfully. "Have I been seen dropping banana peel in the streets or pulling faces at the mayor?"

"No, it's nothing like that. I want to know what's been going on up at Tregarthen's."

"Mr. Smith has seen you, has he?"

"Yes, he came down and told me about it. I went to have a talk with those two young men, but they'd just paid their bill and gone. Then I came looking for you."

Simon offered a cigarette.

"What did Smith tell you?"

"Well, sir, he told me that you were having a drink in the bar, and one of those fellows put dope in your beer, and you punched his nose. Then one of them came down and threw the beer away, so there was no evidence except a fly that Smith couldn't find. And Smith said you said something about Abdul Osman, which he said he thought might be a man who has a yacht over by Tresco."

The sergeant's pleasant face was puzzledly serious, as well it might be. Such things simply did not happen on his well-conducted island.

Simon lighted his cigarette and thought for a moment. Abdul Osman was too big a fish for the net of a police force consisting of one man, and the only result of any interference from that official quarter would most likely be the unhappy decease of a highly amiable sergeant — a curiosity whom Simon definitely felt should be preserved for the nation. Also he recalled a story, that the sergeant had told him on their first meeting — a story so hilariously incredible that it surpassed any novelist's wildest flights of fantasy.

A previous holder of the office once arrested a man and took him to the village lock-up, only to find that he hadn't the keys of the lock-up with him.

"Stay here while I get my keys," said the worthy upholder of the law sternly; and that was the last they saw of their criminal.

While Simon did not doubt for a moment that Sergeant Hancock would be incapable of such a magnificent performance as that, his faith did not extend to the ability of a village lock-up to keep Abdul Osman inside and his shipload of satellites out.

"That's very nearly what happened, Sergeant," he said easily. "I think their idea was to rob the hotel and get away on the boat that afternoon. Smith wasn't drinking, so they couldn't drug him; but with me out of the way they'd have been two to one, and he wouldn't have stood much chance. They'd been staying in the hotel for a fortnight to get the lie of the land. I just happened to notice what they'd done to my beer."

"But what was that about Abdul Osman?"

"I think Smith can't have heard that properly. He was telling me some story about a man of that name, and it must have been on his mind. When I punched this bloke's face he threatened to call the police, and what I said was: 'Ask your pal what he thinks of the idea first.' Smith must have thought I said 'Ask Abdul.' "

The sergeant's face was gloomy.

"And you just punched his nose and let him get away! Why, if you'd only got hold of me—"

"But Smith did get hold of you."

"Oh, yes, he got hold of me after they'd gone. I had to go over and see a man over at the other end of the island about paying his rates, and Smith couldn't find me till it was too late. I can't be everywhere at once."

The Saint grinned sympathetically.

"Never mind. Come in here and drown it in drink."

"Well, sir, I don't mind if I do have just one. I don't think I'm supposed to be on duty just this minute."

They went into the bar and found the barman enjoying his evening shave — a peculiarity of his which the Saint had observed before, and which struck Simon as being very nearly the perfect illustration for a philosophy of the Futility of Effort.

They carried their drinks over to the window at the bottom end of the bar, which looked across the harbour. The local boats were coming in to their moorings one by one, with their cargoes of holiday fishing parties. Simon studied them with a speculative eye as they came in.

"Whose boat's that — just coming in?" he asked; and the sergeant looked out.

"What, that nearest one? That's Harry Barrett's. He's a good boatman if you want to go out for the day."

"No — the other one — just coming round the end of Rat Island."

The sergeant screwed up his eyes.

"I don't know that one, sir." He turned round. "John, what's the name of that boat out there by the pier?"

The barman came down and looked out.

"That? That one's Lame Frankie's boat — the Puffin. Built her himself, he did."

Simon watched the boat all the way in to her mooring, and marked its position accurately in his memory. He discarded the idea of Barrett's trim-looking yawl reluctantly — he was likely to have his hands full while he was using the craft he proposed to borrow, and the Puffin, though she was too broad in the beam for her length, judged by classic standards of design, looked a trifle more comfortable as a single-hander for a busy man. And in making his choice he noted down the name of Lame Frankie for a highly anonymous reward; for the Saint's illicitly contracted obligations were never left unpaid.

But none of his intentions just then were public property. He held up to the light a glass of gin and bitters of astounding size for which he had been charged the sum of ninepence, and sighed.

"How I shall ever be able to bring myself to pay one and six for a drink about one eighth the size of this in London again, is more than I know," he murmured contentedly, and improved the shining hour by drinking it down rapidly and calling for another.

He strolled back with Patricia to their modest supper as it was beginning to grow dark. Their meal was just being put on the table.

"You poach a wonderful egg, Mrs. Nance," he remarked approvingly, and sank into his chair as the door closed behind that excellent landlady. "Pat, darling, you must wish me bon appétit, because I've got a lot to do on these vitamins."

She had not liked to question him before, but now she gazed at him resignedly.

"We were going away for a holiday," she reminded him.

"I know," said the Saint. "And we still are — away to the south, where there's sunshine and good wine and tomorrow is also a day. But we came by this roundabout way on a hunch, and the hunch was right. There is still a little work for us to do."

He finished his plate without speaking again, poured himself out a cup of coffee, and lighted a cigarette. Then he said:

"There's more nonsense talked about capital punishment than anything else, and the sentimentalists who organize petitions for the reprieve of every murderer who's ever sentenced are probably less pernicious than the more conventional humanitarians. Murder, in England anyway, is the most accidental of crimes. A human life is such a fragile thing, it's so easily snuffed out; and dozens of respectable men, without a thought of crime in their heads, have lost control of themselves for one second, and have woken up afterwards to the numbing and irrevocable realization that they have committed murder, and the penalty is death. There are deliberate murders; but there are other crimes no less deliberate and no less damning. The drug trafficker, the white slaver, the blackmailer — not one of them could ever plead that he acted in uncontrollable passion, or gave way to an instant's temptation, or did it because his wife and children were starving. All of those crimes are too deliberate — need too much capital, too much premeditation, too long to work through from beginning to end. And each of them wrecks human lives less mercifully than a sudden bullet. Why should the death penalty stop where it does?… That is justice as we have chosen to see it; and even now I believe that the old days were worth while."

