The Saint Goes On

Simon tapped out a cigarette on his case, and smiled. It was certainly rather a gorgeous situation. His gaze flickered wickedly over Claud Eustace Teal's reddening face.

"All the excitement seems to go on around Lord Ripwell and me," he murmured. "With both of us here together under the same roof, we could look forward to a gay week-end. I think it would be a grand idea to stay."

IV "WELL, what d'you make of it, Templar?" asked Ripwell, when they were scattered about the living-room around a bottle of excellent dry sherry.

Simon shrugged.

"Up to the present, nothing at all. All of you know as much as I do. There seems to be some kind of move afoot to discourage people from seeing Ellshaw; but I've taken a gander at him myself, and I didn't notice anything about him that anyone would be crazy to see. All the same, there must be something big behind it-you don't get three murders planned for the same day because somebody wants to keep the name of his tailor secret."

"Do you think you could ever have known Ellshaw under another name, your lordship?" asked Teal. "Can you think of anyone who might have a bad enough grievance against you to want to blow you up?"

"I haven't an enemy in the world," said Lord Ripwell; and, looking at his clean pleasant face and friendly eyes, the statement was easy to believe.

The Saint grinned slowly, and reached out to refill his glass.

"I have plenty," he remarked. "But if you haven't any, it disposes of that motive. Anyway, it's my experience that your enemies won't take nearly as many risks to kill you as the blokes who just think you might stand in their way. Revenge may be sweet, but boodle buys a hell of a lot more cigars."

"Are we to consider ourselves in a state of siege?" inquired Irelock somewhat ironically.

"Not unless it amuses you," answered the Saint coolly. "But I don't think anyone in this gathering who wants to live to a great age ought to be too casual about standing in front of windows or wandering around the garden after dark. The Ellshaw-hiding outfit keeps moving pretty quickly, by the look of things, and they have enterprising ideas."

Ripwell looked almost hopeful.

"I suppose you've got a gun, Inspector?"

Mr. Teal moved his head in a slow negative gesture, with his jaws working phlegmatically.

"No, I'm not armed," he said tolerantly; and his gaze shifted deliberately on to the Saint, as if estimating the degree of certainty with which he could pick out one man who was.

"I think we have a revolver somewhere," said Irelock.

"By George, so we have!" exclaimed Ripwell. "See if you can find it, Martin."

"There isn't any ammunition," said Irelock cynically.

His lordship's face fell momentarily. Then he recovered buoyantly.

"We'll have to get some-I've got a licence for it. Never thought I should want it, but this is absolutely the time. Where can I get some cartridges? What d'you say, Inspector?

With all this business going on, I'm entitled to have a gun in self-defence, what?"

Mr. Teal had the typical English police officer's distaste for firearms, but he had no authority to show his disapproval.

"Certainly, if you have a licence, you're entitled to it," he replied unenthusiastically. "The local police may be able to lend you a few rounds of ammunition."

There was another arrival before dinner in the shape of Lord Ripwell's son, the Honourable Kenneth Nulland, who drove up in a very small and very noisy sports car. Irelock went out to meet him and brought him in-he was a young man with fair wavy hair and a face rather like a bright young cod, and he was very agitated. He shook hands limply.

"Haven't you solved the mystery yet? It's no good asking me to help you. I think it was the jolly old Communists, or the Fascists, or something. Anyhow, I hope they don't try anything more while I'm here-I can only just stay to dinner."

"I thought you were coming down for the week-end," said his father slowly.

"Sorry, Pop. Old Jumbo Ferris rang up and asked me to go to a party-he's having a jolly old beano down at his place in Hampshire."

"Did you have to accept? Cicely's coming over tomorrow." Nulland shook his head. He grabbed a drink and hung himself over a chair, rather like a languid eel in plus fours. "Sorry, Pop. But she won't miss me."

"I don't blame her," said Ripwell. with devastating candour. He turned to Teal and the Saint. "Cicely Holland's a sort of protegee of mine. Works in my office. Daughter of a pal of mine when I was young. Never made any money, but he was a pal till he died. Damned fine girl. I wish Kenneth was fit to marry her. She won't look at him as he is, and I wouldn't either."

Kenneth Nulland grinned weakly. "Pop thinks I'm a jolly old prodigal son," he explained. The explanation was scarcely necessary. Simon sensed the bitter disappointment behind Lord Ripwell's vigorous frankness, and, for his own comfort, led the conversation away into a less personal channel. But while he went on casually talking he studied Lord Ripwell's heir-presumptive more closely, and realised that Nulland was simultaneously studying him. The youngster was a mass of undisciplined nerves under his flaccid posturing, and the inane cliches which made up ninety per cent, of his dialogue came pattering out so noisily at the slightest lull in the general talk that Simon wondered why he was so afraid of silence.

Teal noticed it too.

"What do you think?" he asked the Saint.

They were alone together for a moment after dinner- Lord Ripwell was telephoning the local Inspector, and Nulland had taken Martin Irelock out to admire some new gadget he had had fitted to his car.

"He's frightened," said the Saint carefully. "But I don't know that it would take much to frighten him. Maybe he doesn't want to be blown up."

Mr. Teal sucked at his after-dinner ration of spearmint. He was letting himself become temporarily resigned to the irregularity of his position. After all, there was nothing else that he could do about it. The house was Lord Ripwell's, and the case was more or less Lord Ripwell's: if Lord Ripwell wanted the Saint to stay with him, that was Lord Ripwell's business and nobody else's. Even the Assistant Commissioner, Teal tried to tell himself with more confidence than he actually felt, could have found no flaw in the transparent logic of the argument. Therefore, proceeded Chief Inspector Teal, brilliantly scoring all the points in this pleasant imaginary debate with the spectre of his superior officer, since the Saint had to be accepted, it was simply an obvious stroke of masterly and unscrupulous cunning to pick his brains for any help they could be induced to yield.

"That fellow had something on his mind," said the detective, astutely pursuing this Machiavellian plan.

"If you could call it a mind," said the Saint, docilely surrendering the fruits of his cerebration.

Teal screwed up a scrap of pink paper in his pudgy fingers.

"I suppose he'd come into all Ripwell's money, if a bomb went off as it was meant to."

"Don't forget he'd come into all Mrs. Ellshaw's money as well-and mine," said the Saint, with the utmost kindness. "And I'll bet he'd need it all. There's a beautiful motive in that, waiting for some bright detective to dig it out, Claud. I expect Ripwell gives him a perfectly miserly allowance, don't you? Ripwell strikes one as that sort of man."

Mr. Teal's mouth tightened-he was an amiable man in most ways, but he had a train of memories behind him which were apt to start a quite unreasonably truculent inflammation in his stout bosom when the Saint smiled at him so compassionately and said things which made him feel that his legs were being playfully lengthened. He might even have responded with fatal rudeness, if he had had time to compose a sufficiently crushing retort; but Lord Ripwell joined them again before this devastating gem of repartee was polished to his mordant satisfaction.

"Inspector Oldwood will be over in ten minutes," said his lordship. "He's bringing some ammunition for my gun-I wish I knew where the damned thing was." He went to the french window that opened on to the garden at the side, and peered out. "Hey, Martin!"

It was nearly dark outside, and the air had turned cool directly the sun went down. Simon Templar, lighting one of Lord Ripwell's cigars by the mantelpiece, wondered if that seasonable evening chill was enough to account for the way Kenneth Nulland seemed to be shivering when he came in behind the secretary.

"Martin, where is that damned revolver? I haven't seen it for months."

"I think it's in the loft," said Irelock. "Shall I have a look for it tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow?" repeated Ripwell, screwing up his face like a disappointed schoolboy. "Eh? What? I want it now. Suppose this gang comes back tonight? Nonsense. What's the matter with looking for it now?"

"Right-ho," said Irelock peaceably. "I'll look for it now."

"Right-jolly-old-ho," echoed Nulland, peeling himself off the edge of the table in his undulating boneless way. "And I must be tootling along. Cheerio, Pop. Sorry I can't stay longer, but jolly old Jumbo Ferris is always complaining about me being late for his parties. Toodle-oo, Martin-------"

Mr. Teal cleared his throat.

"Just a minute, Mr. Nulland," he said. "There are one or two small questions you might be able to help us with before you go."

The young man's restless eyes travelled about the room.

"What are they? I don't know anything."

"Have you ever met a man named-----"

"Look!"

It was Irelock's voice, sharp and unnatural. Wheeling round to look at him, the Saint saw that his face was tense and startled, his weak eyes in their tortoiseshell frames staring rigidly at the window.

"What is it?" snapped Teal.

"A man looked in-just now-with a mask on his face. I saw him"

Teal put his gum away in the side of his mouth and waded towards the casement with surprising speed for a man of his flabby dimensions, but Simon was even quicker. His hand dropped on the detective's shoulder.

"Wait for it, Claud! You may be just ballast at Scotland Yard, but you're the light of my life-and I'd hate you to go out too soon. Switch off those lights, somebody!"

It was Lord Ripwell who carried out the order; and the Saint's voice went on speaking in the dark.

"Okay, souls. Now you can get on with it. But try to remember what I told you about standing in front of lighted windows-and watch your step outside. Will someone show me the way to the back door?"

"I will," barked Ripwell eagerly.

He grabbed Simon by the arm and hustled him into the hall. Irelock called out: "Shall Ken and I take the front?"

"Do that," said the Saint, and slipped out his automatic as he followed Ripwell into the kitchen.

"I wish I knew where that damned revolver of mine was," said his lordship plaintively, as he shot back the bolt of the trades door.

The Saint smiled.

"Since you haven't got it, you'd better let me go first. And put down that cigar-it's a swell target."

He slipped out into the cool darkness, thumbing down the safety catch of his gun with an absurd feeling of unreality. The night was moonless, and the sky was a film of deep grey, only a shade lighter than the dull black of the earth and the trees. A stir of the air that was too soft even to be called a breeze brought the mingled scents of the river and damp grasses to his nostrils: everything was so suddenly quiet and peacefully commonplace after the boisterous confusion of their dispersal that he almost put his gun away again and laughed at himself. Such things did not happen. And yet-he would have liked to know why Kenneth Nulland was afraid, and what his reaction to the name of Ellshaw would have been Crack!

The shot crashed out from the front of the house, and a shout followed it. He heard the roar of an engine, and all the feeling of unreality vanished. As he raced up the strip of turf under the shadow of the wall he heard a shrill cry for help, in what sounded like Kenneth Nulland's voice.

Crack!

A tongue of flame split the blackness ahead, and he heard Lord Ripwell gasp at his heels. He whipped up his gun and fired at the flash-there was no danger of mistaken identity there, for on the analysis they had held a short while ago he was the only one of the party who was armed. Therefore the other gun belonged to one of the raiding party-however many of them there were. It spoke again, and the thunder of his second shot rang out on the reverberations of the first, but it was blind shooting with a hundred chances to one against a hit.

Someone ran over the grass and plunged through the cupressus hedge into the road, and the car's engine roared louder. Simon tore recklessly in pursuit, and came out into the gravelled lane as the flaring headlights leapt towards him. A man lurched out of the darkness and struck at him, catching him on the shoulder; and the Saint spun round and caught the striking wrist. The forefinger of his other hand took up the resistance of the trigger.

"Are you ready to die?" he said softly.

"Oh, Lord!" ejaculated Martin Irelock.

Simon let him go, and turned round again as the red tail light of the car whirled round the near corner.

"Hell!" He dropped the gun in his pocket. "Maybe I can catch them with my car."

He ran over the drive and leapt into the seat of the Hirondel. There was not a sound when he pressed the starter button, and he slid his hand along under the dash and felt wires trailing loose. It would take precious minutes to get out a light and re-connect them, and by that time the chase would be hopeless. With a sigh he opened the door and stepped down again; and then a match flared some distance away, and he heard Teal's voice.

"Give me a hand, someone."

He went back to the corner of the house; and saw that the man who lay on the ground, with Teal bending over him, was Lord Ripwell.

V THE match flickered out, and Teal struck another. Ripwell's eyes were open, and he was breathing painfully.

"Don't bother about me-I'm not hurt. Just a scratch. I'll- be all right. Did you get-any-of those villains?"

"I'm afraid not," said the Saint grimly.

They picked him up and carried him into the house. The bullet had passed through his chest just below the right shoulder-there was an ugly exit wound which had smashed his shoulder-blade, but the internal injuries were probably clean.

"I forgot to-put down-the cigar," he said with a twisted mouth, when they had settled him on his bed.

The Saint understood. Ripwell had been running just behind him and a little to one side when the first shot that he saw was fired. Simon realised now that he had heard him gasp when the bullet struck, but in the excitement of the moment he had not recognised the sound.

"Where's the nearest doctor?" asked Teal, turning to Irelock.

It was only then, when they were all gathered in the same room, that Simon realised that they were still one short of their number.

"Where's Ke----"

He started the question without thinking, and could have bitten his tongue the next moment; but he broke off too late. Ripwell struggled up on his elbow and stared from face to face, finishing the name for him in his clear commanding voice.

"Kenneth! Where's Kenneth?"

There was an answer in Irelock's pale strained features, at least enough answer for the Saint to read, even before the secretary began to stammer: "He's-he's gone"

"Gone to see if he can catch Inspector Oldwood on his way here, hasn't he?" Simon caught him up in an instant, with cold blue eyes cutting off the truth with a flash of steel. "We'd better go and grab this doctor, and we may meet them."

He dragged Irelock out of the room and ran him down the stairs. In the hall he faced him, taking out a cigarette and straightening it between steady brown fingers.

"What has happened to Kenneth?" he asked.

"They got him." Irelock was trembling slightly, and his grown-up Kewpie face looked older and tensely hard. "We opened the front door, and somebody fired at us. Got me in the arm-only a graze." He pulled up his sleeve to show a raw straight furrow scored at an angle across his wrist. "I ran out and got hit in the stomach-not with a bullet that time, but it almost laid me out. I heard Ken yell for help, and then 1 heard people running away. I ran after them, and then I caught you. You remember. But they must have got Ken."

Simon flicked his thumb over his lighter, and drew his cigarette red in the flame.

"I only heard one shot before they started potting at me. Have you got a torch?"

They went out and searched the garden with an electric flashlight which Irelock produced from the kitchen. Inspector Oldwood arrived and challenged them while they were doing it, but relaxed when he recognised Ripwell's secretary. He had come from the opposite direction to that which the escaping car had taken, and he had seen no one on the road near the cottage. Certainly he had not seen Nulland.

One or two startled villagers and a handful of young people from adjacent bungalows, attracted by the noise and the shooting, were revealed at the gate in the fringe of the torchlight; and Oldwood pressed them into the search while Irelock went back into the house to telephone for a doctor. There was not a great deal of ground to cover, and two of the holiday bungalow party had torches. In twenty minutes the last of the searches had drifted back to the front drive.

"Perhaps he went for help," said Oldwood, who had not had time to learn more than the vaguest rudiments of the story.

"I don't think so," said the Saint.

He noticed something else, in the reflected glow of the hovering ovals of torchlight, and swept his own light over the drive again. The Hirondel showed up its gleaming lines of burnished metal, exactly where he had left it when he first drove in; but it was the only car there. Of Kenneth Nulland's noisy little roadster there was no trace but the tyre tracks in the gravel.

Simon whistled softly.

"In his own car, too, by God! That's hot stuff-or is it?"

He saw something else, which had been overlooked in the first search-a small dark shadow on the ground close to the place where Nulland's car had stood-and went over to it. It was a red silk handkerchief, and when he picked it up he felt that it was wet and sticky.

"We'd better see how badly Ripwell's hurt," he said.

The doctor had arrived while the search was going on, stopping his car outside the gates, but he was still busy upstairs when Teal came down and joined them.

"He ought to pull through," was Teal's unofficial report. "He's stopped a nasty packet, but the doctor says his constitution is as sound as a bell. What's this about Nulland?"

"What's this about anyhow?" asked Oldwood more comprehensively.

He was a red-faced grizzled man who looked more like a rather hard-bitten farmer than anything else, with an air of quiet self-contained confidence which was not to be flustered even by such sensational events as he had walked into. When his knowledge had been brought up to date he was still quiet and deliberate, stuffing his pipe with square unhurried fingers.

"I haven't anything for you." he said at the end. "I haven't been able to trace any suspicious characters hanging around here yet, but I'm still making inquiries."

"I wonder whether Nulland was kidnapped, or if he ran away," said Teal stolidly.

"The evidence doesn't show that he ran away," said the Saint.

He produced the silk handkerchief which he had picked up in the drive. There was an embroidered "K" in one corner, and the wet stickiness on it was blood.

Teal studied the relic and passed it over to the local man, who put it away in an envelope.

"What are the roads like around here, Oldwood? We can try to stop that car."

"They can't have gone Chertsey way," said Oldwood, striking a match. "Because that's the way I came from. They may have gone almost anywhere else. There's a road to Staines, another to Sunbury, and another to Walton-and half a dozen different routes they could take from any of those places."

"Added to which," murmured the Saint, "there must be at least fifty other baby sports cars exactly like his wandering about Surrey tonight."

"It'll have to be tried," said Teal doggedly. "Do you know the number, Mr. Irelock?"

The secretary hadn't noticed it. Apparently Nulland changed his cars at an average rate of about once a month, except when one of his frequent accidents compelled an even quicker change, and it was almost beyond anyone's power to keep track of the numbers. The instructions that Teal telephoned out were hardly more than a hopeless routine, and all of them knew it.

He had just finished when the doctor came downstairs to confirm the preliminary bulletin.

"He's fairly comfortable now, but he'll want looking after for the next couple of days-I don't think there's any need to move him to the hospital. I'll send a nurse along tonight if I can get hold of one-otherwise I'll bring her over with me tomorrow morning."

"I suppose you didn't find a bullet," said Teal.

The doctor shook his head.

"It went right through him. From the look of the wound I should say it must have been fired from a fairly large-calibre gun."

"That reminds me," said Oldwood, searching his jacket pockets. "I brought over those cartridges that he asked for. You may as well have them, but I don't know that they're much use now."

"They may be useful," said Irelock. "We'd better keep some sort of guard while all this is going on."

"I'll send a man over as soon as I get back to the station," said Oldwood, and stood up. "You might give me a lift, Doctor, if it isn't taking you out of your way. There's nothing more we can do tonight."

Irelock saw them out, and then went back up the stairs to look in on Ripwell; and the Saint lighted another cigarette and stretched out his legs under the table. There was a train of thought shunting about in the half-intuitive sidings of his mind, backing and puffing tentatively, feeling its way breathlessly over a dark maze of lines with only one dim signal to guide it; but something about the way it was moving sent that weird sixth-sense tingle coursing again over his thoracic vertebrae. Teal trudged about over a minute area of carpet with his jaws oscillating rhythmically, and his sleepy eyes kept returning to the inscrutable immobility of the Saint's brown face.

"Well, what do you make of it now?" he said at last.

Simon came far enough out of his trance to put his smouldering cigarette back between his lips.

"I think it was magnificently staged," he said.

"How do you mean-magnificently? To try something like this only an hour or two after we get here, and make a success of it---"

"I like the organisation," said the Saint dreamily. "Think it over, Claud. A bloke pushes his face against the window, and there's a first-class scare. The gathering breaks up and goes dashing out in the dark through three separate doors. There are five of us milling around in all directions, and yet it only takes a few seconds to sort out the right people and make a job of it. The bullet that hit Ripwell may have been meant for either him or me, but we were the two who got the bombs to begin with. Young Nulland is snatched off-a member of the same family-but nobody seems to have tried to grab Irelock when he was knocked out. And nobody tries to damage that beautiful stomach of yours."

"That may only be because they didn't have time."

"Or else because you don't know enough to be dangerous."

Mr. Teal scowled.

"Nulland's car was only a two-seater, wasn't it?" He stared at the curtained windows, working at the problem in his own slow methodical way. "We ought to have tried the river. . . . These people are clever."

