The Saint vs Scotland Yard (The Holy Terror)

In the hall, Simon halted the fatigue party for a moment.

"Before we pass out into the night," he said, "I want you to be quite clear about one thing. Those bags you're carrying, as you may or may not know, are each supposed to contain the equivalent of two hundred thousand pounds in ready money; and I want you to know anything that you may be prepared to do to keep all those spondulix for yourselves is just so much tadpole-gizzard beside what I'm prepared to do to prise it off you. So you should think a long while before you do anything rash. I am the greatest gun artist in the world," said the Saint persuasively, but with a singular lack of honesty, "and I'm warning you here and now that at the first sign I see of any undue enterprise, I shall shoot each of you through the middle of the eleventh spinal vertebra, counting from the bottom. Move on, my children."

The procession moved on.

It went down the porch steps and through the iron wicket gate to the road; and the Saint brought up the rear with his right hand in his pocket. The comedy was played without witnesses: at that hour Vandermeer Avenue, a quiet backwater even at the height of the day, was absolutely deserted. A sum total of four lighted windows was visible along the whole length of the thoroughfare, and those were too far away to provide the slightest inconvenience in any conceivable circum­stances. Hampstead was being good that night. . . .

The car which Simon had observed on his prowl round the exterior of the house was parked right opposite the gate— which was where he had expected it to be. As the two men paused outside the gate, waiting for further instructions, a door of the car opened, and a slim supple figure decanted itself lightly on to the sidewalk. Patricia. . . . She came for­ward with her swinging long-limbed stride.

"O.K., Simon?"

"O.K., lass."

"Gee, boy, I'm glad to see you."

"And I you. And the whole Wild West show was just a sitting rabbit, believe it or believe it not." The Saint's hand touched her arm. "Get back behind the wheel, Pat, start her up, and be ready to pull out as soon as the boodle's on board. It isn't every day we ferry a cool million across London, and I don't see why the honour of being the pilot shouldn't be your share of the act."

"Right-ho. ..."

The girl disappeared, and Simon opened another door.

He watched the cases being stowed one by one in the back of the car, and the forefinger of his right hand curled tensely over the trigger of his gun. He had meant every word of his threat to the two men who were doing the job; and they must have known it, for they carried out his orders with commendable alacrity.

And yet Simon felt a faint electric tingle of uneasiness fan­ning up his back and into the roots of his hair like the march of a thousand ghostly needle-points. He could not have de­scribed it in any other way, and he was as much at a loss to account for it as if the simile had been the actual fact. It was sheer blind instinct, a seventh sense born of a hundred breath­less adventures, that touched him with single thrill of insufficient warning—and left it at that. And for once in his life he ignored the danger-sign. He heard the whine of the self-starter, followed by the low-pitched powerful pulsing of the eight cleanly balanced cylinders, and saw the door closed upon the last of the bags: and he turned smiling to the two bruisers. He pointed.

"If you keep straight on down that road," he said, "it ought to land you somewhere near Birmingham—if you travel far enough. You might make that your next stop."

One of the men took a pace towards him.

"You just listen a minute——"

"To what?" asked the Saint politely.

"I'm telling yer——"

"A bad habit," said the Saint disapprovingly. "You must try and break yourself of that. And now I'm sorry, but I can't stop. I hope you'll wash the back of your neck, see that your socks are aired, say your prayers every night, and get your face lifted at the first opportunity. . . . Now push your ears back, my cherubs, and let your feet chase each other."

His right hand moved significantly in his pocket, and there was an instant's perilous silence. And then the man who had spoken jerked his head at the other.

"Come on," he said.

The two men turned and lurched slowly away, looking back over their shoulders.

And the Saint put one foot on the running-board.

And somewhere, far away, he heard the sound of his own head being hit. It was as extraordinary an experience as any that had ever happened to him. Patricia was looking ahead down the road, while her hand eased the gears quietly into mesh; and the Saint himself had not heard the slightest move­ment that might have put him on his guard. And the premoni­tory crawling of his nerves which he had felt a few seconds earlier had performed what it considered to be its duty, and had subsided. . . . He could have believed that the whole thing was an incredibly vivid hallucination—but for the sicken­ing sharp stab of sudden agony that plunged through his brain like a spurt of molten metal and paralysed every milligram of strength in his body.

A great white light swelled up and exploded before his eyes; and after it came a wave of whirling blackness shot with rocketing flashes of dizzy, dazzling colour, and the blackness was filled with a thin high singing note that drilled into his eardrums. His knees seemed to melt away beneath him. . . .

And then, from somewhere above the vast dark gulf into which he was sinking, he heard Patricia's voice cry out.

"Simon!"

The word seemed to spell itself into his dulled brain letter by letter, as if his mind read it off a slowly uncoiling scroll. But it touched a nerve centre that roused him for one frac­tional instant of time to fight back titanically against the numbing oblivion that was swallowing him up.

He knew that his eyes were open, but all he could see was one blurred segment of her face, as he might have seen her picture in a badly-focused fade-out that had gone askew. And to that isolated scrap of vision in the overwhelming blackness he found the blessed strength to croak two words:

"Drive on."

And then a second surge of blackness welled up around him and blotted out every sight and sound, and he fell away into the infinite black void.

Chapter VII

"So even your arrangements can break down, Templar— when your accomplice fails you," Kuzela remarked silkily. "My enterprising young friend, when you are older you will realise that it is always a mistake to rely upon a woman. I have never employed a woman myself for that reason."

"I'll bet that broke her heart," said the Saint.

Once again he sat in Kuzela's study, with his head still throbbing painfully from the crashing welt it had received, and a lump on the back of it feeling as if it were growing out of his skull like a great auk's egg. His hair was slightly dis­arranged, and straps on his wrists prevented him from rearranging it effectively; but the Saintly smile had not lost one iota of its charm.

"It remains, however, to decide whether you are going to be permitted to profit by this experience—whether you are going to live long enough to do so. Perhaps it has not occurred to you that you may have come to the end of your promising career," continued the man on the other side of the desk dispassionately; and the Saint sighed.

"What, not again?" he pleaded brokenly, and Kuzela frowned.

"I do not understand you."

"Only a few months ago I was listening to those very words," explained the Saint. "Alas, poor Wilfred! And he meant it, too. 'Wilf, old polecat,' I said, 'don't you realise that I can't be killed before page three hundred and twenty?' He didn't believe me. And he died. They put a rope round his neck and dropped him through a hole in the floor, and the consequences to his figure were very startling. Up to the base of the neck he was not so thin—but oh, boy, from then on. ... It was awfully sad."

And Simon Templar beamed around upon the congregation —upon Kuzela, and upon the two bruisers who loafed about the room, and upon the negro who stood behind his chair. And the negro he indicated with a nod.

"One of your little pets?" he inquired; and Kuzela's lips moved in the fraction of a smile.

"It was fortunate that Ngano heard some of the noise," he said. "He came out of the house just in time."

"To sock me over the head from behind?" drawled the Saint genially. "Doubtless, old dear. But apart from that——"

"Your accomplice escaped, with my property. True. But, my dear Templar, need that prove to be a tragedy? We have your own invaluable self still with us—and you, I am quite sure, know not only where the lady has gone, but also where you have hidden a gentleman whom I should very much like to have restored to me."

Simon raised languid eyebrows.

"When I was the Wallachian Vice-Consul at Pfaffenhausen," he said pleasantly, "our diplomacy was governed by a pictur­esque little Pomeranian poem, which begins:

Der Steiss des Elephanten

Ist nicht, ist nicht so klein.

If you get the idea——"

Kuzela nodded without animosity. His deliberate, ruthless white hands trimmed the end of a cigar.

"You must not think that I am unused to hearing remarks like that, Templar," he said equably. "In fact, I remember listening to a precisely similar speech from our friend the Duke of Fortezza. And yet——" He paused to blow a few minute flakes of tobacco leaf from the shining top of the desk, and then his pale bland eyes flicked up again to the Saint's face. . . . "The Duke of Fortezza changed his mind," he said.

Simon blinked.

"Do you know," he said enthusiastically, "there's one of the great songs of the century there! I can just feel it. Something like this:

The Duke of Fortezza

Quite frequently gets a

Nimpulse to go blithering off on to the blind,

But the Duchess starts bimbling

And wambling and wimbling

And threatens to wallop his ducal behind;

And her Ladyship's threats are

So fierce that he sweats

And just sobs as he pets her

With tearful regrets—Ah!

The Duke of Fortezza

Is changing his mind.

We could polish up the idea a lot if we had time, but you must admit that for an impromptu effort——"

"You underrate my own sense of humour, Templar." Un­emotionally Kuzela inspected the even reddening of the tip of his cigar, and waved his match slowly in the air till it went out. "But do you know another mistake which you also make?"

"I haven't the foggiest notion," said the Saint cheerfully.

"You underrate my sense of proportion."

The Saint smiled.

"In many ways," he murmured, "you remind me of the late Mr. Garniman. I wonder how you'll get on together."

The other straightened up suddenly in his chair. For a moment the mask of amiable self-possession fell from him.

"I shall be interested to bandy words with you later—if you survive, my friend." He spoke without raising his voice; but two little specks of red burned in the cores of his eyes, and a shimmering marrow of vitriolic savagery edged up through his unalteringly level intonation. "For the present, our time is short, and you have already wasted more than your due allow­ance. But I think you understand me." Once again, a smooth evanescent trickle of honey over the bitingly measured sylla­bles. "Come, now, my dear young friend, it would be a pity for us to quarrel. We have crossed swords, and you have lost. Let us reach an amicable armistice. You have only to give me a lit­tle information; and then, as soon as I have verified it, and have finished my work—say after seven days, during which time you would stay with me as an honoured guest—you would be as free as air. We would shake hands and go our ways." Kuzela smiled, and picked up a pencil. "Now firstly: where has your accomplice gone?"

"Naturally, she drove straight to Buckingham Palace," said the Saint.

Kuzela continued to smile.

"But you are suspicious. Possibly you think that some harm might befall her, and perhaps you would be unwilling to accept my assurance that she will be as safe as yourself. Well, it is a human suspicion after all, and I can understand it. But suppose we ask you another question. . . . Where is the Duke of Fortezza?" Kuzela drew a small memorandum block towards him, and poised his pencil with engaging expectancy. "Come, come! That is not a very difficult question to answer, is it? He is nothing to you—a man whom you met a few hours ago for the first time. If, say, you had never met him, and you had read in your newspaper that some fatal accident had overtaken him, you would not have been in the least disturbed. And if it is a decision between his temporary inconvenience and your own promising young life . . ." Kuzela shrugged. "I have no wish to use threats. But you, with your experience and imag­ination, must know that death does not always come easily. And very recently you did something which has mortally offended the invaluable Ngano. It would distress me to have to deliver you into his keeping. . . . Now, now, let us make up our minds quickly. What have you done with the Duke?"

Simon dropped his chin and looked upwards across the desk.

"Nothing that I should be ashamed to tell my mother," he said winningly; and the other's eyes narrowed slowly.

"Do I, after all, understand you to refuse to tell me?"

The Saint crossed his left ankle over to his right knee.

"You know, laddie," he remarked, "you should be on the movies, really you should. As the strong silent man you'd be simply great, if you were a bit stronger and didn't talk so much."

For some seconds Kuzela looked at him.

Then he threw down his pencil and pushed away the pad.

"Very well, then," he said.

He snapped his fingers without turning his head, and one of the two bruisers came to his side. Kuzela spoke without giving the man a glance.

"Yelver, you will bring round the car. We shall require it very shortly."

The man nodded and went out; and Kuzela clasped his hands again on the desk before him.

"And you, Templar, will tell us where we are going," he said, and Simon raised his head.

His eyes gazed full and clear into Kuzela's face, bright with the reckless light of their indomitable mockery, and a sardoni­cally Saintly smile curved the corners of his mouth.

"You're going to hell, old dear," he said coolly; and then the negro dragged him up out of his chair.

Simon went meekly down the stairs, with the negro gripping his arm and the second bruiser following behind; and his brain was weighing up the exterior circumstances with light­ning accuracy.

Patricia had got away—that was the first and greatest thing. He praised the Lord who had inspired her with the sober far­sightedness and clearness of head not to attempt any futile heroism. There was nothing she could have done, and merci­fully she'd had the sense to see it. ... But having got away, what would be her next move?

"Claud Eustace, presumably," thought the Saint; and a wry little twist roved across his lips, for he had always been the most incorrigible optimist in the world.

So he reached the hall, and there he was turned round, and hustled along towards the back of the house. As he went, he stole a glance at his wrist-watch. . . . Patricia must have been gone for the best part of an hour, and that would have been more than long enough for Teal to get busy. Half of that time would have been sufficient to get Teal on the phone from the nearest call box and have the house surrounded by enough men to wipe up a brigade—if anything of that sort were going to be done. And not a sign of any such developments had interrupted the playing of the piece. . . .

Down from the kitchen a flight of steps ran to the cellar; and as the Saint was led down them he had a vivid apprecia­tion of another similarity between that adventure and a con­cluding episode in the history of the late Mr. Garniman. The subterranean prospects in each case had been decidedly unin­viting; and now the Saint held his fire and wondered what treat was going to be offered him this time.

The cigar-chewing escort stopped at the foot of the steps, and the Saint was led on alone into a small bare room. From the threshold, the negro flung him forward into a far corner, and turned to lock the door behind him. He put the key in his pocket, took off his coat, and rolled up his sleeves; and all the time his dark blazing eyes were riveted upon the Saint.

And then he picked up a great leather whip from the floor, and his thick lips curled back from his teeth in a ghastly grin.

"You will not talk, no?" he said.

He swung his arm; and the long lash whistled and crackled through the air, and snaked over the Saint's shoulders like the recoiling snap of an overstrained hawser.

Chapter VIII

Simon reeled away in a slash of agony that ate into his chest as if a thin jet of boiling acid had been sprayed across his back.

And he went mad.

Never, otherwise, could he have accomplished what he did. For one blinding instant, which branded itself on his optic nerves with such an eye-aching clarity that it might have stood for an eternity of frozen stillness, he saw everything there was to see in that little room. He saw the stained grey walls and ceiling and the dusty paving underfoot; he saw the locked door; he saw the towering figure of the gigantic hate-vengeful negro before him, and the cyclopean muscles swelling and rippling under the thin texture of the lavender silk shirt; and he saw himself. Just for that instant he saw those things as he had never seen anything before, with every thought of everything else and every other living soul in the world wiped from his mind like chalk marks smeared from a smooth board. . . .

And then a red fog bellied up before his eyes, and the stillness seemed to burst inwards like the smithereening of a great glass vacuum bulb.

He felt nothing more—in that white heat of berserk fury, the sense of pain was simply blotted out. He dodged round the room by instinct, ducking and swerving mechanically, and scarcely knew when he succeeded and when he failed.

And at his wrists he felt nothing at all.

The buckle of the strap there was out of reach of his teeth, but he twisted his hands inwards, one over the other, tighten­ing up the leather with all his strength, till his muscles ached with the strain. He saw the edges of the strap biting into his skin, and the flesh swelling whitely up on either side; the pain of that alone should have stopped him, but there was no such thing. And he stood still and twisted once again, with a concen­trated passion of power that writhed over the whole of his upper body like the stirring of a volcano; and the leather broke before his eyes like a strip of tissue paper. . . .

And the Saint laughed:

The whip sang around again, and he leapt in underneath it and caught it as it fell. And what he had intuitively expected happened. The negro jerked at it savagely—and Simon did not resist. But he kept his hold fast, and allowed all the vicious energy of that jerk to merge flowingly into his own unchecked rush; and it catapulted him to his mark like a stone from a sling. His right fist sogged full and square into the negro's throat with a force that jarred the Saint's own shoulder, and Simon found the whip hanging free in his hand.

He stepped back and watched the grin melting out of the contorted black face. The negro's chest heaved up to the en­compassing of a great groaning breath, but the shattering mule-power of that pent-up super-auxiliated swipe in the gul­let had stunned his thyro-arytenoids as effectively as if a bullet had gone through them. His mouth worked wildly, but he could produce nothing more than an inaudible whisper. And the Saint laughed again, gathering up the whip.

"The boys will be expecting some music," he said, very gently. "And you are going to provide it."

Then the negro sprang at him like a tiger.

That one single punch which had reversed the situation would have sent any living European swooning off into hours of tortured helplessness, but in this case the Saint had never expected any such result from it. It had done all that he had ever hoped that it would do—obliterated the negro's speaking voice, and given the Saint himself the advantage of the one unwieldy weapon in the room. And with the red mists of unholy rage still swilling across his vision, Simon Templar went grimly into the fight of his life.

He sidestepped the negro's first maniac charge as smoothly and easily as a practised pedestrian evading a two-horse dray, and as he swerved he brought the whip cracking round in a stroke that split the lavender silk shirt as crisply as if a razor had been scored across it.

The negro fetched up against the far wall with an animal scream, spun round, and sprang at him again. And again the Saint swayed lightly aside, and made the whip lick venomously home with a report like a gunshot. . . .

He knew that that was the only earthly hope he had—to keep his opponent tearing blindly through a hazing madness of pain and fury that would scatter every idea of scientific fighting to the four winds. There were six feet eight inches of the negro, most of three hundred pounds of pitiless, clawing, blood-mad primitive malignity caged up with Simon Templar within those blank damp-blotched walls; and Simon knew, with a quiet cold certainty, that if once those six feet eight inches, those three hundred-odd pounds of bone and muscle resolved themselves into the same weight and size of logical, crafty, fighting precision, there was no man in the world who could have stood two minutes against them. And the Saint quietly and relentlessly crimped down his own strength and speed and fighting madness into the one narrow channel that would give it a fighting chance.