He sat and smoked until it was quite dark; and, being the man he was, no detail of the future weighed on his mind. He scribbled industriously on a writing pads with occasional pauses for thought; and presently Patricia came round behind him to see what he had written.

At the top of the sheet he had roughly pinned the scrap of a report torn from the Daily Telegraph, and panelled it in characteristic slashes of blue pencil.

The blue pencil had scored thickly under the last sentence. And underneath it the Saint was writing:

"Is all that necessary?" asked Patricia with a smile.

"Of course it is," said the Saint. "Because I've got an appointment with one kind of excrescence, must I forget all the others? God in heaven, while there's still a supply of smug fools for me to tear in pieces I shall have everything to live for… There are about five hundred and fifty more verses to that song, embracing everything from the massacre of Garigliano down through Christopher Columbus and Marco Polo to the last Czar of Russia, which I may write some day. I think it will end like this—"

"I can never finish my best songs — my gorge rises too rapidly," said the Saint; and then he looked at his watch, and stood up, stretching himself with his gay smile. "Pat, I must be going. Wish me luck."

She kissed him quickly; and then he was gone, with the cavalier wave of his hand that she knew so well. All the old ageless Saint went with him, that fighting troubadour whom he chose to be, who could always find time to turn aside in an adventure to shape one of those wild satires that came from him with such a biting sincerity. In some way he left her happier for that touch of typical bravado.

Her emotion was not shared by Galbraith Stride,

Something had come into the life of that successful man that he felt curiously impotent to fight against, something that had stricken him with a more savage shock because it was the one thing that he had never prepared himself for. It had the inexorable march of a machine. It left him unable to think clearly, with a sense of physical helplessness as if he had been worn down overnight by a fierce fever, struggling with the foreknowledge of defeat against a kind of paralysis of panic. And that thing was the name of the Saint.

He was a silent man at dinner that night. He knew that Abdul Osman had crushed and beaten him with an ease that seemed fantastically ridiculous, and the knowledge hypnotized him into a sort of horrible nightmare. And yet at the same time he knew that he might still have been fighting, calling on all the resources of guile and duplicity that had brought him to the power that was being stripped from him, if it had not been for the words that had stunned his ears early that afternoon. He was that strange psychological freak, a criminal possessed of an imagination that amounted almost to mania; and when Osman had told him that the Saint was still at large an overstrained bulwark on the borders of his reason seemed to have crashed inwards. He was still fighting for all he could hope to save from the disaster, but it was a dumb stubborn fight without vitality.

He sent for Laura Berwick at nine o'clock. Her slender young body looked particularly beautiful in the black evening gown she was wearing; in some way its cool sweetness was framed in that sombre setting with an effect that was pulse-quickeningly radiant from the contrast. To do him justice, Galbraith Stride felt a momentary twinge of remorse as he saw her.

"My dear, I want you to take a note over to Mr. Osman. It's rather important, and I'd feel relieved if you delivered it yourself."

He had been drinking, but the whisky that reeked on his breath had thickened his voice without making him drunk. It served the purpose of nipping that twinge of remorse in the bud, before he had time to forget his own danger.

"Couldn't one of the crew go?" she asked, in some surprise.

"I'm afraid there are reasons why they can't," he said. "They — er — hum — I may be able to explain later. A matter of business. It's vitally important—"

"But what about Mr. Almido?"

"Mr. Almido," said Stride, "is a fool. Between ourselves, I don't trust him. Some funny things been happening to my accounts lately. No, my dear, you must do this for me. I'd go myself, only I–I'm not feeling very well. You can take the motorboat."

He was staring at her with the fixed and glassy eyes of semi-intoxication — she could see that — but there was something besides alcohol in his stare that frightened her. His excuses for requiring her to go over in person seemed absurd; and yet it seemed equally absurd to imagine that there could be anything serious behind them. She was fond of him, in a purely conventional way — chiefly because he was the only relative she had had since she was six years old. She knew nothing of his business; but in his remotely fussy way he had been kind to her.

"All right — I'll go for you. When do you want it done?"

"At once." He pressed a sealed envelope into her hand, and she felt that his own hand was hot and sticky. "Run along right away, will you?"

"Right-ho," she said; and wondered, as she went to the door, why her own words rang in her ears without a trace of the artificial cheerfulness that she had tried to put into them.

She left him sitting at the table, squinting after her with the same glazed stare; and went up on deck to find Toby Halidom.

"Daddy wants me to go over to the Luxor and deliver a note," she said, and he was naturally perplexed.

"Why shouldn't one of the crew go — or that Dago secretary with the Marcel wave?"

"I don't know, Toby." Out under the stars, the vague impressions she had received in the saloon seemed even more absurd. "He was rather funny about it, but he seemed to want it particularly badly, so I said I'd go."

"Probably suffering from an attack of liver," hazarded Toby heartily. "All the same, he ought to know better than to ask you to pay calls on a reptile like that at this hour of the night. I'd better come with you, old thing — I don't like you to go and see that ugly nigger alone"

It was not Toby Halidom's fault that he had been brought up to that inscrutable system of English thought in which all coloured men are niggers unless they happen also to be county cricketers; but on this occasion at least his apprehensions were destined to be fully justified. They had both met Abdul Osman once before during their stay, and Laura knew that her fiance had shared her instinctive revulsion. She felt relieved that he had spontaneously offered to go with her.