"How many have you counted up to?"

"Ellshaw's the only one we know personally, but you saw another man in Duchess Place when you went there. I don't know how many more there are, but Ellshaw couldn't do it all alone. I know that man, and I'd swear he wasn't a killer."

The door opened and Irelock returned, bringing a bottle and glasses on a tray.

"What are the four motives that might make anyone a killer?" asked the Saint.

Teal's heavy lids settled more wearily over his eyes.

"Revenge? Nobody whom he's attacking ever seems to have met him before, except his wife. Jealousy?"

"Of what?"

"The fear of being found out?" suggested Irelock.

"We haven't anything against him," answered the detective. "And I don't know how to believe that he's done anything before that would be big enough to give him such a guilty conscience. He's the type that makes the usual whine about persecution when he's caught, but he always goes quietly."

Simon nodded.

"So that only leaves the best motive of all. Money. Big money."

"Extortion?" queried Teal sceptically.

"It has been done," said the Saint mildly. "But it doesn't meet all the facts this time. What's he going to extort from Mrs. Ellshaw and me? And how can we know anything that might spoil the racket before Nulland's even been kidnapped -much less before anyone's put in the bill for ransom? And how the hell could you get a ransom out of Lord Ripwell if he was dead? Don't forget that he was on the bumping-off list before tonight."

Chief Inspector Teal breathed audibly.

"Well, if you've got a theory of your own, I'd like to hear it. All you've done yet is to make it more complicated."

"On the contrary," said the Saint, with that intangible intuitive train of thought still shuffling through the untracked subconscious labyrinths of his imagination, "I think it's getting simpler."

"You've got a theory?" Irelock pressed him eagerly.

The Saint smiled.

"For the first time since all the excitement started, I've got more than a theory," he answered softly. "I've got a fact."

"What is it?" demanded Teal, too quickly; and the Saint grinned gently, and got up with a swing of his long legs.

"You'd like to know, wouldn't you? Well, how do you know you don't?"

Mr. Teal swallowed the last faint scrap of flavour out of his gum, and blinked at him.

"How do I know"

"How do you know you don't? Because you do." Simon Templar flattened the stump of his cigarette in an ashtray, and laughed at him soundlessly. He put his hand on Teal's cushy shoulder. "It's all there waiting for you, Claud, if you figure it out. Think back a bit, and work on it. Who's supposed to be the detective here-you or me?"

"Do you mean you know who's responsible?" asked Irelock.

The Saint turned his head.

"Not yet. Not positively. I've just got a few ideas walking around in my mind. One or two of 'em have got together for a chat, and when they've all met up I think they're going to tell me something. I'd like to see how his lordship's getting on."

He went upstairs and let himself quietly into the bedroom. Ripwell was smoking a cigar and reading a book, and he looked up with a steady smile that overcame the pallor of his face.

"Looks as if I'm pretty hard to kill, what? You were splendid-I wish we'd caught one of those blighters. Why the devil didn't I have that damned revolver? I might have bagged one myself."

"Inspector Oldwood brought over some ammunition for you," said the Saint. "I'll see that you have it before we turn in. It's a comforting thing to have under your pillow."

"Damn comforting," agreed his lordship. "I don't mind telling you I'm glad to have you in the house-you won't be leaving yet, will you?"

"Not for a while."

Lord Ripwell grunted cheerfully.

"That's good. They got Kenneth, didn't they? Oh, yes, I know-I dragged it out of Martin just now. Decent of you to try and keep it from me, but I'd rather know. I can stand a good deal. Wish Kenneth could. Still, an experience like that may wake him up a bit. What d'you think they'll do to him?"

"I don't know. But somehow I don't think it'll be anything -fatal."

Ripwell nodded.

"Neither do I. If they'd wanted to-do that . . . they needn't have taken him away. I'm glad you think so too, though. I wouldn't like to feel I was hoodwinking myself. Somebody'd better ring up that chap Ferris and tell him Ken won't be coming down."

"Do you know the number?"

"Never did know it. Ring up his flat in London and see if you can get it from there. The least we can do is to save Kenneth from getting in trouble for being late again. You'll find a directory under that table. Address in Duchess Place somewhere, I think."

"What?"

The question was slapped out of the Saint with such spontaneous startlement that Ripwell dropped his cigar and scorched the sheet.

"Eh? What? What's the matter?"

"Did you say Duchess Place?"

Ripwell picked up his cigar and dusted off the debris of ash from the bedclothes.

"I think that's right. Kenneth has talked about it. Why?"

Simon did not answer. He sprang up and dived under the extension telephone table by the bedside for the directory. He could hear Mrs. Florence Ellshaw's unmusical voice rasping in his ear as clearly as if her ghost had been standing beside him, repeating fragments of her long-winded and meandering story: ". . . In Duchess Place, sir . . . number six . . . next door to two young gennelmen as I do for, such nice young gennelmen. . . ."

"Does he share this flat with another fellow?" Simon jerked out, whipping over the pages.

Lord Ripwell raised his eyebrows foggily.

"I believe he does. Don't know who it is, though. How did you know?"

The Saint didn't answer that one either. He had found his place in the directory and run down the list of Ferrises until he came to one whose address was in Duchess Place- at number eight, Duchess Place. And he was staring at the entry with a queer short-winded feeling sinking into his solar plexus and an electric buck-and-wing careering over his ganglions in a style that eclipsed everything else of its kind hitherto. It was several seconds before he spoke at all.

"Holy Smoke," he breathed. "Jolly Old Jumbo!"

VI "WHAT'S the matter?" repeated Lord Ripwell, with pardonable blankness.

"Nothing," said the Saint absently. "It's just some more of the pieces falling into place. Wait a minute."

He jumped up and began to pace quickly up and down the room, slamming the directory shut and chucking it back under the table. The train of thought was moving faster, dashing hectically up and down over its maze of sidings faster than he was covering the floor. His tanned keen face was cut into bronze lines of intense thought, with his sea-blue eyes blazing vividly against the sunburned background. He wheeled round with his fist smashing impetuously into his palm.

"It's getting together. ... To kill Mrs. Ellshaw just because she'd come to see me wasn't such a good motive. I was flattering myself a bit. But she'd always have to talk-to some one. Suppose it was the two young gennelmen that she did for? That's the sort of coincidence that happens. When Ellshaw had to disappear, who could have foreseen that his wife might go to work for someone who knew the bloke who . . . Wait for it again. . . . Yes, they knew Kenneth. And Kenneth never said whether he'd heard of Ellshaw-never had a chance to. ... My God, I'd forgotten that piece of organisation!"

Ripwell's pleasant face was hardening uncertainly.

"What are you driving at? If you're suggesting that Kenneth is a murderer"

"Murderer?" The Saint came up with a start, half dazed, out of the trance in which he had been letting his thoughts race on aloud, without making any effort to dictate their destination. "I never said that. ButGod, am I getting this untied?"

"I don't know what you mean," persisted Ripwell hoarsely.

Simon swung back to the bed and dropped his hands on the old man's shoulders.

"Don't worry," he said gently. "I'm sorry-I didn't mean to scare you. Even now, I'm not quite sure what I do mean. But I'll look after things. And I'll be right back."

He pressed Ripwell quietly back on the pillows and went out quickly, making for the stairs with an exuberant stride that almost bowled Martin Irelock off the landing.

"What's the excitement?" demanded the secretary.

"I've got some more ideas." Simon kept hold of the arm which he had clutched to save Irelock from taking the worst of the spill. "Are you busy?"

"No-I was just making sure that your room's all right."

"Then come downstairs again. I want to talk to you."

He did not release the arm until they were downstairs in the living-room. The french casement was ajar, the half-drawn curtains stirring in the draught. Simon took out his cigarette-case.

"Where's Teal?"

"I don't know. Oldwood's man just arrived-I expect he's showing him round."

The Saint put a cigarette between his lips and took a match from the ash-stand, stroking it alight with his thumbnail.

"I've remembered something that may interest you," he said. "An interesting scientific fact. If you have a sample of fresh blood, it's possible to analyse its type and get an exact mathematical ratio of probabilities that it came from some particular person."

Irelock blinked.

"Is it really? That's interesting."

"I said it was interesting. How does it appeal to you?"

The secretary picked up the whisky decanter mechanically, and poured splashes into the three glasses on the tray. All the splashes did not go into the glasses.

"I don't know-why should it appeal to me particularly?"

"Because," answered the Saint deliberately, "I've an idea that if I asked Teal to have the blood on Ken's handkerchief analysed, and then we took a sample of your blood from that graze on your arm, we'd find that the odds were that it was your blood!"

"What do you-----"

"What do I mean? I'm always hearing that question. I mean that I told you and Teal just now that I'd got a fact, and this is it. There was only one shot fired in the front of the house. It scratched your wrist-low down. This handkerchief was in Kenneth's breast pocket. I noticed it. While it's possible that you may have gone out of the door with your hands shoulder high, it's damned unlikely; and therefore I didn't quite see how a bullet that passed you about the level of your hips could have hit Ken in the chest, unless the warrior who fired it was lying at your feet-which again is unlikely."

Irelock's knuckles showed white where he gripped his glass, and for a second or two he made no reply. Then, with an imperceptible shrug, he looked back at the Saint, tight-lipped.

"All right," he said, with a nod of grim resignation. "You've seen through it. I'm afraid I should make a rotten criminal. It was my blood."

"How come?"

Irelock grimaced ruefully.

"Teal suspected it."

"You mean to tell me that Ken ran away?"

"Yes."

Simon drew smoke from his cigarette and trickled it through his nostrils.

"Go on."

"That's about all I know. I don't know why. I could see a silhouette of the car against the headlights when they were switched on, and there was only one man in it. I found the handkerchief while I was pretending to help you to look for him, and I wiped it on my arm and dropped it back on the drive. I suppose it was a silly thing to do, but the only thing I could think of was how to try and cover him up-to make it look as if he hadn't run away."

There was no doubt that he was speaking the truth, but Simon drove on at him relentlessly.

"Why should you think he wanted covering up?" "Why else should he want to run away? Besides, you must have seen that there was something on his mind all the evening-I saw you looking at him. I don't know what it was. But he's always been wild. I've tried to help him. Lord Ripwell would probably have disinherited him more than once if I hadn't been able to get him out of some of his scrapes." "Such as?"

"Oh, the usual wild things that a fellow like that does. He gambles. And he drinks too much."

"Gets obstreperous when he's tight, does he?" "Yes. You wouldn't think it of him, but he does. When he's drunk he'd pick a fight with anybody, but when he's sober he'd run away from a mouse."

"Could he have killed anyone when he was drunk?" Irelock stared at him with horror. "Good Lord-you don't think that?"

"I don't know what I think," said the Saint impatiently. "I'm just trying to sort things out. Ripwell hasn't disinherited him yet, has he? Well, who'd make the biggest profit out of Rip-well's death? . . . But even that hasn't anything to do with the rest of it. There are two mysteries tangled up, and I'm trying to make them tie. The hell with it!"

He picked up a glass and subsided with it into a chair, frowning savagely. Odd loose ends out of the tangle kept on linking up and matching, tantalising him with a deceptive hope that the rest of the pattern was just about to follow on and fall neatly into place; but at the climax there was always one clashing colour, some shape or other that did not fit. Somewhere in the web there must be a thin tortuous thread that would hold it all together, but the thread was always dancing just beyond his grasp.

"If-if you're not quite sure," Irelock was saying hesitantly, "have you got to say anything to Teal? I mean, unless Lord Ripwell-unless everybody's got to know that Kenneth funked..."

He broke off at the sound of a footstep on the path outside, but his bright eyes continued the appeal. Simon moved his head noncommittally, but he had no immediate intention of making Chief Inspector Teal a free gift of the wear and tear on his own valuable grey matter.

"I've posted the constable outside, under the bedroom window," said the detective, and looked at the glass which Irelock was offering him. "No, thank you-fat men didn't ought to drink. It's had for the heart. The doctor hasn't been able to get hold of a nurse yet, so we'd better take it in turns to sit up."

Irelock nodded, and took the first sip at his highball.

"I don't mind taking the-----"

His voice wrenched into a ghastly retching sound, and they stared at him in momentary paralysis. And then, as Simon started to his feet, he lurched forward and knocked the glass spinning out of the Saint's hand with a convulsive sweep of his arm.

"For God's sake!" he gasped. "Don't drink. . .. Poison!"

VII SIMON sprang forward and caught him before Teal's lumbering movement in the same direction had more than started, but Irelock flung him off with demented energy and went staggering to the window. They heard him vomiting painfully outside.

"Get on the 'phone for a doctor," snapped the Saint, as he dashed after him.

Irelock reeled into his arms in the darkness.

"Get me back," he panted huskily. "May be-all right.. . . Get . . . mustard and water", Simon brought him back into the room and laid him down on the sofa-he was curiously black about the eyes and the perspiration was streaming off him. Teal came in with the emetic almost at once, having gone out and found it on his own initiative; and there was a further period of unpleasantness. . . .

"All right-thanks."

Irelock lay back at last with a groan. His breathing was still laboured, but the spasmodic twitching of his limbs was reduced to a faint trembling.

"I'm feeling--better. . . . Think we-got rid of it-in time. . . . That would have been-another mystery-for you!"

To Simon Templar there was no mystery. His glance flashed from the whisky decanter to the still open French door through which Teal had come in, and he looked up to find Mr. Teal's somnolent eyes following the same route. His gaze crystallised thoughtfully.

"While you were outside posting your cop under the window, Claud Eustace! Is that organisation and is that nerve, or what is it?"

He took up the untouched glass which Mr. Teal had declined, and moistened his mouth from it, holding the liquid only for a moment. There was a distinctive sweet oily taste in it which might have passed unnoticed under the sharper bite of the spirit unless he had been looking for it, and he retained a definition of the savour in his memory after he had spat out the sip.

Teal's eyes were wide open.

"Then they still can't be far away," he said.

The Saint's lips stirred in an infinitesimal reckless smile.

"One day you'll be a detective after all, Claud," he murmured. Teal was starting to move ponderously towards the window, but Simon passed him with his long easy stride and stopped him. "But I'm afraid you'll never be a night hunter. Let me go out."

"What can you do?" asked Teal suspiciously.

"I can't arrest him," Simon admitted. "But I can be a good dog and bring you the bone. We missed a trick last time- crashing out like a mob of blasted red-faced fox-hunting squires after a poacher. You wouldn't catch anyone but a damn fool that way, on a dark night like this. But I know the game. I'll go out and be as invisible as a worm, and if anyone steps inside these grounds again I'll get him. And I think somebody will be coming!"

The detective hesitated. His memories of the Assistant Commissioner floated bogeyly across his imagination; the memory of all the deceptions he had suffered from the Saint narrowed his eyes. But he knew as well as anyone what amazing things Simon Templar could do in the dark, and he knew his own limitations.

"If you do catch anyone, will you promise to bring him in?"

"He's yours," said the Saint tersely; but he made a mental reservation about the exact time at which that transfer of property would come into effect.

He went out alone, dissolving noiselessly into the night like a wandering shadow. From the blackness outside the window he watched Teal using the telephone, and presently saw the lights of a car drive up and stop outside the gate. The doctor walked up the short drive and was challenged on his way by the police guard; and Simon took that opportunity of introducing himself.

"This is a funny business, sir, isn't it?" said the constable, when the doctor had gone on into the house.

He was a middle-aged beefy man who kept shaking himself down uncomfortably in his plain clothes, as if he had been wearing a uniform too long to feel thoroughly at home in any other garb. He would probably continue to wear a uniform for the rest of his life, but it was no less probable that he was quite contented with the prospect.

Simon strolled back with him to his post, and gave him a cigarette. He did not expect the man he was waiting for to enter the grounds for a little while.

"Kidnapped 'is lordship's son, too, didn't they? said the policeman. "Now, why should they want to do that?"

The question was put more or less in rhetorical appeal to some unspecified oracle, rather than as one demanding a direct answer; and the Saint did not immediately attempt to answer it.

"I suppose you know Lord Ripwell fairly well," he said, "Well, so-and-so," said the constable, puffing, "Must be about five year now, sir- ever since 'e bought the house." "I shouldn't think he'd be an easy man to extort money from."

"I wouldn't like to be the man to try it. Mind you, 'is lordship's known to be a generous gentleman-do anything for a fellow oo's out of luck, if he's asked properly. But not the kind you could force anything out of. No, sir. Why I remember in my time what 'appened to a chap oo tried to blackmail 'im."

The stillness of the Saint's eyes could not be seen in the dark.

"Somebody tried to blackmail him once, did they?" he said quietly "Yes, sir. It wasn't nothing much they 'ad to blackmail 'im with, but you can see for yourself 'is lordship must've been quite a lad in 'is time, and some people are that narrow-minded they don't expect a man to be even 'uman." There was a sympathetic note in the constable's voice which hinted that he himself could modestly claim, in his own time to have been Quite A Lad. "Anyway, all 'is lordship did was to get the Inspector up and 'ave him listen to some of this talk. And then, when he could 'ave 'ad the fellow sent to prison, he wouldn't even prosecute 'im."

"No?"

"Wouldn't even make a charge. 'I don't want to, be vindictive,' he says. 'The silly ass 'as had a good fright,' he says, 'and now you let him go. You can see he's just some down-and-out idiot oo thought 'e could make some easy money.' And in the end I believe 'e gave the chap 'is fare back to London."

"Who was this fellow?" Simon asked.

"I dunno. Said 'is name was Smith, like most of 'em do when they're first caught. We never had no chance to find out oo he really was, on account of Ms lordship not prosecuting him, but 'e did look pretty down and out. Seedy little chap with a great red nose on 'im like a stop light."

The doctor came out and returned to his car-Simon heard his parting conversation with Teal at the door, and gathered that Martin Irelock was in no danger. The hum of the car died away; and Simon gave the talkative guard another cigarette and faded back into the dark to resume his own prowling.

His brain was becoming congested with new things to think about. So an attempt had been made to extort money from Ripwell. He was confirmed in his own estimate of the prospects of the hopeful extorter, but apparently the aspirant himself had required to be convinced by experience. There was something about the anecdote as he felt it which gave him a distinct impression of a trial balloon. Someone had wanted first-hand knowledge of Lord Ripwell's reaction to such an attempt; and the constable's brief description of the aspiring blackmailer had one prominent feature in common with the elusive Mr. Ellshaw. Curiously enough, in spite of the increased congestion of ideas, the Saint felt that the mystery was gradually becoming less mysterious. . . .

He moved round the house as soundlessly as a hunting cat. As Chief Inspector Teal knew and admitted, queer things, almost incredible things, happened to Simon Templar when he got out in the dark-things which would never have been believed by the uninitiated observer who had only seen him in his sophisticated moods. He could leave his immaculately dressed, languidly bantering sophistication behind him in a room, and go out to become an integral part of the wild. He could go out and move through the night with the supple smoothness of a panther, without rustling a blade of grass under his feet, merging himself into minute scraps of shadow like a jungle animal, feeling his way uncannily between invisible obstructions, using strange faculties of scent and hearing with such weird certainty that those who knew him best, when they thought about it, sometimes wondered if the roots of all his amazing outlawry might not be found threading down into the deeps of this queer primitive instinct.

No living man could have seen or heard him as he passed on his silent tour, summarising the square lights of windows in the black cube of the house. Lord Ripwell's lighted window, under which the police guard stood, was on one side. A bulb burned faintly in the hall, at the front, facing closely on to the road. The dully luminous colour of curtains on the other side marked the living-room which he had left not long ago. At the back of the house, where the Thames margined the grounds, he could see one red-shaded lamp in an upstairs window- presumably that was Irelock's room, for he had gathered that the only domestic servant employed at the cottage was a daily woman who had gone home immediately after dinner. Chief Inspector Teal must have been keeping watch downstairs with a dwindling supply of spearmint; and Simon wondered whether he had been jarred enough out of his principles to take over Lord Ripwell's revolver and the ammunition, to wait with him for the sudden death that would surely stalk through that place again before morning.

