The Saint in New York

"We ought to have met before, Sebastian," he murmured.

The chauffeur nodded.

"Sure, I read aboutcha. I like dat job. I been waitin' to see Morrie Ualino get his ever since I had to pay him protection t'ree years ago, when he was runnin' de taxi racket. Say, dat was some smash ya had back dere. Some guys tryin' to knock ya off?"

"Trying."

The driver shook his head.

"I can't figure what dis city is comin' to," he confessed. "Ya ain't hoit, though?"

"Not the way I was meant to be," said the Saint.

He was watching the traffic behind them now. The driver had excelled himself. After the first few hectic blocks he had reverted to less conspicuous driving, without surrendering any of the skill with which he dodged round unexpected corners and doubled on his own tracks. Any pursuit which might have got started soon enough to be useful seemed to have been shaken off: there was not even the distant siren of a police car to be heard. The man at the wheel seemed to have an instinctive flair for getaways, and he did his job without once permitting it to interfere with the smooth flow of his loquacity.

As they covered the last stretch of Lexington Avenue, he said: "Ja rather go in here, or Forty-second Street?"

"This'll do," said the Saint. "And thanks."

"Ya welcome," said the driver amiably. "Say, I wouldn't mind doin' a job for a guy like you. Any time you could use a guy like me, call up Columbus 9-4789. I eat there most days around two o'clock."

Simon opened the door as the cab stopped, and pushed a twenty-dollar bill into the driver's collar.

"Maybe I will, some day," he said and plunged into the station with the driver's "So long, pal," floating after him.

Taking no chances, he dodged through the subways for a while, stopped in a washroom to repair some of the slight damage which the accident had done to his appearance, and finally let himself out onto Park Avenue for the shortest ex­posed walk to the Waldorf. Once again he demonstrated how much a daring outlaw can get away with in a big city. In the country he would have been a stranger, to be observed and discussed and inquired into; but a big city is full of strangers, and nearly all of them are busy. None of the men and women who hurried by, either in cars or on their own feet, were at all interested in him; they scurried intently on towards their own affairs, and the absent-minded old gentleman who actually cannoned into him and passed oh with a muttered apology never knew that he had touched the man for whom all the police and the underworld were searching.

Valcross came in about lunchtime. Simon was lounging on the davenport reading an afternoon paper; he looked up at the older man and smiled.

"You didn't expect to see me back so early—isn't that what you were going to say?"

"More or less," Valcross admitted. "What's wrong?"

Simon swung his legs off the sofa and came to a sitting posi­tion.

"Nothing," he said, lighting a cigarette, "and at the same time, everything. A certain Mr. Papulos, whom you wot of, has been taken off; but he wasn't really on our list. Mr. Kuhl­mann, I'm afraid, is still at large." He told his story tersely but completely. "Altogether, a very unfortunate misunder­standing," he concluded. "Not that it seems to make a great deal of difference, from what Pappy was saying just before the ukulele music broke us up. Pappy was all set to shoot the works, but the works we want were not in him. However, in close cooperation with the bloke who carries a scythe and has such an appalling taste in nightshirts, we may be able to rectify our omissions."

Valcross, at the decanter, raised his eyebrows faintly.

"You're taking a lot of chances, Simon. Don't let this—er —bloke who carries the scythe swing it the wrong way."

"If he does," said the Saint gravely, "I shall duck. Then, in sober and reasonable argument, I shall endeavour to prove to the bloke the error of his ways. Whereupon he will burst into tears and beg my forgiveness, and we shall take up the trail again together."

"What trail?"

Simon frowned.

"Why bring that up," he protested. "I'm blowed if I know. But it occurs to me, Bill, that we shall have to be a bit careful about the taking off of some of these other birds on our list— if they all went out like Pappy there wouldn't be anyone left who could lead us to the Big Fellow, and he's a guy I should very much like to meet. But if Papulos was talking turkey there may be a line to something in the further prospective tribulations of Zeke Inselheim; and that's why I came home."

Valcross brought a filled glass over to him.

"Does that supply the need?" he asked humorously.

The Saint smiled.

"It certainly supplies one of them, Bill. The other is rather bigger. I think you told me once that the expenses of this jaunt were on you."

The other looked at him for a moment, and then took out a checkbook and a fountain pen.

"How much do you want?"

"Not money. I want a car. A nice, dark, ordinary-looking car with a bit of speed in hand. A roadster will do, and a fairly new second-hand one at that. But I'll let you go out and buy it, for the reason you mentioned yourself—things may be happening pretty fast around the Château Inselheim, and I'd rather like to be there."

He had no very definite plan in mind; but the penultimate revelation of the late Mr. Papulos was impressed deeply on his memory. He thought it over through the afternoon, till the day faded and New York donned her electric jewels and came to life.

The only decision he came to was that if anything was go­ing to happen during the next twenty-four hours it would be likely to happen at night; and it was well after dark when he set out in the long underslung roadster that Valcross had provided. After the day had gone, and the worker had re­turned to his fireside, Broadway came into its own: the under­world and its allies, to whom the sunset was the dawn, and who had a very lukewarm appreciation of firesides, came forth from their hiding places to play and plot new ventures; and if Mr. Ezekiel Inselheim and his seed were still the target, they would be likely to waste no time.

It was, as a matter of fact, one of those soft and balmy nights on which a fireside has a purely symbolical appeal. Overhead, a full moon tossed her beams extravagantly over an unapprecia­tive city. A cool breeze swept across the Hudson, whipping the heat from the granite of the mighty metropolis. Over in Brooklyn, a certain Mr. Theodore Bungstatter was so moved by the magic of the night that he proposed marriage to his cook, and swooned when he was accepted; and the Saint sent his car roaring through the twinkling canyons of New York with a sublime faith that this evening could not be less produc­tive of entertainment than any which had gone before.

As a matter of fact, the expedition was not embarked on quite so blindly as it might have appeared. The information supplied by the late Mr. Papulos had started a train of thought, and the more Simon followed it the more he became convinced that it ought dutifully to lead somewhere. Any such racket as Papulos had described depended for its effec­tiveness almost entirely upon fear—an almost superstitious fear of the omnipotence and infallibility of the menacing party. By the failure of the previous night's kidnapping that atmosphere had suffered a distinct setback, and only a prompt and decisive counter-attack would restore the damage. On an expert and comprehensive estimate, the odds seemed about two hundred to one that the tribulations of Mr. Insel­heim were only just beginning; but it must be confessed that Simon Templar was not expecting quite such a rapid vindica­tion of his arithmetic as he received.

As he turned into Sutton Place he saw an expensive lim­ousine standing outside the building where Mr. Inselheim's apartment was. He marked it down mechanically, along with the burly lounger who was energetically idling in the vicinity. Simon flicked his gear lever into neutral and coasted slowly along, contemplating the geography of the locale and weigh­ing up strategic sites for his own encampment; and he had scarcely settled on a spot when a dark plump figure emerged from the building and paused for a moment beside the burly lounger on the sidewalk.

The roadster stopped abruptly, and the Saint's keen eyes strained through the night. He saw that the dark plump figure carried a bulky brown-paper package under its arm; and as the brief conversation with the lounger concluded, the figure turned towards the limousine and the rays of a street lamp fell full across the pronounced and unforgettable fea­tures of Mr. Ezekiel Inselheim.

Simon raised his eyebrows and regarded himself solemnly in the driving mirror.

"Oho," he remarked to his reflection. "Likewise aha. As Mr. Templar arrives, Mr. Inselheim departs. We seem to have arrived in the nick of time."

At any rate, the reason for the burly lounger's presence was disposed of, and it was not what the Saint had thought at first. He realized immediately that after the stirring events of the last twenty-four hours the police, with their inspired efficiency in locking the stable door after the horse was stolen, would have naturally posted a guard at the Inselheim residence; and the large-booted idler was acquitted of any sinister in­tentions.

The guilelessness of Mr. Inselheim was less clearly estab­lished, and Simon was frowning thoughtfully as he slipped the roadster back into gear and watched Inselheim entering the limousine. For a few moments, while the limousine's en­gine was warming up, he debated whether it might not have been a more astute tactical move to remain on the spot where Mr. Inselheim's offspring might provide a centre of more urgent disturbances. And then, as the limousine pulled out from the curb, he flicked an imaginary coin in his mind, and it came down on the memory of a peculiar brown-paper pack­age. With a slight shrug he pulled out a cigarette case and juggled it deftly with one hand as he stepped on the gas.

"The hell with it," said the Saint to his attractive reflection. "Ezekiel is following his nose, and there may be worse land­marks."

The limousine's taillight was receding northwards, and Simon closed up until he was less than twenty yards behind, trailing after it through the traffic as steadily as if the two cars had been linked by invisible ropes.

* * *

After a while the dense buildings of the city thinned out to the quieter, evenly spaced dwellings of the suburbs. There the moon seemed to shine even more brightly; the stars were chips of ice from which a cool radiance came down to freshen the summer evening; and the Saint sighed gently. In him was a certain strain of the same temperament which blessed our Mr. Theodore Bungstatter of Brooklyn: a night like that filled him with a sense of peace and tranquillity that was utterly alien to his ordinary self. He decided that in a really well-organized world there would have been much bet­ter things for him to do on such an evening than to go trailing after a bloke who boasted the name of Inselheim and looked like it. It would have been a very different matter if the mys­terious and beautiful Fay Edwards, who had twice passed with such surprising effect across the horizons of that New York venture, had been driving the limousine ahead. . . .

He thrust a second cigarette between his lips and struck a match. The light revealed his face for one flashing instant, striking a rather cold blue light from thoughtfully reckless eyes —a glimpse of character that might have interested Dutch Kuhlmann not a little if that sentimentally ruthless Teuton had been there to see it. The Saint had his romantic regrets, but they subtracted nothing from the concentration with which he was following the job in hand.

His hand waved the match to extinction, and in his next movement he reached forward and switched out all the lights in the car. In the closer traffic of the city there was no reason why he should not legitimately be following on the same route as the limousine, but out on the less populated thoroughfares his leech-like devotion might cause a nervous man some inquisitive agitation which Simon Templar had no wish to arouse. His left arm swung languidly over the side as the roadster ripped round a turn in the road at an even sixty and roared on to the northwest.

The road was a level strip of concrete laid out like a silver tape under the sinking moon. He steered on in the wake of the limousine's headlight, soothing his ears with the even purr of tires swishing over the macadam, his nerves relaxed and resting. Above the hum of the engines rose a faint and not unmelodious sound. Simon Templar was serenading the stars. . . .

The song ended abruptly.

Something flashed in the corner of his eye—something jerky and illuminating like an electric torch. It flashed three times, with the precision of a lighthouse; and then the dark­ness settled down again.

Simon's hands steadied on the wheel, and he shut off the engine and declutched with two swift simultaneous move­ments. His foot shifted to the brake and brought the roadster to a standstill as quickly as it could be done without giving his tires a chance to scream a protest.

In the last mile or two, out on the open road, he had fallen behind a bit, and now he was glad that he had done so. The red taillight of the limousine leapt into redder brilliance as Inselheim jammed on the brakes, pulling it over to the side of the road as it slowed down. Then, right at its side, the flashlight beamed again.

From a safe distance, Simon saw a dark object leave the window at the side of the limousine, trace an arc through the air, and vanish into the bushes at the side of the highway. Then the limousine took off like a startled hare and shot away into the night as if it had seen a ghost; but by that time the Saint was out of his car, racing up the road without a sound.

The package which Inselheim had thrown out remained by the roadside where it had fallen, and Simon recognized it at once as the parcel which the millionaire had carried under his arm when he left his apartment. That alone made it inter­esting enough, and the manner of its delivery established it as something which had to be investigated without delay— although Simon could make a shrewd grim guess at what it contained. But his habitual caution slowed up his steps before he reached it, and he merged himself into the blackness be­neath a tree with no more sound than an errant shadow. And for a short time there was silence, broken only by the soft rustle of leaves in the night wind.

The package lay in a patch of moonlight, solitary and for­lorn as a beer bottle on a Boy Scout picnic ground. The Saint's eyes were fixed on it unwinkingly, and his right hand slipped the gun out of his pocket and noiselessly thumbed the safety catch out of gear. A gloved hand moved out of the darkness, reaching for the parcel, and Simon spoke quietly.

"I don't think I'd touch that, Ferdinand," he said.

There was a gasp from the darkness. By rights there should have been no answer but a shot, or the sounds of a speedy and determined retreat; but the circumstances were somewhat exceptional.

The leaves stirred, and a cap appeared above the greenery. The cap was followed by a face, the face by a pair of shoul­ders, the shoulders by a chest and an abdomen. The appear­ance of this human form rising gradually out of the black­ness as if raised on some concealed elevator had an amazingly spooky effect which was marred only by the physiognomy of the spectre and the pattern of its clothes. Simon could not quite accept an astral body with such a flamboyant choice of worsteds, but he gazed at the apparition admiringly enough.

"Well, well, well!" he remarked. "If it isn't my old college chum, wearing his old school tie. Can you do any more tricks like that, Heimie?—it's fun to be fooled, but it's more fun to know!"

Heimie Felder goggled at him dumbly. The developments of the past twenty-four hours had been no small strain on his limited intellect, and the stress and surprise of them had robbed him of much of his natural elasticity and joie-de-vivre. Standing waist-high in the moonlight, his face reflected a greenish pallor which was not entirely due to the lunar rays.

"Migawd," he said, expressing his emotions in the mildest possible terms.

The Saint smiled.

"In a year or two you'll be quite used to seeing me around, won't you?" he remarked chattily. "That is, if you live as long as a year or two. The mob you belong to seems to have such suspicious and hasty habits, from what Pappy was telling me. . . . Excuse me if I collect this."

He stooped swiftly and picked up the brown-paper parcel from its patch of moonlight. Heimie Felder made no attempt to stop him—the power of protest seemed to have deserted him at last, never to return. But his lips shaped a dazed com­ment of one word which groped for the last immutable land­mark of sanity in his staggering universe.

"Nuts," Heimie said hollowly.

The Saint was not offended. He tucked the parcel under his arm.

"I'm afraid I must be going," he murmured. "But I'm sure we shall be getting together again soon. We seem to be des­tined ..."

His voice dropped to nothing as he caught the sound of a footfall somewhere on his right. Staring into the bulging eyes of the man in front of him, he saw there a sudden flicker of hope; and his teeth showed very white in the moonlight.

"I think not," he advised softly.

His gun moved ever so slightly, so that a shaft of moonlight caught the barrel for a moment; and Heimie Felder was silent. The Saint shifted himself quietly in the darkness, so that his automatic half covered the visible target and yet was ready to turn instantly into the obscurity of the road at his side; and another voice spoke out of the gloom.

"You got it, Heimie?"

Heimie breathed hard, but did not speak; and the Saint answered for him. His voice floated airily through the night.

"No, brother," he said smoothly, "Heimie has not got it. I have it—and I also have Heimie. You will advance slowly with your hands well above your head, or else you may get it your­self."

For the third time that night the moon demonstrated its friendliness. On his right the Saint could make out a dark and shadowy figure, though he could not see the newcomer clearly on account of the trees at the roadside. But a vagrant beam of the moon danced glitteringly on something metallic in the intruder's hand, and the new voice spoke viciously.

"You rat!"

The gun banged in his hand, spitting a venomous squirt of orange flame into the blackness, and the bullet whisked through the leaves and thudded into the tree where the Saint stood. Simon's eyes narrowed over the sights, as coldly delib­erate as if he had been firing on a range; his forefinger closed on the trigger, and the metallic object on which the moon­beam danced spun crazily from the man's hand and flew across the road. A roar of pain and an unprintable oath drowned the clatter of metal on the macadam, and the same voice yelled: "Get him, Heimie!"

In the next second the black bulk of the man was charging down on him. Simon pressed the trigger again coolly; but nothing happened—the hammer fell on a dud cartridge. He dropped the parcel under his arm and snatched at the slid­ing jacket, but the charging weight of the man caught him before the next shell was in the chamber.

Simon went back against the tree with a force that seemed to bruise his very lungs through the pads of muscle across his back. His breath came with a grunt and he rebounded out again, sluggishly, like a sandbag, and felt his fist smack into a chest like a barrel. Then the man's arms whipped round him and they went down together, rolling heavily over the uneven ground.

The sky was shot with daubs of vivid colour, while a black­ness deeper than the blackness of night struggled to close over the Saint's brain. His chest was a dull mass of pain from that terrific crash against the tree, and the air had to be forced into it with a mighty effort at each agonizing breath, as if his face were smothered with a heavy cushion. Nothing but a titanic vitality of will kept him conscious and fighting. The man on top of him was thirty pounds heavier than he was; and he knew that if Heimie Felder recovered from the superstitious paralysis which had been gripping him, and located the centre of the fight soon enough, there would be nothing but a slab of carved marble to mark the spot where a presumptuous outlaw had bucked the odds once too often.

They crashed through a low bush and slithered down a slight gradient, punching and kicking and grappling like a pair of wildcats. The big man broke through Simon's arms and got hold of his head, gouging viciously. The Saint's head bumped twice against the hard turf, and the flashing daubs of colour whirled in giddy gyrations across his vision. Sud­denly his body went limp, and the big man let out an exultant yell.

"I got him, Heimie! I got him! Where are ya?"

Simon saw the close-cropped bullet head for one instant clearly, lifted in black silhouette against the swimming stars. He swung up the useless automatic which he was still clutch­ing and smashed it fiercely into the silhouette; and the grip on his head weakened. With a new surge of power the Saint heaved up and rolled them over again, straddling the cursing man with his legs and hammering the butt of his gun again and again into the dark sticky pulpiness from which the curs­ing came. ...

A rough hand, which did not belong to the man under­neath him, essayed to encircle his throat from the rear; and Simon gathered that the full complement of the opposition was finally gathered on the scene. The cursing had died away, and the heavy figure of his first opponent was soft and motion­less under him and the Saint dropped his gun. His right hand reached over his shoulder and grasped the new assailant by the neck.

"Excuse me, Heimie," said the Saint, rather breathlessly— "I'm busy."

He got one knee up and lifted, pulling downwards with his right hand. Heimie Felder was dragged slowly from the ground: his torso came gradually over the Saint's shoulder: and then the Saint turned his wrist and straightened his legs with a quick jerk, and Heimie shot over and downwards and hit the ground with his head. Apart from that solid and soporific thump, he made no sound; and silence settled down once more upon the scene.

The Saint dusted his clothes and repossessed himself of his automatic. He wiped it carefully on Heimie's silk handker­chief, ejected the dud cartridge which had caused all the trouble, and replenished the magazine. Then he went in search of the parcel which had stimulated so much unfriendly argu­ment, and carried it back to his car without a second glance at the two sleeping warriors by the roadside.

Chapter 6

How Simon Templar Interviewed Mr. Inselheim, and Dutch Kuhlmann Wept

It seems scarcely necessary to explain that Mr. Ezekiel Inselheim was a Jew. He was a stoutish man with black hair surrounding a shiny bald pate, pleasant brown eyes, and a rather attractive smile; but his nose would have driven Hitler into frenzies of belligerent Aryanism. Confronted by that shamelessly Semitic proboscis, no well-trained Nazi could ever have been induced to believe that he was a kindly and honest man, shrewd without duplicity, self-made without arrogance, wealthy without offensive ostentation. It has always been dif­ficult for such wild possibilities to percolate into the atro­phied brain cells of second-rate crusaders, and a thousand years of self-styled civilization have made no more improve­ments in the Nordic crank than they have in any other type of malignant half-wit.