"I'd be glad if you would come, Toby."

Galbraith Stride heard the motorboat chugging away from the side, and listened to it till the sound died away. Then he went over and pressed a bell in the panelling. It was answered by the saturnine Mr. Almido.

"We shall be leaving at ten," he said; and his secretary was pardonably surprised.

"Why, sir, I thought—"

"Never mind what you thought," said Stride thickly. "Tell the captain."

Almido retired; and Stride got up and began to pace the saloon. The die was cast. He had abdicated to Abdul Osman. He had saved his liberty — perhaps he could even save himself from the Saint. The reaction was starting to take hold of him like a powerful drug, spurring him with a febrile exhilaration and scouring an unnatural brightness into the glaze of his eyes. He had no compunction about what he had done. Laura Berwick was not his own flesh and blood — that would have been his only excuse, if he had bothered to make any. The thought of her fate had ceased to trouble him. It counted for nothing beside his own safety. For a brief space he even regretted the feebleness of his surrender — wondered if a card like Laura could not have been played to far better effect…

It was only another twist in the imponderable thread that had begun to weave itself when the boom of the Claudette's dinghy had swung over against Laura Berwick's head that morning; but the twist was a short one. For Fate, masking behind the name which Galbraith Stride feared more than any other name in the world, had taken a full hand in the game that night.

There were two doors into the saloon. One of them opened into a microscopic vestibule, from which a broad companion gave access to the deck and an alleyway led out to other cabins and the crew's quarters forward; the other opened into Stride's own stateroom. In his restless pacing of the saloon, Stride had his back turned to the second door when he heard a sharp swish and thud behind him. He jerked round, raw-nerved and startled; and then he saw what had caused the sound, and his heart missed a beat.

Standing straight out from the polished woodwork of the door was a long thin-bladed knife with a hilt of exquisitely carved ivory, still quivering from the force of the impact that had driven it home.

His lungs seemed to freeze achingly against the walls of his chest, and a parching dryness came into his throat that filled him with a presentiment that if he released the scream which was struggling for outlet just below his wishbone it could only have materialized as a thin, croaking whisper. The hand that dragged the automatic from his pocket was shaking so much that he almost dropped it. The sudden appearance of that quivering knife was uncanny, supernatural. The opposite door had been closed all the time, for he had been pacing towards it when the thing happened; the ports and skylight also were fastened. From the angle at which it had driven into the door it should have flashed past his face, barely missing him as he walked; but he had not seen it.

If he had been in any state in which he could think coherently, he might have hit on the explanation in a few moments; but he was not in that state. It never occurred to him that the door behind him might have been opened, the knife driven home, and the door rapidly and silently closed again, with just that very object of misleading his attention which it had achieved.

Which was indubitably very foolish of Mr. Galbraith Stride.

Filled with the foreboding that a second attack would almost instantly follow the first unsuccessful one, trembling in the grip of a cold funk that turned his belly to water, he backed slowly and shakily towards the door where the knife had struck, facing in the direction from which he believed the danger threatened. Curiously enough, his only idea was that Abdul Osman had decided to take no chances on his regretting his bargain, and had sent one of his men stealthily to eliminate that possibility. If he had thought of anything else, it is possible that the scream which he ached to utter would not have been suppressed.

Back… back… three paces, four paces… And then suddenly he saw the bulkheads on each side of him, and realized with an eerie thrill of horror that he was actually passing through them — that the door which should have come up against his back had been opened noiselessly behind him, and he was stepping backwards over the threshold.

He opened his mouth to cry out, turning his head as he did so; but the cry rattled voicelessly in his throat. A brown shirt-sleeved arm whipped round his neck from behind and strangled him in the crook of its elbow, while fingers like bars of steel fastened on his wrist just behind the gun. His head was dragged back so that he looked up into the inverted vision of twin blue eyes that were as clear and cold as frozen ultramarines; and then the intruder's mouth spoke against his ear.

"Come and pay calls with me, Galbraith," he heard; and then he fainted.

Chapter VII

ABDUL OSMAN had also been drinking, but with him it had been almost a festive rite. He had put on a dinner suit, with a red tarboosh; and his broad soft stomach, swelling out under the sloping expanse of a snowy shirt front, gave him the appearance of a flabby pyramid walking about on legs, as if a bloated frog had been dressed up in European clothes. His wide sallow face was freshly shaved and had a slightly greasy look around the chin. Although he wore Western clothes, cut by the best tailors in London, the saloon of his yacht, in which he was walking about, was decorated entirely in the Oriental style, which was the only one in which he felt truly comfortable. The rugs on the floor were Bokhara and Shiraz, virtually priceless; the tables ebony inlaid with mother-of-pearl; the couches low, covered with dark silk brocades, heavily strewn with cushions. Even the prosaic portholes were framed with embroidered hangings and barred with iron grilles so that they should not clash with the atmosphere, and the dim concealed lights left corners full of shadows. Osman, in his dinner jacket and white starched shirt front, fitted into those surroundings with a paradoxical effect, like an ardent nudist clinging to his straw hat and pince-nez; but he was incapable of perceiving the incongruity.

He was preening himself before a mirror, a half emptied glass in one hand, the other smoothing an imperceptible crease out of his bow tie, a thin oval cigarette smouldering between his lips, when he heard the approaching sputter of a motor launch. He listened in immobile expectancy and heard the engine cut off and the sound of voices. Then the Arab seaman, Ali, knocked on the door and opened it, and Laura Berwick stood in the entrance.