He came down to the water's edge and sat with his back to a tree, as motionless as if he had been one of its own roots. Surely, he knew, the death would come; but whether it would successfully claim a victim depended largely upon him. There was a smooth speed about every move of the case which appealed to him: it was cut and thrust, parry and riposte-a. series of lightning adjustments and counter-moves which he could appreciate for its intrinsic qualities even while he was still fumbling for the connecting link that held it all together. The poison which had found its way into the whisky less than an hour ago belonged to the same scheme of things. He could recall its peculiar sweet oily taste on his tongue, and he thought he knew what it was. The symptoms which Martin Irelock had shown corroborated it. Very few men would have known that it was poisonous at all. How should an illiterate little racetrain rat like Ellshaw have known it?

A mosquito zoomed into his ear with a vicious ping, and one of his thighs began to itch; but still he did not move. At other times in his life he had lain out like that, immobile as a carved outcrop of rock, combing the dark with keyed-up senses as delicate as those of any savage, when the first man whose nerves had cracked under the unearthly strain would have paid for the microscopic easing of a cramped muscle with his life. That utter relaxation of every expectant sinew, the supersensitive isolation of every faculty from all disturbances except those which he was waiting for, had become so automatic that he used no conscious effort to achieve it. And in that way, without even turning his head, he became aware of the black ghost of a canoe that was drifting soundlessly down the stream towards the place where he sat.

Still he did not move. A nightingale started to tune up in the branches over his head, and a frail wisp of cloud floated idly across the hazy stars which were the only light in the darkness. The canoe was only a dim black brush-stroke on the grey gloom, but he saw that there was only one man in it, and saw the ripple of tarnished-silver water as the unknown dipped his paddle and turned the craft in towards the bank. It seemed unlikely that any ordinary man would be cruising down the river at that hour alone, revelling in a dreamy romance with himself, and the Saint had an idea that the man who was coming towards him was not altogether ordinary. Unless a dead man creeping down the Thames in a canoe at midnight could be called ordinary.

The canoe slid under the bank, momentarily out of sight: but the Saint's ears carried on the picture of what was happening. He heard the soft rustle of grasses as the side scraped the shore, the plip-plop of tiny drops of water as the wet paddle was lifted inboard, the faint grate of the wood as it was laid down. He sat on under his tree without a stir in his graven stillness, building sound upon sound into a construction of every movement that was as vividly clear to him as if he had watched it in broad daylight. He heard the scuff of a leather shoe-sole on the wood, quite different from the dull grate of the paddle; the rustle of creased clothing; the whisper of turf pressed underfoot. Then a soundless pause. He sensed that the man who had disembarked was probing the night clumsily, looking for some sign or signal, hesitating over his next move. Then he heard the frush of trodden grass again, and a sifflation of suppressed breathing that would have been quite inaudible to any hearing less uncannily acute than his.

A shadow loomed up against the stygian tarnish of the water, half the height of a man, and remained still. The prowler was sitting on the bank, waiting for something which Simon could not divine. There was a longer and more complicated rustling, a tentative scratch and an astonishingly loud sizzle of flame; and the man's head and shoulders leapt up out of the dark for an instant in startlingly crisp silhouette against the glow of a match cupped in his hands.

The Saint moved for the first time. He rolled up silently and smoothly on to his feet, straightening his knees gradually until he came upright. The pulsing of his heart had settled down to a steady acceleration that did nothing to disturb the feline flow of any of his movements. It was only a level beat of excitement in his veins, a throbbing eagerness to complete his acquaintance with that elusive man around whose fanatical seclusion centred so much violence and sudden death.

Simon came up behind him very quietly. The man never knew he was coming, had no warning of danger before two sets of steel fingers closed on his throat. And then it was too late for him to do anything useful. He was not very strong, and he was almost paralysed with the heart-stopping horror of that silent attack out of the dark. The cry that burst involuntarily from his lungs was crushed by the choking grip on his neck before it could come to sound in his mouth, and a heavy knee settled snugly into the small of his back and pinned him helplessly to the ground in spite of all his frantic struggles. It was all over very quickly.

The Saint felt him go limp, and cautiously relaxed the pressure of his hands. Then he slipped his arms under the man's unconscious body and lifted him up. The whole encounter had made very little noise; and Simon was no less attentive to silence than he had been before, while he carried the man down the bank and laid him out in the canoe. A couple of deft sweeps of the paddle sent the craft skimming out into the stream; but the Saint kept it moving until a bend in the river hid the lights of the house before he struck a match and inspected the face of his capture.

It was Ellshaw.

VIII "Now you are going to talk, brother," said the Saint.

He sat facing his trophy over another flickering match, giving the other every facility to recognise him before the light went out. Ellshaw's face was wet with the river water that had been slopped over him to help him back to unhappy consciousness; but there was something else on his face besides water-a pale clammy fright that made his oversized red nose stand out like a full-blown rose against the blanched sickliness of his cheeks.

The match spun from the Saint's fingers into the water with an expiring hiss, dropping the curtain of blackness between them again; and the Cockney's adenoidal voice croaked hysterically through the curtain.

"I carn't tell yer nothing, guv'nor-strike me dead if I can!"

"I shouldn't dream of striking you dead if you can," said the Saint kindly. "But if you can't . . . well, I really shouldn't know what to do with you. I couldn't just let you run away, because then you might begin to think you'd scored off me and get a swollen head, which would be very bad for you. I couldn't adopt you as a pet and take you around with me on a lead, because I don't like your face so much. I couldn't put you in a cage and send you to the Zoo, because the other monkeys might object. And so the question would arise, brother, how would one get rid of you? And of course it would always be so easy to get hold of your skinny neck again for a while, and hold you under water while you blew bubbles."

"Yer wouldn't dare!" panted Ellshaw.

"No?" The Saint's voice was just an infinitely gentle challenge lilting out of the darkness. "Did you get a good look at me when I struck that match, by any chance? You knew me well enough when I dropped in to see you in Duchess Place. And you talked as if you'd heard all about me, too. Did somebody ever tell you there was anything I didn't dare?"

He could hear the racking harshness of the man's breathing.

"Yer wouldn't dare," Ellshaw repeated as if he was only trying to convince himself. "That-that 'ud be murder!"

"Yeah?" drawled the Saint. "I'm not so sure. You tell me the answer, brother, out of that vast general-knowledge fund of yours-is it legally possible to kill a man who's already dead? Because you are dead, aren't you? You were murdered nearly a year ago."

It was a shot literally in the dark, but the sharp catch of the other's breath was as clear an answer to him as if he had had a searchlight focused down the boat. His thumb-nail gritted across another match, and the flame cut the pitiless buccaneering lines of his face out of the gloom for as long as it took him to light a cigarette. And then there was only the red tip of the cigarette glowing in the intensified dark, and his voice coming from behind it: "So how on earth could I murder you again, brother? I could only make you stay dead, and I don't think anybody's ever laid down the law about a crime like that."

"I don't know nothing," persisted Ellshaw hoarsely. "Honest I don't."

"Honest you do," said the Saint persuasively. "But I didn't even ask for your opinion. Just you come through with what's on your mind, and I'll let you know whether I think it was worth knowing."

Ellshaw did not answer at once; and Simon went on quite calmly, with a matter-of-fact detachment that was more deadly than any bullying bluster: "Don't kid yourself, sonny. If I had to toast your feet over a hot fire to make you talk, it wouldn't be the first toasting party I'd been out on. If I ever felt like wiping you off the face of the earth, I'd do it and never have a sleepless night on account of it. But just for this one occasion, I'm liable to be as good as you'll let me. When I came out here to catch a man, I told Chief Inspector Teal I'd bring him back with me, and I'd just as soon bring him back alive. What Teal will do to you when he gets you depends a whole lot on how you open your mouth first. Get wise to the spot you're sitting in, Ellshaw. It isn't everybody's idea of a good time to get himself hanged; but nobody who did a good job of King's Evidence has ever been strung up yet."

"They couldn't do it," said Ellshaw sobbingly. "They couldn't 'ang me. I ain't done nothing------"

"What about your wife?" said the Saint ruthlessly.

"She's all right, guv'nor. I swear she is. Nobody's done 'er no 'arm. I can tell you all abaht that."

"Tell me."

"Well, guv'nor, it was like this. When she spotted me in Duchess Plyce, an' I 'ad to get rid of 'er, we thought afterwards she might go blabbin' abaht 'aving seed me, so we 'ad to keep 'er quiet, see? But she ain't dead. She just got took off to some other place an' kep' there so she couldn't talk. We couldn't 'ave people lookin' for 'er, though, an' kickin' up a fuss; so we 'ad to give out she was dead, see?"

"Did you have to get the police to fish her dead body out of the Thames as well-just to make it more convincing?" asked the Saint coldly.

He was not quite sure what answer he expected-certainly he had not looked at the question as a vital thrust in the argument. The reaction which it obtained startled him, and he was surprised to find that he could still be startled.

For some seconds Ellshaw did not speak at all; and then his voice was shockingly different from the defiant whine in which he had been talking before.

"Go on," he said huskily. "Yer carn't tike me in wiv a yarn like that."

"My dear sap," said the Saint slowly, "I don't want to take you in with any yarn. I'm only telling you. Your wife's body was taken out of the river last night. It was supposed to be suicide at first, but now they're pretty sure it was murder."

There was another silence at the opposite end of the canoe; and Simon Templar drew his cigarette to an instant's bright gleam of red in which the lines of his mouth could be seen as intent and inexorable as a stone mask, and went on without a change in the purring level of his voice.

"If you keep your mouth shut I wouldn't give you a bad penny for your chance. You can put a lot of things over on a jury, but somehow or other they never take a great shine to a fellow who kills his own wife. Of course, they say hanging isn't such a bad death-----"

Ellshaw was making queer noises in his throat, as if he was struggling to do something with his voice. "Oh Gawd!"

His feet shuffled on the bottom. His breath was whistling through his teeth with a weird harshness that chilled something dormant in the Saint's heart.

"You ain't tryin' to scare me, are yer? Yer just tellin' me the tile to make me talk. She ain't-dead?" "I'm afraid she is." Ellshaw gulped. "My Gawd . . ." His voice went shrill. "The dirty lyin'

swine! The rat! He told me-----"

There was a sound as if he flopped over a thwart. In another moment he was sprawled across the Saint's feet, clutching aimlessly at Simon with crazy shaking hands.

"I didn't do it," he blubbered. "I swear I didn't! I didn't wish 'er dead. I believed wot I told yer. I thought she was just 'idden away somewhere, like I was. I ain't never murdered nobody!"

"Didn't you know that Lord Ripwell was to be murdered?" said the Saint relentlessly. "Didn't you know that I was to be murdered?"

"Yes, I did!" shouted the other wildly. "But I wouldn't 'ave murdered Florrie. I wouldn't 'ave stood for killin' me own missus. That filthy double-crossin'"

Simon gripped him by the shoulders. "Will you squeal, Ellshaw?"

He could feel the man's stupefied eyes straining to find him in the darkness.

"Yes, I'll squeal. My Gawd, I'll squeal!" "You're a bright boy after all," said the Saint. He pushed the demented man away and took up his paddle again. Driving the canoe back up the stream with cool steady strokes, he felt a great ease of triumph. It was the same quiet thrill that a chess-player must feel on mastering an intricate problem. He realised with a touch of humour that it was one of the very few episodes in which success could not conceivably bring him one pennyworth of boodle; but it made no difference to his satisfaction. He had taken one of his impulsively wholehearted likings to Lord Ripwell.

The red light in the back upper window swam into view again past a clump of trees, and he turned the canoe into the bank and drove the paddle-blade into the shallow river bed to hold it. Ellshaw was still moaning and muttering incoherently; and, for his own sake, Simon hauled him up out of the canoe and shook him vigorously.

"Snap out of it, brother. This is your chance to get even- and shift yourself off the high jump at the same time " "I'm going to squeal," repeated Ellshaw dazedly The Saint kept hold of him.

"Okay. Then come up to the house and let Teal listen to it." He rushed the trembling man over the rough lawn and up the side of the house to the french window of the living-room. There was an exclamation somewhere in the middle distance, and heavy feet pounded after him. The beam of a bullseye lantern picked him up.

"Oh, it's you, sir," said the police guard, illuminatingly.

"I thoughtGosh, what have you got there?"

"A tandem bicycle," said the Saint shortly. "Get back to your post."

Teal, startled by the noise, was on his feet when he thrust his prize into the room. The detective's jaw hung open, and for a second or two he stopped chewing.

"Good Lord-is that"

"Yes, it is, Claud. A new gadget for punching holes in cellophane. If I could go on thinking up questions like that, I might be a policeman myself. Which God forbid. Don't you know your boy friend?"

For once in his life Chief Inspector Teal was incapable of being offended.

"Ellshaw! Was he outside?"

"No, he was baked into the middle of a sausage-roll in the pantry perfectly disguised as a new genius from Scotland Yard."

"How did you know he'd be there?"

"Oh, my God!" Simon pushed the harvest of his brain work into a chair like a sack of beans, and subsided against the table. "Have I got to do everything for you? All right. It was only this morning that I crashed into Duchess Place. I ought to have been killed last night. Since that failed, they hoped to get me this morning when I went nosing around. When that fell through, they had to make a quick getaway. I assumed that they were so far from expecting trouble that they hadn't got a spare bolthole waiting to move into. Therefore they had to do something temporary. The Grand Panjandrum couldn't have been a Grand Panjandrum at all if he hadn't known that Ellshaw was a bit of a dim bulb. Therefore he wouldn't want to risk letting him far out of his reach. He knew he was coming down here this afternoon, so naturally he'd park Ellshaw somewhere locally where he could get in touch with him, while he figured out what they were going to do next. Having made up his mind, he'd have to tell Ellshaw. Therefore Ellshaw would have to come to him for instructions-it would probably be easier than him going to see Ellshaw, and at the time he'd think it was just as safe. Therefore Ellshaw had to come here. Therefore he probably had to come here soon. Therefore he'd probably come to-night. And even if he didn't, I couldn't do any harm by waiting. Therefore I waited. Q. E. D. Or do you want a dictionary to help you out with the two-syllable words?"

Teal swallowed.

"Then he was"

His eyes travelled to a carefully corked bottle on a side table. Simon knew at once that it must be a sample of whisky corked for analysis, and smiled faintly.

"You needn't bother with that," he said. "I can tell you what's in it. It's nitroglycerine ... as used in making the best bombs. If Irelock hadn't coughed it all up you could drop him down the stairs and blow up the house; but it's a deadly enough poison without that. No, I don't think Ellshaw did it. He wouldn't have known. But the man who made our two bombs might have."

"Then do you mean it isn't Ellshaw"

"Of course not. It's much too big for him. There he is. Look at him. There's the guy that all the commotion's about-the great million-pound mystery that people had to be killed to keep. But he isn't the brains. He couldn't do anything at all. He's dead!"

Mr. Teal blinked, staring at the red-nosed snivelling man who lay sprawling hot-eyed in the chair where Simon had thrown him. He looked alive. The low-pitched gasping noises that broke through his lips sounded alive. "How is he dead?" Teal asked stupidly. "Because he's been murdered. And don't forget something else. He's King's Evidence-I promised him that, and you haven't a case to go to a jury without him." The detective hesitated.

"But if he had anything to do with murdering his wife"

"He didn't. I believe that, and so will you. He was double-crossed. After his wife had seen him, he was told she'd got to disappear in case she shot her mouth. He thought she was just going to be kept somewhere in hiding, like he was. He'll tell you all about it. The Grand Panjandrum knew he'd never stand for killing his wife, so that was the story. And that's why he's going to squeal. You are going to squeal, aren't you, Ellshaw?"

The man licked his lips.

"Yes, I'll talk. I'll tell everythink I know." His voice had gone back to its normal level, but it was coarse and raspy with the blind vindictiveness of the passion that was sweating down inside him. "But I didn't kill Florrie. Nobody 'ad to kill her. I didn't know nothink about it. I'll tell yer."

The Saint lighted a cigarette and drew the smoke down into his lungs.

"There you are, Claud," he murmured. "Your case is all laid out for you. Shall I start the story or shall Ellshaw?"

Teal nodded.

"I think we'd better wait a moment before we begin," he said. "Our police methods are useful sometimes. We've got young Nulland."

"You have?"

"Yes." Mr. Teal was beginning to recover some of his habitual bored smugness. "He was held up with a puncture just outside Sunningdale, and a motor-cycle patrol spotted him-I had a 'phone call while the doctor was here last. He's being sent back under guard-they ought to arrive any minute now."

Simon raised his eyebrows.

"So you know that he wasn't kidnapped after all?"

"It doesn't look like it," replied the detective stolidly. "Anyhow, there was nobody with him when he was found, and he hadn't any convincing story to tell. We'll soon know, when he gets here."

The Saint let go a trickle of smoke; but before he could speak again a car hummed slowly up the road and stopped opposite the house. He sat up, with the careless lights wakening in his blue eyes, and listened to the tread of footsteps coming up the drive.

"Didn't I tell you we were going to have fun?" he remarked. "I think your police are wonderful."

Mr. Teal looked at him for a moment, and then went out to open the front door.

Simon's glance followed him, and then turned back to the man who sat quivering in the armchair. He swung his legs off the table.

"You're the exhibit, aren't you?" he said softly.

He turned the chair round so that Ellshaw faced the door and must be the first person whom the returning prodigal would see when he entered the room. Then he went back to his perch on the table and went on with his cigarette. Outwardly he was quite calm; and yet he was waiting for a moment which in its own way was the tensest climax of the adventure. Out of the twisted tangled threads, in breathless pauses between the shuttling of move and counter-move and unexpected revelation, he had at last built up a pattern and a theory. All the threads were in place; and it only wanted that last flash of the shuttle to bind them all irrefragably together-or tangle the web once more and set him back to the place where he began.

Inspector Oldwood came first; then the Honourable Kenneth Nulland; last of all came Teal, completing the party and closing the door behind him. Presumably the guard who had brought Nulland over from Sunningdale had been dismissed, or told to wait outside.

Simon did not so much as glance at the two detectives. His eyes were fixed on the pale fish-like face of Lord Ripwell's son and heir.

He saw the face turn whiter, and saw the convulsive twitch of the young man's hands and the sudden glazing of his eyes. Nulland's lips moved voicelessly once or twice before any sound came.

"Oh, God," he said; and went down without another word in a dead faint.

Simon Templar drew a deep breath.

"Now I can tell you a story," he said.

IX NULLAND sat on the sofa after they had brought him round. He sat staring at Ellshaw as if his brain was still incredulously trying to absorb the evidence of his eyes; and Ellshaw stared back at him with dry lips and stony eyes.

"I think this all began more than a year ago," said the Saint.

Chief Inspector Teal searched for a fresh wafer of chewing gum and unwrapped it. It was significant that at this time he made no attempt to assert his own authority to take charge of the proceedings; and, after one curious glance at him, Inspector Oldwood pulled out his pipe and found his way to a chair without interrupting.

"The idea, of course, was to get hold of Ripwell's money," Simon went on, lighting a cigarette. "Probably any other millionaire's money would have done just as well, but Rip-well was the obvious victim close at hand. The question was how to do it. Ordinary swindling could be ruled out: Ripwell was much too keen a business man to let himself be diddled out of anything more than paltry sums. That left, on the face of it, one other chance-extortion. Well, that was tried, in a tentative sort of way. Ellshaw came here with some minor secret out of Ripwell's past, and the result was just about what one would expect. Ripwell laid a trap for him, gave him a good scare, as he thought, and then didn't bother to prosecute him."

"How on earth did you know that?" asked Oldwood, with some surprise.