It was a duel between brute strength and animal ferocity on the one hand, and on the other hand the lithe swiftness and lightning eye of the trickiest fighting man alive—a duel with no referee, in which no foul was barred. Tirelessly the Saint went round the room, flitting airily beyond, around, even under the massive arms that grappled for him, bobbing and swooping and turning, up on his toes and supple as a dancer, as elusive as a drop of quicksilver on a plate; and always the tapered leather thong in his hand was whirling and hissing like an angry fer-de-lance, striking and coiling and striking again with a bitter deadliness of aim. Once the negro grabbed at the whip and found it, and the Saint broke his hold with a kick to the elbow that opened the man's fingers as if the tendons had been cut; once the Saint's foot slipped, and he battered his way out of a closing trap in a desperate flurry of rib-creaking body blows that made even the negro stagger for a sufficient moment; and the fight went on.

It went on till the negro's half-naked torso shone with a streaming lather of sweat and blood, and a sudden kicking lurch in his step shot into Simon's taut-strung brain the wild knowledge that the fight was won.

And for the first time the Saint stood his ground, with his back to one wall, holding the negro at bay by the flailing sweep of the lash alone.

Then Simon pressed forward, and the negro went back. . . .

The Saint drove him into the opposite corner and beat him whimpering to his knees. And then, as the man spilled forward on to his face, Simon leapt in and got an ankle hold.

"Get your hands right up behind your back," he rasped incisively, "or I'll twist the leg off you!"

He applied his leverage vigorously, and the man obeyed him with a yelp. Simon locked the ankle with his knees and bent his weight over it. With quick deft fingers he knotted the tail of the whip round the negro's wrists, and passed the stock over one shoulder, round the neck, and back over the other shoul­der into a slip-knot. A draught of air gulped noisily into the negro's straining lungs, and Simon gave the noose a yank.

"One word from you, and you graze in the Green Pastures," he stated pungently, and heard the lungful choke sibilantly out again. "And get this," said the Saint, with no increase of friendliness: "if you move the half of an inch in that hog-tie, you'll bowstring your own sweet self. That's all."

He fished the key of the door out of the negro's pocket and stood up, breathing deeply.

He himself was starting to look as if he had recently taken a warm shower-bath in his clothes; and now that the anaesthetic red mists were thinning out, a large part of his back was beginning to stiffen itself up into an identical acreage of ache; but he was not yet ready to sit down and be sorry about such minor discomforts. With the key snapping over in the lock, he brushed the hair back off his forehead and opened the door; and the cigar-chewer at the foot of the steps crawled upright like a slow-motion picture, with his jaw sagging nervelessly and his eyes popping from their orbits, gaping at the Saint as he might have gaped at his own ghost. . . .

Smiling, and without any haste, Simon walked towards him.

And the man stood there staring at him, watching him come on, numbed with a bone-chilling superstitious terror. It was not until the Saint was within two yards of him that a sobbing little wail gurgled in his throat and he reached feebly round to his hip pocket.

Of the rest of the entertainment he knew little. He knew that a grip about which there was nothing ghostly seized upon his right wrist before he had time to draw, while another metallic clutch closed round his knees; he knew that the weight came suddenly off his feet; and then he seemed to go floating ethereally through space. Somewhere in the course of that flight an astonishingly hard quantity of concrete impinged upon his skull, but it did not seem an important incident. His soul went bimbering on, way out into the land of blissful dreams. . . .

And the Saint went on up the steps.

He was half-way up when a bell jangled somewhere over­head, and he checked involuntarily. And then a tiny skew-eyed grin skimmed over his lips.

"Claud Eustace for the hell of it," he murmured, and went upwards very softly.

Right up by the door at the top of the stairs he stopped again and listened. He heard slow and watchful footsteps going down the hall, followed by the rattle of a latch and the cautious whine of slowly turning hinges. And then he heard the most perplexing thing of all, which was nothing more or less than an expansive and omnipotent silence.

The Saint put up one hand and gently scratched his ear, with a puzzled crease chiselling in between his eyebrows. He was prepared to hear almost anything else but that. And he didn't. The silence continued for some time, and then the front door closed again and the footsteps started back solo on the return journey.

And then, in the very opposite direction, the creak of a window-sash sliding up made him blink.

Someone was wriggling stealthily over the sill. With his ear glued to a panel of the door, he could visualise every move­ment as clearly as if he could have seen it. He heard the faint patter of the intruder's weight coming on to the floor, and then the equally faint sound of footsteps creeping over the linoleum. They connected up in his mind with the footsteps of the man who had gone to the door like the other part of a duet. Then the second set of footsteps died away, and there was only the sound of the man's returning from the hall. Another door opened. . . . And then a voice uttered a corro­sively quiet command.

"Keep still!"

Simon almost fell down the steps. And then he windmilled dazedly back to his balance and hugged himself.

"Oh, Pat!" he breathed. "Mightn't I have known it? And you ring the bell to draw the fire, and sprint round and come in the back way. . . . Oh, you little treasure!"

Grinning a great wide grin, he listened to the dialogue.

"Put your hands right up. . . . That's fine. . . . And now, where's Kuzela?"

Silence.

"Where is Kuzela?"

A shifting of feet, and then the grudging answer: "Upstairs."

"Lead on, sweetheart."

The sounds of reluctant movement. . . .

And the whole of Simon Templar's inside squirmed with ecstasy at the pure poetic Saintliness of the technique. Not for a thousand million pounds would he have butted in just then —not one second before Kuzela himself had also had time to appreciate the full ripe beauty of the situation. He heard the footsteps travelling again: they came right past his door and went on into the hall, and the Saint pointed his toes in a few movements of an improvised cachucha.

And then, after a due pause, he opened the door and fol­lowed on.

He gave the others time to reach the upper landing, and then he went whisking up the first flight. Peeking round the banisters, he was just in time to get a sight of Patricia disap­pearing into Kuzela's study. Then the door slammed behind her, and the Saint raced on up and halted outside it.

While after the answering of the dud front-door call there had certainly been a silence. the stillness to which he listened now made all previous efforts in noiselessness sound like an artillery barrage. Against that background of devastating blank-ness, the clatter of a distant passing truck seemed to shake the earth, and the hoot of its klaxon sounded like the Last Trump.

And then Patricia spoke again, quite calmly, but with a lethal clearness that was hedged around on every side with the menace of every manner of murder.

"Where is the Saint?" she asked.

And upon those words Simon Templar figured that he had his cue.

He turned the handle soundlessly and pushed the door wide open.

Patricia's back was towards him. A little farther on to one side the second bruiser stood by with his hands high in the air. And behind the desk sat Kuzela, with his face still frozen in an expression of dumb, incredulous stupefaction. . . . And as the door swung back, and the Saint advanced gracefully into the limelight, the eyes of the two men revolved and centred on him, and dilated slowly into petrified staring orbs of some­thing near to panic.

"Good morning," said the Saint.

Patricia half turned. She could not help herself—the expres­sions on the faces of the two men in front of her were far too transparently heartfelt to leave her with any mistrust that they were part of a ruse to put her off her guard.

But the result of her movement was the same; for as she turned her eyes away, the smallest part in the cast had his moment. He awoke out of his groping comatosity, saw his chance, and grabbed it with both fists.

The automatic was wrested violently out of the girl's hands, and she was thrown stumbling back into the Saint's arms. And the Saint's gentle smile never altered.

He passed Patricia to one side, and cocked a derisive eye at the gun that was turned against him. And with no more heed for it than that, he continued on towards the desk.

"So nice to see you again," he said.

Chapter IX

Kuzela rose lingeringly to his feet.

There was a perceptible pause before he gained control of the faculty of speech. The two consecutive smacks that had been jolted into the very roots of his being within the space of the last forty seconds would have tottered the equilibrium of any man—of any man except, perhaps, the Saint himself. . . . But the Saint was not at all disturbed. He waited in genteel silence, while the other schooled the flabby startlement out of his face and dragged up his mouth into an answering smile.

"My dear young friend!"

The voice, when Kuzela found it, had the same svelte tim­bre as before, and Simon bowed a mocking compliment to the other's nerve.

"My dear old comrade!" he murmured, open-armed.

"You have saved us the trouble of fetching you, Templar," Kuzela said blandly. "But where is Ngano?"

"The Negro Spiritual?" The Saint aligned his eyebrows ban­teringly. "I'm afraid he—er—met with a slight accident."

"Ah!"

"No—not exactly. I don't think he's quite dead yet, though he may easily have strangled himself by this time. But he hasn't enjoyed himself. I think if the circumstances had been reversed, he would have talked," said the Saint, with a glacial inclemency of quietness.

Kuzela stroked his chin.

"That is unfortunate," he said.

And then he smiled.

"But it is not fatal, my friend," he purred. "The lady has already solved one problem for us herself. And now that she is here, I am sure you would do anything rather than expose her to the slightest danger. So let us return to our previous con­versation at once. Perhaps the lady will tell us herself where she went to when she drove away from here?"

Simon put his hands in his pockets.

"Why, yes," he said good-humouredly. "I should think she would."

The girl looked at him as if she could not quite believe her ears. And Simon met her puzzled gaze with blue eyes of such a blinding Saintly innocence that even she could read no entice­ment to deception in them.

"Do you mean that?" she asked.

"Of course," said the Saint. "There are one or two things I shouldn't mind knowing myself."

Patricia put a hand to her head.

"If you want to know—when I left here I drove straight to—"

"Buckingham Palace," drawled the Saint. "And then?"

"I had the bags taken up to Beppo's room, and I saw him myself. He was quite wide awake and sensible. I told him I was coming back here to get you out, and said that if I wasn't back by four o'clock, or one of us hadn't rung him up, he was to get in touch with Teal. I gave him Teal's private number. He didn't want me to go at all, but I insisted. That's all there is to tell. I picked up a puncture on the second trip out here, and that held me up a bit ——"

"But who cares about that?" said the Saint.

He turned back to the desk.

The man with the gun stood less than a yard away on his right front; but the Saint, ignoring his very existence, leaned a little forward and looked from the distance of another yard into the face of Kuzela. The loose poise of his body somehow centred attention even while it disarmed suspicion. But the mockery had gone out of his eyes.

"You heard?" he asked.

Kuzela nodded. His mouth went up at one corner. "But I still see no reason for alarm, my friend," he said, in that wheedling voice of slow malevolence. "After all, there is still time for much to happen. Before your friend Mr. Teal arrives——"

"Before my friend Chief Inspector Teal arrives with a squad of policemen in a plain van, I shall be a long way from here," said the Saint.

Kuzela started.

"So you have invoked the police?" he snapped. And then again he recovered himself. "But that is your affair. By the time they arrive, as you say, you will have left here. But where do you think you will have gone?"

"Home, James," said the Saint.

He took one hand out of his pocket to straighten his coat, and smiled without mirth.

"Fortunately, the argument between us can be settled to­night," he said, "which will save me having to stage any re­unions. Your black torturer has been dealt with. I have given him a dose of his own medicine which will, I think, put him in hospital for several weeks. But you remain. You are, after all, the man who gave Ngano his orders. I have seen what you did to the Duke of Fortezza, and I know what you wanted to have done to me. ... I hope you will get on well with Wilfred."

"And what do you think you are going to do to me?" asked Kuzela throatily; and Simon held him with his eyes.

"I'm going to kill you, Kuzela," he said simply.

"Ah! And how will you do that?"

Simon's fingers dipped into his pocket. They came out with an ordinary match-box, and he laid it on the desk.

"That is the answer to all questions," he said.

Kuzela stared down at the box. It sat there in the middle of his clean white blotter, yellow and oblong and angular, as commonplace a thing as any man could see on his desk—and the mystery of it seemed to leer up at him malignantly. He picked it up and shook it: it weighed light in his hand, and his mind balked at the idea that it should conceal any engine of destruction. And the Saint's manner of presenting it had been void of the most minute scintilla of excitement—and still was.

He eyed Kuzela quizzically.

"Why not open it?" he suggested.

Kuzela looked at him blankly. And then, with a sudden im­patience, he jabbed his thumb at the little sliding drawer. . . .

In a dead silence, the box fell through the air and flopped half-open on the desk.

"What does this mean?" asked Kuzela, almost in a whisper.

"It means that you have four minutes to live," said the Saint.

Kuzela held up his hand and stared at it.

In the centre of the ball of his right thumb a little globule of blood was swelling up in the pinky-white of the surround­ing skin. He gazed stupidly from it to the match-box and back again. In imagination, he felt a second time the asp-like prick that had bitten into his thumb as he moved the drawer of the box—and understood. "The answer to all questions. . . ."

He stood there as powerless to move as a man in a night­mare, and watched the infinitely slow distention of the tiny crimson sphere under his eyes, his face going ashen with the knowledge of inescapable doom. The drop of blood hypno­tised him, filled his vision till he could see nothing else but the microscopic reflections glistening over the surface of it—until all at once it seemed to grow magically into a coruscating red vesicle of enormous size, thrusting in upon him, bearing him down, filling the whole universe with the menace of its smothering scarlet magnitude. A roaring of mighty waters seethed up about his ears. . . .

The others saw him brace himself on his feet as if to resist falling; and he remained quite still, with his eyes fixing and going dim. And then he took one step sideways, swayed, and crumpled down on to the floor with his limbs twitching convul­sively and his chest labouring. . . .

Quite calmly and casually the Saint put out a hand and clasped it on the gun wrist of the man who stood beside him.

The man seemed to come alive out of a dream. And without any noticeable interregnum of full consciousness, he seemed to pass right on into another kind of dream—the transition being effected by the contingence upon the point of his jaw of a tearing uppercut that started well below the Saint's waistline and consummated every erg of its weight and velocity at the most vital angle of the victim's face. With the results aforemen­tioned. He went down in a heap and lay very still, even as his companion had done a little earlier; and Simon picked up the gun.

"Which finishes that," said the Saint, and found Patricia looking down again at Kuzela.

"What happened to him?" she asked, a trifle unsteadily.

"More or less what he tried to make happen to me. Ever come across those trick match-boxes that shoot a needle into you when you try to open them? I bought one last afternoon, and replaced the needle with something that was sent to me along with the message you know about. And I don't know that we shall want it again."

He took the little box of death over to the fireplace, dropped it in the grate, and raked the glowing embers over it. Then he took up his hat and stick, which he saw lying in a chair, and glanced around for the last time. Only Kuzela's fingers were twitching now, and a wet froth gleamed on his lips and dribbled down one cheek. . . . Simon put an arm round the girl's shoulders.

"I guess we can be going," he said, and led her out of the room.

It was in the hall that the expression on the face of a clock caught his eye and pulled him up with a jerk.

"What time did you say Beppo was going to get in touch with Teal?" he inquired.

"Four o'clock." Patricia followed his gaze and then looked at her wrist. "That clock must be fast ——"

"Or else you've stopped," said the Saint pithily. He turned back his sleeve and inspected his own watch. "And stopped you have, old darling. It's thirty-three minutes after four now— and to give Claud Eustace even a chance to think that he'd pulled me out of a mess would break my heart. Not to include another reason why he mustn't find us here. Where did you leave the car?"

"Just one block away."

"This is where we make greyhounds look lazy," said the Saint, and opened the front door.

They were at the gate when Simon saw the lights of a car slowing up and swinging in to the kerb on his left. Right in front of him, Kuzela's car was parked; and the Saint knew clairvoyantly that that was their only chance.

He caught Patricia's arm and flipped up the collar of her coat.

"Jump to it," he crisped.

He scudded round to the driving-seat, and the girl tumbled in beside him as he let in the clutch. He shot right past the police car with his head well down and his shoulders hunched. A tattered shout reached him as he went by; and then he was bucking off down a side street with the car heeling over on two wheels as he crammed it round the corner. The police car would have to be turned right round in a narrow road before it could get after him, and he knew he was well away. He dodged hectically south-east, and kept hard at it till he was sure he had left any pursuit far behind.

Somewhere in the northern hinterlands of the Tottenham Court Road he stopped the car and made some hurried repairs to his appearance with the aid of the driving-mirror, and ended up looking distinctly more presentable than he had been when they left Hampstead. He looked so presentable, in fact, that they abandoned the car on that spot, and walked boldly on until they met a taxi, which took them to Berkeley Square.

"For the night isn't nearly over yet," said the Saint, as they walked down Upper Berkeley Mews together after the taxi had chugged off out of sight.

It was one of those fool-proof prophecies which always de­lighted his sense of the slickness of things by the brisk promptness with which they fulfilled themselves. He had hardly closed the door of his house when the telephone bell began to ring, and he went to answer the call with a feeling of large and unalloyed contentment.

"Hullo-o? . . . Speaking. . . . That's which? . . . Teal? . . . Well, blow me, Claud Eustace, this is very late for you to be out! Does your grandmother allow you——? What? . . .

What have I been doing tonight? I've been drinking beer with Beppo. ... No, not a leper—BEPPO. B for bdellium, E for eiderdown, P for psychology, P for pneumonia, O for a muse of fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of ... I beg your pardon? . . . You were called up and told I was in trouble? . . . Someone's been pulling your leg, Claud. I'm at peace with the world. . . . Whassat? . . . Why, sure. I was just going to bed, but I guess I can stay up a few minutes longer. Will you be bringing your own gum? . . . Right-ho. . . ."

He listened for a moment longer; and then he hung up the receiver and turned to Pat.

"Claud's coming right along," he said gleefully, and the laughter was lifting in his voice. "We're not to try to get away, because he'll have an armed guard at every sea and air port in the British Isles ten minutes after he gets here and finds we've done a bunk. Which will be tremendous fun for all concerned. . . . And now, get through to Beppo as fast as you can spin the dial, old sweetheart, while I sprint upstairs and change my shirt—for there's going to be a great day!"