Abdul Osman saw her in the mirror, from which he had not moved; and for a second or two he did not stir. His veins raced with the sudden concrete knowledge of triumph. Cold-blooded? The corners of his mouth lifted fractionally, wrinkling up his eyes. At their very first meeting, the formal touch of her hand had filled him with a hunger like raging furnaces: now, seeing her gloriously modelled face and shoulders standing out brilliantly pale in the dark doorway, his heart pounded molten flame through his body.

He turned slowly, spreading out one arm in a grandiose gesture.

"So you have come — my beautiful white rose!"

Laura Berwick smiled hesitantly. The room was full of the peculiarly dry choky scent of sandalwood. Everything in her recoiled in disgust from its ornately exotic gloom. It seemed unhealthy, suffocating, heavy with an aura of horribly secret indulgence, like the slack puffy body of the man who was feeding his eyes on her. She was glad that Toby had come with her — his clear-cut Spartan cleanness was like an antiseptic.

"Mr. Stride asked me to bring a note over to you," she said.

He held out his hand, without taking his eyes from her face. Unhurriedly he ripped open the envelope — it contained nothing but a blank sheet of paper. Deliberately he tore it into four pieces and laid them on a table.

"Perhaps," he said, "it was more important that a note should bring you over to me."

Then for the first time he saw Toby Halidom, and his face changed.

"What are you doing here?" he inquired coldly.

The young man was faintly taken aback.

"I just buzzed over with Miss Berwick," he said. "Thought she might like some company, and all that."

"You may go."

There was an acid, drawling incisiveness in Osman's voice that was too dispassionate to be rude. It staggered Halidom with the half-sensed menace of it.

"I asked Mr. Halidom to come with me," said Laura, striving to keep a sudden breathlessness out of her voice. "We shall be going back together."

"Did — er — your stepfather suggest that arrangement?"

"No. Toby just thought he'd come."

"Really!" Osman laughed softly, an almost inaudible chuckle that made the girl shiver unaccountably. "Really!" He turned away, a movement that came after his temporary motionlessness with a force that was subtly sinister. "Really!" The joke seemed to amuse him. He strolled away down the room, the cigarette smouldering between his fingers, and turned again at a place where the dim lights left him almost in darkness. The cigarette end glowed like a hot ruby against the grey smudge of his shirt front in the gloom — they could not see his thick fingers touching bells that had men always waiting to answer them. "How very romantic, my dear Halidom! The perfect knight-errant!"

Toby Halidom flushed dully at the sneer. Something in the atmosphere of the interview was getting under his skin, in spite of the healthy unimaginativeness of his instincts.

"Well, Laura, let's be getting along," he said, and heard the note of strain in his own assumed heartiness.

Osman's ghostly chuckle whispered again out of the shadows, but he said nothing. Halidom turned abruptly to the door, opened it, and stopped dead. There were three of Osman's crew outside, crowded impassively across the opening.

Toby faced the Egyptian with clenched fists.

"What's the idea, Osman?" he demanded bluntly.

Abdul moved an inch or two from his position, so that his broad fleshy face stood out like a disembodied mask of evil under one of the rose-shaded light globes.

"The idea, Halidom, is that Laura is staying here with me — and you are not."

"You lousy nigger—"

Halidom leapt at the mask like a young tiger-cat, but he was stopped short in less than a foot. Sinewy brown arms caught his arms from behind, twisted and pinioned them expertly.

Osman stepped forward slowly.

"Did you say something, Halidom?'

"I called you a lousy nigger," retorted Toby defiantly. "You heard me all right. Shall I say it again?"

"Do."

Osman's voice was sleek, but his hands were shaking. His face had gone a dead white, save only for the scarred red circles on his cheeks. Toby swallowed, and flung up his head.

"You foul, slimy—"

Osman's fist smacked the last word back into his teeth.

"If you had remembered your manners, Halidom, your fate might have been very different," he said; and it was obvious that he was only controlling himself momentarily, by an effort of will that brought beads of perspiration to the whiteness of his forehead. "But that is one word you cannot use. There was another man who used it many years ago — perhaps you would like to see him?"

He spoke to Ali purringly, in Arabic, and the man disappeared. Halidom was struggling like a maniac.

"You can't get away with this, you ugly swine—"

"No?"

Osman struck him again; and then, after a moment's pause, deliberately spat in his face. Laura cried out and flung herself forward, but one of the men caught her instantly. Osman sauntered over to her and tilted up her chin in his bloated hands.

"You're a spitfire too, are you, my dear? That makes it all the more interesting. I'm good at taming spitfires. In a moment I'll show you one of my tamed ones.

You shall see me tame Halidom in the same way — and you too."

He looked round as the seaman returned with his secretary. Clements was in a pitiful state — Osman had withheld the needle from him all that day, as he had threatened to do, and the slavering creature that tottered into the room made even Halidom's blood run cold.

The man fell on his knees at Osman's feet, slobbering and moaning unintelligibly; and Osman caught him by the hair and dragged him upright.

"Do you see this, Halidom? This is a man who used to call me a dirty nigger. Once upon a time he was just like you — strong, straight, insolent. He feared nothing, and despised me because I wasn't another stupid Englishman like himself. But then, one day, someone introduced him to the needle — the little prick that brings so much courage and cleverness for a while. Have you ever tried it, Halidom? You haven't even thought of it. You've been too busy playing cricket and being called a fine fellow because you could play it well. But you will try it. Oh, no, not voluntarily, perhaps — but the effects will be just the same. You will feel big, strong, clever, a fine fellow, until the drug wears off, and then you will feel very tired. Then I shall give you some more, and again you will feel fine and big and strong. And so we shall go on; you will want a little more each time, but I shall give you just the right amount, until" — in a sudden spasm of savagery he shook Clements by the handful of hair that he was still holding — "until you are bigger and stronger than ever — a finer fellow than you have ever been — like this thing here!"

