The Saint and the Happy Highwayman

"You've done everything you could, Mr Fernack,"

he said. "If Vascoe refuses to give us any assistance he can't expect much."

"The trouble is that if anything goes wrong, that won't stop him squawking," Fernack said gloomily.

Of all the persons concerned, Simon Templar was probably the most untroubled. For two days he peacefully followed the trivial rounds of his normal law-abiding life; and the plain-clothes men whom Fernack had set to watch him, in spite of his instructions, grew bored with their vigil.

At about two o'clock in the morning of the third day his telephone rang.

"This is Miss Vascoe's chauffeur, sir," said the caller. "She couldn't reach a telephone herself so she asked me to speak to you. She said that she must see you."

Simon's blood ran a shade faster--he had been half expecting such a call.

"When and where?" he asked crisply.

"If you can be at the second traffic light going north in Central Park in an hour's time, sir--she'll get there as soon as she has a chance to slip away."

"Tell her I'll be there," said the Saint.

He hung up the instrument and looked out of the window. On the opposite pavement a man paced wearily up and down, as he had done for two nights before, wondering why he should have been chosen for a job that kept him out of bed to so little purpose.

But on this particular night the monotony of the sleuth's existence was destined to be relieved. He followed his quarry on a brief walk which led to Fifty-second Street and into one of the many night haunts which crowd a certain section of that fevered thoroughfare, where the Saint was promptly ushered to a favoured table by a beaming headwaiter. The sleuth, being an unknown and unprofitable-looking stranger, was ungraciously hustled into an obscure corner. The Saint sipped a drink and watched the late floor show for a few minutes, and then got up and sauntered back through the darkened room towards the exit. The sleuth,'noting with a practised eye that he had still left three quarters of his drink and a fresh packet of cigarettes on the table, and that he had neither asked for nor paid a check, made the obvious deduction and waited without anxiety for his return. After a quarter of an hour he began to have faint doubts of his wisdom, after half an hour he began to sweat, and in forty-five minutes he was in a panic. The lavatory attendant didn't remember noticing the Saint, and certainly he wasn't in sight when the detective arrived; the doorman was quite certain that he had gone out nearly an hour ago because he had left him two dollars to pay the waiter.

An angry and somewhat uncomfortable sleuth went back to the Saint's address and waited for some time in agony before the object of his attention came home. As soon as he was relieved at eight o'clock he telephoned headquarters to report the tragedy; but by then it was too late.

Inspector Fernack's eyes swept scorchingly over the company that had collected in Vascoe's drawing room. It consisted of Elliot Vascoe himself, Meryl, the Earl of Eastridge, an assortment of servants and the night guard from Ingerbeck's.

"I might have known what to expect," he complained savagely. "You wouldn't help me to prevent anything like this happening but after it's happened you expect me to clean up the mess. It 'd serve you right if I told you to let your precious Ingerbeck do the cleaning up. If the Saint was here now----"

He broke off, with his jaw dropping and his eyes rounding into reddened buttons of half-unbelieving wrath.

The Saint was there. He was drifting through the door like a pirate entering a captured city, with an impotently protesting butler fluttering behind him like a flustered vulture--sauntering coolly in with a cigarette between his lips and blithe brows slanted banter-ingly over humorous blue eyes. He nodded to Meryl and smiled over the rest of the congregation.

"Hullo, souls," he murmured. "I heard I'd won my bet, so I toddled over to make sure."

For a moment Vascoe himself was gripped in the general petrifaction, and then he stepped forward, his face crimson with fury.

"There you are," he burst out incoherently. "You come here--you----There's your man, Inspector. Arrest him!"

Fernack's mouth clamped up again.

"You don't have to tell me," he said grimly.

"And just why," Simon inquired lazily, as the detective moved towards him, "am I supposed to be arrested?"

"Why?" screamed the millionaire. "You--you stand there and ask why? I'll tell you why! Because you've been too clever for once, Mr Smarty. You said you were going to burgle this house, and you've done it-- and now you're going to prison where you belong!"

The Saint leaned back against an armchair, ignoring the handcuffs that Fernack was dragging from his pocket. '

"Those are harsh words, Comrade," he remarked reproachfully. "Very harsh. In fact, I'm not sure that they wouldn't be actionable. I must ask my lawyer. But would anybody mind telling me what makes you so sure that I did this job?"

"I'll tell you why." Fernack spoke. "Last night the guard got tired of working so hard and dozed off for a while." He shot a smoking glance at the wretched private detective who was trying to obliterate himself behind the larger members of the crowd. "When he woke up again, somebody had opened that window, cut the alarms, opened that centre showcase and taken about a hundred thousand dollars' worth of small stuff out of it. And that somebody couldn't resist leaving his signature." He jerked out a piece of Vascoe's own note-paper, on which had been drawn a spidery skeleton figure with an elliptical halo poised at a rakish angle over its round blank head. "You wouldn't recognize it, would you?" Fernack jeered sarcastically.

Even so, his voice was louder than it need have been. For, in spite of everything, at the back of his mind there was a horrible little doubt. The Saint had tricked him so many times, had led him up the garden path so often and then left him freezing in the snow, that he couldn't make himself believe that anything was certain. And that horrible doubt made his head swim as he saw the Saint's critical eyes rest on the drawing.

"Oh yes," said the Saint patiently. "I can see what it's meant to be. And now I suppose you'd like me to give an account of my movements last night."

"If you're thinking of putting over another of your patent alibis," Fernack said incandescently, "let me tell you before you start that I've already heard how you slipped the man I had watching you--just about the time that this job was done."

Simon nodded.

"You see," he said, "I had a phone message that Miss Vascoe wanted to see me very urgently and I was to meet her at the second traffic light going north in Central Park."

The girl gasped as everyone suddenly looked at her.

"But Simon--I didn't----"

Her hand flew to her mouth.

Fernack's eyes lighted with triumph as they swung back to the Saint.

"That's fine," he said exultantly. "And Miss Vascoe doesn't know anything about it. So who else is going to testify that you spent your time waiting there--the man in the moon?"

"No," said the Saint. "Because I didn't go there."

Fernack's eyes narrowed with the fog that was starting to creep into his brain.

"Well, what----"

"I was expecting some sort of call like that," said the Saint. "I knew somebody was going to knock off this exhibition--after the bet I'd made with Vascoe, the chance of getting away with it and having me to take the rap was too good to miss. I meant it to look good --that's why I made the bet. But of course our friend had to be sure I wouldn't have an alibi, and he was pretty cunning about it. He guessed that you'd be having me shadowed, but he knew that a message like he sent me would make me shake my shadow. And then I'd have a fine time trying to prove that I spent an hour or so standing under a traffic light in Central Park at that hour of the night. Only I'm pretty cunning myself, when I think about it, so I didn't go. I came here instead."

Fernack's mouth opened again.

"You----"

"What are we wasting time for?" snorted Vascoe. "He admits he was here----"

"I was here," said the Saint coolly. "You know how the back of the house goes practically down to the East River, and you have a little private garden there and a landing stage? I knew that if anything was happening, it 'd happen on that side--it'd be too risky to do anything on the street frontage, where anybody might come by and see it. Well, things were happening. There was a man out there, but I beat him over the head and tied him up before he could make a noise. Then I waited around, and somebody opened the window from inside and threw out a parcel. So I picked it up and took it home. Here it is."

He took it out of his hip pocket--it was a very large parcel, and the bulge would have been easy to notice if anyone had got behind him.

Vascoe let out a hoarse yell, jumped at it and wrenched it out of his hands. He ripped it open with clawing fingers.

"My miniatures!" he sobbed. "My medallions--my cameos! My----"

"Here, wait a minute!"

Fernack thrust himself forward again, taking possession of the package. For a second or two the denouement had blown him sky-high, turned him upside down and left him with the feeling that the pit of his stomach had suddenly gone away on an unauthorized vacation; but now he had his bearings again. He faced the Saint with homicidal determination.

"It's a fine story," he said raspily. "But this is one time you're not going to get away with it. Yeah, I get the idea. You pull the job so you can win your bet and then you bring the stuff back with that fairy tale and think everything's going to be all right. Well, you're not going to get away with it! What happened to the guy you say you knocked out and tied up, and who else saw him, and who else saw all these things happen?"

The Saint smiled.

"I left him locked up in the garage," he said. "He's probably still there. As for who else saw him, Martin Ingerbeck was with me."

"Who?"

"Ingerbeck himself. The detective bloke. You sec, I happened to help him with a job once, so I didn't see why I shouldn't help him with another.* So as soon as I guessed what was going to happen, I called him up and he met me at once and came along with me. He even recognized the bloke who opened the window, too."

*See Saint Overboard (Crime Club).

"And who was that?" Fernack demanded derisively, but somehow his derision sounded hollow.

The Saint bowed.

"I'm afraid," he said, "it was the Earl of East-ridge."

His lordship stared at him pallidly.

"I think you must be mad," he said.

"It's preposterous !" spluttered Vascoe. "I happen to have made every inquiry about Lord Eastridge. There isn't the slightest doubt that he's----"

"Of course he is," said the Saint calmly. "But he wasn't always. It's a curious old English custom--a fellow can go around with one name for most of his life and then he inherits a title and changes his name without any legal formalities. It's funny that you should have been asking me about him, Fernack. His name used to be Dennis Umber. As soon as Meryl mentioned the Earl of Eastridge I remembered what it was that I'd read about him in the papers. I'd noticed that he came into an earldom when his uncle died. That's why I thought something like this might happen, and that's why I made that bet with Vascoe."

The night guard fizzed suddenly out of his retirement.

"That's right!" he exploded excitedly. "I'll bet it was him. I wondered why I went off to sleep like that. Well, about two o'clock he came downstairs--said he was looking for something to read because he couldn't get to sleep--and got me to have a drink with him. It was just after he went upstairs again that I fell off. That drink must've been doped!"

Eastridge looked from side to side and his face twitched. He made a sudden grab at his pocket, but Fernack was too quick for him.

Simon Templar hitched himself off the armchair as the brief scuffle subsided.

"Well, that seems to be that," he observed languidly. "You'll have to wait for another chance, Fernack. Go home and take some lessons in detecting, and you may do better next time." He looked at Vascoe. "I'll see my lawyers later and find out what sort of a suit we can cook up on account of all the rude things you've been saying, but meanwhile I'll collect my check from Morgan Dean." Then he turned to Meryl. "I'm going to lend Bill Fulton the profits to pay off his debts with," he said. "I shall expect a small interest in his invention and a large slice of wedding cake."

Before she could say anything he was gone. Thanks didn't interest him: he wanted breakfast.

VI THE STAR PRODUCERS

Mr homer quarterstone was not, to be candid, a name to conjure with in the world of the Theatre. It must be admitted that his experience behind the footlights was not entirely confined to that immortal line: "Dinner is served." As a matter of fact, he had once said "The Baron is here" and "Will there be anything further, madam?" in the same act; and in another never-to-be-forgotten drama which had run for eighteen performances on Broadway, he had taken part in the following classic dialogue:

Nick: Were you here?

Jenkins (Mr Homer Quarterstone) : No sir.

Nick: Did you hear anything?

Jenkins : No sir.

Nick : A hell of a lot of use you are.

Jenkins : Yes sir.

(Exit, carrying tray.)

In the executive line, Mr Quarterstone's career had been marked by the same magnanimous emphasis on service rather than personal glory. He had not actually produced any spectacles of resounding success but he had contributed his modest quota to their triumph by helping to carry chairs and tables on to the stage and arrange them according to the orders of the scenic director. And although he had not actually given his personal guidance to any of the financial manoeuvres associated with theatrical production, he had sat in the box office at more than one one-night stand, graciously controlling the passage over the counter of those fundamental monetary items without which the labours of more egotistical financiers would have been fruitless.

Nevertheless, while it is true that the name of Quar-terstone had never appeared in any headlines, and that his funeral cortege would never have attracted any distinguished pallbearers, he had undoubtedly found the Theatre more profitable than many other men to whom it had given fame.

He was a man of florid complexion and majestic bearing, with a ripe convexity under his waistcoat and a forehead that arched glisteningly back to the scruff of his neck; and he had a taste for black homburgs and astrakhan-collared overcoats which gave an impression of great artistic prosperity. This prosperity was by no means illusory, for Mr Homer Quarterstone, in his business capacity, was now the principal, president, director, owner and twenty-five percent of the staff of the Supremax Academy of Dramatic Art, which according to its frequent advertisements had been the training ground, the histrionic hothouse, so to speak, of many stars whose names were now household words from the igloos of Greenland to the tents of the wandering Bedouin. And the fact that Mr Quarterstone had not become the principal, president, director, owner, etc., of the Supremax Academy until several years after the graduation of those illustrious personages, when in a period of unaccustomed affluence and unusually successful borrowing he had purchased the name and good will of an idealistic but moribund concern, neither deprived him of the legal right to make that claim in his advertising nor hampered the free flow of his imagination when he was expounding his own experience and abilities to prospective clients.

Simon Templar, who sooner or later made the acquaintance of practically everyone who was collecting too much money with too little reason, heard of him first from Rosalind Hale, who had been one of those clients; and she brought him her story for the same reason that many other people who had been foolish would often come to Simon Templar with their troubles, as if the words "The Saint" had some literally supernatural significance, instead of being merely the nickname with which he had once incongruously been christened.

"I thought it was only the sensible thing to do--to get some proper training--and his advertisements looked genuine. You wouldn't think those film stars would let him use their names for a fraud, would you?

... I suppose I was a fool, but I'd played in some amateur things, and people who weren't trying to flatter me said I was good, and I really believed I'd got it in me, sort of instinctively. And some of the people who believe they've got it in them must be right, and they must do something about it, or else there wouldn't be any actors and actresses at all, would there? . . . And really I'm--I--well, I don't make you shudder when you look at me, do I ?"

This at least was beyond argument, unless the looker was a crusted misogynist, which the Saint very firmly was not. She had an almost childishly heart-shaped face, with small features that were just far enough from perfection to be exciting, and her figure had just enough curves in just the right places.

The Saint smiled at her without any cynicism.

"And when you came into this money . . ."

"Well, it looked just like the chance I'd been dreaming about. But I still wanted to be intelligent about it and not go dashing off to Hollywood to turn into a waitress, or spend my time sitting in producers' waiting rooms hoping they'd notice me and just looking dumb when they asked if I had any experience, or anything like that. That's why I went to Quarterstone. And he said I'd got everything, and I only wanted a little schooling. I paid him five hundred dollars for a course of lessons, and then another five hundred for an advanced course, and then another five hundred for a movie course and by that time he'd been talking to me so that he'd found out all about that legacy, and that was when his friend came in and they got me to give them four thousand dollars to put that play on."

"In which you were to play the lead."

"Yes, and----"

"The play never did go on."

She nodded, and the moistness of her eyes made them shine like jewels. She might not have been outstandingly intelligent, she might or might not have had any dramatic talent, but her own drama was real. She was crushed, frightened, dazed, wounded in the deep and desperate way that a child is hurt when it has innocently done something disastrous, as if she was still too stunned to realize what she had done.

Some men might have laughed, but the Saint didn't laugh. He said in his quiet friendly way: "I suppose you checked up on your legal position ?"

"Yes. I went to see a lawyer. He said there wasn't anything I could do. They'd been too clever. I couldn't prove that I'd been swindled. There really was a play and it could have been put on, only the expenses ran away with all the money before that, and I hadn't got any more, and apparently that often happens, and you couldn't prove it was a fraud. I just hadn't read the contracts and things properly when I signed them, and Urlaub--that's Quarterstone's friend--was entitled to spend all that money, and even if he was careless and stupid you couldn't prove it was criminal. ... I suppose it was my own fault and I've no right to cry about it, but it was everything I had, and I'd given up my job as well, and--well, things have been pretty tough. You know."

He nodded, straightening a cigarette with his strong brown fingers.

All at once the consciousness of what she was doing now seemed to sweep over her, leaving her tongue-tied. She had to make an effort to get out the last words that everything else had inevitably been leading up to.

"I know I'm crazy and I've no right, but could you-- could you think of anything to do about it?"

He went on looking at her thoughtfully for a moment, and then, incredulously, she suddenly realized that he was smiling, and that his smile was still without satire.

"I could try," he said.

He stood up, long immaculately tailored legs gathering themselves with the lazy grace of a tiger, and all at once she found something in his blue eyes that made all the legends about him impossible to question. It was as if he had lifted all the weight off her shoulders without another word when he stood up.

"One of the first things I should prescribe is a man-sized lunch," he said. "A diet of doughnuts and coffee never produced any great ideas."

When he left her it was still without any more promises, and yet with a queer sense of certainty that was more comforting than any number of promises.

The Saint himself was not quite so certain; but he was interested, which perhaps meant more. He had that impetuously human outlook which judged an adventure on its artistic quality rather than on the quantity of boodle which it might contribute to his unlawful income. He liked Rosalind Hale, and he disliked men such as Mr Homer Quarterstone and Comrade Urlaub sounded as if they would be; more than that, perhaps, he disliked rackets that preyed on people to whom a loss of four thousand dollars was utter tragedy. He set out that same afternoon to interview Mr Quarter-stone.

The Supremax Academy occupied the top floor and one room on the street level of a sedate old-fashioned building in the West Forties; but the entrance was so cunningly arranged and the other intervening tenants so modestly unheralded that any impressionable visitor who presented himself first at the ground-floor room labelled "Inquiries," and who was thence whisked expertly into the elevator and upwards to the rooms above, might easily have been persuaded that the whole building was taken up with various departments of the Academy, a hive buzzing with ambitious Thespian bees. The brassy but once luscious blonde who presided in the Inquiry Office lent tone to this idea by saying that Mr Quarterstone was busy, very busy, and that it was customary to make appointments with him some days in advance; when she finally organized the interview it was with the regal generosity of a slightly flirtatious goddess performing a casual miracle for an especially favoured and deserving suitor--a beautifully polished routine that was calculated to impress prospective clients from the start with a gratifying sense of their own importance.

Simon Templar was always glad of a chance to enjoy his own importance, but on this occasion he regretfully had to admit that so much flattery was undeserved, for instead of his own name he had cautiously given the less notorious name of Tombs. This funereal anonymity, however, cast no shadow over the warmth of Mr Quarterstone's welcome.

"My dear Mr Tombs! Come in. Sit down. Have a cigarette."

Mr Quarterstone grasped him with large warm hands, wrapped him up, transported him tenderly and installed him in an armchair like a collector enshrining a priceless piece of fragile glass. He fluttered anxiously round him, pressing a cigarette into the Saint's mouth and lighting it before he retired reluctantly to his own chair on the other side of the desk.

"And now, my dear Mr Tombs," said Mr Quarter-stone at last, clasping his hands across his stomach, "how can I help you?"

Simon looked at his hands, his feet, the carpet, the wall and then at Mr Quarterstone.

"Well," he said bashfully, "I wanted to inquire about some dramatic lessons."

"Some--ah--oh yes. You mean a little advanced coaching. A little polishing of technique?"

