The Saint In England

I

Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal unfolded the paper wrapping from a leaf of chewing gum with slow-moving pudgy fingers, and the sleepy china-blue eyes in his pink chubby face blinked across the table with the bland expressionlessness of a doll.

"Of course I know your point of view," he said flatly. "I'm not a fool. I know that you've never done anything which I could complain about if I were just a spectator. I know that all the men you've robbed and" — the somnolent eyes steadied themselves deliberately for a moment — "and killed," he said — "they've all deserved it — in a way. But I also know that, technically, you're the most dangerous and persistent criminal outside of prison. I'm a police officer, and my job is technicalities."

"Such as pulling in some wretched innkeeper for selling a glass of beer at the wrong time, while the man who floats a million-pound swindle gets away on a point of law," Simon Templar suggested gently; and the detective nodded.

"That's my job," he said, "and you know it."

The Saint smiled.

"I know it, Claud," he murmured. "But it's also the reason for my own career of crime."

"That, and the money you make out of it," said the detective, with a tinge of gloomy cynicism in his voice.

"And, as you say, the boodle," Simon agreed shamelessly.

Mr. Teal sighed.

In that stolid, methodical, honest, plodding, unimaginative and uninspired mechanism which was his mind, there lingered the memory of many defeats — of the countless times when he had gone up against that blithe and bantering buccaneer, and his long-suffering tail had been mercilessly pulled, stretched, twisted, strung with a pendant of tin cans and fireworks, and finally nailed firmly down between his legs; and it was not a pleasant recollection. Also in his consciousness was the fact that the price of his dinner had undoubtedly been paid out of the boodle of some other buccaneering foray, and the additional disturbing fact that he had enjoyed his dinner immensely from the first moment to the last. It was very hard for him to reconcile those three conflicting emanations from his brain; and his heavy-lidded eyes masked themselves even deeper under their perpetual affectation of weariness as he rolled the underwear of his spearmint ration into a small pink ball and flicked it across the restaurant tablecloth. He might even have been phrasing some suitable reply which should have comprehended all the opalescent facets of his paradox in one masterly sentence; but at that moment a waiter came to the table.

The chronicler, a conscientious and respectable citizen whose income-tax payments are never more than two years in arrears, hesitates over those last ten words. He bounces, like an inexpert matador on the antlers of an Andalusian bull, upon the horns of a dilemma. All his artistic soul, all that luminescent literary genius which has won him the applause and reverence of the reading world, rises in shuddering protest against that scant dismissal. He feels that this waiter, who rejoiced in the name of Bassanio Quinquapotti, should have more space. He is tempted to elaborate at much greater length the origin and obscure beginnings of this harbinger of fate, this dickey-bird of destiny; to expatiate in pages of elegant verbiage upon the psychological motivations which put him into permanent evening dress, upon his feverish sex life, and upon the atrophied talent which made him such a popular performer on the sackbut at informal Soho soirées. For this waiter who came to the table was the herald of five million golden pounds, the augur of one of the Saint's most satisfactory adventures, and the outrider of yet another of the melancholy journeys of Mr. Teal. With all these things in mind, the sensitive psyche of the historian revolts from that terse unceremonious description — "a waiter came to the table." And only the bloodthirsty impatience of editors and publishers forces him to press on.

"Excuse me, sir," said this waiter (whose name, we insist on recording, was Bassanio Quinquapotti), "but are you Mr. Teal?"

"That's right," said the detective.

"You're wanted on the telephone, sir," said the waiter (Bassanio Quinquapotti).

Mr. Teal got up and left the table. Ulysses, at some time or another, must have got up and left a table with the same limpid innocence, undreaming of the odyssey which lay before him… And the Saint lighted a cigarette and watched him go.

It was one of those rare occasions when Simon Templar's conscience carried no load; when his restless brain was inevitably plotting some fresh audacious mischief, as it always Was, but there was no definite incident in the daily chronicles of London crime which could give Scotland Yard cause to inquire interestedly into his movements; and Chief Inspector Teal was enjoying a brief precarious interlude of peace. At those times the Saint could beguile Mr. Teal into sharing a meal with him, and Mr. Teal would accept it with an air of implacable suspicion; but they would both end their evening with a vague feeling of regret.

On this particular occasion, however, thanks to the egregious Mr. Quinquapotti, the feeling of regret was doomed on one side to be the reverse of vague; but this vision of the future was hidden from Claud Eustace Teal.

He wedged himself into the telephone booth in the foyer of the restaurant with the pathetic trustfulness of a guinea pig trotting into a vivisection ist's laboratory and took up the receiver.

"Teal speaking," he said.

The familiar voice of his assistant at the Yard clacked back at him through the diaphragm. It uttered one sentence. It uttered another.

Once upon a time there was a small non-Aryan happily making mud pies in Palestine with a party of pals. Looking up from his harmless play, this urchin happened to behold the prophet Elisha hiking up towards Bethel, and in a spirit of pure camaraderie heaved a brick at him and encouraged him after the fashion of healthy urchins of all time, saying, "Go up, thou baldhead." Whereupon, to his vast and historic surprise, a brace of she-bears came out of a wood and used him for a quick-lunch bar, along with forty-one of his playmates.

Chief Inspector Teal, it must be confessed, had outgrown the instinct to heave bricks at bald-headed prophets many years ago. In the course of his professional career, indeed, he had even learned to regard them with some reverence, and had, since the supply of kind-hearted she-bears in London is somewhat limited, been detailed at times to protect them from similar affronts. But he was still capable of experiencing some of the emotions that must have assailed that ancient Hebrew guttersnipe as he felt himself, out of a clear sky, being sucked down the gullet of a bear. The voice of Mr. Teal's assistant went on uttering, and the mouth of Mr. Teal opened wider as the recital went on. The milk of human kindness, always an unstable element in Mr. Teal's sorely tried cosmogony, curdled while he listened. By the time his assistant had finished, it would, if Laid aside in a cool place, have turned itself gradually into a piece of cheese.

"All right," he said thickly, at the end. "I'll call you back."

He hung up the receiver and levered himself out of the cabinet. Squeezing his way between the tables on his way back across the restaurant, he was grimly conscious of the Saint's face watching his approach. It was a face that inevitably stood out among the groups of commonplace diners, a lean and darkly handsome face which would have arrested any wandering glance; but it was no less inevitably the face of an Elizabethan buccaneer, lacking only the beard. The lean relaxed figure struck the imagination like a sword laid down among puddings; and for the same reason it was indescribably dangerous. The very clear and humorous blue eyes had a mocking recklessness which could never have stood in awe of man or devil; and Mr. Teal knew that that also was true. The detective's mind went back once again over the times when he had confronted that face, that debonair immaculate figure, those gay piratical blue eyes; and the remembrance was no more comforting than it had been before. But he went back to the table and sat down.

"Thanks for the dinner, Saint," he said.

Simon blew a smoke ring.

"I enjoyed it, too," he remarked. "Call it a small compensation for the other times when everything hasn't been so rosy. I often feel that if only our twin souls, freed from the contagion of this detectivitis which comes over you sometimes—"

"It's a pity you didn't complete the party," Teal said with a certain curious shortness.

The Saint raised his eyebrows.

"How?"

"That American gunman you've been going about with, for instance — what's his name?"

"Hoppy Uniatz? He's gone to the Ring to have a look at some wrestling. Ran into some Yankee grunter he knew over on the other side, who's doing a tour over here; so Hoppy felt he'd better go and root for him."

"Yes?" Teal was jerkily unwrapping a fresh slice of gum, although the wad in his mouth was still putting forth flavour in a brave endeavour to live up to its advertising department. "He wouldn't have gone there alone, of course."

"I think he went with this wriggler's manager and a couple of his clutching partners," said the Saint.

Mr. Teal nodded. Something was happening to his blood pressure — something which had begun its deadly work while he was listening to the voice of his assistant on the telephone. He knew all the symptoms. The movements with which he folded his wafer of naked spearmint and stuffed it into his mouth had a stupendous slothfulness which cost him a frightful effort to maintain.

"Or your girl friend, perhaps — Patricia Holm," Teal articulated slowly. "What's happened to her?"

"She came over all evening dress and went to a party — one of these Mayfair orgies. Apart from that she's quite normal."

"She'd have a good time at a party, wouldn't she?" Teal said ruminatively.

The Saint swilled liqueur brandy around in the bowl of a pear-shaped glass.

"I believe lots of young men do get trampled to death in the stampede when she turns up," he admitted.

"But there'd be enough survivors left to be able to swear she'd been dancing or sitting out with one or other of 'em from the time she arrived till well after midnight — wouldn't there?" Teal insisted.

Simon sat up. For one or two minutes past he had been aware that a change had come over the detective since he returned to the table, and there had been a sudden grittiness in the way that last question mark had been tagged on which he couldn't have missed if he had been stone deaf. He looked Teal over with thoughtful blue eyes.

"Claud!" he exclaimed accusingly. "I believe there's something on your mind!"

For a moment Teal's windpipe tied itself into a knot of indignation which threatened to strangle him. And then, with a kind of dogged resolution, he untied it and waded on.

"There's plenty on my mind," he said crunchily. "And you know what it is. I suppose you've been laughing yourself sick ever since you sat down at the table. I suppose you've been wondering if there were any limits on earth to what you could make me swallow. Well, I've bought it. I've given you your rope. And now suppose you tell me why you think it isn't going to hang you?"

"Claud!" The Saint's voice was wicked. "Are you sure you haven't had too much of this brandy? I feel that your bile is running away with you. Is this—"

"Never mind my bile!" Teal got out through his teeth. "I'm waiting for you to talk about something else. And before you start, let me tell you that I'm going to tear this alibi to pieces if it takes me the rest of my life!"

Simon raised his eyebrows.

"Alibi?" he repeated gently.

"That's what I said."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"No?" Teal meant to be derisive, but the word plopped out of his mouth like a cork out of a bottle. "I'm talking about this precious alibi of yours which accounts for everything that fellow Uniatz and that girl Patricia Holm have been doing all the evening — and probably accounts for all your other friends as well. I mean this alibi you think you've framed me into giving you—"

"What on earth are you talking about?" asked the Saint patiently; and Teal drew another laboured breath.

"I mean," he said, and all the cumulative rancour of five years of that unequal duel was rasping through his voice like a red-hot file — "I mean that you must be thinking it was damned clever of you to get me to have dinner with you on this night of all nights, and keep me here with you from seven o'clock till now, when a dead man was picked up on the Brighton road half an hour ago with your mark on him!"

II

Simon stared at him blankly. And even while he did so, he realized that he was letting the opportunity of a lifetime of Teal-baiting dawdle past him and raise its hat as it went by, without so much as lifting a hand to grab it. To be accused for once of a crime of which he was as innocent as an unborn Eskimo, and to have a made-to-measure alibi presented to him on a plate at the same time, should have presented vistas of gorgeous possibility to warm the heart. But he didn't even see them. He was too genuinely interested.

"Say that again," he suggested.

''You've heard me already," retorted the detective gratingly. "It's your turn now. Well, I'm waiting for it. I like your fairy tales. What is it this time? Did he commit suicide and tie your mark round his neck for a joke? Did the Emperor of Abyssinia do it for you, or was it arranged by the Sultan of Turkey? Whatever your story is, I'll hear it!"

It has been urged by some captious critics of these records that Chief Inspector Teal has rarely been observed in them to behave like a normal detective. This charge the scribe is forced to admit. But he points out that there are very few of these chronicles in which Chief Inspector Teal has had any chance to be a normal detective. Confronted with the slow smile and bantering blue eyes of the Saint, something went haywire inside Mr. Teal. He was not himself. He was overwrought. He gave way. He behaved, in fact, exactly as a man who had been burned many times might have been expected to behave in the presence of fire. But it wasn't his fault; and the Saint knew it.

"Now wait a minute, you prize fathead," Simon answered quite pleasantly. "I didn't kill this bloke—"

"I know you didn't," said Teal, in an ecstasy of elephantine sarcasm. "You've been sitting here talking to me all the time. This fellow just died. He drew your picture on a piece of paper and had heart failure when he looked at it."

"Your guess is as good as mine, Claud," drawled the Saint lazily. "But personally I should say that some low crook is trying to frame me."

"You would, eh? Well, if I were looking for this low crook—"

"You'd come to my address." Simon pushed his cigarette into an ashtray, finished his drink, and spread money on the table to pay the bill. "Well, here I am. You gave me the murder and you gave me the alibi. You thought of this game. Why don't you get on with it? Am I arrested?"

Teal gulped and swallowed a piece of gum.

"You'll be arrested as soon as I know some more about this murder. I know where to find you—"

The Saint smiled.

"I seem to have heard words to that effect before," he said. "But it hasn't always worked out quite that way. My movements are so erratic. Why take a chance? Let me arrest myself. My car's just round the corner, and the night is before us. Let's go and find out some more about this murder of mine."

He stood up; and for some unearthly reason Teal also rose to his feet. An exasperating little bug of uncertainty was hatching out in the detective's brain and starting to dig itself in. He had been through these scenes before, and they had lopped years off his expectation of life. He had known the Saint guilty of innumerable felonies and breaches of the peace, beyond any possible shadow of human doubt, and had got nothing out of it — nothing but a smile of infuriating innocence and a glimmer of mocking amusement in the Saint's eyes, which was not evidence. He was used to being outwitted, but it had never occurred to him that he might be wrong. Until that very moment, when the smile of infuriating innocence was so startlingly absent… He didn't believe it even then — he had reached the stage when nothing that Simon Templar said or did could be taken at its face value — but the germ of preposterous doubt was brooding in his mind, and he followed the Saint out into the street in silence, without understanding why he did it.

"Where did this news come from?" Simon inquired, as he slid in behind the wheel of the great shining Hirondel which was parked close by.

"Horley," Teal replied curtly, and couldn't help adding: "You ought to know."

The Saint made no retort; and that again was unusual. The tiny maggot of incertitude in Teal's brain laid another egg, and he chewed steadily on his remaining sludge of spearmint in self-defensive taciturnity while the long thrumming nose of the car threaded its way at breath-taking speed through the thinning traffic of south London.

Simon kindled a fresh cigarette from the lighter on the dash and thrust the Hirondel over the southward artery with one hand on the wheel and the speedometer quivering around seventy, driving automatically and thinking about other things.

Before that, he had sometimes wondered why such a notorious scapegoat as himself should have been passed over for so long by the alibi experts of the underworld, and he had only been able to surmise that the fear of attracting his own attention was what had deterred them. The man who had set a new precedent this night must either have been very confident or very rash; and the Saint wanted to know him. And there was an edge of quiet steel in the Saint's narrowed eyes as they followed the road in the blaze of his sweeping headlights which indicated that he would have an account to settle with his unauthorized substitute when they met…

Perhaps it was because he was very anxious to learn something more which might help to bring that meeting nearer, or perhaps it was only because the Saint never felt really comfortable in a car unless it was using the king's highway for a race track, but it was exactly thirty-five minutes after they left the restaurant when he swung the car round the last two-wheeled corner and switched off the engine under the blue lamp of Horley police station. For the latter half of the journey Mr. Teal had actually forgotten to chew; but he released his hold on his bowler hat and climbed out phlegmatically enough. Simon followed him up the steps and heard Teal introduce himself to the night sergeant.