He sat slumping wearily before the table in his library. The white light of his desk lamp made his sallow face appear even paler than it was naturally; his hands were resting on the blotter in front of him, clenched into impotent fists, and he was staring at them, with a dull, almost childish hurt creas­ing deep grooves into the flesh on either side of his mouth.

Upstairs, his daughter slept peacefully, resting again in her own bed with the careless confidence of childhood; and for that privilege he had been compelled to pay the price. In spite of the fact that that strange Robin Hood of the twentieth century who was called the Saint had brought her back to him without a fee, Inselheim knew that the future safety of the girl still depended solely on his own ability to meet the payments demanded of him. He knew that his daughter had been kid­napped as a warning rather than for actual ransom, knew that there were worse weapons than kidnapping which the Terror would not hesitate to employ at the next sign of rebellion; if he had ever had any doubts on that score, they had been swept away by the cold guttural voice which had spoken to him over the telephone that morning; and it was the knowledge of those things that clenched his unpractised fists at the same time as that dull bitter pain of helplessness darkened his eyes.

Ezekiel Inselheim was wondering, as others no less rich and famous had wondered before him, why it was that in the most materially civilized country in the world an honoured and peaceful citizen had still to pay toll to a clique of organized bandits, like medieval peasants meeting the extortions of a feudal barony. He was wondering, with a grim intensity of revolt, why the police, who were so impressively adept at handing out summonses for traffic violations, and delivering per­jured testimony against unfortunate women, were so plain­tively incapable of holding the racketeers in check. And he knew the answers only too well.

He knew, as all America knew, that with upright legisla­tors, with incorruptible police and judiciary, the gangster would long ago have vanished like the Western bad man. He knew that without the passive cooperation of a resigned and leaderless public, without the inbred cowardice of a terrorized population, the racketeers and the grafting political leaders who protected them could have been wiped off the face of the American landscape at a cost of one hundredth part of the tribute which they exacted annually. It was the latter part of that knowledge which carved the stunned, hurt lines deeper into his face and whitened the skin across his fleshy fists. It gave him back none of the money which had been bled out of him, returned him no jot of comfort or security, filled him with nothing but a cancerous ache of degradation which was curdling into a futile trembling agony of hopeless anger. If, at that moment, any of his extortioners had appeared before him, he would have tried to stand up and defy them, knowing that there could be only one outcome to his lonely, pitiful resistance. . . .

And it was at that instant that some sixth sense made him turn his head, with a gasp of fear wrenched from sheer over­wrought nerves strangling in his throat.

A languid immaculate figure lolled gracefully on the win­dowsill, one leg flung carelessly into the room, the other re­maining outside in the cool night. A pair of insolent blue eyes were inspecting him curiously, and a smile with a hint of mockery in it moved the gay lips of the stranger. It was a smile with humour in it which was not entirely humorous, blue eyes with an amused twinkle which did not belong to any conventional amusement. The voice, when it spoke, had a banter­ing lilt, but beneath the lilt was something harder and colder than Inselheim had ever heard before—something that re­minded him of chilled steel glinting under a polar moon.

"Hullo, Zeke," said the Saint.

At the sound of that voice the pathetic mustering of anger drained out of Inselheim as if a stopcock had been opened, leaving nothing but a horrible blank void. Upstairs was his child—sleeping. . . . And suddenly he was only a frightened old man again, staring with fear-widened eyes at the revival of the menace which was tearing his self-respect into shreds.

"I've paid up!" he gasped hysterically. "What do you want? I've paid! Why don't you leave me alone——"

The Saint swung his other leg into the room and hitched himself nonchalantly off the sill.

"Oh, no, you haven't," he said gravely. "You haven't paid up at all, brother."

"But I have paid!" The broker's voice was wild, the words tumbling over each other in the ghastly incoherence of panic. "Something must have gone wrong. I paid—I paid tonight, just as you told me to. There must be some mistake. It isn't my fault. I paid ——"

Simon's hands went to his pockets. From the breast pocket of his coat, the side pockets, the pockets of his trousers, he produced bundle after bundle of neatly stacked fifty-dollar bills, tossing them one by one onto the desk in an apparently inexhaustible succession, like a conjuror producing rabbits out of a hat.

"There's your money, Zeke," he remarked cheerfully. "Ninety thousand bucks, if you want to count it. I allotted myself a small reward of ten thousand, which I'm sure you'll agree is a very modest commission. So you see you haven't paid up at all."

Inselheim gaped at the heaps of money on the desk with a thrill of horror. He made no attempt to touch it. Instead, he stared at the Saint, and there was a numbness of stark terror in his eyes.

"Where—where did you get this?"

"You dropped it, I think," explained the Saint easily. "For­tunately I was behind you. I picked it up. You mustn't mind my blowing in by the fire escape—I'm just fond of a little variety now and again. Luckily for you," said the Saint vir­tuously, "I am an honest man, and money never tempts me —much. But I'm afraid you must have a lot more dough than is good for you, Zeke, if the only way you can think of to get rid of it is to go chucking scads of it around the scenery like that."

Inselheim swallowed hard. His face had gone chalk white.

"You mean you—you picked this up where I dropped it?"

Simon nodded.

"That was the impression I meant to convey. Perhaps I didn't make myself very clear. When I saw you heaving buckets of potatoes over the horizon in that absent-minded sort of way——"

"You fool!" Inselheim said, with quivering lips. "You've killed me—that's what you've done. You've killed my daugh­ter!" His voice rose in a hoarse tightening of dread. "If they don't get this money—they'll kill!"

Simon raised his eyebrows. He sat on the arm of a chair.

"Really?" he asked, with faint interest.

"My God!" groaned the man. "Why did you have to inter­fere? What's this to you, anyway? Who are you?"

The Saint smiled.

"I'm the little dicky bird," he said, "who brought your daughter back last time."

Inselheim sat bolt upright

"The Saint!"

Simon bowed his acknowledgment. He stretched out a long arm, pulled open the drawer of the desk in which long ex­perience had taught him that cigars were most often to be found, and helped himself.

"You hit it, Zeke. The bell rings, and great strength returns the penny. This is quite an occasion, isn't it?" He pierced the rounded end of the cigar with a deftly wielded matchstick, reversed the match, and scraped fire from it with his thumb­nail, ignoring the reactions of his astounded host. "In the cir­cumstances, it may begin to dawn on you presently why I have that eccentric partiality to fire escapes." He blew smoke towards the ceiling and smiled again. "I guess you owe me quite a lot, Zeke; and if you've got a spot of good Bourbon to go with this I wouldn't mind writing it off your account."

Inselheim stared at him for a long moment in silence. The cumulative shocks which had struck him seemed to have dead­ened and irised down the entrances of his mind, so that the thoughts that seethed in the anterooms of consciousness could only pass through one by one. But one idea came through more strongly and persistently than any other.

"I know," he said, with a dull effort. "I'm sorry. I—I guess I owe you—plenty. I won't forget it. But—you don't under­stand. If you want to help me, you must get out. I've got to think. You can't stay here. If they found you were here— they'd kill us both."

"Not both," said the Saint mildly.

He looked at Inselheim steadily, with a faintly humorous interest, like a hardened dramatic critic watching with ap­proval the presentation of a melodrama, yet realizing with a trace of self-mockery that he had seen it all before. But it was the candid appraisement in his gaze which stabbed mercilessly into some lacerated nerve that was throbbing painfully away down in the depths of the Jew's crushed and battered fibre— a swelling nerve of contempt for his own weakness and in­adequacy, the same nerve whose mute and inarticulate reactions had been clenching his soft hands into those piti­fully helpless fists before the Saint came. The clear blue light of those reckless bantering eyes seemed to illumine the profundi­ties of Inselheim's very soul; but the light was too sudden and strong, and his own vision was still too blurred, for him to be able to see plainly what the light showed.

"What did you come here for?" Inselheim asked; and Simon blew one smoke ring and put another through the centre of it.

"To return your potatoes—as you see. To have a cigar, and that drink which you're so very inhospitably hesitating, to provide. And to see if you might be able to help me."

"How could I help you? If it's money you want——"

"I could have helped myself." The Saint glanced at the stacks of money on the desk with one eyebrow cocked and a glimmer of pure enjoyment in his eye. "I seem to be getting a lot of chances like that these days. Thanks all the same, but I've got one millionaire grubstaking me already, and his bank hasn't failed yet. No—what I might be able to use from you, Zeke, is a few heart-to-heart confidences."

Inselheim shook his head slowly, a movement that seemed to be a more of an automatic than a deliberate refusal.

"I can't tell you anything."

Simon glanced at his wrist watch.

"A rather hasty decision," he murmured. "Not to say flatter­ing. For all you know, I may be ploughing through life in a state of abysmal ignorance. However, you've got plenty of time to change your mind. . . ."

The Saint rose lazily from his chair and stood looking downwards at his host, without a variation in the genial lei­sureliness of his movements or the cool suaveness of his voice; but it was a lazy leisureliness, a cool geniality, that was more impressive than any noisy dominance.

"You know, Zeke," he rambled on affably, "to change one's mind is the mark of a liberal man. It indicates that one has assimilated wisdom and experience. It indicates that one is free from stubbornness and pride and pimples and other deadly sins. Even scientists aren't dogmatic any more— they're always ready to admit they were wrong and start all over again. A splendid attitude, Zeke—splendid. . . ."

He was standing at his full height, carelessly dynamic like a cat stretching itself; but he had made no threatening move­ment, said nothing menacing . . . nothing.

"I'm sure you see the point, Zeke," he said; and for some reason that had no outward physical manifestation, Inselheim knew that the gangsters whom he feared and hated could never be more ruthless than this mild-mannered young man with the mocking blue eyes who had clambered through his window such a short while ago.

"What could I tell you?" Inselheim asked tremulously.

Simon sat on the edge of the desk. There was neither triumph nor self-satisfaction in his air—nothing to indicate that he had ever even contemplated any other ultimate re­sponse. His gentleness was almost that of a psycho-analyst extracting confessions from a nervous patient; and once again Inselheim felt that queer light illuminating hidden cor­ners of himself which he had not asked to see.

"Tell me all, Zeke," said the Saint

"What is there you don't know?" Inselheim protested weakly. "They kidnapped Viola because I refused to pay the protection money——"

"The protection money," Simon repeated idly. "Yes, I knew about that. But at least we've got started. Carry on, Uncle."

"We've all got to pay for protection. There's no way out. You brought Viola back, but that hasn't saved her. If I don't pay now—they'll kill. You know that. I told you. What else is there——"

"Who are they?" asked the Saint.

"I don't know."

Simon regarded him quizzically.

"Possibly not." Under the patient survey of those unillu­sioned eyes, the light in Inselheim's subconsciousness was very bright. "But you must have some ideas. At some time or another, there must have been some kind of contact. A voice didn't speak out of the ceiling and tell you to pay. And even a bloke with as many potatoes as you have doesn't go scattering a hundred grand across the countryside just because some maniac he's never heard of calls up on the phone and tells him to. That's only one of the things I'm trying to get at. I take it that you don't want to go on paying out hundreds of thousands of dollars to this unknown voice till the next new moon. I take it that you don't want to spend the rest of your life wondering from day to day what the next demand is going to be—and wondering what they'll do to your daughter to enforce it. I take it that you want a little peace and quiet— and that even beyond that you might like to see some things in this city changed. I take it that you have some manhood that goes deeper than merely wearing trousers, and I'm asking you to give it a chance."

Inselheim swallowed hard. The light within him was blind­ing, hurting his eyes. It terrified him. He rose as if in sheer nervousness and paced the room.

Simon watched him curiously. He knew the struggle that went on inside the man, and after a fashion he sympathized. . . . And then, as Inselheim reached the far wall, his hand shot out and pressed a button. He turned and faced the Saint defiantly.

"Now," he said, with a strange thickness in his voice, "get out! That bell calls one of my guards. I don't wish you any harm—I owe you everything—for a while. But I can't—I can't sign my own death warrant—or Viola's. . . ."

"No," said the Saint softly. "Of course not."

He hitched himself unhurriedly off the desk and walked to the window. There, he threw a long leg across the sill; and his unchanged azure eyes turned back to fix themselves on Inselheim.

"Perhaps," he said quietly, "you'll tell me the rest another day."

The broker shook his head violently.

"Never," he gabbled. "Never. I don't want to die. I won't tell anything. You can't make me. You can't!"

A heavy footstep sounded outside in the hall. Inselheim stood staring, his chest heaving breathlessly, his mouth half open as if aghast at the meaning of his own words, his hands twitching. The light in his mind had suddenly burst. He looked for contempt, braced himself for a retort that would shrivel the last of his pride, and instead saw nothing in the Saint's calm eyes but a sincere and infinite compassion that was worse than the bitterest derision. Inselheim gasped; and his stomach was suddenly empty as he realized that he had thrown everything away.

But the Saint looked at him and smiled.

"I'll see you again," he said; and then, as a knock came on the door and the guard's voice demanded an answer, he low­ered himself briskly to the fire-escape landing and went on his way.

The profit from his visit had been precisely nil—in fact, a mercenary estimate might have assessed it as a dead loss of ninety thousand dollars—but that was his own fault. As he slid nimbly down the iron ladders he cursed himself gently for that moment's unwariness which had permitted Inselheim to put a finger on the bell. And yet, without the shock of seeing that last denial actually accomplished, without that final flurry of insensate panic, the broker's awakening might never have been completed. And Simon had a premonition that if Inselheim's chance came again the result would be a little different.

Oddly enough, in his preoccupation with that angle on the task in hand, the Saint had forgotten that there were other parties who would be likely to develop an interest in Sutton Place that night. He stepped off the last ladder into the inky blackness of the narrow alley where it let him down without a thought of immediate danger, and heard the slight movement behind him too late. He spun round with his right hand dart­ing to his pocket, but before it bad touched his gun a strong arm was flung round his neck from behind and the steel snout of an automatic jabbed into his back. A voice harsh with exultation snarled in his ear: "Come a little ways with us, will ya . . . pal?"

* * *

Not a shadow of uneasiness darkened the Saint's brow as he crossed the threshold of the back room of Charley's Place and stood for a moment regarding the faces before him. Be­hind him he heard the click of the latch as the door was closed; and the men who had risen from their seats in the front bar and followed him as his captors hustled him through ranged themselves along the walls. More than a dozen men were gathered in the room. More than two dozen eyes were riveted on him in the same calculating stares—eyes as hard and un­winking as coloured marbles, barren of all humanity.

He was unarmed. He had nothing larger than a pin which might have been used as an offensive weapon. His gun had been taken from him; and the knife which he carried in his sleeve, having left men alive and day before to tell the tale of its deadliness, had been removed almost as quickly. The new desperate suspicion of concealed weapons with which his earlier exploits had filled the minds of the mob had prompted a vastly less perfunctory search than the deceased Mr. Papulos had thought necessary—a search which had left no inch of his person untouched, and which had even seized on his penknife and cigarette case as possible sources of danger. The thorough­ness of the examination had afforded the Saint some grim amusement at the time, but not for a moment had he lost sight of what it meant. Yet his poise had never been more easy and debonair, the steel masked down more deceptively in the mocking depths of his eyes, than it was as he stood there smil­ing and nodding to the assembled company like an actor tak­ing a bow.

"How! my palefaced brothers," he murmured. "The council sits, though the pipe of peace is not in evidence. Well, well, well—every time we get together you think of new games, as the bishop said to the actress. And what do we play tonight?"

A weird light came into the eyes of Heimie Felder, who sat at the table with a fresh bandage round his head. He leaned across and whispered to Dutch Kuhlmann.

"Nuts," he said, almost pleadingly. "De guy is nuts. Dijja hear what he says?"

Kuhlmann's contracted pupils were fixed steadily on the Saint's face. He made no answer. And after that first general survey of the congregation in which he had been included, Simon had not looked at him. For all of the Saint's interest was taken up with the girl who also sat at the table.

It was strange what a deep impression she had made on him in the places where she had crossed his path. He realized that even now he knew nothing about her. He had heard, or as­sumed that he heard, her voice over the telephone; he had seen, or assumed that he saw, the owner of that disembodied voice in the house on Long Island where Viola Inselheim was held and Morrie Ualino died; and once he had felt her hand in the darkness and she had pressed a gun into his hand. But she had never identified herself to more than one of his senses at the same time; and he knew that his cardinal belief that this slim, fair-haired girl with the inscrutable amber eyes was that mysterious Fay Edwards of whom Fernack had spoken rested on nothing but intuition. And yet, even while the active part of his brain had been most wrapped up in the practical mechanics of his vendetta, her image had never been very far from his mind.

The sight of her in that room, the one glimpse of colour and beauty in the grim circle of silent men, brought back to the Saint every question that he had asked himself about her. Every question had trailed off into the same nebulous voids of guesswork in which the hope of any absolute answer was more elusive than the end of a rainbow; but to see her again at such a moment gave him a throb of pleasure for which there was no logical accounting. Once when he was in need she had helped him; he might never know why. Now he was again in need, and he wondered what she was thinking and what she would do. Her face told him nothing—only a spark of something to which he could give no name gleamed for an instant in her eyes and was gone.

Dutch Kuhlmann turned to her.

"This is der Saint?" he asked.

She answered without shifting her gaze from Simon: "Yes. That's the man who killed Morrie."

It was the first tune he had ever seen her and heard her speak at once, the first definite knowledge that his intuition had been right; and a queer thrill leapt through him at the sound of her voice. It was as if he had been fascinated by a picture, and it had suddenly come to life.

"Good-evening, Fay," he said.

She looked at him for a moment longer and then took a cigarette from her bag and struck a match. The movement veiled her eyes, and the spark which he thought he had seen there might have existed only in his imagination.

Kuhlmann nodded to a man who stood by the wall, and another door was unlocked and opened. Through it, after a brief pause, came two other men.

One of them was a big burly man with grey hair and a florid complexion on which the eyebrows stood out startlingly black and bushy, as if they had been gummed on by an absent-minded make-up artist. The other was a small bald-headed man with a heavy black moustache and gold-rimmed pince-nez, whose peering and fluttering manner reminded the Saint irresistibly of a weasel. Seen together, they looked rather like a vaudeville partnership which, either through mishap or design, had been obliged to share the props originally in­tended for one, and who had squabbled childishly over the division: between them they possessed the material for two normally sized men of normal hairiness, but on account of their disagreement they had both emerged with extravagant inequalities. Simon had an irreverent desire to remove the bushy eyebrows from the large man and glue them where it seemed they would be more appropriate, above the luxuriant moustache of the small one. Their bearing was subtly different from that of the others who were assembled in the room; and the Saint gave play to his flippant imaginings only for a passing second, for he had recognized them as soon as they came in and knew that the conference was almost complete. One of . them was the district attorney, Marcus Yeald; the other was the political boss of New York City himself, Robert Orcread— known by his own wish as "Honest Bob."

They studied the Saint with open interest while chairs were vacated for them at the table. Yeald did his scrutinizing from a safe distance, peering through his spectacles nervously— Simon barely overcame the temptation to say "Boo!" to him and find out if he would jump as far as he seemed pre­pared to. Orcread, on the other hand, came round the table without sitting down.

"So you're the guy we've been looking for," he said; and the Saint smiled.

"I guess you know whom you were looking for, Honest Bob," he said.

Orcread's face hardened.

"How did you know my name?"

"I recognized you from your caricature in the New Yorker last week, brother," Simon explained, and gathered at once that the drawing had not met with the Tammany dictator's approval.

Orcread chewed on the stump of dead cigar in his mouth and hooked a thumb into his waistcoat. He looked the Saint up and down again with flinty eyes.

"Better not get too fresh," he advised. "I been wanting a talk with you, but I'll do the wisecracking. You've given us plenty of trouble. I suppose you know you could go to the chair for what you've done."