He thrust the man away; but Clements was back as soon as he had recovered his balance, clutching Osman's hand, kissing it, fawning over it in a trembling abjectness that was nauseating.

"That will be pleasant for you, Halidom, won't it?"

Toby was staring at Clements with an incredulous loathing that turned his stomach sick.

"You filthy swine—"

"I have found, Halidom," said Osman, staring at him steadily, "that the needle is an excellent help for taming your kind. But my little whip also does its share — especially in the beginning, when there are moments of open rebellion. Would you like to see that as well?"

He touched a concealed spring, and a section of the panelling sprang open. Clements darted forward as he saw it, but Osman pushed the enfeebled body away easily with one hand and sent it sprawling. Inside the cupboard that was disclosed they could see a couple of hypodermic syringes set in gleaming nickelled racks, with a row of tiny glass phials beside them; but Osman left those alone. He took out a short leather whip, so thick at the base that it was difficult to see where it joined the handle, and tapering to a point in which there was a thin hard knot.

"An excellent instrument," Osman said, "which has helped to drive a proper sense of respect into the man you see."

He ran the lash through his fingers thoughtfully, gazing down at the grovelling creature by his feet. Something in the sight of that last triumph of his, that living completeness of humiliation, seemed to snap the thread of his gloating self-control. With his thick lips twisting back wolfishly, he leapt at Halidom and slashed twice at his face; then he turned and dragged Clements up again, holding him pinned against the wall with a hand grasping his throat.

"Look at them, Clements!" he screamed. "Look at them!" He forced the man's livid face round towards Toby and Laura. "Can you see them — or are you too hungry for the needle? They're white — white — the colour you were so proud of! And you're not ashamed, are you? I've thrashed you often enough before my blacks — you're used to that — but how do you like your own people to see what you've sunk to? Look at them, I tell you. A white man and a white girl — staring at you — despising you — and even that doesn't give you enough self-respect to stand up for yourself. Bah!"

He stepped back and sent the whip hissing about the man's thin shoulders; and then he came close to Halidom again.

"And that," he said hoarsely — "that is what you will be like, Halidom."

His mouth was drooling at the corners, his fingers twitching with the intensity of his passion. Toby looked him in the eyes.

"You'll never get away with this," he said, as quietly as he could. "Stride knows we're here, and as soon as he gets worried about Laura—"

Abdul Osman laughed harshly.

"My dear Halidom, you're mistaken. Stride sent Laura to me — to stay! He did not send you, but I imagine your disappearance will be a relief to him — if you had been left on his hands he might not have known what to do with you. By this time he is making his preparations to leave."

"I don't believe it!" cried the girl. "Toby — it can't be true — he's lying—"

Osman looked at her.

"It doesn't matter to me what you believe," he said silkily. "Doubtless you will be convinced in course of time."

"It's a lie!" she protested again, but a chill fear had closed on her heart. "He'll go straight to the police—"

"The police?" Osman's sinister chuckle whispered through the room. "They would be delighted to see him. You little fool! Didn't you know where his money came from? Didn't you know that all his life he's done nothing but trade in women and drugs — that I hold enough evidence to send him to prison for twenty years? You, my dear Laura, are the price of his liberty: you and — er — his retirement from business. A price that he was glad to offer, and that I was very happy to accept."

She could not think properly, could not comprehend the whole hideous significance of what he was saying. She could not believe it; and yet, from the manner in which he said it, either it must be true or he must be mad And neither alternative opened out a gleam of hope. But she remembered the strangeness that she had seen in Galbraith Stride's eyes when he insisted that she must deliver his message herself, and she was frozen with dread before that unspeakable explanation.

Beside her, Toby Halidom was struggling again in a blind fury of helplessness; and Osman looked at him again.

"I shall commence your treatment very soon, my friend," he said; and then he spoke again to Ali. "Take him away and bind him carefully — I shall ring when I wish to see him again."

Almost before he could speak, Halidom was hustled out of the room, with the girl's wild pitiful cry ringing in his ears. Rough brown hands forced him down a dark alleyway, tightened ropes round his wrists and ankles, and hurled him into an evil-smelling unlighted cabin. He heard the door locked on the outside, and was alone with a despair such as he had never dreamed of in his life, a despair haunted with visions that verged on sheer shrieking madness. There was only one hope left for him — a hope so small that it was almost worse than no hope at all. They had not troubled to search him, and there was a penknife in his pocket. If he could reach that, saw at the ropes on his wrists… then there would still be the locked door, and a hostile crew to break through unarmed… But he was trying to get at that knife, with strange futile tears burning under his eyelids.

Laura Berwick thought that her reason would break. The last of the swarthy seamen had released her and gone out with Toby — there was no one in the saloon but herself and Abdul Osman, and that ghastly relic of a man cowering in a corner and watching Osman's movements with blubbering hate-filled eyes. Osman did not even seem to be aware of his existence — perhaps he had grown so used to having that thing of his own creation with him that he took no more notice of him than if he had been a dog; or perhaps in the foul depths of his mind there was some spawning idea of heaping humiliation on humiliation both for the girl and his beaten slave. He edged towards her unsteadily, his glittering eyes leering with unutterable things, and she retreated from him as she would have done before a snake, until her back was to the wall and she could retreat no further.

"Come to me, beautiful white rose!"

His arms reached out for her. She tried to slip sideways away from their clawing grasp, keeping her eyes out of sheer terror from looking full into that puffed lecherous face; but he caught her arm and held it with a strength greater than her own. She was drawn irresistibly into his hot embrace — she felt the horrible softness of his paunch against her firm young flesh, and shuddered until mists swam before her eyes. She could not possibly endure it much longer. Her senses reeled, and she seemed to have lost all her strength…

And then, as his greedy lips found her face, her brain went out at last into merciful blackness; and she heard the shot that struck him down only as a dim part of her dream.