"From your cop outside-I was having a chat with him, and it just happened to come out. But I recognised Ellshaw from the description of this attempted blackmailer, which you probably couldn't have done, and that made a lot of difference. But even so, it was only incidental evidence. It just clinched an explanation of why the blackmail had to be tackled afresh in a more roundabout way. I don't think Ellshaw's little effort was ever meant to succeed. It was meant to give a direct line on the way Ripwell could be expected to react to a bigger proposition, and it washed him out pretty completely. So that was when the real plot started."

"You mean, to murder Lord Ripwell?" said Teal hesitantly.

"Yes. Of course, wilful murder was a much bigger proposition; but it had to be faced. And it was about the only solution. If Ripwell's money couldn't be extorted out of him, it could still be inherited. I'll give our friend all the credit for looking at it cold-bloodedly, facing the facts, seeing the answer, and making the best possible use of the bare material at his disposal. Take a look at Nulland for yourselves-weak, vain, rather stupid, a gambler, capable of extraordinary vicious-ness when he's in liquor- Mr. Teal's cherubic pink face seemed to go a shade less rubicund.

"But-good God!" he said. "To murder his own father"

Simon looked at him oddly.

"You know, Claud, there are times when I ask myself whether anyone could possibly be so dumb as you try to make yourself out," he remarked compassionately. "All I'm doing is to tell you the facts about Nulland's character as I had them from Martin Irelock; and he ought to know what he's talking about. He does know, too, and he could prove it. Naturally he wouldn't think of doing it; but I'm not too prejudiced, and I've got Ellshaw for a witness. Irelock wants to cover up Nulland. That's why he put down that fake bloodstained handkerchief to-night, to make it look more positively like kidnapping- and I'm ready to bet that he actually told Kenneth to run away in the first place-because he could see that Nulland was shaking in his boots at the idea of being surrounded with detectives, even a wretched imitation of a detective like you, Claud. Irelock knew that Nulland couldn't get through the rest of the evening, let alone the week-end, without getting caught out; and he was ready to go to any lengths to save him. He's been setting himself up as a shield all along. Anywhere between last week and a year ago, when Nulland thought he'd killed Ellshaw, Irelock played guardian angel."

"Do you mean Irelock was in it with him?" stammered Mr. Teal blankly.

The Saint's lips twitched helplessly; but he held back the scathing retort which they were shaping automatically. His keen ears had caught an infinitesimal sound outside the room, and in one amazing soundless moment he had hitched himself off the table and crossed over to the door. He turned the handle and whipped it open, and his long arm shot out and caught Martin Irelock as the secretary was turning away.

"Come in," said the Saint's gentlest voice. "Come in and help me finish my story."

Irelock came in because he had to. With the Saint's iron grip on his arm, he had no option. He was in his pyjamas and a thick camel-hair dressing-gown, and his unnaturally old doll-like face was even greyer than it had been when he had swallowed his recent glassful of whisky and nitroglycerine. Simon closed the door again and stayed with his back to it.

"What's the matter?" demanded Irelock, in a strangely weak voice. "I heard somebody arrive"

"Lots of people have been arriving, dear old fruit," said the Saint heartily. "In fact, the whole cast is more or less assembled. We were only waiting for you to complete the party. And now I want you to tell all these nice kind policemen how you set out to get hold of Ripwell's millions."

"I don't know what you're talking about," said Irelock throatily.

"No?" The Saint's voice returned to gentleness. "Well, you've got a lot of good precedents for that remark. I think nearly all the best murderers have said it. But this time we know too many of the answers. In fact, I think I could almost finish the job without any help from you. We all know how, when you first got the idea of making yourself rich, you tried Ripwell on blackmail-through Ellshaw here. And we were just starting to reconstruct your next move. We've seen how you must have figured out that if you couldn't get anything out of Ripwell, it'd be a damned sight easier to get it out of his son. We've got a good idea of how you set about it. Using Ellshaw again, you must have engineered Kenneth into a gamble with him. You knew Kenneth's weaknesses. You fed him plenty of drink at the same time. Ellshaw is such a damn bad cardsharper that people see through him even when they are tight, as Teal told me. Kenneth saw through him. There was a quarrel, then a fight. Ellshaw got laid out-as you'd planned. And then you sobered Kenneth up and told him Ellshaw was dead. You said you'd find a way to get rid of the body and cover up the evidence, and later you told him you'd done it. And from that moment he was in your power to do what you liked with-while you were making him believe, all the time, that you were his best friend. All you had to do was to hide your partner-Ellshaw-away, while you got rid of Ripwell; and then, after Kenneth had inherited the money, everything was set for you to start putting on the screw."

"That's right, guv'nor," Ellshaw broke in savagely. "That's wot 'e told me. An' I shammed dead, an' everythink. And then the dirty double-crossin' swine------"

"The man's raving," said Irelock unsteadily.

"Nuts," said the Saint crisply. "You're through, and you know it. Kenneth's here to tell the world how you kidded him you were saving him from the gallows. Ellshaw's here to tell us that that's the plot as you put it up to him. And Ellshaw's here as well to tell us how you double-crossed him by killing his wife!"

Ellshaw was coming up out of his chair with a red flame in his eyes. His fingers were curled and rigid like claws.

"Yes, that's wot you did," he snarled. "You told me she wouldn't come to no 'arm-you swore you was only goin' to 'ide 'er away somewhere. And you killed 'er! You murdered my wife! You told me a lot of lies. You knew I wouldn't 've let yer do it if I'd known. And you were goin' to keep me workin' in with you, 'elpin' yer to mike money an' playin' all yer dirty games, when all the time you'd got Florrie's blood on yer 'ands. My Gawd, if 'anging isn't too good for yer---------"

His voice went into a sort of shriek. Oldwood, who was nearest, wrapped powerful arms round him and held him back.

"That's the swine as did it!" screamed Ellshaw. " 'E told me wot 'e was up to, 'ow 'e was goin' to kill Lord Ripwell an' then put the black on 'is son fer 'aving killed me in a fight. I know all about it! An' I can tell yer 'ow 'e meant to kill Mr. Templar in Duchess Plyce "

"Take it easy," said Oldwood, struggling with him.

Teal thrust himself forward at last, a massive figure of belated officialdom coming into its egregious own. He looked at Nulland.

"Is that true?"

The young man swallowed.

"Yes," he said in a low voice. "At least, the part about me is."

"You ran away tonight because you thought we were after you?"

The other nodded without speaking; and Teal turned back to Irelock.

"Have you got any answer to make?"

Irelock stood silent, looking from face to face. His mouth tightened, making his Kewpie face seem even more grotesquely grown up, but he did not open it to reply. The detective waited; then he shrugged.

"Very well. I shall have to take you into custody, of course. I have to warn you that anything you say may be taken down and used in evidence against you."

For the first time since he had come into the room, Ire-lock met his eyes. He even smiled slightly.

"That's hardly necessary, Inspector," he said. "You seem to have plenty of evidence already. I think I can flatter myself that it took a clever man to catch me." His gaze wandered significantly over to the Saint. "When did you first -suspect me?"

"When you saw a face at the window," Simon told him, "and the party broke up at a very psychological moment. I hadn't anything definite even then; but I began to wonder."

Irelock nodded.

"That was bad luck, of course," he said matter-of-factly. "But I had to do something to stop Kenneth finding out that Ellshaw had been seen alive. Then, after I'd started a scare, I thought I might as well go on with it. If I'd been lucky, I might have got you and Ripwell in the garden-as it was, you nearly got me." He touched his forearm, where the bullet had grazed him. "But it made my story more circumstantial. It was only afterwards that I realised that Kenneth might be suspected, and I had to try and manufacture some evidence in his favour."

"Why did you drink your own poison?"

"Partly because Teal wouldn't drink, and by that time I knew I'd got to get rid of both of you together. Partly because you'd just been saying things which showed me that you were fairly hot on my trail-I didn't know what you might have said to Teal already. It was the only time I lost my nerve. I tried to turn the idea into a way of throwing you off the scent again."

"Do you realise the meaning of all you're saying?" asked Teal grimly.

Irelock sighed.

"Oh, yes. Quite well. But there doesn't seem to be much point in giving you any more trouble. After all, you've got other witnesses. You ought not to have Ellshaw; but that's another piece of bad luck. I told him that if he saw a red light in my window he was to keep away, but apparently he didn't keep away far enough."

"One more question," said the Saint. "Why didn't you kill me in Duchess Place?"

"Because I hadn't got a gun," answered Irelock simply. "I never set out to go in for that sort of crime-not till it was thrust on me. I notice that murderers in books always have guns, but they aren't really easy for the amateur to get hold of. I should have got rid of you like I got rid of Mrs. Ellshaw -knocked you out and sunk you in the river while you were unconscious. It was only when things began to happen down here that I got hold of Ripwell's old revolver. And of course he did have some ammunition; but he'd forgotten it."

"Have you still got this gun?" Teal asked quickly.

Irelock's lips moved in a wan smile, and he put his right hand into the breast of his dressing-gown. Three of them at least caught the sudden cunning shift of his eyes, and realised too late what was coming-it was queer, Simon reflected afterwards, how completely they had been taken in by his implied surrender, when every one of them should have known that the murderers who make a full and calm confession at the moment when they are unmasked are as rare as fresh pineapples in Lapland.

What Ellshaw knew, or what he guessed, none of them ever discovered. It is only on record that he was the first of them to move, the only one to get up and go straight for Ire-lock. Twice the room rocked to the crash of the heavy gun, and Ellshaw staggered at the impact of each shot; but he held on his course. He must have been dead on his feet; but in some uncanny way he caught Irelock at the door and fell on his arm dragging the revolver down so that it could only aim at the floor. It took two men to unlock the clutch of his fingers on Irelock's wrist; and the bruises of that dying grip were still stamped on the other's flesh a fortnight later, when he stepped down from the dock to wait for the answer to the greatest mystery of all.

Part III THE CASE OF THE FRIGHTENED INNKEEPER

"BUSINESS" took Simon Templar to Penzance, though nobody ever knew exactly what he had to do there. He took Hoppy Uniatz with him for company. But Hoppy never saw him do it. Simon parked him in the bar of a convenient pub for an hour, and that was that. For all that this story can record, he may have spent the hour in another pub across the street, talking to nobody and watching nothing. The Saint's business was as irregular as himself, and directed by the same incalculable twists of motive: he was liable to do a great many important things with apparent aimlessness, and a great many unimportant things with the most specious and circumstantial parade of reasons.

It is about two hundred and eighty miles from London to Penzance, which the Saint drove in five hours, including one break for a cigarette and a drink in Taunton; and after that one hour for which Hoppy Uniatz was alone, he climbed back into his car as if he was cheerfully prepared to drive the same two hundred and eighty miles home without further delay.

The chronicler, whose one object it is to conceal no fact which by its unfair suppression might deceive any one of the two hundred and fifty thousand earnest readers of this epic, is able to reveal that this performance had never entered Simon Templar's head; although the Saint would have done it without turning a hair if it had happened to be necessary. But he did not say so; and Mr. Uniatz, citizen of a country whose inhabitants regard a thousand-mile jaunt in much the same light as the average Londoner regards a trip to Brighton, would have been quite unperturbed whatever the Saint had announced for his programme. Hardly anything was capable of perturbing Mr. Uniatz except a call for mental effort lasting more than five consecutive seconds, and that was an ordeal to which he had never been known to submit himself voluntarily.

He sat placidly at the Saint's side while the huge snarling Hirondel droned eastwards along the coast, chewing the butt of an incredibly rank cigar in a paradise of utter intellectual vacancy which allowed his battered features to relax in a calm that had its own rugged beauty, being very much like something that Epstein might have conceived in a sportive mood. They left the rocks of Cornwall behind them and entered the rolling pastures and red earth of Devon, diving sometimes through the cool shadows of a wood, sometimes catching sight of a wedge of sea sparkling in the sunlight between a fold of the hills. Simon Templar, who was constitutionally unable to regard the highways of England as anything but a gigantic road-face circuit laid out for his personal use, did nothing to encourage a placid relaxation in anybody who rode with him; but Hoppy had sat in that car often enough to learn that any other atittude could lead only to a nervous breakdown. Only once was he jarred out of his phlegmatic fatalism, when the Saint sounded his horn and pulled out to pass a big speeding saloon on a straight stretch beyond Sid-mouth. As they swept up alongside, the saloon swerved out spitefully: the Saint's face hardened under a sheath of bronze, and he held grimly on, with his offside wheels on the very edge of the road. They got through, with a shrill scraping of wings; and then Simon swung the Hirondel sharply in, and heard Hoppy's breath hiss through his teeth.

"Geez, boss," said Mr. Uniatz uncertainly, "I fought we was finished, den." He felt around at his hip. "Say, why don't ya stop de wagon an' lemme go back an' shoot up dat goddamn son of a witch?"

Simon glanced at the driving mirror, and smiled rather gently.

"He has been shot up, Hoppy," he said; and Mr. Uniatz looked back and saw that the saloon had stopped far behind, tilting over at a perilous angle with its nearside wheels buried in a deep ditch.

They roared over four more hills, whipped around half a dozen more corners in hair-raising skids, and thundered past a gaunt grey building in a barren hollow, close to the road. Simon took the cigarette from between his lips and pointed to it.

"Do you know what that place is, Hoppy?" he asked.

Hoppy screwed his neck round.

"It looks like a jail, boss," he said; and the Saint grinned.

"It is a jail," he murmured. "With that eagle eye of yours, you go straight to the bullseye. That noble pile is Larkstone Prison, where the worst of the first offenders go-there isn't anyone in it who's doing less than seven years. Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal has often told me how much he'd like to see me there."

They climbed another slope, and dropped down with surprising contrast into Larkstone Vale. In an instant the rather monotonously undulating agricultural country through which they had been travelling disappeared like a mirage, and they were coasting down a mild gradient cut into one wall of the valley towards the sea. A glimpse of thatched cottages clustering along the borders of the estuary blinked through the trees which cloaked the slope, and a broad shallow stream wound southwards in the same direction a little way below them. It was one of the least known beauty spots in the South West, still unspoiled even in those days; and the setting sun, abruptly cut off by the rise which they had just crested, left it in a pool of peaceful dusk which made all the tortuous alleys of lawlessness where the Saint made his career, and where the men in the drab prison over the last spur of hill had been less fortunate, seem momentarily ridiculous and unreal.

Simon trod on the brake and brought the great car to a smooth standstill on the upper ledge of the village.

"I think this will do us for the night," he said.

"We ain't goin' back to London?" asked Mr. Uniatz, putting two and two together with a certain justifiable pride in his achievement.

The Saint shook his head.

"Not tonight, Hoppy. Perhaps not for days and days. I like the look of this place. There may be adventure-romance- a beauteous damsel in distress-anything. You never know. They may even have some good beer, which would do me almost as much good. C'mon, fella-let's have a look round."

Mr. Uniatz disentangled himself from the bucket seat in which his muscular form had been wedged, and stepped stoically into the road. He was not by nature or upbringing a romantic man, and the only damsels in distress he had ever seen were those he distressed himself; but he had been afflicted since adolescence with a chronic parching of the gullet, and the place where they had stopped looked as if it might be able to assist him on his endless search for relief. It was an old rambling house of white plaster and oak timbering, with dormer windows breaking through a thatched roof and crimson ramblers straggling up the walls; a carved and painted sign over the door proclaimed it to be the Clevely Arms. Entering hopefully, Mr. Uniatz saw the Saint drawing off his gloves in a sort of lounge hall with a rough-hewn staircase at the far end, his dark head almost touching the beams and his blue eyes twinkling with an expectant humour that might well have been worn by an Elizabethan privateer standing in the same spot three hundred and fifty years ago. But no Elizabethan privateer could have had more right to that smile and the twinkling eye with it than the Saint, who had carved his name into the dull material of the twentieth century as a privateer on a scale that would have made Queen Elizabeth dizzy to think of.

"Over there," he said, "I think you'll find what you want."

He swung across the hall and ducked under a low lintel on one side into a small but comfortable bar. A pleasant-looking grey-haired man with glasses came through a curtain behind the counter as he approached, and bade them good evening.

"I should like a pint of beer," said the Saint, "and half a bottle of whisky."

The grey-haired man filled a pewter tankard from the wood, and turned back with it.

"And a whisky?" he queried.

He had a quiet and educated voice, and the Saint hated to shock him. But his first duty was to his friend.

"Half a bottle," he repeated.

"Would you like me to wrap it up?"

"I hardly think," said the Saint, with some regret, "that that will ever be necessary."

The landlord took down a half-bottle from the shelf behind him, and put it on the counter. Simon slid it along to Mr. Uniatz. Mr. Uniatz removed the cap, placed the neck in his mouth, and poured gratefully. His Adam's apple throbbed in rhythmic appreciation as the neat spirit flowed soothingly through the arid deserts of his throat in a stream that would have rapidly choked anyone with a less calloused esophagus.

Simon turned again to the landlord, who was watching the demonstration in a kind of dazed awe.

"You see why I find it cheaper to buy in bulk," he remarked.

The grey-haired man blinked speechlessly; and Hoppy put down the empty bottle and wiped his lips with a sigh.

"You ain't seen nut'n yet, pal," he declared. "Where I come from, dey call me a fairy."

It was the first time he had spoken since they entered the house, and Simon was utterly unprepared for the result.

All the colour drained out of the grey-haired man's face; and the ten-shilling note which Simon had laid on the bar, which he had just picked up, slipped through his shaking fingers and fluttered down out of sight. He stared at Hoppy with his nostrils twitching and his eyes dilated in stark terror, waiting without movement as if he expected sudden death to leap at him across the bar.

It only lasted for a moment, that startling transformation into terrified immobility; and then he stooped and clumsily retrieved the fallen note.

"Excuse me," he muttered, and shuffled out through the curtain behind the counter.

The Saint put down his tankard and fished out a cigarette. Not even the most shameless flatterer had ever said that Hoppy's voice was vibrant with seductive music: such a statement, even with the kindest intentions, could not have been made convincingly about that rasping dialect of New York's lower East Side which was the only language Mr. Uniatz knew. Hoppy's voice was about as attractive and musical as a file operating on a sheet of jagged tinplate. But the Saint had never known it to strike anyone with such sheer paralysed horror as he had seen the landlord reduced to for that brief amazing moment.

Mr. Uniatz, who had been staring at the curtained opening with a blank fish-like expression which in its own way was no less cataleptic, turned perplexedly towards him, seeking light.

"Dijja see dat, boss?" he demanded. "De guy looked like he was waitin' for us to turn de heat on him! Did I say anyt'ing I shouldn't of?"

Simon shook his head.

"I wouldn't know, Hoppy," he answered thoughtfully. "Maybe the bloke doesn't like fairies-you can never tell, in these great open spaces."

He might have said more; but he heard a footstep beyond the curtain, and picked up his tankard again. And then, for the second time, he put it down untouched; for it was a girl who came through into the serving space behind the bar.

If there was to be a beauteous damsel in distress, Simon decided, the conventions insisted that it must be her role. She was tall and slender, with dark straight hair that took on an unexpected curl around her neck, steady grey eyes, and a mouth to which there was only one obvious way of paying tribute. Her skin reminded him vaguely of peaches and rose-petals, and the sway of her dress as she came in gave him a suggestion of her figure that filled his head with ideas of a kind to which he was quite amorally susceptible. She said "good evening" in a voice that scarcely intruded itself into the quiet room, and turned to some mysterious business with the shelves behind her.

Simon left a drift of smoke float away from his cigarette, and his blue eyes returned with a trace of reluctance to the homely features of Mr. Uniatz.

"What would you think," he asked, "of a girl whose name was Julia?"

Out of the corner of his eye he saw her start, and turned round to face her with that gay expectant smile coming back to his lips. He knew he had been right.

"I came right along," he said.

Her gaze flashed to Hoppy Uniatz, and then back to the Saint, in a second of frightened uncertainty.

"I don't understand," she said.