"Oh no," said the Saint hastily. "I mean, you know your business, of course, but I'm only a beginner."

Mr Quarterstone sat up a little straighter and gazed at him.

"You're only a beginner?" he repeated incredulously.

"Yes."

"You mean to tell me you haven't any stage experience?"

"No. Only a couple of amateur shows."

"You're not joking?"

"Of course not."

"Well!"

Mr Quarterstone continued to stare at him as if he were something rare and strange. The Saint twisted his hatbrim uncomfortably. Mr Quarterstone sat back again, shaking his head.

"That's the most extraordinary thing I ever heard of," he declared.

"But why?" Simon asked, with not unreasonable surprise.

"My dear fellow, anyone would take you for a professional actor! I've been in the theatrical business all my life--I was on Broadway for ten years, played before the King of England, produced hundreds of shows --and I'd have bet anyone I could pick out a professional actor every time. The way you walked in, the way you sat down, the way you use your hands, even the way you're smoking that cigarette--it's amazing! Are you sure you're not having a little joke?"

"Absolutely."

"May I ask what is your present job?"

"Until a couple of days ago," said the Saint ingenuously, "I was working in a bank. But I'd always wanted to be an actor, so when my uncle died and left me twenty thousand dollars 1 thought it was a good time to start. I think I could play parts like William Powell," he added, looking sophisticated.

Mr Quarterstone beamed like a cat full of cream.

"Why not?" he demanded oratorically. "Why ever not? With that natural gift of yours . . ." He shook his head again, clicking his tongue in eloquent expression of his undiminished awe and admiration. "It's the most amazing thing! Of course, I sometimes see fellows who are nearly as good-looking as you are, but they haven't got your manner. Why, if you took a few lessons----"

Simon registered the exact amount of glowing satisfaction which he was supposed to register.

"That's what I came to you for, Mr Quarterstone. I've seen your advertisements----"

"Yes, yes!"

Mr Quarterstone got up and came round the desk again. He took the Saint's face in his large warm hands and turned it this way and that, studying it from various angles with increasing astonishment. He made the Saint stand up and studied him from a distance, screwing up one eye and holding up a finger in front of the other to compare his proportions. He stalked up to him again, patted him here and there and felt his muscles. He stepped back again and posed in an attitude of rapture.

"Marvellous!" he said. "Astounding!"

Then, with an effort, he brought himself out of his trance.

"Mr Tombs," he said firmly, "there's only one thing for me to do. I must take you in charge myself. I have a wonderful staff here, the finest staff you could find in any dramatic academy in the world, past masters, every one of 'em--but they're not good enough. I wouldn't dare to offer you anything but the best that we have here. I offer you myself. And because I only look upon it as a privilege--nay, a sacred duty, to develop this God-given talent you have, I shall not try to make any money out of you. I shall only make a small charge to cover the actual value of my time. Charles Laughton paid me five thousand dollars for one hour's coaching in a difficult scene. John Barrymore took me to Hollywood and paid me fifteen thousand dollars to criticize him in four rehearsals. But I shall only ask you for enough to cover my out-of-pocket expenses--let us say, one thousand dollars--for a course of ten special, personal, private, exclusive lessons. . . . No," boomed Mr Quarterstone, waving one hand in a magnificent gesture, "don't thank me! Were I to refuse to give you the benefit of all my experience, I should regard myself as a traitor to my calling, a very--ah--Ishmael!"

If there was one kind of acting in which Simon Templar had graduated from a more exacting academy than was dreamed of in Mr Quarterstone's philosophy, it was the art of depicting the virgin sucker yawning hungrily under the baited hook. His characterization was pointed with such wide-eyed and unsullied innocence, such eager and open-mouthed receptivity, such a succulently plastic amenability to suggestion, such a rich response to flattery--in a word, with such a sublime absorptiveness to the old oil--that men such as Mr Quarterstone, on becoming conscious of him for the first time, had been known to wipe away a furtive tear as they dug down into their pockets for first mortgages on the Golden Gate Bridge and formulae for extracting radium from old toothpaste tubes. He used all of that technique on Mr Homer Quarterstone, so effectively that his enrolment in the Supremax Academy proceeded with the effortless ease of a stratospherist returning to terra firma a short head in front of his punctured balloon. Mr Quarterstone did not actually brush away an unbidden tear, but he did bring out an enormous leather-bound ledger and enter up particulars of his newest student with a gratifying realization that Life, in spite of the pessimists, was not wholly without its moments of unshadowed joy.

"When can I start?" asked the Saint, when that had been done.

"Start?" repeated Mr Quarterstone, savouring the word. "Why, whenever you like. Each lesson lasts a full hour, and you can divide them up as you wish. You can start now if you want to. I had an appointment . . ."

"Oh."

"But it is of no importance, compared with this." Mr Quarterstone picked up the telephone. "Tell Mr Urlaub I shall be too busy to see him this afternoon," he told it. He hung up. "The producer," he explained, as he settled back again. "Of course you've heard of him. But he can wait. One day he'll be waiting on your doorstep, my boy." He dismissed Mr Urlaub, the producer, with a majestic ademan. "What shall we take first--elocution ?"

"You know best, Mr Quarterstone," said the Saint eagerly.

Mr Quarterstone nodded. If there was anything that could have increased his contentment, it was a pupil who had no doubt that Mr Quarterstone knew best. He crossed his legs and hooked one thumb in the armhole of his waistcoat.

"Say 'Eee.' "

"Eee."

"Ah."

Simon went on looking at him expectantly.

"Ah," repeated Mr Quarterstone.

"I beg your pardon?"

"I said 'Ah.' "

"Oh."

"No, ah."

"Yes, I----"

"Say it after me, Mr Tombs. 'Aaaah.' Make it ring out. Hold your diaphragm in, open your mouth and bring it up from your chest. This is a little exercise in the essential vowels."

"Oh. Aaaah."

"Oh."

"Oh."

"I."

"I."

"Ooooo." "Ooooo."

"Wrong."

"I'm sorry . . ."

"Say 'Wrong,' Mr Tombs."

"Wrong."

"Right," said Mr Quarterstone.

"Right."

"Yes, yes," said Mr Quarterstone testily. "I----"

"Yes, yes, I."

Mr Quarterstone swallowed.

"I don't mean you to repeat every word I say," he said. "Just the examples. Now let's try the vowels again in a sentence. Say this: 'Faaar skiiies loooom O-ver

meee.' "

"Faaar skiiies loooom O-ver meee."

"Daaark niiight draaaws neeear."

"The days are drawing in," Simon admitted politely.

Mr Quarterstone's smile became somewhat glassy, but whatever else he may have been he was no quitter.

"I'm afraid he is a fraud," Simon told Rosalind Hale when he saw her the next day. "But he has a beautiful line of sugar for the flies. I was the complete gawky goof, the perfect bank clerk with dramatic ambitions-- you could just see me going home and leering at myself in the mirror and imagining myself making love to Greta Garbo--but he told me he just couldn't believe how anyone with my poise couldn't have had any experience."

The girl's white teeth showed on her lower lip.

"But that's just what he told me!"

"I could have guessed it, darling. And I don't suppose you were the first, either. ... I had two lessons on the spot, and I've had another two today; and if he can teach anyone anything worth knowing about acting, then I can train ducks to write shorthand. I was so dumb that anyone with an ounce of artistic feeling would have thrown me out of the window, but when I left him this afternoon he almost hugged me and told me he could hardly wait to finish the course before he rushed out to show me to Gilbert Miller."

She moved her head a little, gazing at him with big sober eyes.

"He was just the same with me, too. Oh, I've been such a fool!"

"We're all fools in our own way," said the Saint consolingly. "Boys like Homer are my job, so they don't bother me. On the other hand, you've no idea what a fool I can be with soft lights and sweet music. Come on to dinner and I'll show you."

"But now you've given Quarterstone a thousand dollars, and what are you going to do about it?"

"Wait for the next act of the stirring drama."

The next act was not long in developing. Simon had two more of Mr Quarterstone's special, personal, private, exclusive lessons the next day, and two more the day after--Mr Homer Quarterstone was no apostle of the old-fashioned idea of making haste slowly, and by getting in two lessons daily he was able to double his temporary income, which then chalked up at the very pleasing figure of two hundred dollars per diem, minus the overhead, of which the brassy blonde was not the smallest item. But this method of gingering up the flow of revenue also meant that its duration was reduced from ten days to five, and during a lull in the next day's first hour (Diction, Gesture and Facial Expression) he took the opportunity of pointing out that Success, while already certain, could never be too certain or too great, and therefore that a supplementary series of lessons in the Art and Technique of the Motion Picture, while involving only a brief delay, could only add to the magnitude of Mr Tombs's ultimate inevitable triumph.

On this argument, for the first time, Mr Tombs disagreed.

"I want to see for myself whether I've mastered the first lessons," he said. "If I could get a small part in a play, just to try myself out . . ."

He was distressingly obstinate, and Mr Quarter-stone, either because he convinced himself that it would only be a waste of time, or because another approach to his pupil's remaining nineteen thousand dollars seemed just as simple, finally yielded. He made an excuse to leave the studio for a few minutes, and Simon knew that the next development was on its way.

It arrived in the latter part of the last hour (Declamation with Gestures, Movement and Facial Expression--The Complete Classical Scene).

Mr Quarterstone was demonstrating.

"To be," trumpeted Mr Quarterstone, gazing ceil-ingwards with an ecstatic expression, the chest thrown out, the arms slightly spread, "or not to be." Mr Quarterstone ceased to be. He slumped, the head bowed, the arms hanging listlessly by the sides, the expression doleful. "That--is the question." Mr Quarterstone pondered it, shaking his head. The suspense was awful. He elaborated the idea. "Whether 'tis nobler"--Mr Quarterstone drew himself nobly up, the chin lifted, the right arm turned slightly across the body, the forearm parallel with the ground--"in the mind"--he clutched his brow, where he kept his mind--"to suffer"---he clutched his heart, where he did his suffering--"the slings"--he stretched out his left hand for the slings-- "and arrows"--he flung out his right hand for the arrows--"of outrageous fortune"--Mr Quarterstone rolled the insult lusciously around his mouth and spat it out with defiance--"or to take arms"--he drew himself up again, the shoulders squared, rising slightly on tiptoe---"against a sea of troubles"--his right hand moved over a broad panorama, undulating symbolically --"and by opposing"--the arms rising slightly from the elbow, fists clenched, shoulders thrown back, chin drawn in--"end them!"--the forearms striking down again with a fierce chopping movement, expressive of finality and knocking a calendar off the table.

"Excuse me," said the brassy blonde, with her head poking round the door. "Mr Urlaub is here."

"Tchah!" said Mr Quarterstone, inspiration wounded in mid-flight. "Tell him to wait."

"He said----"

Mr Quarterstone's eyes dilated. His mouth opened. His hands lifted a little from his sides, the fingers tense and parted rather like plump claws, the body rising. He was staring at the Saint.

"Wait!" he cried. "Of course! The very thing! The very man you've got to meet! One of the greatest producers in the world today! Your chance!"

He leapt a short distance off the ground and whirled on the blonde, his arm flung out, pointing quiveringly.

"Send him in!"

Simon looked wildly breathless.

"But--but will he----"

"Of course he will! You've only got to remember what I've taught you. And sit down. We must be calm."

Mr Quarterstone sank into a chair, agitatedly looking calm, as Urlaub bustled in. Urlaub trotted quickly across the room.

"Ah, Homer."

"My dear Waldemar! How is everything?"

"Terrible! I came to ask for your advice . . ."

Mr Urlaub leaned across the desk. He was a smallish, thin, bouncy man with a big nose and sleek black hair. His suit fitted him as tightly as an extra skin, and the stones in his tiepin and in his rings looked enough like diamonds to look like diamonds. He moved as if he were hung on springs, and his voice was thin and spluttery like the exhaust of an anemic motorcycle.

"Niementhal has quit. Let me down at the last minute. He wanted to put some goddam gigolo into the lead. Some ham that his wife's got hold of. I said to him, 'Aaron, your wife is your business and this play is my business.' I said, 'I don't care if it hurts your wife's feelings and I don't care if she gets mad at you, I can't afford to risk my reputation on Broadway and my investment in this play by putting that ham in the lead.' I said, 'Buy her a box of candy or a diamond bracelet or anything or send her to Paris or something, but don't ask me to make her happy by putting that gigolo in this play.' So he quit. And me with everything set, and the rest of the cast ready to start rehearsing next week, and he quits. He said, 'All right, then use your own money.' I said, 'You know I've got fifty thousand dollars in this production already, and all you were going to put in is fifteen thousand, and for that you want me to risk my money and my reputation by hiring that ham. I thought you said you'd got a good actor.' 'Well, you find yourself a good actor and fifteen thousand dollars,' he says, and he quits. Cold. And I can't raise another cent--you know how I just tied up half a million to save those aluminum shares."

"That's tough, Waldemar," said Mr Quarterstone anxiously. "Waldemar, that's tough! . . . Ah--by the way--pardon me--may I introduce a student of mine? Mr Tombs . . ."

Urlaub turned vaguely, apparently becoming aware of the Saint's presence for the first time. He started forward with a courteously extended hand as the Saint rose.

But their hands did not meet at once. Mr Urlaub's approaching movement died slowly away, as if paralysis had gradually overtaken him, so that he finally came to rest just before they met, like a clockwork toy that had run down. His eyes became fixed, staring. His mouth opened.

Then, very slowly, he revived himself. He pushed his hand onwards again and grasped the Saint's as if it were something precious, shaking it slowly and earnestly.

"A pupil of yours, did you say, Homer?" he asked in an awestruck voice.

"That's right. My star pupil, in fact. I might almost say ..."

Mr Urlaub paid no attention to what Quarterstone might almost have said. With his eyes still staring, he darted suddenly closer, peered into the Saint's face, took hold of it, turned it from side to side, just as Quarterstone had once done. Then he stepped back and stared again, prowling round the Saint like a dog prowling round a tree. Then he stopped.

"Mr Tombs," he said vibrantly, "will you walk over to the door, and then walk back towards me?"

Looking dazed, the Saint did so.

Mr Urlaub looked at him and gulped. Then he hauled a wad of typescript out of an inside pocket, fumbled through it and thrust it out with one enamelled fingernail dabbing at a paragraph.

"Read that speech--read it as if you were acting it."

The Saint glanced over the paragraph, drew a deep breath and read with almost uncontrollable emotion.

"No, do not lie to me. You have already given me the answer for which I have been waiting. I am not ungrateful for what you once did for me, but I see now that that kind act was only a part of your scheme to ensnare my better nature in the toils of your unhallowed passions, as though pure love were a thing that could be bought like merchandise. Ah, yes, I loved you, but I did not know that that pretty face was only a mask for the corruption beneath. How you must have laughed at me! Ha, ha. I brought you a rose, but you turned it into a nest of vipers in my bosom. They have stabbed my heart! (Sobs.)"

Mr Urlaub clasped his hands together. His eyes bulged and rolled upwards.

"My God," he breathed hoarsely.

"What?" said the Saint.

"Why?" said Mr Quarterstone.

"But it's like a miracle!" squeaked Waldemar Urlaub. "He's the man! The type! The face! The figure! The voice! The manner! He is a genius! Homer, where did you find him? The women will storm the theatre." He grasped the Saint by the arm, leaning as far as he could over the desk and over Mr Quarter-stone. "Listen. He must play that part. He must. He is the only man. I couldn't put anyone else in it now. Not after I've seen him. I'll show Aaron Niementhal where he gets off. Quit, did he ? Okay. He'll be sorry. We'll have a hit that'll make history!"

"But Waldemar . . ."

Mr Urlaub dried up. His clutching fingers uncoiled from Simon's arm. The fire died out of his eyes. He staggered blindly back and sank into a chair and buried his face in his hands.

"Yes," he whispered bitterly. "I'd forgotten. The play can't go on. I'm sunk, Homer--just for a miserable fifteen grand. And now, of all times, when I've just seen Mr Tombs I"

"You know I'd help you if I could, Waldemar," said Mr Quartcrstone earnestly. "But I just bought my wife a fur coat, and she wants a new car, and that ranch we just bought in California set me back a hundred thousand."

Mr Urlaub shook his head.

"I know. It's not your fault. But isn't it just the toughest break?"

Quarterstone shook his head in sympathy. And then he looked at the Saint.

It was quite a performance, that look. It started casually, beheld inspiration, blazed with triumph, winked, glared significantly, poured out encouragement, pleaded, commanded and asked and answered several questions, all in a few seconds. Mr Quarterstone had not at any period in his career actually held down the job of prompter, but he more than made up with enthusiasm for any lack of experience. Only a man who had been blind from birth could have failed to grasp the idea that Mr Quarterstone was suggesting, and the Saint had not strung along so far in order to feign blindness at the signal for his entrance.

Simon cleared his throat.

"Er--did you say you only needed another fifteen thousand dollars to put on this play?" he asked diffidently, but with a clearly audible note of suppressed excitement.

After that he had to work no harder than he would have had to work to get himself eaten by a pair of hungry lions. Waldemar Urlaub, once the great light had dawned on him, skittered about like a pea on a drum in an orgy of exultant planning. Mr Tombs would have starred in the play anyhow, whenever the remainder of the necessary wind had been raised-- Urlaub had already made up his mind to that--but if Mr Tombs had fifteen thousarld dollars as well as his genius and beauty, he would be more than a star. He could be co-producer as well, a sharer in the profits, a friend and an equal, in every way the heir to the position which the great Aaron Niementhal would have occupied. His name would go on the billing with double force--Urlaub grabbed a piece of paper and a pencil to illustrate it:

Sebastian Tombs

and

Waldmar Urlaub

present

SEBASTIAN TOMBS

in

"LOVE--THE REDEEMER"

There would also be lights on the theatre, advertisements, photographs, newspaper articles, news items, gossip paragraphs, parties, movie rights, screen tests, Hollywood, London, beautiful and adoring women . . . Mr Urlaub built up a luminous picture of fame, success and fortune, while Mr Quarterstone nodded benignly and slapped everybody on the back and beamed at the Saint at intervals with a sublimely smug expression of "I told you so."

"And they did all that to me, too," said Rosalind Hale wryly. "I was practically Sarah Bernhardt when they'd finished. . . . But I told you just how they did it. Why do you have to let yourself in for the same mess that I got into?"

"The easiest way to rob a bank is from the inside," said the Saint cryptically. "I suppose you noticed that they really have got a play?"

"Yes. I read part of it--the same as you did."

"Did you like it?"

She made a little grimace.

"You've got a right to laugh at me. I suppose that ought to have been warning enough, but Urlaub was so keen about it, and Quarterstone had already made me think he was a great producer, so I couldn't say that I thought it was awful. And then I wondered if it was just because I didn't know enough about plays."

"I don't know much about plays myself," said the Saint. "But the fact remains that Comrade Urlaub has got a complete play, with three acts and everything, god-awful though it is. I took it away with me to read it over and the more I look at it the more I'm thinking that something might be done with it."