"Probably," admitted the Saint. "But that was just ignor­ance. When I first came here, I didn't know that I had to get an official license to kill people."

"You should have thought of that sooner," Orcread said. His voice had the rich geniality, of the professional orator, but underneath it the Saint's sensitive ears could detect a ragged edge of strain. "It's liable to be tough for a guy who comes here and thinks he can clean up the town by himself. You know what I ought to be doing now?"

The Saint's smile was very innocent.

"I can guess that one. You ought to be calling a cop and handing me over to him. But that would be a bit awkward for you—wouldn't it? I mean, people might want to know what you were doing here yourself."

"You know why I'm not calling a cop?"

"It must be the spring," Simon hazarded. "Or perhaps to­day was your old grandmother's birthday, and looking into her dear sweet face you felt the hard shell of worldliness that hides your better nature softening like an overripe banana."

Orcread took the cigar stub from between his teeth and rolled it in his fingers. The leaves crumpled and shredded under the roughness of his hand, but his voice did not rise.

"I'm trying to do something for you," he said. "You ain't so old, are you? You wouldn't want to get into a lot of trouble. It ain't right to go to the chair at your age. It ain't right to be taken for a ride. And why should you?"

"Don't ask me," said the Saint. "If I remember rightly, the suggestion was yours."

"I could do a lot for a guy like you. If you'd come and seen me first, none of this would have happened. But these things you've been doing don't make it easy for us. I don't say we got a grudge against you. Irboll was just a no-account hoodlum, and Ualino was getting too big for himself anyway—I guess he had it coming to him before long. But you're trying to go too fast, and you make too much noise about it. That sort of thing don't go with the public, and it's my job to stop it. It's Mr. Yeald's job to stop it—ain't it, Mark?"

"Certainly," said the lawyer's dry voice, like the voice of a parrot repeating a lesson. "These things have got to be stopped. They will be stopped."

Orcread tapped the Saint on the chest.

"That's it," he said impressively. "We have given our word to the electors that this sort of thing shall be stamped out, and we gotta keep our promises. But we don't want to be too hard on you. So I says to Mark: 'Look here, this Saint must be a sensible young guy. Let's make him an offer.' "

Simon nodded thoughtfully, but Orcread's words only touched the fringes of his attention. He had been trying to find a reason why Orcread and Yeald should ever have en­tered the conference at all; and in searching for that reason he had made a remarkable discovery. For about the first time in his career he had grossly underestimated himself. He knew that his spectacular advent upon the New York scene had caused no small stir in certain circles, as indeed it had been designed to do; but he had not realized that his modest efforts could have raised so much dust as Orcread's presence appeared to indicate.

And then he began to understand what a small disturbance could throw a complicated machine out of gear, when the machine was balanced on an unstable foundation of bluff and apathy and chicane, and the disturbance was of that one peculiar kind. The newspaper headlines, which he had enjoyed egotistically flashed across his mind's eye with a new meaning. He had not thought, until Orcread told him, that the coinci­dence of the right man and the right moment, coupled with the mercurial enthusiasms of the New World, could have flung the figure of the Saint almost overnight onto a pinnacle where the public imagination would see it as a rallying point and the banner of a reformation. He had not thought that his dis­interested attempts to brighten the Manhattan and Long Island entertainments could have started a fresh wave of civic am­bition whose advance ripples had already been felt under the sensitive thrones of the political rulers.

He listened to Orcread again with renewed interest.

"So you see, we're being pretty generous. Two hundred thousand bucks is worth something to any man. And we get you out of a tough spot. You get out of here without even feel­ing uncomfortable—you go to England or anywhere else you like. A young guy like you could have a good time with two hundred grand. And I'm here to tell you that it's on the up-and-up."

Simon Templar looked at him with a slow and deceptive smile. The glitter of amusement in the Saint's eyes was faint.

"You're making me feel almost sentimental, Bob," he said gravely. "And what is the trivial service I have to do to earn all these benefits?"

Oscread threw his mauled cigar away, and parked the thumb thus released in the other armhole of his waistcoat. He rocked back on his heels, with his prosperous paunch thrown out, and beamed heartily.

"Well . . . nothing," he said. "All we want to do is stop this sort of thing going on. Well, naturally it wouldn't be any good packing you off if things went on just the same. So all we'd ask you to do is tell us who it is that's backing you— tell us who the other guys in your mob are—so we can make them the same sort of proposition, and that'll be the end of it. What d'you say? Do we call it a deal?"

The Saint shook his head regretfully.

"You may call it.a deal, if you like," he said gently, "but I'm afraid I call it bushwah. You see, I'm not that sort of a girl."

"He's nuts," said Heimie Felder doggedly, out of a deep silence; and Orcread swung round on him savagely.

"You shut your damn mouth!" he snarled.

He turned to the Saint again, the benevolent beam still hollowly half frozen on his face, as if he had started to wipe it off and had forgotten to finish the job, his jaw thrust out and his flinty eyes narrowed.

"See here," he growled, "I'm not kidding, and if you know what's good for you, you'll lay off that stuff. I'm giving you a chance to get out of this and save your skin. What's funny . about it?"

"Nothing," said the Saint blandly, "except that you're sitting on the wrong flagpole. Nobody's backing me, and I haven't got a mob—so what can I do about it? I hate to see these tender impulses of yours running away with you, but ——"

A vague anger began to darken Orcread's face.

"Will you talk English?" he grated. "You ain't been run­ning this business by yourself just to pass the time. What are you getting out of it, and who's giving it to you?"

The Saint shrugged wearily.

"I've been .trying to tell you," he said. "Nobody's backing me, and I haven't got a mob. Ask any of this beauty chorus whether they've ever seen me with a mob. I, personally, am the whole works. I am the wheels, the chassis, and the gadget that squirts oil into the gudgeon pins. I am the one-man band. So all you've got to do is to hand me that two hundred grand and kiss me good-bye."

Orcread stared at him for a moment longer and then turned away abruptly. He walked across the room and plumped himself into a chair between Yeald and Kuhlmann. In the voiceless pause that followed, the lips of Heimie Felder could be seen framing tireless dogmas about nuts.

The Saint smiled to himself and bummed a cigarette from the nearest member of the audience. He was obliged dis­passionately. Inhaling the smoke dreamily, he glanced around at the hard, emotionless faces under the lights and realized quite calmly that any amusement which he derived from the situation originated entirely in his own irresponsible sense of humour.

Not that he was averse to tight corners and dangerous games —his whole history, in fact, was composed of a long series of them. But it occurred to him that the profitable and amusing phase of the soiree, if there had ever been one, was now def­initely over. He had established beyond question the fact that Orcread and the district attorney were in the racket up to their necks, but the importance of that confirmation was almost entirely academic. More important than that was the concrete revelation of their surprisingly urgent interest in his own activities. Judged solely on its merits, the hippo­potamoid diplomacy of Honest Bob Orcread earned nothing but a sustained horselaugh—Simon had not once been under the delusion that any of the gentlemen present would have allowed him to be handed two hundred thousand dollars; under their noses, or that after the ceremony they would have escorted him to the next outward liner with mutual expres­sions of philanthropy and good will—but the fact that the offer had been made at all, and that Orcread had thought it worth while lending his own rhetorical genius to it, wanted some thinking over. And most certainly there were places in New York more conducive to calm and philosophic thought than the spot in which he was at present In short, he saw no good point in further dalliance at Charley's Place, and the real difficulty was how he could best take his leave.

From the fragments of conversation that reached him from the table, he gathered that altruistic efforts were being made to solve his problem for him. The booming voice of Honest Bob Orcread, even when lowered to what its owner believed to be an airy whisper, was penetrating enough to carry the general theme of the discussion to the Saint's ears.

"How do we know it ain't a stall?" he could be heard reiter­ating. "A guy couldn't do all that by himself."

The district attorney pursed his lips, and his answer rustled dustily like dry leaves.

"Personally, I believe he is telling the truth. I was watching him all the time. And nobody has seen anybody else with him."

"Dot's right," Kuhlmann agreed. "It's chust von man mit a lot of luck, taking everybody by surprise. I can look after him."

Orcread was worried, in a heavy and struggling way.

"I hope you're right. But that don't settle anything. We gotta do something that'll satisfy the public. If you make a martyr of him it'll only make things worse. Now, if we could get him in court an' make a monkey out of him, we could say: "Well, we done our duty. We caught the guy that was making all the trouble. And now look at him. We could fix things so he didn't get any sympathy."

"I doubt it," Yeald said. "Once he was in court it would be difficult to stop him talking. I wouldn't dare to hold the trial in camera; and all the reporters would be wanting inter­views. You couldn't keep them away."

"Well, I think we oughta make an example. How would it be if . . ."

The rumbling and the rustling went on, and the Saint smoked his cigarette with no outward signs of concern. But not for a moment had he ceased to be aware that the old gen­tleman with the scythe, of whom he had undertaken to make an ally, was very close to him that night. Yet his smile was undimmed, and his eyes had the stillness of frozen sea water as he idly watched the whispering men who were debating how the processes of justice could best be turned to meet their own ends. And within him was a colder, deadlier contempt than anything he had felt since the beginning of that adventure.

In the room before him were more than a dozen men whose lives were dedicated to plunder and killing, mercenaries of the most amazing legion of crime that modern civilization had ever known; but it was not against their that he felt the dead­liest chill of that cold anger. It was against the men who made their looting possible—the men who held positions of trust, whom a blind public had permitted to seize office, whose wages were paid over and over again out of the pockets of ordinary honest citizens, whose cooperation allowed robbery and murder to go unpunished and even commended. The law meant nothing; except when it was an expedient instru­ment to remove an obstacle to further pillage.

Outside, beyond that room, lay a great city, a monument in brick arid granite to the ingenuity of man; and in that city seven million people paid tribute to a lawless handful. The Saint had never been given to glorifying himself into any kind of knightly hero; in the end he was a mercenary himself, hired by Valcross to do an outlaw's work; but if he had had any doubts of the justice of his cause, they would have been swept away that night. Whether he acknowledged it or not, whether they knew it or not, he was the champion of seven million, facing sentence in that hushed room for a thing that perhaps none of the seven million could have put into words; and it had never seemed more vital that he should come out alive to carry the battle on. . . .

And then, as if in answer, Orcread's voice rammed itself into his consciousness again and brought him out of his reverie.

"You've heard all we've got to say, Saint. There's only two ways out for you—mine or yours. You can think again if you like."

"I've done all the thinking I can," said the Saint evenly.

"Okay. You've had your chance."

He got up heavily and stood staring at Simon with the same worried perplexity; he was not satisfied yet that he had heard the truth—it was beyond his comprehension that a menace which had attacked the roots of his domination could be so simple—but the consensus of opinion had gone against him. Marcus Yeald twiddled the locks of his briefcase, stood up, and fidgeted with his gloves. He glanced at the door speculatively, in his peering petulant way, and one of the men opened it.

Orcread hitched himself round reluctantly and nodded to Kuhlmann.

"Okay, Dutch," he said and went out, followed by Yeald. The door was dosed and locked again, and a ripple of released suppression went over the room. The conference, as a con­ference, was over. . . .

"Come here, Saint," said Kuhlmann gutturally.

After that single scuffle of movement which followed Orcread's exit an electric tension had settled on the room— a tension that was subtly different from that which had just been broken. Kuhlmann's unemotional accents did not relieve it. Rather, they seemed to key on the tautness another notch; but the Saint did not appear to feel it. Cool, relaxed, serene as if he had been in a gathering of intimate friends, he saun­tered forward a couple of steps and stood in front of the rack­eteer.

He knew that there was nothing he could do there. The odds were impossible. But he stood smiling quietly while Kuhlmann looked up into his face.

"You're a goot boy," Kuhlmann said. "You give us a liddle bit of trouble, und that is bad. But we cannot finish our talk here. So I think"—he swallowed a lump in his throat, and his voice broke—"I think you go outside und vait for us for a minute."

Quick hands grabbed the Saint's wrists and twisted him round, but he did not struggle. He was led to the door; and as he went out, Kuhlmann nodded, blinking, to two of the men who stood along the wall.

"You, Joe, und you, Maxie—give him der business. Und meet me here again aftervards."

Without a flicker of expression the two men detached them­selves from the wall and followed the Saint out, their hands automatically feeling in their pockets. The door closed behind the cortege, and for a moment nobody moved.

And then Dutch Kuhlmann dragged out his large white handkerchief and dabbed with it at his eyes. A distinct sob sounded in the room; and the remaining gunmen glanced at each other with almost sheepish grins. Dutch Kuhlmann was crying.

* * *

The moon which had shed its light over the earlier hours of the evening, and which had germinated the romance of Mr. Bungstatter of Brooklyn, had disappeared. Clouds hung low between the earth and the stars, and the night nestled blackly over the city. A single booming note from the Metro­politan Tower announced the passing of an hour after mid­night.

On the fringe of the town, sleep claimed honest men. In the Bronx and the nearest portions of Long Island, in Hoboken, Peekskill, and Poughkeepsie, families slept peacefully. In Brooklyn, Mr. Theodore Bungstatter slept in ecstatic bliss— and, it must be confessed, snored. And with the hard nozzle of Maxie's automatic grinding deep into his ribs Simon Templar was hurried across the pavement outside Charley's Place and into a waiting car.

Joe piled in on the other side, and a third man took the wheel. The muzzle of another gun stabbed into the Saint's other side, and there was a cold tenseness in the eyes of the escort which indicated that their fingers were taut on the trig­gers. On this ride they were taking no chances.

Simon looked out of the windows while the driver jammed his foot down on the starter. The few pedestrians who passed scarcely glanced aside. If they had glanced aside, they would have seen nothing extraordinary; and if they had seen any­thing extraordinary, the Saint reflected with a wry grin, they would have run for their lives. He had taken a hand in a game where he had to play alone, and there would be no help from anyone but himself. . . . But even as he looked back, he saw the slim figure of Fay Edwards framed in the dark door­way through which he had been brought; and the old ques­tions leapt to his mind again.

The brim of her hat cast a shadow over her eyes, and he could not even tell whether she was looking in his direction. He had no reason to think that she would. Throughout his interview with Orcread she had sat like an inattentive specta­tor, smoking, and thinking her own thoughts. When Kuhl­mann's sentence had been passed upon him she had been lighting another cigarette: she had not even looked up, and her hand had not shaken. When he was turned and hustled out of the room she had been raising her eyes to look at him again, with a calm impersonal regard that told him no more than her present pose.

"Better take a good look," advised Maxie.

There was no derision, no bitterness in his voice—it simply uttered a grim reminder of the fact that Simon Templar was doomed to have few more attractive things to look at.

The Saint smiled and saw the girl start off to cross the road behind the car, without looking round, before Joe reached forward and drew the curtains.

"She's worth a look," Simon murmured and slanted an eye­brow at the closed draperies which shut out his view on either side. "This wagon looks like a hearse already."

Joe grunted meaninglessly, and the car pulled away from the curb and circled the block. The blaze of Broadway showed ahead for a moment, like the reflection of a fire in the sky; then they were turned around and driving west, and the Saint settled down and made himself as comfortable as he could.

The situation had no natural facilities for comfort. There was something so businesslike, so final and confident, in the manner of his captors, that despite himself an icy finger of doubt traced its chill course down the Saint's spine. Except for the fact that no invisible but far-reaching hand of the Law sanctioned this strange execution, it had a disturbing similar­ity to the remorseless ritual of lawful punishment.

Before that he had been in tight corners from which the Law might have saved him if he had called for help; but he had never called. There was something about the dull, pon­derous interventions of the Law which had never appealed to him, and in this particular case their potentialities appealed to him least of all. Intervention, even if it succeeded, meant arrest and trial; and his brief acquaintance with Orcread and Yeald had been sufficient to show him how much justice he could expect from that. Not that the matter of justice was very vital in his case. The most incorruptible court in the world, he had to admit, could do nothing else but sentence him to about forty years' imprisonment even if it didn't go so far as ordering execution, and on the whole he preferred his chances with the illicit sentence. It would not be the first time that he had sat in a game of life and death and played the cards out with a steady hand no matter how the luck ran; and now he would do it again, though at that precise moment he hadn't the faintest idea what method he would use. Yet for the first time in many years he wondered if he had not taken on too much.

But no hint of what passed in his mind showed on his face. He leaned back, calm-eyed and nonchalant, as if he were one of a party of friends on their way home; and even when they stopped at the driveway of a ferry he did not move. He cocked one quizzical blue eye at Maxie.

"So it's to be Jersey this time, is it?"

"Yeah," said the gunman, with a callous twist of humour. "We thought ye might like a change."

An efficient-looking blue-coated patrolman stood no more than four yards away; but no sixth sense, no clairvoyant flash of prescience, warned him to single out the gleaming black sedan from the line of other vehicles which were waiting their turn to go on board. He dreamed his dreams of an inspector­ship in a division well populated with citizens who would be unselfishly eager to dissuade him with cash and credit from the obvious perils of overworking himself at his job; and the Saint made no attempt to interrupt him. The driver paid their fares, and they settled into their place on the ferry to wait until it chose to sail.

Simon gazed out at the inky waters of the Hudson and won­dered idly why it should be that the departure of a ferry was always accompanied by twice as much fuss and anxiety as the sailing of an ocean liner; and he derived a rather morbid ex­hilaration even from that vivid detail of his experience. He had heard much, and speculated more, about that effective American method of removing an appointed victim; but in spite of his flippant remarks to Valcross he had not expected that he would have this unique opportunity of learning at first hand the sensations of the man who played the leading role in the drama. He felt that in this instance the country, which had adopted the "ride" as a native sport for wet week-ends was rather overdoing itself in its eagerness to show him the works so quickly and comprehensively, but the tightness of his corner was not capable of damping a keen professional interest in the proceedings. And yet, all the time, he missed the reassuring pressure of the knife blade that should have been cuddling snugly along his forearm; and his eyes were very cold and bright as he flicked his cigarette end through the open front window and watched it spring like a red tracer bullet across the dark. . . .

Maxie rummaged in his pockets with his free hand, drew forth a crumpled pack of cigarettes, and extended it politely.

"Have another?"

"A last smoke for the condemned man, eh?"

Equally courteous and unruffled, the Saint thumbed a Chesterfield from the package and carefully straightened it out. Maxie passed him the cigar lighter from the arm rest and then lighted a smoke for himself; but in none of the motions of this studious observance of the rules of etiquette was there an opening for a surprise attack from the victim. Simon felt Joe's automatic harden against his side almost imperceptibly while the exchange of courtesies was going on, and knew that his companions had explored all the possibilities of such situa­tions before they began to shave. He signed and leaned back again, exhaling twin streams of smoke from his nostrils.

"What is that girl Fay?" he asked casually, taking up a natural train of thought from the gunman's penultimate re­mark.

Maxie tilted back his hat.

"Whaddaya mean, what is she? She's a doll."

Simon reviewed the difficulties of reaching Maxie's intellect with the argument that was occupying his own mind. He knew better than anyone else that the glamorous woman of mystery whose feminine charms rule hard-boiled desperadoes as with a rod of iron, and whose brilliant brain outwits criminals and detectives with equal ease, belonged only in the pages of highly spiced fictional romance, and that in the underworld of New York she was the most singular curiosity of all. To the American hoodlum and racketeer the female of the species has only one function, reserved for his hours of relaxation, and requiring neither intelligence nor outstanding personality. When he calls her a "doll," his vocabulary is an accurate psychological revelation. She is a toy for his diversion, on which he can squander his easily won dollars to the advertise­ment of his own wealth, to whom he can boast and in boasting expand his own ego and feel himself a great guy; but she has no place in the machinery of his profession except as a spy, a stringer of suckers, or a dumb instrument for putting a rival on the spot, and she has no place in his councils at all.