Chapter VIII

SIMON TEMPLAR slammed the door of the glory hole forward, twisted the key, and snapped it off short in the lock. He heard a babel of shouts and jabbering in heathen tongues break out behind it, and grinned gently. So far as he had been able to discover in a lightning reconnaissance, practically the whole of Osman's crew was congregated up there in the fo'c'sle: he had already battened down the hatch over their heads, and it would take them nothing less than an hour to break out.

It was the moment for a speed of action that could be outdistanced by nothing less nimble than a Morality Squad discovering new vices to suppress — that speed of decision and performance in which the Saint had no equal. With the stillness of the ship still freshly bruised by the sharp thud of that single shot, it was a time when committee meetings and general philosophy had to take second place.

He raced down the alleyway towards the second door under which he had seen a strip of light; it was thrown open as he reached it, and an olive-skinned man in uniform, with his shirt unbuttoned, stared into his face from a range of twelve inches. In the cabin behind him, two others, apparently fellow officers, were frozen statuesquely around a table littered with cards. Just for the sharp-etched half of a second there was an utter immobility; and then Simon's fist crashed into the man's face and sent him staggering. In another second that door also was locked and the key broken.

Simon had located only one other danger point, and that was a few steps farther down the passage. As he opened the door he saw that it was the galley, and the explanation of the light he had seen was provided by a coal-black Kano boy who was placidly peeling potatoes and humming one of his own weird melodies. The song died away in an abrupt minor as the Kano boy looked up at him with rolling eyes: Simon saluted him cheerily and turned the third key on the safe side of the door.

Then he went aft to the saloon; and as he went he saw another door hanging drunkenly open on its mutilated hinges.

Toby Halidom was pillowing Laura's head on one arm, babbling silly incoherent things to her. His other hand covered the doorway with the automatic that had killed Osman, and for one second Simon felt nearer death than he cared to stand at any time.

"Put that down, you ass," he said; and then Toby recognized him and lowered the gun slowly.

"What are you doing here?"

"Getting you out of trouble," said the Saint briskly. "You needn't worry — the crew won't be interfering yet. I've just locked them up to keep them out of mischief."

His gaze swept comprehensively round the room — over the body of Abdul Osman, who lay stretched out on his back, half underneath a table that he had clutched at and brought down with him in his fall, with a slowly widening red stain on his white shirt front; over the unconscious figure of Galbraith Stride; over the enslaved secretary, Clements, who sat without movement on one of the couches, his face hidden in his hands, with an empty hypodermic syringe lying where it had fallen on the dark tapestry beside him… He reached out and took the automatic from Halidom's unresisting fingers.

"I don't care if I hang for it!" said the young man hysterically. "He deserved everything he got."

Simon's eyebrows went up through one slow half-centimetre.

"If you hang for it?" he repeated.

"Yes. They can do what they like. I killed him — the swine. I shot him—"

The Saint's smile, that quirk of the lips which could be so gay, so reckless, so mocking, so debonair, so icily insolent, so maddeningly seraphic, as his mood willed it, touched his mouth and eyes with a rare gentleness that transformed him. A strange look, almost of tenderness, touched the chiselled lines of that mad buccaneering face.

"Hang you, Toby?" he said softly. "I don't think they'll do that."

The young man scarcely heard him. For at that moment Laura's eyes opened, full of the horror of her last moment of consciousness, and saw the face of the young man bending over her with a queer little choking sob.

"Toby!"

She clung to him, raising herself against his shoulder, still wild-eyed with lingering nightmares; and then she shrank back as she saw Abdul Osman.

"Toby! Did you "

"It's all right, darling," said Halidom huskily. "He won't trouble us again."

Then the Saint's hands touched each of their shoulders.

"I don't think you need to stay here," he said quietly.

He led them out onto the deck, out into the night air that was cool and fresh with the enduring sweetness of the sea. The motorboat in which they had come was still moored at the bottom of the gangway; but now the Puffin was made fast behind it, with its spread sails stirring like the wings of a grey ghost against the dark water. Between them they helped the girl down to the motorboat; and Simon sat on the half-deck and gazed aft to the seats where the other two had settled themselves. A match flared at the end of his cigarette.

"Will you try and listen to me?" he said, in the same quiet tone. "I know what you've been through tonight, because I was listening most of the time. There were some things I had to know before I moved — and then, when the time came for me to interfere, there wasn't much for me to do. I did what I could, and no one will stop you going back to the Claudette."

The hand with the cigarette moved towards the Luxor's side in a faint gesture.

"A man was killed there tonight. I've never seen any good reason for buttering up a bad name just because it's a dead one. As Toby said, he deserved everything he got — maybe more. He was a man whose money had been wrung farthing by farthing out of the ruin and degradation of more human lives than either of you can imagine. He was a man who'll leave the world a little cleaner for being dead.

"But in the eyes of the law he was murdered. In the eyes of the law he was a citizen who had every right to live, who could have called for policemen paid for by other citizens to protect him if he'd ever been threatened, who would have been guiltless for ever in the eyes of the law until his crimes could have been proved according to the niggling rules of evidence to twelve bamboozled half-wits by a parade of blathering lawyers. And the man who killed him will be sentenced to death according to the law.

"That man was Galbraith Stride."

They were staring at him, intent and motionless.

"I know what you thought, Toby," said the Saint. "You burst into the saloon with murder in your heart, and saw Osman dead, and Laura with the gun close to her hand. You could only think for the moment that she had done it, and you made a rather foolish and rather splendid confession to me with some wild idea of shielding her. If I had any medals hung around me I'd give you one. But you certainly weren't in your right mind, because it never occurred to you to ask what Stride was doing there, or where Laura found the gun.