Rosalind was aghast.

"You don't mean to say you'd really put your money into producing it?"

"Stranger things have happened," said the Saint thoughtfully. "How bad can a play be before it becomes good? And how much sense of humour is there in the movie business? Haven't you seen those reprints of old two-reelers that they show sometimes for a joke, and haven't you heard the audience laughing itself sick? . . . Listen. I only wish I knew who wrote Love --the Redeemer. I've got an idea . . ."

Mr Homer Quarterstone could have answered his question for him, for the truth was that the author of Love--the Redeemer resided under the artistic black homburg of Mr Homer Quarterstone. It was a matter of considerable grief to Mr Quarterstone that no genuine producer had ever been induced to see eye to eye with him on the subject of the superlative merits of that amorous masterpiece, so that after he had grown weary of collecting rejections Mr Quarterstone had been reduced to the practical expedient of using his magnum opus as one of the props in the more profitable but by no means less artistic drama from which he and Mr Urlaub derived their precarious incomes; but his loyalty to the child of his brain had never been shaken.

It was therefore with a strange squirmy sensation in the pit of his stomach that Mr Quarterstone sat in his office a few mornings later and gazed at a card in the bottom left-hand corner of which were the magic words, "Paragon Pictures, Inc., Hollywood, Calif." A feeling of fate was about him, as if he had been unexpectedly reminded of a still-cherished childhood dream.

"Show her in," he said with husky magnificence.

The order was hardly necessary, for she came in at once, shepherded by a beaming Waldemar Urlaub.

"Just thought I'd give you a surprise, Homer," he explained boisterously. "Did your heart jump when you saw that card? Well, so did mine. Still, it's real. I fixed it all up. Sold her the play. 'You can't go wrong,' I said, 'with one of the greatest drammers ever written.' "

Mrs Wohlbreit turned her back on him coldly and inspected Mr Quarterstone. She looked nothing like the average man's conception of a female from Hollywood, being gaunt and masculine with a sallow lined face and gold-rimmed glasses and mousey hair plastered back above her ears, but Mr Quarterstone had at least enough experience to know that women were used in Hollywood in executive positions which did not call for the decorative qualities of more publicized employees.

She said in her cold masculine voice: "Is this your agent?"

Mr Quarterstone swallowed.

"Ah----"

"Part owner," said Mr Urlaub eagerly. "That's right, isn't it, Homer? You know our agreement-- fifty-fifty in everything. Eh? Well, I've been working on this deal----"

"I asked you," said Mrs Wohlbreit penetratingly, "because I understand that you're the owner of this play we're interested in. There are so many chisellers in this business that we make it our policy to approach the author first direct--if he wants to take any ten-percenters in afterwards, that's his affair. A Mr Tombs brought me the play first, and told me he had an interest in it. I found out that he got it from Mr Ur-laub, so I went to him. Mr Urlaub told me that you were the original author. Now, who am I to talk business with?"

Mr Quarterstone saw his partner's mouth opening for another contribution.

"With--with us," he said weakly.

It was not what he might have said if he had had time to think, but he was too excited to be particular.

"Very well," said Mrs Wohlbreit. "We've read this play, Love--the Redeemer, and we think it would make a grand picture. If you haven't done anything yet about the movie rights ..."

Mr Quarterstone drew himself up. He felt as if he was in a daze from which he might be rudely awakened at any moment, but it was a beautiful daze. His heart was thumping, but his brain was calm and clear. It was, after all, only the moment with which he had always known that his genius must ultimately be rewarded.

"Ah--yes," he said with resonant calm. "The movie rights are, for the moment, open to--ah--negotiation. Naturally, with a drama of such quality, dealing as it does with a problem so close to the lives of every member of the thinking public, and appealing to the deepest emotions and beliefs of every intelligent man and woman----"

"We thought it would make an excellent farce," said Mrs Wohlbreit blandly. "It's just the thing we've been looking for for a long time." But before the stricken Mr Quarterstone could protest, she had added consolingly: "We could afford to give you thirty thousand dollars for the rights."

"Ah--quite," said Mr Quarterstone bravely.

By the time that Mrs Wohlbreit had departed, after making an appointment for the contract to be signed and the check paid over at the Paragon offices the following afternoon, his wound had healed sufficiently to let him take Mr Urlaub in his arms, as soon as the door closed, and embrace him fondly in an impromptu rumba.

"Didn't I always tell you that play was a knockout?" he crowed. "It's taken 'em years to see it, but they had to wake up in the end. Thirty thousand dollars! Why, with that money I can----" He sensed a certain stiffness in his dancing partner and hastily corrected himself: "I mean, we--we can----"

"Nuts," said Mr Urlaub coarsely. He disengaged himself and straightened the creases out of his natty suit. "What you've got to do now is sit down and figure out a way to crowbar that guy Tombs out of this."

Mr Quarterstone stopped dancing suddenly and his jaw dropped.

"Tombs?"

"Yeah! He wasn't so dumb. He had the sense to see that that play of yours was the funniest thing ever written. When we were talking about it in here he must have thought we thought it was funny, too."

Mr Quarterstone was appalled as the idea of duplicity struck him.

"Waldemar--d'you think he was trying to----"

"No. I pumped the old battle-axe on the way here. He told her he only had a part interest, but he wanted to do something for the firm and give us a surprise-- he thought he could play the lead in the picture, too."

"Has she told him----"

"Not yet. You heard what she said. She gets in touch with the author first. But we got to get him before he gets in touch with her. Don't you remember those contracts we signed yesterday? Fifty percent of the movie rights for him!"

Mr Quarterstone sank feebly on to the desk.

"Fifteen thousand dollars!" He groaned. Then he brightened tentatively. "But it's all right, Waldemar. He agreed to put fifteen thousand dollars into producing the play, so we just call it quits and we don't have to give him anything."

"You great fat lame-brained slob," yelped Mr Ur-laub affectionately. "Quits! Like hell it's quits! D'you think I'm not going to put that play on, after this? It took that old battle-axe to see it, but she's right. They'll be rolling in the aisles!" He struck a Quarterstoneish attitude. " 'I brought you a rose,' " he uttered tremulously, " 'but you turned it into a nest of vipers in my bosom. They have stabbed my heart!' My God! It's a natural! I'm going to put it on Broadway whatever we have to do to raise the dough--but we aren't going to cut that mug Tombs in on it."

Mr Quarterstone winced.

"It's all signed up legal," he said dolefully. "We'll have to spend our own dough and buy him out."

"Get your hat," said Mr Urlaub shortly. "We'll cook up a story on the way."

When Rosalind Hale walked into the Saint's apartment at the Waldorf-Astoria that afternoon, Simon Templar was counting crisp new hundred-dollar bills into neat piles.

"What have you been doing?" she said. "Burgling a bank?"

The Saint grinned.

"The geetus came out of a bank, anyway," he murmured. "But Comrades Quarterstone and Urlaub provided the checks. I just went out and cashed them."

"You mean they bought you out?"

"After a certain amount of haggling and squealing --yes. Apparently Aaron Niementhal changed his mind about backing the show, and Urlaub didn't want to offend him on account of Aaron offered to cut him in on another and bigger and better proposition at the same time; so they gave me ten thousand dollars to tear up the contracts, and the idea is that I ought to play the lead in Niementhal's bigger and better show."

She pulled off her hat and collapsed into a chair. She was no longer gaunt and masculine and forbidding, for she had changed out of a badly fitting tweed suit and removed her sallow make-up and thrown away the gold-rimmed glasses and fluffed out her hair again so that it curled in its usual soft brown waves around her face, so that her last resemblance to anyone by the name of Wohlbreit was gone.

"Ten thousand dollars," she said limply. "It doesn't seem possible. But it's real. I can see it."

"You can touch it, if you like," said the Saint. "Here." He pushed one of the stacks over the table towards her. "Fifteen hundred that you paid Quarter-stone for tuition." He pushed another. "Four thousand that you put into the play." He drew a smaller sheaf towards himself. "One thousand that I paid for my lessons. Leaving three thousand five hundred drops of gravy to be split two ways."

He straightened the remaining pile, cut it in two and slid half of it on to join the share that was accumulating in front of her. She stared at the money helplessly for a second or two, reached out and touched it with the tips of her fingers, and then suddenly she came round the table and flung herself into his arms. Her cheek was wet where it touched his face.

"I don't know how to say it," she said shakily. "But you know what I mean."

"There's only one thing bothering me," said the Saint some time later, "and that's whether you're really entitled to take back those tuition fees. After all, Homer made you a good enough actress to fool himself. Maybe he was entitled to a percentage, in spite of everything."

His doubts, however, were set at rest several months afterwards, when he had travelled a long way from New York and many other things had happened, when one day an advertisement in a New York paper caught his eye:

14th Week! Sold out 3 months ahead!

The Farce Hit of the Season:

LOVE--THE REDEEMER

by Homer Quarterstone

Imperial Theatre A Waldemar Urlaub Production

Simon Templar was not often at a loss for words, but on this occasion he was tongue-tied for a long time. And then, at last, he lay back and laughed helplessly.

"Oh well," he said. "I guess they earned it."

VII THE CHARITABLE COUNTESS

Simon templar's mail, like that of any other celebrity, was a thing of infinite variety. Perhaps it was even more so than that of most celebrities, for actors and authors and the other usual recipients of fan mail are of necessity a slightly smaller target for the busy letter-writer than a man who has been publicized at frequent intervals as a twentieth-century Robin Hood, to the despair and fury of the police officials at whose expense the publicity has been achieved. Of those correspondents who approached him under his better-known nom de guerre of "The Saint," about half were made up of people who thought that the nickname should be taken literally, and half of people who suspected that it stood for the exact opposite.

There were, of course, the collectors of autographs and signed photos. There were the hero-worshipping schoolboys whose ideas of a future profession would have shocked their fathers, and the romantic schoolgirls whose ideals of a future husband would have made their mothers swoon. There were also romantic maidens who were not so young, who supplied personal data of sometimes startling candour and whose propositions were correspondingly more concrete.

And then there were the optimists who thought that the Saint would like to finance a South American revolution, a hunt for buried treasure on the Spanish Main, a new night club or an invention for an auxiliary automatic lighter to light automatic lighters with. There were the plodding sportsmen who could find a job in some remote town, thereby saving their wives and children from imminent starvation, if only the Saint would lend them the fare. There were the old ladies who thought that the Saint might be able to trace their missing Pomeranians, and the old gentlemen who thought that he might be able to exterminate the damned Socialists. There were crooks and cranks, fatheads and fanatics, beggars, liars, romancers, idiots, thieves, rich men, poor men, the earnest, the flippant, the gay, the lonely, the time-wasters and the genuine tragedies, all that strange and variegated section of humanity that writes letters to total strangers; and then sometimes the letters were not from one stranger to another, but were no less significant, like a letter that came one morning from a man named Marty O'Connor:

/ should of writen you before but I didnt want you to think I was asking for a handout. I stuck at that job in Canada and we were doing fine. I thought we were all set but the guy was playing the markit, I didnt know he was that dumb, so the nex thing is hes bust, the garage is sold up and Im out a job. I could not get nothing else there, but I hear the heat is off in New York now so me and Cora hitchike back, I got a job as chaufer and hold that 3 weeks til the dame hears I got a police record, she won't believe Im going strait now. I got the bums rush, havent found nothing since, but Cora does odd jobs and I may get a job any day. When I do you got to come see us again, we never fergot what you done for us and would do the same for you anytime if we burn for it. . . .

That was a reminder of two people whom he had helped because he liked them and because he thought they were worth helping, in one of those adventures that made all his lawlessness seem worth while to him, whatever the moralists might say. Marty O'Connor, who put off writing to his friend for fear of being suspected of begging, was a very different character from many others who wrote with no such scruples and with less excuse--such as the Countess Jannowicz, whose letter came in the same mail.

The smile which Simon had had for Marty's letter turned cynical as he read it. On the face of it, it was a very genteel and dignified epistle, tastefully engraved under an embossed coronet, and printed on expensive handmade paper. The Countess Jannowicz, it said, requested the pleasure of Mr Simon Templar's company at a dinner and dance to be held at the Waldorf-Astoria on the twentieth of that month, in aid of the National League for the Care of Incurables, RSVP.

That in itself would have been harmless enough, but the catch came in very small copperplate at the foot of the invitation, in the shape of the words, "Tickets $25"--and in the accompanying printed pamphlet describing the virtues of the League and its urgent need of funds.

Simon had heard from her before, as had many other people in New York, for she was a busy woman. Born as Maggie Oaks in Weehauken, New Jersey, resplendent later as Margaretta Olivera in a place of honour in the nuder tableaux at the Follies, she had furred her nest with a notable collection of skins, both human and animal, up to the time when she met and married Count Jannowicz, a Polish boulevardier of great age and reputedly fabulous riches. Disdaining such small stuff as alimony, she had lived with him faithfully and patiently until the day of his death, which in defiance of all expectations he had postponed for an unconscionable time through more and more astounding stages of senility, only to discover after the funeral that he had been living for all that time on an annuity which automatically ceased its payments forthwith; so that after nineteen years of awful fidelity his widowed countess found herself the proud inheritor of a few more furs, a certain amount of jewelery, a derelict castle already mortgaged for more than its value and some seventeen kopeks in hard cash.

Since she was then forty-four, and her outlines had lost the voluptuousness which had once made them such an asset to the more artistic moments of the Follies, many another woman might have retired to the companionable obscurity of her fellow unfortunates in some small Riviera pension. Not so Maggie Oaks, who had the stern marrow of Weehauken in her bones. At least she had the additional intangible asset of a genuine title, and during her spouse's doggedly declining years she had whiled away the time consolidating the social position which her marriage had given her; so that after some sober consideration which it would have educated a bishop to hear, she was able To work out a fairly satisfactory solution to her financial problems.

Unlike Mr Elliot Vascoe, of whom we have heard before, who used charity to promote his social ambitions, she used her social position to promote charities. What the charities were did not trouble her much, so long as they paid her the twenty-five percent of the proceeds which was her standard fee. She had been known to sponsor, in the same day, a luncheon in aid of the Women's Society for the Prosecution of Immorality, and a ball in aid of the Free Hospital for Unmarried Mothers. As a means of livelihood, it had been a triumphant inspiration. Social climbers fought to serve, expensively, on her committees; lesser snobs scrambled to attend her functions and get their names in the papers in such distinguished company; charitable enterprises, struggling against depressions, were only too glad to pass over some of the labour of extracting contributions from the public to such a successful organizer; and the Countess Jannowicz, nee Maggie Oaks, lived in great comfort on Park Avenue and maintained a chauffeur-driven Packard out of her twenty-five per-, cents, eked out by other percentages which various restaurants and hotels were only too glad to pay her for bringing them the business.

The Saint had had his piratical eye on her for a long time; and now, with the apt arrival of that last invitation at a period when he had no other more pressing business on his hands, it seemed as if the discounting of the charitable countess was a pious duty which could no longer be postponed.

He called on her the same afternoon at her apartment, for when once the Saint had made up his mind to a foray the job was as good as done. A morning's meditation had been enough for him to sketch out a plan of campaign, and after that he saw no good reason to put it aside while it grew whiskers.

But what the plan was is of no importance, for he never used it. He had sent in a card bearing his venerable alias of Sebastian Tombs, but when the countess sailed into the luxuriously modernistic drawing room in which the butler had parked him, she came towards him with outstretched hand and a grim smile that promised surprises a split second before she spoke.

"Mr Templar?" she said coolly. "I'm sorry I had to keep you waiting."

It would be unfair to say that the Saint was disconcerted--in a buccaneer's life nothing could be foreseen, anyway, and you had to be schooled to the unexpected. But a perceptible instant went by before he answered.

"Why, hullo, Maggie," he murmured. "I was going to break it to you gently."

"A man with your imagination should have been able to do better. After all, Mr Sebastian Tombs is getting to be almost as well known as the great Simon Templar--isn't he?"

The Saint nodded, admitting his lapse, and making a mental note that the time had come to tear himself finally away from the alter ego to which he had clung with perverse devotion for too many years.

"You keep pretty well up-to-date," he remarked.

"Why not?" she returned frankly. "I've had an idea for some time that I'd be getting a visit from you one day."

"Would that be the voice of conscience?"

"Just common sense. Even you can't have a monopoly on thinking ahead."

Simon studied her interestedly. The vats of champagne which had sparkled down her gullet in aid of one charity or another over the past six years had left their own thin dry tang in her voice, but few of her other indulgences had left their mark. The cargoes of caviar, the schools of smoked salmon, the truckloads of foie gras, the coveys of quail, the beds of oysters and the regiments of lobsters which had marched in eleemosynary procession through her intestines, had resolved themselves into very little solid flesh. Unlike most of her kind, she had not grown coarse and flabby; she had aged with a lean and arid dignity. At fifty, Maggie Oaks, late of Weehauken and the Follies, really looked like a countess, even if it was a rather tart and dessi-cated countess. She looked like one of those brittle fish-blooded aristocrats who stand firm for kindness to animals and discipline for the lower classes. She had hard bright eyes and hard lines cracked into the heavy layers of powder and enamel on her face, and she was a hard bad woman in spite of her successful sophistication.

"At least that saves a lot of explanations," said the Saint, and she returned his gaze with her coldly quizzical stare.

"I take it that I was right--that you've picked me for your next victim."

"Let's call it 'contributor,' " suggested the Saint mildly.

She shrugged.

"In plain language, I'm either to give you, or have stolen from me, whatever sum of money you think fit to assess as a fine for what you would call my misdeeds."

"Madam, you have a wonderful gift of coming to the point."

"This money will be supposedly collected for charity," she went on, "but you will take your commission for collecting it before you pass it on."

"That was the general idea, Maggie."

She lighted a cigarette.

"I suppose I shouldn't be allowed to ask why it's a crime for me to make a living in exactly the same way as you do?"

"There is a difference. I don't set myself up too seriously as a public benefactor. As a matter of fact, most people would tell you that I was a crook. If you want that point of view, ask a policeman."

Her thin lips puckered with watchful mockery.

"That seems to make me smarter than you are, Mr Templar. The policeman would arrest you, but he'd tip his hat to me."

"That's possible," Simon admitted imperturbably. "But there are other differences."

"Meaning what?"

"Mathematical ones. A matter of simple economy. When I collect money, unless I'm trying to put things right for someone else who's been taken for a mug, between seventy-five and ninety percent of it really does go to charity. Now suppose you collect a thousand dollars in ticket sales for one of your parties. Two hundred and fifty bucks go straight into your pocket--you work on the gross. Other organizing expenses take up at least a hundred dollars more. Advertising, prizes, decorations, publicity and what not probably cost another ten percent. Then there's the orchestra, hire of rooms and waiters and the cost of a lot of fancy food that's much too good for the people who eat it--let's say four hundred dollars. And the caterers give you a fifty-dollar cut on that. The net result is that you take in three hundred dollars and a nice big dinner, and the good cause gets maybe a hundred and fifty. In other words, every time one of your suckers buys one of your thirty-dollar tickets, to help to save fallen women or something like that, he gives you twice as much as he gives the fallen women, which might not be exactly what he had in mind. So I don't think we really are in the same class."