Chapter X

Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal fixed his pudgy hands in the belt of his overcoat, and levelled his unfriendly gaze on the superbly elegant young man who lounged against the table in front of him.

"So that message I had was a fake, was it?" he snarled.

"It must have been, Claud." Teal nodded fatly.

"Perhaps it was," he said. "But I went to the address it gave me—and what do you think I found?"

"The Shah of Persia playing ludo," hazarded Simon Templar intelligently; and the detective glowered.

"In the cellar I found a nigger tied up with the whip that had beaten half the hide off his back. Outside, there was a white man with a fractured skull—he's gone to hospital as well. In a room upstairs there was another man laid out with a broken jaw, and a fourth man in the same room—dead."

The Saint raised his eyebrows.

"But, my dear old sturgeon!" he protested reasonably; "what on earth do you think I am? A sort of human earthquake?"

"Both the nigger and the man with the broken jaw," Teal continued stonily, "gave me a description of the man re­sponsible, and it fits you like a glove. The man with the broken jaw also added the description of the woman who couldn't be distinguished apart from Miss Holm."

"Then we obviously have doubles, Claud."

"He also heard the woman say: "Where is the Saint?' "

Simon frowned.

"That's certainly odd," he admitted. "Where did you say this was?"

"You know darned well where it was! And I'll tell you some more. Just as I got there in the police car, a man and a woman dashed out of the house and got away. And who do you suppose they looked like?"

"The same doubles, obviously," said the Saint with great brilliance.

"And just one block away from that house we found a blue saloon Hirondel, which the two people I saw would have got away in if they'd had time to reach it. The number of it was ZX1257. Is that the number of your car?"

The Saint sat up.

"Claud, you're a blessing in disguise! That certainly is my car—and I was thinking I'd lost her! Pinched outside May Fair only yesterday afternoon, she was, in broad daylight. I was meaning to ring up Vine Street before, but what with one thing and another ——"

Teal drew a deep breath—and then he exploded.

"Now would you like to know what I think of your defence?" he blurted out, in a boiling gust of righteous wrath. And he went on without waiting for encouragement. "I think it's the most weak-kneed tangle of moonshine I've ever had to listen to in my life. I think it's so drivelling that if any jury will listen to it for ten minutes. I'll walk right out of the court and have myself certified, I've got two men who'll swear to you on their dying oaths, and another one to put beside them if he recovers, and I know what I saw myself and what the men who were with me saw; and I think everything you've got to say is so maudlin that I'm going to take you straight back to Scotland Yard with me and have it put in writing before we lock you up. I think I've landed you at last, Mr. Saint, and after what you said to me this morning I'm damned glad I've done it."

The Saint took out his cigarette-case and flopped off the table into an armchair, sprawling one long leg comfortably over the arm.

"Well, that does express your point of view quite clearly," he conceded. He lighted a cigarette, and looked up brightly. "Claud, you're getting almost fluent in your old age. But you've got to mind you don't let your new-found eloquence run away with you."

"Oh, have I?" The detective took the bait right down into his oesophagus, and clinched his teeth on the line. "Very well. Then while all these extraordinary things were being done by your double—while half a dozen sober men were seeing you and listening to you and being beaten up by you and getting messages from you—maybe you'll tell me what you were doing and who else knows it besides yourself?"

Simon inhaled luxuriously, and smiled.

"Why, sure. As I told you over the phone, I was drinking beer with Beppo."

"And who's he?"

"The Duke of Fortezza."

"Oh yes?" Teal grew sarcastic. "And where was the King of Spain and the Prime Minister of Jugoslavia?"

"Blowed if I know," said the Saint ingenuously. "But there were some other distinguished people present. The Count of Montalano, and Prince Marco d'Ombria, and the Italian Ambassador——"

"The Italian what?"

"Ambassador. You know. Gent with top hat and spats."

"And where was this?"

"At the Italian Embassy. It was just a little private party, but it went on for a long time. We started about midnight, and didn't break up till half-past four—I hadn't been home two minutes when you phoned."

Teal almost choked.

"What sort of bluff are you trying to pull on me now?" he demanded. "Have you got hold of the idea that I've gone dotty? Are you sitting there believing that I'll soak up that story, along with everything else you've told me, and just go home and ask no questions?" Teal snorted savagely. "You must have gone daft!" he blared.

The Saint came slowly out of his chair. He posed himself before the detective, feet astraddle, his left hand on his hip, loose-limbed and smiling and dangerous; and the long dicta­torial forefinger which Teal had seen and hated before drove a straight and peremptory line into the third button of the detective's waistcoat.

"And now you listen to me again, Claud," said the Saint waspily. "Do you know what you're letting yourself in for?"

"Do I know what I'm——"

"Do you know what you're letting yourself in for? You burst into my house and make wild accusations against me. You shout at me, you bully me, you tell me I'm either lying or dippy, and you threaten to arrest me. I'm very sensitive, Claud," said the Saint, "and you hurt me. You hurt me so much that I've a damned good mind to let you run me in— and then, when you'd put the rope right round your own neck and drawn it up as tight as it'd go, I'd pull down such a schemozzle around your bat ears that you'd want nothing more in life than to hand in your resignation and get away to some forgotten corner of earth where they've never seen a newspa­per. That's what's coming your way so fast that you're going to have to jump like a kangaroo to get from under it. It's only because I'm of a godly and forgiving disposition," said the Saint virtuously, "that I'm giving you a chance to save your skin. I'm going to let you verify my alibi before you arrest me, instead of having it fed into you with a stomach-pump afterwards; and then you are going to apologise to me and go home," said the Saint.

He picked up a telephone directory, found a place, and thrust the book under Teal's oscillating eyes.

"There's the number," he said. "Mayfair three two three O. Check it up for yourself now, and save yourself the trouble of telling me I'm just ringing up an accomplice."

He left the detective blinking at the volume, and went to the telephone.

Teal read off the number, put down the book, and pulled at his collar.

Once again the situation had passed out of his control. He gazed at the Saint purply, and the beginnings of a despondent weariness pouched up under his eyes. It was starting to be borne in upon him, with a preposterous certitude, that he had just been listening to something more than bluff. And the irony of it made him want to burst into tears. It was unfair. It was brutal. It outraged every cannon of logic and justice. He knew his case was watertight, knew that against the evidence he could put into a witness-box there could simply be no human way of escape—he could have sworn it on the rack, and would have gone to his death still swearing it. And he knew that it wasn't going to work.

Through a haze of almost homicidal futility, he heard the Saint speaking.

"Oh, is that you, Signor Ravelli? . . . Simon Templar speaking. Listen: there's some weird eruption going on in the brains of Scotland Yard. Some crime or other was committed somewhere tonight, and for some blithering reason they seem to think I was mixed up in it. I'm sorry to have to stop you on your way to bed, but a fat policeman has just barged in here——"

"Give me that telephone!" snarled Teal.

He snatched the instrument away and rammed the receiver against his ear.

"Hullo!" he barked. "This is Chief Inspector Teal, Criminal Investigation Department, speaking. I have every reason to believe that this man Templar was concerned in a murder which took place in Hampstead shortly after four o'clock this morning. He's tried to tell me some cock-and-bull story about . . . What? . . . But damn it ... I beg your pardon, sir, but I definitely know . . . From twelve o'clock till half-past four? . . . But . . . But . . . But oh, hell, I ... No, sir, I said . . . But he ... Who? ..."

The diaphragm of the receiver clacked and chattered and Teal's round red face sagged sickly.

And then:

"All right, sir. Thank you very much, sir," he said in a strangled voice, and slammed the microphone back on its bracket.

The Saint smoothed his hair.

"We might get on to Beppo next," he suggested hopefully. "He's staying at the Berkeley. Then you can have a word with Prince d'Ombria ——"

"Can I?" Teal had eaten wormwood, and his voice was thick and raw with the bitterness of it. "Well, I haven't got time. I know when I'm licked. I know where I am when half a dozen princes and ambassadors will go into the witness-box and swear that you're chasing them round the equator at the very moment when I know that I'm talking to you here in this room. I don't even ask how you worked it. I expect you rang up the President of the United States and got him to fix it for you. But I'll be seeing you another time—don't worry."

He hitched his coat round, and grabbed up his hat.

"Bye-bye," sang the Saint.

"And you remember this," Teal gulped out. "I'm not through with you yet. You're not going to sit back on your laurels. You wouldn't. And that's what's going to be the finish of you. You'll be up to something else soon enough—and maybe you won't have the entire Italian Diplomatic Service primed to lie you out of it next time. From this minute, you're not even going to blow your nose without I know it. I'll have you watched closer than the Crown Jewels, and the next mis­take you make is going to be the last."

"Cheerio, dear heart," said the Saint, and heard the vicious bang of the front door before he sank back into his chair in hysterics of helpless laughter.

But the epilogue of that story was not written until some weeks later, when a registered packet bearing an Italian post­mark was delivered at No. 7, Upper Berkeley Mews. Simon opened it after breakfast.

First came a smaller envelope, which contained a draft on the Bank of Italy for a sum whose proportions made even Simon Templar blink.

And then he took out a small shagreen case, and turned it over curiously. He pressed his thumb-nail into the little spring catch, and the lid flew up and left him staring. Patricia put a hand on his shoulder. "What is it?" she asked, and the Saint looked at her. "It's the medallion of the Order of the Annunziata—and I think we shall both have to have new hats on this," he said.

PART III

The Melancholy Journey of Mr. Teal

Chapter I

Now there was a day when the Saint went quite mad.

Of course, one might with considerable justification say that he always had been mad, anyway, so that the metamorphosis suggested by that first sentence would be difficult for the ordi­nary observer to discover. Patricia Holm said so, quite defi­nitely; and the Saint only smiled.

"Neverwithstanding," he said, "I am convinced that the sea­son is ripe for Isadore to make his contribution to our bank balance."

"You must be potty," said his lady, for the second time; and the Saint nodded blandly.

"I am. That was the everlasting fact with which we started the day's philosophy and meditation. If you remember——"

Patricia looked at the calendar on the wall, and her sweet lips came together an the obstinate little line that her man knew so well.

"Exactly six months ago," she said, "Teal was in here giving such a slick imitation of the sorest man on earth that anyone might have thought it was no impersonation at all. Two of his best men have been hanging around outside for twenty-four hours a day ever since. They're out there now. If you think six months is as far as his memory will go——"

"I don't."

"Then what are you thinking?"

The Saint lighted his second cigarette, and blew a streamer of smoke towards the ceiling. His blue eyes laughed.

"I think," he answered carefully, "that Claud Eustace is just getting set for his come-back. I think he's just finished nursing the flea I shot into his ear last time so tenderly that it's now big and bloodthirsty enough to annihilate anything smaller than an elephant—and maybe that plus. And I'm darned sure that if we lie low much longer, Claud Eustace will be getting ideas into his head, which would be very bad for him indeed."

"But——"

"There are," said the Saint, "no buts. I had a look at my pass-book yesterday, and it seems to be one of the eternal verities of this uncertain life that I could this day write a cheque for ninety-six thousand, two hundred and forty-seven pounds, eleven shillings, and fourpence—and have it honoured. Which is very nice, but just not quite nice enough. When I started this racket, I promised myself I wasn't coming out with one penny less than a hundred thousand pounds. I didn't say I'd come out even then, but I did think that when I reached that figure I might sit down for a bit and consider the possible advantages of respectability. And I feel that the time is getting ripe for me to have that think."

This was after a certain breakfast. Half a dozen volumes might be written around nothing else but those after-break­fast séances in Upper Berkeley Mews. They occupied most of the early afternoon in days of leisure, for the Saint had his own opinions about the correct hours for meals; and they were the times when ninety per cent, of his coups were schemed. Towards noon the Saint would arise like a giant refreshed, robe himself in furiously patterned foulard, and enter with an immense earnestness of concentration upon the task of shatter­ing his fast. And after that had been accomplished in a prop­erly solemn silence, Simon Templar lighted a cigarette, slanted his eyebrows, shifted back his ears, and metaphorically rolled up his sleeves and looked around for something to knock sideways. A new day—or what was left of it—loomed up on his horizon like a fresh world waiting to be conquered, and the Saint stanced himself to sail into it with an irrepressible im­petuosity of hair-brained devilment that was never too tired or short-winded to lavish itself on the minutest detail as cheer­fully and generously as it would have spread itself over the most momentous affair in the whole solar system.

And in those moods of reckless unrepentance he smiled with shameless Saintliness right into that stubborn alignment of his lady's mouth, challenged it, teased it, dared it, laughed it into confusion, kissed it in a way that would have melted the mouth of a marble statue, and won her again and again, as he always would, into his own inimitable madness. As he said then. . . .

"There's money and trouble to be had for the asking," said the Saint, when it was all over. "And what more could anyone want, old dear? . . . More trouble even than that, maybe. Well, I heard last night that Claud Eustace was also interested in Isadore, though I haven't the foggiest idea how much he knows. Tell me, Pat, old sweetheart, isn't it our cue?"

And Patricia sighed.

When Frankie Hormer landed at Southampton, he figured that his arrival was as secret as human ingenuity could make it. Even Detective Inspector Peters, who had been waiting for him for years, on and off, knew nothing about it—and he was at Southampton at the time. Frankie walked straight past him, securely hidden behind a beard which had sprouted to very respectable dimensions since he last set foot in England, and showed a passport made out in a name that his godfathers and godmother had never thought of. Admittedly, there had been a little difficulty with the tall dark man who had entered his life in Johannesburg and followed him all the way to Durban —inconspicuously, but not quite inconspicuously enough. But Frankie had dealt with that intrusion the night before he sailed. He carried two guns, and knew how to use them both.

And after that had been settled, the only man who should have known anything at all was Elberman, the genial little fellow who had financed the expedition at a staggering rate of interest, and who had personally procured the passport afore­mentioned, which was absolutely indistinguishable from the genuine article although it had never been inside the Foreign Office in its life.

Frankie had made that trip a number of times before—often enough to acquire a fairly extensive knowledge of the possible pitfalls. And this time he was reckoning to clean up, and he was taking no chances. The man from Johannesburg had both­ered him more than a little, but the voyage back to England had given him time to forget that. And in the train that was speeding him towards Waterloo, Frankie thought ahead into a pleasant and peaceful future—with a chalet in Switzerland, probably, and a villa on the Riviera thrown in, and an endless immunity from the anxieties that are inseparable from what those who have never tried to earn it call "easy money".

And so, perhaps, his vigilance relaxed a trifle on the last lap of the journey—which was a pity, because he was quite a likeable man in spite of his sins. Perrigo got him somewhere between Southampton and Waterloo—Perrigo of the big coarse hands that were so quick and skilful with the knife. Thus Frankie Hormer enters the story and departs; and two men have been killed in the first four pages, which is good going.

Of this, Simon Templar knew nothing at the moment. His absorbing interest in Mr. Perrigo, and particularly in Mr. Perrigo's trousers, developed a little later. But he knew a whole lot of other things closely connected with the dramatis personæ already introduced, for it was part of the Saint's busi­ness to know something about everything that was happening in certain circles; and on the strength of that he went after Isadore Elberman in quest of further information.

The structural alterations along the south side of Upper Berkeley Mews, which had recently been providing the Saint with as much exercise as he wanted, were now completed; and by means of a slight elaboration of his original scheme, he was able to enter and leave his home without in any way disturb­ing the stolid vigil of the two plain-clothes men who prowled before his front door, day and night, in a variety of disguises which afforded him continuous entertainment.

At nine o'clock that night he went upstairs to his bedroom, slid back the tall pier-glass which adorned one wall, and stepped into a narrow dimly-lighted passage, closing the panel again behind him. Thus with his feet making no sound on the thick felt matting that was laid over the floor, he passed down the corridor between the back of the mews and the dummy wall which he had built with his own hands, through numbers 5 and 3—which highly desirable residences had already been re-let to two impeccably respectable tenants who never knew that their landlord had a secret right-of-way through their homes. So the Saint came (through the false back of a ward­robe) into the bedroom of No. 1, which was occupied by the chauffeur of a Mr. Joshua Pond, who was the owner of No. 104, Berkeley Square, which adjoined the corner of the mews. Mr. Pond was not otherwise known to the police as Simon Templar, but he would have been if the police had been clever enough to discover the fact. And the Saint left No. 1, Upper Berkeley Mews through another cupboard in the room at which he had entered it, and reappeared out of a similar cupboard in one of the bathrooms of No. 104, Berkeley Square, and so became a free man again, while Chief Inspector Teal's watchers went on patrolling Upper Berkeley Mews in an ineffable magnificence of futility which can't really have done them any harm.

This was one of the things that Perrigo didn't know; and the possibility that the Saint might have any business with Isadore Elberman that night was another.

Perrigo had got what he wanted. It had been easier than he had expected, for Frankie Hormer had made the mistake of occupying a reserved compartment all by himself on the boat train. Perrigo walked in on him with some gold braid pinned to his overcoat and a guard's cap on his head, and took him by surprise. The trouble had started at Waterloo—a detective had recognised him in the station, and he had only just managed to make his getaway.

He reached Elberman's house at Regent's Park by a round­about route, and morsed out the prearranged signal on the bell with feverish haste. The entrance of the house was at the back, in a little courtyard which contained the doorways of four other houses that also overlooked the Park. While he waited for the summons to be answered, Perrigo's eyes searched the shadows with the unsleeping instinct of his calling. But he did not see the Saint, for the simple reason that the Saint was at that moment slipping through a first-floor window on the Park side.