"They're in the inspector's office, sir," said the man.

Simon went in at Teal's shoulder and found three men drinking coffee in the bare distempered room. One of them, from his typical bulk and the chair he occupied at the desk, appeared to be the inspector; the second, a grey-haired man in pince-nez and an overcoat, was apparently the police surgeon; the third was a motorcycle patrol in uniform.

"I thought I'd better come down at once," Teal said laconically.

The inspector, who shared the dislike of all provincial inspectors for interference from Scotland Yard, but accepted it as an unfortunate necessity, nodded no less briefly and indicated the motorcycle patrol.

"He can tell you all about it."

"There ain't much to tell, sir," said the patrol, putting down his cup. "Just about two mile from here, it was, on the way to Balcombe. I was on me way home when I saw a car pulled up by the side of the road an' two men beside it carryin' what looked like a body. Well, it turned out it was a body. They said they saw it lyin' in the road an' thought it was someone been knocked down by another car, but when I had a look I saw the man had been shot. I helped 'em put the body in their car and rode in alongside of 'em to the police station here."

"What time was this?" Teal asked him. "About half-past ten, sir, when I first stopped.

It was exactly a quarter to eleven when we got here."

"How had this man been shot?"

It was the doctor who answered:

"He was shot through the back of the head, at close range — probably with an automatic or a revolver. Death must have been instantaneous."'

Mr. Teal rolled his gum into a spindle, pushed his tongue into the middle to shape a horseshoe, and chewed it back into a ball.

"I was told you'd found the Saint's mark on the body," he said. "When was that?"

The inspector turned over the papers on his desk.

"That was when we were going through his things. It was in his outside breast pocket."

He found a scrap of paper and handed it over. Teal took it and smoothed it out. It was a leaf torn from a cheap pocket diary; and on one side of it had been drawn, in pencil, a squiggly skeleton figure whose round blank head was crowned with a slanting elliptical halo.

Teal's heavy eyes rested on the drawing for a few seconds, and then he turned and held it out to the Saint.

"And I suppose you didn't do that?" he said.

There was a sudden stillness of incomprehension over the other men in the room, who had accepted Simon without introduction as an assistant of the Scotland Yard man; and Teal glanced back at them with inscrutable stolidity.

"This is the Saint," he explained.

A rustle of astonishment stirred the local men, arid Teal bit on his gum and met it with his own soured disillusion: "No, I haven't done anything clever. He's been with me all the evening. He hasn't been out of my sight from seven o'clock till now — not for five minutes."

The police surgeon blew a bubble in his coffee cup and wiped his lips on his handkerchief, gaping at him stupidly.

"But that's impossible!" he spluttered. "The body was still warm when I saw it, and the pupils contracted with atropine. He couldn't have been dead three hours at the outside!"

"I expected something like that," said the detective, with sweltering restraint. "That's all it wanted to round off the alibi."

Simon put the torn scrap of paper back on the inspector's desk. It had given him a queer feeling, looking at that crude sketch on it. He hadn't drawn it; but it was his. It had become too well known for him to be able to use it very often now, for the precise reason which Mr. Teal had overlooked — that when that little drawing was found anywhere on the scene of a crime, there was only one man to search for. But it still had its meaning. That childish haloed figure had stood for an ideal, for a justice that struck swiftly where the law could not strike, a terror which could not be turned aside by technicalities: it had never been used wantonly… The three local men were staring at him inquisitively, more like morbid sightseers at a sensational trial than professional sifters of crime; but the Saint's gaze met them with an arctic calm.

"Who was this man?" he asked.

The inspector did not answer at once, until Teal's shifting glance repeated the question. Then he turned back to the things on his desk.

"He had a Spanish passport — nothing seems to have been stolen from him. The name is — here it is — Enrique. Manuel Enrique. Age thirty; domicile, Madrid."

"Occupation?"

The inspector frowned over the booklet.

"Aviator," he said.

Simon took out his cigarette case, and his eyes travelled thoughtfully back to the drawing which was not his. It was certainly rather squiggly.

"Who were these men who picked him up on the road?"

Again the inspector hesitated, and again Teal's attitude repeated the interrogation. The inspector compressed his lips. He disapproved of the proceedings entirely. If he'd had his way, the Saint would have been safely locked away in a cell in no time — not taking up a cross-examination of his own. With the air of a vegetarian being forcibly fed with human flesh, he picked up a closely written report sheet.

"Sir Hugo Renway, of March House, Betfield, near Folkestone, and his chauffeur, John Kellard," he recited tersely.

"I suppose they didn't stay long."

The inspector leaned back so that his chair creaked.

"Do you think I ought to have arrested them?" he inquired ponderously.

The doctor smirked patronizingly and said: "Sir Hugo is a justice of the peace and a permanent official of the Treasury."

"Wearing top hat and spats?" asked the Saint dreamily.

"He was not wearing a top hat."

The Saint smiled; and it was a smile which made Mr. Teal queerly uneasy. The little beetle of dubiety in his mind laid another clutch of eggs and sat on them. In some way he felt that he was losing his depth, and the sensation lifted his temperature a degree nearer to boiling point.

"Well, Claud," the Saint was saying, "we're making, progress. I arrested myself to come down here, and I'm always ready to go on doing your work for you. Shall I charge myself, search myself, and lock myself up in a cell? Or what?"

"I'll think it over and let you know," said the detective jaggedly.

"Go on a fish diet and give your brain a chance," Simon advised him.

He trod on his cigarette end and buttoned his coat; and his blue eyes went back to Mr. Teal with a level recklessness of challenge which was like a draught of wind on the embers of Teal's temper.

"I'm telling you again that I don't know a thing about this bird Manuel Enrique, beyond what I've heard here. I don't expect you to believe me, because you haven't that much intelligence; but it happens to be the truth. My conscience is as clean as your shirt was before you put it on—"

"You're a liar," brayed the detective.

"Doubtless you know your own laundry best," said the Saint equably; and then his eyes chilled again. "But that's about all you do know. You're not a detective — you're a homing pigeon. When in doubt, shove it on the Saint — that's your motto. Well, Claud, just for this once, I'm going to take the trouble to chew you up. I'm going to get your man. I've got a quarrel with anyone who takes my trade-mark in vain; and the lesson'll do you some good as well. And then you're going to come crawling to me on your great fat belly—"

In a kind of hysteria, Teal squirmed away from the sinewy brown forefinger which stabbed at his proudest possession.

"Don't do it!" he blared.

"— and apologize," said the Saint; and in spite of himself, in spite of every obdurately logical belief he held, Chief Inspector Teal thought for a moment that he would not have liked to stand in the shoes of the man who ventured to impersonate the owner of that quiet satirical voice.

III

March house, from one of the large-scale ordnance maps of which Simon Templar kept a complete and up-to-date library, appeared to be an estate of some thirty acres lying between the village of Betfield and the sea. Part of the southern boundary was formed by the cliffs themselves, and a secondary road from Betfield to the main Folkestone highway skirted it on the northwest. The Saint sat over his maps with a glass of sherry for half an hour before dinner the following evening, memorizing the topography — he had always been a firm believer in direct action, and, wanting to know more about a man, nothing appealed to him with such seductive simplicity as the obvious course of going to his house and taking an optimistic gander at the scenery.

"But whatever makes you think Renway had anything to do with it?" asked Patricia Holm.

"The top hat and spats," Simon told her gravely. He smiled. "I'm afraid I haven't got the childlike faith of a policeman, lass, and that's all there is to it. Claud Eustace would take the costume as a badge of respectability, but to my sad and worldly mind it's just the reverse. From what I could gather, Hugo wasn't actually sporting the top hat at the time, but he seems to have been that kind of man. And the picture they found on the body was rather squiggly — as it might have been if a bloke had drawn it in a car, traveling along… I know it's only one chance in a hundred, but it's a chance. And we haven't any other clue in the whole wide world."

Hoppy Uniatz had no natural gift of subtlety, but he did understand direct action. Out of the entire panorama of human endeavour, it was about the only thing which really penetrated through all the layers of bullet-proof ivory which protected his brain. Detaching his mouth momentarily from a tumbler of gin nominally diluted with ginger ale, he said: "I'll come wit' ya, boss."

"Is it in your line?" asked the Saint.

"I dunno," Hoppy confessed frankly. "I ain't never done no boiglary. Whadda we have to wear dis costume for?"

Patricia looked at him blankly.

"What costume?"

"De top hat an' spats," said Hoppy Uniatz.

The Saint covered his eyes.

Six hours later, braking the Hirondel to a smooth standstill under an overarching elm where the road touched the northwest boundary of March House, Simon felt more practically cautious about accepting Hoppy's offer of assistance. On such an expedition as he had undertaken, a sportive elephant would certainly have been less use; but not much less. All the same, he" had no wish to offend Mr. Uniatz, whose proud spirit was perhaps unduly sensitive on such points. He swung himself out into the road, detached the spare wheel, and opened up the tool kit, while Hoppy stared at him puzzledly.

"This is where you come in," the Saint told him flatteringly. "You're going to be an unfortunate motorist with a puncture, toiling over the wheel."

Mr. Uniatz blinked at him dimly.

"Is dat part of de boiglary?" he asked.

"Of course it is," said the Saint unscrupulously. "It's probably the most important part. You never know when some village slop may come paddling around these parts, and if he saw a car standing by the road with nobody in it he'd naturally be suspicious."

Hoppy reached round for his hip flask and nodded.

"Okay, boss," he said. "I get it. If de cop comes while you're gone, I give him de woiks."

"You don't do anything of the sort," said the Saint wearily. "They don't allow you to kill policemen in this country. What you do is to give your very best imitation of a guy fixing a flat. You might possibly get into conversation with him. Talk sentimentally about the little woman at home, waiting for her man. Make him feel homesick and encourage him to push on. But you don't give him de woiks."

"Okay, boss," repeated Hoppy accommodatingly. "I'll fix it."

"God help you if you don't," said the Saint harrowingly and left him to it.

The frontier of the March House estate at that point consisted of a strong board fence about eight feet high topped with three lines of barbed wire carried on spiked iron brackets beetling outwards at an angle: the arrangement was effective enough to have checked any less experienced and determined trespasser than the Saint, and even Simon might have wasted some time over it if it had not been for the overhanging elm under which he had thoughtfully stopped his car. But by balancing himself precariously on the side of the tonneau and leaping upwards, he was able to get a fingerhold on one of the lower branches; and he swung himself up onto it as if Tarzan had been his grandfather.

Finding his way through the tree, in the dark, was not quite so easy; but he managed it more or less silently, and dropped from another branch onto a mat of short undergrowth on the inside of the fence.

From there, while the muffled mutterings of Hoppy Uniatz wrestling with a wheel drifted faintly to his ears, he surveyed the lay of the land ahead of him. He was in a spinney of young trees and brushwood; barred here and there with the boles of older trees similar to the one by,which he had made his entrance; a half-moon, peeping fitfully between squadrons of cirrus cloud, gave his night-hunter's eyes enough light to make out that broad impression and at the same time suggested an open space some distance farther on beyond the coppice. The house itself stood roughly in the same direction, according to his map-reading; and with a fleeting smile for the complete craziness of his intentions he began to pick his way through the scrub towards it.

A small bird let out a startled squeak at his feet and went whirring away into the dark, and from time to time he heard the rustlings of diminutive animal life scurrying away from his approach; but he encountered no pitfalls or trip wires or other unpleasant accidents. The clear space ahead was farther away than he had thought at first, and as he went on he seemed to make very little progress towards it. Presently he understood why, when he broke out through a patch of thinner shrubbery into what seemed to be a long narrow field laid out broadside to his route: twenty yards away, on the other side, was a single rank of taller trees linked by what appeared to be another fence — it was this wall of shadow and line of lifting tree trunks which he had never seemed to come any nearer to as he threaded his way through the spinney.

As he crossed the field and came close to this inner boundary, he saw that it was not a fence, but a loosely grown hedge about six feet high. He was able to see this without any difficulty because when he was still a couple of yards away the pattern of it was suddenly thrown up in silhouette by the kindling of a light behind it. At first his only impression was that the moon had chosen that moment for one of its periodical peeps from behind the drifting flotillas of cloud. Then, very quickly, the light flared up brighter. He saw the patchwork shadow of the hedge printed on his own clothes, and instinctively ducked behind the sheltering blackness of the nearest tree. And as he did so he became aware that the humming noise he had been hearing had grown much louder.

It was a noise which had been going on, very faintly, for some time; but he had thought nothing of it. A car passing on another road half mile away might have caused it, and a subconscious suggestion of the same car drawing nearer had prevented him paying much attention to the first increase in its volume. But at this moment it had swelled into a steady drone that was too powerful and unvarying for any ordinary car to make, rising to the indefinable borderline of assertiveness at which his sense of hearing was jolted into sitting up and taking notice. He listened to it, frowning, while it grew to sharp roar — and then stopped altogether.

The Saint remained as still as the tree beside which he stood, as if he had been an integral part of it, and looked out over the hedge at the field where the light was. Rising a little oh his toes, he was able to get a clear view of it and see the cause of the light.

A double row of flares was being kindled in the field, like a file of tiny brilliant bonfires — with a sudden jerk of understanding, he remembered other days in his life, and knew what they were. Mounds of cotton waste soaked in petrol or paraffin. Even while he watched, the last of them was lighted: a reddish glow danced in the dark, licked up into a tentative flame, and spring suddenly into blazing luminance. The shadow of the man who had lit it stretched out in a sudden long bar of blackness into the surrounding gloom where the light exhausted itself. The twin rank of flares was complete, forming a broad lane of light from northwest to southeast, six flares to each side, two hundred yards long at a rough guess. The dimension of the field beyond that was lost in the darkness which lapped the light.

Over his hear there was a rush of air and a dying hiss of wind as though a monstrous bird sighed across the sky. Looking upwards, he saw a shadow like a great black cross diving against the hazy luminousness of the clouds, barely skimming the tree tops: it plunged into the lane of light, gathering shape and detail — flattened out, bumped once, and landed.

Almost at the same moment the nearer flares began to flicker and die down. One of them went out; then another…

"Never again, so long as I live, will I be rude to luck," the Saint said to Patricia Holm, much later. "For every dozen minor troubles the little lady gives us, somehow or other she manages to let you draw three to a straight flush and fill your hand — once or twice in a lifetime."

He stood, fascinated, and watched the flares going out. Fifteen minutes earlier, he might have run into no end of trouble, without profit to himself or anybody else; fifteen minutes later, there might have been nothing whatever to see; only the blind gods of chance had permitted him to arrive at the exact moment when things were happening. In the outer glow of the farthest flare he saw a man attaching himself to the tail of the aeroplane and beginning to push it farther into the darkness; in a few seconds he was joined by the pilot, unidentifiable in helmet and goggles and leather coat. The engine had been switched off as the ship touched the deck, and the last scene of the drama was played out in utter silence. The two men wheeled the machine away, presumably into some invisible hangar: the last flare wavered and blinked, and the fitful gloom of the night came down once again upon the scene.