Simon picked up a burnt match-stick from the floor and leaned his elbows on the bar. As he moved his tankard to make room, it split a tiny puddle of beer on the scarred oak. He put the match-stick in the puddle and drew a moist line down from it towards her, branching out into a couple of legs. While he did it, he talked.

"My name is Tombs." He drew a pair of arms spreading out from his first straight line, so that the sketch suddenly became an absurd childish drawing of a man with the original spot of liquid from which it had developed for a head. "I booked a room the other day, by letter." He dipped the match again, and drew a neat elliptical halo of beer over the head of his figure. "Didn't you get it?" he asked, with perfectly natural puzzlement.

She stared down at his completed handiwork for a moment; and then she raised her eyes to his face with a sudden light of hope and relief in them. She picked up a cloth and wiped the drawing away with a hand that was not quite steady.

"Oh, yes," she said. "I'm sorry-I didn't recognise you. You haven't stayed here before, have you?"

"I'm afraid not," said the Saint. "But then, I didn't know what I was missing."

Once again she glanced nervously at Mr. Uniatz, who was gazing wistfully at a row of bottles whose smug fullness was reawakening the pangs of his incurable malady.

"I'll get the man to take your bags up," she said.

Taking in the grace of her slim young suppleness as she turned away, Simon Templar was more than ever convinced that he was not wasting his time. He had been lured into no wild-goose chase. In that quiet inn at the foot of Larkstone Vale there was a man in whose eyes he had seen the fear of death, and a damsel in distress who was as beautiful as anything he had seen for many moons; that was more or less what he had been promised, and it was only right that the promise should have been so accurately fulfilled. The dreary cynics were everlastingly wrong; such joyously perfect and improbable things did happen-they were always happening to him. He knew that he was once more on the frontiers of adventure; but even then he did not dream of anything so amazing as the offer that Bellamy Wage had made on the day when he was sentenced to ten years, penal servitude after the Neovision Radio Company failed for nearly two million pounds.

II "SAY," blurted Hoppy Uniatz, broaching a subject which had clearly been harassing him for some time, "is anyt'ing de matter wit' me?"

"I shouldn't be surprised," said the Saint pitilessly, from the basin where he was washing the dust of travel from his face. "All that whisky you sluice your system with must have its effect some day, even on a tin stomach like yours. What are the symptoms?"

Mr. Uniatz was not talking about ailments of that kind.

"De foist time I open my mout' in dis jernt, de barman looks at me like he t'inks I'm gonna take him for a ride. When de goil comes in, she looks at me just de same way, like I was some kinda snake. I ain't no Ronald Colman, boss, but I never fought my pan was dat bad. Have all dese guys here got de jitters, or is anyt'ing de matter wit' me?" he asked, working back to his original problem.

The Saint finished drying his face with a chuckle, and slung the towel round his neck. He took a cigarette from a packet on the table and lighted it.

"I'm afraid I've rather led you up the garden, Hoppy," he confessed.

"De garden?" repeated Mr. Uniatz dimly.

"I've been kidding you," said the Saint, hastily abandoning metaphor, in which Mr. Uniatz was always liable to lose his way. "We aren't stopping here just because I saw the place and thought we'd stay. I came here on purpose."

Hoppy Uniatz digested this statement. Simon could watch the idea percolating gradually into his skull.

"Oah ... I see ... So when you says de name is Tombs "That's the name I'm using here, as long it takes in anybody. And don't you forget it."

"I get it, boss. An' de room you booked"

Simon laughed.

"That requires a little more explanation," he said.

He took up his coat from where he had thrown it over a chair, and slipped out an envelope from the breast pocket. The lamplight gleamed on a ripple of his bare biceps as he sprawled himself over the bed with it.

"Listen to this," he commanded:

"Dear Saint, I've no right to be writing this letter to you, and probably you'll never even read it. I've never met you, and I don't even know what you look like. But I've read about some of the things you've done, and if you're the sort of man I think you are you might listen to me for a minute.

This is an old sixteenth century inn which belongs to my uncle, who's a retired engineer. My father died in South Africa five months ago, and I came here to live because there was nowhere else for me to go.

Queer things have been happening here, Saint. I don't know how to go on, because it sounds such utter nonsense. But I've heard people walking around the place at night, when I know perfectly well there's nobody about; and sometimes there are sort of rumbling noises underground that I can't account for. Lately there have been some horrible men here-I know you must be thinking I'm raving already, it sounds so childish and hysterical, but if only 1 could talk to you myself, I might be able to convince you.

I can't go on writing like this, Saint. You'll just think, 'Oh, another neurotic female who wants a good smacking,' and throw it into the wastepaper basket. But if you're ever travelling this way, and you have a little time to spare, I'd give anything to see you drop in. You can stay here as an ordinary guest, and find out for yourself whether I'm crazy. My uncle says I am, but he's frightened too. I can see he is, even though he won't admit it.

Something's growing up in this place that must mean trouble; and it might be in your line. I wish I could hope that you'd believe me.

JULIA TRAFFORD."

The furrows of painful thought grooved themselves into Mr. Uniatz's brow again.

"Julia?" he said. "Was dat de dame we spoke to downstairs?"

"I take it she was."

"An' she wrote you dat letter?"

"To which I replied saying that I should come here as soon as I could, armed to the teeth and probably masquerading under the suggestive name of Tombs."

"So we come here today on poipose"

"To find out whether the girl really is nuts, or whether there are fun and games in the offing that might keep us out of mischief for a while."

Mr. Uniatz nodded. The layout was becoming clearer. Only one major point remained obscure. "Whaddas it got to do," he asked, "wit' de garden?"

The Saint groaned helplessly, and rolled off the bed to rake out a clean shirt from his Oshkosh. Buttoning it at the open window, he looked out through a loose grille of trees, over the red and grey roofs of the village towards the sea. The tide was out, and the estuary was a tongue of glistening reddish mud, veined with tiny rivulets, that licked in between the hills and drank up the flow of the river. On either edge of it a narrow strip of shingle broke straight up into irregular red cliffs capped with velvet grass. The mud was littered with dinghies and stranded buoys, and the broad hulls of a half-dozen fishing boats lay canted over along the line of the deepest channel, with a man or two moving on the decks about the ordinary business of checking tackle and sorting nets. There was a sense of peace and patience about the place, an atmosphere of changeless simplicity and homeliness, that made him wonder once again what sinister racket could possibly find food in such surroundings. But that was what he had come there to discover.

He picked up his coat with a good-humoured smile.

"I'll murder you later," he promised Mr. Uniatz kindly.

Leaving Hoppy to perform his own ablutions, he went downstairs again and strolled out into the road. He wanted a map from his car to gain a more detailed knowledge of the topography of the district; and on his way back he collected another item of information from the legend painted over the door in the traditional style: MARTIN JEFFROLL, Licensed to Sell Wines, Beer, Spirits, and Tobacco. The superscription was not new, but it revealed traces of an older name which had been blacked out. Presumably Mr. Jeffroll was the grey-haired man who had been so strangely frightened by the sound of Hoppy Uniatz's discordant voice.

Simon went back into the little bar off the hall and lighted a fresh cigarette. It was Jeffroll who came through the curtains and civilly declined the Saint's invitation to join him in a drink. Simon ordered a pink gin, and was served with unobtrusive courtesy: the panic-stricken creature whom he had glimpsed in Jeffroll's shoes a short while ago might never have existed, but the landlord had withdrawn behind a wall of indefinable reserve that was somewhat discouraging to idle conversation. Having served the drink, he retired again through the curtain, leaving the Saint alone.

Simon took up the glass and solemnly drank his own health in the mirror behind the bar; and he was setting the glass down again when the same mirror showed him a man who had just come into the hall. Quite spontaneously he turned round and scanned the newcomer as he came on under the low arch-it was purely the instinctive speculative scan of a lone man at a bar who considers the approach of another lone man with whom he may exchange some of the trivial conversation that ordinarily breaks out on these occasions, and he was unsuspectingly surprised to notice that the other was coming towards him with more than speculative directness.

There was hardly time in the short distance that the other had to cover for the Saint's curiosity to grow beyond the vaguest neutrality; and then the man was standing in front of him.

"Is that your car outside?" he asked.

His voice was harsh and domineering; and the Saint did not like it. Studying the man more closely in the waning light, he decided that he didn't care much for its owner, either. He had never been able to conceive an instant brotherly regard for ginger-headed men in loud-checked ginger plus fours, with puffy bags under their small eyes and mouths that turned down sulkily at the corners, particularly when they spoke with harsh domineering voices; but even then he was not actually suspicious.

"I have got a car outside," he said coolly. "A cream and red Hirondel."

"I see. So you're the young swine who drove me into a ditch outside Sidmouth."

The Saint ceased to be perplexed. A genial smile of complete comprehension lighted up his face.

"Good Lord!" he exclaimed happily. "Have you been all this time getting out?"

"What did you say?" snarled the man.

"I asked whether you'd been all this time getting out," Simon repeated, with undiminished affability. "Or was that a rude question? Is your car still in and did you walk from there?"

The man took another step towards him. At those still closer quarters, he did not look any more attractive.

"Don't give me any of your lip," he rasped. "Do you know you nearly killed me with your dirty driving?"

"I rather hoped I had," said the Saint calmly. "I like killing road-hogs-it makes the country so much more pleasant to move about in."

"Say that again?"

Simon raised his eyebrows. The ginger-haired man, even without knowing the Saint, might have been warned by the imperturbable leisureliness of that gesture alone; but he was too close beside himself with rage to perceive his own foolishness.

"My dear hog," said the Saint, "are you deaf or something?

I said"

It has already been mentioned that the ginger-haired man was incapable of perceiving his own foolishness. Otherwise he could not possibly have been tempted as he was by the half-glass of gin and angostura which Simon Templar was poising in his left hand while he talked. Even though he might have known the toughness of his own two-hundred-pound frame, and might have guessed that the debonair young man in front of him weighed no more than a hundred and seventy-five pounds, he need not have allowed his undisciplined temper to make him such a sempiternal sap. But he did.

His hand smacked up in an insolent swipe; and the glass of pink gin was knocked up through the Saint's fingers to splash its contents over Simon's face and the front of his coat.

Simon glanced at the mess, and started to take out his handkerchief. He was smiling again; and the Saint was as dangerous as a Turk when he smiled.

"That was rather rash of you," he said; and suddenly his fist shot out like a bullet from a gun.

The ginger-haired man never even saw it coming. Something that was more like a lump of brown rock than a human fist leapt towards him through the intervening space and collided smashingly with his nose in a punch that sent him reeling back in a blind gush of agony to fetch up jarringly against the wall behind him. Hauling himself forward again with a strangled oath, he saw the Saint's gentle smile again through a crimson mist, and launched a vicious swing at it that would have been worth all his trouble if it had connected. But in some unaccountable way the smile omitted to keep the appointment. It swayed unhurriedly aside at the very moment when the swing should have met it; and the violence with which his fish bludgeoned the empty air threw the ginger-haired man off his balance. In technical language, he led off for the next blow with his chin, and that same astonishingly hard fist was there in exactly the right place to meet his lead. The only difference was that on this encounter he felt no pain. His teeth scrunched shudderingly together under the impact; and then every raw and vengeful thought in his head was wiped out by a ringing of heavenly bells and a vast soothing darkness that merged indistinguishably into dreamless sleep. . . .

Simon picked up his handkerchief again and quietly mopped the sticky dampness off his clothes. Jeffroll had come through into the bar again, and he realised that the girl Mia was standing in the low archway that connected with the hall. But it was not until he noticed how silently they were staring at the recumbent slumber of the ginger-haired man that he realised that the delightful episode which had just taken place had an implication for them that he would never have suspected.

III JEFFROLL was the first to look up.

"What happened?" he asked.

The Saint shrugged.

"I haven't the faintest idea," he replied blandly. "The bloke seemed a bit excited, and I think he banged his head on something. It doesn't look like a very exhilarating pastime, but I suppose there's no accounting for tastes. Was he a pal of yours?"

Jeffroll let himself out from behind the bar and dropped on one knee beside the prostrate ginger-clad body, without answering. Simon's coolly observant eyes noticed that his hands were trembling again, and that his actions contained an essence of something more than the natural solicitude of a conventional innkeeper whose premises have been desecrated by an ordinary breach of the peace. The Saint put away his sodden handkerchief and considered whether he had left anything undone that might improve the shining hour; and then he saw that startled face of Hoppy Uniatz peering over Julia Trafford's shoulder, and went across to him.

Mr. Uniatz's mouth hung open-and, hanging open, it was an amazingly large mouth. The light of battle was peeping tentatively out of his eyes like spring sunshine through a cloud.

"What ya hit him wit', boss?" he asked wistfully. And then, as the merest afterthought: "Who is dat guy?"

"The guy we ditched near Sidmouth," explained the Saint under his breath. He grasped Hoppy firmly by the arm. "And now shut your face for a bit, will you? I guess I'm about ready to eat."

The dining-room was a low raftered room looking out on to a tiny garden cut out of the sheer hillside. Simon steered Mr. Uniatz briskly into it before that unrivalled maestro of tactlessness could drop any heavier bricks in the hearing of the chief protagonists, but when he reached his sanctuary he found that it was considerably less invulnerable than he had hoped it would be. The room only held four tables, and it was so small that the four of them might have been joined together in one communal board for all the privacy they afforded. Moreover, one of the tables was already occupied by a party of four men who fell curiously silent at the Saint's entrance.

They were in their shirtsleeves, and their shapeless trousers had an air of grubby masculine comfort, as if they were placidly prepared to crawl about on their knees or sit down on a heap of loose earth without any qualms about its effect on their appearance. At first sight they might easily have been taken for a quartet of hikers; and yet, if that was what they were, they must have started on their pilgrimage very recently, for their bare forearms were practically untouched by the sun. Their hands, in contrast to that unexpected whiteness of arm, were coarsened with the unmistakable rough griminess of manual labour, which could hardly overtake the average holiday tramper before exposure had left its mark on his skin. It was that minor contradiction of make-up, perhaps, rather than their unfriendly silence, which made Simon Templar pay particular attention to them; but there was no outward and visible sign of his interest. He took them in at one casual glance, with all their individual oddities-a big black-haired man who had not shaved, a thin fair-haired man with a weak chin, a bald burly man with a vintage-port complexion, and an incongruously small and nondescript man with a grey moustache and pince-nez. And beyond that one sweeping survey there was nothing to show that he had taken any more notice of their existence than he had of the typical country-hotel wallpaper adorned with strips of pink ribbon and bouquets of unidentifiable vegetation with which some earlier landlord had endeavoured to improve his property. He dumped Mr. Uniatz in a seat at a corner table, taking for himself the chair which commanded a full view of the room, and cast a pessimistic eye over the menu.

It offered one of those seductive bilingual repasts with which the traveller in England, whatever he may have to put up with during the day, is so richly compensated at eventide.

Potage Birmingham Boiled Cod au Beurre Leg de Mouton r�ti Pommes Chips Spinach Suet Pudding Fromage-Biscuits Simon put down the masterpiece with a faint sigh, and opened his cigarette-case.

"Did I ever tell you," he asked, "about the extraordinary experience of a most respectable sheep I used to know, whose name was Percibald?"

It was plain from the expression on Mr. Uniatz's homely pan that he had never heard the story. It was equally plain that he was ready to try dutifully to discover its precise connection with the shindig in hand. The convolutions of painful concentration carved themselves deeper into his dial.

"Boss"

"Percibald," said the Saint firmly, "was a sheep of exceptionally distinguished appearance, as you may judge from the fact that he was once the innocent cause of a libel action in which a famous Cabinet Minister sued the president and council of the Royal Academy for damages on the grounds that a picture exhibited in their galleries portrayed him in the act of sharing the embraces of a nearly nude wench with every evidence of enjoyment. On investigation it was found that the painting had only been intended for a harmless pastoral scene featuring a few classical nymphs and shepherds, and that the artist, feeling that shepherds without any sheep might look somewhat stupid, had induced Percibald to pose with one of the nymphs in the foreground. This, however, was merely an incident in Percibald's varied career. The extraordinary experience I was going to tell you about . . ."

He blurbed on, hardening his heart against the pathetic perplexity of his audience. It is one of the chronicler's major regrets that the extraordinary experience of Percibald is not suitable for quotation in a volume which may fall into the hands of ladies and young children; but it is doubtful whether Mr. Uniatz ever saw the point. Nor was the Saint greatly concerned about whether he did or not. His main object was to shut off the spate of questions with which Mr. Uniatz's hairy bosom was obviously overflowing.

At the same time, without ever seeming to pay any attention to them, he was quietly watching the four men in the opposite corner. After their first silence they had put their heads together so briefly and casually that if he had actually taken his eyes off them for a moment he might not have noticed it. Then an exchange of whispered words opened out into an elaborately natural argument which he had no trouble to hear even while he was talking himself.

"Well, I know it's on the road to Yeovil. I've been there often enough."

"Damn it, I was born and brought up in Crewkerne, and I ought to know."

"I'll bet you a pound you don't."

"I'll bet you five pounds you're talking through your hat."

"Well, you show it to me on a map."

"All right, who's got a map?"

It turned out that none of them had a map. The big unshaven man finished loading his pipe and got up.

"Perhaps the landlord's got a map."

"He hasn't. I asked him yesterday."

The extraordinary experience of Percibald reached its indelicate conclusion. Mr. Uniatz looked as if he was going to cry. The Saint scanned his memory rapidly for another anecdote; and then the big man moved a little way down the mantelpiece and cleared his throat.

"Excuse me, sir-do you happen to have a map of the country around Yeovil?"

Simon put aside a plate containing a small piece of lukewarm blotting-paper which was apparently the translation of Boiled Cod au Beurre.

"I've got one in the car," he said. "Are you in a hurry?"

"Oh, no. Not a bit. We just want to settle an argument- I don't know if you know the district?"

"Vaguely."

"Do you know Champney Castle? I say it's between Crewkerne and Yeovil, and my friend says it's in the other direction -on the way to Ilchester."

The Saint had never heard of Champney Castle, and he was even inclined to doubt whether such a place existed; but it never occurred to him to interfere with anybody's innocent amusements.

"I know it quite well," he replied unblushingly. "There's an entrance from the Ilchester Road and another from the Yeovil Road. So you're both right."

The man looked convincingly blank for a moment; and then a chuckle of laughter broke out from his companions, in which he joined. Cordial relations having thus been established, the other members of the party turned their chairs to an angle that subtly gathered up the Saint and Hoppy into their conversation. It was all very neatly and efficiently done, with a disarming geniality that would have melted the reserve of anyone less hoarily aged in sin.

"Are you staying here long?" inquired the fat man with the fruity face.

"I haven't made any plans," answered the Saint carelessly. "I expect we'll hang around for a few days, if there's anything interesting to do."

"Do you like fishing?"

"Sometimes."

"You get some pretty big conger off Larkstone Point."

Simon nodded.

"I should think they'd be good sport."

The small man with the grey moustache polished his pince-nez industriously on a napkin.

"Dangerous, of course, if you don't know your business," he remarked. "You don't want to loop the gaff on your wrist -if you did that, and made a slip, I don't suppose we'd ever see you again. But lots of things are much more dangerous."

'I suppose so," agreed the Saint gravely.

"Lots of things," repeated the thin fair-haired man, apparently addressing the tablecloth.

"For instance," said the fat fruity man thoughtfully, "I've never been able to make out why everybody in America seems to be so frightened of gangsters. If any of them tried to do their stuff over here, I'm sure that would be very dangerous . . . for them."

The big unshaven man struck a match.

"Wouldn't stand an earthly, would they, Major? I don't know how the police would react to it; but personally I wouldn't have any compunction about tying 'em to a rock at low tide and leaving 'em there."

"Nor would I," echoed the one with the fair hair, to his audience of bread-crumbs.

"Serve them right if we did it," said the grey moustache clearly. "I haven't any sympathy for common thugs who try to shove their noses into other people's business."