The Saint saw no easy approach to Maxie from that angle; but he said: "She's good to look at, all right, but I can't see anything else she's got that you could use. I wouldn't let any girls sit in on my business—you can never trust 'em."

Maxie regarded him pityingly.

"Say, why don't ya get wise? That dame has got it here." He tapped the area where his brain might be presumed to reside. "She's got more of it than you or anybody else like ya."

Simon shrugged dubiously.

"You ought to know. But I wouldn't do it. The cleverer a dame is, the more she's dangerous. You can't ever be sure of 'em. They ride along with you for a while, and then the first thing you know they've fallen for some other guy and they're working like hell to double-cross you."

"What, her?" Maxie's stare deepened with indignation as well as scorn. "I guess Heimie was right—you must be nuts. Who's she going to double-cross? She's the Big Fellow's mouth­piece."

The Saint's face was expressionless.

"Mouthpiece?" he repeated slowly.

"Yeah. She talks for him. If he's got something to say, she says it. If we got anything to say, she takes it back. She's the only one in the mob who knows everything that's going on."

Simon did not move. He sat perfectly still, watching the lights along the riverside begin to slide across the darkness as the ferry pulled out from the pier. The urgency of his pre­dicament dropped out of his mind as if a trapdoor had fallen open, leaving a sensation of emptiness through which weaved an eerie squirm of excitement Maxie's frank expansiveness fairly took his breath away.

It was about the last thing he had expected to develop from that ride. And then, in another moment, he realized how it came about. The callous confidence of his executioners was an attitude which worked two ways; the utter, irrevocable finality of it was sufficient to make conversations possible which could never have happened otherwise. In a different setting, threats and torture and even the menace of certain death would have received no response but a stony, iron-jawed silence, according to that stoical gangland code of which the late Mr. Papulos had been such a faithless ex­ponent; but to a condemned prisoner on the road to execution a gunman could legitimately talk, and might even de­rive some pleasure from the dilation of his ego and the proof of his own omniscience and importance in so doing—death loomed so inevitably ahead, and dead men told no tales. It gave the Saint a queer feeling of fatality to realize that he had to come to the end of his usefulness before he could make any headway in his quest, but even if dissolution had been a bare yard away he could never have separated himself from the instinct to learn all that he could while knowledge was being offered. And even at that stage he had not lost hope.

"I'm sorry I didn't meet this Big Fellow," he remarked, with­out a variation in his even tone of casual conversation. "He must be worth knowing."

"You got too near as it was," Joe said matter-of-factly. "You shouldn't of tried it, pal."

"He sounds an exclusive sort of bird," Simon admitted; and Maxie took the cigarette out of his mouth to grin widely.

"You ain't said nuth'n yet. Exclusive ain't the word for it. Say, you don't know how good we're bein' to ya. You're lucky to of got away from Morrie Ualino—Morrie 'd 've had ya in the hot box for sure."

As if he felt a glow of conscious pride at this discovery of his own share in such an uncustomary humaneness, he pulled out his crumpled pack of Chesterfields and offered them again. Simon took one and accepted a light, the procedure being governed by exactly the same courtesy and caution as before.

"Yes," he said thoughtfully, "your Big Fellow must be the wrong kind of bloke to buck."

"You're learning late," Maxie agreed laconically.

"All the same," pursued the Saint, with an air of vague puz­zlement, "I can't quite see what makes you and the rest of the mob take your orders from a fellow who isn't in the racket —a bird you haven't ever even seen. I mean, what have you got to gain by it?"

Maxie hitched himself round and tapped a nicotine-stained forefinger on his brain pan again, in that occult gesture which appeared to be his synonym for a salute to intelligence.

"Say, that guy has got what it takes. An' if a guy has got what it takes, an' shoots square an' can find the dough, I'll take orders from him. And that goes for Joe an' Heimie an' Dutch and the rest of the mob, too. The dough ain't been so easy since they made liquor legal, see?"

The Saint frowned with inviting perplexity; and Maxie, not at all reluctant, endeavoured to clarify his point.

"When we had prohibition, a bootlegger an' his mob were all right, see? They were breaking the law, but it wasn't a law that anybody cared about. Everybody, even respectable citizens, guys on Park Avenue an' everything, useta know bootleggers and ring 'em up and talk to 'em an' be proud to know them. Why, guys would boast about their bootleggers like they would about their doctors or their lawyers, and get into arguments and fights with other guys about whose boot­legger was the best. They paid us our dough an' didn't grum­ble, because they knew we had to take risks to get the stuff they wanted; and the cops was sort of enemies of the public because they tried to stop us getting the stuff—sometimes. Ya couldn't get a guy to testify against a guy that was getting him his liquor, in favour of another guy who was trying to stop the liquor comin' through, see?"

"Mmm," conceded the Saint doubtfully, more for punctua­tion than anything else.

"Well, when prohibition went out, that changed every­thing, see? A bootlegger wasn't any guy's friend any more. He was just a racketeer that was trying to stick something on the prices of stuff that any guy could go and buy legitimate, an' the cop was a guy that was trying to put the racketeer out of business an' keep the prices down; and everybody suddenly forgot everything we'd done for 'em in the dry years, an' turned right round on us." Maxie scowled mournfully at the flimsiness of human gratitude. "Well, we hadda do something, hadn't we? A guy's gotta live."

"I suppose so," said the Saint. "Which guy is this?"

Maxie wrinkled his nose.

"A lotta guys got in trouble about that time," he said remi­niscently. "We had a sort of reform drive, an' got hunted about a lot. It got worse all the time. A lotta guys couldn't get it into their coconuts that it wasn't going to be easy money any more, an' it was too bad about them. You had to have it here." He thumbed his forehead again mysteriously. "Business wasn't good, so we hadn't got the money to pay the cops; an' the cops not getting money started going after us again an' makin' things worse." Maxie sighed reminiscently. "But then the Big Fellow came along," he said cheering up, "an' everything was jake again."

"Why?" Simon asked, with the same ingenuously puzzled air.

"Well, he put us in the big dough again, see?"

"With the same old rackets?"

"Yeah. But he's got brains. An' information. He's got every­thing taped out. When he says: "The layout is like this and that, we gotta fix it this way and that way,' we know it's going to be just like he says. So we don't make no mistakes."

The lights of the waterside had ceased to move, and there was a general stir of voyagers gathering themselves to con­tinue on their way. The driver climbed back into the car and settled himself, waiting for their turn to pull out in the line of disembarking traffic.

Keeping their place decorously in the procession, they climbed the winding road that leads upwards from the Jersey shore, and in a short time they were speeding across the Jersey meadows. The drive became a monotonous race through un­familiar country—straight lines of highway which might have been laid across the face of the moon for all the landmarks that Simon could pick out, straggling lights of unidentifiable small towns, blazing headlights of other cars which leapt up out of the blackness and roared by in an instant of noise, to be swallowed up in the gulf of dark behind. The powerful sedan, guided by the expert hands of the silent driver, flashed at a reckless pace through the countryside, slowed smoothly down from time to time to keep well within the prescribed speed limits of a village, then leapt ahead down another long stretch of open road. Despite the speed at which they were travelling, the journey seemed interminable: the sense of utter isolation, of being shut away from the whole world in that mass-produced projectile whirling through the uncharted night, would have had an overwhelmingly soporific effect if it had not been for the doom to which they were driving.

The Saint had no means of knowing how far ahead that destination lay, and a cold fatalism would not let him ask. He knew that it could not be very far away—knew that his time must be getting short and his need more desperately urgent—but still he had had no opportunity to save himself. The vigilance of his companions had never relaxed, and if he made the slightest threatening move it would hardly incon­venience them at all to shoot him where he sat and fling his body out of the car without slackening speed.

They could have done that anyhow, might even be prepar­ing to do it. He did not know why he had assumed that he was being taken to a definite place of execution, to be slain there according to a crude gangland ritual; but it was on that ex­pectation that he had based his only hopes of escape.

He stole a glance at Maxie. The gunman was lounging non­chalantly in his corner, the backward tilt of his hat serving to emphasize the squat impassivity of his features, twirling an unlighted cigar in one side of his thick mouth. To say that he was totally unimpressed by the enormity of the thing he was there to do would convey only the surface of his attitude. He was, if anything, rather bored.

Simon fought to maintain his outward calm. The length of the journey, the forced inaction under the strain of such a deadly suspense, was slowly wearing down his nerves; but at all costs he had to remain master of himself. His chance would be thin enough even if it ever came, he knew; and the faintest twitch of panic, the very slightest disordering of the swift, cold precision and coordination of brain and arm, would eliminate that chance to vanishing point. And all the time another aloof and wholly dissociated threat in his mind, akin to the phlegmatic detachment of a scientist who notes his own symptoms on his deathbed, was weaving the fact that Maxie might still go on talking to a man whom he be­lieved to be helpless. ...

The Saint cleared his throat and tried to resume the con­versation in the same tone of innocent puzzlement as before —as if it had never been broken off. He had to go on trying to learn those things which he might never be able to turn to advantage, had to do something to occupy his mind and ease the strain on his aching self-control.

"How do you mean, the Big Fellow came along?" he said. "If he wasn't even in the racket, if you'd never heard of him before and haven't even seen him yet—how did you know you could trust him? How did you know he'd be any use to you?"

"How did we know he'd be any use to us? Say, he showed us. Ya can't get around facts. He had it all worked out."

"Yes, I know; but he must have started somewhere. How did he get in touch with you? What was the first you heard of him?"

Maxie grunted and peered ahead through the windshield.

"I guess you'll have to figure that out yourself—you'll have plenty of time," he said; and Simon looked out and saw that the car was slowing down.

Chapter 7

How Dutch Kuhlmann Saw a Ghost, and Simon Templar Returned Home

At first the Saint could see nothing but a stretch of de­serted highway that seemed to reach for endless miles into the distance; and then the driver spun the wheel sharply to the right, and the car bounced off the road into a narrow lane.

Simon was not surprised that he had failed to spot it. The sweeping branches of trees almost met over the bumpy disused bypath: their foliage scraped the top of the sedan and brushed with a slithering sound against the sides as they went down the side road at a considerably reduced speed. Before they had gone five yards they were effectively screened from the view of any car that might be travelling along the main thoroughfare.

With both hands clinging to the wheel, which leapt and shuddered in his grasp like a live thing, the driver headed deeper and deeper along the narrow track. If the combined bulks of Joe and Maxie had not formed a system of human wedges pinning him tightly to the cushions, the Saint would have been bumped clear of the seat each time the tires car­omed off the boulders that studded the roadbed.

Simon Templar was aware of the quickened beating of his heart. There was a dryness in his throat and a vague feeling of constriction about his chest that made him breathe a little deeper than normally; but the breathing was slow, steady, and deliberate, not the quick, shallow gasps of fear. The tension of his nerves had passed the vibrating point—they were strung down to a terrific immobility that was as impermanent as the stillness of a compressed spring. The waiting and suspense was over; now there was nothing but the end of the ride to see, and a chance for life to be taken if fate offered it. And if the chance did not offer, that was the end of adventures.

The lane was growing even narrower as they went on; the trees and bushes that lined its sides closed in upon them. Plainly it had been derelict for years: the march of macad­amized arteries had swept by and left it for no other service but for such journeys as they were on, and its destination, if it had ever had one, had long since found other and faster com­munications with the outside world. At last, when the stream­lined body of the sedan could make no further headway, the driver jammed on the brakes and brought the car to a lurching halt. Then he snapped off the headlights, -leaving only the bright glow of the parking lights to illuminate the scene.

A good enough spot for a murder, the Saint was forced to admit; and he wondered how many other men had dared the vengeance of Dutch Kuhlmann and the Big Fellow, only to pay for their temerity in that lonely place. With the switching off of the purring engine all sound seemed to have been blot­ted out of the night, as if the world had been folded under a dense pack of wool; even the distant hum of other cars away back on the highway they had left, if there were any, was in­audible. As far as the Saint could see, there was nothing around them but a wilderness of trees and shrubbery scattered over an undulating stony common; a man could die there with no sound that the world would ever hear, and his body might lie there for weeks before some chance passer-by stumbled on it and sent a new blare of headlines screaming across the front pages. Suddenly the Saint guessed why he had been taken so far, with such precautions, instead of simply being pushed out on any New York street and riddled with bullets as the car drove away. It had been sufficient often enough for other vic­tims; but this case was different. The handling of it linked up with certain things that Orcread and Yeald had discussed. The Saint was not to become a martyr or even a sensation: he was to disappear, as swiftly and unaccountably as he had come, like a comet—all questions could go unanswered perhaps for ever, and the fickle public would soon forget. . . .

Something creaked at the back of the car, breaking the still­ness; and Maxie roused himself. He climbed out unhurriedly and turned round again as soon as he was outside, his auto­matic glinting dully in the subdued light. He jerked it at the Saint expressively.

"Out, buddy."

Behind the Saint, Joe's gun added its subtle pressure to the command.

Simon pulled himself up slowly. Now that the climax of the ride was reached, he had ceased speculating upon the reactions of a doomed man. Every cell in his keen brain, every nerve and fibre of his body, was dynamically alive and watchful. His mind had never worked more clearly and smoothly, his body had never been keyed to a more perfect pitch of physical fit­ness, than they were at that moment in the deepening shadow of death. It was impossible to think that in a few brief mo­ments, with one inconceivably numbing, crashing shock, that vibrant, pulsing life could be stilled, the brilliant mind dulled for ever, the play and delight of sensual experience and the sweet awareness of life swallowed up in a black nothingness from which there was no return.

He stepped down gradually to the running board. A yard from him, Maxie's automatic was levelled steadily at his chest; behind him, Joe's gun pushed no less steadily into his back. The wild thought crossed his mind that he might launch him­self onto Maxie from the running board in a desperate smoth­ering leap, trusting to the surprise to bowl him over before he could shoot, and to the beneficent darkness to take care of the rest. But in the next instant he knew that there was no hope there. In spite of his outward stolidity, Maxie was watching him like a cat; and he had measured his distance perfectly. To have jumped then would have been to jump squarely into a bullet, and Joe would probably have got him from behind at the same time.

With a face of iron the Saint lowered himself to the ground and straightened up, but his eyes met Maxie's calmly enough.

"Is this as far as we go?" he inquired.

"You said it," Maxie assented curtly.

Behind him, Simon could hear the crunch of Joe's brogans on the soil as the other gunman followed him out, and the brusque click of the door closing again. The weight of the gun muzzle touched his back again. He was gripped between two potential fires as securely as if he had been held in a pair of tangible forceps; and for the second time that icy qualm of doubt squirmed clammily in the pit of his stomach. In every movement that was made there was a practised confidence, an unblinking vigilance, such as he had never encountered be­fore. No other two men he had ever met could have held him in the car so long, talking to him and lighting his cigarettes, without giving him a moment's chance to take them off their guard. No other two men that he could think of could have manoeuvred him in and out of it without offering at least one even toss-up on a break for freedom. He had always known, at the back of his mind, that one day he must meet his match— that sometime, somewhere, the luck which had followed him so faithfully throughout his career must turn against him, as it does in the life of every gambler and adventurer who refuses to acknowledge any limits. But he had not thought that it would happen there—just as no man ever believes that he will die tomorrow, although he knows that there must come a to­morrow when he will die. ... A thin shadow of the old Saintly smile touched his lips and did not reach his eyes.

"I hope you're going to do this with all the regular formali­ties," he said gently. "You know, I've often wondered just how the thing was done. I'd be awfully disappointed if you didn't bump me off in the most approved style."

At the back of him, Joe choked on an oath; but Maxie was unimpressed.

"Sure," he agreed affably. "We'll give you a show. But there ain't much to it. Just in the line of business, see?"

"I see," said the Saint quietly.

The complete unconcern, the blandly brutal callousness of Maxie's reply, seemed to have frozen something deep in his heart. He had faced death before—death that flamed out at him in violent, seething hate, death that dispassionately pro­posed his annihilation as a matter of cold expedience. He had dealt out death himself, in various ways. But never had he known a man to attempt to snuff out another's Life so casually, with such an indescribable absence of all personal feeling, as this ruthless killer who was preparing to send a bullet through his vitals—"just in the line of business. . . ."

The Saint had had his own rules of the game; but at that moment they were forgotten. If he ever broke loose from the trap in which he was held, if Destiny offered him that one lone ghost of a break to get away and join in the game again, for the rest of that adventure he would play it as his opponents played it—giving no quarter. He would be the same as they were—utterly without mercy or compunction. He would have only one remedy for all mistakes—the same as theirs.

In the dim light his eyes had lost all expression. Their gaze was narrowed down to a mere frosty gleam of jagged ice.

"Over by that tree," directed Maxie conversationally. "That's the best spot."

His phrasing of the words held a sinister implication that many other spots in that locality had been tried, and that his choice was based on the findings of long experience; but the suggestion was absolutely unconscious. He seemed even more indifferent than if he had been posing the Saint for a photo­graph.

Simon looked at him for a moment and then turned away. There was nothing else he could do. Sometimes he had won­dered why even on the way to certain death a man should still submit to the dictation of a gun; now, with a terrible clarity of reason, he knew the answer. Until death had actually struck him, until the ultimate unanswerable instant of annihilation, he would cling to the hope that some miracle must bring re­prieve; obedient to some illogical blind instinct of self-pres­ervation, he would do nothing to precipitate the end.

Under the turning muzzle of Maxie's gun, the Saint took up his position against the trunk of a towering elm and turned round again. Joe nodded approvingly and at a sign from Maxie stepped closer to prepare the victim for execution ac­cording to the gangland code.

Methodically he unbuttoned the Saint's coat and opened it; then began a similar task upon his shirt.

"Some guys started wearin' bullet-proof vests," Maxie ex­plained cheerfully.

Simon's nerves were tensed to the last unbearable ounce; his body was rigid like a steel bar. Now there was only Maxie cov­ering him: Joe was fully taken up with his gruesome ritual, and the voiceless driver had raised the hood of the car and was seemingly engrossed in some minor ailment that he had de­tected in its mechanism. If he was to have a chance at all, it could only be now.

He moved slightly, as if to help Joe with his unbuttoning. Then, with a lightning movement, his left hand shot up. Lean fingers closed on Joe's left wrist as he fumbled with the Saint's shirt, and a sudden whipping contraction of steel sinews jerked the man aside, throwing him off balance and turning him half round on the leverage of his extended arm. The gun in his right hand was flung out of aim: Simon heard the crack of the explosion and saw the vicious splash of flame from the barrel, but the shot went off at right angles to the line it should have taken.

Simon's fist snapped over and thudded into the back of the gunman's neck, accurately at the base of his skull, smacking into the hard flesh and bone in a savage punch that must have almost jarred the bones loose from their sockets. The man grunted stupidly and lurched forward; but the Saint's left arm lashed round his upper body and held him up as a human shield, while his right hand grabbed at the man's gun wrist and held it to prevent Joe twisting it up behind his back and firing at point-blank range. He had had no time to wonder what Maxie might be doing during that flurry of hectic action; when the Saint had last observed him he had been three yards away and a trifle to his left; but the first jerk which had hurled Joe across the line of fire had made that position useless. Simon looked for him over Joe's shoulder and did not see him. He hauled his living shield round in a frantic spin; and then he heard the deafening peal of an automatic exploding some­where close behind him on his right, and something hit him in the right side of his back below the shoulder with terrific force.