Simon Templar drew a long deep breath and stepped back out of the shadow of his tree. Of all the sins which he might have accused the top hat and spats of Sir Hugo Renway of camouflaging, ordinary smuggling was the last; but he was always accessible to new ideas.

In this case the most obvious course which presented itself was a further and yet more sleuthlike investigation into the topography and individual peculiarities of March House; and with the sublime abandon of the congenitally insane he proposed to pursue the said course without delay. The last flare was finally extinguished, and the peaceful darkness settled once more upon the field. As far as anyone outside the estate could have told, the aeroplane had flown on across the Channel — if any reflected glow of light had been visible beyond the belt of woodland through which he had passed, and the high fence beside the road, it could hardly have attracted any ordinary citizen's attention, and it had lasted such a short time that there would have been nothing particularly remarkable about it anyway. But to anyone who had been privileged to witness the performance from the inside, the whole thing was highly furtive and irregular, especially at the country house of a justice of the peace and permanent Treasury official; and the Saint could see nothing for it but to intrude.

And it was at that psychological moment that the moon, to whose coy tactics we have already had occasion to refer, elected once again to say peekaboo to the slumbering world.

Simon Templar had owed his life to many queer things, from opening a window to dropping a cigarette, but he had never owed it before to such a rustic combination of items as a flirtatious moon and a rabbit. The rabbit appeared about one second after the moon, by lolloping out of a bush into the pool of twilight which the moon provided between two trees. The Saint had been so absolutely immobile in his observation post by the tree trunk that it could never even have noticed him: it had simply been attracted by the lighting effects provided in the adjoining field, and, being a bunny of scientific appetites and an inquisitive turn of mind, it had suspended its foraging for a space to explore this curious phenomenon. Simon saw the moving blur of it out of the corner of his eye before he realized what it was — and froze instinctively back into motionlessness almost before he had begun to move. Then he saw the rabbit clearly and moved again. A dry leaf rustled under his foot, and the rabbit twitched its nose and decided to abandon its cosmic investigations for that evening.

But it didn't lollop back into the bush from which it had emerged. Perhaps it had a date with some loose-moraled doe in the next parish and had merely paused to admire the wonders of nature on its way to more serious business or perhaps it had only heard news of some fresh young lettuces sprouting in the kitchen gardens of March House; only its reincarnation in the shape of a theosophist will ever tell. But at all events, it pushed on instead of turning back. It made a rapid hopping dive for the nearest gap in the hedge through which Simon himself had been preparing to pass.

And it died.

There was a momentary flash of blue flame, and the rabbit kicked over backwards in a dreadful leap and lay twitching in the patch of moonlight.

IV

Simon turned it over with his foot: it was indubitably one of the deadest rabbits in the county of Kent. Then he took a tiny flashlight from his pocket and examined the hedge with great caution. There were lines of gleaming copper wire strung through it at intervals of about six inches and rising to a height of six feet above the ground — if he had not stopped to watch the rabbit he could not have helped touching one of them.

The Saint pushed a hand somewhat unsteadily across his forehead and turned his attention to the tree. But there was no chance there of repeating his Tarzan impersonation, for there were similar copper wires coiled round the trunk to a greater height than he could reach. Without rubber gloves and insulated wire cutters he could go no farther; and he had no doubt that the same high-voltage circuit continued all the way round the landing field and enclosed everything else that might be interesting to look at.

Twenty minutes later he dropped out of another tree into the road beside his car and found Hoppy Uniatz sitting on the running board and gazing disconsolately at an inadequate hip flask which had long since run as dry as a Saharan water hole.

"Hi, boss," said Mr. Uniatz, rising stiffly from his unprofitable meditations. "Dijja get de dough?"

Simon shook his head, lighting a cigarette in his cupped hands.

"I didn't get to first base," he said. "A rabbit stopped me." He saw a vacuous expression of perplexity appear on Mr. Uniatz's homely dial and extinguished his lighter with a faint grin. "Never mind, Hoppy. Pass it up. I'll tell you all about it next year. Let's get back to London."

He slid into the driving seat; and Mr. Uniatz put his flask away and followed him more slowly, glancing back doubtfully over his shoulder with a preoccupied air. As Simon pressed the starter, he coughed.

"Boss," said Mr. Uniatz diffidently, "is it oke leavin' de cop here?"

"Leaving the which?" ejaculated the Saint limply.

"De cop," said Mr. Uniatz.

Simon pushed the gear lever back into neutral and gazed at him.

"What are you talking about?" he inquired.

"Ya see, boss," said Mr. Uniatz, with the manner of Einstein solving a problem in elementary arithmetic, "de tire wasn't flat."

"What tire?" asked the Saint heroically.

"De tire you told me to change," explained Hoppy. "Ya told me to fix de flat, but it wasn't."

The Saint struggled with his vocabulary in an anguished silence, seeking words in which he might deal suitably with the situation; but before he had counted all the syllables in the phrases he proposed to use, Mr. Uniatz was ploughing on, as if determined, now that he had started, to make a clean breast of the matter.

"Well, boss, I put back de wheel an' sat down to wait for de cop. After a bit he rides up on a bicycle. 'Hi-yah, guy,' he says, 'whaddaya doin' here?' So I tells him I was fixin' a flat, but it wasn't. 'Well, whaddaya waitin' for?' he says. So I remembers what ya tells me, boss, an' I says: 'I'm t'inkin' of de little woman back home, waitin' for her man.' 'Ya big bum,' he says, 'ya drunk.' "

"I'll bet he didn't," said the Saint.

"Well, it was sump'n like dat," said Hoppy, dismissing the quibble, "only he talked wit' an accent."

"I see what you mean," said the Saint. "And what did you do?"

"Well, boss, I hauls off an' gives him a poke in de jaw."

"And what does he say to that?"

"He don't say nut'n, boss." Mr. Uniatz jerked a nicotine-stained thumb backwards at an undistinguishable quarter of the night. "I tucks him up in de bushes an' leaves him. Dat's what I mean, is it oke leavin' him here," said Hoppy, harking back to his original problem.

Simon Templar fought with his soul for a short time without speaking. If he had followed his most primitive instincts, there would probably have been a late lamented Mr. Uniatz tucked up in the bushes alongside the sleeping rural constable; but the Saint's sense of civic responsibility was improving.

"I guess we'll leave him," he said at length. "It can't make things any worse."

He drove back to London in, a thoughtful frame of mind. It was one of those times when the hundredth chance turned up in magnificent vindication of all harebrained enterprise; and when the established villain was a man in the position of Sir Hugo Renway, the Saint was inclined to have a few things to think about. There were only two forms of smuggling in which the rewards were high and the penalties heavy enough to justify such extreme measures as the murdered airman on the Brighton road and that lethally electrified wire fence at March House — it is curious that the Saint was still far from reading the real interpretation into the facts he knew.

The wandering policeman whom Hoppy Uniatz had poked in de jaw was a complication which had not been allowed for in his plan of campaign as seriously as it might; and he was not expecting the repercussions of it to reach him quite so quickly as they did.

He put the Hirondel back in its garage at about a quarter to four and walked round to his apartment on Piccadilly. A sleepy night porter took them up in the lift: he was a new employee of the building whom the Saint had not seen before, and Simon made a "mental note to learn more about him at an early date — he had found it a very sound principle to enlist the sympathies of the employees in any such building where he lived, for there were other detectives besides Mr. Teal who had visualized a cast-iron arrest of the Saint as a signpost to promotion. But he was not thinking of doing anything about it at that hour, and his mind was too much occupied with other matters to notice that the man looked at him with more than ordinary curiosity as he got in.

His apartment lay at the end of a short corridor. He strolled innocently towards it, taking out his key, with Hoppy following him; and he was on the point of putting his key in the lock when a voice that was only too familiar spoke behind him:

"Do you mind if we come in?"

The Saint turned rather slowly on his heel and looked at the two men who had appeared from somewhere to bar the way back along the corridor — there was something rather solid and purposeful about the way they stood shoulder to shoulder so as to fill the passage, something which put the glint of steel back in his eyes and set his heart ticking a fraction faster. Hoppy's hand was leaping automatically to his hip; but Simon caught it by the wrist and smiled.

"You know you're always welcome, Claud," he murmured. "But you do choose the most Bohemian hours for your visits."

He turned back to the door and unlocked it and led the way into the living room, spinning his hat onto a peg in the hall as he passed through. He took a cigarette from the box on the table and lighted it, facing round with one hand in his pocket and that thoughtful smile still on his lips.

"Well, what's the fun, boys?" he inquired genially. "Has somebody pinched the north side of Oxford Street and do you think I did it, or have you just dropped in to sing carols?"

"Where have you been tonight?" asked Mr. Teal.

His manner was not the manner of a man who had dropped in to sing carols. Even in his wildest flights of whimsy, the Saint had never thought of Chief Inspector Teal as the Skylark of Scotland Yard, but he had known him to look more like an embryonic warbler than he did just then. Simon smiled even more genially and even more thoughtfully and trickled out a lungful of blue smoke.

"We've been on a pub-crawl with Andrew Volstead and Lady Astor, and Hoppy came along to carry the bromo-seltzer."

Teal did not smile.

"If you've got another alibi," he said, "I'd like to hear it. But it had better be a good one."

The Saint pondered for a moment.

"You are getting particular," he said. "A story like that would always have kept you amused for hours in the old days. I suppose you've been taking a correspondence course in this detective business. All right. We haven't been on a pub-crawl. We've been splitting hairs on the dome of St. Paul's and looking for needles in the Haymarket."

Mr. Teal's hands remained in his pockets, but his whole attitude suggested that they were grasping something as heavy as a steam roller.

"Is that all you've got to say?" he demanded hoarsely.

"It'll do for the time being," said the Saint calmly. "That's what I say we've been doing; and what the hell does it matter to you?"

The detective appeared, somehow, in spite of his mountainous immobility, to approach the verge of gibbering. It may seem unkind of the chronicler to mention this, but he is conscientiously concerned to deal only with the bare facts, without apology or decoration. And yet he must admit that Mr. Teal had lately suffered much.

"Now listen," Mr. Teal got out through his teeth. "About half-past eleven tonight the watchman at Hawker's factory, down at Brooklands, was knocked on the head by someone he found prowling around the sheds. When he woke up and raised the alarm, one of the hangars had been forced open and an aeroplane had been stolen!"

Simon tapped his cigarette on the edge of an ashtray. His brain was starting to turn over like an electric motor responding to the touch of a switch, but no hint of that sudden mental commotion could have been seen in his face. His gaze went back to the detective from under quizzically slanting eyebrows.

"It sounds pretty ambitious," he remarked. "But what makes you think I'd be interested?"

"I don't have to think—"

"I know, Claud. You just chew a thistle and your ears flap."

"I don't have to think," Teal said grimly, "when you leave your mark behind you."

The Saint raised one eyebrow a little further.

"Meaning?"

"When the watchman woke up, there was a piece of paper pinned to his coat. There was a drawing on it. It was the same drawing that was found in the pocket of that dead airman last night — Manuel Enrique, It was your mark!"

"Dear me!" said the Saint.

The detective's china-blue eyes were as hard and bright as porcelain. His mouth had disappeared altogether — it was a mere slit in the hardened round chubbiness of his face.

"I suppose you can explain that away," he snapped.

"Of course I can," said the Saint easily. "The same low criminal who was taking my name in vain on the Brighton road last night—"

"Is that all the alibi you've got this time?" Teal asked, with a kind of saw-edged note in his voice.

"More or less," said the Saint. He watched the detective take a second grip on himself, watched a glimmer of tentative relief and triumph creep hesitantly into the angry baby-blue eyes, watched the thinned mouth begin to open for an answer — and added, with a seraphically apologetic smile, at the very last and most devastating instant: "Oh, yes, there was something I forgot to mention. On the way from St. Paul's to the Haymarket I did stop at the Lex Garage off Piccadilly to collect my car; and now I come to think of it, Claud, it must have been exactly half-past eleven."

Mr. Teal blinked. It was not the nervous bashful blink of a gentle botanist being rudely confronted with the facts of mammalian reproduction: it was the dizzy blink of a bather who has made unwary contact with an electric eel. His chest appeared to deflate; then it swelled up again to a point where his coat was straining on its seams.

"You expect me to believe that?" he blared.

"Of course not," said the Saint. "You haven't enough intelligence to save yourself that much time. But you can verify it. Go to the garage and find out. Their records'll show what time I checked out. The night staff'll remember me. Go and ask 'em. Push off and amuse yourself. But if that's all that's on your mind tonight, I'm going to bed."

"You can wait a little longer," retorted Teal. "Half-past eleven isn't the only time I want you to account for."

The Saint sighed.

"What's the rest of it?"

"You seemed rather interested in Sir Hugo Renway last night," Teal said waspily, "so I asked the police down there to keep an eye on his place. I know your methods pretty well by now, and I had an idea you might go there. At half-past one this morning the constable was cycling round the estate when he saw your car — and him!"

"What, Brother Uniatz?" drawled Simon. "Did you see a cop, Hoppy?"

Mr. Uniatz, who had been trying to unlock the cellaret with a piece of bent wire, turned round vacantly.

"Yes, boss," he said.

"Ha!" barked Mr. Teal. It may sound improbable, but that is a close approximation to the noise he made.

"I see one only yesterday," Hoppy elaborated hastily, with the Saint's blue stare scorching through him. "In de Haymarket."

Chief Inspector Teal did not burst. Perhaps it is not actually possible for the human organism to become so inflated with spleen that it explodes into small fragments — the chronicler is inclined to take this as the only plausible reason why his favourite detective did not stand there and pop. But there was something about him which suggested that even the point of a joke might have punctured him into the power of performing that impossible disintegration. He glared at the Saint again with reddening eyes.

"This constable was also knocked on the head," he went on, getting the words out somehow through his contracting larynx; "and when he woke up—"

"The garden gate had been forced open and March House had been stolen," murmured Simon. "I know. The bloke flew off with it in the aeroplane."

"He reported to the local station, and they telephoned me. The other thing I want to know is what you were doing at that time."

"We were driving round and round Regent's Park; and I'll give you half a million pounds if you can prove we weren't!"

The detective bit on his long-forgotten chewing gum with a force that almost fractured his jaw.

"Do you think you can make a monkey out of me?" he roared.

Simon shook his head.

"Certainly not," he replied solemnly. "I wouldn't try to improve on God's creation."

The chronicler has already submitted, perhaps somewhat rashly, his opinion that the human organism is not capable of literally expanding into small and separate pieces under no other influence than the dilation of its own wrath. But he has, fortunately, offered the suggestion that some outside prod might succeed in procuring this phenomenal disruption.

Mr. Teal did not burst, physically. But he performed the psychological equivalent. Moved by a cosmic passion which stronger men than he might have failed lamentably to control, he grasped destiny in both his quivering hands. He did something which he had never in all his life contrived to do before.

"All right," he said throatily. "I've heard all I want to hear tonight. You can tell the rest of it to a jury. I'm arresting you on charges of common assault, burglary, and willful murder."