Not even Mr. Uniatz's most ardent admirers, if he ever had any, could fairly have flattered him on his lightning grasp of conversational trends; but he had a definite talent for assimilating a simple idea if it was pushed under his nose several times in a sufficient variety of ways. Even then, he was still far from knowing exactly what was going on; but it was dimly percolating into the misty twilight of what for want of a better word must be loosely termed his mind (a) that the four men at the other table were saying something uncomplimentary, and (b) that their attitude included some general disparagement of the manners and customs of his native land. It would be untrue to suggest that he knew the meaning of more than half of these words, hut they would have served to convey a fairly accurate description of his psychic impressions if he had known them. It was also a matter of elementary knowledge to him that a guy does not get uncomplimentary to another guy without he is prepared to shoot his best insults out of a rod; and that was a stage of the proceedings at which Mr. Uniatz could make up a lot of lost ground in the way of repartee. He began to grope frowningly around his hip, but Simon kicked him under the table and smiled.

"You do sound bloodthirsty," he murmured.

The bald fruity man got up. Standing on his feet, he looked big and solid in spite of his rich complexion and extensive waist-line.

"Oh, no. Not particularly bloodthirsty. Just four old soldiers who got used to being shot at quite a long while ago. I really don't think we'd be the best people for any gangsters to pick on-some of them would certainly get hurt. It's worth thinking about, anyway!"

A waitress came in with the next course of the Saint's dinner. She went over and whispered something to the grey-moustached man, who dropped his pince-nez and spoke in an undertone to the fair-haired man with the receding chin. The other two looked at them as they got up.

"You must excuse us," said the grey moustache, rather abruptly.

He went out, and the others followed him after a second's hesitation. Hoppy Uniatz stared at the closing door blankly- he was experiencing some of the sensations of an early Christian who, having braced himself for a slap-up martyrdom, has been rudely sniffed at by a lion and then left high and dry in the middle of the arena. Coming on top of the other incomprehensible things that had happened to him since he arrived there, this was not soothing. He turned to the Saint with a rough sketch of these complex emotions working itself out on his face.

"Boss," he said awkwardly, "dis place makes me noivous."

IV Simon Templar chuckled, and probed a tentative fork into the section of warm rawhide crowned with a wodge of repulsive green mash which was apparently the local interpretation of Leg de Mouton under the influence of spinach. "I can't imagine it, Hoppy," he said.

Mr. Uniatz's frown deepened.

"Ja see dose guys take a run-out powder on us?" he demanded, starting methodically at the beginning. "They do seem to have breezed on."

"Maybe dey see me goin' for my Betsy," said Mr. Uniatz, passing on to the more nebulous realms of theory. "They could hardly have helped it."

"Well, where dey t'ink dey get off pullin' dat stuff an' beatin' it before we say anyt'ing?" The Saint grinned.

"I think we can say we've been very politely warned off. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen it done in a more classical style-those birds must have been reading the smoothest detective stories. How's your spinach? Mine tastes as if they'd been mowing the lawn this afternoon."

He struggled through as much more of the meal as his stomach would endure, and lighted a cigarette. Mr. Uniatz was finished some time before him-Hoppy's calloused maw would have engulfed a plateful of live toads dressed with thistles and woodpulp without noticing anything extraordinary about the menu, even in normal times, and when he was worried he was even less likely to observe what he was eating. Simon pushed back his chair and stood up cheerfully. "Let's take a walk," he said. Mr. Uniatz licked his lips yearningly. "I could just do wit' a drink, boss."

"Afterwards," said the Saint inexorably. "I want to look over the lie of the land."

There was no sign of the four genial diners when they went out, nor of the unpleasant ginger-haired man who had been foolish. A couple of obvious local inhabitants were poring over tankards of beer in the bar parlour off the hall- Simon caught a mere glimpse of them as he went by, but he did not see Martin Jeffroll, and there was nothing visible or audible to suggest that anything worth the attention of a modern buccaneer had happened there for the last two hundred years.

He got into his car and drove it round to the garage, a ramshackle shed dumped inartistically on to the north wall of the inn. It had never been designed to give a comfortable berth to cars of the Hirondel's extravagantly rakish proportions, and there was a big grey lorry parked along one side which forced the Saint to go through some complicated manoeuvres before he could get in. He managed to squeeze himself into the available space with some accompaniment of bad language, and rejoined Hoppy on the road.

"We'll go down to the waterfront and smell some ozone." There was a rough grey stone promenade where the lowest houses straggled along the edge of the bay, and at one end of the village a similar stone causeway sloped down from it and ran out for some distance along the edge of the channel through which the river found its way seawards through the mud. Apparently it had been laid out at some time to give easier access to the boats moored in the channel at low tide. The usual fishing village's collection of miscellaneous hardy craft was scattered out across the inlet, with here and there a hull whose brighter paint and more delicate lines spoke of some more fortunate resident's pleasure. A little way out on the darkening water he could see a few scraps of sail, and a curiously shaped vessel at anchor which looked like a dredger.

He was rather surprised to see a signpost on the quay- one arm pointed to Seaton, the other to Sidmouth. He had not known that there was another through road besides the one by which he had arrived. Later that evening he looked it up on a map and found that there was an alternative route along the coast which took a big loop seawards, rejoining his own road near Lyme Regis.

The knowledge did not immediately give him any clue to the mystery. He sat on a bollard and watched the tide lap in through the gathering dark, smoking a steady series of cigarettes and trying to coordinate his meagre information. There was a girl who did not look particularly hysterical, who had heard strange things at night. There was an innkeeper who was undoubtedly a badly frightened man. There was a red-haired road hog who seemed to have something to do with something. There were four hikers untouched by the weather who talked like traditional conspirators in the accents of Sandhurst. He could see one rather obvious theory which might somehow embrace them all, but it failed to satisfy him. Larkstone was some way east of the historical smugglers' country; and in any case the popularisation of aerial transport had changed all the settings of that profession.

Mr. Uniatz had no theories. He had been trying very hard to work several things out for himself, but after a while the effort gave him a headache and he laid off.

It was quite dark when they strolled back to the hotel. Jeff-roll was locking up. He bade the Saint a distantly polite good night, and Simon remembered the lorry which was taking up more than its fair share of the garage.

"Do you think it could be moved?" he asked. "I'm likely to be here for two or three days."

The landlord pursed his lips apologetically.

"As a matter of fact, it was left here on account of a debt by a man I've never seen again. It won't go-the propeller shaft is broken. And it's too heavy to push. I don't want to spend any money on repairing it, and I'm trying to sell it as it stands. I'm afraid it is a bit of a nuisance, but I'd be very much obliged if you could put up with it."

Simon went upstairs with the knowledge that he was unlikely to get much sleep that night, but the prospect did not trouble him. He had gone without sleep before, and could give the appearance of going without it for phenomenal periods, although by cat-napping at appropriate moments he could secure more rest than many people gain, from a night's conventional slumber. At the same time he wished that he could have heard more from Julie Trafford first, and it might have been a telepathic fulfillment of his unspoken thought when the door of his bedroom opened again almost as soon as he had closed it and she came in.

Almost every woman has some setting in which she can look astonishingly beautiful: for Julia Trafford, wide-trousered crepe de Chine pyjamas and a flimsy silk wrap, with the shaded lights striking unexpected glints of copper from her dark hair, was only one of many, Hoppy Uniatz, who had no natural modesty, stared at her dreamily. The Saint could have thought of many more interesting things to talk to her about than the troubles of her frightened uncle; but he hoped she was not going to fall in love with him, which was one of the most serious risks he ran when succouring damsels in distress.

"I had to see you," she said. "That letter I wrote was so stupid-I didn't believe you'd pay any attention to it at all. Are you really the Saint?"

"Scotland Yard is convinced about it," he said solemnly, "so I suppose I must be."

He made her sit down and gave her a cigarette.

"What exactly is this all about?" he asked.

"I don't know," she said helplessly. "That's the trouble. That's why I wrote to you. There's something ugly going on. My uncle's terrified, even though he won't admit it. I've begged him to tell me several times, but he keeps on saying I'm imagining things. And I know that isn't true."

The ginger-haired man, apparently, had been there before; and on his second visit he had been accompanied by two others whose descriptions sounded equally unpleasant. Each time he had seen Jeffroll alone, and each time the interview had left the innkeeper white and shaking. After both occasions she had made attempts to gain his confidence, but he had only denied that there was any trouble, and refused to talk about it any more. She knew, however, that since the second visit he had taken out a licence for a revolver, for the local police sergeant had come in with it one afternoon when he was out.

"Do you think he's being blackmailed?" she asked.

"I don't know," said the Saint mildly. "What about these noises you hear at night-would they be the blackmailers painting up their armour?"

"They're-well, I told you nearly all I could in my letter. This is a very old place, and a lot of boards creak when they're stepped on. Sometimes when I've been lying awake reading at night I've heard them, even when I know Uncle Martin's gone to bed and nobody else has any business to be moving about. At first I thought we were being burgled, but I went downstairs twice and I couldn't find anybody."

He raised his eyebrows.

"You thought there were burglars in the place, and you went down to look for them alone?"

"Oh, I'm not nervous-I think most burglars would run for their lives if they thought anybody was coming after them. But that was before that red-haired man came here."

"And the noises have been going on-how long?"

"Nearly all the time I've been here. And then there's the rumbling. It sounds like a train going by, very close, so that the house vibrates; but the nearest railway is five miles away." She looked at him with a sudden youthful defiance. "You don't believe in ghosts, do you?"

"I've never seen one yet," he said coolly. "Certainly not a ginger-haired one in ginger plus fours."

He finished his cigarette and lighted another, strolling thoughtfully about the room. He did believe in neurotic women, having been pestered by more than his share, but he knew no species which panicked over imaginary terrors and at the same time went single-handed in search of burglars. Besides, he had seen certain things for himself. The landlord's startling reaction to Mr. Uniatz's rasping voice, for instance- it had puzzled him considerably at the time, but he realised now that a man who had had disturbing interviews with a bloke like Gingerhead might have some reason to be frightened of a stranger who looked and talked like the most blatantly typical gangster that ever stepped. Obviously Jeffroll was being threatened; but ordinary blackmail was a very inadequate explanation, and the cruder forms of extortion were not likely to reach a small innkeeper in an obscure Devonshire village.

"Who are the Four Horsemen?"

She was baffled for a moment.

"Oh, you mean the men who were having dinner? They were here before I came. My uncle seems to be quite friendly with them. They go out fishing every night-you never see them about before dinner."

The fat fruity man, he learned, was Major Portmore; the big black-haired man was Mr. Kane; the grey moustache and pince-nez were worn by Captain Voss; and the thin man with the deficient chin who always talked to the table was blessed with the name of Weems.

"They've always been perfectly nice to me," she said.

"I'll believe you," he murmured. "I thought they were most refined. A bit sinister in their line of backchat, but very British. What happened to the ginger bloke?"

She didn't know. Jeffroll had carted him into his private office to revive him, leaving her in charge of the bar, and later on had announced that the patient had recovered and departed quietly. He had seemed pleased, and this was understandable.

The Saint smiled.

"I suppose there must be a good deal of head-scratching going on about us by this time," he said. "First of all we're taken for a couple of Gingerhead's strongarm guys, and then I sock Gingerhead on the jaw and put the whole thing cockeyed. I wonder if Uncle is tying himself in knots over it, or whether he thinks the whole show was a piece of low cunning especially staged to put him off the scent."

"I couldn't tell you; but I'll let you know if I do find out. You've spoken to Major Portmore, then-what did he have to say?"

"He was quite pleasant. They told us they didn't like gangsters, and gave us a few ideas about what they'd feel like doing if any hoodlums tried to muscle in on their preserves. It was all very nicely done, and if I'd been an ordinary thug I might have been quite impressed. Possibly. But I'll agree with you that they seem pretty harmless fellows at heart, and that only makes things more complicated. If they're quite innocent, why the hell don't they get some policemen to deal with Gingerhead and me?"

He scowled over the enigma for a few moments longer, and then he shrugged.

"Anyway, I suppose we'll find out. I'm going to do my sleeping in the daytime like the Four Horsemen-the night has a thousand eyes, and mine are going to be two of 'em."

He got up out of the armchair into which he had thrown himself, with a quick smile that wiped the hard calculating lines out of his face in a flash of careless friendliness that was absurdly comforting. She really was rather beautiful, even if that moment found her at a loss for anything but the conventional answer.

"I don't know why you should take so much trouble"

"It's no trouble. Most of us have to earn our living, and if there is any useful racket working around here I shall get my percentage out of the gate. I'll let you know where I get to, and you can keep in touch with me. I haven't made up my mind yet what part I'm going to try to put over, so you'd better not take a lot more risks like this in case anybody got wise to us. If I want to tell you anything, I'll leave a note"- he glanced swiftly about the room-"under that corner of the carpet. And you'd better park your mail in the same place. Unless it's desperately urgent. Don't worry, kid-Hoppy and I are rough on rats, and when the ungodly think up a game that we didn't play in our cradles . . ."

He left the rest of the sentence in the air, with the hairs at the back of his neck tingling.

While he talked, he had become faintly aware of a queer vibration that was at first too deep in its choice of wavelength to be perceptible to any ordinary faculty. And then, gradually, it grew strong enough to be felt. A glass upturned over the neck of the carafe on the washstand trilled in a sudden shrill relay of the impulse. He listened, in utter silence, and heard something like the rumble of wheels roll through the earth and come to a thudding stop far underneath his feet.

V JULIA TRAFFORD'S face was suddenly white in the dim light which robbed the tapestry covering of the chairback behind her of much of its hideousness. Her lips parted breathlessly.

"That's it," she whispered, with her grey eyes widening against his. "You heard it yourself-didn't you? That's what I've been hearing."

The lamplight cut dark lines and piratical masses of shadow out of his brown face, brought up the glint of blue steel in his mocking gaze. He stood checked in precarious stillness, with the white scrap of his cigarette clipped between steady fingers; and the lamp threw his shadow towering up the wall so that his head and shoulders stooped over the low ceiling.

"How far away is this railway?" he said.

"The line's about five miles inland-the nearest station is Colyford."

He nodded.

"Go back to your room, bright eyes," he said, and his hand touched her shoulder as she stood up. "And don't lose any sleep over it. Whatever this racket is, I'll take it apart and see what makes it go."

He closed the door after her, and found Hoppy Uniatz gaping at it with the glazed other-worldly look of a man who is going to be seasick. For a couple of seconds he studied the phenomenon in fascinated silence; and then he cleared his throat tactfully, and Mr. Uniatz came out of his trance with a guilty start.

"I could give dat dame a tumble sometime-when I ain't got nut'n better to do," he said, in a tone so overpoweringly blase that the Saint blinked at him in considerable awe.

Simon would have liked to probe deeper into this remarkable statement, but he reserved his curiosity for a more leisured date.

"I think I'll wander about the place and look at the architecture," he said.

"Okay, boss." Mr. Uniatz roused himself finally out of his dreams, and dragged out his Betsy. He slid back the jacket and inspected the cartridge in the chamber with unromantic stoicism. "Wit' you an' me on de job, I guess dis racket is on de skids."

"With me on the job, it may be," said the Saint calmly. "You're going to stay here and snore for both of us-and that ought to be a pushover for you."

He was firm about this, in spite of Hoppy's injured protests. For a partner in a gun-fight, Simon would have asked nobody better; but for a tour of stealthy investigation he would as soon have chosen a boisterous young bison.

"I want you to look after Julia," he said craftily, and Mr. Uniatz brightened. "Where are you going?"

"Anyt'ing you say goes, boss," said Hoppy, with his hand on the door-knob.

"You don't have to go," said the Saint coldly. "I said look after the girl, not at her. Her room's just down the passage on the other side, and if she's in trouble you'll be able to hear her. When she wants you in her bedroom I'm sure she'll ask for you."

He left Mr. Uniatz brooding happily over this consoling thought, and went out into the dark corridor. At such times of emergency the Saint's fluency of shameless inventiveness was unparalleled-he had not the faintest idea where Julia Trafford's room was actually situated, and the fear of what might happen if an amorous and impatient Mr. Uniatz went prowling hopefully into the bedchamber of a hysterical cook was perhaps one of the most disturbing thoughts in his mind at that moment.

The passage was more or less, rather less than more, lighted by the wavering gleam of a small oil lamp hung in a bracket on the wall-from the beginning he had noticed this prevalence of primitive illumination in the hotel, for he had seen the silver pylons of the national electric supply grid spanning the valley as he drove down. Downstairs it was quite dark; but on these ventures he carried his own illumination which was less conspicuous in any case than switching on the ordinary lights in any place he wanted to explore.

The dim beam of an electric flashlight in his hand, irised down to the thinnest useful pencil of luminance by a circle of tinfoil pasted over the lens, guided him about the ground floor. No creaking boards betrayed his movements, for he had a tread like a cat when he chose to use it, and an uncanny instinct for treacherous footings. He covered the rooms which he had seen before, hall and dining-room and lounge bar, and others which he had not seen but which were roughly what he would have expected to find. The kitchen was behind the dining-room, a big stone-flagged room like a barn, which must have served for a staff dining-room as well, and might well have held even more distinguished company in the days when eating was a heartier and more earnest business. Opening off the kitchen was a long paved passage which seemed to run the length of the building. He tried the different doors, each with the same care and silence, and reviewed a series of sculleries, pantries, lavatories, coal and wood cellars, wine and beer stores, and a small staff sitting-room. The last door, at the end, appeared to lead out into a yard at the back--it was locked on the inside, and when he turned the key he found himself in the open under the shadow of the garage.

He was retracing his steps when he heard the dull vibrant rumble under his feet again. It was much more distinct than it had sounded upstairs, with a definite metallic harshness, but even then it was not so loud that he could fix it clearly in his mind. If he had been there as an ordinary unsuspecting guest, it might not have attracted his attention at all-he would probably have put it down subconsciously to a heavy lorry passing on the road outside, and would never have felt urged to probe into it further. Also, the place being what it was, he would very soon have been in bed and asleep; and there was nothing sufficiently startling about the muffled noise to wake him. But he was not asleep and he was not unsuspecting, and he knew that the sound was not quite the same as that of a passing lorry.

He opened another door in the passage and found himself in another short length of corridor-it was scarcely large enough to be called an inner hall. On one side was a door carrying the painted word "Private": it was locked, and he guessed that this was Jeffroll's own sanctum. On the other side was a red curtain, and when he went through it he discovered himself back in the diminutive lounge, but on the serving side of the bar.

There was one obvious thing to do there, and the Saint was nerveless enough to do it. He paid the money scrupulously into the till and sat on the bar with his modest glass and a completely brazen cigarette, waiting and listening in silence. Twenty minutes later he heard the noise again.

This time it seemed to give birth to three faint echoes -they were about sixty seconds apart, and each of them was sharper and crisper in tone than the original sound. The effect was something like that of three slow spaced rollers of surf sweeping up a shingle beach. Again the noise was not startlingly loud, but it was closer and clearer.

Simon ran thoughtful fingers through his hair. The rumble passed again, seeming to recede into the distance; and then the stillness settled down again. His watch told him that it was nearly midnight, but he had no superstitions.

He slid down to the floor, broke up the stub of his cigarette and washed the fragments down the sink under the bar, dried his glass on a cloth and replaced it on its shelf, and picked up his torch. He was, for the moment, irritatingly stymied; but he felt that something ought to be done. He had verified the last fraction of Julia Trafford's story, and he was baffled to find any natural explanation. On the other hand, up to that moment he had also failed to find an unlawful solution. Secret passages of some kind were manifestly indicated, but to measure every room and corridor and draw up plans of the building to locate discrepancies in the sum total was a lengthy job for which he had very little patience and, prosaically enough, no implements at all.

There remained the locked door of Jeffroll's private office, and he thought he could cope with this. Curiously enough it gave him an unaccountable difficulty, and he had been working on it for a couple of minutes before he discovered that the thing that was obstructing his skeleton key was another key left in the lock on the inside.