"You don't mean that I'm in a better class?" she protested sarcastically.

The Saint shook his head.

"Oh no," he said. "Not for a moment. . . . But I do think that some of these differences ought to be adjusted."

Her mouth was as tight as a trap.

"And how will that be done?"

"I thought it 'd be an interesting change if you practised a little charity yourself. Suppose we set a donation of fifty thousand dollars----"

"Do you really think I'd give you fifty thousand dollars?"

"Why not?" asked the Saint reasonably. "Other people have. And the publicity alone would be almost worth it. Ask your press agent. Besides, it needn't really even cost you anything. That famous diamond necklace of yours, for instance--even in the limited markets I could take it to, it 'd fetch fifty thousand dollars easily. And if you bought yourself a good imitation hardly anyone would know the difference."

For a moment her mouth stayed open at the implication of what he was saying, and then she burst into a deep cackle of laughter.

"You almost scared me," she said. "But people have tried to bluff me before. Still, it was nice of you to give me the warning." She stood up. "Mr Templar, I'm not going to threaten you with the police because I know that would only make you laugh. Besides, I think I can look after myself. I'm not going to give you fifty thousand dollars, of course, and I'm not going to let you steal my necklace. If you can get either, you'll be a clever man. Will you come and see me again when you've hatched a plot?"

The Saint stood up also, and smoothed the clothes over his sinewy seventy-four inches. His lazy blue eyes twinkled.

"That sounds almost like a challenge."

"You can take it as one if you like."

"I happen to know that your necklace isn't insured --no company in the country will ever carry you for a big risk since that fraudulent claim that got you a suspended sentence when you were in the Follies. Insurance company black lists don't fade."

Her thin smile broadened.

"I got ten thousand dollars, just the same, and that's more than covered any losses I've had since," she said calmly. "No, Mr Templar, I'm not worried about insurance. If you can get what you're after I'll be the first to congratulate you."

Simon's brows slanted at her with an impudent humour that would have given her fair warning if she had been less confident. He had completely recovered from the smithereening of his first ingenious plans, and already his swift imagination was playing with a new and better scheme.

"Is that a bet?" he said temptingly.

"Do you expect me to put it in writing?"

He smiled back at her.

"I'll take your word for it. ... We must tell the newspapers."

He left her to puzzle a little over that last remark, but by the time she went to bed she had forgotten it. Consequently she had a second spell of puzzlement a couple of mornings later when she listened to the twittering voice of one of her society acquaintances on the telephone.

"My dear, how too original! Quite the cleverest thing I ever heard of! ... Oh, now you're just playing innocent! Of course it's in all the papers! And on the front page, too! . . . How did you manage it? My dear, I'm madly jealous! The Saint could steal anything I've got, and I mean anything! He must be the most fascinating man--isn't he?"

"He is, darling, and I'll tell him about your offer," said the countess instinctively.

She hung up the microphone and said: "Silly old cow!" There had been another ball the night before, in aid of a seamen's mission or a dogs' hospital or something, and she had had to deal with the usual charitable ration of champagne and brandy; at that hour of the morning after her reactions were not as sharp as they became later in the day. Nevertheless, a recollection of the Saint's parting words seeped back into her mind with a slight shock. She took three aspirins in a glass of whisky and rang for some newspapers.

She didn't even have to open the first one. The item pricked her in the eyes just as the sheet was folded:

SAINT WILL ROB COUNTESS

FOR CHARITY

"It's a Bet," says Society Hostess

new- YORK, October 12.-- Simon Templar, better known as "The Saint," famous 20th-century Robin Hood, added yesterday to his long list of audacities by announcing that he had promised to steal for charity the $100,000 necklace of Countess Jannowicz, the well-known society leader.

But for once the police have not been asked to prevent the intended crime. Templar called on the countess personally last Tuesday to discuss his scheme, and was told that she would be the first to congratulate him if he could get away with it.

The twist in the plot is that Countess Jannowicz is herself an indefatigable worker for charity, and the organizer of countless social functions through which thousands of dollars are annually collected for various hospitals and humane societies.

Those who remember the countess' many triumphs in roping in celebrities as a bait for her charities believe that she has surpassed herself with her latest "catch." It was whispered that the sensational stunt launching of some new

{continued on page nine)

The countess read it all through, and then she put her head back on the pillows and thought about it some more and began to shake with laughter. The vibration made her feel as if the top of her head was coming off but she couldn't stop it. She was still quivering among her curlers when the telephone exoloded again.

"It's someone from Police Headquarters," reported her maid. "Inspector Fernack."

"What the hell does he want?" demanded the countess.

She took over the instrument.

"Yes," she squawked.

"This is Inspector Fernack of Centre Street," clacked the diaphragm. "I suppose you've seen that story about the Saint and yourself in the papers?"

"Oh yes," said the countess sweetly. "I was just reading it. Isn't it simply delightful?"

"That isn't for me to say," answered the detective in a laboured voice. "But if this is a serious threat we shall have to take steps to protect your property."

"Take steps----Oh, but I don't want to make it too easy for him. He always seems to get away with everything when the police are looking out for him."

There was a strangled pause at the other end of the wire. Then:

"You mean that this is really only a publicity stunt?"

"Now, now," said the countess coyly. "That would be telling, wouldn't it? Good-bye, Inspector."

She handed the telephone back to her maid.

"If that damn flatfoot calls again, tell him I'm out," she said. "Get me some more aspirin and turn on my bath."

It was typical of her that she dismissed Fernack's offer without a moment's uneasiness. After she had bathed and swallowed some coffee, however, she did summon the sallow and perspiring Mr Ullbaum who lived a feverish life as her press agent and vaguely general manager.

"There'll be some reporters calling for interviews," she said. "Some of 'em have been on the phone already. Tell 'em anything that comes into your head, but keep it funny."

Mr Ullbaum spluttered, which was a habit of his when agitated, which was most of the time.

"But what's so funny if he does steal the necklace?"

"He isn't going to get the necklace--I'll take care of that. But I hope he tries. Everybody he's threatened to rob before has gone into hysterics before he's moved a finger, and they've been licked before he starts. I'm going to lick him and make him look as big as a flea at the same time--and all without even getting out of breath. We'll treat it as a joke now, and after he's made a fool of himself and it really is a joke, it '11 be ten times funnier. For God's sake go away and use your own brain. That's what I pay you for. I've got a headache."

She was her regal self again by cocktail time, when the Saint saw her across the room at the Versailles with a party of friends, immaculately groomed from the top of her tight-waved head to the toes of her tight-fitting shoes and looking as if she had just stepped out of an advertisement for guillotines. He sauntered over in answer to her imperiously beckoning forefinger.

"I see your press agent didn't waste any time, Mr Templar."

"I don't know," said the Saint innocently. "Are you sure you didn't drop a hint to your own publicity man?"

She shook her head.

"Mr Ullbaum was quite upset when he heard about it."

The Saint smiled. He knew the permanently flustered Mr Ullbaum.

"Then it must have been my bloke," he murmured. "How did you like the story?"

"I thought it was rather misleading in places, but Mr Ullbaum is going to put that right. . . . Still, the police are quite interested. I had a phone call from a detective this morning before I was really awake."

A faint unholy glimmer crossed the Saint's eyes.

"Would that be Inspector Fernack, by any chance?"

"Yes."

"What did you tell him?"

"I told him to leave me alone."

Simon seemed infinitesimally disappointed, but he grinned.

"I was wondering why he hadn't come paddling around to see me and add some more fun to the proceedings. I'm afraid I'm going to miss him. But it's nice to play with someone like you who knows the rules."

"I know the rules, Mr Templar," she said thinly. "And the first rule is to win. Before you're finished you're going to wish you hadn't boasted so loudly."

"You're not worried?"

She moved one jewel-encrusted hand indicatively.

"Did you notice those two men at that table in the corner?"

"Yes--have they been following you? I'll call a cop and have them picked up if you like."

"Don't bother. Those are my bodyguards. They're armed and they have orders to shoot at the drop of a hat. Are you sure you aren't worried?"

He laughed.

"I never drop my hat." He buttoned his coat languidly, and the impudent scapegrace humour danced in his eyes like sunlight on blue water. "Well--I've got to go on with my conspiring, and I'm keeping you from your friends . . ."

There was a chorus of protest from the other women at the table, who had been craning forward with their mouths open, breathlessly eating up every word.

"Oh no!"

"Countess, you must introduce us!"

"I've been dying to meet him!"

The countess' lips curled.

"Of course, my dears," she said, with the sugariness of arsenic. "How rude of me!" She performed the introductions. "Lady Instock was telling me only this morning that you could steal anything from her," she added spikily.

"Anything," confirmed Lady Instock, gazing at the Saint rapturously out of her pale protruding eyes.

Simon looked at her thoughtfully.

"I won't forget it," he said.

As he returned to his own table he heard her saying to a unanimous audience: "Isn't he the most thrilling----"

Countess Jannowicz watched his departure intently, ignoring the feminine palpitations around her. She had a sardonic sense of humour, combined with a scarcely suppressed contempt for the climbing sycophants who crawled around her, that made the temptation to elaborate the joke too attractive to resist. Several times during the following week she was impelled to engineer opportunities to refer to "that Saint person who's trying to steal my necklace" ; twice again, when their paths crossed in fashionable restaurants, she called him to her table for the express pleasure of twitting him about his boast. To demonstrate her contempt for his reputation by teasing him on such friendly terms, and at the same time to enjoy the awed reactions of her friends, flattered something exhibitionistic in her that gave more satisfaction than any other fun she had had for years. It was like having a man-eating tiger for a pet and tweaking its ears.

This made nothing any easier for Mr Ullbaum. The countess was already known as a shrewd collector of publicity and the seeds of suspicion had been firmly planted by the opening story. Mr Ullbaum tried to explain to groups of skeptical reporters that the Saint's threat was perfectly genuine but that the countess was simply treating it with the disdain which it deserved; at the same time he tried to carry out his instructions to "keep it funny," and the combination was too much for his mental powers. The cynical cross-examinations he had to submit to usually reduced him to ineffectual spluttering. His disclaimers were duly printed, but in contexts that made them sound more like admissions.

The countess, growing more and more attached to her own joke, was exceptionally tolerant.

"Let 'em laugh," she said. "It'll make it all the funnier when he flops."

She saw him a third time at supper at "21" and invited him to join her party for coffee. He came over, smiling and immaculate, as much at ease as if he had been her favourite nephew. While she introduced him --a briefer business now, for he had met some of the party before--she pointedly fingered the coruscating rope of diamonds on her neck.

"You see I've still got it on," she said as he sat down.

"I noticed that the lights seemed rather bright over here," he admitted. "You've been showing it around quite a lot lately, haven't you? Are you making the most of it while you've got it?"

"I want to make sure that you can't say I didn't give you plenty of chances."

"Aren't you afraid that some ordinary grab artist might get it first ? You know I have my competitors."

She looked at him with thinly veiled derision.

"I'll begin to think there is a risk of that, if you don't do something soon. And the suspense is making me quite jittery. Haven't you been able to think of a scheme yet?"

Simon's eyes rested on her steadily for a moment while he drew on his cigarette.

"That dinner and dance you were organizing for Friday--you sent me an invitation," he said. "Is it too late for me to get a ticket?"

"I've got some in my bag. If you've got twenty-five dollars----"

He laid fifty dollars on the table.

"Make it two--I may want someone to help me carry the loot."

Her eyes went hard and sharp for an instant before a buzz of excited comment from her listening guests shut her off from him. He smiled at them all inscrutably and firmly changed the subject while he finished his coffee and smoked another cigarette. After he had taken his leave, she faced a bombardment of questions with stony preoccupation.

"Come to the dance on Friday," was all she would say. "You may see some excitement."

Mr Ullbaum, summoned to the Presence again the next morning, almost tore his hair.

"Now will you tell the police?" he gibbered.

"Don't be so stupid," she snapped. "I'm not going to lose anything, and he's going to look a bigger fool than he has for years. All I want you to do is see that the papers hear that Friday is the day--we may sell a few more tickets."

Her instinct served her well in that direction at least. The stories already published, vague and contradictory as they were, had boosted the sale of tickets for the Grand Ball in aid of the National League for the Care of Incurables beyond her expectations, and the final announcement circulated to the press by the unwilling Mr Ullbaum caused a flurry of last-minute buying that had the private ballroom hired for the occasion jammed to overflowing by eight o'clock on the evening of the twentieth. It was a curious tribute to the legends that had grown up around the name of Simon Templar, who had brought premature grey hairs to more police officers than could easily have been counted. Everyone who could read knew that the Saint had never harmed any innocent person, and there were enough sensation-seekers with clear consciences in New York to fill the spacious suite beyond capacity.

Countess Jannowicz, glittering with diamonds, took her place calmly at the head table beside the chairman. He was the aged and harmlessly doddering bearer of a famous name who served in the same honorary position in several charitable societies and boards of directors without ever knowing much more about them than was entailed in presiding over occasional public meetings convened by energetic organizers like the countess; and he was almost stone deaf, an ailment which was greatly to his advantage in view of the speeches he had to listen to.

"What's this I read about some fella goin' to steal your necklace ?" he mumbled, as he shakily spooned his soup.

"It wouldn't do you any good if I told you, you dithering old buzzard," said the countess with a gracious smile.

"Oh yes. Hm. Ha. Extraordinary."

She was immune to the undercurrents of excitement that ebbed and flowed through the room like leakages of static electricity. Her only emotion was a slight anxiety lest the Saint should cheat her, after all, by simply staying away. After all the build-up, that would certainly leave her holding the bag. But it would bring him no profit, and leave him deflated on his own boast at the same time; it was impossible to believe that he would be satisfied with such a cheap anticlimax as that.

What else he could do and hope to get away with, on the other hand, was something that she had flatly given up trying to guess. Unless he had gone sheerly cuckoo, he couldn't hope to steal so much as a spoon that night, after his intentions had been so widely and openly proclaimed, without convicting himself on his own confession. And yet the Saint had so often achieved things that seemed equally impossible that she had to stifle a reluctant eagerness to see what his uncanny ingenuity would devise. Whatever that might be, the satisfaction of her curiosity could cost her nothing--for one very good reason.

The Saint might have been able to accomplish the apparently impossible before, but he would literally have to perform a miracle if he was to open the vaults of the Vandrick National Bank. For that was where her diamond necklace lay that night and where it had lain ever since he paid his first call on her. The string she had been wearing ever since was a first-class imitation, worth about fifty dollars. That was her answer to all the fanfaronading and commotion--a precaution so obvious and elementary that no one else in the world seemed to have thought of it, so flawless and unassailable that the Saint's boast was exploded before he even began, so supremely ridiculously simple that it would make the whole earth quake with laughter when the story broke.

Even so, ratcheted notch after notch by the lurking fear of a fiasco, tension crept up on her as the time went by without a sign of the Saint's elegant slender figure and tantalizing blue eyes. He was not there for the dinner or the following speeches, nor did he show up during the interval while some of the tables were being whisked away from the main ballroom to make room for the dancing. The dancing started without him, went on through long-drawn expectancy while impatient questions leapt at the countess spasmodically from time to time like shots from ambush.

"He'll come," she insisted monotonously, while news photographers roamed restively about with their fingers aching on the triggers of their flashlights.

At midnight the Saint arrived.

No one knew how he got in; no one had seen him before; but suddenly he was there.

The only announcement of his arrival was when the music stopped abruptly in the middle of a bar. Not all at once, but gradually, in little groups, the dancers shuffled to stillness, became frozen to the floor as the first instinctive turning of eyes towards the orchestra platform steered other eyes in the same direction.

He stood in the centre of the dais, in front of the microphone. No one had a moment's doubt that it was the Saint, although his face was masked. The easy poise of his athletic figure in the faultlessly tailored evening clothes was enough introduction, combined with the careless confidence with which he stood there, as if he had been a polished master of ceremonies preparing to make a routine announcement. The two guns he held, one in each hand, their muzzles shifting slightly over the crowd, seemed a perfectly natural part of his costume.

"May I interrupt for a moment, ladies and gentlemen ?" he said.

He spoke quietly but the loud-speakers made his voice audible in every corner of the room. Nobody moved or made any answer. His question was rather superfluous. He had interrupted, and everyone's ears were strained for what he had to say.

"This is a holdup," he went on in the same easy conversational tone. "You've all been expecting it, so none of you should have heart failure. Until I've finished, none of you may leave the room--a friend of mine is at the other end of the hall to help to see that this order is carried out."

A sea of heads screwed round to where a shorter stockier man in evening clothes that seemed too tight for him, stood blocking the far entrance, also masked and also with two guns in his hands.

"So long as you all do exactly what you're told, I promise that nobody will get hurt. You two"--one of his guns flicked towards the countess' bodyguards, who were standing stiff-fingered where they had been caught when they saw him--"come over here. Turn your backs, take out your guns slowly and drop them on the floor."

His voice was still quiet and matter-of-fact but both the men obeyed like automatons.

"Okay. Now turn round again and kick them towards me. . . . That's fine. You can stay where you are, and don't try to be heroes if you want to live to boast about it."

A smile touched his lips under the mask. He pocketed one of his guns and picked up a black gladstone bag from the dais and tossed it out on to the floor. Then he put a cigarette between his lips and lighted it with a match flicked on the thumbnail of the same hand.

"The holdup will now proceed," he remarked affably. "The line forms on the right, and that means everybody except the waiters. Each of you will put a contribution in the bag as you pass by. Lady Instock, that's a nice pair of earrings. . . ."

Amazed, giggling, white-faced, surly, incredulous, according to their different characters, the procession began to file by and drop different articles into the bag under his directions. There was nothing much else that they could do. Each of them felt that gently waving gun centred on his own body, balancing its bark of death against the first sign of resistance. To one red-faced man who started to bluster, a waiter said tremulously: "Better do what he says. Tink of all da ladies. Anybody might get hit if he start shooting." His wife shed a pearl necklace and hustled him by. Most of the gathering had the same idea. Anyone who had tried to be a hero would probably have been mobbed by a dozen others who had no wish to die for his glory. Nobody really thought much beyond that. This wasn't what they had expected, but they couldn't analyze their reactions. Their brains were too numbed to think very much.

Two brains were not numbed. One of them belonged to the chairman who had lost his glasses, adding dim-sightedness to his other failings."From where he stood he couldn't distinguish anything as small as a mask or a gun but somebody seemed to be standing up on the platform and was probably making a speech. The chairman nodded from time to time with an expression of polite interest, thinking busily about the new corn plaster that somebody had recommended to him. The other active brain belonged to the Countess Jannowicz but there seemed to be nothing useful that she could do with it. There was no encouraging feeling of enterprise to be perceived in the guests around her, no warm inducement to believe that they would respond to courageous leadership.

"Can't you see he's bluffing?" she demanded in a hoarse bleat. "He wouldn't dare to shoot!"