V

Simon extinguished his cigarette in an ashtray. The ticking of his heart was going faster, but not so very much faster. It was Curious how Teal's ultimate explosion surprised him; curious also that it did not find him unprepared. Perhaps, in his heart of hearts, he had always known that something of the kind must happen, some day. The gay career of Teal-baiting could not go on for ever: it had gone on for a long time, but Mr. Teal was human. There was no more concrete evidence now than there had ever been; but the Saint had a good deal of belated psychological understanding. In Teal's place, he would probably have done the same.

The detective was still speaking, with the same rather frantic restraint and rather frantic consciousness of the awful temerity of what he was going to do:

"I caution you that anything you say now will be taken down and may be used in evidence at your trial."

The Saint smiled. He understood. He deeply sympathized. In Teal's place, he would probably have done the same. But he was not in Teal's place.

"If you want to make a fool of yourself, Claud, I can't stop you," he said; and his left fist leapt out and crashed like a cannon ball into the furrow between Chief Inspector Teal's first and second chins.

The expression of compressed wrathfulness vanished startlingly from the detective's face. For a moment it was superseded by a register of grotesque surprise; and then every other visible emotion was smudged out by a vast blank sleepiness which for once was entirely innocent of pose. Mr. Teal's legs folded up not ungracefully beneath him; he lay down on the floor and went to sleep.

Mr. Teal's mute equerry was starting forward, and his mouth was opening: it is possible that at any moment some human sound might have emerged from that preternaturally silent man, but Simon gave it no-chance. The man was grabbing for his wrists, and the Saint obligingly permitted him to get his hold. Then he planted his left foot firmly in the detective's stomach and rolled over backwards, pushing his foot vimfully upwards as he pulled his wrists down. The man sailed over his head in an adagio flying somersault and hit the carpet with an explosive "wuff!" which any medium-sized dog could have vocalized much better; and Simon somersaulted after him more gently and sat astride his chest. He grasped the man's coat collar in his hands and twisted his knuckles scientifically into the carotid arteries — unconsciousness can be produced in two or three seconds by that method, when employed by a skilful exponent, and Sergeant Barrow's resistance had been considerably impaired already by the force with which his shoulder blades had landed on the floor. It was all over in far less time than it takes to describe; and Simon looked up at Mr. Uniatz, who was prancing about like a puppy with his revolver reversed in his hand.

"Fetch me a towel from the bathroom, Hoppy," he ordered. "And for heaven's sake put that blasted cannon away. How many more times have I got to tell you that this is the closed season for policemen?"

While he was waiting, he handcuffed the two detectives with their own bracelets; and when the towel arrived he tore it into two strips and gagged them.

"Get your hat," he said, when the job was finished. "We're going to travel."

Mr. Uniatz followed him obediently. It may be true, as we have acknowledged, that the higher flights of philosophy and metaphysics were for ever beyond the range of Mr. Uniatz's bovine intellect; but he had an incomparable grip on the fundamentals of self-preservation. Experience had taught him that after an active encounter with the police the advantages of expeditious traveling could be taken for granted — a fact which relieved his brain of much potentially painful exertion.

As they turned into Berkeley Square, he followed a little more hesitantly; and eventually he plucked at the Saint's sleeve.

"Where ya goin', boss?" he asked. "Dis ain't de way to de garage."

"It's the way to the garage we're going to," answered the Saint.

He had automatically ruled out the Hirondel as a conveyance for that getaway — the great red-and-cream speedster was far too conspicuous and far too well known, and it was the car whose description would be immediately broadcast by Mr. Teal as soon as that hapless sleuth had worked the gag out of his mouth and reached the telephone. Simon had another and more commonplace car in reserve, in another garage and another name, which he had laid up some weeks ago with a far-sighted eye to just such a complication as this; and he was inclined to flatter himself on his forethought without undertaking the Herculean labour of hammering the idea into Hoppy's armour-plated skull.

Whether any net was actually spread out for him in time to cross his path, he never knew; certainly he slipped through London without incident, making excellent time over the almost deserted roads in spite of several detours at strategic points where he might have been stopped. He abandoned the car outside the entrance of the Vickers factory on the Byfleet road, where there would soon be a score of other cars parked around it, and one more modest saloon might easily pass unnoticed for days; and walked through the woods to his house as the dawn was breaking. There was no hope that Teal would fail to draw that covert as soon as he had reorganized his forces; but it was a temporary haven, and the Saint had a few items of personal equipment there which he wanted to pick up.

There were sounds of movement in the kitchen when he let himself in at the front door, and in another moment the belligerent walrus-moustached visage of Orace appeared on the opposite side of the hall. Simon threw his hat at him and smiled.

"What's our chance of breakfast, Orace?" he asked.

"Narf a minnit," said Orace expressionlessly and vanished again.

Over the bacon and eggs, golden brown toast and steaming coffee which Orace produced necromantically in very little more than the time he had promised, the Saint's brain was working overtime. For the time being, Teal had been dealt with; but the past tense had no more permanent stability than the haven in which Simon Templar was eating his breakfast. Ahead of those transient satisfactions lay the alternatives of penal servitude or a completed getaway; and he had no spontaneous leaning towards either. He turned them over in his mind like small beetles discovered under a log and decided that he liked them even less. But there was a third solution which took him longer to think over — which, in fact, kept him wrapped in silent concentration until his plate was pushed away and he was smoking a cigarette over a second cup of coffee and Mr. Uniatz intruded his bashful personality again.

Hoppy's brain had not been working overtime, because the hours between one breakfast and the following bedtime were rarely long enough to let it do much more than catch up with where it had left off the previous night. Nevertheless the wheels, immersed in the species of thick soup in which nature had asked them to whizz round, had been doggedly trying to revolve.

"Boss," said Hoppy Uniatz, articulating with some indistinctness through a slice of toast, two ounces of butter, a rasher of bacon, and half an egg, "de cops knows you got dis house."

Simon harked back over some leagues of his own cerebrations and recognized the landmark which Hoppy had contrived to reach.

"That's perfectly true," he remarked admiringly. "Now don't go doing any more of that high-pressure thinking — give your brain a minute to cool off, because I want you to listen to me."

He rang the bell and smoked quietly until Orace answered. Mr. Uniatz, happily absolved from further brainwork, engulfed the rest of the food within his reach and cast longing eyes at a decanter of whisky on the sideboard.

"Orace," said the Saint, "I'm afraid Claud Eustace is after us again."

"Yessir," said Orace phlegmatically.

"You might sound more sympathetic about it," Simon complained. "One of the charges is wilful murder."

"Well, it's yer own thunderin' fault, ain't it?" retorted Orace, unmoved.

The Saint sighed.

"I suppose you're right," he admitted. "Anyway, Hoppy's idea is that we ought to pull an Insull."

"Dat means to take it on de lam," explained Hoppy, clarifying the point.

Orace's faded eyes lost none of their ferocity, but his overhanging moustache twitched.

"If yer can wite 'arf a minnit, sir," he said, "I'll go wiv yer."

The Saint laughed softly and stood up. His hand fell on Orace's shoulder.

"Thanks a lot, you old humbug; but it isn't necessary. You see, Hoppy's wrong. And you ought to know it, after all the years you've been around with me." He leaned back against the mantelpiece, one hand in his pocket, and looked at the two men with eyes that were beginning to twinkle again. "Hoppy reminds me that Teal knows all about this house, but he's forgotten that Teal also, knows I know it. Hoppy thinks we ought to pack our keisters and take it on the lam, but he's for-gotten that that's the very thing Teal is expecting us to do. After all, Claud Eustace has seen me hang it on the limb before… Are you there, Hoppy?"

"Yes, boss," said Mr. Uniatz, after glancing around to reassure himself of the fact.

"It's quite true that you'll probably see some cops skating up the drive before long; but somehow I don't think Claud Eustace will be with them. It'll be almost a formality. They may browse around looking for incriminating relics, but they won't be seriously looking for me — or Hoppy. And that's why none of 'em will ever be great detectives, because this is exactly where Hoppy is going to be — lying snug and low in the secret room off the study, which is one of the things they still don't know about this house."

"Chees!" said Mr. Uniatz, in pardonable awe. "Didja t'ink of all dat while ya was eatin' breakfast?"

The Saint smiled.

"That and some more; but I guess that's enough for your head to hold at one time." He looked at his watch. "You'd better move into your new quarters now — Orace will bring you food and drink from time to time, and I'll know where to find you when I want you."

He steered Hoppy across the hall and into the study, slid back the bookcase beside the desk, and pushed him through the gap in the wall behind it. Framed in the narrow opening, Mr. Uniatz blinked out at him pleadingly.

"Boss," he said, "it's gonna be toisty waitin'."

"Hoppy," said the Saint, "if I think you're going to have to wait long, I'll tell Orace to have a pipeline laid from a distillery right into the room. Then you can just lie down under the tap and keep your mouth open — and it'll be cheaper than buying it in bottles."

He slammed the bookcase into place again and turned round on the last puff of his cigarette as Orace came in.

"You've got to be an Orpen of the Storm, and draw the fire," he said. "But it shouldn't be very dangerous. They've nothing against you. The one thing you must do is get in touch with Miss Holm — let her know all the latest news and tell her to keep in contact. There may be fun and game! for all before this party's over."

"Addencha better 'ide in there yerself, sir?" asked Orace threateningly. "I can look after every-think for yer."

The Saint shook his head.

"You can't look after what I'm going to look after," he said gently. "But I can tell you some more. It won't mean much to you, but you can pass it on to Miss Holm in case she's curious, and remember it yourself in case anything goes wrong." He caught Orace by the shoulders and swung him round. The mocking blue eyes were reckless and wicked; the Saintly smile was as blithe and tranquil as if he had been setting out on a picnic — which, according to his own scapegrace philosophy, he was.

"Down at Betfield, near Folkestone," he said, "there's a place called March House, where a guy called Sir Hugo Renway lives. The night before last, this guy murdered a Spanish airman named Manuel Enrique, on the Brighton road — and left my mark on him. Last night, this same guy pinched an aeroplane out of the Hawker factory over the road — and left my mark on the night watchman. And in the small hours of this morning, an aeroplane which may or may not have been the one that was pinched landed in the grounds of March House. I was there, and I saw it. A few hours back, Claud Eustace Teal tried to run me in for both those efforts.

"I wasn't responsible for either of 'em, but Teal doesn't believe it. Taking things by and large, you can't exactly blame him. But I know better, even if he doesn't; and I'm just naturally curious. I want to know what all this jolly carnival is. about that Renway's trying to tack onto me. And there's one thing you'll notice, Orace, with that greased-lightning brain of yours, which ties all these exciting goings-on together. What is it, Orace?"

The war-like moustache of his manservant bristled.

"Hairyplanes," said Orace brilliantly; and Simon smote him on the back.

"You said it, Horatio. With that sizzling brain of yours, you biff the ailnay on the okobay. Hairyplanes it is. We've got to get to the bottom of this, as the bishop said to the actress; and it strikes me that if I were to fetch out the old Gillette and go hairyplaning — if I blundered into March House as a blooming aviator waiting to be pruned—"

The peremptory zing of the front doorbell interrupted him, and he looked up with the mischief hardening on his lips. Then he chuckled again.

"I expect this is the deputation. Give them my love, Orace — and some of those exploding cigarettes. I'll be seein' ya!"

He reached the window in a couple of strides and swung himself nimbly through. Orace watched him disappear into the dell of bracken at the other end of the lawn and strutted off, glowering, to answer the front door.

VI

There is believed to exist a happy band of half-wits whose fondest faith it is that the life of a government official, the superman to whom they entrust their national destiny, is one long treadmill of selfless toil from dawn to dusk. They picture the devoted genius labouring endlessly over reports and figures, the massive brain steaming, the massive stomach scarcely daring even to call a halt for food. They picture him returning home at the close of the long day, his shoulders still bowed beneath the cares of state, to fret and moil over their problems through the night watches. They are, we began by explaining, a happy band of half-wits.

The life of a government official is very far from that; particularly if he is of the species known as "permanent," which means that he is relieved even of the sordid obligation of being heckled from time to time by audiences of weary electors. His job is safe. Only death, the Great Harvester, can remove him; and even when he dies, the event may pass unnoticed until the body begins to fall apart. Until then, his programme is roughly as follows.

10:30 a.m. Arrive at office in Whitehall. Read newspaper. Discuss night before with fellow officials. Talk to secretary. Pick up correspondence tray. Put down again. 11:30 a.m. Go out for refreshment. 12:30 p.m. Return to office. Practise putting on H. M. carpet.

1:00 p.m. Go out to lunch.

3:00 p.m. Back from lunch. Pick up correspondence tray. Refer to other department.

3:30 p.m. Sleep in armchair.

4:00 p.m. Tea.

4:30 p.m. Adjourn to club. Go home.

As a matter of fact, Sir Hugo Renway was not thinking of his office at all at half-past nine that morning. He was discussing the ravages of the incorrigible green fly with his gardener; but he was not really thinking of that, either.

He was a biggish thin-lipped man, with glossily brushed grey hair and a slight squint. The squint did not make him look sinister: it made him look smug. He was physically handicapped against looking anyone squarely in the face; but the impression he managed to convey was, not that he couldn't, but that he didn't think it worth while. He was looking at the gardener in just that way while they talked, but his air of well-fed smugness was illusory. He was well-fed, but he was troubled. Under that smooth supercilious exterior, his nerves were on edge; and the swelling drone of an aeroplane coming up from the Channel harmonized curiously well with the rasp of his thoughts.

"I don't think none of them new-fangled washes is any good, zir, if you aarsk me," the man was reiterating in his grumbling brogue; and Renway nodded and noticed that the steady drone had suddenly broken up into an erratic popping noise.

The man went on grumbling, and Renway went on pretending to listen, in his bored way. Inwardly he was cursing — cursing the stupidity of a man who was dead, whose death had transformed the steady drone of his own determination into the erratic popping which was going through his own, nerves.

The aeroplane swept suddenly over the house. It was rather low, wobbling indecisively; and his convergent stare hardened on it with an awakening of professional interest. The popping of the engine had slackened away to nothing. Then, as if the pilot had seen sanctuary at that moment, the machine seemed to pull itself together. Its nose dipped, and it rushed downwards in a long glide, with no other accompaniment of sound than the whining thrum of the propeller running free. Instinctively Renway ducked; but the plane sideslipped thirty feet over his head and fishtailed down to a perfect three-point landing in the flat open field beyond the rose garden.

Renway turned round and watched it come to a standstill. He knew at once that the helmeted figure in the cockpit had nothing left to learn about the mastery of an aeroplane. That field was a devil to get into, he had learned from experience; but the unknown pilot had dumped his ship in it with a dead stick as neatly as if he had had a whole prairie to choose from. Enrique had been the same — a swarthy daredevil who could land on a playing card and make an aeroplane do anything short of balancing billiard balls on its tail, whose nerveless brilliance had been so maddeningly beyond the class of all Renway's own taut-strung effort… Renway's hands tensed involuntarily at his sides for a moment while he went on thinking; and then he turned away and began minutely examining some buds of rose-crimson Papa Gontiers as the pilot walked under a rustic arch and came towards him.