Elberman himself opened the door, and recognised his visi­tor.

"You're late," he said.

His pale bird-like face, behind the owlish spectacles, ex­pressed no more agitation than his voice. He merely stated the fact—a perkily unemotional little man.

"I had to run for it at Waterloo," said Perrigo shortly.

He pushed into the hall, and shed his overcoat while Elber­man barred the door behind him. Divested of that voluminous garment, he seemed even huskier than when he was wearing it. His jaw was square and pugnacious, and his nose had been broken years ago.

Elberman came back and looked up at him inquiringly.

"You weren't followed?"

"Not far."

"Everything else all right?"

Perrigo grunted a curt affirmative. He clapped his hat on a peg and thrust out his jaw.

"What you're talking about's O.K.," he said. "It's the follow-up that's not jake. When Henderson hears about Frankie, he'll remember the way I ran—and there's a warrant for me over that Hammersmith job already."

"You killed Frankie?"

All Elberman's questions were phrased in the same way: they were flat statements, with the slightest of perfunctory interrogation marks tacked on to the last syllable.

"Had to," Perrigo said briefly. "Let's get on—I want a drink."

He was as barren of emotion as Elberman, but for a different reason. Habit had a hand in Perrigo's callousness. In the course of his chequered career he had been one of Chi­cago's star torpedoes, until a spot of trouble that could not be squared had forced him to jump the Canadian border and thence remove himself from the American continent. There were fourteen notches on his gun—but he was not by nature a boastful man.

Elberman led the way up the stairs, and Perrigo followed at his shoulder.

"Did you get that ticket?"

"Yes, I got you a berth. It's on the Berengaria. She sails tomorrow afternoon. You're in a hurry to leave?"

"I'll say I am. I guess it's safe for me to go back now, and I know a dealer in Detroit who'll give me a good price for my share. I'll get enough to give me a big start, and I'll make it grow. There's no money in this durned country."

Elberman shrugged, and opened a door.

He took two paces into the room, and Perrigo took one. And then and there the pair of them halted in their tracks like a Punch and Judy show whose operator has heard the lunch-hour siren, the muscles of their jaws going limp with sheer incredulous astonishment.

Chapter II

"Come right in, boys," said the Saint breezily.

He reclined gracefully in Isadore Elberman's own sacrosanct armchair. Between the fingers of one hand was a freshly lighted cigarette; the fingers of the other hand curved round the butt of a .38 lead-pump that looked as if it could do everything the makers claimed for it and then some. It was as unsociable-looking a piece of armament as Perrigo had ever seen—and he knew what he was talking about. The sight of it kept his hands straight down and flaccid at his sides, as in­nocuous as the fists of something out of a waxwork exhibition.

If further pictorial detail is required, it may be provided by mentioning that the Saint was wearing a light grey suit and a silk shirt, both of which showed no traces of ever having been worn before; and an unwary angel might have been pardoned for turning round and hurriedly overhauling its own con­science after getting one glimpse of the radiant innocence of his face.

But most of these interesting points were wasted on the single-track minds of the two men in the doorway. Their retinas, certainly, registered a photographic impression of the general homoscape; but the spotlight of their attention merely oscillated momentarily over the broader features of the picture, and settled back in focus on the salient factor of the whole scenery—the starkly-fashioned chunk of blued steel that stared unwinkingly into the exact centre of the six-inch space between them, only too plainly ready and eager to concentrate its entire affection upon whichever of them first put in a bid for the monopoly.

"Make yourselves at home, boys," murmured the Saint. "Per­rigo, you may close the door—how did you leave Frankie, by the way?"

Perrigo, with one hand dumbly obedient on the knob, started as if he had received an electric shock. The casual question needled with such an uncanny precision slick into the very core of things that he stared back at the Saint in the dim beginnings of a kind of vengeful terror.

"What do you know about Frankie?" he croaked.

"This and that," said the Saint, nonchalantly unhelpful. "Carry on shutting the door, brother, and afterwards you may keep on talking." He listened to the click of the latch, and spilled a quantity of cigarette-ash on to Mr. Elberman's price­less carpet. "It was tough on your pal being bumped off in Durban," he continued conversationally, as if he had no other object but to put his victims at their ease. "Also, in my opin­ion, unnecessary. I know Frankie was inclined to be cagey, but I think a clever man could have found out what ship he was sailing home on without sending a man out to South Africa to spy on him. . . . Come in, boys, come in. Sit down. Have a drink. I want you to feel happy."

"Who are you?" snarled Perrigo.

Simon shifted his mocking gaze to Elberman.

"Do you know, Isadore?" he asked.

Elberman shook his head, moistening his lips mechanically.

Simon smiled, and stood up. "Sit down," he said.

He ushered the two men forcefully into chairs, relieving Perrigo of a shooting-iron during the process. And then he put his back to. the fire and leaned against the mantelpiece, spin­ning his gun gently round one finger hooked in the trigger-guard.

"I might deceive you," he said with disarming candour, "but I won't. I am the Saint." He absorbed the reflex ripples of expression that jerked over the seated men, and smiled again. "Yes—I'm the guy you've been wanting to meet all these years. I am the man with the load of mischief. I," said the Saint, who was partial to the personal pronoun, and apt to become loqua­cious when he found that it could start a good sentence, "I am the Holy Terror, and the only thing for you boys to do is to try and look pleased about it. I'm on the point of taking a longish holiday, and my bank balance is just a few pounds shy of the amount I'd fixed for my pension. You may not have heard anything about it before, but you are going to make a donation to the fund."

The two men digested his speech in silence. It took them a little time, which the Saint did not begrudge them. He always enjoyed these moments. He allowed the gist of the idea to percolate deeply into their brains, timing the seconds by the regular spinning of his gun. There were six of them. Then—

"What d'you want?" snarled Perrigo.

"Diamonds," said the Saint succinctly.

"What diamonds?"

Perrigo's voice cracked on the question. The boil of bellig­erent animosity within him split through the thin overlay of puzzlement in which he tried to clothe his words, and tore the flimsy bluff to shreds. And the Saint's eyes danced.

"The illicit diamonds," he said, "which Frankie Hormer was bringing over by arrangement with Isadore. The diamonds for which Isadore double-crossed Frankie and took you into part­nership, my pet. The boodle that you've got on your person right now, pretty Perrigo!"

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

"No? Then perhaps Isadore will explain."

Again the Saint's bantering attention transferred itself to the owner of the house, but Elberman said nothing.

And Simon shook his head sadly.

"You may be the hell of a bright conspirator, Isadore," he remarked, "but you seem to be the odd man out of this conversazione. Pardon me while I do my Wild West stuff."

He unbuttoned his coat and took a length of light cord from an inside pocket. There was a running bowline ready at one end of it; he crossed to Elberman's chair and dropped the noose over his head, letting it settled down to his waist. With a brisk yank and a couple of twists he had the man's arms pinioned to his sides and the complete exhibit attached to the chair, finishing off with a pair of non-skid knots. He performed the entire operation with his left hand, and the gun in his right hand never ceased to keep the situation under effec­tive control.

Then he returned to Perrigo.

"Where are they, sweetheart?" he inquired laconically; and the man tightened up a vicious lower lip.

"They're where you won't find them," he said.

Simon shrugged.

"The place does not exist," he said.

His glance quartered Perrigo with leisurely approbation— north to south, east to west. Somewhere in the area it covered was a hundred thousand pounds' worth of crystallised carbon, which wouldn't take up much room. A search through the man's pockets would only have taken a few seconds; but the Saint rather liked being clever. And sometimes he had inspira­tions of uncanny brilliance.

"Your trousers and coat don't match," he said abruptly.

The inspiration grew larger, whizzing out of the back of beyond with the acceleration of something off Daytona Beach, and the jump that Perrigo gave kicked it slap into the immedi­ate urgent present.

"And I'll bet Frankie Hormer's don't, either," said the Saint.

The words came out in a snap.

And then he laughed. He couldn't help it. His long shot had gone welting through the bull's-eye with point-blank accu­racy, and the scoring of the hit was registered on Perrigo's face as plainly as if a battery of coloured lamps had lighted up and a steam organ had begun to play Down among the Dead Men to celebrate the event.

"What's the joke?" demanded Perrigo harshly; and Simon pulled himself together.

"Let me reconstruct it. Diamonds are precious things—espe­cially when they're the kind about which possession is the whole ten points of the law. If you're packing a load of that variety around with you, you don't take chances with 'em. You keep 'em as close to you as they'll go. You don't even carry them in your pockets, because pockets have their dangers. You sew them into your clothes. Frankie did, anyway. Wait a min­ute!" The Saint was working back like lightning over the ground he knew. He grabbed another thread and hauled it out of the skein—and it matched. "Why didn't you cut the di­amonds out of Frankie's clothes? If you had time to trade clothes, you had time to do that. Then it must have been because it was dangerous. Why so? Because Frankie was dead! Because you didn't want to leave a clue to your motive. You killed Frankie, and——Hold the line, Perrigo!" The gangster was coming out of his chair, but Simon's gun checked him half-way. "You killed Frankie," said the Saint, "and you changed your coat for his."

Perrigo relaxed slowly.

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

"You do. You're three minutes late with your bluff. The train has pulled out and left you in the gentleman's cloakroom. Where you have no right to be. Take off that coat!"

Perrigo hesitated for a moment; and then, sullenly, he obeyed.

He threw the garment down at the Saint's feet, and Simon dropped on one knee. With the flat of his hand he went padding over every inch of the coat, feeling for the patch of tell-tale hardness that would indicate the whereabouts of Frankie Hormer's half-million-dollar cargo.

That was the sort of happy harvest that it was an unadulter­ated pleasure for the Saint to reap—the kind in which you just winked at the ears, and they hopped down off their stalks and marched in an orderly fashion into the barn. It made him feel at peace with the world. . . . Down the sleeves he went, with tingling fingers, and over the lapels. . . . Almost like lifting shoe-laces out of a blind beggar's tray, it was. ... He went along the bottom of the coat and up the back. He turned the pockets inside out, and investigated a wallet which he found in one of them.

And then, with a power-driven vacuum pump starting work on his interior, he turned the coat over and began again.

He couldn't have been mistaken. He'd been as sure of his deductions as any man can be. The aptness of them had been placarded all over the place. And never in his life before had one of those moments of inspiration led him astray. He had grown to accept the conclusions they drew and the procedures they dictated as things no less inevitable and infallible than the laws of Nature that make water run downhill and moun­tains sit about the world with their fat ends undermost. And now, with a direct controversion of his faith right under his groping hands, he felt as if he was seeing Niagara Falls squirt­ing upwards into Lake Ontario, while the Peak of Teneriffe perambulated about on its head with its splayed roots waving among the clouds.

For the first search had yielded nothing at all.

And the second search produced no more.

"Is—that—really—so!" drawled the Saint.

He stared at Perrigo without goodwill, and read the sneer in the other's eyes. It touched the rawest part of the Saint's most personal vanity—but he didn't tell the world.

"Thinking again?" Perrigo gibed.

"Why, yes," said the Saint mildly. "I often do it." He stood up unconcernedly, fishing for his cigarette-case, and lighted another cigarette, still allowing nothing to distract the relentless aim of his automatic.

Somewhere there was a leak in the pipe, and his brain was humming out to locate it.

From Elberman there was nothing to be learned—he sat placidly where the Saint had roped him, outwardly unper­turbed by what was happening, apparently satisfied to leave what small chance there was of effective opposition in the hands of Perrigo. And Elberman probably knew no more than the Saint, anyhow.

No—the secret was locked up behind the narrowed glinting eyes of Perrigo. Somewhere in the mind of that tough baby was stored the sole living human knowledge of the fate of the biggest packet of illicit diamonds ever brought into England in one batch; and Simon Templar was going to extract that knowledge if he had to carve it out with dynamite and rock-drills.

Chapter III

"I heard you were clever." Perrigo spoke again, rasping into the breach in a voice that was jagged with spiteful triumph. "Got a reputation, haven't you? I'll say you must have earned it."

"Sure I did," assented the Saint, with a gaze like twin pin­points of blue fire.

And then a thunder of knocking on the front door drummed up through the house and froze the three of them into an instant's bewildered immobility.

It was, if the Saint had but known it at that moment, the herald of an interruption that was destined to turn that ex­ceedingly simple adventure into the most riotous procession that the chronicler has yet been called upon to record. It was the starting-gun for the wildest of all wild-goose chases. It was, in its essence, the beginning of the Melancholy Journey of Mr. Teal. If the Saint had known it, he would have chalked up the exact time on the wall and drawn a halo round it. But he did not know.

He stiffened up like a pointer, with his head cocked on one side and two short vertical lines etching in between his eye­brows. The clamorous insistence of that knocking boded no welcome visitor. There was nothing furtive or sympathetic about it—nothing that one could associate with any possible client of a receiver of stolen goods. It hammered up the stair­way in an atmosphere of case-hardened determination. And then it stopped, and grimly awaited results.

Simon looked from Elberman to Perrigo, and back again. He intercepted the glances that passed between them, and gathered from them a joint nescience equal to his own. In Perrigo's eyes there was suspicion and interrogation, in Elber­man's nothing but an answering blank.

"Throwing a party?" murmured the Saint.

In silence he inhaled from his cigarette, and flicked it back­wards into the fire. Listening intently, he heard through the window on his left the single sharp pip of a motor-horn sound­ing on a peculiar note. And the knocking below started again.

There was no doubt about its intentions this time. It signified its uncompromising determination to be noticed, and added a rider to the effect that if it wasn't noticed damned quickly it was perfectly prepared to bust down the door and march in regardless.

"So you've brought the cops, have you?" grated Perrigo.

He came recklessly out of his chair.

The obvious solution had dawned upon him a second after it dawned upon the Saint, and he acted accordingly. His inter­pretation was all wrong, but his reasoning process was simple.

To the Saint, however, the situation remained the same, whatever Perrigo thought. With the police outside, his gun was temporarily as useless as a piece of scrap-iron. And besides, he wanted further converse with Perrigo. Those three hundred carats of compact mazuma were still somewhere in Perrigo's charge, and Simon Templar was not going home without them. Therefore the bluff was called. Perrigo had got to stay alive, aesthetically distressing as his continued existence might be.

Simon pocketed his gun and stood foursquare to the fact. He slipped his head under Perrigo's smashing fist, and lammed into the gangster's solar plexus a half-arm jolt that sogged home like a battering-ram punching into a lump of putty. Perrigo gasped and went down writhing, and the Saint grinned.

"Sing to him, Isadore," he instructed hopefully, and went briskly out on to the landing.

That toot on the horn outside the window had been Patri­cia's signal to say that something troublesome was looming up and that she was wide awake; but the first item of information was becoming increasingly self-evident. As Simon went down the stairs, the clattering on the front door broke out again, reinforced by impatient peals on the bell, and the door itself was shaking before an onslaught of ponderous shoulders as the Saint turned out the light and drew the bolts.

A small avalanche of men launched themselves at him out of the gloom. Simon hacked one of them on the shins and se­cured a crippling grip on the nose of another; and then some­one found the switch and put the light on again, and the Saint looked along his arm and found that his fingers were firmly clamped on the proboscis of Chief Inspector Teal himself.

"Why, it's Claud Eustace!" cried the Saint, without moving.

Teal shook the hand savagely off his nose, and wiped his streaming eyes.

"What the hell are you doing here?" he brayed.

"Playing dingbat through the daisies," said the Saint.

All the debonair gay impudence that he possessed was glim­mering around his presence like a sort of invisible aurora borealis, and the perception of it made something seethe up through the detective like a gush of boiling lava. His brows knitted down over a glare of actual malevolence.

"Yes? And where's Perrigo?"

"He's upstairs."

"Since when?"

"About half an hour."

"And when did you arrive?"

"Roughly simultaneous, I should say."

"What for?"

"Well, if you must know," said the Saint, "I heard a rumour that Perrigo had discovered the second rhyme to 'Putney', which I wanted for a limerick I was trying to compose. I thought of an old retired colonel of Putney, who lived on dill pickles and chutney, till one day he tried chilis boiled with carbide, tiddy dum tiddy dum didy utney. It's all very difficult."

Teal unfastened his coat and signed to one of the men who were with him.

"Take him," he ordered curtly.

Simon put his hands in his pockets and leaned against the wall with an air of injury.

"In your own words—what for?" he inquired; and a little of Chief Inspector Teal's old pose of heavy sleepiness returned. It was an affectation on which the detective had lately been losing a lot of his grip.

"A man named Hormer, a diamond smuggler, was murdered on the train between Southampton and Waterloo this evening. Perrigo was seen at Waterloo. I want him on suspicion of having committed the murder, and I'm going to take you on suspicion of being an accessory."

"Sorry," said the Saint; and something about the way he said it made Teal's baby blue eyes go dark and beady.

"Going to tell me you've got another alibi?"

"I am."

"I'll hear about that later."

"You'll hear about it now." The arrogant forefinger which Teal had learned to hate as personally as if it had a separate individual existence prodded into the gibbosity of his waistline with unequivocal emphasis. "From seven o'clock till eight-fifteen I was having dinner at Dorchester House—which in­cludes the time that train got in. I had two friends with me. I talked to the head waiter, I discussed vintages with the wine waiter, and I gave the maître d'hôtel a personal lesson in the art of making perfect crêpes suzette. Go and ask 'em. And ask your own flat-footed oaf outside my house what time he saw me come in"

Teal champed grimly on his gum.

"I didn't accuse you of committing the murder," he said. "I'm having you for an accessory, and you can prove you were Nova Scotia at the time for all that'll help you. Tell me you're going to prove you're in Nova Scotia right now, and perhaps I'll listen."