The Saint stumbled and caught his breath as a redhot an­guish stabbed through him from the point of impact of that fearful blow; and at the same moment Joe's body kicked con­vulsively in his. grasp and became a dead weight. Simon's right arm was numb to his fingertips from the shock. He turned fur­ther, dragging Joe with him, and heard a dull bump as the dead man's automatic slipped from his nerveless fingers and fell to the ground, but he could not reach it. To have tried to do so, with one arm useless, would have meant letting go his only protection; and he knew he would never have had time to cover the distance and locate the fallen weapon in the dark. He looked up and saw Maxie's pitiless face, a white blotch in the faint light.

"You got two minutes to say your prayers, Saint," Maxie grated, with the first trace of vindictiveness that he had shown. He tilted his head and spoke louder.

"Hi, Hunk, you damn fool! Where are ya?"

Then Simon remembered the driver of the car and knew that the chance which he thought he had seen was only a chi­mera, a last sadistic jest on the part of the fortune which had deserted him. Between them, the two men would get him easily. He couldn't watch both at once, or protect himself from the two of them together. One of them would outflank him, as simply as walking round a table, without risk and with­out effort; and that would be the finish.

The Saint did not pray. He had no deities to call on, except the primitive pagan gods of battle and sudden death who had carried him on a flood tide of favour into that blind alley and left him there to pay the last account alone. But he looked up at the dark sky and saw that the clouds had broken, and a star twinkled millions of miles aloft in the blue rift. A light breeze passed across the common, stirring the fresh scents of the night; and he knew that, whatever the reckoning might be, he would have asked for no other life.

"Hunk!" Maxie called again, raspingly.

He dared not turn his head for fear of taking his eyes off the Saint; but the Saint looked beyond him and saw a strange thing.

The driver was not probing into the vitals of the car, as he had been. He was not even approaching at a lumbering trot to throw his taciturn weight into the unequal scale. It took the Saint a second or two to discover where he was—a second or two longer to realize that the blurred form extended at full length beside the car was the driver, lying as if in sleep.

And then he saw something else—a slender, graceful figure that was coming up behind Maxie on soundless feet. And as he saw it, she spoke.

"The Big Fellow says wait a minute, Maxie."

Maxie's eyes went wide in hurt surprise, and his jaw sagged foolishly. Only the aim of his automatic did not waver. It clung to its mark as if his brain stubbornly refused to accept the evidence of his ears; and his astounded gaze did not shift away from the Saint.

"Wha—whass that?" he got out.

"This is Fay," said the girl.

Simon Templar opened his nostrils to a vast lung-easing breath. The cool sweet air of the unwalled fields went down into his lungs like ethereal nectar and sent the blood racing again along his stagnant veins. He lifted his head and looked up at the lone twinkling star in that slim gap in the black canopy of cloud, and over the abyss of a thousand million light-years the star seemed to wink at him. He was alive.

There are no words to describe what he felt at that moment. When a man has been down into the uttermost depths, when the shadow of the dark angel's wings has blotted out the last light and their cold breath has touched his brow, not in sud­den accident or the anaesthetic heat of passion, but with a re-morseless deliberation that wrings the last dram of self-control from every second of hopeless knowledge, his return to life is beyond the reach of words. To say that the weight of all mor­tality is swept from his shoulders, that the snapping of the strain leaves every heroically disciplined nerve loose and inert like a broken thread, that the precious response of every living sense takes away his breath with its intolerably brilliant beauty, is to say nothing. He is like a man who has been blind from birth, to whom the gift of sight has been given in the middle of his life; but he is far more than that. He has been dumb and deaf, without taste or smell or hearing, without mind or movement; and all those things have been given to him at the same time.

As in a dream, the Saint heard Maxie's blank bewildered voice again.

"How did you get here?"

"I walked," said the girl coldly. "Did you hear what I told you? The Big Fellow says to lay off him."

"But—but——" Maxie was floundering in a bottomless morass of incredulity that had taken the feet from under him."But he killed Joe," he managed, in a sudden gasp.

The girl had advanced coolly until she was at his side. She gazed across at the limp form gripped in the Saint's left arm.

"Well?"

The monosyllable dropped from her lips with a pellucid serenity that was void of the faintest tinge of interest She did not care what had happened to Joe. She was at a loss to find any connection whatsoever between his death and the object of her arrival. Maxie struggled for speech.

And the Saint realized that Joe's automatic was still on the ground close by, where it had fallen.

His arm was beginning to ache with the dead weight on it, and he heaved the body up and got a fresh grip while his keen eyes probed the darkness. There was a throbbing pain growing up in his wound that turned to a sharp twinge in his chest every time he breathed, but he scarcely noticed the discomfort Presently he found a dull gleam of metal in the grass some­where to his left front.

He edged himself towards it, inch by inch, with infinite pa­tience. Every instinct urged him to drop his encumbering load and make a swift, desperate dive for it, but he knew that the gamble would have been hopelessly against him. With every muscle held relentlessly in check, he worked himself across the intervening space with movements so smooth and minute that they could never have been noticed. There was only about a yard and a half to go, but it might have been seven miles. And at last Maxie recovered his voice.

"What does the Big Fellow want us to do?" he demanded harshly. "Kiss him?"

"The Big Fellow says to let him go."

The dull gleam of metal was only six inches away then. Si­mon extended a cautious toe, touched it here and there, drew it gently towards him. It was the gun he was looking for. His right arm was still useless; but if he could drop Joe and dive for it with his left—the instant Maxie's attention was dis­tracted, as it must be soon. . . .

"Let him go?" Maxie's eyes were wild, his mouth twisted. "Like hell I'll let him go! You must be nuts. He killed Joe." Maxie's forearm stiffened, and the gun in his hand moved slightly. "You're too late, Fay—we'd done the job before you got here. This is how we let him go, the dirty double-cross­ing ——"

"Don't be a fool!"

In a flash the girl's hands were on his wrist, dragging his arm down; and in that moment the Saint had his chance. With a swift jerk of his sound shoulder he flung the body of his shield away, well away to one side, and his hand plunged downwards to the automatic that he was still marking with his toe. His fingers closed on the butt, and he straightened up again with it in his hand.

"I think that's pretty good advice, Maxie," he said gently.

There was a trace of the old Saintly lilt in his voice, a lilt of triumphant mockery that was born in the surge of new power and confidence which went through him at the feel of gun metal in his hands again. Maxie stared at him frozenly, with his right arm still stretched downwards in the girl's grasp, and the muzzle of his automatic pointed uselessly into the ground. Simon's finger itched on the trigger. He had sworn to be with­out mercy. The indifference of his executioners had hardened the last dregs of pity out of his heart.

"Wasn't it two minutes that we had to say our prayers, Maxie?" he whispered.

The gunman glared at him with dilated eyes. All at once, in a physical quiver of comprehension, he seemed to take in the situation—that the Saint was alive and free and the tables were turned. With a foul oath, heedless of the menace of the Saint's automatic, he broke loose from the girl with a savage fling of his arm and brought up his gun.

Simon's forefinger tightened on the trigger—once. Maxie's gun was never fired. His arms flew wide, and his head snapped back. For one swaying moment he stared at the Saint with all the furies of hell concentrated in his flaming eyes; and then a dull glaze crept over his eyeballs and the fires died out. His head sagged forward as if he were tired; his knees buckled, and he pitched headlong to the ground.

Simon gazed down at the two sprawled figures for a second or two in silence, while the jagged ice melted out of his eyes without softening their expression. A faint gesture of repug­nance crinkled a thin line into one corner of his mouth; but whether the repugnance was for the two departed killers, or for the manner in which they had been exterminated, he did not know himself. He dismissed the proposition with a shrug, and the careless movement sent a sharp twinge of pain through his injured shoulder to bring him finally back to reality. With an inaudible sigh, he put the gun away in his pocket and turned his eyes back to the girl.

She had not moved from where he had last seen her. The dead body of Maxie lay at her feet; but she was not looking at it, and she had made no attempt to possess herself of the automatic that was still clutched in his hand. The light was too dim for the Saint to be able to see the expression on her face; but the poise of her body reminded him irresistibly of the night when she had watched him kill Morrie Ualino, and more recently of the tune, only an hour or two ago, when he himself had been sent out from the back room of Charley's Place on the ride which had only just ended. There was the same impregnable aloofness, the same inscrutable carelessness of death, as though in some impossible way she had detached herself from every human emotion and dominated even the last mystery of dissolution. He walked up closer to her, slowly, because it hurt him a little when he breathed, until he could see the brightness of her tawny eyes; but they told him nothing.

She did not speak, and he hardly knew what to do. The situ­ation was rather beyond him. He saluted her vaguely, with the ghost of a bow, and let his arm fall to his side.

"Thank you," he said.

Her eyes were pools of amber, still and unreadable.

"Is that all?" she asked in a low voice.

Again he felt that queer leap of expectation at the husky music which she made of words. He moved his hands in a slight helpless gesture.

"I suppose so. It's the second time you've helped me—-I don't know why. I haven't asked. What else is there?"

"What about this?"

Suddenly, before he knew what she was doing, her arms were around his neck, her soft slenderness pressed close to him, the satin of her cheek against his. For a moment he was too amazed to move. Hazily, he wondered if the terrible strain he had been through had unhinged some weak link in his imag­ination. The tenuous perfume of her skin and hair stole in upon his senses, sending a creeping trickle of fire along his veins; her lips found his mouth, and for one mad second he was shaken by the awareness of her passion. He winced im­perceptibly, and she drew back.

"I'm sorry," he said. "You see, you didn't get here quite soon enough. I stopped one."

Instantly she forgot everything else. She drew him over to the car, switched on the headlights, and made him take off his coat. With quick, gentle hands she slipped his shirt down over his shoulder; he could feel the warm stickiness of blood on his back. On the ground close by, the chauffeur still lay as if asleep.

"Better make sure he doesn't wake up while you're doing the first aid," said the Saint, with a rather weary gesture towards the unconscious man.

"He won't wake up," she answered calmly. "I killed him."

Then Simon saw that the shadow between the driver's shoul­der blades was the hilt of a small knife, and a phantom chill went through him. He understood now why Maxie's call had gone unanswered. The girl's hands were perfectly steady on his back; he couldn't see her face because she was behind him, but he knew what he would have found there. It would have been masked with the same cold beauty, the same unearthly contempt of life and death and all their associations, which he had only once seen broken—so strangely, only a few moments before.

She fastened his handkerchief and her own over the wound, replaced his shirt, and drew his coat loosely over the shoulder. Her hand rested there lightly.

"You'll have to see a doctor," she said. "I know a man in Passaic that we can go to."

He nodded and moved round to the side of the car. Com­petently, she lowered the hood over the engine and forestalled him at the wheel. He didn't protest.

It was impossible to turn the car about in the confined space, and she had to back up the lane until they reached the highway. She did it as confidently as he would have expected her to, although he had never met a woman before who had really achieved a complete mastery of the art of backing. In­animate stones seemed to have become alive, judging by the way they thrust malicious obstacles into the path of the tires and threatened to pitch the car into the shrubbery, but her small right hand on the wheel performed impossible feats. In a remarkably short time they had broken through the trees and swung around in the main road; and the powerful sedan, responding instantly to the pressure of her foot on the accelera­tor, whirled away like the wind towards Passaic. The Saint saw no other car near the side road and was compelled to repeat Maxie's question.

"How did you get here?"

"I was in the trunk behind," she explained. "Hunk was hanging around so long that I thought I'd never be able to get out. That's why I was late."

The strident horn blared a continuous warning to slower cars as the speedometer needle flickered along the dial. She drove fast, flat out, defiantly, yet with a cold machine-tooled precision of hand and eye that took the recklessness out of her contempt for every other driver's rights to the road. Perhaps, as they scrambled blasphemously out of her path, they caught a glimpse of her fair hair and pale careless face as she flashed by, like a valkyrie riding past on the gales of death.

Simon lay back in his corner and lighted a cigarette. His shoulder was throbbing more painfully, and he was glad to rest. But the puzzle in his mind went on. It was the second time she had intervened, this time to save his life; and he was still without a reason. Except—the obvious one. There seemed to be no doubt about that; although until that moment she had never spoken a word to him. The Saint had lived his life. He had philandered and roistered with the best, and done it as he did most other things, better than any of them; but in that mad moment when she had kissed him he had felt some­thing which was unlike anything else in his experience, some­thing of which he could almost be afraid. . . .

He was too tired to go deeper into it then. Consciously, he tried to postpone the accounting which would be forced on him soon enough; and he was relieved when the lights of Pas­saic sprang up around them, even though he realized that that only lessened the time in which he must make up his mind."

The girl stopped the car before a small house on the out­skirts of the town and climbed out. Simon hesitated.

"Hadn't you better wait here?" he suggested. "If this bird is connected with your mob——"

"He isn't. Come on."

She was ringing the bell when he reached the door. After a lengthy interval the doctor opened it, sleepy-eyed and dishev­elled, in his shirt and trousers. He was a swarthy, stocky man with a loose lower lip and rather prominent eyes which shifted salaciously behind thick pebble glasses—Simon would not have cared to take his wife there, but nevertheless the doc­tor's handling of the present circumstances was commendable in every way. After one glance at the Saint's stained shirt and empty sleeve he led the way to his surgery and lighted the gas under a sterilizing tray.

He gave the Saint a long shot of brandy and proceeded to wash his hands methodically in a cracked basin.

"How've you been keeping, Fay?" he asked.

"Pretty well," she replied casually. "How about you?"

He grunted, drying his hands.

"I've been fairly busy. I haven't taken a vacation since I went to the Chicago exhibition."

The bullet had entered the Saint's back at an angle, pierced cleanly through the latissimus dorsi, ricochetted off a rib, and lodged a few inches lower down in the chest wall. Simon knew that the lung had not been touched—otherwise he would prob­ably have been dead before that—but he was grateful for knowing the exact extent of the injury. The doctor worked with impersonal efficiency; and the girl took a cigarette and watched, passing him things when he asked for them. Simon looked at her face—it was impassive, untouched by her thoughts.

"Have another drink?" asked the doctor, when he had dressed the wound.

Simon nodded. His face was a trifle pale under his tan.

Fay Edwards poured it out, and the doctor went back to his cracked basin and washed his hands again.

"It was worth going to, that exhibition," he said. "I was too hot to enjoy it, but it was worth seeing. I don't know how they managed to put on some of those shows in the Streets of Paris."

He came back and peered at the Saint through his thick lenses, which made his eyes seem smaller than they were.

"That will cost you a thousand dollars," he said blandly.

The Saint felt in his pockets and remembered that he hadn't a nickel. Fortunately, he had deposited his ten-thousand-dollar bonus in a safe place before he went to interview Inselheim, but all his small change had been taken when he was searched after his capture. That was a broad departure from the un­derworld tradition which demands that a man who is taken for a ride shall be left with whatever money he has on him, but it was a tribute to the fear he had inspired which could transform even a couple of five-dollar bills and some silver into potential lethal weapons in his hands. He smiled crook­edly.

"Is my credit good?"

"Certainly," said the surgeon without hesitation. "Send it to me tomorrow. In small bills, please. Leave the dressing on for a couple of days, and try to take things easy. You may have a touch of fever tomorrow. Take an aspirin."

He ushered them briskly down the hall, fondling the girl's hand unnecessarily.

"Come and see me any time you want anything, Fay. Good­night."

Throughout their visit he bad not raised an eyebrow or asked a pertinent question: one gathered that a wounded man waking him up for attention in the small hours of the morning was nothing epoch-making in his practice, and that he had long since found it wise and profitable to mind his own busi­ness.

They sat in the car, and Simon lighted a cigarette. The doc­tor's brandy had taken off some of the deathly lassitude which had drained his vitality before; but he knew that the stimula­tion was only temporary, and he had work to do. Also there was still the enigma of Fay Edwards, which he would have to face before long. If only she would be merciful and leave the time to him, he would be easier in his mind: he had his normal share of the instinct to put off unpleasant problems. He didn't know what answer he could give her; he wanted time to think about it, although he knew that time and thought would bring him no nearer to an answer. But he knew she would not be merciful. The quality of mercy was rare enough in women, and in anyone like her it would be rarest of all. She would face his answer in the same way that she faced the fact of death, with the same aloof, impregnable detachment; he could only sense, in an indefinable intuitive way, what would lie behind that cold detachment; and the sensation was vaguely frightening.

"Where would you like to go?" she asked.

He smoked steadily, avoiding her eyes.

"Back to New York, I suppose. I haven't finished my job tonight. But you can drop me off anywhere it suits you."

"You're not fit to do any more today."

"I haven't finished," he said grimly.

She regarded him inscrutably; her mind was a thousand miles beyond his horizon, but the fresh sweetness of her body was too close for comfort.

"What did you come here to do?"

"I had a commission," he said.

He put his hand in his breast pocket, took out bis wallet, and opened it on his knee. She leaned towards him, looking over his shoulder at the scrap of paper that was exposed. His forefinger slid down the list of names written on it

"I came here to kill six men. I've killed three—Jack Irboll, Morrie Ualino, and Eddie Voelsang. Leaving three."

"Hunk is dead," she said, touching the list. "That was Jenson—the man who drove this car tonight."

"Leaving two," he amended quietly.

She nodded.

"I wouldn't know where to find Curly Ippolino. The last I heard of him, he was in Pittsburgh." Her golden-yellow eyes turned towards him impassively. ''But Dutch Kuhlmann is next."

The Saint forced himself to look at her. There was nothing else to be done. It had to be faced; and he was spellbound by a tremendous curiosity.

"What will you do? He's one of your friends, isn't he?"

"I have no ... friends," she said; and again he was dis­turbed by that queer haunting music in her voice. "I'll take you there. He'll just about be tired of waiting for Joe and Maxie by the time we arrive. You'll see him as he comes out."

Simon looked at the lighted panel of instruments on the dash. He didn't see them, but they were something to which he could turn his eyes. If they went back to find Dutch Kuhl­mann, her challenge to himself would be in abeyance for a while longer. He might still escape. And his work remained: he had made a promise, and he had never yet failed to keep his word. He was certain that she was not leading him into a trap—it would have been fantastic to imagine any such com­plicated plan, when nothing could have been simpler than to allow Maxie to complete the job he had begun so well. On the other hand, she had offered the Saint no explanation of why she should help him, had asked him to give no reasons for his own grim mission. He felt that she would have had no interest in reasons. Hate, jealousy, revenge, a wager, even justice—any reasons that logic or ingenuity might devise would be only words to her. She was waiting, with her hand on the starting switch, for anything he cared to say.

The Saint bowed bis head slowly.

"I meant to go back to Charley's Place," he said.

A little more than one hour later Dutch Kuhlmann gulped down the dregs of his last drink, up-ended his glass, pulled out his large old-fashioned gold watch, yawned with Teutonic thoroughness, and shoved his high stool back from the bar.

"I'm goin' home," he said. "Hey, Toni—when Joe an' Maxie get here, you tell them to come und see me at my apartment"

The barman nodded, mechanically wiping invisible stains from the spotless mahogany.

"Very good, Mr. Kuhlmann."

Kuhlmann stood up and glanced towards the two sleek sphinx-faced young men who sat patiently at a strategic table. They finished their drinks hurriedly and rose to follow him like well-trained dogs as he waddled towards the door, exchang­ing gruff good-nights with friends and acquaintances as he went. In the foyer he waited for them to catch up with him. They passed him and stood between him and the door while it was opened. Also they went out first and inspected the street carefully before they nodded to him to follow. Kuhlmann came out and stood between them on the sidewalk—he was as thorough and methodical in his personal precautions as he was in everything else, which was one reason why his czardom had survived so long. He relighted his cigar and flicked the match sportively at one of his equerries.

"Go und start der car, Fritzie," he said.