"I'm terribly sorry," said the aviator, "but I'm afraid I've had a forced landing in your grounds."

Renway looked at him for a moment. He had a dangerous devil-may-care sort of mouth, which showed very white teeth when he smiled. Enrique had had a smile very much like that.

"So I see," said Renway and returned to his study of rosebuds.

His voice was an epitome of all the mincing rudeness which the English lower classes have been so successfully trained to regard as a symbol of superiority. The Saint would have liked to hit him with a spanner; but he restrained himself.

"I'm terribly sorry," he repeated. "My oil pressure started to drop rather quickly, and I had to come down where I could. I don't think I've done any damage. If you can direct me to the village, I'll arrange to get the machine moved as quickly as possible."

"One of the servants will show you the way."'

Renway looked up with his complacent squint and glanced at the gardener, who put away his pruning knife and dusted his hands.

"It's very good of you," said the Saint; and then an unfortunate accident happened.

He was carrying a valise in one hand, which he had taken out of the machine and brought with him. It could not have been very securely fastened, for at that moment it fell open.

A cascade of shirts, socks, pyjamas, shaving tackle, and similar impedimenta might not have distracted Renway for more than a couple of seconds from his horticultural absorption; but nothing of the kind fell out. Instead, the valise emptied itself of a heavy load of small square tins such as cough lozenges are sold in. The tins did, in fact, carry printed labels proclaiming their contents to be cough lozenges; but one of them burst open in its fall and scattered a small snowfall of white powder over the path.

Simon dropped on his knees and shoveled the tins back with rather unsteady hands, forcing them into the attache case with more haste than efficiency. He scraped the white powder clumsily back into the one which had burst open; and when Renway touched him on the shoulder he jumped.

"Pardon my curiosity," said Renway, with unexpected suaveness, "but you have the most unusual luggage."

Simon laughed somewhat shortly.

"Yes, I suppose it is. I'm the Continental traveller for — er — some patent-medicine manufacturers—"

"I see."

Renway looked back at the aeroplane again; and again his hands tensed involuntarily at his sides. And then, once more, he looked at the Saint. Simon forced the last tin into his case, crammed the locks together, and straightened up.

"I'm awfully sorry to give you so much trouble," he said.

"Not at all." Renway's voice was dry, unnatural. He was aghast at himself, sweating coldly under the arms at the realization of what he was doing; but he spoke without any conscious volition. The jangling of his nerves forced him on, provided the motive power for the fantastic inspiration which had seized him. "In fact, my chauffeur can drive into Folkestone himself and make the necessary arrangements, while you stay here. You can give him instructions; and it's sure to mean a good deal of waiting about. I suppose the authorities will have to be notified…"

He was watching the pilot closely when he uttered that last sentence, although the cast in his eye made him appear to be staring past him; and he did not miss the slight instantaneous tightening of the dangerous mouth.

"Oh, I couldn't possibly let you do that," Simon protested. "I've given you quite enough trouble as it is—"

"Not a bit of it," insisted Renway, still watching him.

He was quite sure now. The pilot stiffened almost imperceptibly — Renway saw the shift off his eyes and the whitening of his knuckles on the hand which clutched the valise, and went on with more pronounced assurance: "It's no trouble at all to me, and my chauffeur has far too little to do. Besides, that landing must have given you one or two bad moments; and I'm sure you wouldn't refuse a drink. Come along up to the house, my dear fellow, and let me "see what I can find for you."

He took the Saint's arm and led him away with a grim cordiality which it would have been difficult to resist — even if Simon had wanted to. They went through a small rockery up to the tennis lawn, across the lawn to a paved terrace, through open French windows into a rather stuffy library.

"Will you have a cigarette — or is it too early for a cigar?"

Simon took a cigarette and lighted it while Renway rang the bell.

"Sit down, Mr. — er—"

"Tombs."

"Sit down, Mr. Tombs."

The Saint sat on the edge of a plush armchair and smoked in silence until the butler answered the bell. Renway ordered drinks, and the butler went out again. The silence went on. Renway went over to a window and stood there, humming unmusically to himself.

"Awkward thing to have happen to you," ventured the Saint.

Renway half turned his head.

"I beg your pardon?"

"I said, it's an awkward thing to have happened to you — oil pressure going down."

"Quite," said Renway and went on humming.

The butler came in with a tray, put it down, and departed. Renway crossed over to it and poured whisky into two glasses.

"Soda?"

"Thanks."

Renway worked the siphon and handed over the drink. Then he took up his own glass; and abruptly, as if he were blurting out something which he had been mustering his determination to say for several minutes, he snapped: "I suppose you don't think I believe that story of yours about being a patent-medicine salesman?"

"Don't you?" said the Saint evasively.

"Of course not. I know cocaine when I see it."

Simon, who had carefully filled all his tins with boracic, wanted to smile. But he glanced apprehensively at the valise, which he had put down beside his chair, and then hardened his face into an ineffective mask.

"But don't worry," said Renway. "I'm not going to tell the police. It's none of my business. I'm only wondering why a fellow like you — clever, daring, a good pilot — why you should waste your time over small stuff like that."

Simon licked his lips.

"It isn't so very small. And what else is there for me to do? There aren't so many jobs going these days for an out-of-work ace. You know yourself that war heroes are two a penny nowadays. I'm desperate enough to take the risk; and I want the money."

"You'll never make a million out of it."

"If you know anything that I can make a million out of, I'll do it.".

Renway swallowed another gulp of whisky and put down his glass. In the last few moments the jangling of his nerves seemed to have risen to a pitch at which anything might crack. And yet it was without the tense wearing raggedness that he had felt before — he had a crazy breathless presentiment of success, waiting for him to grasp if he risked the movement. It had come miraculously, incredibly, literally out of the blue; and it was all personified in the broad-shouldered blue-eyed shape of the dangerous young man whose leather coat filled his armchair. Renway wiped his mouth on a silk handkerchief and tucked it away.

"Tomorrow morning," he said, "an aeroplane will leave Croydon for Paris with about ten tons of gold on board — as a matter of fact, the value will be exactly three million pounds. It is going to be shot down over the Channel, and the gold is going to be stolen. If you were desperate enough, you would be the man to do it."

VII

Simon Templar did not need to act. The peculiar stillness that settled over him called for no simulation. It was as starkly genuine as any expression his face had ever worn.

And far back in the dim detached recesses of consciousness he was bowing down before the ever-lasting generosity of fortune. He had taken that wide sweep out over the sea and choked his engine over the cliffs at the southern boundary of March House, staged his whole subsequent demonstration of guilt and truculence, rolled the dice down the board from beginning to end with nothing more substantial behind the play than a vast open-minded optimism; but the little he knew and the little he had guessed, the entire nebulous theory which had given him the idea of establishing himself as a disreputable airman, was revealed to be so grotesquely inadequate that he was temporarily speechless. His puerile stratagem ought to have gained him nothing more than a glimpse of March House from the inside and a quick passage to the nearest police station; instead of which, it had flung doors wide open into something which even now he could scarcely believe in cold blood.

"It couldn't be done," he said at length.

"It can be done by a few men with the courage to take big chances for a share in three million pounds," said Renway. "I have all the necessary information. I have everything organized. The only thing I need to make it certain is the perfect pilot."

Simon tapped his cigarette.

"I should have thought that was the first thing."

"It was the first thing." Renway drank again. He was speaking with more steadiness now, with a conviction that was strengthening through every sentence; his faded stare weaved endlessly over the Saint's face, changing from one eye to the other. "I had the ideal man; but he — met with an accident. There wasn't time to find anyone else. I was going to try it myself, but I'm not an expert pilot. I have no fighting experience. I might have bungled it. You wouldn't."

Meeting the gaze of those unequally staring eyes, Simon had an eerie intuition that Renway was mad. He had to make a deliberate effort to separate a part of his mind from that precognition while he pieced his scanty facts together again in the light of what Renway had said.

There had been a pilot. That would have been₍Manuel Enrique, who died on the Brighton road. A new pilot swooped down out of the sky, and within twenty minutes was being offered the vacant post. With all due deference to the gods of luck, it seemed as if that new aviator were having a remarkable red carpet laid out for him.

"You don't only need a pilot," said the Saint mechanically. "You need a proper fighting ship, with geared machine guns and all the rest of it."

"There is one," said Renway. "I took it from Hawker's factory last night. It's one of a new flight they're building for the Moravian government. The one I took had been out on range tests, and the guns were still fitted. I also took three spare drums of ammunition. I flew it over here myself — it was the first night landing I've ever made."

It had not been a particularly clean one, Simon remembered; and then he saw the continual tensing and twitching of Renway's hands and suddenly understood much more.

There had been a pilot; but he had — met with an accident. And yet the plot in which he had a vital role could not be given up. Therefore it had grown in Renway's mind to the dimensions of an obsession, until the point had been reached where it loomed up as the needle's eye of an insanely conceived salvation. Although Enrique was dead, the aeroplane had still been stolen: Renway had flown it himself, and the ordeal of that untutored night flight had cut into the marrow of his nerves. Still the goal could not be given up. The new pilot arrived at the crisis of an eight-hour sleepless nightmare of strain — a solution, an escape, a straw which he could grapple even while preserving the delusion that he was a superman irresistibly turning a chance tool to his need. Simon recalled Renway's abrupt defiant plunge into the subject after that long awkward silence, and hypothesis merged into certainty. It was queer, he reflected, how that superman complex, that delusion of being able to enslave human instruments body and soul by the power of a hypnotic personality which usually existed only in the paranoiac's own grandiose imagination, had been the downfall of so many promising criminals.

"You did that?" said the Saint, in a tone which contained exactly the right blend of incredulous admiration and sober awe.

"Of course."

Simon put out his cigarette and helped himself to a second.

"That's a beginning," he said. "But the pilots will be armed — they're in touch with the shore by radio all the way—"

"What is the good of that?" asked Renway calmly. "The conditions aren't the same as they would be in war time. They aren't really expecting to be attacked. They see another aeroplane overtaking them, that's all — there's always plenty of traffic on that route, and they wouldn't think anything of it. Then you dive. With your experience, they'd be an easy target. It ought to be finished in a couple of bursts — long before they could wireless any alarm to the shore. And as soon as their wireless stops, I shall carry on with their report. I have a short-wave transmitter installed in this house, and I have a record of every signal that's been sent out by cross-Channel aircraft for the last month. I know all the codes. The shore stations will never know what's happened until the aeroplane fails to arrive."

The Saint blew out a flick of smoke and kept his eyes on Renway's pale complacent face. It was dawning on him that if Renway was a lunatic, he was the victim of a very thorough and methodical kind of madness.

"There isn't only traffic in the air." he said.

"There's also shipping. Suppose a ship sees what happens?"

Renway made a gesture of impatience.

"My good fellow, you're going over ground that I covered two months ago. I could raise more objections than you know yourself. For instance, all the time the aeroplane is over the Channel, there will be special motorboats cruising off the French and English coasts. One or more of them may possibly reach the scene. It will be part of your job to keep them at a distance by machine-gun fire from the air until all the gold has been secured."

"How do you propose to do that?" persisted the Saint. "You can't lift ten tons of gold out of a wrecked aeroplane in five minutes."

A sudden sly look hooded Renway's eyes.

"That has also been arranged," he said.

He refilled his glass and drank again, sucking in his lips after the drink. As if wondering whether he had betrayed too much already, he said: "You need only be concerned with your own share in the proceedings. Do you feel like taking a part?"

Simon thought for a moment and nodded.

"I'm your man," he said.

Renway remained looking at him for a while longer, and the Saint fancied he could almost see the man's nerves relaxing in the sedative glow of conquest.

"In that case, I shall not need to send for my chauffeur."

"What about my machine?" asked the Saint.

"You can keep it here until you require it again. I have plenty of accommodation, and one of my mechanics can find out the cause of your trouble and put it right."

For a second the Saint's eyes chilled, for no mechanic would take long to discover that there was nothing whatever the matter with the machine in which he had landed. But he answered easily enough:

"That's very good of you."

Renway picked up his valise and took it to a big built-in safe at one end of the room, into which he locked it. He came back blandly, rubbing his hands.

"Your — er — samples will be quite safe there until you need them. Shall we go and attend to your aeroplane?"

They walked out again in the strengthening sunshine, down through the rose garden and across the small field where the Saint had made his landing. Simon felt the dead weight of the automatic in his pocket bumping his hip as he walked, and felt unexpectedly glad of its familiar comfort: the nervous twitching of Renway's hands had finished altogether now, and there was an uncanny inert calm about his sauntering bulk which was frightful to study — the unnatural porcine opaqueness of a man whose mind has ceased to work like other men's minds…

Renway went on talking, in the same simpering monotone, as if he had been describing the layout of an asparagus bed: "I shall know the number of the transport plane and the time it leaves Croydon five minutes after it takes off — you'll have plenty of time to be waiting for it in the air."

On the other side of the field there was a big tithe barn with the hedge laid up to one wall. Renway knocked on a small door, and it opened three inches to show a narrow strip of the grimy face and figure of a man in overalls. After the first pause of identification it opened wider, and they went in.

The interior was cool and spacious, dimly lit in contrast with the sunlight outside by a couple of naked bulbs hung from the high ridge. Simon's first glance round was arrested by the grey bull-nosed shape of the Hawker pursuit plane at the far end of the shed. In another two or three hours he would have found it less easy to recognize, except by the long gleaming spouts of the machine guns braced forward from the pilot's cockpit, for another overalled man mounted on a folding ladder was even then engaged in painting out the wing cocardes with a layer of neutral grey dope. But the national markings on the empennage were still untouched — if the Saint had ever been tempted to wonder whether he had lost himself in a fantastic dream, the sight of those shining strips of colour was the last thing that was needed to show him that he was in touch with nothing more fantastic than astounding reality.

He fished out his case and selected another cigarette while he surveyed the other details of his surroundings. While he was in the air he had guessed that the field adjoining the one in which he had landed was the one where he had watched the Hawker ship land some hours ago, and a glimpse of other and wider doors outlined in cracks of light on the opposite wall of the barn was his confirmation. There was a stack of petrol cans in one corner, and a workbench and lathe in another. He saw the spare drums of ammunition which Renway had referred to under the workbench, and some curious pear-shaped objects stacked in a wooden rack beside it — in another moment he realized that they were bombs.

He indicated them with a slight movement of his thumb.

"For use on the rescue boats?" he queried; and Renway nodded.

Simon left the cigarette between his lips, but thoughtfully refrained from lighting it.

"Isn't it a bit risky?" he suggested. "I mean, having everything here where anybody might get in and see it?"

Renway's mouth widened slightly. If another muscle of his face had moved it might have been a smile, but the effect of the surrounding deadness of flesh was curiously horrible.

"I have two kinds of servants — those who are in my confidence, and those who are merely menials. With the first kind, there is no risk — although it was a pity that Enrique met with an accident…" He paused for a moment, with his faded eyes wandering inharmoniously over the Saint; and then he pointed to a big humming engine bedded down in the concrete floor on his right. "To the second kind, this is simply the building which houses our private electric light plant. The doors are kept locked, and there is no reason for them to pry further. And all of them are having a special holiday tomorrow."