He changed his instrument for a pair of thin-nosed pliers and turned the key quite easily, but with even greater caution. A key on the inside of a locked room, except in fictional murder mysteries, vouches for someone on the inside to turn it; and yet he could not see so much as a glimmer of light in the cracks between the old badly-fitting oak door and its frame.

Then, as he took up the pressure of the latch with delicately practised fingers, he heard a limp sort of dragging scuff of movement which no normal ambusher would have made, and a grunting moan of sterterously exhaled breath which removed the last of his hesitation.

The nape of his neck prickled, but he went in boldly-he had an intuitive certainty of what he would find there, and he did not gasp when the beam of his torch shone full into the dilated eyes of the man with ginger hair.

VI SIMON swept his flashlight round in a quick survey of the rest of the room. There was no other visible exit than the door which he had just opened, unless the door of a large built-in safe in another wall concealed unconventional secrets. There was a desk with a swivel chair behind it, a typewriter on a side table, a filing cabinet, a shelf littered with books and papers, an armchair, and a few faded and nondescript prints on the walls-the conventional furnishings of a small country hotel office. He had no doubt that some of these superficially innocuous fittings might repay closer investigation, but he turned back to the ginger-haired man as a more obvious feature of interest.

"Do you do this for fun, or are you practising a vaudeville act?" he murmured pleasantly.

The other made no answer, for the very good reason that his mouth was blocked by an amateurish but effective gag. Nor, as he might well have been tempted to do, did he get up and make another attempt to destroy the symmetry of the Saint's face, because the lengths of wire bound tightly about his wrists and ankles made any such hearty greeting impossible.

Simon enjoyed the sound of his own voice, but in those circumstances he was prepared to be generous. He squatted down and loosened the gag sufficiently to remove one of Gingerhead's disadvantages, but not so thoroughly that it could not be speedily replaced if necessary. When the cloth was pulled down he saw that the man's mouth was twitching with fear.

"What are you going to do?"

Simon tilted up his flashlight to show his own face.

"What would you do to a bloke who was very rude to you and spilt your drink?" he asked.

The man licked his lips.

"I didn't mean to do that. I lost my temper. I didn't know-------"

"What didn't you know?"

"I didn't know you were-one of them. You've got to let me out. You can't do anything to me. There's a law in this country-------"

Simon thought quickly, and came to a decision.

"Let you out, Ginger Whiskers? You're a bit of an optimist, aren't you?"

"I could make it worth your while," said the other feverishly. His voice was not harsh and domineering now, but its quavering terror was perhaps more unpleasant. "I'll give you anything you like-a thousand, two thousand-------"

"Go on."

"Five thousand"

The Saint clicked his tongue reproachfully.

"Ten thousand pounds," said the man shakily. "I'll give you ten thousand pounds to let me go!"

"This is getting interesting," drawled the Saint. "Have you got all this money in your pocket?"

"I can get it for you." The man dropped his voice lower, although neither of them had spoken far above a whisper.

The Saint sighed.

"Sorry, brother, but this is a cash business."

"You could have it first thing in the morning-before that, if you wanted it."

"Where is it coming from?" asked the Saint, with calculated scepticism. "Will you do down into the village and hold out your hat, or are you going to burgle the bank?"

"I know where I can get it. I've got to meet a man- to-night!"

"Where are you going to meet him?"

The man glared at him silently, with narrowing eyes; but Simon stuck to his point.

"Let me go and meet this man," he said slowly. "If hell pay ten thousand quid to save your life, I'll come back and see about it."

"How do I know you will?"

"You don't," Simon admitted sadly. "But you can take it from me that unless I do see this bird and his money I'm not going to do anything for you. And then the uncertainty would be so much more trying. Instead of wondering whether I was going to help you or not, you'd only be able to wonder whether you were going to be buried alive under the public bar or fed to the congers off Larkstone Point."

He kept his light focused on the ginger-haired man's blotched puffy face, and read everything that was going on in the mind behind it.

"He'll be waiting on the road to Axminster, exactly three miles from Seaton," came the reply at length. "He'll do anything to get me out. For God's sake, hurry!"

Simon doubted whether God would really be deeply concerned, but he allowed the invocation to pass unchallenged. He bent forward and replaced the gag as it had been when he came in, and switched out his light on the ginger-haired man's mutely terrified eyes.

"If they have fed you to the congers when I get back, I'll go fishing," he murmured kindly.

He left the office on this encouraging note, and let himself out into the back yard by the door at the end of the kitchen passage. The garage doors had been left open, and after a second's hesitation he began to manoeuvre his car out of its place by hand. It was a task that taxed all his strength, but he preferred the hard work to the risk of starting the engine where it might be heard by someone in the hotel. Fortunately the garage was built on a slight slope, and after a good deal of straining and perspiration he manhandled the big Hirondel into a position where he could get in behind the wheel and coast out of the yard and down the hill until it was safe to touch the self-starter. At the first corner he turned round, and sent the great purring monster droning back up the grade towards the Seaton Road. He was well on his way before he remembered that he had not even waited to tell Hoppy Uniatz where he was going.

There was something else which he had forgotten, but he did not recall that until much later.

He was conscious of a deep and solemn exhilaration. The sublime good fortune that was always spreading itself so prodigally over all his adventures showed no signs of shirking its responsibilities. Destiny was still doing its stuff. One got a letter, one went somewhere, one exchanged a few lines of affable badinage with a selection of mysterious blokes, one dotted an ugly sinner on the button, and forthwith the wheels began to go round. It might have been a coincidence that he had had cause to smite Ginger Whiskers so early in the proceedings; but from then on everything had unwound like clockwork. The presence of Ginger Whiskers, bound and gagged, in that locked office, was only part of the machinery -obviously, when Jeffroll had come out and seen him slumbering peacefully and harmlessly on the floor, the opportunity to put him away must have seemed far too good to miss. Simon would have grabbed at it himself, and he guessed that that decision was the cause of the message which had summoned the Four Horsemen from the dining-room and broken up their friendly exchange of compliments. Everything, up to that point, was clear: the mystery of what it was all about remained. But the eccentric philanthropist who was willing to pay ten thousand pounds for the life of a blister like Ginger-head might offer some more hints on that subject.

He understood the ginger-haired man's psychology to three places of decimals. Whatever the outcome of this interview might be, the waiting accomplice would at least learn what had happened to his confederate; and Ginger Whiskers was doubtless banking far more heavily on the advantages of getting this message through than on the Saint's desire to help him. If their positions had been reversed, the Saint would have gambled on the same horse. But before that bet was decided he hoped to become much wiser himself-he had forgotten that in certain circles he was one of the best-known men in England.

The trip meter on the dash was just turning over the third mile from Seaton when he picked up a red light stationary by the side of the road. As his headlights drew nearer to it he saw that it was the rear light of a small saloon of a popular make. He dimmed his lights and pulled in just in front of it; and a man came up, walking with quick jerky steps. "Is that you, Garthwait?"

Simon gathered that this was the name by which Ginger was known to the police. He hunched his shoulders and tried to remember Garthwait's rasping voice. "Yes."

The light of a powerful torch was flashed on his face, and he heard the unknown man's hissing breath.

"At least," he said quickly, "Garthwait sent me"

"Mr. Simon Templar, isn't it?" said the other gently. "I know your face quite well."

For a moment the Saint almost recanted his views on the lavish publicity which the newspapers had given to some of his exploits, although for many years that disreputable fame had been one of his most modest vanities. But he smiled.

"You do know your way around, don't you, dear old bird?" he remarked.

"That is my business," said the other dryly, as if he was making a very subtle joke. "Please keep your hands on the steering wheel, where I can see them. I've got you covered, my friend, and I could shoot you long before you could reach your gun."

His voice had a dusty pedantic quality which was the last intonation Simon Templar would ever have expected from a man who spoke of unlawful armaments and sudden death with so much self-possession.

"You're welcome," said the Saint amiably. "My life is insured, and I'm considered to be an A. 1 risk. I wish I could say the same for Comrade Garthwait. There seems to be some sort of idea that he would be Good for Contented Congers; but he said you'd pay ten thousand pounds to keep him on dry land, and I thought it might be worth looking into. I suppose love is blind, but what you can see in a wall-eyed wart like that"

"Where is Garthwait?"

"When I saw him last, he was gagged up and tied together with wire, meditating about the After Life." "Where was this?" "In the Old House." "The hotel?"

"Oh, no," said the Saint carefully. "It was too risky to keep him there. Don't you know the Old House?"

The man behind the flashlight did not pursue the subject. "And he told you I'd give you ten thousand pounds to let him out?"

"That's what he said. I'm afraid I thought he was a bit optimistic at the time, but I didn't like to discourage him.

After all, when there's so much money at stake"

"How do you know that?" asked the other sharply. The Saint smiled. "Garthwait told me." "Did he tell you about last night's job?" "Yes, he told me that, too," answered Simon coolly, and knew in the next instant that he had made a fatal mistake- the man he was talking to was as alive to all the tricks of the trade as he was himself.

"That's interesting," said the dry stilted voice, "because there was never any such thing as 'last night's job.' You had better get out of that car, Mr. Templar. If Garthwait is really in danger, it would doubtless be diminished if your friends knew that you were in a similar predicament."

Simon thought very swiftly. He had set out cheerfully to try his luck, and the luck had gypped him very neatly. At the same time, he couldn't let it have everything its own way. In a kindly and impartial spirit, he reviewed the pros and cons of the not so philanthropic philanthropist's suggestion for continuing the game, and decided that it lacked any really boisterous humour.

He had not stopped his engine when he stopped the car, but it was throttled down to a mere whisper which might not have forced itself upon the philanthropist's attention. While he appeared to deliberate whether he should obey or not, he made a rapid deduction from the flashlight of the probable position of the man behind it. Then, with a faint shrug, he opened the door.

The light moved out of the way, towards the rear of the car, as he had expected. Turning as if to get out, his left hand found the switch which controlled the car's lights; he had already flipped the car into gear, and his feet were resting on the clutch and accelerator pedals. In one concerted movement he snapped out every light against which he might have been silhouetted, roused the engine to a sudden roar of power, and banged in the clutch.

Something crashed deafeningly behind him and left his ears singing; and then he was crouched low over the steering wheel, swerving away up the road with the seat pressing forcefully into his back under the urge of the Hirondel's terrific power. The open door slammed into latch in the slipstream: his ears caught the thin shred of another more vicious slam behind him that might have been an echo of the door and was not, and his teeth flashed in a Saintly smile before he whirled round the next corner and was out of range.

He was still smiling when he ran down the hill into Lark-stone and cut his engine before swinging round to glide up to the garage beside the inn. Even after that minor miscalculation he remained the blithest of optimists-he hadn't once caught sight of the face of the man to whom he had spoken, but he would know that dry pedantic voice anywhere, and he had found men before with less to identify them than that.

He had his next surprise when he turned his wheels towards the garage and prepared to repeat his earlier strenuous performance by manhandling the car back into its berth, for as his dimmed lights panned round he saw that he had an unobstructed run in. The lorry that had blocked his way before, which Jeffroll had told him was out of action with a broken propeller-shaft, had vanished.

VII So had Garthwait-he discovered that when he went indoors and opened the door of the manager's office. The mere fact that the door opened without any manipulation reminded him that he had not turned the key from the outside when he left; and then he remembered that he had also left behind the pliers with which he had turned it in the first place-they were still lying on the floor where Garthwait had been, and he recollected that he had put them down when he loosened the gag and had forgotten to pick them up again. The pliers, like most similar instruments, were also wire-cutters; and there were four severed strands of wire lying near them to show how they had been used.

For a man who had made so many mistakes in one night, the Saint went to bed very light-heartedly. He heard the same queer subterranean rumbling twice more before he fell asleep, but he did not allow it to disturb his rest.

The faithful Mr. Uniatz had been snoring serenely in his chair when Simon turned in, and he was still snoring on the same majestic note when the Saint woke up. He leapt up like a startled hippopotamus when the Saint shook him; and then he blinked sheepishly and lowered his gun.

"Sorry, boss ... I guess I must of fell asleep."

"After all, a brain like yours must rest sometimes," said the Saint handsomely.

It was eight o'clock, and the morning was clear and bright. Sitting squeezed up in the diminutive bath of the hotel's one rudimentary bathroom, he told the story of his night's adventure in carelessly effervescent sentences-at least, the tale bubbled on exuberantly enough, in the flamboyant inconsequential idiom which was his own inimitable language, until he noticed that his audience was not following him with all the rapt breathlessness which he felt his narrative deserved. He stopped, and regarded Mr. Uniatz speculatively. Mr. Uniatz coughed.

"Boss," said Mr. Uniatz, waking out of his reverie as if the whole tedious business of noises in the night, gagged men in locked rooms, pedagogues with pop-guns, and disappearing lorries had now been satisfactorily disposed of, and the meeting was free to pass on to more spiritual pursuits-"what rhymes wit' 'goil'?"

" 'Boil,'" suggested the Saint, after a moment's poetic reflection.

Mr. Uniatz pondered the idea for a while, his lips moving as if in silent prayer. Then he shook his head dubiously.

"I dunno, boss-it don't sound quite right."

"What doesn't sound quite right?"

"Dis voice of mine."

"I shouldn't let that prey on my mind, Hoppy," said the Saint encouragingly, although he was finding the train of thought more and more obscure. "After all, you can't have everything. Maybe Caruso wasn't so hot with a Roscoe."

Hoppy Uniatz frowned.

"I don't mean de verse I talk wit', boss; I mean de voice I'm makin' up when I fall asleep last night. It starts dis way: "You're so beautiful, you're like a rose, I'm tellin' ya, an' I'm a guy who knows: Your eyes are like de shinin' stars, Dey remind me of my Ma's; I t'ink you are a swell kind of goil"

He hesitated.

"I bet a neck like yours never had a berl,"

he concluded, scratching his head. "It don't sound right, somehow, but I never had no practice makin' up pomes."

Simon dried and dressed himself in stunned silence.

He strolled out into the road in the strengthening sunshine, and found his steps leading him almost automatically down towards the harbour, although he had no need of the walk to sharpen his appetite for breakfast. Down on the quay he found a blue-jerseyed old salt smoking his pipe on a bollard and gazing out to sea with the faraway bright blue eye which is popularly supposed to express the sailor's unquenchable yearning for the great open waters, but which can actually be quenched with the most perfunctory dilution of water. It was a very conventional politeness to exchange good mornings, easy enough to pass on to some more explicit appreciations of the weather, and from there to a broader discussion of life in those parts. The man had the easy garrulousness of his kind, and perhaps he also scented a future customer for fishing expeditions.

"Aye, there was more life here when I wurr a boy. Fordy ships there wurr in the fishing fleet then-now, there ain't 'aardly a dozen. What with the 'aarbour fillin' up now an' everything, it do zeem as if we'll all have to take up vaarm-ing afore long." He poked the stem of his pipe towards the horizon. "That dredger out yonder, she been workin' here for three months gone, tryin' to keep us open, but it keeps fillin' up."

Simon gazed out at the thread of smoke rising from the dredger's funnel against the pale blue sky.

"You mean the sea's going back on you?"

"Aye, it do zeem that way zometimes. You zee that channel down there where the boats lay-down there by the causeway? That's where she's woorst. Seems to come up with the tide, like, every night, an' it gets caught there like it would by a breakwater; or else the river brings it down an 'the tide catches it an' throws it back. It's all we can do to keep 'er clear." The man's voice held a certain personal pride, as if he himself had gone out with a spade and established the enormity of the disaster at first hand. "It's due to the world goin' round the sun, that's what it is-just as you could walk across on dry land once from here to Fraance. . . ."

He grumbled on into a startlingly abstruse geological theory which was apparently designed to prove that such things did not happen when the earth was flat-only returning from his flights of imagination when the time came to point out, as the Saint had suspected, that he was the owner of the best boat for fishing on the coast, and that his services could be secured at any time for a purely nominal fee.

Simon made vague promises, and went thoughtfully back up the hill. Nestling into the bank of cool green, with the stippled shadows of the overhanging trees stirring lazily across it, the rambling black-timbered inn looked more than ever like the sort of place where the most sensational mystery should be a polite and courtly seventeenth-century ghost with a clanking chain and a head under its arm; and he wondered if that was one reason why it had been so ideally chosen.

He did not go indoors at once, but continued his stroll round to the garage. The lorry was back in its place, exactly as if it had never been moved; and it would not have required much self-deception to persuade him that he had dreamed its absence. But the Saint did very little dreaming of that kind; and he touched the radiator and felt that it was warm.

He put his foot on one of the rear wheels and pulled himself up to inspect the interior of the truck. There was a dusty layer of red earth on the bottom, and particles of the same soil clung to the sides: he smeared one between his finger and thumb, and it was damp.

"All very interesting," said the Saint to himself.

He squeezed in between the lorry and the wall, and saw other sprinklings of earth on the concrete floor. The wall against which the truck was parked was an exterior wall of the hotel itself-the bare oak beams and timbering and the rough yellowish plaster seemed to stare out miserably at the cheap modern brickwork and corrugated iron which had been stuck on to them to produce the garage. He spent some minutes in a minute examination of the wall, and used the blade of his penknife to make sure.

When he came out again he was humming gently under his breath, and his blue eyes were twinkling with a quiet and profound delight. The yard straggled off into a long grass slope flimsily cut off by a staked wire fence. He ducked through the wire and sauntered up the hill until he reached a slight prominence from which he had a considerable view of the road which ran past the inn, and the upper country towards which it led. He could see where the straight march of the silver power pylons dropped over the main ridge of hill, stepped carelessly over the road three hundred yards away, and sent its glistening wires in a long sweep over the gladed valley to climb sedately over the rise on the other side. For some time he stood with his hands in his pockets and the dreamiest ghost of a smile on his lips, gazing out over the landscape. There was a ditch at the foot of the hill, beside the road, and it was this that he made for when he walked down again. The bottom of the ditch was overgrown with weeds and couch-grass; but he felt about with his hand, and found what he had expected to find-a heavy insulated cable. He knew that he would find one end of the cable leading to the pylon nearest the road, if he cared to follow it. Walking slowly back to the inn, he came to a place where a slight hump in the road border indicated a comparatively recently filled excavation. It disappeared at the end of the concrete lane that led to the garage, and he knew that the insulated cable reached its destination somewhere very near.

At that moment he knew half the answer to the riddle of the Clevely Arms, and the solution staggered him.

Hoppy Uniatz was already in the dining-room, endeavouring to persuade a giggling waitress that a pound of fried steak garnished with three eggs and a half-dozen rashers of bacon was a very modest breakfast for a healthy man.

"Get him what he wants, Gladys," said the Saint, sinking into the other chair. "And call yourself lucky he's on a diet. If he was eating properly he'd spread you on a piece of toast and swallow you for an hors d'oeuvre."

"Dat bale of straw is fifty in de deck," growled Mr. Uniatz cryptically, reaching for the solace of the bottle of whisky which he had foresightedly brought into the room with him. "Where ya been, boss?"

Simon lighted a cigarette.

"I've been exploring. We'll go on and see some more when you've finished."

"I dunno, boss." Mr. Uniatz stared vacantly at the pink floral motif on the opposite wall. "Dis ain't such a bad flea-box. Whadda we have to pull de pin for?"

"We aren't pulling the pin, Hoppy," said the Saint. "This is just some local scenery we're going to take a look at. We may be staying here a long time-I don't know. Life has these uncertainties. But I think the trouble is coming fairly soon."

How soon the trouble was to come he had no means of knowing.

He went up the hill again, with Hoppy, after breakfast, but not in the same direction as he had gone before. This time he climbed the steeper slope due west from the back of the hotel. They struggled through winding paths among the trees and undergrowth to a muttered accompaniment of strange East Side expletives from Mr. Uniatz, who never took exercise out of doors, and presently broke clear of the patch of woodland into a broad bare tract of grass that rolled up to an undulating horizon against the blue sky. From the top of this rise he could see patches of the roof of the inn through the branches; but he was more interested in the view on the opposite side of the hill. He stood looking at this for a little while in silence while Mr. Uniatz recovered his breath, and then he sat down on the grass and took out his cigarette-case.