One of the sphinz-faced young men detached himself from the little group and went and climbed into the driving seat of Kuhlmann's Packard, which was parked a little distance up the road. He was paid handsomely for his special duty, but the post was no sinecure. His predecessor in office, as a matter of fact, had lasted only three weeks—until a bomb planted un­der the scuttle by some malicious citizen had exploded when the turning of the ignition key had completed the necessary electrical circuit.

Kuhlmann's benign but restless eyes roved over the scene while the engine was being warmed up for him, and so he was the first to recognize the black sedan which swept down the street from the west. He nudged the escort who had remained with him.

"Chust in time, here is Joe and Maxie comin' back."

He went forward towards the approaching car as it drew closer to the curb. He was less than two yards from it when he saw the ghost—too late for him to turn back or even cry out. He saw the face of the man whom he had sent away to execu­tion, a pale ghost with stony lips and blue eyes cold and hard like burnished sapphires, and knew in that instant that the sands had run out at last. The sharp crack of a single shot crashed down the echoing channel of the street, and the black sedan was roaring away to the east before his body touched the pavement.

* * *

The police sirens were still moaning around like forlorn banshees in the distances of the surrounding night when Fay Edwards stopped the car again in Central Park. Simon had a sudden vivid memory of the night when he had sat in exactly the same spot, in another car, with Inspector Fernack; it was considerably less than thirty-six hours ago, and yet so much had happened that it might as well have been thirty-six years. He wondered what had happened to Fernack, and what that grim-visaged, massive-boned detective was thinking about the vol­cano of panic and killing which had flamed out in the under­world since they had had that strange, irregular conversation. Probably Fernack was scouring the city for him at that moment, harried to superhuman efforts by the savage anxiety of commissioners and politicians and their satellites; their next conversation, if they ever had one, would probably be much less friendly and tolerant. But that also seemed as far away as if it belonged in another century. Fay Edwards was waiting.

She had switched off the engine, and she was lighting a cig­arette. He saw the calm, almost waxen beauty of her face in the flicker of the match she was holding, the untroubled quiet of her eyes, and had to make an effort to remember that she had killed one man that night and helped him to kill another.

"Was that all right?" she asked.

"It was all right," he said.

"I saw your list," she said reflectively. "You had my name on it. What have I done? I suppose you want something with me. I'm here—now."

He shook his head.

"There should have been a question mark after it. I put you down for a mystery. I was listening in when you spoke to Nather—that was the first time I heard your voice. I was watch­ing you with Morrie Ualino. You gave me the gun that got me out of there. I wanted to know who you were—what you had been—why you were in the racket. Just curiosity."

She shrugged.

"Now you know the answer."

"Do I?" The response was automatic, and at once he wished he had checked it. He felt her eyes turning to look at him, and added quickly: "When you came and told Maxie tonight that the Big Fellow said he was to let me go—that wasn't the truth."

"What makes you think so?"

"I'm guessing. But I'll bet on it."

She drew on her cigarette placidly. The smoke drifted out and floated down the beam of the lights.

"Of course it wasn't true. The Big Fellow was on your list as well, wasn't he?" she said inconsequently. "Do you want him, too?"

"Most of all."

"I see. You're very determined—very single-minded, aren't you?"

"I have to be," said the Saint. "And I want to finish this job. I want to write 'The End' to it and start something else. I'm a bit tired."

She was smoking thoughtfully, a very faint frown of concen­tration cutting one tiny etched line between her brows—the only wrinkle in the soft perfection of her skin. She might have been alone in her room preparing to go out, choosing between one dress and another. It meant nothing to her,emotions that the only thing they shared in their acquaintance were kill­ings, that the Saint's mission was set down in an unalterable groove of battle and sudden death, that all the paths they had taken together were laid to the same grim goal. He had an eerie feeling that death and killings were the things she under­stood best—that perhaps there was nothing else she really un­derstood.

"I think I could find the Big Fellow," she said; and he tried to appear as casual and unconcerned as she was.

"You know him, don't you?"

"I'm the only one who knows him."

It was indescribably weird to be sitting there with her, wounded and tired, and to be discussing with her the greatest mystery that the annals of New York crime had ever known, waiting on the threshold of unthinkable revelations, where otherwise he would have been faced with the same illimitable blank wall as had confronted him from the beginning. In his wildest day-dreams he had never imagined that the climax of his quest would be reached like that, and the thought made him feel unwontedly humble.

"He's a great mystery, isn't he?" said the Saint meditatively. "How long have you known him?"

"I met him nearly three years ago, before he was the Big Fellow at all—before anyone had ever heard of him. He picked me up when I was down and out." She was as casual about it as if she had been discussing an ephemeral scandal of nine days' importance, as if nothing of great interest to anyone hung on what she said. "He told me about his idea. It was a good one. I was able to help him because I knew how to con­tact the sort of people he had to get hold of. I've been his mouthpiece ever since—until tonight."

"D'you mean you—parted company?"

"Oh, no. I just changed my mind."

"He must be a remarkable fellow," said the Saint.

"He is. When I started, I didn't think he'd last a week, even though his ideas were good. It takes something more than good ideas to hold your own in the racket. And he couldn't use per­sonality—direct contact—of any kind. He was determined to be absolutely unknown to anyone from beginning to end. As a matter of fact, he hasn't got much personality—certainly not of that kind. Perhaps he knows it. That may be why he did everything through me—he wouldn't even speak to any of the mob over the telephone. Probably he's one of those men who are Napoleons in their dreams, but who never do anything because directly they meet anyone face to face it all goes out of them. The Big Fellow found a way to beat that. He never met anyone face to face—except me, and somehow I didn't scare him. He just kept on dreaming, all by himself."

A light was starting to glimmer in the depths of Simon Templar's understanding. It wasn't much of a light, little more than a faint nimbus of luminance in the caverns of an illim­itable obscurity; but it seemed to be brightening, growing in­finitesimally larger with the crawling of time, as if a man walked with a candle in the infinities of a tremendous cave. He had an uncanny illogical premonition that perhaps after all the threads were not so widely scattered—that perhaps the wall might not be so blank as he had thought. Some unreason­able standard of the rightness of things demanded it; anything else would have been out of tune with the rest of his life, a sharp discord in a smooth flow of harmony; but he did not know why he should have that faith in such a fantastic law of coincidence.

"Were his ideas very clever?" he asked.

"He had ways for us to communicate that nobody ever found out," she replied simply. "Morrie Ualino tried to find out who he was—so did Kuhlmann. They tried every trick and trap they could think of, but there was never any risk. I call that clever. He had a way of handling ransom money, between the man who picked it up and the time when he eventually got his share himself, which took the dicks into a blind alley every time. You know the trouble with ransom money—it's nearly always fixed so that it can be traced. The Big Fellow never ran the slightest risk there, either, at any time. That was only the beginning. Yes, he's clever."

Simon nodded. All of that he could follow clearly. It was grotesque, impossible, one of the things that do not and cannot happen; but he had known that from the start. And yet the impossible things had to happen sometimes, or else the whole living universe would long since have sunk into a stagnant mo­rass of immutable laws, and the smug pedants whose sole am­bition is to bind down all surprise and endeavour into their smugly catalogued little pigeonholes would long since have inherited their empty earth. That much he could understand. To handle thugs and killers, the brutal, dehumanized cannon fodder of the underworld, men whose scruples and loyalties and dissensions are as volatile and unpredictable as the flight of a flushed snipe, calls for a peculiar type of dominance. A man who would be a brilliant success in other fields, even a man who might organize and control a gigantic industry, whose thunder might shake the iron satraps of finance on their golden thrones, might be an ignoble failure there. The Big Fellow had slipped round the difficulty in the simplest pos­sible way—had possibly even gained in prestige by the mystery with which he shielded his own weakness. But the question which Maxie had not had time to answer still remained.

"How did the Big Fellow start?" asked the Saint.

"With a hundred thousand dollars." She smiled at his quick blend of puzzlement and attention. "That was his capital. I went to Morrie Ualino with the story that this man, whose name I couldn't give, wanted another man kidnapped and perhaps killed. I had the contact, so we could talk straight. You can find some heels who'll bump off a guy for fifty bucks. Most of the regulars would charge you a couple of hundred up, according to how big a noise the job would make. This man was a big shot. It could probably have been done for ten thousand. The Big Fellow offered fifty thousand, cash. He knew everything—he had the inside information, knew every­thing the man was doing, and had the plans laid out with a footrule. All that Morrie and his mob had to do was exactly what the Big Fellow told them, and ask no questions. They thought it was just some private quarrel. They put the snatch on this man, and then I went behind their backs and put in the ransom demand, just as the Big Fellow told me. It had to be paid in thirty-six hours, and it wasn't. The Big Fellow passed the word for him to be rubbed out, and on the deadline he was thrown out of a car on his own doorstep. That was Flo Youssine."

"The theatrical producer? ... I remember. But the ransom story came out as soon as he was killed—"

"Of course. Morrie sent back to the Big Fellow and said he could do that sort of thing himself, without anybody telling him. The Big Fellow's answer was, 'Why didn't you?' At the same time he ordered another man to be snatched off, at the same price. Morrie did it. There was just as much information as before, the plan was just as perfect, there wasn't a hitch anywhere. Youssine having been killed was a warning, and this time the ransom was paid."

"I see." Simon was fascinated. "And then he worked on Kuhlmann with the same line——"

"More or less. Then he linked him up with Ualino. Nat­urally it wasn't all done at once, but it was moving all the time. The Big Fellow never made a mistake. After Youssine was killed, nobody else refused until Inselheim hung out the other day. The mobs began to think that the Big Fellow must be a god—a devil—their mascot—anything. But he brought in the money, and that was good enough. He was smarter than any of them had ever been, and they weren't too dumb to see it."

It was so simple that the Saint could have gasped. It had the perfection of all simple things. It was utterly and comprehen­sively satisfactory, given the initial genius and the capable mouthpiece; it was so obvious that he could have kicked him­self for ever allowing the problem to swell to such proportions in his mind, although he knew that nothing is so mysterious and elusive as the simple and obvious. It was like the thimble in the old parlour game—one came on it after an intensive search with a shock of surprise, to find that it had been staring everyone in the face from the beginning.

The development of which Papulos had spoken followed easily. Once a sufficient terrorism had been established, the crude mechanics of kidnapping could be dispensed with. The threat of it alone was enough, with the threat of sudden death to follow if the first warning were ignored. He felt a little less contemptuous of Zeke Inselheim than he had been: the broker had at least made his lone feeble effort to resist, to challenge the terror which enslaved a thousand others of his kind.

"And it's been like that ever since?" Simon suggested.

"Not quite," said the girl. "That was only the beginning. As soon as the racket was established, the Big Fellow organized it properly. There was nothing new about it—it's been done for years, here and there—but it had never been done so thor­oughly or so well. The Big Fellow made an industry of it. He couldn't go on hiring Ualino and Kuhlmann to do isolated jobs at so much a time. Their demands would have gone up automatically—they might have tried to do other jobs on their own, and one or two failures would have spoiled the market. All the Big Fellow's victims were handpicked—he was clever there, too. None of them were big public figures, none of them would make terrific newspaper stories, like Lindbergh, none of them would get a lot of public sympathy, none of them had a political hook-up which might have made the cops take special interest, none of them would be likely to turn into fighters; but they were all rich. The Big Fellow wanted things to go on exactly as he had started them. He organized the in­dustry, and the other big shots came in on a profit-sharing basis."

"How was that worked?"

"All the profits were paid into one bank, and all the big shots had a drawing account on it limited to so much per week. The Big Fellow had exactly the same as the rest of them —I handled it all for him. The rest of the profits were to ac­cumulate. It was agreed that the racket should run for three years exactly, and at the end of that time they should divide the surplus equally and organize again if they wanted to. Since you've been here," she added dispassionately, "there aren't many of them left to divide the pool. That means a lot of money for somebody, because last month there were seventeen million dollars in the account."

Her cool announcement of the sum took Simon Templar's breath away. Even though he vaguely remembered having heard astronomical statistics of the billions of dollars which make up America's annual account of crime, it staggered him. He wondered how many men were still waiting to split up that immense fortune, now that Dutch Kuhlmann and Morrie Ualino were gone. There could not be many; but the girl's eyes were turned on him again with quiet amusement

"Is there anything else you want to know?"

"Several things," he said and looked at her. "You can tell me—who is the Big Fellow?"

She shook her head.

"I can't."

"But you said you could find him for me."

"I think I can. But when we began, I promised him I would never tell his name to anyone, or tell anyone how to get in touch with him."

The Saint took a cigarette. His hand was steady, but the steadiness was achieved consciously.

"You mean that if you found him, and I met you in such a way that I accidentally saw him and jumped to the conclusion that he was the man I wanted—your conscience would be clear."

"Why not?" she asked naively. "If that's what you want, I'll do it"

A slight shiver went through the Saint—he did not know whether the night had turned colder, or whether it was a sud­den, terrible understanding of what lay behind that flash of almost childish innocence.

"You're very kind," he said.

She did not reply at once.

"After that," she said at length, "will you have finished?"

"That will be about the end."

She threw her cigarette away and sat still for a moment, con­templating the darkness beyond the range of their lights. Her profile had the aloof, impossible perfection of an artist's ideal.

"I heard about you as soon as you arrived," she said. "I was hoping to see you. When I had seen you, nothing else mat­tered. Nothing else ever will. When you've waited all your life for something, you recognize it when it comes."

It was the nearest thing to a testament of herself that he ever heard, and for the rest of his days it was as clear in his mind as it was a moment after she said it. The mere words were unimpassioned, almost commonplace; but in the light of what little he knew of her, and the time and place at which they were said, they remained as an eternal question. He never knew the answer.

He could not tell her that he was not free for her, that even in the lawless workings of his own mind she was for ever apart and unapproachable although to every sense infinitely desir­able. She would not have understood. She was not even waiting for a response.

She had started the car again; and as they ran southwards through the park she was talking as if nothing personal had ever arisen between them, as if only the ruthless details of his mission had ever brought them together, without a change in the calm detachment of her voice.

"The Big Fellow would have liked to keep you. He admired the way you did things. The last time I saw him, he told me he wished he could have got you to join him. But the others would never have stood for it. He told me to try and make things easy for you if they caught you—he sort of hoped that he might have a chance to get you in with him some day."

She stopped the car again on Lexington Avenue, at the cor­ner of 50th Street.

"Where do we meet?" she asked.

He thought for a moment. The Waldorf Astoria was still his secret stronghold, and he had a lurking unwillingness to give it away. He had no other base.

"How long will you be?" he temporized.

"I ought to have some news for you in an hour and a half or two hours."

An idea struck him from a fleeting, inconsequential gleam of memory that went back to the last meal he had enjoyed in peace, when he had walked down Lexington Avenue with a gay defiance in the tilt of his hat and the whole adventure be­fore him.

"Call Chris Cellini, on East 45th Street," he said. "I probably shan't be there, but I can leave a message or pick one up. Any­thing you say will be safe with him."

"Okay." She put a hand on his shoulder, turning a little to­wards him. "Presently we shall have more time—Simon."

Her face was lifted towards him, and again the fragrant per­fume of her was in his nostrils; the amazing amber eyes were darkened, the red lips parted, without coquetry, in acquies­cence and acknowledgment. He kissed her, and there was a fire in his blood and a delicious languor in his limbs. It was impos­sible to remember anything else about her, to think of any­thing else. He did not want to remember, to strive or plot or aspire; in the surrender to her physical bewitchment there was an ultimate rest, an infinity of sensuous peace, beyond any­thing he had ever dreamed of.

"Au revoir," she said softly; and somehow he was outside the car, standing on the pavement, watching the car slide silently away into the dark, and wondering at himself, with the fresh­ness of her lips still on his mouth and a ghost of fear in his heart.

Presently he awoke again to the throbbing of his shoulder and the maddening tiredness of his body. He turned and walked slowly across to the private entrance of the Waldorf apartments. "Well," he thought to himself, "before morning I shall have met the Big Fellow, and that'll be the end of it" But he knew it would only be the beginning.

He went up in the private elevator, lighting another ciga­rette. Some of the numbness had loosened up from his right hand: he moved his fingers, gingerly, to assure himself that they worked, but there was little strength left in them. It hurt him a good deal to move his arm. On the whole, he supposed that he could consider himself lucky to be alive at all, but he felt the void in himself which should have been filled by the vitality that he had lost, and was vaguely angry. He had always so vigorously despised weariness and lassitude in all their forms that it was infuriating to him to be disabled—most of all at such a time. He was hurt as a sick child is hurt, not knowing why; until that chance shot of Maxie's had found its mark, the Saint had never seriously imagined that anything could attack him which his resilient health would not be able to throw off as lightly as he would have thrown off the hang­over of a heavy party. He told himself that if everything else about him had been normal, if he had been overflowing with his normal surplus of buoyant energy and confidence, not even the strange sorcery of Fay Edwards could have troubled him. But he knew that it was not true.

The lights were all on in the apartment when he let him­self in, and suddenly he realized that he had been away for a long time. Valcross must have despaired of seeing him again alive, he thought, with a faint grim smile touching his lips; and then, when no familiar kindly voice was raised in welcome, he decided that the old man must have grown tired in waiting and dozed off over his book. He strolled cheerfully through and pushed open the door of the living room. The lights were on there as well, and he had crossed the threshold before he grasped the fact that neither of the two men who rose to greet him was Valcross.

He stopped dead; and then his hand leapt instinctively to­wards the electric^:light switch. It was not until then that he realized fully how tired he was and how much vitality he had lost. The response of his muscles was slow and clumsy, and a twinging stab of pain in his shoulder checked the movement halfway and put the seal on its failure.

"Better not try that again, son," warned the larger of the two men harshly; and Simon Templar looked down the barrel of a businesslike Colt and knew that he was never likely to hear a word of advice which had a more soberly overwhelming claim to be obeyed.

Chapter 8

How Fay Edwards Kept Her Word, and Simon Templar Surrendered His Gun

"Well, well, well!" said the Saint and was surprised at the huskiness of his own voice. "This is a pleasant surprise." He frowned at one of the vacant chairs. "But what have you done with Marx?"

"Who do you mean—Marx?" demanded the large man alertly.

The Saint smiled.

"I'm sorry," he said genially. "For a moment I thought you were Hart & Schaffner. Never mind. What's in a name?—as the actress said to the bishop when he told her that she re­minded him of Aspasia. Is there anything I can do for you, or has the hotel gone bankrupt and are you just the bailiffs?"

The two men looked at each other for a moment and found that they had but a single thought. The smaller man voiced it, little knowing that a certain Heimie Felder had beaten him to it by a good number of hours.

"It's a nut," he affirmed decisively. "That's what it is. Let's give it the works."

Simon Templar leaned back against the door and regarded them tolerantly. He was stirred to no great animosity by the opinion which the smaller man had expressed with such an admirable economy of words—he had been hearing it so often recently that he was getting used to it. And at the back of his mind he was beginning to wonder if it might contain a germ of truth. His entrance into that room had been one of the most ridiculously careless manoeuvres he had ever executed, and his futile attempt to reach the light switch still made him squirm slightly to think of. Senile decay, it appeared, was rapidly over­taking him. . . .

He studied the two men with grim intentness. They have been classified, for immediate convenience, as the larger and the smaller man; but in point of fact there was little to choose between them—the effect was much the same as establishing the comparative dimensions of a rhinoceros and a hippopot­amus. The "smaller" man stood about six feet three in his shoes and must have weighed approximately three hundred pounds; the other, it should be sufficient to say, was a great deal larger. Taken as a team, they summed up to one of the most undesir­able deputations of welcome which the Saint could imagine at that moment.

The larger man bulked ponderously round the intervening table and advanced towards him. With the businesslike Colt jabbing into the Saint's middle, he made a quick and efficient search of Simon's pockets and found the gun which had be­longed to the late lamented Joe. He tossed it back to his com­panion and put his own weapon away.