The Saint's brain functioned at racing speed.

A neat handful of spiky little facts prickled into its machin­ery, graded themselves, and were dealt with. One—that Perrigo had still got the diamonds. Two—that the diamonds must be detached from Perrigo. Three—that the detaching must not be done by Claud Eustace Teal. Four—that the Saint must there­fore remain a free agent. Five—that the Saint would not remain a free agent if Claud Eustace Teal could help it.

Item five was fairly crackling about in the subtler under­tones of the detective's drowsy voice, and it was that item which finally administered the upward heave to the balloon. The Teal-Templar feud was blowing up to bursting-point, and nobody knew it better than the Saint. But he also knew some­thing else, which was that the burst was going to spray out into the maddest and merriest rodeo that ever was. Simon Templar proposed personally to supervise the spray.

He slipped his hands out of his pockets, and a very Saintly smile touched his lips.

"I might even prove something like that," he said.

And then he pushed Teal backwards and went away in one wild leap.

He had reached the foot of the stairs before the detectives had fully grasped what was happening, and he took the steps in flights of four at a pace that no detective in England could have approached. He made the upper landing before they were properly started. There was a big oak chest on that landing—Simon had noticed it on his way down—and he hulked it off the wall and ran it to the top of the stairs.

"Watch your toes, boys," he sang out, and shoved.

The three men below looked up and saw the chest hurtling down upon them. Having no time to get from under, they braced themselves and took the shock. And there they stuck, half-way up and half-way down. The huge iron-bound coffer tobogganed massively into them, two hundredweight of it if there was an ounce, and jammed them in their tracks. They couldn't go round, they couldn't go over, and it was several seconds before some incandescent intellect conceived the idea of going back.

Which was some time after the Saint had renewed his hectic acquaintance with Gunner Perrigo.

He found the gangster on his feet by a side table, cramming some papers into a shabby wallet. Perrigo's face was still con­torted with agony, but he turned and crouched for a fight as the Saint burst in. As a matter of fact, the Saint was the last person he had ever expected to see again that night, and his puzzled amazement combined with the gesture of the Saint's upraised hand to check him where he was.

"Hold everything, Beautiful," said the Saint. "The police are in, and you and I are pulling our freight together."

He locked the door and strode coolly past the dumbfounded hoodlum. Flinging the window wide, he looked down into the private gardens that adjoined Gloucester Terrace and the park beyond. He saw shadows that moved, and knew that the house was surrounded. Simon waved a cheery hand to the cordon and closed the window again.

He turned back to Perrigo.

"Is there a way over the roof, or a back staircase?" he asked.

The man looked him his underlip jutting.

"What's the idea, Templar?"

"The idea is to get to hell out of here," said the Saint crisply. "Tell me what you know—and tell it quick!"

Perrigo glowered at him uncertainly, and in the silence they heard Teal's invading contingent arriving profanely on the landing.

And Perrigo made up his mind.

"There's no way out," he said.

He spoke the truth as far as he knew it; but the Saint laughed.

"Then we'll go out that way."

The door-handle rattled, and the woodwork creaked under an impacting weight; and Elberman suddenly roused out of his long retirement. ——

"And vot happens to me?" he squeaked, with his la­bouriously cultivated accent scattering to the four winds. "Vot do I say ven dey com' in?"

Simon walked to the mantelpiece and picked up a large globular vase, from which he removed the artificial flowers.

"You stay here and sing," he said, and forced the pot down firmly over the receiver's ears.

Outside, Chief Inspector Teal settled his hat and stepped back a pace. The casket that had delayed him was at the bottom of the stairs then, but if Teal could have had his way with it would have been at the bottom of the nethermost basement in Gehenna.

"All together," he snapped.

Three brawny shoulders moved as one, and the door splin­tered inwards.

Except for Isadore Elberman, struggling like a maniac to shake the porcelain cowl off his head, the room was empty of humanity.

Teal's glance scorched round it. There was plenty of furni­ture, but not a thing that would have given cover to a full-grown man. Then he saw a communicating door in another wall, and swore.

He dashed through, leaving his men to deal with the easy prisoner. Curtains flapping before an open window caught his eye, and instinctively he went over and stuck his head out. A man standing by a bush below looked up.

"Seen anyone?" Teal shouted.

"No, sir."

Teal withdrew his head and noticed a second door standing ajar. He went through it and found himself back on the landing he had just left, and his language became lurid.

Simon Templar and Perrigo stopped for a moment in the hall. Perrigo was a tough guy from the Uskides upwards, but Simon felt personally responsible for his safety and he took the responsibility seriously. There were irrefutable financial reasons for his solicitude—one hundred thousand of them. And for the duration of the fast-travelling episode he had got Perrigo's confidence. He tapped the gangster's bosom impres­sively.

"In case we should get separated, 7, Upper Berkeley Mews is the address," he stated. "See you remember it."

Perrigo gloomed sidelong at him, still fuddled with suspi­cious perplexity.

"I don't want to see you again," he growled.

"You will," said the Saint, and pushed him onwards.

Chief Inspector Teal floundered to the top of the stairs, and two of his men pressed close behind him. They looked down and saw Simon Templar alone in the hall, hands on hips, with his back to the door and an angelic smile on his upturned face.

"About that rhyme," said the Saint. "I've just thought of something. Suppose the old colonel 'went up in smoke for his gluttony? Would the Poet Laureate pass it? Would Wilhel­mina Stitch approve?"

"Get him!" snapped Teal.

The detectives swept down in a bunch.

They saw the Saint open the door, and heard outside the sharp pipping of a motor-horn. Patricia Holm was cruising round. But this they did not know. The door slammed shut again, and as a kind of multiple echo to the slam came the splattering cackle of an automatic. It fired four times, and then Teal got the door open.

He faced a considerable volume of pitchy darkness, out of which spoke the voice of one of the men he had posted to guard the courtyard.

"I'm sorry, sir—they got away."

"What happened?"

"Shot out the lights and slipped us in the dark, sir." Way down the road, a horn tooted seven times, derisively.

Chapter IV

A tinge of old beetroot suffused Mr. Teal's rubicund complexion.

To say that his goat was completely and omnipotently got conveys nothing at all. In the last ten minutes his goat had been utterly annihilated, and the remains spirited away to the exact point in space where (so Einstein says) eternity changes its socks and starts back on the return journey. He was as comprehensively de-goated as a man can be.

With a foaming cauldron of fury bubbling just below his collar, he stood and watched his two outposts come up the steps towards him.

"Did you see Perrigo?" he rasped.

"Yes, sir. He came out first, and waited. I didn't recognise him at once—thought it was one of our own men. Then another bloke came out "

Teal turned on the men behind him.

"And what are you loafing about here for?" he stormed. "D'you want your nannies to hold your hands when you go out at night? Get after them!"

He left the pursuit in their hands, and fumed back up the stairs. There he found a bedraggled Isadore Elberman, re­leased at last from his eccentric headgear, in charge of a plain-clothes constable. The receiver was as loquacious as Teal al­lowed him to be.

"You can't hold me for nothing, Mr. Teal. Those men attacked me and tied me up. You saw how I was fixed when you came in."

"I know all about you," said Teal unpleasantly.

Elberman blinked rapidly.

"Now you listen and I tell you somethings, Mr. Teal. I don't like Perrigo. He's stole some tickets and never pay me for them, nor nothing else vot he owes me. You catch him and I'll tell you all about him. I'm an innocent man vot's been robbed. Now I'll tell you."

"You can tell the magistrate in the morning," said Teal.

He was in no mood to listen patiently to anyone. His temper had been jagged over with a cross-cut saw. Simon Templar had tweaked his nose for the umpteenth time, lit­erally and figuratively; and the realisation of it was making Teal's palms sweat. It mattered nothing that a warrant to arrest the Saint could be obtained for the trouble of asking for it, and that the Saint could probably be located in fifteen minutes by the elementary process of going to No. 7, Upper Berkeley Mews and ringing the bell. Time after time Teal had thought his task was just as easy, and time after time he had found a flourishing colony of bluebottles using his ointment for a breeding-ground. It had gone on until Teal was past feeling the faintest tremor of optimism over anything less than a capture of the Saint red-handed, with stereoscopic cameras, trained on the scene and a board of bishops standing by for witnesses. And something dimly approaching that ideal had offered itself that night—only to slither through his fingers and flip him in the eye with its departing tail.

He had no real enthusiasm for the arrest of Elberman, and even his interest in Perrigo had waned. The Saint filled his horizon to the exclusion of everything else. With a morose detachment he watched Elberman removed in a taxi, and stayed on in the same spirit to receive the reports of the men who had been down the road. These were not helpful.

"We went as far as Euston Road in the squad car, sir, but it wasn't any use. They had too long a start."

Teal had expected no better. He gave his subordinates one crowded minute of the caustic edge of his tongue for not having got on the job more promptly, and was mad with himself for doing it. Then he dismissed them.

"And give my love to your Divisional Inspector," he said. "Tell him I like his officers. And when I want some dumbbell exercise, I'll send for you again."

He made his exit on that line, and was sourly aware that their surprised and reproachful glances followed him out of the house.

He realised that the Saint had got under his skin more deeply than he knew. Never in any ordinary circumstances could the stoical and even-tempered Mr. Teal have been moved to pass the buck to his helpless underlings in such a fashion.

And Teal didn't care. As he climbed into his car, the broil­ing crucibles of fury within him were simmering down to a steady white-hot calidity of purpose. By the time he got to grips with his man again, the Saint would probably have an­other peck of dust ready to throw in his eyes, some new smooth piece of hokum laid out for him to skate over. Teal was prepared for it. It made no difference to him. His whole universe at that moment comprised but one ambition—to hound Simon Templar into a corner from which there could be no escape, corral him there, and proceed to baste into him every form of discourtesy and dolour permitted by the laws of England. And he was going to do it if it took him forty years and travelled him four thousand miles.

Some of which it did-—-but this prophecy was hidden from him.

The most inexorably wrathful detective in the British Isles, Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal, stepped on the gas and walloped into the second lap of his odyssey, heading for Upper Berkeley Mews.

Chapter V

Simon Templar garaged his gat in a side pocket and leapt into the darkness. The men outside were on their toes for concerted action, but the dousing of the lights beat them. Simon swerved nimbly round the noises of their blundering, and sprinted for the square patch of twilight that indicated the way out of the courtyard.

His fingers hooked on the brickwork at the side of the opening as he reached it, and he fetched round into the road on a tight hair-pin turn that brought him up with his back to the wall outside. A yard or two to his left he saw the parking lights of a car gliding along the kerb.

Then Perrigo came plunging out. He skidded round the same turn and picked up his stride again without a pause. Simon shot off the wall and closed alongside him. He grabbed Perrigo's arm.

"The car—you won't make it on foot!"

He sprang for the running-board as he spoke—Patricia was keeping level, with the Hirondel dawdling easily along in second. Perrigo looked round hesitantly, making the pace flat-footed. Then he also hauled himself aboard.

"Right away, lass," said the Saint.

The great car surged forward, sprawling Perrigo head over heels on to the cushions of the back seat. Patricia changed up without a click, and Simon swung himself lightly over into place beside her.

"Well?" she asked calmly; and the Saint laughed.

"Oh, we had quite a jolly little party."

"What happened?"

Simon lighted a cigarette, and inhaled with deep satisfaction.

"Claud Eustace Teal's stomach walked in, closely followed by Claud Eustace. It was most extraordinary. Subsequently, I walked out. Claud Eustace is now thinking that that was even more extraordinary."

Patricia nodded.

"I saw the men getting into the gardens, and then I drove round to the back and saw the squad car. Did you have much trouble?"

"Nothing to speak of." The Saint was slewed round in his seat, his keen eyes searching back up the road. "I pulled Teal's nose, told him a perfectly drawing-room limerick, and left him to think it over. ... I should turn off again here, old darling —they're certain to be after us."

The girl obeyed.

And then she flashed the Saint a smile, and she said:

"Boy, I was all set to crash that squad car if they'd tried to take you away in it."

The Saint stared.

"You were which?"

"Sure, I'd have wrecked that car all right."

"And then?"

"I'd have got you out somehow."

"Pat, have you gone loco?"

She laughed, and shook her head, hustling the car recklessly down the long clear street.

Simon gazed at her thoughtfully.

It was typical of him that even then he was able to do that— and do it with his whole attention on the job. But the longer you knew him, the more amazing did that characteristic of light-hearted insouciance become. The most tempestuous inci­dents of his turbulent life occupied just as much of his mind as he allotted to them, and no more. And their claims were repudiated altogether by such a mood of scapegrace devilment as descended upon him at that instant.

He took in the features that he knew even better than his own with a new sense of delight. They stood out fair and clean-cut against the speeding background of sombre build­ings—the small nose, the finely modelled forehead, the firm chin, the red lips slightly parted, the eyes gay and shining. The wind whipped a faint flush into her cheeks and swept back her hair like a golden mane. Under her short leather jacket the small high breasts seemed to be pressing forward with the eagerness of youth.

She turned to him, knowing his eyes were on her.

"What are you thinking, lad?"

"I'm thinking that I shall always want to remember you as I'm seeing you now," said the Saint.

One of the small strong hands came off the wheel and rested on his knee. He covered it with his own.

"I'm glad I was never a gentleman," he said.

They raced on, carving a wide circle out of the map of London. Traffic crossings delayed them here and there, but they kept as much as possible to unfrequented side streets, and moved fast. Perrigo sat in the back and brooded, with his coat collar turned up over his ears. His cosmos was still in a dizzy whirl, which he was trying to reduce to some sort of coherence. The vicissitudes that had somersaulted upon him from all angles during the past forty-five minutes had hopelessly dislo­cated his bearings. One minute the Saint was thumping him in the stomach, the next minute he was helping him on with his hat. One minute the Saint was preparing to hoist him, the next minute he was yanking him out of a splice. One minute the Saint seemed to have a direct hook-up with the police, the next minute he was leading the duck-out with all the zeal of an honest citizen avoiding contact with a Member of Parlia­ment. It was a bit too much for Gunner Perrigo, a simple soul for whom the solution of all reasonable problems lay in the breech of a Smith-Wesson.

But out of the chaos one imperishable thought emerged to the forefront of his consciousness, and it was that which moti­vated his eventual decision. One bifurcated fact stood inde­feasible amid the maelstrom. The Saint knew too much, and the Saint had at one time announced his intention of hijack­ing a certain parcel of diamonds. And the two prongs of that fact linked up and pointed to a single certainty: that the safest course for Gunner Perrigo was to get the hell out of any place where the Saint might be—and to make the voyage alone.

The car was held up at an Oxford Street crossing, and the Saint's back was towards him. Perrigo thought he had it all his own way.

But he had reckoned without the driving-mirror. For several minutes past the Saint had been doing a lot of Perrigo's think­ing for him, and the imminence of some such manoeuvre as that had been keeping him on the tip-toe of alertness. Throughout that time the driving-mirror had never been out of the tail of his eye, and he spotted Perrigo's stealthy move­ment almost before it had begun.

He turned his head and smiled sweetly.

"No," he said.

Perrigo squinted at him, sinking back a trifle.

"I can look after myself now," he grunted.

"You can't," said the Saint.

He was turning round again when Perrigo set his teeth, jumped up, and wrenched at the handle of the door.

It flew open; and then the Saint put one foot on the front seat and went over into the tonneau in a flying tackle.

He took Perrigo with him. They pelted over into the back seat in a lashing welter of legs and arms, fighting like savages. Perrigo had the weight, and brute strength, but Simon had the speed and cunning. The car lurched forward again while they rolled over and over in a flailing thudding tangle. After a few seconds of it, the Saint got an arm loose and whipped in a couple of pile-driving rib-binders; the effects of them put him on top of the mess, and he wedged Perrigo vigorously into a corner and held him there with a knee in his chest.

Then he looked up at the familiar helmet of a police con­stable, and found that the car had stopped.

They were in one of the narrow streets in the triangle of which Regent and Oxford form two sides. A heavy truck and a brace of taxis had combined to put a temporary plug in the meagre passage, and the constable happened to be standing by. Patricia was looking round helplessly.

"Wot's this?" demanded the Law, and Simon smiled win­ningly.

"We are secret emissaries of the Sheik Ali ben Dova, and we have sworn to place the sacred domestic utensil of the Caliph on top of the Albert Memorial."

"Wot?"

"Well, what I mean is that my friend is rather drunk, and that's his idea."

The Law produced a notebook.

"Any'ow," he said, "you got no right to be treating 'im like that."

Perrigo's mouth opened, and Simon shifted some more weight on to his knee. Perrigo choked and went red in the face.

"Ah, but you've no idea how violent he gets when he's had a few," said the Saint. "Goes quite bats. I'm trying to get him home now before he does any damage."

"Help!" yapped Perrigo feebly.

"Gets delusions, and all that sort of thing," said the Saint. "Thinks people are trying to kidnap him and murder him and so forth. Fancies everyone he meets is a notorious criminal. Doesn't even recognise his own wife—this is his wife, officer. Leads her an awful life. I don't know why she married the fool. And yet if you met him when he was sober, you'd take him for the most respectable gentleman you ever saluted. And he is, too. Man with a big diamond business. Right now, he's worth more money than you could save out of your salary if you were in the Force another three hundred years and lived on air."

Patricia leaned over pleadingly.

"Oh, officer, it's dreadful" she cried. "Please try to under­stand—please help me to save a scandal! Last time, the mag­istrate said he'd send my husband to prison if it happened again."