"Laura, I don't want to make it any harder for you, but there is one thing you must know. Every word that Osman told you was true. Galbraith Stride himself was just such a man as Osman. He has never been such a power for evil, perhaps; but that's only because he wasn't big enough. He was certainly no better. Their trades were the same, and they met here to divide their kingdoms. Osman won the division because he was just a shade more unscrupulous, and Stride sent you to him in accordance with their bargain.

"You might like to think that Stride repented at the last moment and came over to try and save you; but I'm afraid even that isn't true. He killed Osman for a much more sordid reason, which the police will hear about in due time."

Even in the darkness he could see their eyes fixed on him. It was Laura Berwick who spoke for them both.

"Who are you?" she asked; and Simon was silent only for a second.

"I am Simon Templar, known as the Saint — you may have heard of me. I am my own law, and I have sentenced many men who were lesser pestilences than Abdul Osman or Garbraith Stride… Oh, I know what you're thinking. The police will also think it for a little while. I did come here tonight to kill Abdul Osman, but I wasn't quick enough."

He stood up and swung himself lightly back onto the gangway. His deft fingers cast off the painter and tossed it into the boat; and without another word he went up to the deck and down again to the saloon.

They sentenced Galbraith Stride for the murder of Abdul Osman on the first day of November, just over a month after these events that have been recorded, after a trial that lasted four days.

One of the documents that played a considerable part in bringing the jury to their verdict was a sealed letter that was produced by a London solicitor at the inquest. It was addressed in Abdul Osman's own heavy sprawling calligraphy:

Inside was a comprehensive survey of Galbraith Stride's illicit activities that made the police open their eyes. It was typewritten; but the concluding paragraph was in Osman's own handwriting.

The defense made a valiant effort to save their case by making great play with the fact that the notorious Simon Templar was not only in the district, but was actually on board the Luxor when the murder was committed; but the judge promptly repressed all questions that were not directly concerned with the circumstances of the murder.

''The police," he said, "have charged Galbraith Stride with the murder, and I cannot have alternative murderers dragged in at this stage of the proceedings. We are here to decide whether the prisoner, Galbraith Stride, is guilty or not guilty; and if he should eventually be found not guilty it will be open to the police to bring charges against such other persons as they think fit."

There was also, somewhat inconsistently, an attempt on the part of the defense to represent their client as a repentant hero hastening to rescue his stepdaughter from her fate. The case for the prosecution lasted two days, and this happened when the Crown's position was rapidly becoming unassailable. And then Clements was called, and that finished it.

He was a very different man from the whimpering wreck who had suffered all the indignities that Osman's warped brain could think of to heap upon him. From the moment of Osman's death he had become free of the supplies of cocaine that were stocked in that concealed cupboard in the saloon: he had used them liberally to maintain himself in the normal state that he would never be able to return to again without the help of drugs, keeping their existence secret until the case was transferred to the mainland and he could secure proper treatment. But there was no treatment that could give him back the flame of life; and so the police surgeon told him.

"Honestly, Clements, if I'd been told that a man could develop the resistance to the stuff that you've got, so that he would require the doses that you require to keep him normal, without killing himself, I shouldn't have believed it. You must have had the constitution of an ox before you started that — that—"

"Folly?" queried Clements, with a flicker of expression passing over his wasted features. "Yes, I used to be pretty strong, once."

"There's no cure for what you've got," said the doctor bluntly; for he was still a young man, an old Rugger blue, and some of the things that he saw in his practice hurt him.

But Clements only smiled. He knew that the poisons they were pumping into him six times a day to keep him human would kill him within a matter of weeks, but he could not have lasted much longer anyway. And he had one thing to finish before he died.

He went into the witness box steady-nerved, with his head erect and the sparkle of cocaine in his eyes. The needle that the young doctor had rammed into his arm half an hour before had done that; but that was not in evidence. They knew he was a cocaine addict, of course — he told them the whole story of his association with Abdul Osman, without sparing himself. The defense remembered this when their turn came to cross-examine.

"In view of these sufferings which you endured at the hands of the dead man," counsel put it to him, "didn't you ever feel you would like to kill him?"

"Often," said Clements calmly. "But that would have cut off my supplies of the drug."

"Wouldn't it be quite conceivable, then," counsel continued, persuasively, "that if you had killed him you would be particularly anxious to keep yourself out of the hands of the police at any cost?"

Just for that moment the witness's eyes flashed.

"You'd better ask the doctor," he said. "He'll tell you that I shall probably be dead in a couple of months anyway. Why should I waste my last days of life coming here to tell you lies? It would make no difference to me if you sentenced me to death today."

Counsel consulted his notes.

"You had never met Galbraith Stride before?"

"Never."

Then came the attempt to represent the killing as an act in the defense of a girl's honour.

"I have told the court already," said Clements, with that terribly patient calm of a man for whom time has no more meaning, which somehow set him apart from the reproof that would immediately have descended upon any ordinary witness who attempted to make a speech from the box, "that nothing of the sort was suggested. Miss Berwick had fainted; and during the time that she was being attacked I was only occupied with taking advantage of the confusion to get at Osman's supply of cocaine. I cannot make any excuses for that — no one who has been spared that craving can understand how it overrules all other considerations until it has been satisfied. Deprived of it, I was not a man — I was a hungry animal. I went to the cabinet and gave myself an injection, and sat down to allow the drug time to take effect. When I looked up, Galbraith Stride was there. He had a pistol in his hand, and he appeared to have been drinking. He said: 'Wait a minute, Osman. She's worth more than that. I'm damned if I'll let you have her and get rid of me as well. You can make another choice. If you take her, we'll divide things differently.' Osman flew into a rage and tried to hit him. Stride fired, and Osman fell. I thought Stride was going to fire again, and I caught hold of the nearest weapon I could find — a brass vase — and hit him with it. I hadn't much strength, but luckily it struck him on the chin and knocked him out."