"Now, you," he rasped, "what's your name?"

"They call me Daffodil," said the Saint exquisitely. "And what's yours?"

The big man's eyebrows drew together, and his eyes hard­ened malevolently.

"Listen, sucker," he snarled, "you know who we are."

"I don't," said the Saint calmly. "We haven't been intro­duced. I tried a guess, but apparently I was wrong. You might like to tell me."

"My name's Kestry," said the big man grudgingly, "and that's Detective Bonacci. We're from headquarters. Satisfied?"

Simon nodded. He was more than satisfied. He had been thinking along those lines ever since he had looked down the barrel of the big man's gun and it had failed to belch death at him instantly and unceremoniously, as it would probably have done if any of the Kuhlmann or Ualino mobs had been behind it. The established size of the men, the weight of their shoes, and the dominant way they carried themselves had helped him to the conclusion; but he liked to be sure.

"It's nice of you to drop in," he said slowly. "I suppose you got my message."

"What message?"

"The message I sent asking you to drop in."

Kestry's eyes narrowed.

"You sent that message?"

"Surely. I was rather busy at the time myself, but I got a. bloke to do it for me."

The detective expanded his huge chest.

"That's interesting, ain't it? And what did you want to see me about?"

The Saint had been thinking fast. So a message had actually been received—his play for time had revealed that much. He wondered who could have given him away. Fay Edwards? She knew nothing. The taxi driver who had been so interested in him on the day when Papulos died? He didn't see how he could have been followed——

"What did you want to see me about?" Kestry was repeating.

"I thought you might like to hear some news about the Big Fellow."

"Did you?" said the detective, almost benignly; and then his expression changed as if a hand had smudged over a clay model. "Then, you lousy liar," he roared suddenly, "why did the guy that was phoning for you say: "This is the Big Fellow —you'll find the Saint in the tower suite of the Waldorf Astoria belonging to a Mr. Valcross—he's been treading on my toes a damn sight too long'?"

Simon Templar breathed in and out in a long sigh.

"I can't imagine," he said. "Maybe he'd had too much to drink. Now I come to think of it, he was a bit cock-eyed——"

"You're damn right you can't imagine it," Kestry bit out with pugnacious satisfaction. He had been studying" the Saint's face closely, and Simon saw suspicion and confirmation pass in procession through his mind. "I know who you are," Kestry said. "You are the Saint!"

Simon bowed. If he had had a chance to inspect himself in a mirror and discover the ravages which the night's ordeal had worked on his appearance, he might have been less surprised that the detective had taken so long to identify him.

"Congratulations, brother," he murmured. "A very pretty job of work. I suppose you're just practising tracking people down. Let's see—is there anything else I can give you to play with? . . . We used to have a couple of fairly well-preserved clues in the bathroom, but they slipped down the waste pipe last Saturday night——"

"Listen again, sucker," the detective cut in grittily. "You've had your gag, and the rest of the jokes are with me. If you play dumb, I'll soon slap it out of you. The best thing you can do is to come clean before I get rough. Understand?"

The Saint indicated that he understood. His eyes were still bright, his demeanour was as cool and debonair as it had al­ways been; but a sense of ultimate defeat hung over him like a pall. Was this, then, the end of the adventure and the finish of the Saint? Was he destined after all to be ignominiously carted off to a cell at last, and left there like a caged tiger while on four continents the men who had feared his outlawry read of his downfall and gloated over their own salvation? He could not believe that it would end like that; but he realized that for the last few hours he had been playing a losing game. Yet there was not a hint of despair or weakness in his voice when he spoke again.

"You don't want much, do you?" he remarked gently.

"I want plenty with you," Kestry shot back. "Where's this guy Valcross?"

"I haven't the faintest idea," said the Saint honestly.

Before he realized what was happening, Kestry's great fist had knotted, drawn back, and lashed out at bis face. The blow slammed him back against the door and left his brain rocking.

"Where do I find Valcross?"

"I don't know," said the Saint, with splinters of steel glitter­ing in his eyes. "The last tune I saw him, he was occupying a private cage in the monkey house at the Bronx Zoo, disguised as a retired detective."

Kestry's fist smacked out again with malignant force, and the Saint staggered and gripped the edge of the door for sup­port.

"Where's Valcross?"

Simon shook his head mutely. There was no strength in his knees, and he felt dazed and giddy. He had never dreamed of being hit with such power.

Kestry's flinty eyes were fixed on him mercilessly.

"So you think you won't talk, eh?"

"I'm rather particular about whom I talk to, you big baboon," said the Saint unsteadily. "If this is your idea of playing at detectives, I don't wonder that you're a flop."

Kestry's stare reddened.

"I've got you, anyhow," he grated, and his fist swung round again and sent the Saint reeling against a bookcase.

He caught the Saint by his coat lapels with one vast hand and dragged him up again. As he did so, he seemed to notice for the first time that one of Simon's sleeves was hanging empty. He flung the coat off his right shoulder and saw the dull red of drying stains on his shirt.

"Where did you get that?" he barked.

"A louse bit me," said the Saint. "Now I come to think of it, he must have been a relation of yours."

Kestry grabbed his wrist and twisted the arm up adroitly behind his back. The strength of the detective's hands was terrific. A white-hot blaze of pure agony went through the Saint's injured shoulder, and a kind of mist swam across his eyes. He knew that he could not hold up much longer, even though he had nothing to tell. But the medieval methods of the third degree would batter and torture him into unconsciousness before they were satisfied with the consolidation of their status as the spiritual heirs of Sherlock Holmes.

And then, through the hammering of many waters that seemed to be deadening his ears, he heard the single sharp ring of a bell, and the racking of his arm eased.

"See who it is, Dan," ordered Kestry.

Bonacci nodded and went out. Kestry kept his grip on the Saint's arm, ready to renew his private entertainment as soon as the intrusion was disposed of, but his eyes were watching the door.

It was Inspector Fernack who came in.

He stood just inside the room, pushing back his hat, and took in the scene with hard and alert grey eyes. His craglike face showed neither elation nor surprise; the set of his massive shoulders was as solid and immutable as a mountain.

"What's this?" he asked.

"We got the Saint," Kestry proclaimed exultantly. "The other guy—Valcross—ain't been here, but this punk'll soon tell me where to look for him. I was just puttin' him on the grill ——"

"You're telling me?" Fernack roared in on him abruptly, in a voice that dwarfed even the bull-throated harshness of his subordinate's. "You bloody fool! Who told you to do it here? Where d'you get that stuff, anyway?"

Kestry gulped as if he could not believe his ears.

"But say, Chief, where's the harm? This mug wouldn't come through—he was wisecrackin' as if this was some game we were playin' at—and I didn't want to waste any time gettin' Valcross as well ——"

"So that's what they taught you at the Police Academy, huh?" Fernack ripped in searingly. "I always wondered what that place was for. That's a swell idea, Kestry. You go ahead. Tear the place to pieces. Wake all the other guests in the hotel up an' get a crowd outside. Bonacci can be ringing up the tabloids an' gettin' some reporters in to watch while you're do­ing it. The commissioner'll be tickled to death. He'll probably resign and hand you his job!"

Kestry let go the Saint's wrist and edged away. Simon had never seen anything like it. The great blustering bully of a few moments ago was transformed into the almost ludicrous semblance of a schoolboy who has been caught stealing apples. Kestry practically wriggled.

"I was only tryin' to save time. Chief," he pleaded.

"Get outside, and have a taxi waiting," Fernack commanded tersely. "I'll bring the Saint down myself. After that you can go home. Bonacci, you stay here an' wait for Valcross if he comes in. . . ."

Simon had admired Fernack before, but he had never appreciated the dominance of the man's character so much. Fernack literally towered over the scene like a god, booming out curt, precise directions that had the effect of cannon balls. In less than a minute after he had entered the room he had cleaned it up as effectively as if he had gone through it with a giant's flail. Kestry almost slunk away, vacating the apartment as if he never wished to see it again. Bonacci, who had been edging away into an inconspicuous corner, sank into a chair as if he hoped it would swallow him up completely until the thunder had gone. Fernack was left looming over the situation like a volcano, and there was a gleam in his frosted gaze which hinted that he would not have cared if there had been another half-dozen pygmies for him to destroy.

He eyed the Saint steadily, taking in the marks of battle which were on him. The detective's keen stare missed nothing, but no reaction appeared on the granite squareness of his face. From the beginning he had given no sign of recognition; and Simon, accepting the cue, was equally impassive.

"Come on," Fernack grunted.

He took the Saint's sound arm and led him out to the ele­vator. They rode down in silence and found Kestry waiting sheepishly with a taxi. Fernack pushed the Saint in and turned to his lieutenant.

"You can go with us," he said.

They journeyed downtown in the same atmosphere of silent tension. Kestry's muteness was aggrieved and plaintive, yet wisely self-effacing; Fernack refrained from talking because he chose to refrain—he was majestically unconcerned with what reasons might be attributed to his taciturnity. Simon wondered what was passing in the iron detective's mind. Fernack had given him his chance once, had even confessed himself theo­retically in sympathy; but things had passed beyond a point where personal prejudices could dictate their course. The Saint thought that he had discerned a trace of private enthusiasm in the temperature of the bawling out which Fernack had given Kestry, but even that meant little. The Saint had given the city of New York a lot of trouble since that night when he had talked to Fernack in Central Park, and he respected Fernack's rugged honesty too much to think of any personal appeal. As the cards fell, so they lay.

The Saint was getting beyond caring. The vast weariness which had enveloped him had dragged him down to the point where he could do little more than wait with outward stub­bornness for whatever Fate had in store. If he must go down, he would go down as he had lived, with a jest and a smile; but the fight was sapped out of him. His whole being had settled down to the acceptance of an infinity of pain and fatigue. He only wanted to rest. He scarcely noticed the brief order from Fernack which switched the cab across towards Washington Square; and when it stopped and the door was opened he climbed out apathetically, and was surprised to find that he was not in Centre Street

Fernack followed him out and turned to Kestry.

"This is my apartment," he said. "I'm going to have a talk to the Saint here. You can go on. Report to me in the mom-ing. Good-night."

He took the Saint's arm again and led him into the house, leaving the bewildered Kestry to find his own explanations. Fernack's apartment was on the street level, at the back— Simon was a trifle perplexed to find that it had a bright, com­fortable living room, with a few good etchings on the walls and bookcases filled with books which looked as if they had been read.

"You're never too old to learn," said Fernack, who missed nothing. "I been tryin' to get some dope about these Greeks. Did you ever hear of Euripides?" He pronounced it Eury-pieds. "I asked a Greek who keeps a chop house on Mott Street, an' he hadn't; but the clerk in the bookstore told me he was a big shot." He threw his hat down in a chair and picked up a bottle. "Would you like a drink?"

"I could use it," said the Saint with a wry grin.

Fernack poured it out and handed him the glass. It was a liberal measure. He gave the Saint time to swallow some of it and light a cigarette, and then spat at the cuspidor which stood out incongruously by the hearth.

"Saint, you're a damn fool," he said abruptly.

"Aren't we all?" said the Saint helplessly.

"I mean you more than most. I've talked to you once. You know what it's all about. You know what I'm supposed to do now."

"Fetch out the old baseball bat and rubber hose, I take it," said the Saint savagely. "Well, I know all about it. I've met your Mr. Kestry. As a substitute for intelligence and a reason­able amount of routine work, it must be the slickest thing that was ever invented."

"We use it here," Fernack said trenchantly. "We've found that it works as well as anything. The only thing is, some fools don't know when you've gotta use it and when you're wastin' your time. That ain't the point. I got you here for something else. You've been out and around for some time since we had our talk. How close have you got to the Big Fellow?"

The question slammed out like a shot, without pause or ar­tifice, and something in the way it was put told Simon that the time for evasions and badinage was over.

"I was pretty damn near it when I walked into Kestry's lov­ing arms," he said. "In fact, I could have picked up a message in about an hour that ought to have taken me straight to him."

Fernack nodded. His keen grey eyes were fixed steadily on the Saint's face.

"I'm not askin' you how you did it or who's sending you the message. You move fast. You're clever. It's queer that one little bullet can break up a guy like you."

He put a hand in his hip pocket, as if his last sentence had suggested a thought which required concrete expression, and pulled out a pearl-handled gun. He tossed it in the palm of his hand.

"Guns mean a lot in this racket," he said. "If a bullet out of a gun hadn't hit you, you might have got away from Kestry and Bonacci. I wouldn't put it beyond you. If you had this gun now, you'd be able to get away from me." He dropped the revolver carelessly on the table and stared at it. "That would be pretty tough for me," he said.

Simon looked at the weapon, a couple of yards away, and sank back further into his chair. He took another drink from his glass.

"Don't play cat-and-mouse, Fernack," he said. "It isn't worthy of you."

"It would be pretty tough," Fernack persisted, as if he had not heard the interruption. "Particularly after I brought Kestry as far as the door an' then sent him home. There wouldn't be anything much I could put up for an alibi. I didn't have to see you alone in my own apartment, without even a guy waitin' in the hall in case you gave any trouble, when I could 've taken you to any station house in the city or right down to Centre Street. If anything went wrong, I'd have a hell of a lot of questions to answer; an' Kestry wouldn't help me. He must be feelin' pretty sore at the way I bawled him out at the Waldorf. It'd give him a big kick if I slipped up an' gave him the laugh back at me. Yeah, it'd be pretty tough for me if you got away, Saint."

He scratched his chin ruminatively for a moment and then turned and walked heavily over to the far end of the room, where there was a side table with a box of cheap cigars. Si­mon's eyes were riveted, in weird fascination, on the pearl-handled revolver which the detective had left behind. It lay in solitary magnificence in the exact centre of the bare table— the Saint could have stood up and reached it in one step— but Fernack was not even looking at him. His back was still turned, and he was absorbed in rummaging through the cigar box.

"On the other hand," the deep voice boomed on abstract­edly, "nobody would know before morning. An' a lot of things can happen in a few hours. Take the Big Fellow, for instance. There's a guy that this city is wantin' even worse than you. It'd be a great day for the copper that brought him in. I'm not sure that even the politicians could get him out again—be­cause he's the man that runs them, an' if he was inside they'd be like a snake with its head cut off. We've got a new munic­ipal election comin' along, and this old American public has a way of waking up sometimes, when the right thing starts 'em off. Yeah—if I lost you but I got the Big Fellow instead, Kestry'd have to think twice about where he laughed."

Fernack had found the cigar which he had been hunting down. He turned half round, bit off the end, and spat it through his teeth. Then he searched vaguely for matches.

"Yeah," he said thoughtfully, "there's a lot of responsibility wrapped up in a guy like you."

Simon cleared his throat. It was oddly difficult to speak dis­tinctly.

"Suppose any of those things happened—if you did get the Big Fellow," he said jerkily. "Nobody's ever seen him. Nobody could prove anything. How would that help you so much?"

"I don't want proof," Fernack replied, with a flat arrogance of certitude that was more deadly than anything the Saint had ever heard. "If a guy like you, for instance, handed a guy to me and said he was the Big Fellow—I'd get my proof. That's what you don't understand about the third degree. When you know you're right, a full confession is more use than any amount of evidence that lawyers can twist around backwards. Don't worry. I'd get my proof."

Simon emptied his glass. His cigarette had gone out and he had not noticed it—he threw it away and lighted another. A new warmth was spreading over him, driving away the intoler­able fatigue that gripped his limbs, crushing down pain; it might have been the quality of Fernack's brandy, or the dawn of a hope that had been dead for a long time. The unwonted hoarseness still clogged his throat.

But the fight was back in him. The hope and courage, the power and tie glory, were creeping back through his veins in a mighty tide that washed defeat and despondency away. The sound of trumpets echoed in his ears, faint and far away—how faint and far, perhaps no one but himself would ever know. But the sound was there. And if it was a deeper note, a little less brazen and flamboyant than it had ever been before, only the Saint knew how much that also meant.

He stood up and reached for the gun. Even then, he could scarcely believe that it was in his power to touch it—that it wouldn't vanish into thin air as soon as his fingers came within an inch of it, a derisive will-o'-the-wisp created by weariness and despair out of the fumes of unnatural stimulation. At least, there must be a string tied to it—it would be jerked suddenly out of his reach, while the detective jeered at him ghoulishly. . . . But Fernack wasn't even looking at him. He had turned away again and was fumbling with a box of matches as if he had forgotten what he had picked them up for.

Simon touched the gun. The steel was still warm from Fernack's pocket. His fingers closed round the butt, tightened round its solid contours; it fitted beautifully into his hand. He held it a moment, feeling the supremely balanced weight of it along the muscles of his arm; and then he put it away in his pocket

"Take care of it," Fernack said, striking his match. "I'm rather fond of that gun."

"Thanks, Fernack," said the Saint quietly. "I'll report to you by half-past nine—with or without the Big Fellow."

"You'd better wash and clean up a bit and get your coat on properly before you go," said Fernack casually. "The way you look now, any dumb cop would take you in on sight."

Ten minutes later Simon Templar left the house. Fernack did not even watch him go.

* * *

Chris Cellini himself appeared behind the bars of his base­ment door a few moments after Simon rang the bell. He recog­nized the Saint almost at once and let him in. In spite of the hour, his rich voice had not lost a fraction of its welcoming cordiality.

"Come in, Simon! I hope you don't want a steak now, but you can have a drink."

He was leading the way back towards the kitchen, but Simon hesitated in the corridor.

"Is anyone else here?"

Chris shook his head.

"Nobody but ourselves. The boys have only just gone—we had a late night tonight, or else you'd of found me in bed."

He sat the Saint down at the big centre table, stained with the relics of an evening's conviviality, and brought up a bot­tle and a couple of clean glasses. His alert brown eyes took in the pallor of Simon's face, the marks on his shirt which showed beyond the edge of his coat, and the stiffness of his right arm.

"You've been in the wars, Simon. Have you seen a doctor? Are you all right?"

"Yes, I'm all right," said the Saint laconically.

Chris regarded him anxiously for a moment longer; and then his rich habitual laugh pealed out again—a big, mean­ingless, infectious laugh that was the ultimate expression of his sunny personality. If there was a trace of artificiality about it then, Simon understood the spirit of it.

"Say, one of these days you'll get into some serious trouble, and I shall have to go to your funeral. The last time I went to a funeral, it was a man who drank himself to death. I remem­ber a couple of years ago ..."

He talked with genial inconsequence for nearly an hour, and Simon was unspeakably glad to have all effort taken out of his hands. Towards the end of that time Simon was watch­ing the slow crawling of the hands of the clock on the wall till his vision blurred; the sudden jangle of the bell in the passage outside made him start. He downed the rest of his drink quickly.

"I think that's for me," he said.

Chris nodded, and the Saint went outside and picked up the receiver.

"Hullo," said a thick masculine voice. "Is dat Mabel?"

"No, this is not Mabel," said the Saint viciously. "And I hope she sticks a knife in you when you do find her."

Over in Brooklyn, a disconsolate Mr. Bungstatter jiggered the hook querulously and then squinted blearily at the danc­ing figures on his telephone dial and stabbed at them dog­gedly again.

The Saint went back to the kitchen and shrugged heavily in answer to Chris's unspoken question. Chris was silent for a short while and then went on talking again as if nothing had happened. In ten minutes the telephone rang again.

Simon lighted a fresh cigarette to steady his nerves—he was surprised to find how much they had been shaken. He went out and listened again.

"Simon? This is Fay."

The Saint's heart leaped, and his hand tightened on the receiver; he was pressing it hard against his ear as if he were afraid of missing a word. She had no need to tell him who it was—the cadences of her voice would ring in his memory for the rest of his life.