"If you can take your mind off poetry for a while and concentrate on what I'm saying, it may be useful," he said. "I want you to know what this is all about-just in case of accidents."

And he went on talking for about half an hour, sorting out the facts and putting them together with infinite deference to the limitations of Mr. Uniatz's cerebral system, until he had made sure that even Hoppy had assimilated as much of the secret as he knew himself. He had never expected to produce any sensational reactions; but Mr. Uniatz bit the end from a cigar and spat it out with a phlegmatic practicality which was equivalent to the flabbergasted incoherence of any lesser man.

"Whadda we do, boss?" he asked.

"We hang around," said the Saint. "It may happen tonight or it may happen a month from now; but we can take it as written that a job like this isn't planned and worked out on that scale without there's something pretty worthwhile in it, and when the balloon goes up we'll be around to inspect the boodle."

He had a cool estimate of his own danger. The Garthwait outfit had acquired bigger and better reasons to dislike him, whatever part they had decided he was playing in the pageant. The Jeffroll fraternity might be equally puzzled about his status, but in the next ten minutes he had three separate indications of their esteem.

While he sat talking on the hill his keen eyes had caught the stirring of a bush at the edge of the wooded patch below him, and he had seen the movement of a scrap of white behind it. Walking down again as casually as if he had noticed nothing, he let the path lead him towards the place where he had seen the watcher. It was Major Portmore, leaning against the bole of a tree where the shrubbery almost hid him from the hill-top-but for the flash of his white shirt, he might have been passed unobserved while he stood still. He had a pipe between his teeth and a shot-gun under his arm, and he nodded unconcernedly when the Saint greeted him.

"Thought I might get a rabbit," he said amiably. "You often see them sunning themselves up there."

Simon raised a faintly quizzical eyebrow.

"I should have thought tigers would have been more in your line," he murmured.

"Tigers," said the Major, taking out his pipe, "or rats. It's all the same to me."

The Saint let his eyes dwell gently on the other's shepherd's-warning complexion.

"If the rats are pink ones, on bicycles," he said gravely, "don't shoot."

He left the gallant Major a shade darker in colour, and bore thoughtfully to the left, towards the garage. Slipping into his car, he adjusted the throttle and ignition, and pressed the starter. The engine turned over several times without firing, and he abandoned the effort to save his batteries. Doubtless an expert investigation would show what had been done to put it out of action, but it required no investigation to tell him that Major Portmore's sudden transfer of interest from fishing to rabbiting had the same reason as the disabling of the Hirondel.

He wandered round to the front of the hotel, and found Captain Voss sitting on a bench beside the door with a newspaper on his knee, his face wrinkled up against the glare till he looked like a grey-haired lizard. He said "Good morning" briefly in answer to the Saint's cheery nod, and returned to his paper; but the Saint knew that he did not read another line until they had passed on into the hall.

Simon Templar went into the lounge and sat on a window seat with his feet up, considering these three tributes with the aid of a cigarette. The change of attitude since last night was not lost on him. Then, the principal idea had been to persuade him to move on, and he had gathered that if he moved on without fuss everybody would have been quite happy and asked no questions. Now, even if the idea was not actually to keep him there, it was at least plain that he was not to go anywhere without being watched-the tampering with his car fitted in with that scheme equally well, for it was flagrantly a hopeless car for anyone to try to follow. Simon sat thinking it over with profound interest, while Hoppy Uniatz sat beside him and chewed one end of his cigar and smoked the other in a sublime complacency of unhelpfulness. He heard a small car grind fussily down the road and stop with a squeak outside, without letting it interrupt his meditations; and then, through the half-open window over his head, he heard something else that stiffened him into attention with a jerk.

"Morning, Voss-is Jeffroll inside?"

It was the thin desiccated voice of the man he had met on the Axminster road in the small hours of that morning-the man who, according to Garthwait himself, might have paid ten thousand pounds for the rescue of that prodigious pun-pie on the cosmos.

VIII THERE was no doubt that his bald use of Voss's surname, without prefix, was not meant impertinently; equally beyond question was the implied acceptance of the familiarity in Voss's pleasant reply: "He's in the office-sorry I can't come in with you."

"Not at all," said the dry voice punctiliously.

Simon was peering between the curtains, trying to catch a glimpse of the owner of the voice; and then he heard footsteps in the hall and sank back hurriedly, snatching out a handkerchief to cover his face. Pretending to blow his nose vigorously, but not so noisily as to make himself the object of undesirable curiosity, he saw the man come through the archway which communicated the lounge and the hall. It was a small man, who walked easily under the low beams, and the chief impression it gave was one of studied and all-permeating greyness. Everything about him seemed to be grey-from the top of his baldish head and the parchment pallor of his face, down through his rusty swallow-tail coat and striped trousers, to his incongruously foppish suede shoes. He carried a small black briefcase in a grey-gloved hand; and Simon searched for a moment for the one unmistakable thing that linked his whole appearance to his dry dusty voice. In another moment he got it. The Saint refused to believe that anyone who looked and dressed and spoke so exactly like a rather seedy lawyer could possibly have any other reason for existence.

And this grey old bird was the mysterious unknown who had recognised him on the Axminster road. Simon's eyes narrowed fractionally as he remembered the parched undertone of humour in the man's accounting for that recognition. "That is my business . . ." Undoubtedly it was-but why was this bloke, whom Garthwait promptly called upon in his emergency, calling in such a friendly fashion on the men who had tied Garthwait up and apparently planned to fatten eels on him?

Simon bit his lips. He would have given much to overhear what was happening in the office; but his explorations had already revealed that there were only two approaches to Jeff-roll's sanctum, either through the back of the bar or along the passage from the kitchen, and a moment's reflection showed both of those routes to be impracticable. The Saint swore comprehensively under his breath, damning and blasting everything about the hotel, from the amblyopic architect who had first conceived its fatuous layout down to the last imbecile grandchild of the paranoiac plumbers who had inexplicably omitted to drown themselves in its drains; and when he took out his cigarette-case again for the soothing compensation of tobacco, it was empty.

He got up restlessly, and went out again to the road. An ancient Morris stood outside, and he recognised it as the car he had met during the night-the identification of the grey dry man was absolutely complete, beyond question. But what the hell was it all about? The lawyer knew that he had been associated with Garthwait, must have known that his voice was easily recognisable; if he had been on such friendly terms with the hotel garrison as his approach and reception seemed to prove, he seemed to be taking an insane risk in coming back to see them after having been caught in his duplicity. Or was it something more than an insane risk? The Saint realised that unless that action were absolutely insane, the danger might be transferred to himself. He had to catch up with the development and put himself in front of it again, quickly. He still wanted a cigarette. . . .

"Going for a walk?" said a quiet voice at his elbow. "Mind if I come with you?"

He had set off to walk down to the village almost automatically, remembering a tobacconist's shop that he had noticed on his earlier stroll; and he had been concentrating so fiercely on his new problem that for the instant his mind had let slip the knowledge that he was under very thinly veiled surveillance.

"I'm only going out for some cigarettes," he said.

"That's just what I want," replied Captain Voss blandly.

For a moment Simon coldly considered whether he should pick up the wizened little man and throw him forcefully over Larkstone Point into the sea; but he controlled himself. He did only want a packet of cigarettes just then, and it would be time enough to start throwing his weight about when he had something more important on hand. But he stopped a little way down the hill to make a pretence of tying his shoelace, and looked back at the hotel. The big black-haired man, Kane, was sitting outside now, exactly as Voss had been sitting, turning the pages of the same newspaper. The door was still guarded while Hoppy remained inside-Voss must have given some signal to call out the reserve watchdog when he left his post.

Simon bought a packet of cigarettes, while Voss made a similar purchase, and turned back up the hill. He was walking slowly, but his brain was tearing along, trying to place itself inside the minds of at least three people at once. In spite of that, while he had built up and demolished a score of theories, he hadn't a single settled hypothesis standing at the end of this quarter of an hour's walk.

Someone else had thought ahead of him-he saluted the fact grimly as he came up to the door of the inn again. The lawyer's car was still standing outside, but the man himself was not in sight. Jeffroll was. He was standing beside Kane, watching them approach; and he nodded as the Saint came up.

"Good morning, Mr. Tombs-could you spare me a moment?"

"Any number," said the Saint coolly.

At that moment he was tense and alert, keyed to a hair-trigger watchfulness, although there was not a trace of uneasiness to be read on his brown face.

"Come into the office," said Jeffroll.

Simon realised that his face was curiously strained and haggard, his mouth twitching unconsciously as it had been the previous evening. Whatever this conversation was to be about, quite definitely it held something that the Saint hadn't included in any of his theories.

Perhaps that was the principal reason why Simon Templar's vigilance relaxed at that crucial moment. He had shrewdly summarised Jeffroll as a man who would never be a good actor, and he knew that that drawn anxiety was utterly genuine. He followed the landlord through the lounge and the curtains behind the bar, with his imagination whirling through a fresh burst of frantic effort to encompass this new and unexpected twist, but without the same grim vigilance, although he knew that Voss had come in also and was following behind him. That is, and ever after was, the only excuse he could make for himself; and the mistake have cost him his life.

Jeffroll opened the door of the office, and stood aside for the Saint to go in. Simon went in with a languid stride-Port-more and Weems were there, but the lawyer was surprisingly absent. Then something hard jabbed into his back, and he began to appreciate his error.

"Put up your hands."

It was Jeffroll's voice, behind him, speaking with a half-hysterical menace that held the Saint studiously motionless where a more callous and seasoned intonation might have encouraged him to lazy backchat or even a swift attempt to retrieve the situation. But he was old enough in outlawry to know that the innkeeper's forefinger was as uncertain on the trigger as only the finger of a panic-stricken man can be; and he stood very still.

The weight of his automatic came off his hip pocket; and then he was pushed forward. Only then, when he could turn round and see Jeffroll's face, and keep a wary eye on the man's reactions, did he venture to indulge in any conversational amenities.

"Bless my soul," he remarked mildly. "Do you know, for a moment I thought you were going to kiss me."

Major Portmore reached down under the desk, where he was sitting, and brought up the shot-gun which he had been carrying in the wood that morning.

"Get over against the wall and shut up," he ordered harshly.

Simon got over against the wall.

"Now then," said Jeffroll, over the sights of his revolver, "where is Julia?"

The Saint's mouth hardened as if it had been turned to stone. Then that was the explanation of the landlord's strange whiteness. Ideas drummed through his brain-Hoppy Uniatz asleep, Garthwait who had escaped while he was away, the lawyer's visit. . . . But he scarcely had time to pin down one of those speeding flashes of fact before Jeffroll's voice was shrilling into his ears again.

"Hurry up, damn you! I'm going to count up to ten. If you haven't answered by that time"

"What happens?" asked the Saint, in his quietest voice. "You can hang yourself off that beam without bothering to shoot me-or would you rather have it done legally? And where does it get you, anyhow?"

Portmore nodded.

"That's right," he said impersonally. "I told you shooting was too quick, Jeffroll. Voss-Weems-you tie him up. I'll see if I can make him talk."

Weems got up limply out of his chair and produced a coil of wire. The Saint's arms were twisted behind his back, and the wrists quickly and efficiently bound; then his ankles were similarly treated. Jeffroll's mouth worked as if he was tempted to refuse interference and stick to his original threat, but he said nothing.

Portmore got up and came round the desk. He handed the shot-gun over to Voss and stood in front of the Saint.

"Will you answer that question, or have I got to thrash it out of you?" he demanded.

Simon looked at him steadily. Placed as he was, it required a superhuman effort to hold back the obvious defiance. Only the fact that he could understand and sympathise with the feelings of his inquisitors helped him to check his temper -that, and the knowledge that the same liberties could not be taken with a crazed amateur that could be taken with dispassionate professionals.

"Don't you think it might have been worth while asking me the question in a normal manner, before you were reduced to all this Lyceum stuff?" he replied evenly.

For a second they were taken aback; then Portmore blustered back into the breach.

"All right-if you're going to answer the question, you can answer it now."

"I haven't the vaguest notion where Julia is," said the Saint immediately. "But I expect Garthwait could tell us."

"Because he helped you take her away," chattered Jeffroll.

"You're wrong there," said the Saint, as equably as he could. "I've told you that I had nothing to do with it. Will you tell me when you think she was taken?"

The landlord's white tragic face was in grotesque contrast to the murderousness of his eyes.

"You know that. You let Garthwait out of this office-you only pretended to fight him because you thought we'd be taken in by you. You took her away between you, last night. You took your car out of the garage----"

"You saw that when you came out to drive a lorryload of earth from your tunnel down to the quay and tip it into the harbour," said the Saint.

If he had expected to cause a sensation with that blunt challenge, he was disappointed. Not one of the men showed any more reaction than if he had shown that he knew the hotel had a thatched roof; and Jeffroll babbled on: "You took her away in your car, and then Garthwait telephoned this morning-------"

"This is wasting time," snarled Voss. "Let him do the talking, old man; and if he doesn't talk we'll see what we can do to make him."

"I'm waiting for a chance to talk," retorted the Saint curtly. "I guess there are plenty of explanations to be made, and I don't want to waste time either. I'll put my cards on the table and trade them for yours, if you can stop making damn fools of yourselves for five minutes."

"Get on with it, then," said Portmore. "And don't call me a damn fool again, or I'll hurt you."

Simon looked him in the eyes.

"Hitting a man who can't hit you back would naturally prove you weren't a damn fool, wouldn't it?" he said icily.

"Oh, leave him alone, Portmore," drawled Weems. "Let's hear what he's got to say first."

"Thanks." Simon held the Major's gaze as long as the other would meet it; then he relaxed against the wall. "What I've got to say won't take long. To start with, my name isn't Tombs. It's Templar-Simon Templar. You may have read about me in the newspaper sometime. I'm called the Saint."

This time he did get a reaction; but for about the first time in his life he did not pause to bask in the scapegrace glow which his own notoriety usually gave him.

"I came down here because I heard there was something mysterious going on, and poking my nose into mysterious goings-on is my business. I'd never met Garthwait in my life, never heard of him, till we had that argument in the bar last night and I pushed his face in. I know most of the crooks in this country, but I can't know all of them. I came prowling about last night because I heard noises, and I found Garthwait tied up in here-----"

"And let him out."

"No. I admit it was my fault that he got out, but it was unintentional. I opened the door with a pair of wirecutting pliers, and I left them behind, accidentally, when I went out again. Before that, he'd told me that he was supposed to meet a guy on the Axminster road, and that this guy would give me ten thousand quid to let him loose--from the way he talked he seemed to think I was one of your party. I pushed off to keep the date with this guy------"

"And he gave you ten thousand pounds to let Garthwait go," said Voss flatly.

Simon shook his head.

"He didn't-for one reason, because he was a bit wiser in sin than you fellows, and he recognised me."

"But you'd have done it if he had given you ten thousand pounds."

"I don't know," said the Saint candidly. "It isn't my party anyhow, and I've a pretty open mind; but on the whole I doubt it. Anyway the question doesn't arise. I went out to keep this date because I was hoping to collect some more information on this racket you've got here. On account of the guy on the road recognising me, I didn't get much more than a couple of bullets whizzing past my ear; but I did hear his voice, and I've heard it again this morning. I can't help it if you think this is a tall story, but the guy on the road- Garthwait's pal-was your lawyer friend who just called."

There was a moment's silence; and then Weems sniffed loudly.

"Oh, quate," he said; and Simon Templar, who reckoned that he himself could do almost anything with his voice, had to acknowledge that he had never heard such a quintessence of sneeringly bored incredulity expressed in two syllables.

"You're the worst liar I've ever listened to," rasped Portmore, more crudely. "Why, you bloody crook!-Yestering told us you'd probably have some slippery story----"

"I notice he didn't stay to listen to it," said the Saint.

For a second he had them again; and in that second he got several things straight. Yestering hadn't taken such an insane risk after all-the lawyer had simply come to the hotel with two strings to his bow and an arrow on each of them, ready to use whichever one his reception told him to. If it had been hostile, he would have known at once that the Saint really was in cahoots with the inn garrison; but Julia Trafford would still remain as an effective hostage. The reception having been friendly, Yestering would have realised that the Saint was sitting in with a lone hand: to pass on the job of getting rid of him to Jeffroll & Co. was the most elementary tactical development. But there was one thing the lawyer had forgotten-or, rather, had never known about-one cogent argument that might still be thrown in in time to break the back of Jeffroll's insensate vengefulness before his fear drove him too far beyond the reach of reason. Seizing his momentary advantage without relaxing a fraction of his iron restraint, the Saint used it.

"I can give you a certain amount of proof," he said. "It doesn't back up every word I say, but it's something. I didn't come down here entirely off my own bat. I was asked to come-by someone on the spot who was definitely worried about what was going on."

"Who was that?" asked Voss sceptically.

"Julia."

They stared at him hesitantly-even Portmore looked doubtful. Then Jeffroll's trembling hand brought up the revolver again.

"That's a lie! Julia didn't know anything"

"That's why she wrote to me," said the Saint. "The letter's in my breast pocket-why don't you read it?"

Portmore took it out and passed it over.

"Is that her writing?"

Jeffroll nodded.

"My God," he said stupidly.

Voss took the letter from him, glanced through it, and handed it to Portmore. They looked at each other rather foolishly. Portmore dropped the letter on the desk in front of Weems, who turned it over with a limp hand and rubbed the place where his chin would have been if he had had a chin. An awkward kind of silence settled upon the congregation and scratched itself reflectively, as Job might have done on discovering a new and hitherto unsuspected boil, Weems was the first to break it.

"That does seem to make things look a little bit different," he admitted, gazing vacantly at the inkwell.

Portmore cleared his throat.

"What was your story again?" he asked.

The Saint repeated it, in greater detail; and this time there were no interruptions. When it was finished, the four men looked at one another almost bashfully, like members of a Civic Reform committee who have caught each other buying nudist magazines. Something compromising had certainly been done. There had, perhaps, been a slight technical departure from the canons of good form and unblemished purity. But nothing, of course, that had not been done with the most impeccable motives-that could not, naturally, be explained away with a few well-chosen words delivered in an austere and dignified and gentlemanly tone.

The other three turned automatically to Jeffroll, tacitly appointing him their spokesman; but perhaps this failure to respond immediately was understandable. The innkeeper had lowered his gun some minutes before, but the strained pallor of his face had altered only in degree.

"Then-then that means Garthwait has got her!" he stammered-. "And if Yestering-if Yestering's gone over to him . . . or he may even have been the man who put Garthwait on to us-nobody else knew. Then it'll all have been for nothing- they'll use our work and divide the money. . . ." Suddenly, absurdly, his weak pathetic eyes turned to the Saint in helpless appeal. "What are we going to do?"

Simon smiled.

"I'd like to help you," he remarked lazily, "but I'm afraid it always cramps my style when I'm tied up."

"Sorry, old boy," drawled Captain Voss, for after all he was an officer and a gentleman, and had once played cricket for Oxford.

He stepped forward to undo the wire; but he had barely started fumbling with it when there was a scutter of quick lurching footsteps in the passage outside, and the door burst open with a crash.

It was the big black-haired man, Kane, who reeled in under the startled eyes of his companions. His shirt was ripped into two great trailing fragments, and he was clutching one side of his head dizzily. A small trickle of blood ran down his cheek from under the heel of his hand. He stared at the scene for a moment and then nodded weakly, sagging against the jamb of the door.

"Good," he said huskily. "We've still got one of the swine, anyhow."

"What the hell are you talking about?" demanded Port-more, with the reaction of his nerves indexed in the unnecessary loudness of his voice. "This fellow's all right-we made a mistake. What's happened?"