"I should be terrified," murmured the Saint imper-turbably, without moving his eyes from the passing line. "Madam, that looks like a very fine emerald ring. . . ."

Something inside the countess seemed to be clutching at her stomach and shaking it up and down. She had taken care to leave her own jewels in a safe place but it hadn't occurred to her to give the same advice to her guests. And now the Saint was robbing them under her nose--almost under her own roof. Social positions had been shattered overnight on slighter grounds.

She grabbed the arm of a waiter who was standing near.

"Send for the police, you fool!" she snarled.

He looked at her and drew down the corners of his mouth in what might have been a smile or a sneer, or both, but he made no movement.

Nobody made any movement except as the Saint directed. The countess felt as if she were in a nightmare. It was amazing to her that the holdup could have continued so long without interruption--without some waiter opening a service door and seeing what was going on, or someone outside in the hotel noticing the curious quietness and giving the alarm. But the ballroom might have been spirited away on to a desert island.

The last of the obedient procession passed by the Saint and left its contribution in the bag and joined the silent staring throng of those who had already contributed. Only the chairman and the countess had not moved--the chairman because he hadn't heard a word and didn't know what was going on.

The Saint looked at her across the room.

"I've been saving Countess Jannowicz to the last," he said, "because she's the star turn that you've all been waiting for. Will you step up now, Countess?"

Fighting a tangle of emotions, but compelled by a fascination that drove her like a machine, she moved towards the platform. And the Saint glanced at the group of almost frantic photographers.

"Go ahead, boys," he said kindly. "Take your pictures. It's the chance of a lifetime. . . . Your necklace, Countess."

She stood still, raised her hands a little way, dropped them, raised them again, slowly, to her neck. Magnesium bulbs winked and splashed like a barrage of artificial lightning as she unfastened the clasp and dropped the necklace on top of the collection in the bag.

"You can't get away with this," she said whitely.

"Let me show you how easy it is," said the Saint calmly. He turned his gun to the nearest man to the platform. "You, sir--would you mind closing the bag, carefully, and taking it down to my friend at the other end of the room? Thank you." He watched the bag on its way down the room until it was in the hands of the stocky man at the far entrance. "Okay, partner," he said crisply. "Scram."

As if the word had been a magical incantation, the man vanished.

A kind of communal gasp like a sigh of wind swept over the assembly, as if the final unarguable physical disappearance of their property had squeezed the last long-held breath out of their bodies. Every eye had been riveted on it in its last journey through their midst, every eye had blinked to the shock of its ultimate vanishment, and then every eye dragged itself dazedly back to the platform from which those catastrophes had been dictated.

Almost to their surprise, the Saint was still standing there. But his other gun had disappeared and he had taken his mask off. In some way, the aura of subtle command that had clung to him before in spite of his easy casualness had gone, leaving the easy casualness alone. He was still smiling.

For an instant the two bodyguards were paralyzed. And then with muffled choking noises they made a concerted dive for their guns.

The Saint made no move except a slight deprecating motion of the hand that held his cigarette.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he said into the microphone, "I must now make my apologies, and an explanation."

The bodyguards straightened up, with their guns held ready. And yet something in his quiet voice, unarmed as he was, gripped them in spite of themselves, as it had gripped everyone else in the room. They looked questioningly towards the countess.

She gave them no response. She was rigid, watching the Saint with the first icy grasp of an impossible premonition closing in on her.

Somehow the Saint was going to get away with it. She knew it with a horrible certainty, even while she was wildly trying to guess what he would say. He could never have been so insane as to believe that he could pull a public holdup like that without being arrested an hour after he left the hotel, unless he had had some trick up his sleeve to immobilize the hue and cry. And she knew that she was now going to hear the trick she had not thought of.

"You have just been the victims of a holdup," he was saying. "Probably to nearly all of you that was a novel experience. But it is something that might happen to any of you tonight, tomorrow, at any time--so long as there are men at large to whom that seems like the best way of making a living.

"You came here tonight to help the National League for the Care of Incurables. That is a good and humane work. But I have taken this opportunity--with the kind co-operation of Countess Jannowicz--to make you think of another equally good, perhaps even more constructive work: the Care of Curables.

"I am talking about a class of whom I may know more than most of you--a section of those unfortunates who are broadly and indiscriminatingly called criminals.

"Ladies and gentlemen, not every lawbreaker is a brutalized desperado, fit only for swift extermination. I know that there are men of that kind, and you all know that I have been more merciless with them than any officer of the law. But there are others.

"I mean the men who steal through ignorance, through poverty, through misplaced ambition, through despair, through lack of better opportunity. I mean also men who have been punished for their crimes and who are now at the crossroads. One road takes them deeper and deeper into crime, into becoming real brutalized desperadoes. The other road takes them back to honesty, to regaining their self-respect, to becoming good and valuable citizens. All they need is the second chance which society is often so unwilling to give them.

"To give these men their second chance, has been founded the Society for the Rehabilitation of Delinquents--rather an elaborate name for a simple and straightforward thing. I am proud to be the first president of that society.

"We believe that money spent on this object is far cheaper than the money spent on keeping prisoners in jail, and at the same time is less than the damage that these men would do to the community if they were left to go on with their crimes. We ask you to believe the same thing, and to be generous.

"Everything that has been taken from you tonight can be found tomorrow at the office of the Society, which is in the Missouri Trust Building on Fifth Avenue. If you wish to leave your property there, to be sold for the benefit of the Society, we shall be grateful. If it has too great a sentimental value to you, and you wish to buy it back, we shall be glad to exchange it for a check. And if you object to us very seriously, and simply want it back, we shall of course have to give it back. But we hope that none of you will demand that.

"That is why we ventured to take the loot away tonight. Between now and tomorrow morning, we want you to have time to think. Think of how different this holdup would have been if it had been real. Think of your feelings when you saw your jewelry vanishing out of that door. Think of how little difference it would really make to your lives"--he looked straight at the countess--"if you were wearing imitation stones, while the money that has been locked up idly in the real ones was set free to do good and useful work. Think, ladies and gentlemen, and forgive us the melodramatic way in which we have tried to bring home our point."

He stepped back, and there was a moment of complete silence.

The chairman had at last found his glasses. He saw the speaker retiring with a bow from the microphone. Apparently the speech was over. It seemed to be the chairman's place to give the conventional lead. He raised his hands and clapped loudly.

It is things like that that turn tides and start revolutions. In another second the whole hall was clattering with hysterical applause.

"My dear, how do you think of these things?"

"The most divinely thrilling----"

"I was really petrified . . ."

The Countess Jannowicz wriggled dazedly free from the shrill jabber of compliments, managed somehow to snatch the Saint out of a circle of clamorous women of which Lady Instock was the most gushing leader. In a comparatively quiet corner of the room she faced him.

"You're a good organizer, Mr Templar. The head-waiter tells me that Mr Ullbaum telephoned this afternoon and told the staff how they were to behave during the holdup."

He was cheerfully appreciative.

"I must remember to thank him."

"Mr Ullbaum did no such thing."

He smiled.

"Then he must have been impersonated. But the damage seems to be done."

"You know that for all your talking you've still committed a crime?"

"I think you'd be rather a lonely prosecutor."

Rage had made her a little incoherent.

"I shall not come to your office. You've made a fool of yourself. My necklace is in the bank----"

"Countess," said the Saint patiently, "I'd guessed that much. That's why I want you to be sure and bring me the real one. Lady Instock is going to leave her earrings and send a check as well, and all the rest of your friends seem to be sold on the idea. You're supposed to be the number one patron. What would they think of you if after all the advertising you let yourself out with a fifty-dollar string of cut glass?"

"I can disclaim----"

"I know you can. But your name will still be mud. Whereas at the moment you're tops. Why not make the best of it and charge it to publicity?"

She knew she was beaten--that he had simply turned a trick with the cards that for days past she had been busily forcing into his hand. But she still fought with the bitterness of futility.

'I'll have the police investigate this phony charity----"

"They'll find that it's quite legally constituted, and so long as the funds last they'll be administered with perfect good faith."

"And who'll get the benefit of them besides yourself?"

Simon smiled once again.

"Our first and most urgent case will be a fellow named Marty O'Connor. He helped me with the collection tonight. You ought to remember him--he was your chauffeur for three weeks. Anyone like yourself, Countess," said the Saint rather cruelly, "ought to know that charity begins at home."

VIII THE MUGS' GAME

The stout jovial gentleman in the shapeless suit pulled a card out of his wallet and pushed it across the table. The printing on it said "Mr J. J. Naskill."

The Saint looked at it and offered his cigarette case.

"I'm afraid I don't carry any cards," he said. "But my name is Simon Templar."

Mr Naskill beamed, held out a large moist hand to be shaken, took a cigarette, mopped his glistening forehead and beamed again.

"Well, it's a pleasure to talk to you, Mr Templar," he said heartily. "I get bored with my own company on these long journeys and it hurts my eyes to read on a train. Hate travelling, anyway. It's a good thing my business keeps me in one place most of the time. What's your job, by the way ?"

Simon took a pull at his cigarette while he gave a moment's consideration to his answer. It was one of the few questions that ever embarrassed him. It wasn't that he had any real objection to telling the truth, but that the truth tended to disturb the tranquil flow of ordinary casual conversation. Without causing a certain amount of commotion, he couldn't say to a perfect stranger, "I'm a sort of benevolent brigand. I raise hell for crooks and racketeers of all kinds, and make life miserable for policemen, and rescue damsels in distress and all that sort of thing." The Saint had often thought of it as a deplorable commentary on the stodgy un-adventurousness of the average mortal's mind; but he knew that it was beyond his power to alter.

He said apologetically: "I'm just one of those lazy people. I believe they call it 'independent means.' "

This was true enough for an idle moment. The Saint could have exhibited a bank account that would have' dazzled many men who called themselves wealthy, but it was on the subject of how that wealth had been accumulated that several persons who lived by what they had previously called their wits were inclined to wax profane.

Mr Naskill sighed.

"I don't blame you," he said. "Why work if you don',t have to? Wish I was in your shoes myself. Wasn't born lucky, that's all. Still, I've got a good business now, so I shouldn't complain. Expect you recognize the name."

"Naskill?" The Saint frowned slightly. When he repeated it, it did have a faintly familiar ring, "It sounds as if I ought to know it----"

The other nodded.

"Some people call it No-skill," he said. "They're about right, too. That's what it is. Magic for amateurs. Look."

He flicked a card out of his pocket on to the table between them. It was the ace of diamonds. He turned it over and immediately faced it again. It was the nine of clubs. He turned it over again and it was the queen of hearts. He left it lying face down on the cloth and Simon picked it up curiously and examined it. It was the three of spades, but there was nothing else remarkable about it.

"Used to be a conjuror myself," Naskill explained. "Then I got rheumatism in my hands, and I was on the rocks. Didn't know any other job, so I had to make a living teaching other people tricks. Most of 'em haven't the patience to practise sleight of hand, so I made it easy for 'em. Got a fine trade now, and a two-hundred-page catalogue. I can make anybody into just as good a magician as the money they like to spend, and they needn't practise for five minutes. Look."

He took the card that the Saint was still holding, tore it into small pieces, folded his plump fingers on them for a moment and spread out his hands--empty. Then he broke open the cigarette he was smoking and inside it was a three of spades rolled into a tight cylinder, crumpled but intact.

"You can buy that one for a dollar and a half," he said. "The first one I showed you is two dollars. It's daylight robbery, really, but some people like to show off at parties, and they give me a living."

Simon slid back his sleeve from his wrist watch and glanced out of the window at the speeding landscape. There was still about an hour to go before they would be in Miami, and he had nothing else to take up his time. Besides, Mr Naskill was something novel and interesting in his experience; and it was part of the Saint's creed that a modern brigand could never know too much about the queerer things that went on in the world.

He caught the eye of a waiter at the other end of the dining car and beckoned him over.

"Could you stand a drink?" he suggested.

"Scotch for me," said Mr Naskill gratefully. He wiped his face again while Simon duplicated the order. "But I'm still talking about myself. If I'm boring you----"

"Not a bit of it." The Saint was perfectly sincere. "I don't often meet anyone with an unusual job like yours. Do you know any more tricks?"

Mr Naskill polished a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles, fitted them on his nose and hitched himself forward.

"Look," he said eagerly.

He was like a child with a new collection of toys. He dug into another of his sagging pockets, which Simon was now deciding were probably loaded with enough portable equipment to stage a complete show, and hauled out a pack of cards which he pushed over to the Saint.

"You take 'em. Look 'em over as much as you like. See if you can find anything wrong with 'cm. . . . All right. Now shuffle 'em. Shuffle 'em all you want." He waited. "Now spread 'em out on the table. You're doing this trick, not me. Take any card you like. Look at it-- don't let me see it. All right. Now, I haven't touched the cards at all, have I, except to give 'em to you ? You shuffled 'em and you picked a card without me helping you. I couldn't have forced it on you or anything. Eh? All right. Well, I could put any trimmings I wanted on this trick--any fancy stunts I could think up to make it look more mysterious. They'd all be easy because I know what card you've got all the time. You've got the six of diamonds."

Simon turned the card over. It was the six of diamonds.

"How's that?" Naskill demanded gleefully.

The Saint grinned. He drew a handful of cards towards him, face downwards as they lay, and pored over the backs for two or three minutes before he sat back again with a rueful shrug.

Mr Naskill chortled.

"There's nothing wrong with your eyes," he said. "You could go over 'em with a microscope and not find anything. All the same, I'll tell you what you've got. The king of spades, the two of spades, the ten of hearts----"

"I'll take your word for it," said the Saint resignedly. "But how on earth do you do it?"

Naskill glowed delightedly.

"Look," he said.

He took off his glasses and passed them over. Under the flat lenses Simon could see the notations clearly printed in the corners of each card--KS, 2S, 10H. They vanished as soon as he moved the glasses and it was impossible to find a trace of them with the naked eye.

"I've heard of that being done with coloured glasses," said the Saint slowly, "but I noticed that yours weren't coloured."

Naskill shook his head.

"Coloured glasses are old stuff. Too crude. Used to be used a lot by sharpers but too many people got to hear about 'em. You couldn't get into a card game with coloured glasses these days. No good for conjuring, either. But this is good. Invented it myself. Special ink and special kind of glass. There is a tint in it, of course, but it's too faint to notice." He shoved the cards over the cloth. "Here. Keep the lot for a souvenir. You can have some fun with your friends. But don't go asking 'em in for a game of poker, mind."

Simon gathered the cards together.

"It would be rather a temptation," he admitted. "But don't you get a lot of customers who buy them just for that?"

"Sure. A lot of professionals use my stuff. I know 'em all. Often see 'em in the shop. Good customers--they buy by the dozen. Can't refuse to serve 'em--they'd only get 'em some other way or buy somewhere else. I call it a compliment to the goods I sell. Never bothers my conscience; Anybody who plays cards with strangers is asking for trouble, anyway. It isn't only professionals, either. You'd be surprised at some of the people I've had come in and ask for a deck of readers --that's the trade name for 'em. I remember one fellow ..."

He launched into a series of anecdotes that filled up the time until they had to separate to their compartments to collect their luggage. Mr Naskill's pining for company was understandable after only a few minutes' acquaintance; it was clear that he was constitutionally incapable of surviving for long without an audience.

Simon Templar was not bored. He had already had his money's worth. Whether his friends would allow him to get very far with a programme of card tricks if he appeared before them in an unaccustomed set of horn-rimmed windows was highly doubtful; but the trick was worth knowing, just the same.

Almost every kind of craftsman has specialized journals to inform him of the latest inventions and discoveries and technical advances in his trade, but there is as yet no publication called the Grafter's Gazette and Weekly Skulldugger to keep a professional freebooter abreast of the newest devices for separating the sucker from his dough, and the Saint was largely dependent on his own researches for the encyclopedic knowledge of the wiles of the ungodly that had brought so much woe to the chevaliers d'industrie of two hemispheres. Mr Naskill's conversation had yielded a scrap of information that would be filed away in the Saint's well-stocked memory against the day when it would be useful. It might lie fallow for a month, a year, five years, before it produced its harvest: the Saint was in no hurry. In the fulness of time he would collect his dividend--it was one of the cardinal articles of his faith that nothing of that kind ever crossed his path without a rendezvous for the future, however distant that future might be. But one of the things that always gave the Saint a particular affection for this story was the promptness with which his expectations were fulfilled.

There were some episodes in Simon Templar's life when all the component parts of a perfectly rounded diagram fell into place one by one with such a sweetly definitive succession of crisp clicks that mere coincidence was too pallid and anemic a theory with which to account for them--when he almost felt as if he was reclining passively in an armchair and watching the oiled wheels of Fate roll smoothly through the convolutions of a supernaturally engineered machine.

Two days later he was relaxing his long lean body on the private beach of the Roney Plaza, revelling in the clean sharp bite of the sun on his brown skin and lazily debating the comparative attractions of iced beer or a tinkling highball as a noon refresher, when two voices reached him sufficiently clearly to force themselves into his drowsy consciousness. They belonged to a man and a girl, and it was obvious that they were quarrelling.

Simon wasn't interested. He was at peace with the world. He concentrated on digging up a small sand castle with his toes and tried to shut them out. And then he heard the girl say: "My God, are you so dumb that you can't see that they must be crooks?"

It was the word "crooks" that did it. When the Saint heard that word, he could no more have concentrated on sand castles than a rabid egyptologist could have remained aloof while gossip of scarabs and sarcophagi shuttled across his head. A private squabble was one thing, but this was something else that to the Saint made eavesdropping not only pardonable but almost a moral obligation.

He rolled over and looked at the girl. She was only a few feet from him and even at that range it was easier to go on looking than to look away. From her loose raven hair down to her daintily enamelled toenails there wasn't an inch of her that didn't make its own demoralizing demands on the eye, and the clinging silk swimsuit she wore left very few inches any secrets.

"Why must they be crooks?" asked the man stubbornly. He was young and tow-headed but the Saint's keen survey traced hard and haggard lines in his face. "Just because I've been out of luck----"

"Luck I" The girl's voice was scornful and impatient. "You were out of luck when you met them. Two men that you know nothing about, who pick you up in a bar and suddenly discover that you're the bosom pal they've been looking for all their lives--who want to take you out to dinner every night, and take you out fishing every day, and buy you drinks and show you the town--and you talk about luck! D'you think they'd do all that if they didn't know they could get you to play cards with them every night and make you lose enough to pay them back a hundred times over?"

"I won plenty from them to begin with."

"Of course you did! They let you win--just to encourage you to play higher. And now you've lost all that back and a lot more that you can't afford to lose. And you're still going on, making it worse and worse." She caught his arm impulsively and her voice softened. "Oh, Eddie, I hate fighting with you like this, but can't you see what a fool you're being?"

"Well, why don't you leave me alone if you hate fighting? Anyone might think I was a kid straight out of school."

He shrugged himself angrily away from her, and as he turned he looked straight into the Saint's eyes. Simon was so interested that the movement caught him unprepared, still watching them, as if he had been hiding behind a curtain and it had been abruptly torn down.