"Yes," he said. "What's the news?"

"I haven't been able to get him yet. I've tried all the usual channels. I'm still trying. He doesn't seem to be around. He may get one of my messages at any time, or try to get through to me on his own. I don't know. I'll keep on all night if I have to. Where will you be?"

"I'll stay here," said the Saint

"Can't you get some rest?" she asked—and he knew that he would never, never again hear such soft magic in a voice.

"If we don't find him before morning," he said gently, "I shall have all the time in the world to rest."

He went back slowly into the kitchen. Chris took one look at his face and stood up.

"There's a bed upstairs for you, Simon. Why don't you lie down for a bit?"

Simon spread out his hands.

"Who'll answer the telephone?"

"I'll hear it," Chris assured him convincingly. "The least little thing wakes me up. Don't worry. Directly that telephone rings, I'll call you."

The Saint hesitated. He was terribly tired, and there was no point in squandering his waning reserve of strength. There was nothing that he himself could do until the vital message came through from Fay Edwards. His helplessness, the futile inaction of it, maddened him; but there was no answer to the fact. The rest might clear his mind, restore part of his body, freshen his brain and nerves so that he would not bungle his last chance as he had bungled so much of late. Everything, in the end, would hang on his own quickness and judgment; he knew that if he failed he would have to go back to Fernack, squaring the account by the same code which had given him this one fighting break. ...

Before he had mustered the unwilling instinct to protest, he had been shepherded upstairs, his coat taken from him, his tie loosened. Once on the bed, sleep came astoundingly. His weariness had reached the point where even the dizzy whirligig of his mind could not stave off the healing fogs of unconsciousness any longer.

When he woke up there was a brilliant New York morning in the translucent sky, and Chris was standing beside his bed.

"Your call's just come, Simon."

The Saint nodded and looked at his watch. It was just before eight o'clock. He rolled out of bed and pushed back his dis­ordered hair, and as he did so felt the burning temperature of his forehead. His shoulder was stiffened and aching. Yet he felt better and stronger than he had been before his sleep.

"There'll be some coffee and breakfast for you as soon as you're ready," Chris told him.

Simon smiled and stumbled downstairs to the telephone.

"I'm glad you've had a rest," said the girl's voice.

The Saint's heart was beating in a rhythmic palpitation which he could feel against his ribs. His mouth was dry and hot, and the emptiness was trying to struggle back into his stomach.

"It's done me good," he said. "Give me anything to fight, and I'll lick it. What do you know, Fay?"

"Can you be at the Vandrick National Bank on Fifth Avenue at nine? I think you'll find what you want."

His heart seemed to stand still for a second.

"I'll be there," he said.

"I had to park the car," she went on. "There were too many cops looking for it after last night Can you fix something else?"

"I'll see what I can do."

"Au revoir, Simon," she whispered; and he hung up the receiver and went through into the kitchen to a new day.

There was the good rich smell of breakfast in the air. A pot of coffee bubbled on the table, and Chris was frying eggs and bacon at the big range. The door to the backyard stood open, and through it floated the crisp invigorating tang of the Atlantic, sweeping away the last mustiness of stale smoke and wine. Simon felt magnificently hungry.

He shaved with Chris's razor, clumsily left-handed, and washed at the sink. The impact of cold water freshened him, swept away the trailing cobwebs of fatigue and heaviness. He wasn't dead yet. Inevitably, yet gradually because of the frightful hammering it had sustained, his system was working towards recovery; the resilience of his superb physique and dynamic health was turning the slow balance against misfor­tune. The slight feeling of hollowness in his head, the conse­quence of over-tiredness and fever, was no more than a minor discomfort. He ate hugely, thinking over the problem of se­curing the car which Fay Edwards had asked for; and sud­denly a name and number flashed up from the dim hinter­lands of reminiscence—the name and number of the garru­lous taxi driver who had driven him away from the scene of Mr. Papulos's Waterloo. He got up and went to the tele­phone, and admitted himself lucky to find the man at break­fast

"This is the Saint, Sebastian," he said. "Didn't you say I could call you if I had any use for you?"

He heard the driver's gasp of amazement, and then the eager response.

"Sure! Anyt'ing ya like, pal. What's it woit?"

"Twice as much as you're asking," replied the Saint suc­cinctly. "Meet me on the corner of Lexington and 44th in fifteen minutes."

He hung up and returned to his coffee and a cigarette. He knew that he was taking a risk—the possibility of the chauf­feur having had a share in the betrayal of his hide-out at the Waldorf Astoria was not completely disposed of, and the pros­pect of a substantial reward might be a temptation to treach­ery in any case—but it was the only solution Simon could think of.

Nevertheless the Saint's mouth was set in a grim line when he said good-bye to Chris and walked along 45th Street to Lexington Avenue. He walked slowly and kept his left hand in his pocket with the fingers fastened round the comforting butt of Fernack's revolver. There was nothing out of the ordi­nary about his appearance, no reason for anybody to notice him—-he was still betting on the inadequacy of newspaper photographs and the blindness of the average unobservant man, the only two advantages which had been faultlessly loyal to him from the beginning. And if there was a hint of fever in the brightness of the steel-blue eyes that raked the sidewalks watchfully as he sauntered down the block to the rendezvous at 44th Street, it subtracted nothing from their unswerving vigilance.

But he saw nothing that he should not have seen—no signs of a collection of large men lounging against lampposts or kicking their heels in shop doorways, no suspiciously crawling cars. The morning life of Lexington Avenue flowed normally on and was not concerned with him. Thus far the breaks were with him. Then a familiar voice hailed him, and he stopped in his tracks.

"Hi-yah, pal!"

The Saint looked round and saw the cab he had ordered parked at the corner. And in the broad grin of the driver were no grounds for a solid belief that he was a police stool pigeon or a scout of the Big Fellow's.

"Better get inside quick, before anyone sees ya, pal," he advised hoarsely; and the Saint nodded and stepped in. The chauffeur twisted round to continue the conversation through the communicating window. "Where ja wanna go dis time?"

"The Vandrick National Bank on Fifth Avenue," said the Saint.

The driver started up his engine and hauled the cab out into the stream of traffic.

"Chees!" he said in some awe, at the first crosstown traffic light "Ya don't t'ink we can take dat joint wit' only two guns?"

"I hadn't thought about it," Simon confessed mildly.

The driver seemed disappointed in spite of his initial skepti­cism.

"I figgered dat might be okay for a guy like you, wit' me helpin' ya," he said. "Still, maybe ya ain't feelin' quite your­self yet. I hoid ja got taken for a ride last night—I was t'inkin' I shouldn't be seein' ya for a long while."

"A lot of other people are still thinking that," murmured the Saint sardonically.

They slowed up along Fifth Avenue as they came within a block of the Vandrick Bank Building.

"Whadda we do here, pal?" asked the driver.

"Park as close to the entrance as you can get," Simon told him. "I'll wait in the cab for a bit. If I get out, stay here and keep your engine running. Be ready for a getaway. We may have a passenger—and then I'll tell you more."

"Okay," said the chauffeur phlegmatically; and then an idea struck him. He slapped his thigh. "Chees!" he said. "I t'ought ya was kiddin'. Dat's better 'n hoistin' de bank!"

"What is?" inquired the Saint, with slight puzzlement.

"Aw, nuts," said the driver. "Ya can't catch me twice. Why, puttin' de arm on Lowell Vandrick himself, of course. Chees! I can see de headlines. 'Sebastian Lipski an' de Saint Snatches off de President of de Vandrick National Bank.' Chees, pal, ya had me guessin' at foist!"

Simon grinned silently and resigned himself to letting Mr. Lipski enjoy himself with his dreams. To have disillusioned the man before it was necessary, he felt, would have been as heartless as robbing an orphan of a new toy.

He sat back, mechanically lighting another cigarette in the chain that stretched far back into the incalculable past, and watched the imposing neo-Assyrian portals of the bank. A few belated clerks arrived and scuttled inside, admitted by a liveried doorkeeper who closed the doors again after each one. An early depositor arrived, saw the closed doors, scowled in­dignantly at the doorkeeper, and drifted aimlessly round the sidewalk in small circles, chewing the end of a pencil. The doorkeeper consulted his watch with monotonous regularity every half-minute. Simon became infected with the habit and began counting the seconds until the bank would open, find­ing himself tense with an indefinable restlessness of expecta­tion.

And then, with an effect that gripped the Saint into almost breathless immobility, the first notes of nine o'clock chimed out from somewhere near by.

Stoically the doorkeeper dragged out his watch again, cor­roborated the announcement of the clock to his own satisfac­tion, opened the doors, and left them open, taking up his im­pressive stance outside. The early investor broke off in the middle of a circle and scurried in to do his business. The bank was open.

Otherwise Fifth Avenue was unchanged. A few other de­positors arrived, entered the bank, and departed, with the preoccupied air of men who were carrying the weight of the nation's commerce. A patrolman strolled by, with the pre­occupied air of a philosopher wondering what to philosophize about, if anything. Pedestrians passed up and down on their own mysterious errands. And yet Simon Templar felt himself still clutched in the grip of that uncanny suspense. He could give no account for it. He could not even have said why he should have been so fascinated by the processes of opening the bank. For all he knew, it might merely have been a convenient landmark for a meeting place, and even if the building itself was concerned there were hundreds of other offices on the upper floors which might have an equal claim on his attention; nine o'clock was the hour, simply an hour for him to be there, without any evidence that something would explode at that instant with the precision of a timed bomb; but he could not free himself from the almost melodramatic sense of expectation that made his left hand close tightly on the pearl grips of Fernack's gun.

And then, while his eyes were searching the street restlessly, he suddenly saw Valcross sauntering by, and for the moment forgot everything else.

In a flash he was out of the cab, crossing the pavement— he did not wish to make himself conspicuous by yelling from the window of the taxi. He clapped Valcross on the shoulder, and the older man turned quickly. His eyes widened when he saw the Saint.

"Why, hullo, Simon. I didn't know you were ever up at this hour."

"I'm not," said the Saint. "Where on earth have you been?"

"Didn't you find my note? It was on the mantelpiece."

Simon shook his head.

"There are reasons why I haven't had a chance to look for notes," he said. "Come into my taxi and talk—I don't want to stand around here."

He seized Valcross by the arm and led him back to the cab. Mr. Lipski's homely features lighted up in applause mingled with delirious amazement—if that was kidnapping, it was the slickest and simplest job that he had ever dreamed of. Regret­fully, Simon told him to wait where he was, and slammed the communicating window on him.

"Where have you been, Bill?" he repeated.

"I had to go to Pittsburgh and see a man on business. I heard about it just after you'd gone out, and I didn't know how to get in touch with you. I had supper with him and came back this morning—flying both ways. I've only just got in."

"You haven't been to the Waldorf?"

"No. I was short of cash, and I was going into the bank first."

Simon drew a deep breath.

"It's the luckiest thing that ever happened to you that you had business in Pittsburgh," he said. "And the next luckiest is that you ran short of cash this morning. Somebody's snitched on us, Bill. When I got into the Waldorf in the small hours of this morning it was full of policemen, and one detachment of 'em is still waiting there for you unless it's starved to death!"

Valcross was staring at him blankly.

"Policemen?" he echoed. "But how——"

"I don't know, and it isn't much use asking. The Big Fellow did it—apparently he said I was treading on his toes. Since his own mobs hadn't succeeded in getting rid of me, I sup­pose he thought the police might have a try. He's paying their wages, anyway. That needn't bother us. What it means is that you've got to get out of this state like a bat out of hell."

"But what about you?"

The Saint smiled a little.

"I'm afraid I shall have to wait for my million dollars," he said. "I've got five of your men out of six, but I don't know whether I shall be able to get the sixth."

He told Valcross what had been happening, in terse, crackling sentences pared down to the uttermost parched economy of words. The other's eyes were opening wider from the intervention of Fay Edwards at the last moment of the ride—on through the slaying of Dutch Kuhlmann to the unpleasantness of Mr. Kestry and the amazing reprieve that Fernack had offered. The whole staggering course of those last few hectic hours was sketched out in clipped impression­istic phrases that punched their effect through like a rattle of bullets. And all the while the Saint's eyes were scanning the road and sidewalks, his fingers were curled round the butt of Fernack's gun, his nerves were keyed to the last milligram of vigilance.

"So you see it's been a big night," he wound up. "And there isn't much of it left. Fernack's probably wondering already whether I haven't skipped into Canada and left him to hold the baby."

"And Fay Edwards told you the Big Fellow would be here at nine?" said Valcross.

"Not exactly. She asked me to be here at nine—and she was looking for the Big Fellow. I'm hoping it means she knows something. I'm still hoping."

"It's an amazing story," said Valcross thoughtfully. "Do you know what to make of that girl?"

Simon shrugged.

"I don't think I ever shall."

"I shall never understand women," Valcross said. "I wonder what the Big Fellow will think. That marvellous brain—an organization that's tied up the greatest city in the world into the greatest criminal combine that's ever been known— and a harlot who falls in love with an adventurer can tear it all to pieces."

"She hasn't done it yet," said the Saint.

Valcross was silent for a few moments; and then he said: "You've done your share. You've got five men out of the six names I gave you. In the short time you've been working, that's almost a miracle. The Big Fellow's your own idea—you put him on the list. If you fail—if you feel bound to keep your word and go back to Fernack—I can't stop you. But I feel that you've earned the reward I promised you. I've had a million dollars in a drawing account, waiting for you, ever since you came over. I'd like to give it to you, anyhow. It might be some use to you."

Simon hesitated. Valcross's eyes were fixed on him eagerly.

"You can't refuse," he insisted. "It's my money, and I think it's due to you. No one could have earned it better."

"All right," said the Saint. "But you can pay me in propor­tion. I haven't succeeded—why try to make out that I have?"

"I think I'm the best judge of that," said Valcross and let himself out of the cab with a quick smile.

Simon watched him go with a troubled frown. There was an unpleasant taste in his mouth which he had not noticed before. So the accounts of death would be paid according to their strict percentages, the blood money handed over, and the ledger closed. Six men to be killed for a million dollars. One hundred and sixty-six thousand, six hundred and sixty-six dollars and -sixty-six cents per man. He had not thought of it that way before—he had taken the offer in his stride, for the adventure, without seriously reckoning the gain. Well, he re­flected bitterly, there was no reason why a man who in a few short weeks would be a convicted felon should try to flatter his self-esteem. He would go down as a hired killer, like any of the other rats he had killed. . . .

Valcross was closing the door, turning away towards the bank; and at that moment another taxi flashed past the one in which Simon sat, and swung in to the curb in front of them. The door opened, and a woman got out. It was Fay Edwards.

Simon grabbed at the door handle and flung himself out onto the sidewalk. And then he saw that the girl was not looking at him, but at Valcross.

The Saint had never known anything to compare with that moment. There was the same curious constricted feeling at the back of his knees as if he had been standing with his toes over the edge of a sheer precipice, looking down through space into an unimaginable gulf; seconds passed before he realized that for a time he had even stopped breathing. When he opened his lungs again, the blood sang in his ears like the hissing of distant surf.

There was no need for anything to be said—no need for a single question to be asked and answered. The girl had not even seen him yet. But without seeing her face, without catch­ing a glimpse of the expression in her eyes—he knew. Facts, names, words, events, roared through his mind like a turmoil of machinery gone mad, and fell one by one into places where they fitted and joined. Kestry's harsh voice stating: "Why did the guy that was phoning for you say 'This is the Big Fel­low'?" He had never been able to think who could have given him away—except the one man whom he had never thought of. Fay Edwards saying: "The last I heard of Curly Ippolino, he was in Pittsburgh." Valcross had just returned from Pitts­burgh. Fay Edwards saying: "All the profits were paid into one bank. It was agreed that the racket should run for three years . . . divide the surplus equally . . . Since you've been here, there aren't many of them left to divide . . . That means a lot of money for somebody." Valcross on his way to the bank— Valcross on his way back from Pittsburgh, where the last sur­viving member of the partnership had been. Fay Edwards say­ing: "He told me to try and make things easy for you." Nat­urally—until the job was finished. Valcross meeting him in Madrid. The list of men for justice—all of them dead now. The story of his kidnapped and murdered son, which it had never occurred to the Saint to verify. "I'll pay you a million dollars." With seventeen million at stake, the fee was very modest. You might clean up this rotten mess of crooks and grafters." Oh, God, what a blind fool he'd been!

In that reeling instant of time he saw it all. Jack Irboll dead. Morrie Ualino and Eddie Voelsang dead. The news flashed over the underworld grapevine, long before the news­papers caught up with it, that Hunk Jenson and Dutch Kuhl­mann had also died. The knowledge that the Saint's sphere of usefulness was rapidly drawing to a close, and the bill would remain for payment. The trip to Pittsburgh and the telephone message to police headquarters. The last Machiavellian gesture of that devilish warped genius which had gone out and picked up the scourge of all secret crime, the greatest fighting outlaw in the world, bought him with a story and the promise of a million dollars, used him for a few days of terror, and cast him off before his curiosity became too dangerous. The final shock when Valcross saw the Saint that morning, alive and free. And the simple, puerile, obvious excuse to continue into the bank—and, once there, to slip out by another exit, and perhaps send a second message to the police at the same time. Simon Templar saw every detail. And then, as Fay Edwards turned at last and saw him for the first time, he read it all again, without the utterance of a single word, in that voiceless interchange of glances which was the most astounding solution to a mystery that he would ever know.

Æons of time and understanding seemed to have rocketed past his head while he stood there motionless, taking down into his soul the last biting, shattering dregs of comprehension; and yet in the chronology of the world it was no time at all Valcross had not even reached the doors of the bank. And then, as Fay Edwards saw the Saint and took two quick steps towards him, some supernatural premonition seemed to strike Valcross as if a shout had been loosed after him, and he turned round.

He saw Fay Edwards, and he saw the Saint.

Across the narrow space Simon Templar stared at Valcross and saw the whole mask of genial kindliness destroyed by the blaze of horrible malignity that flamed out of the old man's eyes. The change was so incredible that even though he under­stood the facts in his mind, even though he had assimilated them into the immutable truths of his existence, for that weird interval of time he was paralyzed, as if he had been watching a spaniel turn into a snake. And then Valcross's hand streaked down towards his hip pocket.

Simon's right hand started the hundredth part of a second later, moving with the speed of light—and the stiffness of his wounded shoulder caught it in midflight like a cruel brake. A stiletto of pain stabbed through his back like a hot iron. In the hypnotic grasp of that uncanny moment his disability had been driven out of his mind: he had used his right hand by instinct which moved faster than thought. In an instant he had corrected himself, and his left hand was snatching at Fernack's revolver in his coat pocket; but by that time Val­cross was also holding a gun.

A shot smacked past his ear, stunning the drum like the blast of an express train concentrated twenty thousand times. His revolver was stuck in his pocket. Of the next shot he heard only the report. The bullet went nowhere near him. Then he twisted his gun up desperately and fired through the cloth; and Valcross dropped his automatic and clutched at his side, swaying where he stood.

Simon hurled himself forward. The street had turned into pandemonium. White-faced pedestrians blocked the sidewalk on either side of the bank, crushing back out of the danger zone. The air was raucous with the screams of women and the screech of skidding tires. He caught Valcross round the waist with his sound arm, swung him mightily off his feet, and started back with him towards the cab. He saw Mr. Lipski, his features convulsed with intolerable excitement, scrambling down from his box to assist. And he saw Fay Edwards.

She was leaning against the side of the taxi, holding onto it, with one small hand pressed to the front of her dress; and Simon knew, with a terrible finality, where Valcross's second shot had gone.

Something that was more than a pang came into his throat; and his heart stopped beating. And then he went on.