"I'm not your husband!" howled Perrigo. "I'm being robbed! Officer——"

"You see," said the Saint. "Just what I told you. Three weeks ago he fired a shot-gun at the postman because he said he was trying to put a bomb in the letter-box."

The policeman looked doubtfully from him to the lovely anxious face of Patricia, and was visibly moved. And then Perrigo heaved up again.

"Don't you know who this guy is?" he blurted. "He's the Sgloogphwf——"

This was not what Perrigo meant to say, but Simon clapped a hand over his mouth.

"Uses the most frightful language, too, when he's like this," said the Saint confidentially. "I couldn't even repeat what he called the cook when he thought she was sprinkling arsenic on the potatoes. If I had my way he'd be locked up. He's a dangerous lunatic, that's what he is ——"

Suddenly the policeman's eyes glazed.

"Wot's that?" he barked.

Simon glanced round. His automatic lay in a corner of the seat, clear to view—it must have fallen out of his pocket during the scramble. It gleamed up accusingly from the glossy green-leather upholstery, and every milligram of the accusation was reflected in the constable's fixed and goggling eyes. . . .

Simon drew a deep breath.

"Oh, that's just one of the props. We've been to a rehearsal of one of these amateur dramatic shows—"

The constable's head ducked with unexpected quickness. It pressed down close to the face of Perrigo, and when it raised itself again there was a blunt certitude written all over it.

"That man ain't bin drinking," it pronounced.

"Deodorised gin," explained the Saint easily. "A new inven­tion for the benefit of a A.W.O.L. matrimoniates. Wonderful stuff. No longer can it be said that the wages of gin is breath."

The policeman straightened up.

"Ho, yus? Well, I think you'd better come round to the station, and let's 'ear some more about this."

The Saint shook his head.

He looked over the front of the car, and saw that the jam ahead had sorted itself out, and the road was clear. One hand touched Patricia's shoulder. And he smiled very seraphically.

"Sorry," he said. "We've got that date with the Albert Memo­rial."

He struck flat-handed at the policeman's shoulder, sending him staggering back; and as he did so Patricia engaged the gears and the Hirondel rocketed off the mark again like a shell from a howitzer.

Simon and Perrigo spilled over in another wild flurry. This time the objective was the gun on the seat. Simon got it. He also got Perrigo effectively screwed down to the mat, and knelt heavily on his biceps. The cold muzzle of the automatic rammed up under Perrigo's chin.

"That will be the end of your bonehead act, brother," said the Saint tersely. "You'd better understand that the only chance you've got is with me. You're a stranger over here. If I left you on your own, Teal would have you behind bars in record time. You wouldn't last twenty-four hours. And if you'd been able to make that cop take notice of you the way you wanted, you wouldn't have lasted twenty-four minutes—he'd have lugged you off to the station with the rest of us, and that would have been your finale. Get that up under your skull. And then put this beside it: you can't make your getaway now without consulting me. I've got your passport and your ticket to New York right next my heart—dipped them out of your pocket before we left Isadora's. Which is why you're going to stick as close to me as you know how. When I'm through with you, I'll give you the bum's rush quick enough—but not before!"

Chapter VI

The Hirondel skimmed round a corner and flashed out into Regent Street. The bows of an omnibus loomed up, bear­ing down upon them. Patricia spun the wheel coolly; they swerved round the wrong side of an island, dodged a taxi and a private car, and dived off the main road again.

Perrigo, on the floor of the tonneau, digested the fresh set of facts that the Saint had streamed into him. However apocry­phal the first sheaf that he had meditated had been, these new ones were definitely concise and concrete—as was the circle of steel that bored steadily into his dewlap. He assimilated them in a momentous silence, while the stars gyrated giddily above him.

"All right," he said at length. "Let me up."

Simon hitched himself on to the seat; his gun went into his pocket, but retained command of the situation. As they en­tered Berkeley Square he watched Perrigo looking out to left and right, and was prompted to utter an additional warning.

"Stepping off moving vehicles," he said, "is the cause of ump­teen street accidents per annum. If you left us now, it would be the cause of umpteen plus one. Ponder the equation, brother. . . . And besides," said the Saint, who was starting to feel expansive again, "we've only just begun to know each other. The warbling and the woofling dies, so to speak, and we settle down to get acquainted. We approach the peaceful inter­lude

When the cakes and ale are over

And the buns and beer runs dry

And the pigs are all in clover

Up above the bright blue sky—

as the poet hath it. Do you ever write poetry?" Perrigo said nothing.

"He does not write poetry," said the Saint.

The car stopped a few yards from the entrance of Upper Berkeley Mews, and Simon leaned forward and put his elbows on the back of the front seat. He rested his chin on his hands.

"When we were interrupted, darling," he said, "I was on the point of making some remarks about your mouth. It is, bar none, the most bewitching, alluring, tempting, maddening, seductive mouth I've ever kiss—set eyes on. The idea that it should ever be used for eating kippers is sacrilegious. You will oblige me by eating no more kippers. The way your lips curl at the corners when you're not sure whether you'll smile or not——"

Patricia turned with demure eyes.

"What do we do now?" she asked; and the Saint sighed.

"Teal's bloodhound saw you go out?"

"Yes."

"Then he'd better see you go in again. It'll set his mind at rest. Bertie and I will go our ways."

He opened the door and stepped out, Perrigo followed, constrained to do so by a grip which the Saint had fastened on the scruff of his neck. Maintaining possession of Perrigo, Si­mon leaned on the side of the car.

"When we get a minute or two to ourselves, Pat," he said, "remind me that my discourse on your eyes, which occupies about two hundred and fifty well-chosen words——"

"Is to be continued in our next," said Patricia happily, and let in the clutch.

Simon stood for a moment where she had left him, watching the car swing round into the mews.

And he was realising that the warbling and the woofling were very near their end. His flippant parody had struck home into the truth.

It was a queer moment for that blithe young cavalier of fortune. Out of the clear sky of the completely commonplace, it had flashed down upon him with a blinding brightness. The lights pointed to the end. No tremendous battle had done it, no breathless race for life, no cataclysmic instant of vision when all the intangible battlements of Paradise were shown up under the shadow of the sword. Fate, in the cussedness of its own inscrutable designs, had ordained that the revelation should be otherwise. Something simple and startling, a thing seen so often and grown so tranquilly familiar that the sudden unmasking of its inner portent would sweep away all the foundations of his disbelief like a tidal wave; something that would sheer ruthlessly through all sophistries and lies. A girl's profile against the streaking backcloth of smoke-stained stone. Yellow lamp-light rippling on a flying mane of golden hair. Commedia.

On the night of the 3rd of April, at 10:30 p.m., Simon Templar stood on the pavement of Berkeley Square and looked life squarely in the eyes.

Just for that moment. And then the Hirondel was gone, and the moment was past. But all that there was to be done was done. The High Gods had spoken.

Simon turned. There was a new light in his eyes. "Let's go," he said.

They went. His step was light and swift, and the blood laughed in his veins. He had drunk the magic wine of the High Gods at one draught, down to the last dregs. It is a brave man who can do that, and he has his reward.

Perrigo walked tamely by his side. Simon had less than no idea what was passing in the gangster's mind just then. And he cared less than nothing. He would have taken on a hundred Perrigos that night, one after another or in two squads of fifty, just as they pleased—blipped them, bounced them, boned them, rolled them, trussed them up, wrapped them in grease­proof paper, and laid them out in a row to be called for by the corporation scavengers. And if Perrigo didn't believe it, Perrigo had only got to start something and see what hap­pened. Simon thought less of Perrigo than a resolute rhinoc­eros would think of a small worm.

He ran up the steps of 104, Berkeley Square, turned his key in the lock, and switched on the lights. He made way for Perrigo with a courtly gesture. "In," he said.

Perrigo walked in very slowly. Some fresh plan of campaign was formulating behind the gangster's sullen complicance. Si­mon knew it. He knew that the ice was very thin—that only the two trump cards of passport and tickets, and the superb assurance with which they had been played, had driven Per­rigo so far without a third bid for freedom. And he was not interested. As Perrigo's rearward foot lifted over the threshold, Simon shoved him on, followed him in a flash, and put his back to the closed door.

"You're thinking," he murmured, "that this is where you slug me over the head with the umbrella-stand, recover your property, and fade out. You're wrong."

He pushed Perrigo backwards. It seemed quite an effortless push, but there was an unsuspected kick of strength behind it. It flung Perrigo three paces towards the stairs; and then the hoodlum stopped on his heels and returned in a savage recoil. Simon slipped the gun out of his pocket, and Perrigo reined in.

"You daren't shoot," he blustered.

"Again you're wrong," said the Saint metallically. "It would give me great pleasure to shoot. I haven't shot anyone for months. Perhaps you're thinking I'll be scared of the noise. Once more you're wrong. This gun isn't silenced, but the first three cartridges are only half-charged. No one in the street would hear a sound." For a tense second the Saint's gaze snapped daggers across the space between them. "You still think I'm bluffing. You've half a mind to test it out. Right. This is your chance. You've only to take one step towards me. One little step. . . . I'm waiting for you!"

And Perrigo took the step.

The automatic slanted up, and hiccoughed. It made less noise than opening up a bottle of champagne, but Perrigo's hat whisked off his head and floated down to the carpet be­hind him. The gunman looked round stupidly at it, his face going a shade paler.

"Of course," said the Saint, relapsing into the conversational style. "I'm not a very good shot. I've been practising a bit lately, but I've a long way to go yet before I get into your class. Another time I might sort of kill you accidental like, and that would be very distressing. And then the question arises, Perrigo; would you go to Heaven? I doubt it. They're so particular about the people they let in. I don't think they'd like that check suit you're wearing. And can you play a harp? Do you know your psalms? Have you got a white nightie?"

Perrigo's fists clenched.

"What game are you playing?" he snarled.

"You know me," said the Saint rhetorically. "I am the man who knocked the L out of London, and at any moment I may become the man who knocked the P out of Perrigo. My game hasn't changed since we first met. It's a private party, and the police seemed to want to interfere, so we commuted to another site. That's the only reason why we're here, and why I took the trouble to get you away from Regent's Park. In short, if you haven't guessed it already, I'm still after those diamonds, my pet. They mean the beginning of a new chapter in my career, and a brief interlude of peace for Chief Inspector Teal. They are my old-age pension. I want that packet of boodle more than I've ever wanted any loot before; and if you imagine I'm not going to have them, your name is Mug. And now you can pass on—this hall's getting draughty."

"I'll see you in hell first," grated Perrigo.

"You won't see me in hell at all," said the Saint. "I like warm climates, but I'm very musical, and I think the harps have it. Forward march!"

He propelled Perrigo down the hall to a door which opened on to a flight of stone steps. At the bottom of these steps there was a small square cellar furnished with a chair and a camp bed. The door, Perrigo noticed, was of three-inch oak, and a broad iron bar slid in grooves across it. Simon pointed, and Perrigo went in and sat on the bed.

"When you know me better," said the Saint, "you'll discover that I have a cellar complex. So many people have taken me into cellars in order to do me grievous bodily harm that the infection has got into my system. There's something very sin­ister and thrilling about a cellar, don't you think?"

Perrigo hazarded no opinion.

"How long do I stay here?" he asked.

"Until tomorrow," Simon told him. "You'll find the place rather damp and stuffy, but there's enough ventilation to save you from suffocating. If you decide to strangle yourself with your braces, you might do it under that loose flagstone in the corner, which conceals a deep grave all ready dug for any corpses I might have on my hands. And in the morning I'll be along with some breakfast and a pair of thumbscrews, and we'll have a little chat. Night-night, old dear."

He left Perrigo with those cheering thoughts to chew over, and went out, bolting the iron bar into place and securing it with a steel staple.

A silver-noted buzzer was purring somewhere above him as he ran up the stairs, and he knew that the next development was already on its way. He was not surprised-—he had been expecting it—but the promptitude with which his expectations had been realised argued a tenacious implacability on the part of Chief Inspector Teal that would have unsettled the serenity of anyone but a Simon Templar. But the Saint was lining up to the starting-gate of an odyssey quite different from that of Mr. Teal. He let himself through the linen cupboard of the first-floor bathroom into No. 1, Upper Berkeley Mews, and went quickly down the runway to No. 7; and he was smiling as he stepped out of it into his own bedroom and slid the mirror panel shut behind him.

Patricia was waiting for him there.

"Teal's on his way," she said.

"Alone?"

"He was talking to his sleuth-hound when I gave you the signal. There wasn't anyone else with him."

"Splendid."

His coat off, the Saint was over at the dressing-table, putting a lightning polish on his hair with brush and comb. Under Patricia's eyes, the traces of his recent rough-and-tumble in the car disappeared miraculously. In a matter of seconds he was his old spruce self, lean and immaculate and alert, a laughing storm-centre of hell-for-leather mischief, flipping into a blue velvet smoking-gown. . . .

"Darling—"

She stopped him, with a hand on his arm. She was quite serious.

"Listen, boy. I've never questioned you before, but this time there's no Duke of Fortezza to frame you out."

"Maybe not."

"Are you sure there isn't going to be real trouble?"

"I'm sure there is. For one thing, our beautiful little bolt-hole has done its stuff. Never again will it make that sleuth-hound outside my perfect alibi. After tonight, Claud Eustace will know that I've got a spare exit, and he'll come back with a search warrant and a gang of navvies to find it. But we'll have had our money's worth out of it. Sure, there's going to be trouble. I asked for it—by special delivery!"

"And what then?"

Simon clapped his hands on her shoulders, smiling the old Saintly smile.

"Have you ever known any trouble that I couldn't get out of?" he demanded. "Have you ever seen me beaten?"

She thrilled to his madcap buoyancy—she did not know why.

"Never!" she cried.

Downstairs, the front door bell rang. The Saint took no notice. He held her with his eyes, near to laughing, vibrant with impetuous audacity, magnificently mad.

"Is there anything that can put me down?"

"I can't imagine it."

He swept her to him and kissed her red lips.

The bell rang again. Simon pointed, with one of his wide gestures.

"Down there," he said, "there's an out-size detective whose one aim in life is to spike the holiday that's coming to us. Our own Claud Eustace Teal, with his mouth full of gum and his wattles crimsoning, paying us his last professional call. Let's go and swipe him on the jaw."

Chapter VII

In the sitting-room, Patricia closed her book and looked up as Chief Inspector Teal waddled in. Simon followed the visitor. It was inevitable that he should dramatise himself—that he should extract the last molecule of diversion from the scene by playing his part as strenuously as if life and death de­pended on it. He was an artist. And that night the zest of his self-appointed task tingled electrically in all his fibres. Teal, chewing stolidly through a few seconds' portentous pause, thought that he had never seen the Saint so debonair and dangerous.

"I hope I don't intrude," he said at last, heavily.

"Not at all," murmured the Saint. "You see before you a scene of domestic repose. Have some beer?"

Teal took a tight hold on himself. He knew that there was a toe-to-toe scrap in front of him, and he wasn't going to put himself at a disadvantage sooner than he could help. The searing vials of righteous indignation within him had sim­mered down still further during the drive from Regent's Park, and out of the travail caution had been born. His purpose hadn't weakened in the least, but he wasn't going to trip over his own feet in the attempt to achieve it. The lights of battle glittering about in the Saint's blue eyes augured a heap of snags along the route that was to be paddled, and for once Chief Inspector Teal was trying to take the hint.

"Coming quietly?" he asked.

The feeler went out, gruffly noncommital; and Simon smiled.

"You're expecting me to ask why," he drawled, "but I refuse to do anything that's expected of me. Besides, I know."

"How do you know?"

"My spies are everywhere. Sit down, Claud. That's a collapsi­ble chair we bought specially for you, and the cigars in that box explode when you light them. Oh, and would you mind taking off your hat?—it doesn't go with the wallpaper."

Teal removed his bowler with savage tenderness. He realised that he was going to have an uphill fight to keep the promise he had made to himself. There was the faintest thickening in his lethargic voice as he repeated his question.

"How do you know what I want you for?"

"My dear soul, how else could I have known except by being with you when you first conceived the idea of wanting me?" answered the Saint blandly.

"So you're going to admit it really was you I was talking to at Regent's Park?"

"Between ourselves—it was."

"Got some underground way out of here, haven't you?"

"The place is a rabbit-warren."

"And where's Perrigo?"

"He's playing bunny."

Teal twiddled a button, and his eyelids lowered. The lead­ing tentacles of a nasty cold sensation were starting to weave clammily up his spine. It was something akin to the sensation experienced by a man who, in the prelude to a nightmare, has been cavorting happily about in the middle of a bridge over a fathomless abyss, and who suddenly discovers that the bridge has turned into a thin slab of toffee and the temperature is rising.

Something was springing a leak. He hadn't the ghost of a presentiment of what the leak was going to be, but the symp­toms of its approach were bristling all over the situation like the quills on a porcupine.

"You helped Perrigo to escape at Regent's Park, didn't you?" He tried to make his voice sleepier and more bored than it had ever been before, but the strain clipped minute snippets off the ends of the syllables. "You're admitting that you caused a wilful breach of the peace by discharging firearms in a public thoroughfare, and you obstructed and assaulted the police in the execution of their duty, and that you became an accessory to wilful murder?"

"Between these four walls," said the Saint, "and in these trousers, I cannot tell a lie."

"Very well." Teal's knuckles whitened over the brim of his hat. "Templar, I arrest you——"

"Oh, no," said the Saint. "Oh, no, Claud, you don't."

The detective tautened up as if he had received a blow. But Simon Templar wasn't even looking at him. He was selecting a cigarette from a box on the centre table. He flicked it into the air and caught it between his lips, with his hands complacently outspread. "My only parlour trick," he remarked, changing the subject.