He continued to watch the Saint satirically, as if aware that there was another risk which might have been mentioned; but Simon knew the answer to that one. The case of "samples" which his host had locked up in the library safe, so long as they remained there, must have constituted a reasonably sound security for the adventitious aviator's faithful service — from Renway's point of view. The Saint was acquiring a wholesome respect for the Treasury Poohba's criminal efficiency; and his blue eyes were rather quiet and metallic as he watched the two mechanics wheel his machine through a gate in the hedge and bring it through the broad sliding doors into the barn.

As they strolled back to the house again, Renway pulled out his watch.

"I shall have to attend to some business now," he said. "You'll be able to spend your time making the acquaintance of the other men who are helping me."

They entered the house by another door and went down a long dark low-ceilinged corridor which led into a large panelled room lighted by small leaded windows. Simon ducked his head automatically, but found that he could just stand upright under the black oak beams which crossed the ceiling. There was a billiard table in the centre with a strip of carpet laid round it, and an open brick fireplace at one side; but the room had the musty dampness of disuse.

"March House is rather an architectural scrap-heap," Renway explained impersonally. "You're in the oldest part of it now, which goes back to the fifteenth century. I discovered this quite by accident—"

"This" was a section of panelling, about five and a half feet by three, which sprang open on invisible hinges — Simon could not see exactly what the other did to open it. Renway fumbled in the dark aperture and switched on a light.

"I don't know where the passage originally went to," he said, as they groped their way down a flight of rickety wooden stairs. "At present it leads into the cellars. There used to be an ordinary entrance from a more modern part of the house, where the kitchen is now, but I had that bricked up."

At the foot of the stairway there was a narrow stone-flagged tunnel. Renway switched on another light and they went on, bent almost double in the cramped space. At intervals there was a rough wooden buttress to carry a weak section of the roof, but for the most part the upper curve of the burrow consisted of nothing but the natural chalk. Simon Templar, who had seen the inner workings of more secret doors, rooms, and passages than any other living man, had never managed to lose the first primitive schoolboy thrill of such subterranean accessories of adventure. He followed Renway with whole-hearted enthusiasm; but there was an equally whole-hearted vigilance about him nevertheless, for the thought had crossed his mind that Sir Hugo Renway might be even more clever and efficient than he had yet begun to believe, and he had no overpowering ambition to be suddenly pushed down a well am left there to contemplate the follies of over optimism until hunger and thirst put an end to contemplation.

After about fifteen yards Renway turned a right-angled corner and disappeared; and Simon crept up in his tracks with that knife-bladed vigilance honed to a razor edge. Rounding the corner, he found himself stepping out into a fairly large stone chamber illuminated by several electric bulbs. At the distant end there was a row of beds; a cheap square of carpet was laid out on the floor, and the room was sketchily furnished with a bare wooden table in the centre, a couple of washstands, and a heterogeneous selection of chairs. Four of the men in the room were congregated at one end of the table over a game of cards; the fifth was stitching a button on his coat; the sixth was reading a newspaper. They were all turned rigidly towards the end of the tunnel; and the Saint carefully set his hands on his hips — where one of them would be within handy diving range of his gun.

"Gentlemen," Renway's high-pitched B. B. C. voice was saying, "this is Mr. — er — Tombs, who is taking Enrique's place."

None of the flat fishlike eyes acknowledged the introduction by so much as a flicker.

Renway turned to the Saint.

"You must meet Mr. Petrowitz," he said; "Mr. Jeddy… Mr. Pargo…"

He ran through a list of names, indicating their owners with curt movements of his head; and Simon, looking them over, decided that they were the ugliest gang of cutthroats that even the most rabid Bolshevik could ever hope to find gathered together in a strategic position under the house of an English aristocrat.

His decision embodied something more than pure artistic comment. The sight of those staring immobile men added the last touch to his grim understanding that if Sir Hugo Renway was mad, he was a maniac with the cold logical resolution that was needed to carry out his insane scheme. His glance fell on the newspaper which the sixth man had put down. The black-type banner line across the top of the page leapt to his eye:

It reminded him that he had not yet inquired he name of his new employer. "Are you the Saint?" he asked. Renway's lids drooped. "Yes," he said.

VIII

According to his watch, Simon Templar stayed in hat secret cellar for about eighteen hours: with-out that evidence, he could have been fairly easily persuaded that it was about eighteen days.

It was so completely removed from the sense of reality, as well as from the ordinary change of lights and movements of the outer world, that time had very little meaning. At intervals, one of the men would go to a cupboard in the corner and dig out a loaf of bread and a slab of cheese, a tin of beans, or a bottle of beer: those who felt inclined would join him in a sketchy meal or a drink. One of the card players got up from the table, lay down on one of the beds, and went to sleep, snoring. Another man shuffled the cards and looked flat-eyed at the Saint.

"Want a game?"

Simon took the vacant chair and a stack of chips. Purely as an antidote to boredom, he played blackjack for two hours and finished five chips down.

"That's five hundred pounds," said Pargo, writing figures with a half-inch stub of pencil on a soiled scrap of paper.

"I haven't got five hundred pounds on me," said the Saint.

The man grinned like a rat.

"Nor have any of us," he said. "But you will have after tomorrow."

Simon was impressed without being pleased. He had watched Jeddy rake up a stack of chips that must have represented about three thousand pounds at that rate of exchange, without any sign of emotion; and Mr. Jeddy was a man whose spiritual niche in the Buddy-can-you-spare-a-dime class was as obvious as the fact that he had not shaved for three days.

The others were not vastly different. Their physical aspects ranged from the bearded and faintly odorous burliness of Mr. Petrowitz to the rat-faced and yellow-toothed scrawniness of Mr. Pargo; but all of them had the same dominant characteristic in common. It was a characteristic with which the Saint had become most familiar on the west side of the Atlantic, although it was confined to no single race or nationality; a characteristic which Hoppy Uniatz, who couldn't have spelt the word to save his life, would have been the first to recognize: the peculiar cold lifelessness of the eye which brands the natural killer. But there are grades in killers, just as there are in singers; and the men in that cellar were not in the grand-opera class, the class that collects diamonds and expensive limousines. They were men who did their stuff at street corners and in dingy alleys, for a chance coin or two; the crude hacks of their profession. And they were the men whom Renway had inspired with so much confidence in the certainty of his scheme that they were calmly gambling their hypothetical profits in hundred-pound units.

God alone knew how Renway had gathered them together — neither the Saint nor Teal ever found out. But they constituted six more amazing eye-openers for the Saint to add to his phenomenally growing collection — six stony-faced witnesses to the fact that Sir Hugo Renway, whom Simon Templar would never have credited with the ability to lead anything more piratical than a pompous secession from the Conservative Party, had found the trick of organizing what might have been one of the most astounding robberies in the history of crime.

The men took him for granted. Their conversation, when they spoke at all, was grumbling, low-voiced, monosyllabic. They asked Simon no questions, and he had a sure intuition that they would have been surprised and hostile if he had asked them any. The business for which they were collected there was never mentioned — either it had already been discussed so much that there was nothing left to say on the subject, or they were too fettered by habitual suspicion for any discussion to have a chance of getting under way. Simon decided that in addition to being the ugliest, they were also the dullest assortment of thugs he had ever come across.

The man who had been reading the newspaper put it down and added himself to the increasing company of sleepers, and Simon reached out for the opportunity of getting acquainted with the latest lurid accounts of his own entirely mythical activities. They were more or less what he would have expected; but there was a subheading with the words "Scotland Yard Active" which made him smile. Scotland Yard was certainly active — by that hour, it must have been hopping about like a young and healthy flea-but he would have given much to see their faces if they could have been miraculously enabled to find him at that moment.

As it turned out, that pleasure, or a representative part of it, was not to cost him anything.

"Put those damn lights out," a voice from one of the beds growled at last; and Simon stretched himself out on a hard mattress and continued his meditations in the dark, while the choral symphony of snores gained new and individual artistes around him. After a while he fell asleep himself.

When he woke up the lights were on again, and men were pulling on their coats and gulping cups of hot tea. One by one they began to slouch off into the tunnel; and Simon splashed cold water on his face from a basin and joined in the general move with a reawakening of vitality. A glance at his watch showed him that it was half-past four, but it might have been morning or afternoon for all the sense of time he had left. When he came up the creaking stairladder into the billiard room, however, he saw that it was still dark. Renway, in a light overcoat, was standing close to the panel watching the men as they emerged: he beckoned the Saint with a slight backward tilt of his head.

"How are you getting on?" he asked.

Simon glanced at the last two men as they stumbled through the panel and followed their companions across the room and out by the more conventional door.

"I have been in more hilarious company," he murmured.

Renway did not appear to hear his answer — the impression was that his interest in Mr. Tombs's social progress was merely formal. He did something to the woodwork at the level of his shoulder, and the secret panel closed with a slight click.

"You'd better know some more about our arrangements," he said.

They went out of the house by the same route as they had finally come in the previous morning. The file of men who had preceded them was already trudging southwards over the rough grass as if on a journey that had become familiar by routine — the Saint saw the little dabs of light thrown by their electric torches bobbing over the turf. A pale strip of silver in the east promised an early dawn, and the cool sweetness of the air as indescribably delicious after the acrid frowstiness of the cellar. Renway produced a flashlight of his own and walked in flat-footed taciturnity. They reached the edge of the cliffs and started down a narrow zigzag path. Halfway down it, the Saint suddenly missed the dancing patches of torchlight ahead: he was wondering whether to make any comment when Renway touched his arm and halted.

"This way."

The oval imprint of Renway's flashlight flickered over the dark spludge of a shrub growing in a cleft beside the path: suddenly Renway's own silhouette appeared in the shrinking circle of light, and Simon realized that the Treasury official was going down on all fours and beginning to wriggle into the bush, presenting a well-rounded posterior which might have proved an irresistible and fatal temptation to an aggrieved ex-service civil servant. The Saint, however, having suffered no especial unkindness from the government, followed him dutifully in the same manner and discovered that he could stand upright again on the other side of the opening in the cliff. At the same time he saw the torches of the other men again, heading downwards into the dark as if on a long stairway.

Thirty feet lower down the steps levelled off into an uneven floor. Simon saw the gleam of dark waters in the light of Renway's torch and realized that he was at the foot of a huge natural cave. The lights of the other men were clustered a few yards away — Simon heard a clunk of wood and metal and the soft plash of an oar.

"The only other way to the sea is under water," Renway explained, his thin voice echoing hollowly. "You can see it at low neap tides, but at this time of year it's always covered."

It was on the tip of the Saint's tongue to make some facetious remark about submarines when Renway lifted his torch a little, and Simon saw a shining black whaleback of steel curving out of the water a couple of dozen feet from where they stood, and knew that his flippancy could only have seemed ridiculous beside the truth.

"Did you catch that with a rod and line?" he asked, after a considerable silence.

"It was ostensibly purchased by a French film company six months ago," Renway said prosaically.

"And who's going to run it?"

"Petrowitz — he was a U-boat officer during the war. The rest of the crew had to be trained. It was more difficult to obtain torpedoes — in case anything should come to the rescue which was too big for you to drive off, you understand. But we succeeded."

The Saint put his hands in his pockets. His face was chiselled bronze masked by the dark.

"I get it," he said softly. "The gold is taken on board that little beauty. And then you go down to the bottom and nobody ever sees you any more.

And then when you turn up again somewhere in South America—"

"We come back here," said Renway. "There are certain reasons why this is one of the last places where anyone would ever expect to find us."

Simon admitted it. From Renway's point of view, it must have loomed out as one of the most cunning certainties of crime. And the Saint was quite cold-bloodedly aware that if he failed to separate himself from the picnic in time, it would still be true.

The party of men in the rowboat had reached the submarine and were climbing out.

"My information is that the gold will be leaving Croydon about eight o'clock," Renway said in a matter-of-fact tone. "Perhaps you'd like to check over your aeroplane — there are one or two things I want to talk over with Petrowitz."

The Saint did not want to check over any aeroplane, but there was something else he very much wanted to do. He found his way back up the stairway with Renway's torch and wriggled out again through the hole in the cliff — the last glimpse he had of that strange scene was the lights glinting on the water far below him and the shadows moving over the dull sheen of the submarine's arched back. Renway had certainly spared no effort or expense to provide all the most modern and sensational accessories of melodrama, he reflected as he retraced his tracks to the house, what with electrified wire fences, stolen aeroplanes landing by night, bombs, secret panels, caves, submarines, and unshaven desperadoes; but he found the actuality less humorous than he would have found the same recital in a book. Simon had long had a theory that the most dangerous criminal would be a man who helped himself to some of the vast fund of daring ingenuity expended upon his problems by hordes of detective-story writers; and Sir Hugo Renway's establishment looked more like a detective story come to life than anything the Saint, had ever seen.

The dawn was lightening as he found his way into the library and went directly to the safe. He knelt down in front of it and unrolled a neat leather wallet which he took from a pocket in his voluminous flying coat — the instruments in that wallet were the latest and most ingenious in the world, and would in themselves have been sufficient to earn him a long term of imprisonment, without any other evidence, if Mr. Teal had caught him with them. The safe was also one of the latest and most useful models, but it was at a grave disadvantage. Being an inanimate object, it couldn't change its methods of defense so nimbly as the Saint could vary his attack. Besides which, the Saint was prepared to boast that he could make any professional peterman look like a two-year-old infant playing with a rubber crowbar when it came to safe-opening. He worked with unhurried speed and had the door open in twenty minutes; and then he carefully rolled up his kit and put it away again before he turned to an examination of the interior.

He had already charted out enough evidence within the thirty-acre confines of March House to have hanged a regiment, but there were still one or two important items missing. He found one useful article very quickly, in a small heap of correspondence on one of the shelves — it was a letter which in itself was no evidence of anything, but it was addressed to Sir Hugo Renway and signed by Manuel Enrique. Simon put it away in his pocket and went on with his search. He opened a japanned deed box and found it crammed with banknotes and bearer bonds: that was not evidence at all, but it was the sort of thing which Simon Templar was always pleased to find, and he was just tipping it out when he heard the rattle of the door handle behind him.

The Saint moved like a cat touched with a high-voltage wire. In what seemed like one connected movement, he scooped the bundle of currency and bonds into his pocket, shoved the deed box back on its shelf, swung the door of the safe, and leapt behind the nearest set of curtains; and then Renway came into the room.

He walked straight across to the safe, fishing out the key from his waistcoat pocket; but the door opened as soon as he touched the handle, and he froze into an instant's dreadful immobility. Then he fell on his knees and dragged out the empty deed box…

Simon stepped quietly out from behind the curtains, so that he was between Renway and the door.

"Don't cry, Mother Hubbard," he said.

IX

Renway got to his feet and looked down the barrel of the Saint's gun. His face was pasty, but the lipless gash of a mouth was almost inhumanly steady.

"Oh, it's you," he whispered.

"It is I," said the Saint, with impeccable grammar. "Come here, Hugo — I want to see what you've got on you."