"And it was you who went over to St. Mary's and informed Sergeant Hancock what had happened?"

"Yes."

"On your own initiative?"

"Entirely."

"I suggest that Templar said: 'Look here, Osman's dead, and there's no need for us to get into trouble. Let's go over to Sergeant Hancock and tell him that Stride did it.'"

"That is absurd."

"You remember the statement that Stride made to Sergeant Hancock when he was arrested?"

"Fairly well."

"You will recall, perhaps, that Stride described how he was attacked in his cabin on the Claudette by this man Templar, and that significant mention of a knife that was alleged to have been thrown into a door. Did you hear Sergeant Hancock give evidence that he examined the door in the saloon of the Claudette, and found the mark of a" knife having been driven deeply into it?"

"Yes."

"How would you account for that?"

"If you ask me, I should say that a man like Stride might well have foreseen the possibility of accidents, and he could easily have prepared that mark to substantiate his story in case of trouble."

It was on this point that the greatest weakness of the case for the prosecution seemed to rest. Simon Templar was recalled before the end, and his evidence reexamined.

"You have admitted that you went out to the Luxor on the night in question with the intention of assaulting Osman?"

"I've never denied it," said the Saint.

"Why, if you were so anxious to take the law into your own hands, did you confine your attentions to the deceased?"

"Because I'd heard of him, and I hadn't heard of Stride. Mr. Smithson Smith told me about Osman — that's already been given in evidence."

"And you," said counsel, with deliberate irony, "were immediately filled with such a passion for justice that you couldn't sleep until you had thrashed this monster that Osman was represented to you to be?"

"I thought it would be rather a rag," said the Saint, with a perfectly straight face.

"It has been suggested that you were the man who branded Osman five years ago — was that also intended to be rather a rag?"

"I never met the man before in my life."

"You have heard Galbraith Stride say that you told him that you had done that?"

"He must be dotty," said the Saint — a reply that earned him a three-minute lecture from the learned judge.

In his closing speech, the counsel for the Crown suggested that the difficulty might not be so great as it appeared.

"In this case," he said, "the only discrepancies which you need to take into consideration are those between the evidence given by Mr. Clements and Mr. Templar, and the story told by the prisoner. It is my submission to you that the defense has in no way succeeded in shaking the credibility of those two witnesses; and when you remember, in discarding the evidence of the prisoner that it is not supported by any other witness at any point, and that the only alternative to discarding it as the fantastic story of a man lying desperately to save his neck is to regard all the stories of all the other witnesses as nothing short of a deliberate conspiracy to send an innocent man to the gallows — then, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, in my humble submission, there is only one conclusion at which any reasonable person can arrive."

The jury was away for three hours; but to the reporters in the crowded press seats it was a foregone conclusion. The fingerprints of Galbraith Stride had been found on the gun, and that seemed to clinch it.

So they found him guilty, as we know; and the warders had to hold him up when the judge put on the black cap.

Chapter IX

THREE weeks later an early post brought Toby Halidom a letter.

He was awake to receive it; for during that night the story as it concerned him had dragged through its last intolerable lap. It was the end of three weeks of dreadful waiting — three weeks in which the lines of strain that had marked themselves on the face he loved had been etched in indelible lines of acid on his own memory. It was not that either of them bore any more affection for the man who had made his infamous bargain with Abdul Osman, and who was now awaiting the final irrevocable summons of the law; Galbraith Stride had placed himself beyond that; but they had known him personally, eaten at his table, seen him walking and talking as a human being of the same race as themselves instead of the impersonal deformed specimen in a glass case which the criminologists were already making of him, and they would not have been human themselves if that period of waiting for the relentless march of the law had not preyed on their waking and sleeping hours like an intermittent nightmare. And that night had been the last and worst of all.

At midnight Toby had seen Laura sent to bed by a kindly doctor with a draught which would send her the sleep that could not have come naturally; and he had gone back to his bachelor apartment to get what rest he could. All her sufferings had been his by sympathy: he had seen her stared at in the court by goggle-eyed vampires with no better use for their time than to regale themselves with the free entertainment provided for them by her ordeal — had read with a new-found disgust the sensational journalism that was inevitably splurged on the case, and seen press photographers descending on her like a pack of hounds every time she left the court. He had knocked down one who was too importunate, and it had given him some relief. But the rest of it had remained; and it had been made no easier by the sudden inaccessibility of the one man who might have been able to help him. Simon Templar had been as elusive as a phantom; a couple of days after the case, Chief Inspector Teal, who came down with a watching brief, told him that the Saint had gone abroad.

Toby had slept fitfully until six o'clock, and had woken up unrested. He got up and brewed himself a cup of tea, and paced restlessly up and down his tiny sitting room. The clatter of the postman's knock on his front door was a kind of relief: anything that would serve to distract his mind for a few minutes was welcome.

He went out and found that single letter. It bore a Spanish stamp, and was postmarked from Barcelona.

Toby Halidom lighted a cigarette and read the letter through again, word by word. In some way it lifted a terrible load from his mind, brought him a great breath of relief in the fullness of knowledge that it gave him. And, as he read, there was a queer little smile on his lips that any headmaster of Harrow would have been surprised to see…

He put the letter in the empty grate, set a match to it, and watched the sheets flare and curl and blacken. "Go on and prosper."… And then, with a heart that felt suddenly light and clear, he went to the open window and leaned on the sill, looking out into the blue-grey lightening of that morning of the 22nd of November. Somewhere a clock was striking the hour of eight.