Teal spoke through his teeth.

"And why?" he flared.

"Only one I ever learnt," explained the Saint naively.

"Why don't I arrest you?"

Simon ranged himself side-saddle on the table. He stroked the cog of an automatic lighter and put his cigarette in the flame.

"Because, Claud, what I say to you now, between these four walls and in these trousers, and what I'd say in the witness-box, are two things so totally different you'd hardly believe they came from the same rosebud mouth."

Teal snorted.

"Perjury, eh? I thought something cleverer than that was coming from you, Saint."

"You needn't be disappointed."

"Got a speech that you think'll let you out?"

"I have, Claud. I've got a peach of a speech. Put me in the dock, and I'll lie like a newspaper proprietor. Any idea what that means?"

The detective shrugged.

"That's your affair," he grunted. "If you want to be run for perjury as well as other things, I'm afraid I can't stop you."

Simon leaned forward, his left hand on his hip and his right hand on his knee. The deep-blue danger lights were glinting more brightly than ever in his eyes, and there was fight in every line of him. A back-to-the-wall, buccaneering fight, rol­licking out to damn the odds.

"Claud, did you think you'd got me at last?"

"I did. And I still think so."

"Thought that the great day had dawned when my name was coming out of the Unfinished Business ledger, and you were going to sleep nights?"

"I did."

"That's too bad, Claud," said the Saint.

Teal pursed his lips tolerantly, but there were pinpoints of red luminance darting about in his gaze.

"I'm still waiting to hear why," he said flatly.

Simon stood up.

"O.K.," he said, and a new indefinable timbre of menace was pulsing into his easy drawl. "I'll tell you why. You asked for a showdown. I'll tell you what you've been thinking. There was a feather you wanted for that hat of yours: you tried all manner of ways to get it, but it wasn't having you. You were too dumb. And then you thought you'd got it. Tonight was your big night. You were going to collect the Saint on the most footling break he ever made. I've got away with every­thing from murder downwards under your bloodshot eyes, but you were going to run me for stealing fourpence out of the Bank of England."

"That's not what I said."

"It goes for what you meant. You get what you asked for, Claud. Thought I was the World's Wet Smack, did you? Fig­ured that I was so busy crashing the mountains that I'd never have time to put a tab on all the molehills? Well, you asked for something. Now would you like to know what I've really been doing tonight?"

"I'll hear it."

"I've been entertaining a dozen friends, and I'll give you from now till Kingdom Come to prove it's a lie!"

The detective glared.

"D'you think I was born yesterday?" he yelped.

"I don't know," said the Saint lazily. "Maybe you weren't born at all. Maybe you were just dug up. What's that got to do with it?"

Teal choked. His restraint split into small pieces, and the winds of his wrath began to twitch the bits out of his grasp, one by one.

"What's the idea?" he demanded heatedly; and the Saint smiled.

"Only the usual alibi, old corpuscle. Like it?"

"Alibi?" Teal rent the words with sadistic violence. "Oh, yes, you've got an alibi! Six men saw you at Regent's Park alone, but you've got twelve men to give you an alibi. And where was this alibi?"

"In the house that communicates with this one by the secret passage you wot of."

"You aren't going to change your mind about that passage?"

"Why should I? It may be eccentric, but there's nothing in the Statute Book to say it's illegal."

"And that's the alibi you're going to try and put over on me?"

"It's more," said the Saint comfortably. "It's the alibi that's going to dish you."

"Is it?"

Simon dropped his cigarette into an ashtray and put his hands in his pockets. He stood in front of the detective, six feet two inches of hair-trigger disorder—with a smile.

"Claud," he said, "you're missing the opportunity of a life­time. I'm letting you in on the ground floor. Out of the kindness of my heart I'm presenting you with a low-down on the organisation of a master criminal that hundreds would give their ears to get. I'm not doing it without expense to myself, either. I'm giving away my labyrinth of secret passages, which means that if I want to be troublesome again I shall have to look for a new headquarters. I'm showing you the works of my emergency alibi, guaranteed to rescue anyone from any predicament: there are four lords, a knight and three officers of field rank in it—they've taken me years to collect, and now I shall have to fossick around for a new bunch. But what are trifles like that between friends? Now be sensible, Claud. It becomes increasingly evident that some one is imper­sonating me."

"Yes, and I know who it is!"

"But it was bound to happen, wasn't it?" said the Saint, continuing in that philosophically persuasive strain under which the razor-keen knife-edges were gliding about like hungry sharks in a smooth tropical sea. "In my misguided efforts to do good, I once made myself so notorious that someone or other was bound to think of hanging his sins on me. The wonder is that it wasn't thought of years ago. Now look at that recent affair in Hampstead——"

"I don't want to know any more about that affair in Hamp­stead," said Teal torridly. "I want to know how you're going to swing it on me this time. Come on. Let me have the names and addresses of these twelve liars. I'll run them for perjury at the same time as I'm running you."

"You won't. But I'll tell you what I'll do——"

The Saint's forefinger shot out. Teal struck it aside.

"Don't do that!" he yapped.

"I have to," said the Saint. "I love the way your tummy dents in and pops out again. Talking of tummies——"

"You tell me what you think you're going to do."

"I'll run you for bribery, corruption, and blackmail!" said the Saint.

His languid voice tightened up on the sentence with a sud­den crispness that had the effect of a gunshot. It rocked the atmosphere like an exploding bomb. And it was followed by a silence that was ear-splitting.

The detective gaped at him with goggling eyes, while a substratum of dull scarlet sapped up under the skin of his face. It was the most flabbergasting utterance that Chief Inspec­tor Teal had listened to. He blinked as if he had been smitten with doubts of his own sanity.

"Have you gone off your head?" he hooted.

"Not that I know of."

"And who's supposed to have been bribing me?"

"I have."

"You?"

"Yeah." The Saint took another cigarette from the box, and lighted it composedly. "Haven't seen your pass-book lately, have you? You'd better ask for it tomorrow morning. You'll discover that in the last six weeks alone you've taken eight hundred and fifty pounds off me. Two hundred pounds on February the sixteenth, two-fifty on March the sixth, four hundred on March the twenty-second—apart from smaller regu­lar payments extending over the previous six months. All the cheques have got your endorsement on 'em, and they've all been passed through your account: they're back in my bank now, available for inspection by any authorised person. It's quite a tidy little sum, Claud—eighteen hundred quid alto­gether. You'll have a grand time explaining it away."

Some of the colour ebbed slowly out of Teal's plump cheeks, and he seemed to sag inside his overcoat. Only the expression in his eyes remained the same—a stare of blank, frozen, incred­ulous stupefaction.

"You framed me for that?" he got out.

"I'm afraid I did." Simon inhaled, and blew a smoke-ring. "It was just another of my brilliant ideas. Are you thinking you can deny the endorsements? It won't be easy. Eight hundred and fifty pounds in six weeks is real money. I wrote it off as insurance, but I still hated parting with it. And how many juries would believe that I paid a detective eighteen hundred pounds inside six months just with the idea of being funny? It'd be a steep gamble for you if we had to go through the courts, old dear. I admit it was very naughty of me to bribe you, but there it is. ... Unfortunately, you couldn't be content with what I gave you. You wanted more, and you tried all sorts of persecutions to get it. First that Hampstead affair, and then this show tonight. . . . Oh, well, Claud, it looks as if we shall have to swing together."

Chapter VIII

The detective seemed to have shrunk. His complexion had gone lined and blotchy, and there was a dazed look in his eyes that stabbed the Saint with a twinge of pity.

Teal was a man facing the end. The bombshell that the Saint had flung at him had knocked the underpinning from the very foundations of his universe. The fight and bluster had gone out of him. He knew, better than anyone, the full and devastating significance of the trap that had been laid for him. There was no way out of it—no human bluff or subterfuge that would let him out. He could stick to his guns and give battle to the last ditch—arrest the Saint as he had intended, take his chance with the threatened alibi, fight out the counter-charge of bribery and corruption when it came along, perhaps even win an acquittal—but it would still be the end of his career. Even if he won, he would be a ruined man. A police officer must be above suspicion. And those endorsed and cancelled cheques of which the Saint had spoken, produced in court, would be damning evidence. Acquitted, Teal would still be under a cloud. Ever afterwards, there would be gossips to point to him and whisper that he was a man who had broken the eleventh commandment and escaped the consequences by the skin of his teeth. And he was not so young as he had been —not so young that he could snap his fingers at the gossips and buckle grimly back into the task of making good again. He would have to resign. He would be through.

He stood there, going paler, but not flinching; and the Saint blew two more smoke-rings.

Teal was trying to think, but he couldn't. The suddenness with which the blow had fallen had pulverised his wits. He felt himself going mentally and physically numb. Under the surveillance of those devilishly bleak blue eyes, and in the vivid presence of what they stood for, he couldn't dp any consecutive and sober thinking.

Abruptly, he settled his belt and shook down his coat.

"I'll see you in the morning," he said, in a sort of gulp, and walked jerkily out of the room.

Simon heard the front door close, and listened to the detec­tive's footsteps clumping past the window and dying away towards Berkeley Square. Something seemed to have paralysed their ordinary ponderous self-reliance. There was the least little tell-tale drag in them. . . . And the Saint turned, and found Patricia watching him.

"A notable triumph," he said quietly.

The girl stood up.

"Were you bluffing?" she asked.

"Of course not. I knew that Teal and I were certain to have that showdown sooner or later, and I was prepared for it. I'd got half a dozen more shocks waiting for him, if he'd stayed to hear them. I just wanted to put the wind up him. But I'd no idea it'd be such a smash."

Patricia looked away.

"It was pathetic," she said. "Oh, I could see him go ten years older while you were talking."

Simon nodded. The fruits of victory were strangely bitter.

"Pat, did you know that an hour or so ago I was planning for this to be the sorriest show Teal ever stuck his nose into? The noble game of Teal-baiting was going to be played as it had never been played before. That's all I've got to say. . . . What a damn-fool racket it is!"

He turned on his heel, and left her without another word.

His mind was too full to talk. Upstairs, he threw off his clothes and tumbled into bed, and almost instantly he fell asleep. That gift of sleep is one that all great adventurers have shared—a sleep that heals the mind and solves all problems. Patricia, coming up later, found his face as peaceful as a child's.

He must have slept very soundly, for the sound of a stealthy rustle only half roused him. Then he heard a click, and he was wide awake.

He opened his eyes and glanced round the room. There was enough light for him to see that there was no unusual shadow anywhere. He looked at his watch, and saw that it was nearly seven o'clock in the morning. For some moments he lay still, gazing at the indicator panel on the opposite wall. An ingen­ious system of invisible alarms connected up with that panel from every part of the house, and it was impossible for anyone to move about inside No. 7, Upper Berkeley Mews at night without every yard of his progress being charted by winking little coloured bulbs on the panel. But not one bulb was flickering, and the auxiliary buzzer under the Saint's pillow was silent.

Simon frowned puzzledly, wondering if his imagination had deceived him. And then a breath-taking duet of inspirations whirled into his brain, and he wriggled noiselessly from be­tween the sheets.

He pushed the pier-glass aside, and touched a switch that illuminated the secret passage. Right at his feet, he saw a charred match-end lying on the felt matting, and his lips tightened. He sped down the corridor, and entered the end house. In front of him, the door of a cupboard, and its false back communicating with the bathroom in 104, Berkeley Square, were both wide open; and he remembered that he had left them ajar behind him on the previous night, in his haste to get home and resume the feud with Chief Inspector Teal. The bathroom door was also ajar; he slipped through it, and emerged on the landing. A tiny glow of light farther down the stairs caught his eye, and vanished immediately.

Then he established a second link between the two parts of the duet that had brought him to where he was and wished he had delayed the chase while he picked up his gun. He crept downwards, and saw a shadow that moved.

"Stay where you are," he rapped. "I've got you covered!"

The shadow leapt away, and Simon hurled himself after it. He was still four steps behind when he sprang through the air and landed on the man's shoulders. They crashed down to­gether, rolled down the remaining treads, and reached the bottom with a bump. The Saint groped for a strangle-hold. He had found it with one hand when he saw a dull gleam of steel in the light of a street lamp that flung a faint nimbus of rays through the transom above the front door. He squirmed aside, and the point ripped his pyjamas and thudded into the floor. Then a bony knee picked up into his stomach, and he gasped and went limp with agony. The front door banged while he lay there twisting helplessly.

It was ten minutes before he was able to stagger to his feet and go on a tour of investigation. Down in the basement, he found the cellar door wide open. A hole big enough for a man's arm to pass through had been carved out of it a foot above the massive bolt, and the flagstones were littered with chips of wood. Simon realised that he had been incredibly careless.

He returned to his bedroom and looked at the coat he had been wearing. It had been moved from where he had thrown it down—that had been the cause of the soft rustling that had first disturbed his slumbers. A further investigation showed that Perrigo's passport and tickets were missing from the pocket where Simon had left them. This was no worse than the Saint had expected.

Aching, he went back to bed and slept again. And this time he dreamed a dream.

He was running up the wrong side of a narrow moving stairway. Patricia was in front of him, and he couldn't go fast enough; he had to keep pushing her. He wanted to get past her and catch Perrigo, who was dancing about just out of his grasp. Perrigo was dressed something like an organ-grinder's monkey, in a ridiculous straw hat, a tail coat, and a pair of white flannel trousers. There was an enormous diamond necklace over his collar; and he jeered and grimaced, and bawled: "Not in these trousers." Then the scene changed, and Teal came riding by on a giraffe, wearing a pair of plus fours; and he also said: "Not in these trousers."

Then the Saint woke up, and saw that it was half-past eight. He jumped out of bed, lighted a cigarette, and made for the bathroom. He soaped his face and shaved, haunted by his dream for some reason that he could not nail down; and he was wallowing in bath salts when the interpretation of it flashed upon him with an aptness that made him erupt out of the water with an almighty splash.

Ten minutes later, gorgeously apparelled in his new spring suit, he tore down the stairs and found bacon and eggs on the table and Patricia reading a newspaper.

"Perrigo has left us," he said.

The girl looked up with startled eyes, but Simon was laugh­ing.

"He's left us, but I know where he's gone," said the Saint. "He collected his papers before he went. I forgot that he carried a knife, and locked him up without fanning him—he spent the night digging his way through the door, and came through here for his passport in the early morning. I was just too slow to catch him. We'll meet him again on the boat train —it leaves at ten o'clock."

"How do you know he'll be on it?"

"If he didn't mean to do that, why did he come back for his ticket? No—I know exactly what's in his head. He knows that he's only got one way out, now that he's bereaved of Isadore, and he's going to try to make the grade. He's made up his mind that I'm not helping the police, and he's going to take his chance on a straight duck with me—and I'll bet he'll park himself in the most crowded compartment he can find, just to give himself the turn of the odds. And I'll say some more; I know where those diamonds are now!"

"Have you got them?"

"Not yet. But up at Isadore's I spotted that Perrigo's cos­tume was assorted. I thought he'd changed coats with Frankie Hormer, and I went over his jacket twice before Teal buzzed in. Naturally, I didn't find anything. I must have been half­witted. It wasn't coats he'd swapped—it was trousers. Those diamonds are sewn up somewhere in Bertie's leg draperies!"

Patricia come over to the table.

"Have you thought any more about Teal?" she asked.

Simon strode across to a book-case and took down a small leather-bound volume. There were months of painstaking work in its unassuming compass—names, addresses, personal data, means of approach, sources of evidence, all the la­boriously perfected groundwork that enabled the Saint's raids upon the underworld to be carried through so smoothly and made their meteoric audacity possible.

"Pat," said the Saint, "I'm going to make Teal a great man. It may be extravagant, but what the hell? Can you have the whole earth for ten cents? This party has already cost us our home, our prize alibi, and one of our shrewdest counter-attacks —but who cares? Let's finish the thing in style. I'm the clever­est man in the world. Can't I find six more homes, work out fourteen bigger and better alibis, and invent seventy-nine more stratagems and spoils? Can't I fill two more books like this if I want to?"

Patricia put her arms round his neck.

"Are you going to give Teal that book?"

The Saint nodded. He was radiant.

"I'm going to steal Perrigo's pants, Claud Eustace is going to smile again, and you and I are going away together."

Chapter IX

The Saint was in a thaumaturgical mood. He performed a minor sorcery on a Pullman attendant that materialised seats where none had been before, and ensconced himself with the air of a wizard taking his ease. After a couple of meditative cigarettes, he produced a pencil and commenced a metrical composition in the margins of the wine list.

He was still scribbling with unalloyed enthusiasm when Pa­tricia got up and went for a walk down the train. She was away for several minutes; and when she returned, the Saint looked up and deliberately disregarded the confusion in her eyes.

"Give ear," he said. "This is the Ballad of the Bold Bad Man, another Precautionary Tale:

Daniel Dinwiddie Gigsworth-Glue

Was warranted by those who knew

To be a perfect paragon

With or without his trousers on;

An upright man (the Gigsworths are

Peerlessly perpendicular)

Staunch to the old morality,

Who would have rather died than be

Observed at Slumpton-under-Slop

In bathing drawers without the top."

"Simon," said the girl, "Perrigo isn't on the train." The Saint put down his pencil.

"He is, old darling. I saw him when we boarded it at Water­loo, and I think he saw me."

"But I've looked in every carriage——"

"Did you take everyone's finger-prints?"

"A man like Perrigo wouldn't find it easy to disguise himself."

Simon smiled.