He plunged his left hand swiftly and dexterously into the other's inner breast pocket and found the second thing he had been looking for. It was a cheap pocket diary, and he knew without examining it that it was the one on which his forged trade-marks had been drawn. Renway must have been insanely confident of his immunity from suspicion to keep it on him.

"What ho," drawled Simon contentedly. "Stand back again, Hugo, while I see if you've been compromising yourself."

He stepped back himself and barely had time to feel the foot of the man behind him under his heel before a brawny arm shot over his shoulder and grasped his gun wrist in a grip like a twisting Clamp of iron. Simon started to turn, but in the next split second another brawny arm whipped round his neck and pinned him.

The wrenching hand on his wrist forced him to drop his gun — it had begun to twist too long before he began resisting. Then he let himself go completely limp, while his left hand felt for the knees of the man behind him. His arm locked round them and he heaved himself backwards with a sudden jerk of his thighs. They fell heavily together, and the grips on his wrist and neck were broken. Simon squirmed over, put a knee in the man's stomach, and sprang up and away; and then he saw that Renway had snatched up the automatic and was covering him.

Simon Templar, who knew the difference between certain death and a sporting chance, put up his hands quickly.

"Okay, boys," he said. "Now you think of a game."

Renway's forefinger weighed on the trigger.

"You fool!" he said almost peevishly.

"Admitted," said the Saint. "Nobody ought to walk backwards without eyes in the back of his Head."

Renway had also picked up the diary, which Simon had dropped in the struggle. He put it back in his pocket.

The Saint's brain was turning over so fast that he could almost hear it hum. He still had Enrique's letter — and the bundle of cash. There was still no reason for Renway to suspect him of anything more than ordinary stealing: his taking of the diary was not necessarily suspicious. And Simon understood very clearly that if Renway suspected him of anything more than ordinary stealing, he could, barring outrageous luck, only leave March House in one position. Which would be depressingly and irrevocably horizontal.

Even then, there might be no alternative attitude; but it was worth trying. Simon had a stubborn desire to hang onto that incriminating letter as long as possible. He took out the sheaf of bonds and banknotes and threw them on the desk.

"There's the rest of it," he said cynically. "Shall we call it quits?"

Renway's squinting eyes wandered over him.

"Do you always expect to clear yourself so easily?" he asked, like a schoolmaster.

"Not always," said the Saint. "But you can't very well hand me over to the police this time, can you? I know too much about you."

In the next moment he knew he had made a mistake. Renway's convergent gaze turned Petrowitz, who was massaging his stomach tenderly.

"He knows too much," Renway repeated.

"I suppose there's no chance of letting bygones be bygones and still letting me fly that aeroplane?" Simon asked shrewdly.

The nervous twitch which he had seen before went over Renway's body, but the thin mouth only tightened with it.

"None at all, Mr. Tombs."

"I was afraid so," said the Saint.

"Let me take him," Petrowitz broke in with his thick gruff voice. "I will tie iron bars to his legs and fire him through one of the torpedo tubes. He will not talk after that."

Renway considered the suggestion and shook his head.

"None of the others must know. Any doubt or fear in their minds may be dangerous. He can go back into the cellar. Afterwards, he can take the same journey as Enrique."

Probably for much the same offense, Simon thought grimly; but he smiled.

"That's very sweet of you, Hugo," he remarked; and the other looked at him.

"I hope you will continue to be satisfied."

He might have been going to say more, but at that moment the telephone began to ring. Renway sat down at the desk.

"Hullo… Yes… Yes, speaking." He drew a memorandum block towards him and took up a pencil from a glass tray. With the gun close to his hand, he jotted down letters and figures. "Yes. G-EZQX. At seven… Yes… Thank you." He sat for a little while staring at the pad, as if memorizing his note and rearranging his plans. Then he pressed the switch of a microphone which stood on the desk beside the ordinary post-office instrument. "Kellard?" he said. "There is a change of time. Have the Hawker outside and warmed up by seven o'clock."

He picked up the automatic again and rose from the desk.

"They're leaving an hour earlier," he said, speaking to Petrowitz. "We haven't any time to waste."

The other man rubbed his beard. "You will be flying yourself?"

"Yes," said Renway, as if defying contradiction. He motioned with his gun towards the door. "Petrowitz will lead the way, Mr. Tombs."

Simon felt that he was getting quite familiar with the billiard room, and almost suggested that the three of them should put aside their differences and stop for a game; but Renway had the secret panel open as soon as the Saint reached it. With the two men watching him, Simon went down the shaky wooden stair and heard the spring door close behind him.

He sat down on the bottom step, took out his cigarette case, and computed that if all the cellars in which he had been imprisoned as an adjunct or preliminary to murder had been dug one underneath the other, they would have provided the shaft of a diametric subway between England and the Antipodes. But his jailers had not always been so generous as to push him into the intestines of the earth without searching him; and his blue eyes were thoughtful as he took out his portable burgling kit again. Renway must have been going to pieces rapidly, to have overlooked such an obvious precaution as that; but that meant, if anything, that for a few mad hours he would be more dangerous than before. The attack on the gold plane would still be made, Simon realized, unless he got out in time to stop it. It was not until some minutes after he had started work on the door that he discovered that the panel which concealed it was backed by a solid plate of case-hardened steel…

It was a quarter past six by his wrist watch when he started work; it was five minutes past seven when he got out. He had to dig his way through twelve inches of solid brick with a small screwdriver before he could get the claw of his telescopic jemmy behind the steel panel and break the lock inwards. Anyone who had come that way must have heard him; but in that respect his luck held flawlessly. Probably neither Renway nor Petrowitz had a doubt in their minds that the tempered steel plate would be enough to hold him.

He was tired and sweating when he got out, and his knuckles were raw in several places from accidental blows against the brickwork which they had suffered unnoticed in his desperate haste; but he could not stop. He raced down the long corridor and found his way through the house to the library. Nobody crossed his path. Renway had said that the regular servants would all be away, and the gang were probably busy at their appointed stations; but if anyone had attempted to hinder him, Simon with his bare hands would have had something fast and savage to say to the interference. He burst recklessly into the library and looked out of the French windows in time to see the grey shape of the Hawker pursuit plane skimming across the far field like a bullet and lofting airily over the trees at the end.

Simon lighted another cigarette very quietly and watched the grey ship climbing swiftly into the clear morning sky. If there was something cold clutching at his heart, if he was tasting the sourest narrowness of defeat, no sign of it could have been read on the tanned outline of his face.

After a second or two he sat down at the desk and picked up the telephone.

"Croydon 2720," he called, remembering the number of the aerodrome.

The reply came back very quickly:

"I'm sorry — the line is out of order."

"Then get me Croydon police station."

"I'm afraid we can't get through to Croydon at all. All the lines seem to have gone wrong."

Simon bit his lip.

"Can you get me Scotland Yard?"

He knew the answer to that inquiry also, even before he heard it, and realized that even at that stage of the proceedings he had underestimated Sir Hugo Renway. There would be no means of establishing rapid communication with any vital spot for some hours — that was because something might have gone wrong with the duplicate wireless arrangements, or one of the possible rescue ships might have managed to transmit a message.

The Saint blew perfect smoke rings at the ceiling and stared at the opposite wall. There was only one other wild solution. He had no time to try any other avenues. There would first be the business of establishing his bona fides, then of convincing an impenetrably skeptical audience, then of getting word through by personal messenger to a suitable headquarters — and the transport plane would be over the Channel long before that. But he remembered Renway's final decision — "None of the others must know" — and touched the switch of the table microphone.

"Kellard?" he said. "This is Tombs. Get my machine out and warmed up right away."

"Yessir," said the mechanic, without audible surprise; and Simon Templar felt as if a great load had been lifted from his shoulders.

Probably he still had no chance, probably he Was still taking a path to death as certain as that Which he would have trodden if he had stayed in the cellar; but it was something to attempt — something to do.

Of course, there was a radio station on the premises. Renway had said so. But undoubtedly it was well hidden. He might spend half an hour and more looking for it…

No — he had taken the only way. And if it was a form of spectacular suicide, it ought to have its diverting moments before the end.

It was only natural that in those last few moments he should think of Patricia. He took up the telephone again and called his own number at St. George's Hill. In ten seconds the voice of Orace, who never" seemed to sleep, answered him. "They've gorn," Orace informed him, with a slight sinister emphasis on the pronoun. "Miss 'Olm says she's sleepin' at Cornwall 'Ouse. Nobody's worried 'er."

Simon called another number.

"Hullo, sweetheart," he said; and the Saintly voice had never been more gentle, more easy and light-hearted, more bubbling over with the eager promise of an infinite and adventurous future. "Why, I'm fine… No, there hasn't been any trouble. Just an odd spot of spontaneous combustion in the withered brain cells of Claud Eustace Teal — but we've had that before. I've got it all fixed… Never mind how, darling. You know your Simon. This is much more important. Now listen carefully. D'you remember a guy named George Wynnis, that I've talked about soaking sometime?… Well, he lives at 366 South Audley Street. He never gets up before ten in the morning, and he never has less than two thousand quid in his pockets. Phone Hoppy to join you, and go get that dough — now! And listen. Leave my mark behind!"

"You're crazy," she said; and he laughed.

"I am and I'm not," he said. "But this time I have the perfect alibi; and I want to get you every cent I can lay hold of before I cash in my chips." The lilt in his voice made it impossible to take him literally. "God bless you, keed," he said. "Be seein' ya!"

He hung up the handpiece and leaned back in his chair, inhaling the last puffs of his cigarette. Surely, this time, he had the perfect and immutable alibi. A dry sardonic smile touched his lips; but the fine-cut sapphires in his eyes were twinkling. It would give Claud Eustace something more to think about, anyway… He looked out of the windows, down the long gentle slope that was just being gilded by the sun, and saw his own Tiger Moth standing beside the old tithe barn, the propeller lost" in a swirling circle of light, the mechanic's hair fluttering in the cockpit, a thin plume of haze drifting back from the exhaust. The sky was a pale crystalline eggshell blue, clear and still as a dream, a sky that could give a man pleasant memories to carry with him into the long dark…

Without conscious thought, he hauled out his helmet from a side pocket, pulled it over his head, buckled the strap, and adjusted the goggles on his forehead. And he was doing that when a shadow fell across the desk, and he looked up.

A broad-shouldered portly form, with a round cherubic pink face and small baby-blue eyes, crowned with an incongruous black bowler hat of old-fashioned elevation, was filling the open French doors. It was Chief Inspector Teal.

X

Simon sprang up impetuously.

"Claud!" he cried. "I never thought I should be glad to see your huge stomach—"

"I thought you might be here," said the detective stiffly.

He came on into the room, but only far enough to allow Sergeant Barrow to follow him through the window. With that end accomplished, he kept his distance. There was still a puffy tenderness in his jaw to remind him of a fist like a chunk of stone driven by a bolt of lightning, which had reached him once already when he came too near.

"It must be this deductive business that Scotland Yard is taking up," Simon remarked more slowly.

Teal nodded without relaxing.

"I knew you were interested in Renway, and I knew you'd been here once before — when Uniatz knocked out the policeman. It occurred to me that it'd be just like you to come back, in spite of everything."

"In spite of hell and high water," Simon murmured with a faint smile, "we keep on doing our stuff. Well, it's not a bad reputation to have… But this time I've got something more important to say to you."

"I've got the same thing to say to you as I had last time," said the detective, iron-jawed. "I want you, Saint."

Simon started round the desk.

"But this is serious!"

"So is this," said Teal implacably. He took his right hand out of his pocket, and there was a gun in it. "I don't want to have to use it, but I'm going to take you back this time if it's the last thing I do."

The Saint's eyes narrowed to shreds of flint.

"You're damn right it'll be the last thing you do!" he shot back. And then his tensed lips moved into the thinnest of thin smiles. "Now listen to me, you great oaf. You want me for being mixed up with a guy named Hoppy Uniatz who smacked a cop on the button outside here the other night. Guilty. But you also want me for the murder of Manuel Enrique and the knocking off of an aeroplane from Hawker's. Not guilty and not guilty. That's what I wanted to see you for. That's the only reason on earth why I couldn't have been more glad to see anything else walk in here than your fatuous red face. I want to tell you whom you really do want!"

"I know whom I want," answered Teal stonily.

"Yeah?" The Saint's voice was one vicious upward swoop of derision. "Then did you know you were standing inside his house right now?"

Mr. Teal blinked. His eyes began a fractional widening; his mouth began an infinitesimal opening.

"Renway?" he said. And then the baleful skepticism came back into his face with a tinge of colour. "Is that your new alibi?" he jeered.

"That's my new alibi," said the Saint, rather quickly and quietly; "and you'd better listen to it. Did you know that Renway was the man who stole that aeroplane from Hawker's?"

"I didn't. And I don't know it yet."

"He brought it here and landed it here, and I watched him. Go down to that field out there and have a look at the scars in the grass where he had his flares, if you're too dumb to believe me. Did you know that he had a submarine in a cave in the cliffs, with live torpedoes on board?"

"Did I know—"

"Did you know that the crew of the submarine have been sleeping in a secret room under this house for months? Did you know they were the toughest bunch of hoodlums I've seen in England for years?"

"Did I—"

"Did you know," asked the Saint, in a final rasp, "that three million pounds in gold is on its way flying from Croydon to Paris right now while you're getting in my hair with your blathering imitation of a bum detective — and Renway has got everything set to shoot it down and set up a crime record that'll make Scotland Yard look more halfwitted than it's ever looked since I started taking it apart?"

The detective swallowed. There was an edge of savage sincerity in the Saint's voice which bit into the leathery hide of his incredulity. He suffered a wild fantastic temptation to begin to listen, to take in the preposterous story that the Saint was putting up, to consider the items of it soberly and seriously. And he was sure he was making a fool of himself. He gulped down the ridiculous impulse and plunged into defensive sarcasm.

"Of course I didn't know all that," he almost purred. "Is Einstein going to prove it for you, or will Renway admit it himself?"

"Renway will admit it himself," said the Saint grimly. "But even that won't be necessary. Did you know that these ten tons of gold were being shipped on aeroplane G-EZQX, which took off from Croydon at seven?" He ripped the top sheet off the memorandum block on the desk and thrust it out. "Do you know that that's his handwriting, or will you want his bank manager to tell you?"

Teal looked at the sheet.

"It doesn't matter much whether it's his writing or your version of it," he said, with an almost imperceptible break in the smoothness of his studied purr. "As a Treasury official, Renway has a perfect right to know anything like that."

"Yeah?" Simon's voice was suddenly so soft that it made Teal's laboured suaveness sound like the screech of a circular saw. "And I suppose he had a perfect right to know Manuel Enrique, and not say anything about it when he brought him into the police station at Horley?"

"Who says he knew Enrique?"

The Saint smiled.

"Not me, Claud. If I tell you he did, it'll just make you quite sure he didn't. This is what says so."

He put his hand in his pocket and took out the letter which he had found in the safe. "Or maybe I faked this, too?" he suggested mildly.

"You may have done," said Teal dispassionately; but his baby-blue eyes rested with a rather queer intensity on Simon's face.

"Come for a walk, Claud," said the Saint gently, "and tell me I faked this."