It was so much too late for Simon to switch his eyes away without looking even guiltier that be had to go on watching, and the young man went on scowling, at him and said uncomfortably: "We aren't really going to cut each other's throats, but there are some things that women can't understand."

"If a man told him that elephants laid eggs he'd believe it, just because it was a man who told him," said the girl petulantly, and she also looked at the Saint. "Perhaps if you told him----"

"The trouble is, she won't give me credit for having any sense----"

"He's such a baby----"

"If she didn't read so many detective stories----"

"He's so damned pig-headed----"

The Saint held up his hands.

"Wait a minute," he pleaded. "Don't shoot the referee--he doesn't know what it's all about. I couldn't help hearing what you were saying, but it isn't my fight."

The young man rubbed his head shamefacedly, and the girl bit her lip.

Then she said quickly: "Well, please, won't you be a referee? Perhaps he'd listen to you. He's lost fifteen thousand dollars already, and it isn't all his own money----"

"For God's sake," the man burst out savagely, "are you trying to make me look a complete heel?"

The girl caught her breath, and her lip trembled. And then, with a sort of sob, she picked herself up and walked quickly away without another word.

The young man gazed after her in silence, and his fist clenched on a handful of sand as if he would have liked to hurt it.

"Oh hell," he said expressively.

Simon drew a cigarette out of the packet beside him and tapped it meditatively on his thumbnail while the awkward hiatus made itself at home. His eyes seemed to be intent on following the movements of a small fishing cruiser far out on the emerald waters of the Gulf Stream.

"It's none of my damn business," he remarked at length, "but isn't there just a chance that the girl friend may be right? It's happened before; and a resort like this is rather a happy hunting ground for all kinds of crooks."

"I know it is," said the other sourly. He turned and looked at the Saint again miserably. "But I am pigheaded, and I can't bear to admit to her that I could have been such a mug. She's my fiancee--I suppose you guessed that. My name's Mercer."

"Simon Templar is mine."

The name had a significance for Mercer that it apparently had not had for Mr Naskill. His eyes opened wide.

"Good God, you don't mean----You're not the Saint?"

Simon smiled. He was still immodest enough to enjoy the sensation that his name could sometimes cause.

"That's what they call me."

"Of course I've read about you, but----Well, it sort of . . ." The young man petered out incoherently. "And I'd have argued with you about crooks! . . . But--well, you ought to know. Do you think I've been a mug?"

The Saint's brows slanted sympathetically.

"If you took my advice," he answered, "you'd let these birds find someone else to play with. Write it off to experience, and don't do it again."

"But I can't!" Mercer's response was desperate. "She--she was telling the truth. I've lost money that wasn't mine. I've only got a job in an advertising agency that doesn't pay very much, but her people are pretty well off. They've found me a better job here, starting in a couple of months, and they sent us down here to find a home, and they gave us twenty thousand dollars to buy it and furnish it, and that's the money I've been playing with. Don't you see? I've got to go on and win it back!"

"Or go on and lose the rest."

"Oh, I know. But I thought the luck must change

before that. And yet---- But everybody who plays

cards isn't a crook, is he? And I don't see how they could have done it. After she started talking about it, I watched them. I've been looking for it. And I couldn't catch them making a single move that wasn't above-board. Then I began to think about marked cards-- we've always played with their cards. I sneaked away one of the packs we were using last night, and I've been looking at it this morning. I'll swear there isn't a mark on it. Here, I can show you."

He fumbled feverishly in a pocket of his beach robe and pulled out a pack of cards. Simon glanced through them. There was nothing wrong with them that he could see; and it was then that he remembered Mr J. J. Naskill.

"Does either of these birds wear glasses?" he asked.

"One of them wears pince-nez," replied the mystified young man. "But----"

"I'm afraid," said the Saint thoughtfully, "that it looks as if you are a mug."

Mercer swallowed.

"If I am," he said helplessly, "what on earth am I going to do?"

Simon hitched himself up.

"Personally, I'm going to have a dip in the pool. And you're going to be so busy apologizing to your fiancee and making friends again that you won't have time to think about anything else. I'll keep these cards and make sure about them, if you don't mind. Then suppose we meet in the bar for a cocktail about six o'clock, and maybe I'll be able to tell you something."

When he returned to his own room the Saint put on Mr Naskill's horn-rimmed glasses and examined the cards again. Every one of them was clearly marked in the diagonally opposite corners with the value of the card and the initial of the suit, exactly like the deck that Naskill had given him; and it was then that the Saint knew that his faith in Destiny was justified again.

Shortly after six o'clock he strolled into the bar and saw that Mercer and the girl were already there. It was clear that they had buried their quarrel.

Mercer introduced her: "Miss Grange--or you can just call her Josephine."

She was wearing something in black and white taffeta, with a black and white hat and black and white gloves and a black and white bag, and she looked as if she had just stepped out of a fashion plate. She said: "We're both ashamed of ourselves for having a scene in front of you this afternoon, but I'm glad we did. You've done Eddie a lot of good."

"I hadn't any right to blurt out all my troubles like that," Mercer said sheepishly. "You were damned nice about it."

The Saint grinned.

"I'm a pretty nice guy," he murmured. "And now I've got something to show you. Here are your cards.".

He spread the deck out on the table and then he took the horn-rimmed glasses out of his pocket and held them over the cards so that the other two could look through them. He slid the cards under the lenses one by one, face downwards, and turned them over afterwards, and for a little while they stared in breathless silence.

The girl gasped.

"I told you so!"

Mercer's fists clenched.

"By God, if I don't murder those swine----"

She caught his wrist as he almost jumped up from the table.

"Eddie, that won't do you any good."

"It won't do them any good either! When I've finished with them----"

"But that won't get any of the money back."

"I'll beat it out of them."

"But that '11 only get you in trouble with the police. That wouldn't help. . . . Wait!" She clung to him frantically. "I've got it. You could borrow Mr Templar's glasses and play them at their own game. You could break Yoring's glasses--sort of accidentally. They wouldn't dare to stop playing on account of that. They'd just have to trust to luck, like you've been doing, and anyway, they'd feel sure they were going to get it all back again later. And you could win everything back and never see them again." She shook his arm in her excitement. "Go on, Eddie. It 'd serve them right. I'll let you play just once more if you'll do that!"

Mercer's eyes turned to the Saint, and Simon pushed the glasses across the table towards him.

The young man picked them up slowly, looked at the cards through them again. His mouth twitched. And then, with a sudden hopeless gesture, he thrust them away and passed a shaky hand over his eyes.

"It's no good," he said wretchedly. "I couldn't do it. They know I don't wear glasses. And I--I've never done anything like that before. I'd only make a mess of it. They'd spot me in five minutes. And then there wouldn't be anything I could say. I--I wouldn't have the nerve. I suppose I'm just a mug after all. ..."

The Saint leaned back and put a light to a cigarette and sent a smoke ring spinning through the fronds of a potted palm. In all his life he had never missed a cue, and it seemed that this was very much like a cue. He had come to Miami to bask in the sun and be good, but it wasn't his fault if business was thrust upon him.

"Maybe someone with a bit of experience could do it better," he said. "Suppose you let me meet your friends."

Mercer looked at him, first blankly, then incredulously; and the girl's dark eyes slowly lighted up.

Her slim fingers reached impetuously for the Saint's hand.

"You wouldn't really do that--help Eddie to win back what he's lost----"

"What would you expect Robin Hood to do?" asked the Saint quizzically. "I've got a reputation to keep up --and I might even pay my own expenses while I'm doing it." He drew the revealing glasses towards him and tucked them back in his pocket. "Let's go and have some dinner and organize the details."

But actually there were hardly any details left to organize, for Josephine Grange's inspiration had been practically complete in its first outline. The Saint, who never believed in expending any superfluous effort, devoted most of his attention to some excellent lobster thermidor; but he had a pleasant sense of anticipation that lent an edge to his appetite. He knew, even then, that all those interludes of virtue in which he had so often tried to indulge, those brief intervals in which he played at being an ordinary respectable citizen and promised himself to forget that there was such a thing as crime, were only harmless self-deceptions--that for him the only complete life was still the ceaseless hair-trigger battle in which he had found so much delight. And this episode had everything that he asked to make a perfect cameo.

He felt like a star actor waiting for the curtain to rise on the third act of an obviously triumphant first night when they left the girl at the Roney Plaza and walked over to the Riptide--"that's where we usually meet," Mercer explained. And a few minutes later he was being introduced to the other two members of the cast.

Mr Yoring, who wore the pince-nez, was a small pear-shaped man in a crumpled linen suit, with white hair and bloodhound jowls and a pathetically frustrated expression. He looked like a retired businessman whose wife took him to the opera. Mr Kilgarry, his partner, was somewhat taller and younger, with a wide mouth and a rich nose and a raffish manner: he looked like the kind of man that men like Mr Yoring wish they could be. Both of them welcomed Mercer with an exuberant bonhomie that was readily expanded to include the Saint. Mr Kilgarry ordered a round of drinks.

"Having a good time here, Mr Templar?"

"Pretty good."

"Ain't we all having a good time?" crowed Mr Yoring. "I'm gonna buy a drink."

"I've just ordered a drink," said Mr Kilgarry.

"Well, I'm gonna order another," said Mr Yoring defiantly. No wife was going to take him to the opera tonight. "Who said there was a Depression? What do you think, Mr Templar?"

"I haven't found any in my affairs lately," Simon answered truthfully.

"You in business, Mr Templar?" asked Mr Kilgarry interestedly.

The Saint smiled.

"My business is letting other people make money for me," he said, continuing strictly in the vein of truth. He patted his pockets significantly. "The market's been doing pretty well these days."

Mr Kilgarry and Mr Yoring exchanged glances, while the Saint picked up his drink. It wasn't his fault if they misunderstood him; but it had been rather obvious that the conversation was doomed to launch some tactful feelers into his financial status, and Simon saw no need to add to their coming troubles by making them work hard for their information.

"Well, that's fine," said Mr Yoring happily. "I'm gonna buy another drink."

"You can't," said Mr Kilgarry. "It's my turn."

Mr Yoring looked wistful, like a small boy who has been told that he can't go out and play with his new air gun. Then he wrapped an arm around Mercer's shoulders.

"You gonna play tonight, Eddie?"

"I don't know," Mercer said hesitantly. "I've just been having some dinner with Mr Templar----"

"Bring him along," boomed Mr Kilgarry heartily. "What's the difference? Four's better than three, any day. D'you play cards, Mr Templar?"

"Most games," said the Saint cheerfully.

"That's fine," said Mr Kilgarry. "Fine," he repeated, as if he wanted to leave no doubt that he thought it was fine.

Mr Yoring looked dubious.

"I dunno. We play rather high stakes, Mr Templar."

"They can't be too high for me," said the Saint boastfully.

"Fine," said Mr Kilgarry again, removing the last vestige of uncertainty about his personal opinion. "Then that's settled. What's holding us back?"

There was really nothing holding them back except the drinks that were lined up on the bar, and that deterrent was eliminated with a discreetly persuasive briskness. Under Mr Kilgarry's breezy leadership they piled into a taxi and headed for one of the smaller hotels on Ocean Drive, where Mr Yoring proclaimed that he had a bottle of scotch that would save them from the agonies of thirst while they were playing. As they rode up in the elevator he hooked his arm affectionately through the Saint's.

"Say, you're awright, ole man," he announced. "I like to meet a young feller like you. You oughta come out fishin' with us. Got our own boat here, hired for the season, an' we just take out fellers we like. You like fishin'?"

"I like catching sharks," said the Saint, with unblinking innocence.

"You ought to come out with us," said Mr Kilgarry hospitably.

The room was large and uncomfortable, cluttered with that hideous hodgepodge of gilt and lacquer and brocade, assembled without regard to any harmony of style or period, which passes for the height of luxury in American hotel furnishing. In the centre of the room there was a card table already set up, adding one more discordant note to the cacophony of junk, but still looking as if it belonged there. There were bottles and a pail of ice on a pea-green and old-rose butterfly table of incredible awfulness.

Mr Kilgarry brought up chairs, and Mr Yoring patted Mercer on the shoulder.

"You fix a drink, Eddie," he said. "Let's all make ourselves at home."

He lowered himself into a place at the table, took off his pince-nez, breathed on them and began to polish them with his handkerchief.

Mercer's tense gaze caught the Saint's for an instant. Simon nodded imperceptibly and settled his own glasses more firmly on the bridge of his nose.

"How's the luck going to be tonight, Eddie?" chaffed Kilgarry, opening two new decks of cards and spilling them on the cloth.

"You'll be surprised," retorted the young man. "I'm going to give you two gasbags a beautiful beating tonight."

"Attaboy," chirped Yoring encouragingly.

Simon had taken one glance at the cards, and that had been enough to assure him that Mr Naskill would have been proud to claim them as his product. After that, he had been watching Mercer's back as he worked over the drinks. Yoring was still polishing his pince-nez when Mercer turned to the table with a glass in each hand. He put one glass down beside Yoring, and as he reached over to place the other glass in front of the Saint the cuff of his coat sleeve flicked the pince-nez out of Yoring's fingers and sent them spinning. The Saint made a dive to catch them, missed, stumbled and brought his heel down on the exact spot where they were in the act of hitting the carpet. There was a dull scrunching sound, and after that there was a thick and stifling silence.

The Saint spoke first.

"That's torn it," he said weakly.

Yoring blinked at him as if he was going to burst into tears.

"I'm terribly sorry," said the Saint.

He bent down and tried to gather up some of the debris. Only the gold bridge of the pince-nez remained in one piece, and that was bent. He put it on the table, started to collect the scraps of glass and then gave up the hopeless task.

"I'll pay for them, of course," he said.

"I'll split it with you," said Mercer. "It was my fault. We'll take it out of my winnings."

Yoring looked from one to another with watery eyes.

"I--I don't think I can play without my glasses," he mumbled.

Mercer flopped into the vacant chair and raked in the cards.

"Come on," he said callously. "It isn't as bad as all that. You can show us your hand and we'll tell you what you've got."

"Can't you manage?" urged the Saint. "I was going: to enjoy this game, and it won't be nearly so much fun with only three."

The silence came back, thicker than before. Yoring's eyes shifted despairingly from side to side. And then Kilgarry crushed his cigar butt violently into an ash tray.

"You can't back out now," he said, and there was an audible growl in the fruity tones of his voice.

He broke the other pack across the baize with a vicious jerk of his hand that was as eloquent as a movement could be.

"Straight poker--with the joker wild. Let's go."

To Simon Templar the game had the same dizzy unreality that it would have had if he had been super-naturally endowed with a genuine gift of clairvoyance. He knew the value of every card as it was dealt, knew what was in his own hand before he picked it up. Even though there was nothing mysterious about it, the effect of the glasses he was wearing gave him a sensation of weirdness that was too instinctive to overcome. It was mechanically childish, and yet it was an unforgettable experience. When he was out of the game, watching the others bet against each other, it was like being a cat watching two blind men looking for each other in the dark.

For nearly an hour, curiously enough, the play was fairly even: when he counted his chips he had only a couple of hundred dollars more than when he started. Mercer, throwing in his hand whenever the Saint warned him by a pressure of his foot under the table that the opposition was too strong, had done slightly better; but there was nothing sensational in their advantage. Even Mr Naskill's magic lenses had no influence over the run of the cards, and the luck of the deals slightly favoured Yoring and Kilgarry. The Saint's clairvoyant knowledge saved him from making any disastrous errors, but now and again he had to bet out a hopeless hand to avoid giving too crude an impression of infallibility.

He played a steadily aggressive game, waiting patiently for the change that he knew must come as soon as the basis of the play had had time to settle down and establish itself. His nerves were cool and serene, and he smiled often with an air of faint amusement; but something inside him was poised and gathered like a panther crouched for a spring.

Presently Kilgarry called Mercer on the third raise and lost a small jackpot to three nines. Mercer scowled as he stacked the handful of chips.

"Hell, what's the matter with this game?" he protested. "This isn't the way we usually play. Let's get some life into it."

"It does seem a bit slow," Simon agreed. "How about raising the ante?"

"Make it a hundred dollars," Mercer said sharply. "I'm getting tired of this. Just because my luck's changed we don't have to start playing for peanuts."

Simon drew his cigarette to a bright glow.

"It suits me."

Yoring plucked at his lower lip with fingers that were still shaky.

"I dunno, ole man----"

"Okay." Kilgarry pushed out two fifty-dollar chips with a kind of fierce restraint. "I'll play for a hundred."

He had been playing all the time with grim concentration, his shoulders hunched as if he had to give some outlet to a seethe of violence in his muscles, his jaw thrust out and tightly clamped; and as the time went by he seemed to have been regaining confidence. "Maybe the game is on the level," was the idea expressed by every line of his body, "but I can still take a couple of mugs like this in any game."

He said, almost with a resumption of his former heartiness:

"Are you staying long, Mr Templar?"

"I expect I'll be here for quite a while."

"That's fine! Then after Mr Yoring's got some new glasses we might have a better game."

"I shouldn't be surprised," said the Saint amiably.

He was holding two pairs. He took a card, and still had two pairs. Kilgarry stood pat on three kings. Mercer drew three cards to a pair, and was no better off afterwards. Yoring took two cards and filled a flush.

"One hundred," said Yoring nervously.

Mercer hesitated, threw in his hand.

"And two hundred," snapped Kilgarry.

"And five," said the Saint.

Yoring looked at them blearily. He took a long time to make up his mind. And then, with a sigh, he pushed his hand into the discard.

"See you," said Kilgarry.

With a wry grin, the Saint faced his hand. Kilgarry grinned also, with a sudden triumph, and faced his.

Yoring made a noise like a faint groan.

"Fix us another drink, Eddie," he said huskily.

He took the next pack and shuffled it clumsily. His fingers were like sausages strung together. Kilgarry's mouth opened on one side and he nudged the Saint as he made the cut.

"Lost his nerve," he said. "See what happens when they get old."

"Who's old?" said Mr Yoring plaintively. "There ain't more 'n three years----"

"But you've got old ideas," Kilgarry jeered. "You could have beaten both of us."

"You never had to wear glasses----"

"Who said you wanted glasses to play poker? It isn't always the cards that win."

Kilgarry was smiling, but his eyes were almost glaring at Yoring as he spoke. Yoring avoided his gaze guiltily and squinted at the hand he had dealt himself. It contained the six, seven, eight and nine of diamonds, and the queen of spades. Simon held two pairs again but the card he drew made it a full house. He watched while Yoring discarded the queen of spades and felt again that sensation of supernatural omniscience as he saw that the top card of the pack, the card Yoring had to take, was the ten of hearts.

Yoring took it, fumbled his hand to the edge of the table, and turned up the corners to peep at them. For a second he sat quite still, with only his mouth working. And then, as if the accumulation of all his misfortunes had at last stung him to a wild and fearful reaction like the turning of a worm, a change seemed to come over him. He let the cards flatten out again with a defiant click and drew himself up. He began to count off hundred-dollar chips. . . .