He turned aside quite calmly under the muzzle of Teal's gun and walked to the door. For no earthly reason that he could have given in logical terms, Mr. Teal followed him. And all the time he had a hot gnawing fear that he was making a fool of himself.

Sergeant Barrow followed Mr. Teal because that was his job. He was a fool anyway, and he knew it. Mr. Teal had often told him so.

In the billiard room, Simon pointed to the panel sagging loose on its hinges as he had torn it off — the hole he had chipped through the wall, the wooden stairway going steeply down into the chalk.

"That's where those six men have been living, so that the ordinary servants never knew there was anything going on. You'll find their beds and everything. That's where I was shut up when they got wise to who I was; and that's where I've just got out of."

Teal said nothing for several seconds. And then the most significant thing was, not what he said, but what he did.

He put his gun back in his pocket and looked at the Saint almost helplessly. No one will ever know what it cost him to be as natural as that. But whatever his other failings may have been, Chief Inspector Teal was a kind of sportsman. He could take it, even when it hurt.

"What else do you know?" he asked.

"That the submarine is out in the Channel now, waiting for the aeroplane to come down. That Renway's up over here in that Hawker ship, with loaded machine guns to shoot down the gold transport, and a packet of bombs to drop on any boat that tries to go to the rescue. That all the telephone lines to Croydon Aerodrome, and between the coast and London, have been cut. That there's a radio transmitter somewhere in this place — I haven't found it yet — which is just waiting to carry on signalling when the transport plane stops. That there isn't a hope in hell of getting a warning through to anywhere in time to stop the raid."

Teal's pink face had gone curiously pale.

"Isn't there anything we can do?" he said.

"There's only one thing," answered the Saint. "Down on the landing field you probably saw a Tiger Moth warming up. It's mine. It's the ship I came here in — but that's another story. With your permission, I can go up in it and try to keep Renway off. Don't tell me it's suicide, because I know all that. But it's murder for the crew of that transport plane if I don't try."

The detective did not answer for a moment. He stared at the floor, avoiding the Saint's straight blue gaze.

"I can't stop you," he said at last; and Simon smiled.

"You can forget about Hoppy hitting that policeman, if you're satisfied with the other evidence," he said. He had a sudden absurd thought of what would shortly be happening to a certain George Wynnis, and a shaft of the old mockery touched his smile like sunlight. "And next time I tell you that some low criminal is putting his stuff onto me, Claud," he said, "you mayn't be so nasty and disbelieving."

His forefinger prodded Mr. Teal's stomach in the old maddening way; but his smile was only reminiscent. And without another word he went out of the billiard room, down the long dark corridor to the open air.

As he climbed into the cockpit of his ship he looked back towards the house and saw Mr. Teal standing on the terrace, watching him. He waved a gay arm, while the mechanic dragged away the chocks from under the wheels; and then he settled down and opened the throttle. The stick slid forward between his knees, the tail lifted, and he went roaring down the field to curve upwards in a steep climbing turn over the trees.

He had left it late enough; and if the wind had been in the north instead of in the south he might have been too late. Winding up the sky in smoothly controlled spirals, he saw the single wide span of a big monoplane coming up from the northern horizon, and knew that it must be the transport plane for which Renway was waiting — no other ship of that build would have been flying south at that hour. He looked for Renway and saw a shape like a big square-tipped seagull swinging round in a wide circle over the Channel, six thousand feet up in the cloudless blue…

Renway! The Saint's steady fingers moved on the stick, steepening the angle of climb by a fraction; and his lips settled in a grim reckless line at the remainder that those fingers had no Bowden trips under them, as Renway's had. He looked ahead through the propeller between a double rank of dancing valve springs instead of between the foreshortened blued jackets of a pair of guns. He was taking on a duel in which nothing but his own skill of hand and eye could be matched against the spitting muzzles of Renway's guns — and whatever skill Renway could bring to the handling of them. And suddenly the Saint laughed — a devilish buccaneering laugh that bared his teeth and edged the chilled steel in his eyes, and was drowned to soundlessness in the smashing howl of his engine and whipped away in the tearing sting of the wind.

Renway! The man who had taken his name in vain. The man who had murdered Enrique and put the Saint's mark on him. The man who had stolen the very aeroplane which he was now going up to fight — and had put the Saint's mark on the theft. The overfed, mincing, nerve-ridden, gas-choked, splay-footed, priggish, yellow-bellied, pompous great official sausage who had had the everlasting gall to say that he himself — he — was the Saint!

Simon Templar glanced at the altimeter and edged the stick forward again along his right thigh. Five thousand feet… A gentle pressure of his right foot on the rudder, and the Tiger Moth swung round and levelled off. The country beneath him was flattened out like a painted map, the light green of fields, the darker green of woods, white ribbons of road, and a white ribbon of surf along the edge of the grey-green sea. The transport plane was slipping across the map half a mile under him, cruising at ninety miles an hour air-speed — a lumbering slow-motion cargo boat of the skies. His eagle's eyesight picked out the letters painted across the upper fabric of the wing: G-EZQX. His own air-speed indicator showed a hundred and eighty. It went through his mind that Renway must have watched him coming up. Renway must have seen the Tiger Moth warming up outside the barn and seen it take off. Renway must have guessed that something had gone wrong — must, even then, have been staring down with glazed eyes and twitching fingers, realizing that there was an obstacle in his path that must he blotted out.

Simon wondered when the attack would tonic.

And at that moment it came.

His machine quivered slightly, and he saw an irregular line of punctures sewing itself diagonally across his left wing. Even above the roar of his own engine he heard the Hawker's guns cackling their fierce challenge down the sky. He kicked the rudder and hauled the stick back into his groin, and grinned mirthlessly at the downward drag of his bowels as the nose of the Moth surged upwards, skew-eyed, like the prow of a ship in a terrific sea, and whipped over in a flick roll that twisted into the downward half of a tight loop.

XI

Renway came about in a skidding turn and plunged after him. Screwed round to watch him over the tail, Simon led him down in a shallow dive, weaving deftly from side to side against the efforts of the Hawker's nose to follow him. Little hiccoughs of orange flame danced on the muzzles of Renway's guns; gleaming squirts of tracer went rocketing past the Moth, now wide on the right, now wide on the left. The Saint went on smiling. Aiming an aeroplane is a fine art, and Renway hadn't had the practice — it was the only factor which Simon could count on his side.

A chance swerve of the Hawker sprayed another line of pockmarks across the fuselage; and Simon drew back on the stick and went over in a sudden loop. Renway shot past under his tail and began to pull round in a belated vertical bank. The Saint put a curve in the fall of his loop and went to meet him. They raced head-on for a collision. Simon held his course till the last split second, lifted his nose slightly for a hint, and zoomed over the Hawker's prop on the upturn of a switchback that carried him clear of death by shaved inches.

He looked down on the swing-over of the stalling turn that ended his zoom, and saw Renway's ship sloping down, wobbling erratically. And his fine-drawn hell-for-leather smile opened out wickedly as he opened out the throttle and went down on the Hawker again in a shrieking power dive.

Down… down… The engine howling and the wires moaning shriller and shriller as the air-speed indicator climbed over three hundred and twenty miles an hour. His whole body tensed and waiting fearfully for the first vibration, the first shiver of the wing tips, that would spell the break-up of the machine. The Tiger Moth wasn't built for that sort of work. It was the latest, strongest, fastest thing of its kind in the air; but it wasn't designed for fighting aerobatics. He saw the Hawker dodging in hesitant clumsy efforts to escape; saw Renway's white goggled face staring back over the empennage, leaping up towards him at incredible speed. He set his teeth and pulled back the stick… Now! The Moth seemed to squat down in the air, momentarily blinding him as the frightful centrifugal force sucked the blood down from his head; but the wings held. He peered over the side and saw the Hawker diving again, veering wildly in the trembling control of its pilot.

Simon looped off the top of his zoom and went down again.

That was the only thing he could do, the only hope he had of beating the Hawker's guns. Dive and zoom, loop and dive again. Wipe the Moth's undercarriage across the Hawker's upper wing every time. Split-arch and dive again. Ride the Hawker down by sheer reckless flying. Wing-over and dive again, wires screaming and engine thundering. Smash down on Renway from every angle of the sky, pitting nerve against nerve, judgment against judgment; make him duck and push the stick forward a little more, every time, with the wheels practically rolling over his head with every hairbreadth miss. Beat him down five hundred feet, a thousand, fifteen hundred. Loop and dive again…

The Saint flew as he had never flown before. He did things that couldn't be done, took chances that could never come off, tore his machine through the air under strains that no ship of its class could possibly survive — and kept on flying. If Renway had been able to fly half as well, it couldn't have gone on.

But Renway couldn't fly half as well. For minutes at a time, his guns never had a target within forty-five degrees of them; and when he brought them round, the target had gone. And each time, a little more of his nerve went with it. He was losing height faster and faster, losing it foot by foot to that nerveless demon of the sky who seemed to have made up his mind to lock their machines together and send them crashing to earth in a single shroud of flame… The Saint smiled with merciless blue eyes like chips of frozen sea water; and dived again… He was going to win. He knew it. He could see the Hawker wobbling more wildly at every moment, plunging more panickily downwards at every effort to escape, sprawling more clumsily on every amateurish manoeuvre. He saw Renway's white face looking round again, saw a gloved fist impotently shaken at him, saw the mouth open and heard in his imagination the scream of fury that was ripped to fragments in the wind; and he laughed. He could divine what was in Renway's mind — divine the trembling twitching fear that was shuddering through his flabby limbs, the clammy sweat that must have been breaking out on the soft body — and he laughed through a mask of merciless bronze and swept the Moth screeching down again to whisk its wheels six inches over Renway's helmet. Renway, the snivelling jelly who had called himself the Saint!

Then, for the first time in a long while, he looked down to see what else was happening, and saw that the dogfight had carried them about a mile out over the sea, and the transport plane was just passing over the cliffs.

Renway must have seen it, too. Suddenly, in a frantic vertical bank which almost went into a power spin, he turned and dived on it, his guns rattling.

Simon pushed the stick into the dash, flung the throttle wide, and went down like a plummet.

The sobbing growl of the motor wailed up to an eldritch shriek as the ship slashed through the air. Down and down; with a wind greater than anything in nature slapping his face and plucking at his goggles, while the transport plane curled away in a startled bank and Renway twisted after it. Down and down, in the maddest plunge of that fantastic combat. Fingers cool and steady on the stick, feet as gentle on the rudder bar as the hands of a horseman on the reins, every coordinated nerve and muscle holding the ship together like a living creature. Bleak eyes following every movement of his quarry. Lips parted and frozen in- a deadly smile. Down and down, till he saw the bulk of the Imperial Airways monoplane leap upwards past the tail of his eye, and realized that Renway had shot down past his mark without scoring a hit. Downwards still, while Renway flattened out in a slow turn and began to climb again.

Finish it now — before Renway got in another burst which might be lucky enough to score.

Down… But there wasn't a civil aeroplane built which could squat down out of a dive like that without leaving its wings behind. It would have to be fairly gentle — and that would be bad enough. As coolly as if he had been driving a car at twenty miles an hour, the Saint judged his margin and felt the resistance on the stick. For one absurd instant he realized that Renway's cockpit was coming stone-cold into the place where the sights would have been if the Moth had been armed…

Crash!

The Moth shuddered under him in an impact like the explosion of a big gun. The painted map whirled across his vision while he fought to get the ship under control. He glanced out to right and left — both wings were still there, apparently intact. The nose of the machine began to lift again, steadily, across the flat blue water and the patchwork carpet, until at last it reached the horizon.

Simon looked down.

The Hawker was going down, five hundred feet below him, in a slow helpless spin. Its tail section was shattered as if a giant club had hit it, and tangled up with it were some splintered spars which looked as if they had belonged to his own landing gear. He had glimpses of Renway struggling wildly in the cockpit, wrestling with the useless controls, and felt a momentary twinge of pity which did not show in his face. After all, the man must have been mad… And even if he had killed and tried to kill, he was not going to the most pleasant of all deaths.

Then Simon remembered the bombs which the Hawker was supposed to carry, and realized that the end might be quick.

He watched the Hawker with a stony fascination. If it fell in the sea, the bombs might not go off. But it was very near the cliffs, bobbing and fluttering like a broken grey leaf… For several seconds he thought it would miss the land.

And then, in one of those queer freaks of aerodynamics which every airman knows, it steadied up. For an instant of time it seemed to hang poised in the air. And then, with the straight clean swoop of a paper dart it dived into the very rim of the surf which was creaming along the foot of the white cliffs. There was a split second of horrible suspense; and then the wreckage seemed to lift open under the thrust of a great tongue of orange-violent flame…

Simon Templar tasted his sherry and lighted a cigarette.

"It was fairly easy after that," he said. "I did a very neat pancake on the water about fifty yards offshore, and a motorboat brought me in. I met Teal halfway up the cliff and showed him the entrance of the cave. We took a peek inside, and damn if Petrowitz and his crew weren't coming up the steps. Renway had crashed right on top of the underwater exit and blown it in — and the sub was bottled up inside. Apparently the crew had seen our scrap and guessed that something had gone wrong, and scuttled back for home. They were heading for the last round-up with all sail set, and since they could only get out one at a time we didn't lose any weight helping them on their way."

Patricia Holm was silent for a moment.

"You didn't deserve to come out of it with a whole skin," she said.

"I came out of it with more than that, old darling," said the Saint, with impenitent eyes. "I opened the safe again before I left, and collected Hugo's cash box again. It's outside in the car now."

Hoppy Uniatz was silent somewhat longer. It is doubtful whether he had any clear idea of what all the excitement had ever been about; but he was able to grasp one point in which he seemed to be involved.

"Boss," he said tentatively, "does it mean I ain't gotta take no rap for smackin' de cop?"

The Saint smiled.

"I guess you can put your shirt on it, Hoppy."

"Chees," said Mr. Uniatz, reaching for the whisky with a visible revival of interest, "dat's great! Howja fix it?"

Simon caught Patricia's eye and sighed. And then he began to laugh.

"I got Claud to forget it for the sake of his mother," he said. "Now suppose you tell your story. Did you catch Wynnis?"

The front doorbell rang on the interrogation, and they listened in a pause of silence, while Hoppy poured himself out half a pint of undiluted Scotch. They heard Orace's limping tread crossing the hall, and the sounds of someone being admitted; and then the study door was opened and Simon saw who the visitor was.

He jumped up.

"Claud!" he cried. "The very devil we were talking about! I was just telling Hoppy about your mother."

Mr. Teal came just inside the room and settled his thumbs in the belt of his superfluous overcoat. His china-blue eyes looked as if they were just about to close in the sleep of unspeakable boredom; but that was an old affectation. It had nothing to do with the slight heliotrope flush in his round face or the slight compression of his mouth. In the ensuing hiatus, an atmosphere radiated from him which was nothing like the sort of atmosphere which should have radiated from a man who was thinking kindly of his mother.

"Oh, you were, were you?" he said, and his voice broke on the words in a kind of hysterical bark. "Well, I didn't come down from London to hear about my mother. I want to hear what you know about a man called Wynnis, who was held up in his flat at half-past eight this morning—”