Mercer, with only a pair of sevens, bluffed recklessly for two rounds before he fell out in response to the Saint's kick under the table.

There were five thousand dollars in the pool before Kilgarry, with a straight, shrugged surrenderingly and dropped his hand in the discard.

The Saint counted two stacks of chips and pushed them in.

"Make it another two grand," he said.

Yoring looked at him waveringly. Then he pushed in two stacks of his own.

"There's your two grand." He counted the chips he had left, swept them with a sudden splash into the pile. "And twenty-nine hundred more," he said.

Simon had twelve hundred left in chips. He pushed them in, opened his wallet and added crisp new bills.

"Making three thousand more than that for you to see me," he said coolly.

Mercer sucked in his breath and whispered: "Oh boy!"

Kilgarry said nothing, hunching tensely over the table.

Yoring blinked at him.

"Len' me some chips, ole man."

"Do you know what you're doing?" Kilgarry asked in a harsh strained voice.

Yoring picked up his glass and half emptied it. His hand wobbled so that some of it ran down his chin.

"I know," he snapped.

He reached out and raked Kilgarry's chips into the pile.

"Eighteen hunnerd," he said. "I gotta buy some more. I'll write you a check----"

Simon shook his head.

"I'm sorry," he said quietly. "I'm playing table stakes. We agreed on that when we started."

Yoring peered at him.

"You meanin' something insultin' about my check?"

"I don't mean that," Simon replied evenly. "It's just a matter of principle. I believe in sticking to the rules. I'll play you a credit game some other time. Tonight we're putting it on the line."

He made a slight gesture towards the cigar box where they had each deposited five thousand-dollar bills when they bought their chips.

"Now look here," Kilgarry began menacingly.

The Saint's clear blue eyes met his with sapphire smoothness.

"I said cash, brother. Is that clear?"

Yoring groped through his pockets. One by one he untangled crumpled bills from various hiding places until he had built his bet up to thirty-two hundred and fifty dollars. Then he glared at Kilgarry.

"Len' me what you've got."

"But----"

"All of it!"

Reluctantly Kilgarry passed over a roll. Yoring licked his thumb and numbered it through. It produced a total raise of four thousand one hundred and fifty dollars. He gulped down the rest of his drink and dribbled some more down his chin.

"Go on," he said thickly, staring at the Saint. "Raise that."

Simon counted out four thousand-dollar bills. He had one more, and he held it poised. Then he smiled.

"What's the use?" he said. "You couldn't meet it. I'll take the change and see you."

Yoring's hand went to his mouth. He didn't move for a moment, except for the wild swerve of his eyes.

Then he picked up his cards. With trembling slowness he turned them over one by one. The six, seven, eight, nine--and ten of diamonds.

Nobody spoke; and for some seconds the Saint sat quite still. He was summarizing the whole scenario for himself, in all its inspired ingenuity and mathematical precision, and it is a plain fact that he found it completely beautiful. He was aware that Mercer was shaking him inarticulately and that Yoring's rheumy eyes were opening wider on him with a flame of triumph.

And suddenly Kilgarry guffawed and thumped the table.

"Go to it," he said. "Pick it up, Yoring. I take it all back. You're not so old, either!"

Yoring opened both his arms to embrace the pool.

"Just a minute," said the Saint.

His voice was softer and gentler than ever, but it stunned the room to another immeasurable silence. Yoring froze as he moved, with his arms almost shaped into a ring. And the Saint smiled very kindly.

Certainly it had been a good trick, and an education, but the Saint didn't want the others to fall too hard. He had those moments of sympathy for the ungodly in their downfall.

He turned over his own cards, one by one. Aces. Four of them. Simon thought they looked pretty. He had collected them with considerable care, which may have prejudiced him. And the joker.

"My pot, I think," he remarked apologetically.

Kilgarry's chair was the first to grate back.

"Here," he snarled, "that's not----"

"The hand he dealt me?" The texture of Simon's mockery was like gossamer. "And he wasn't playing the hand I thought he had, either. I thought he'd have some fun when he got used to being without his glasses," he added cryptically.

He tipped up the cigar box and added its contents to the stack of currency in front of him, and stacked it into a neat sheaf.

"Well, I'm afraid that sort of kills the game for tonight," he murmured, and his hand was in his side pocket before Kilgarry's movement was half started. Otherwise he gave no sign of perturbation, and his languid self-possession was as smooth as velvet. "I suppose we'd better call it a day," he said without any superfluous emphasis.

Mercer recovered his voice first.

"That's right," he said jerkily. "You two have won plenty from me other nights. Now we've got some of it back. Let's get out of here, Templar."

They walked along Ocean Drive, past the variegated modernistic shapes of the hotels, with the rustle of the surf in their ears.

"How much did you win on that last hand?" asked the young man.

"About fourteen thousand dollars," said the Saint contentedly.

Mercer said awkwardly: "That's just about what I'd lost to them before. ... I don't know how I can ever thank you for getting it back. I'd never have had the nerve to do it alone. . . . And then when Yoring turned up that straight flush--I don't know why--I had an awful moment thinking you'd made a mistake."

The Saint put a cigarette in his mouth and struck his lighter.

"I don't make a lot of mistakes," he said calmly. "That's where a lot of people go wrong. It makes me rather tired, sometimes. I suppose it's just professional pride, but I hate to be taken for a mug. And the funny thing is that with my reputation there are always people trying it. I suppose they think that my reactions are so easy to predict that it makes me quite a setup for any smart business." The Saint sighed, deploring the inexplicable optimism of those who should know better. "Of course I knew that a switch like that was coming --the whole idea was to make me feel so confident of the advantage I had with those glasses that I'd be an easy victim for any ordinary cardsharping. And then, of course, I wasn't supposed to be able to make any complaint because that would have meant admitting that I was cheating, too. It was a grand idea, Eddie-- at least you can say that for it."

Mercer had taken several steps before all the implications of what the Saint had said really hit him.

"But wait a minute," he got out. "How do you mean they knew you were wearing trick glasses ?"

"Why else do you imagine they planted that guy on the train to pretend he was J. J. Naskill?" asked the Saint patiently. "That isn't very bright of you, Eddie. Now, I'm nearly always bright. I was so bright that I smelt a rat directly you lugged that pack of marked cards out of your beach robe--that was really carrying it a bit too far, to have them all ready to produce after you'd got me to listen in on your little act with Josephine. I must say you all played your parts beautifully, otherwise; but it's little details like that that spoil the effect. I told you at the time that you were a mug," said the Saint reprovingly. "Now why don't you paddle off and try to comfort Yoring and Kilgarry? I'm afraid they're going to be rather hurt when they hear that you didn't manage to at least make the best of a bad job and get me to hand you my winnings."

But Mercer did not paddle off at once. He stared at the Saint for quite a long time, understanding why so many other men who had once thought themselves clever had learned to regard that cool and smiling privateer as something closely allied to the devil himself. And wondering, as they had, why the death penalty for murder had ever been invented.

IX THE MAN WHO LIKED ANTS

"I WONDER what would have happened if you had gone into a respectable business, Saint," Ivar Nordsten remarked one afternoon.

Simon Templar smiled at him so innocently that for an instant his nickname might almost have seemed justified--if it had not been for the faint lazy twinkle of unsaintly mockery that stirred at the back of his blue eyes.

"The question is too farfetched, Ivar. You might as well speculate about what would have happened if I'd been a Martian or a horse."

They sat on the veranda of the house of Ivar Nordsten--whose name was not really Ivar Nordsten, but who was alive that day and the master of fabulous millions only because the course of one of the Saint's lawless escapades had once crossed his path at a time when death would have seemed a happy release. He of all living men should have had no wish to change the history of that twentieth-century Robin Hood, whose dark reckless face could be found photographed in half the police archives of the world, and whose gay impudence of outlawry had in its time set the underworlds of five continents buzzing like nests of infuriated wasps. But in that mood of idle fantasy which may well come with the after-lunch contentment of a warm Florida afternoon, Nordsten would have put forward almost any preposterous premise that might give him the pleasure of listening to his friend.

"It isn't as farfetched as that," he said. "You will never admit it, but you have many respectable instincts."

"But I have so many more disreputable ones to keep them under control," answered the Saint earnestly. "And it's always been so much more amusing to indulge the disreputable instincts. . . . No, Ivar, I mustn't let you make a paragon out of me. If I were quite cynically psychoanalyzing myself, I should probably say that the reason why I only soak the more obvious excrescences on the human race is because it makes everything okay with my respectable instincts and lets them go peacefully to sleep. Then I can turn all my disreputable impulses loose on the mechanical problem of soaking this obvious excrescence in some satisfyingly novel and juicy manner, and get all the fun of original sin out of it without any qualms of conscience."

"But you contradict yourself. The mere fact that you speak in terms of what you call 'an obvious excrescence on the human race' proves that you have some moral standards by which you judge him, and that you have some idealistic interest in the human race itself."

"The human race," said the Saint sombrely, "is a repulsive, dull, bloated, ill-conditioned and ill-favoured mass of dimly conscious meat, the chief justification for whose existence is that it provides a contrasting background against which my beauty and spiritual perfections can shine with a lustre only exceeded by your own."

"You have a natural modesty which I had never suspected," Nordsten observed gravely, and they both laughed. "But," he added, "I think you will get on well with Dr Sardon."

"Who is he?"

"A neighbour of mine. We are dining with him tonight."

Simon frowned.

"I warned you that I was travelling without any dress clothes," he began, but Nordsten shook his head maliciously.

"Dr Sardon likes dress clothes even less than you do. And you never warned me that you were coming here at all. So what could I do? I accepted his invitation a week ago, so when you arrived I could only tell Sardon what had happened. Of course he insisted that you must come with me. But I think he will interest you."

The Saint sighed resignedly and swished the highball gently around in his glass so that the ice clinked.

"Why should I be interested in any of your neighbours?" he protested. "I didn't come here to commit any crimes; and I'm sure all these people are as respectable as millionaires can be."

"Dr Sardon is not a millionaire. He is a very brilliant biologist."

"What else makes him interesting?"

"He is very fond of ants," said Nordsten seriously, and the Saint sat up.

Then he finished his drink deliberately and put down the glass.

"Now I know that this climate doesn't agree with you," he said. "Let's get changed and go down to the tennis court. I'll put you in your place before we start the evening."

Nevertheless he drove over to Dr Sardon's house that evening in a mood of open-minded curiosity. Scientists he had known before, men who went down thousands of feet into the sea to look at globigerina ooze and men who devised complicated electrical gadgets in laboratories to manufacture gold; but this was the first time that he had heard of a biologist who was fon,d of ants. Everything that was out of the ordinary was prospective material for the Saint. It must be admitted that in simplifying his own career to elementary equations by which obvious excrescences on the human race could be soaked, he did himself less than justice.

But there was nothing about the square smooth-shaven man who was introduced to him as Dr Sardon to take away the breath of any hardened outlaw. He might perhaps have been an ordinary efficient doctor, possibly with an exclusive and sophisticated practice; more probably he could have been a successful stockbroker, or the manager of any profitable commercial business. He shook hands with them briskly and almost mechanically, seeming to summarize the Saint in one sweeping glance through his crisp-looking rimless pince-nez.

"No, you're not a bit late, Mr Nordsten. As a matter of fact I was working until twenty minutes ago. If you had come earlier I should have been quite embarrassed."

He introduced his niece, a dark slender girl with a quiet and rather aloof beauty which would have been chilling if it had not been relieved by the friendly humour of her brown eyes. About her, Simon admitted, there might certainly have been things to attract the attention of a modern buccaneer.

"Carmen has been assisting me. She has a very good degree from Columbia."

He made no other unprompted reference to his researches, and Simon recognized him as the modern type of scientist whose carefully cultivated pose of matter-of-fact worldliness is just as fashionable an affectation as the mystical and bearded eccentricity of his predecessors used to be. Dr Sardon talked about politics, about his golf handicap and about the art of Otto Soglow. He was an entertaining and effective conversationalist but he might never have heard of such a thing as biology until towards the close of dinner Ivar Nordsten skilfully turned a discussion of gardening to the subject of insect pests.

"Although, of course," he said, "you would not call them that."

It was strange to see the dark glow that came into Sardon's eyes.

"As a popular term," he said in his deep vibrant voice, "I suppose it is too well established for me to change it. But it would be much more reasonable for the insects to talk about human pests."

He turned to Simon.

"I expect Mr Nordsten has already warned you about the--bee in my bonnet," he said; but he used the phrase without smiling. "Do you by any chance know anything about the subject?"

"I had a flea once," said the Saint reminiscently. "I called him Goebbels. But he left me."

"Then you wrould be surprised to know how many of the most sensational achievements of man were surpassed by the insects hundreds of years ago without any artificial aids." The finger tips of his strong nervous hands played a tattoo against each other, "You talk about the Age of Speed and Man's Conquest of the Air; and yet the fly Cephenomia, the swiftest living creature, can outpace the fastest of your boasted aeroplanes. What is the greatest scientific marvel of the century? Probably you would say radio. But Count Arco, the German radio expert, has proved the existence of a kind of wireless telegraphy, or telepathy, between certain species of beetle, which makes nothing of a separation of miles. Lakhovsky claims to have demonstrated that this is common to several other insects. When the Redemanni termites build their twenty-five-foot conical towers topped with ten-foot chimneys they are performing much greater marvels of engineering than building an Empire State Building. To match them, in proportion to our size, we should have to put up skyscrapers four thousand feet high-- and do it without tools."

"I knew the ants would come into it," said Nordsten sotto voce.

Sardon turned on him with his hot piercing gaze.

"Termites are not true ants--the term 'white ants' is a misnomer. Actually they are related to the cockroach. I merely mentioned them as one of the most remarkable of the lower insects. They have a superb social organization, and they may even be superior strategists to the true ants, but they were never destined to conquer the globe. The reason is that they cannot stand light and they cannot tolerate temperatures below twenty degrees centigrade. Therefore, their fields of expansion are for ever limited. They are one of Nature's false beginnings. They are a much older species than man, and they have evolved as far as they are likely to evolve. . . . It is not the same with the true ants."

He leaned forward over the table, with his face white and transfigured as if in a kind of trance.

"The true ant is the destined ruler of the earth. Can you imagine a state of society in which there was no idleness, no poverty, no unemployment, no unrest? We humans would say that it was an unattainable Utopia; and yet it was in existence among the ants when man was a hairy savage scarcely distinguishable from an ape. You may say that it is incompatible with progress-- that it could only be achieved in the same way that it is achieved by domestic cattle. But the ant has the same instincts which have made man the tyrant of creation in his time. Lasius fuliginosus keeps and milks its own domestic cattle, in the form of plant lice. Polyergus rufescens and Formica sanguined capture slaves and put them to work. Messor barbarus, the harvesting ant, collects and stores grain. The Attiini cultivate mushrooms in underground forcing houses. And all these things are done, not for private gain, but for the good of the whole community. Could man in any of his advances ever boast of that?"

"But if ants have so many advantages," said the Saint slowly, "and they've been civilized so much longer than man, why haven't they conquered the earth before this?"

"Because Nature cheated them. Having given them so much, she made them wait for the last essential-- pure physical bulk."

"The brontosaurus had enough of that," said Nord-sten, "and yet man took its place."

Sardon's thin lips curled.

"The difference in size between man and brontosaurus was nothing compared with the difference in size between man and ant. There are limits to the superiority of brain over brawn--even to the superiority of the brain of an ant, which in proportion to its size is twice as large as the brain of a man. But the time is coming . . ."

His voice sank almost to a whisper, and in the dim light of candles on the table the smouldering luminous-ness of his eyes seemed to leave the rest of his face in deep shadow.

"With the ant, Nature overreached herself. The ant was ready to take his place at the head of creation before creation was ready for him--before the solar system had progressed far enough to give him the conditions in which his body, and his brain with it, his brain which in all its intrinsic qualities is so much finer than the brain of man, could grow to the brute size at which all its potentialities could be developed. Nevertheless, when the solar system is older, and the sun is red because the white heat of its fire is exhausted, and the red light which will accelerate the growth of all living cells is stronger, the ant will be waiting for his turn. Unless Nature finds a swifter instrument than Time to put right her miscalculation . . ."

"Does it matter?" asked the Saint lightly, and Sardon's face seemed to flame at him.

"It matters. That is only another thing which we can learn from the ant--that individual profit and ambition should count for nothing beside more enduring good. Listen. When I was a boy I loved small creatures. Among them I kept a colony of ants. In a glass box. I watched them in their busy lives, I studied them as they built their nest, I saw how they divided their labour and how they lived and died so that their common life could go on. I loved them because they were so much better than everyone else I knew. But the other boys could not understand. They thought I was soft and stupid. They were always tormenting me. One day they found my glass box where the ants lived. I fought them, but there were so many of them. They were big and cruel. They made a fire and they put my box on it, while they held me. I saw the ants running, fighting,

struggling insanely----" The hushed voice tightened

as he spoke until it became thin and shrill like a suppressed scream. "I saw them curling up and shrivelling, writhing, tortured. I could hear the hiss of their seething agony in the flames. I saw them going mad, twisting--sprawling--blackening--burning alive before my eyes----"

"Uncle!"

The quiet voice of the girl Carmen cut softly across the muted shriek in which the last words were spoken, so quietly and normally that it was only in the contrast that Simon realized that Sardon had not really raised his voice.

The wild fire died slowly out of Sardon's eyes. For a moment his face remained set and frozen, and then, as if he had only been recalled from a fleeting lapse of attention, he seemed to come awake again with a slight start.

"Where was I?" he said calmly. "Oh yes. I was speaking about the intelligence of ants. ... It is even a mistake to assume, because they make no audible sounds, that they have not just as excellent means of communication as ourselves. Whether they share the telepathic gifts of other insects is a disputed point, but it is certain that in their antennae they possess an idiom which is adequate to all ordinary needs. By close study and observation it has even been possible for us to learn some of the elementary gestures. The work of Karl Escherich . . ."

He went into details, in the same detached incisive tone in which he had been speaking before his outburst.

Simon Templar's fingers stroked over the cloth, found a crumb of bread and massaged it gradually into a soft round pellet. He stole a casual glance at the girl. Her aloof oval face was pale, but that might have been its natural complexion; her composure was unaltered. Sardon's outburst might never have occurred, and she might never have had to interrupt it. Only the Saint thought that he saw a shadow of fear moving far down in her eyes.

Even after Carmen had left the table, and the room was richening with the comfortable aromas of coffee and liqueur, brandy and cigars, Sardon was still riding his hobbyhorse. It went on for nearly an hour, until at one of the rare lulls in the discussion Nordsten said: "All the same, Doctor, you are very mysterious about what this has to do with your own experiments."

Sardon's hands rested on the table, white and motion less, the fingers spread out.

"Because I was not ready. Even to my friends I should not like to show anything incomplete. But in the last few weeks I have disposed of my uncertainty. Tonight, if you like, I could show you a little"

"We should be honoured."

The flat pressure of Sardon's hands on the table increased as he pushed back his chair and stood up.

"My workshops are at the end of the garden," he said, and blew out the four candles.

As they rose and followed him from the room, Nordsten touched the Saint's arm and said in a low voice : "Are you sorry I dragged you out?"

"I don't know yet," answered the Saint soberly.

The girl Carmen rejoined them as they left the house. Simon found her walking beside him as they strolled through the warm moonlight. He dropped the remains of his cigar and offered his cigarette case; they stopped for a moment while he gave her a light. Neither of them spoke, but her arm slipped through his as they went on.

The blaze of lights which Sardon switched on in his laboratory wiped the dim silvery gloom out of their eyes in a crash of harsh glaring illumination. In contrast with the tasteful furnishings of the house, the cold white walls and bare tiled floor struck the Saint's sensitive vision with the hygienic and inhuman chill which such places always gave him. But Sardon's laboratory was not like any other place of that kind in which he had ever been.

Ranged along the walls were rows of big glass-fronted boxes, in which apparently formless heaps of litter and rubble could be dimly made out. His tye was caught by a movement in one of the boxes, and he stepped up to look at it more closely. Almost in the same moment he stopped, and nearly recoiled from it, as he realized that he was looking at the largest ant that he had ever seen. It was fully six inches long; and, magnified in that proportion, he could see every joint in its shiny armour-plated surface and the curious bifurcated claws at the ends of its legs. It stood there with its antennae waving gently, watching him with its bulging beady eyes . . .

"Tetramorium cespitum," said Dr Sardon, standing beside him. "One of my early experiments. Its natural size is about three tenths of an inch, but it did not respond very well to treatment."

"I should say it had responded heroically," said the Saint. "You don't mean you can do better than that?"

Sardon smiled.

"It was one of my early experiments," he repeated. "I was then merely trying to improve on the work of Ludwig and Ries of Berne, who were breeding giant insects almost comparable with that one, many years ago, with the aid of red light. Subsequently I discovered another principle of growth which they had overlooked, and I also found that an artificial selective cross-breeding between different species not only improved the potential size but also increased the intelligence. For instance, here is one of my later results--a combination of Oecophylla smaragdina and Prenolepsis imparis."

He went to one of the longer and larger boxes at the end of the room. At first Simon could see nothing but a great mound of twigs and leaves piled high in one corner. There were two or three bones, stripped bare and white, lying on the sandy floor of the box. . . . Then Sardon tapped on the glass, and Simon saw with a sudden thrill of horror that what had been a dark hole in the mound of leaves was no longer black and empty. There was a head peering out of the shadow-- dark bronze-green, iridescent, covered with short sparse bristly hairs. . . .

"Oecophylla is, of course, one of the more advanced species," Sardon was saying, in his calm precise manner. "It is the only known creature other than man to use a tool. The larvae secrete a substance similar to silk, with which the ants weave leaves together to make their nests, holding the larvae in their jaws and using them as shuttles. I don't yet know whether my hybrid has inherited that instinct."

"It looks as if it would make a charming pet, anyway," murmured the Saint thoughtfully. "Sort of improved lap dog, isn't it?"

The faint sly smile stayed fixed on Sardon's thin lips. He took two steps further, to a wide sliding door that took up most of the wall at the end of the laboratory, and looked back at them sidelong.

"Perhaps you would like to see the future ruler of the world," he said, so very softly that it seemed as if everyone else stopped breathing while he spoke.

Simon heard the girl beside him catch her breath, and Nordsten said quickly: "Surely we've troubled you enough already----"

'I should like to see it," said the Saint quietly.

Sardon's tongue slid once over his lips. He put his hand up and moved a couple of levers on the glittering panels of dials and switches beside the door. It was to the Saint that his gaze returned, with that rapt express sion of strangely cunning and yet childish happiness.

"You will see it from where you stand. I will ask you to keep perfectly still, so as not to draw attention to yourselves--there is a strain of Dorylina in this one. Dorylina is one of the most intelligent and highly disciplined species, but it is also the most savage. I do not wish it to become angry----"

His arm stretched out to the handle of the door. He slid it aside in one movement, standing with his back ||

to it, facing them.

The girl's cold hand touched the Saint's wrist. Her fingers slipped down over his hand and locked in with his own, clutching them in a sudden convulsive grip. He heard Ivar Nordsten's suppressed gasp as it caught in his throat, and an icy tingle ran up his spine and broke out in a clammy dew on his forehead.

The rich red light from the chamber beyond the door spilled out like liquid fire, so fierce and vivid that it seemed as if it could only be accompanied by the scorching heat of an open furnace; but it held only a slight appreciable warmth. It beat down from huge crimson arcs ranged along the cornices of the inner room among a maze of shining tubes and twisted wires; there was a great glass ball opposite in which a pale- yellow streak of lightning forked and flickered with a faint humming sound. The light struck scarlet highlights from the-gleaming bars of a great metal cage like a gigantic chicken coop which filled the centre of the room to within a yard of the walls. And within the cage something monstrous and incredible stood motionless, staring at them.

Simon would see it sometimes, years afterwards, in uneasy dreams. Something immense and frightful, glistening like burnished copper, balanced on angled legs like bars of plated metal. Only for a few seconds he saw it then, and for most of that time he was held fascinated by its eyes, understanding something that he would never have believed before. . . .

And then suddenly the thing moved, swiftly and horribly and without sound; and Sardon slammed the door shut, blotting out the eye-aching sea of red light and leaving only the austere cold whiteness of the laboratory.

"They are not all like lap dogs," Sardon said in a kind of whisper.

Simon took out a handkerchief and passed it across his brow. The last thing about that weird scene that fixed itself consciously in his memory was the girl's fingers relaxing their tense grip on his hand, and Sar-don's eyes, bland and efficient and businesslike again, pinned steadily on them both in a sort of secret sneer. . . .

"What do you think of our friend?" Ivar Nordsten asked, as they drove home two hours later.

Simon stretched out a long arm for the lighter at the side of the car.

"He is a lunatic--but of course you knew that. I'm only wondering whether he is quite harmless."

"You ought to sympathize with his contempt for the human race."

The red glow of the Saint's cigarette end brightened so that for an instant the interior of the car was filled with something like a pale reflection of the unearthly crimson luminance which they had seen in Dr Sardon's forcing room.

"Did you sympathize with his affection for his pets?"

"Those great ants?" Nordsten shivered involuntarily. "No. That last one--it was the most frightful thing I have ever seen. I suppose it was really alive?"

"It was alive," said the Saint steadily. "That's why I'm wondering whether Dr Sardon is harmless. I don't know what you were looking at, Ivar, but I'll tell you what made my blood run cold. It wasn't the mere size of the thing--though any common or garden ant would be terrifying enough if you enlarged it to those dimensions. It was worse than that. It was the proof that Sardon was right. That ant was looking at me. Not like any other insect or even animal that I've ever seen, but like an insect with a man's brain might look. That was the most frightening thing to me. It knew!"

Nordsten stared at him.

"You mean that you believe what he was saying about it being the future ruler of the world?"

"By itself, no," answered Simon. "But if it were not by itself----"

He did not finish the sentence; and they were silent for the rest of the drive. Before they went to bed he asked one more question.

"Who else knows about these experiments?"

''No one, I believe. He told me the other day that he was not prepared to say anything about them until lie could show complete success. As a matter of fact, I lent him some money to go on with his work, and that is the only reason he took me into his confidence. I was surprised when he showed us his laboratory tonight--even I had never seen it before."

"So he is convinced now that he can show a complete success," said the Saint quietly, and was still subdued and preoccupied the next morning.

In the afternoon he refused to swim or play tennis. He sat hunched up in a chair on the veranda, scowling into space and smoking innumerable cigarettes, except when he rose to pace restlessly up and down like a big nervous cat.

"What you are really worried about is the girl," Nordsten teased him.

"She's pretty enough to worry about," said the Saint shamelessly. "I think I'll go over and ask her for a cocktail."

Nordsten smiled.

"If it will make you a human being again, by all means do," he said. "If you don't come back to dinner I shall know that she is appreciating your anxiety. In any case, I shall probably be very late myself. I have to attend a committee meeting at the golf club and that always adjourns to the bar and goes on for hours."

But the brief tropical twilight had already given way to the dark before Simon made good his threat. He took out Ivar Nordsten's spare Rolls-Royce and drove slowly over the highway until he found the turning that led through the deep cypress groves to the doctor's house. He was prepared to feel foolish; and yet as his headlights circled through the iron gates he touched his hip pocket to reassure himself that if the need arose he might still feel wise.

The trees arching over the drive formed a ghostly tunnel down which the Rolls chased its own forerush of light. The smooth hiss of the engine accentuated rather than broke the silence, so that the mind even of a hardened and unimaginative man might cling to the comfort of that faint sound in the same way that the mind of a child might cling to the light of a candle as a comfort against the gathering terrors of the night. The Saint's lip curled cynically at the flight of his own thoughts. . . .

And then, as the car turned a bend in the drive, he saw the girl, and trod fiercely on the brakes.

The tires shrieked on the macadam and the engine stalled as the big car rocked to a standstill. It flashed through the Saint's mind at that instant, when all sound was abruptly wiped out, that the stillness which he had imagined before was too complete for accident. He felt the skin creep over his back, and had to call on an effort of will to force himself to open the door and get out of the car.

She lay face downwards, halfway across the drive, in the pool of illumination shed by the glaring headlights. Simon turned her over and raised her head on his arm. Her eyelids twitched as he did so; a kind of moan broke from her lips, and she fought away from him, in a dreadful wildness of panic, for the brief moment before her eyes opened and she recognized him.

"My dear," he said, "what has been happening?"

She had gone limp in his arms, the breath jerking pitifully through her lips, but she had not fainted again. And behind him, in that surround of stifling stillness, he heard quite clearly the rustle of something brushing stealthily over the grass beside the drive. He saw her eyes turning over his shoulder, saw the wide horror in them.

"Look!"

He spun round, whipping the gun from his pocket, and for more than a second he was paralyzed. For that eternity he saw the thing, deep in the far shadows, dimly illumined by the marginal reflections from the beam of the headlights--something gross and swollen, a dirty grey-white, shaped rather like a great bleached sausage, hideously bloated. Then the darkness swallowed it again, even as his shot smashed the silence into a hundred tiny echoes.

The girl was struggling to her feet. He snatched at her wrist.

"This way."

He got her into the car and slammed the door. Steel and glass closed round them to give an absurd relief, the weak unreasoning comfort to the naked flesh which men under a bombardment find in cowering behind canvas screens. She slumped against his shoulder, sobbing hysterically.

"Oh, my God. My God!"

"What was it?" he asked.

"It's escaped again. I knew it would. He can't handle it----"

"Has it got loose before?"

"Yes. Once."

He tapped a cigarette on his thumbnail, stroked his lighter. His face was a beaten mask of bronze and granite in the red glow as he drew the smoke down into the mainsprings of his leaping nerves.

"I never dreamed it had come to that," he said. "Even last night, I wouldn't have believed it."

"He wouldn't have shown you that. Even when he was boasting, he wouldn't have shown you. That was his secret . . . And I've helped him. Oh God," she said. "I can't go on!"

He gripped her shoulders.

"Carmen," he said quietly. "You must go away from here."

"He'd kill me."

"You must go away."

The headlamps threw back enough light for him to see her face, tear-streaked and desperate.

"He's mad," she said. "He must be Those horrible things . . . I'm afraid. I wanted to go away but he wouldn't let me. I can't go on. Something terrible is going to happen. One day I saw it catch a dog . . . Oh, my God, if you hadn't come when you did----"

"Carmen." He still held her, speaking slowly and deliberately, putting every gift of sanity that he possessed into the level dominance of his voice. "You must not talk like this. You're safe now. Take hold of yourself."

She nodded.

"I know. I'm sorry. I'll be all right. But----"

"Can you drive?"

"Yes."

He started the engine and turned the car round. Then he pushed the gear lever into neutral and set the hand brake.

"Drive this car," he said. "Take it down to the gates and wait for me there. You'll be close to the highway, and there '11 be plenty of other cars passing for company. Even if you do see anything, you needn't be frightened. Treat the car like a tank and run it over. Ivar won't mind--he's got plenty more. And if you hear anything, don't worry. Give me half an hour, and if I'm not back go to Ivar's and talk to him."

Her mouth opened incredulously.

"You're not getting out again?"

"I am. And I'm scared stiff." The ghost of a smile touched his lips, and then she saw that his face was stern and cold. "But I must talk to your uncle."

He gripped her arm for a moment, kissed her lightly and got out. Without a backward glance he walked quickly away from the car, up the drive towards the house. A flashlight in his left hand lanced the. darkness ahead of him with its powerful beam, and he swung it from left to right as he walked, holding his gun in his right hand. His ears strained into the gloom which his eyes could not penetrate, probing the silence under the soft scuff of his own footsteps for any sound that would give him warning; but he forced himself not to look back. The palms of his hands were moist.

The house loomed up in front of him. He turned off to one side of the building, following the direction in which he remembered that Dr Sardon's laboratory lay. Almost at once he saw the squares of lighted windows through the trees. A dull clang of sound came to him, followed by a sort of furious thumping. He checked himself; and then as he walked on more quickly some of the lighted windows went black. The door of the laboratory opened as the last light went out, and his torch framed Dr Sardon and the doorway in its yellow circle.

Sardon was pale and dishevelled, his clothes awry. One of his sleeves was torn, and there was a scratch on his face from which blood ran. He flinched from the light as if it had burned him.

"Who is that?" he shouted.

"This is Simon Templar," said the Saint in a commonplace tone. "I just dropped in to say hullo."

Sardon turned the switch down again and went back into the laboratory. The Saint followed him.

"You just dropped in, eh? Of course. Good. Why not? Did you run into Carmen, by any chance?"

"I nearly ran over her," said the Saint evenly.

The doctor's wandering glance snapped to his face. Sardon's hands were shaking, and a tiny muscle at the side of his mouth twitched spasmodically.

"Of course," he said vacantly. "Is she all right?"

"She is quite safe." Simon had put away his gun before the other saw it. He laid a hand gently on the other's shoulder. "You've had trouble here," he said.

"She lost her nerve," Sardon retorted furiously. "She ran away. It was the worst thing she could do. They understand, these creatures. They are too much for me to control now. They disobey me. My commands must seem so stupid to their wonderful brains. If it had not been that this one is heavy and waiting for her time----"

He checked himself.

"I knew," said the Saint calmly.

The doctor peered up at him out of the corners of his eyes.

"You knew?" he repeated cunningly.

"Yes. I saw it."

"Just now?"

Simon nodded.

"You didn't tell us last night," he said. "But it's what I was afraid of. I have been thinking about it all day."

"You've been thinking, have you? That's funny." Sardon chuckled shrilly. "Well, you're quite right. I've done it. I've succeeded. I don't have to work any more. They can look after themselves now. That's funny, isn't it?"

"So it is true. I hoped I was wrong."

Sardon edged closer to him.

"You hoped you were wrong? You fool! But I would expect it of you. You are the egotistical human being who believes in his ridiculous conceit that the whole history of the world from its own birth, all the species and races that have come into being and been discarded, everything--everything has existed only to lead up to his own magnificent presence on the earth. Bah! Do you imagine that your miserable little life can stand in the way of the march of evolution? Your day is over! Finished! In there"--his arm stiffened and pointed--"in there you can find the matriarch of the new ruling race of the earth. At any moment she will begin to lay her eggs, thousands upon thousands of them, from which her sons and daughters will breed--as big as she is, with her power and her brains." His voice dropped. "To me it is only wonderful that I should have been Nature's chosen instrument to give them their rightful place a million years before Time would have opened the door to them."

The flame in his eyes sank down as his voice sank and his features seemed to relax so that his square clean-cut efficient face became soft and beguiling like the face of an idiot child.

"I know what it feels like to be God," he breathed.

Simon held both his arms.

"Dr Sardon," he said, "you must not go on with this experiment."

The other's face twisted.

"The experiment is finished," he snarled. "Are you still blind? Look--I will show you."

He was broad-shouldered and powerfully built, and his strength was that of a maniac. He threw off the Saint's hands with a convulsive wrench of his body and ran to the sliding door at the end of the room. He turned with his back to it, grasping the handle, as the Saint started after him.

"You shall meet them yourself," he said hoarsely. "They are not in their cage any more. I will let them out here, and you shall see whether you can stand against them. Stay where you are!"

A revolver flashed in his hand; and the Saint stopped four paces from him.

"For your own sake, Dr Sardon," he said, "stand away from that door."

The doctor leered at him crookedly.

"You would like to burn my ants," he whispered.

He turned and fumbled with the spring catch, his revolver swinging carelessly wide from its aim; and the door had started to move when Simon shot him twice through the heart.

Simon was stretched out on the veranda, sipping a highball and sniping mosquitoes with a cigarette end, when Nordsten came up the steps from his car. The Saint looked up with a smile.

"My dear fellow," said Nordsten, "I thought you would be at the fire."

"Is there a fire?" Simon asked innocently.

"Didn't you know? Sardon's whole laboratory has gone up in flames. I heard about it at the club, and when I left I drove back that way thinking I should meet you. Sardon and his niece were not there, either. It will be a terrible shock for him when he hears of it. The place was absolutely gutted--I've never seen such a blaze. It might have been soaked in gasoline. It was still too hot to go near, but I suppose all his work has been destroyed. Did you miss Carmen?"

The Saint pointed over his shoulder.

"At the present moment she's sleeping in your best guest room," he said. "I gave her enough of your sleeping tablets to keep her like that till breakfast time."

Nordsten looked at him.

"And where is Sardon?" he asked at length.

"He is in his laboratory."

Nordsten poured himself out a drink and sat down.

"Tell me," he said.

Simon told him the story. When he had finished, Nordsten was silent for a while. Then he said: "It's all right, of course. A fire like that must have destroyed all the evidence. It could all have been an accident. But what about the girl?"

"I told her that her uncle had locked the door and refused to let me in. Her evidence will be enough to show that Sardon was not in his right mind."

"Would you have done it anyhow, Simon?"

The Saint nodded.

"I think so. That's what I was worried about, ever since last night. It came to me at once that if any of these brutes could breed----" He shrugged a little wearily. "And when I saw that great queen ant, I knew that it had gone too far. I don't know quite how rapidly ants can breed, but I should imagine that they do it by thousands. If the thousands were all the same size as Sardon's specimens, with the same intelligence, who knows what might have been the end of it?"

"But I thought you disliked the human race," said Nordsten.

Simon got up and strolled across the veranda.

"Taken in the mass," he said soberly, "it will probably go on nauseating me. But it isn't my job to alter it. If Sardon was right, Nature will find her own remedy. But the world has millions of years left, and I think evolution can afford to wait."

His cigarette spun over the rail and vanished into the dark like a firefly as the butler came out to announce dinner; and they went into the dining room together.

WATCH FOR THE SIGN OF THE SAINT!

o

HE WILL BE BACK!