"Disguises are tricky things," he said. "It isn't the false whiskers and the putty nose that get you down—it's the little details. Did I ever tell you about a friend of mine who thought he'd get the inside dope about Chelsea? He bought a pink shirt and a velvet coat, grew a large semicircular beard, rented a studio, and changed his name to Prmnlovcwz; and he had a great time until one day they caught him in an artist's colourman's trying to buy a tube of Golder's Green. . . . Now you must hear some more about Daniel:

How lovely, oh, how luminous

His spotless virtue seemed to us

Who sat among the cherubim

Reserving Daniel's pew for him!

Impossible to indispose,

His honour, shining like his nose,

Blazed through an age of sin and strife

The beacon of a blameless life. . . .

And then he fell. . . .

The Tempter, who

Was mortified by Daniel Glue,

Played his last evil card; and Dan

Who like a perfect gentleman,

Had scorned strong drink and wicked oaths

And blondes with pink silk underclothes,

Bought (Oh, we saw the angels weep!)

A ticket in the Irish Sweep."

Patricia reached across the table and captured the Saint's hands.

"Simon, I won't be out of it! Where is Perrigo?"

"If you talk much louder, he'll hear you."

"He isn't in this coach!"

"He's in the next one."

The girl stared.

"What does he look like?"

Simon smiled, lighting a cigarette.

"He's chosen the simplest and nearly the most effective dis­guise there is. He's got himself up as a very fair imitation of our old pal the Negro Spiritual." The Saint looked at her with merry eyes. "He's done it well, too; but I spotted him at once. Hence my parable. Did you ever see a nigger with light yellow eyes? They may exist, but I've never met one. There used to be a blue-eyed Sikh in Hong Kong who became quite famous, but that's the only similar freak I've met. So when I got a glimpse of those eyes I took another peek at the face—and Perrigo it was. Remember him now?"

Patricia nodded breathlessly.

"Why couldn't I see it?" she exclaimed.

"You've got to have a brain for that sort of thing," said the Saint modestly.

"But—yes, I remember now—the carriage he's in is full——"

"And you're wondering how I'm going to get his trousers off him? Well, the problem certainly has its interesting angles. How does one steal a man's trousers on a crowded train? You mayn't believe it, but I see difficulties about that myself."

An official came down the train, checking up visas and issuing embarkation vouchers. Simon obtained a couple of passes, and smoked thoughtfully for some minutes. And then he laughed and stood up.

"Why worry?" he wanted to know. "I've thought of a much better thing to do. One of my really wonderful inspirations."

"What's that?"

Simon tapped her on the shoulder.

"I'm going to beguile the time by baiting Bertie," he said, with immense solemnity. "C'mon!"

He hurtled off in his volcanic way, with a long-striding swing of impetuous limbs, as if a gale of wind swept him on.

And Patricia Holm was smiling as she ran to catch him up— the unfathomable and infinitely tender smile of all the women who have been doomed to love romantic men. For she knew the Saint better than he knew himself. He could not grow old. Oh, yes, he would grow in years, would feel more deeply, would think more deeply, would endeavour with spasmodic soberness to fall in line with the common facts of life; but the mainsprings of his character could not change. He would de­ceive himself, but he would never deceive her. Even now, she knew what was in his mind. He was trying to brace himself to march down the road that all his friends had taken. He was daring himself to take up the glove that the High Gods had thrown at his feet, and to take it up as he would have taken up any other challenge—with a laugh and a flourish, and the sound of trumpets in his ears. And already she knew how she would answer him.

She came up behind him and caught his elbow.

"But is this going to help you, lad?"

"It will amuse me," said the Saint. "And it's an act of piety. It's our sacred duty to see that Bertie has a journey he'll never forget. I shall open the ball by trying to touch him for a subscription to the funds of the Society for Distributing Woollen Vests to the Patriarchs of the Upper Dogsboddi. Speaking emotionally and in a loud voice I shall wax eloquent on the work that has already been done among his black brothers, and invite him to make a contribution. If he does, we'll go and drink it and think up something else. If he doesn't, you'll barge in and ask him for his autograph. Address him as Al Jolson, and ask him to sing something. After that——"

"After that," said Patricia firmly, "he'll pull the commu­nication cord, and we shall both be thrown off the train. Lead on, boy!"

Simon nodded, and went to the door of the compartment he had marked down.

And there he stopped, statuesquely, while the skyward-slant­ing cigarette between his lips sank slowly through the arc of a circle and ended up at a comically contrasting droop.

After a few seconds, Patricia stepped to his side and also looked into the compartment. And the Saint took the cigarette from his mouth and exhaled smoke in a long expiring whistle.

Perrigo was gone.

There wasn't a doubt about that. The corner seat that he had occupied was as innocent of human habitation as any corner seat has ever been since George Stephenson hitched up his wagons and went rioting down to Stockton-upon-Tees. If not more so. As for the other seats, they were occupied respec­tively by a portly matron with a wart on her chin, a small boy in a sailor suit, and a thin-flanked female with pimples and a camouflaged copy of The Well of Loneliness, into none of whom could Gunner Perrigo by any conceivable miracle of make-up have transformed himself. . . . Those were the irre­futable facts about the scene, pithily and systematically re­corded; and the longer one looked at them, the more gratui­tously grisly they became.

Simon singed the inoffensive air with a line of oratory that would have scorched the hide of a salamander. He did it as if his heart was in the job, which it was. Carefully and compre­hensively, he covered every aspect and detail of the situation with a calorific lavishness of imagery that would have warmed the cockles of a sergeant-major's heart. Nobody and nothing, however remotely connected with the incident, was left outside the wide embrace of his oration. He started with the paleo­lithic progenitors of the said George Stephenson, and worked steadily down to the back teeth of Isadore Elberman's grand­children. At which point Patricia interrupted him.

"He might be having a wash or something," she said.

"Yeah!" The Saint was scathing. "Sure, he might be having a wash. And he took his bag with him in case the flies laid eggs on it. Did you notice that bag? I did. It was brand-new—hadn't a scratch on it. He'd been doing some early morning shopping before he caught the train, hustling up some kit for the voyage. All his own stuff was at Isadore's, and he wouldn't risk going back there. And his bag's gone!"

The embarkation officer passed them, and opened the door of the compartment.

"Miss Lovedew?" The pimply female acknowledged it."Your papers are quite in order ——"

Simon took Patricia's arm and steered her gently away.

"Her name is Lovedew," he said sepulchrally. "Let us go and find somewhere to die."

They tottered a few steps down the corridor; and then Patricia said: "He must be still on the train! We haven't slowed up once since we started, and he couldn't have jumped off without breaking his neck——"

The Saint gripped her hands.

"You're right!" he whooped. "Pat, you're damn right! I said you wanted a brain for this sort of thing. Bertie must be on the train still, and if he's on the train we'll find him—if we have to take the whole outfit to pieces. Now, you go that way and I'll go this way, and you keep your eyes peeled. And if you see a man with a huge tufted beard, you take hold of it and give it a good pull!"

"Right-o, Saint!"

"Then let's go!"

He went flying down the alley, lurching from side to side from the rocking of the train, and contriving to light another cigarette as he went.

He did his share thoroughly. In the space of ten minutes he reviewed a selection of passengers so variegated that his brain began to reel. Before his eyes passed an array of physiognomies that would have made Cesare Lombroso chirrup ecstatically and reach for his tape-measure. Americans of all shapes and sizes, Englishmen in plus fours, flannel bags, and natty suitings, male children, female children, ambiguous children, large women, small women, three cosmopolitan millionaires— one fat, one thin, one sozzled—three cosmopolitan millionaires' wives—ditto, but shuffled—a novelist, an actor, a politician, four Parsees, three Hindus, two Chinese, and a wild man from Borneo. Simon Templar inspected every one of them who could by any stretch of imagination have come within the frame of the picture, and acquired sufficient data to write three books or six hundred and eighty-seven modern novels. But he did not find Gunner Perrigo.

He came to the end of the last coach, and stood gazing moodily out of the window before starting back on the return journey.

And it was while he was there that he saw a strange sight.

The first manifestation of it did not impress him immedi­ately. It was simply a scrap of white that went drifting past the window. His eyes followed it abstractedly, and then reverted to their gloomy concentration on the scenery. Then two more scraps of white flittered past his nose, and a second later he saw a spread of red stuff fluttering feebly on the wire fence beside the line.

The Saint frowned, and watched more attentively. And a perfect cataract of whatnots began to aviate past his eyes and distribute themselves about the route. Big whatnots and little whatnots, in divers formations and half the colours of the rainbow, went wafting by the window and scattered over the fields and hedges. A mass of green taffeta flapped past, looking like a bilious vulture after an argument with a steam hammer, and was closely followed by a jaundiced cotton seagull that seemed to have suffered a similar experience. A covey of miscel­laneous bits and pieces drove by in hot pursuit. No less than eight palpitating banners of assorted hues curvetted down the breeze and perched on railings and telegraph poles by the wayside. It went on until the entire landscape seemed to be littered with the loot of all the emporia of Knightsbridge and the Brompton Road.

And suddenly the meaning of it flashed upon the Saint—so suddenly and lucidly that he threw back his head and bowed before a gust of helpless mirth.

He spun round to the door beside him. He had made sure that it was locked, but he must have been mistaken. He heaved his shoulder at it, and it burst open—-it had been temporarily secured with a gimlet, as he discovered later. But at that moment he was not curious about that. He hadn't a doubt in his head that his latest and most sudden inspiration was right, and he knew exactly what he was going to do about it.

Five minutes later, after a brief interlude for wash and brush-up purposes, he was careering blissfully back along the corridor on one of the most supremely joyous journeys of his life.

At the compartment at which Perrigo had been, he stopped, and opened the door.

"Miss Lovedew," he said pensively, and again the impetigi­nous female looked up and acknowledged the charge, "Is your luggage insured?"

"Of course," said the woman. "Why?"

"You should begin making out your claim immediately," said the Saint.

The woman stared.

"I don't understand you. What's happened? Are you one of the company's servants?"

"I am the head cook and bottle-washer," said the Saint gravely, "and I did not like your red flannel nighties."

He closed the door again and passed on, carolling hilar­iously to himself, and leaving the lady to suffer from as­tounded fury as well as acne.

In the Pullman he found Patricia gazing disconsolately in front of her. Her face lighted up as he arrived.

"Did you find him?"

Simon sat down.

"What luck did you have?"

"Just sweet damn-all," said the girl wryly. "I've been over my part of the train four times, and I wouldn't have missed Perrigo if he'd disguised himself as a mosquito."

"I am inspired," said the Saint.

He took the wine list and his pencil, and wrote rapidly. Then he held up the sheet and read:

"The mountains shook, the thunders came,

The very heavens wept for shame;

A Gigsworth in a white chemise

Visibly vortexed at the knees,

While Dan's defection turned quite giddy

The ghost of Ancestor Dinwiddie.

If Dan had been a common cad

It wouldn't have been half so bad;

If he had merely robbed a bank,

Or floated companies that sank,

Or, with a piece of sharp bamboo,

Bashfully bumped off Mrs. Glue;

They might have understood his whim

And, in the end, forgiven him:

Such things, though odd, have now and then

Been done by perfect gentlemen;

But Daniel's foul iniquity

Could hardly have been worse if he

Had bought (or so it seemed to them)

A chocolate after 9 p.m."

Patricia smiled.

"Will you always be mad?" she asked.

"Until the day I die, please God," said the Saint.

"But if you didn't find Perrigo——"

"But I did find him!"

The girl gasped.

"You found him?"

Simon nodded; and she saw then that his eyes were laughing.

"I did. He was in the luggage van at the end, heaving mentionables and unmentionables out of a wardrobe trunk. And just for the glory of it, Pat, the trunk was labelled with the immortal name of Lovedew—I found that out afterwards and tried to break the news to her, but I don't think she believed me. Anyway, I whaled into him, and there was a breezy exchange of pleasantries. And the long and the short of

"That Perrigo is locked up in that trunk, just where he wanted to be; but there's an entirely new set of labels on it that are going to cause no small stir on board the Berengaria if Claud Eustace arrives in time. Which I expect he will— Isadore is almost certain to have squealed. And all we've got to do is wait for the orchestra to tune up." Simon looked at his watch. "There's half an hour to go yet, old Pat, and I think we might stand ourselves a bottle!"

Chapter X

A clock was booming the half-hour after twelve when Chief Inspector Teal climbed stiffly out of his special police car at the gates of the Ocean Dock. It had been half-past ten when he left Albany Street Police Station, and that single chime indicated that the Flying Squad driver had made a very creditable run of it from London to Southampton.

For Isadore Elberman had duly squealed, as the Saint had expected, and it had been no mean squeal. Considerably stewed down after a sleepless night in the cells, he had reiter­ated to the Divisional Inspector the story with which he had failed to gain Teal's ear the evening before; and the tale had come through with a wealth of embellishments in the way of circumstantial detail that had made the Inspector reach hastily for the telephone and call for Mr. Teal to lend his personal patronage to the squeak.

Isadora Elberman was not the only member of the cast who had spent a sleepless night. Teal had been waiting on the doorstep of his bank when it opened in the morning. He asked casually for his balance, and in a few minutes the cashier passed a slip of paper across the counter. It showed exactly one thousand eight hundred pounds more to his credit than it should have done, and he had no need to make further inquir­ies. He took a taxi from the bank to Upper Berkeley Mews; but a prolonged assault on the front door elicited no response, and the relief watcher told him that Templar and the girl had gone out at nine-thirty and had not returned. Teal went back to New Scotland Yard, and it was there that the call from Albany Street found him.

And on the way down to Southampton the different frag­ments of the jigsaw in which he had involved himself had fitted themselves together in his head, dovetailing neatly into one another without a gap or a protuberance anywhere, and producing a shape with one coherent outline and a sickeningly simple picture lithographed upon it in three colours. So far as the raw stark facts of the case were concerned, there wasn't a leak or a loose end in the whole copper-bottomed consolida­tion of them. It was as puerile and patent as the most ele­mentary exercise in kindergarten arithmetic. It sat up on its hind legs and leered at him.

Slowly and stolidly, with clenched fists buried deep in the pockets of his overcoat, Chief Inspector Teal went up the gangway of the Berengaria to see the story through.

And down in the well-deck aft, Simon Templar was sitting on a wardrobe trunk discoursing genially to two stewards, a porter, an irate lady with pimples, and a small group of fasci­nated passengers.

"I agree," the Saint was saying. "It is an outrage. But you must blame Bertie for that. I can only conclude that he doesn't like red flannel nighties either. So far as can be de­duced from the circumstances, the sight of your eminently respectable robes filled him with such an uncontrollable frenzy that he began to empty the whole contents of your trunk out of the window. But am I to blame? Am I Bertie's keeper? At a moment when my back was turned——"

"I don't believe you!" stormed the irate lady. "You're a common thief, that's what you are! I should know that trunk anywhere. I can describe everything that's in it——"

"I'll bet you can't," said the Saint.

The lady appealed to the assembled spectators.

"This is unbearable!" she raved. "It's the most barefaced imposture I ever heard of! This man has stolen my clothes and put his own labels on the trunk——"

"Madam," said the Saint, "I've never disputed that the trunk, as a trunk, was yours. The labels refer to the destination of the contents. As a strictly law-abiding citizen——"

"Where," demanded the pimply female hysterically, "is the Captain?"

And at that point Teal shouldered himself into the front rank of the crowd.

Just for a second he stood looking at the Saint, and Simon saw that there were shadows under his eyes and the faintest trace of flabbiness about his cheeks. But the eyes themselves were hard and expressionless, and the lips below them were pressed up into a dour line.

"I thought I should find you here," he said.

The last of the Lovedews whirled round.

"Do you know this man?"

"Yes," said Teal rigidly. "I know him."

The Saint crossed his legs and took out a cigarette-case. He indicated the detective with a wave of his hand.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he murmured, "allow me to introduce the deus ex machina, or whizzbang out of the works. This is Mr. Claud Eustace Teal, who is going to tell us about his wanderings in Northern Euthanasia. Mr. Teal, Miss Lovedew. Miss Lovedew ——"

"Teal?" The infuriated lady leapt back as though she had been stung. "Are you Teal?"

"That is my name," said the slightly startled detective.

"You stand there and admit that to me?"

"Yes—of course."

The woman reeled back into the arms of one of the bystand­ers.

"Has everyone gone mad?" she wailed. "I'm being robbed in broad daylight! That is this man's accomplice—he hasn't de­nied it! Can nobody do anything to stop them?"

Teal blinked.

"I'm a police officer," he said.

"You're a liar!" screamed the woman.

"My good lady ——"

"Don't you dare speak to me like that! You're a low, mean, impertinent thief——"

"But——"

"I want my trunk. I'm going to have my trunk! How can I go to New York without my trunk? That is my own trunk——"

"But, Claud," said the Saint earnestly, "have you seen the trunk of the butler of her uncle? That is a trunk of the most colossal."

Miss Lovedew gazed wildly about her.

"Will no one help me?" she moaned.

Simon removed the cigarette from his mouth and stood up. He placed one foot on the trunk, rested his right forearm on his knee, and raised a hand for silence.

"May I be allowed to explain?" he said.

The woman clutched her forehead.

"Is anyone going to listen to this—this—this——"

"Gentleman?" suggested the Saint, tentatively.

Teal stepped forward and took a grip of his belt.

"I am a police officer," he repeated trenchantly, "and I should certainly like to hear his explanation."

This time he made the statement of his identity with such a bald authoritativeness that the buzz of surrounding comment died down to a tense hush. Even the pimply protagonist gaped at him in silence, with her assurance momentarily shaken. The stillness piled up with almost theatrical effect.

"Well?" said Teal.

The Saint gestured airily with his cigarette.

"You arrive," he said, "in time to arbitrate over a serious misunderstanding. Let me give you the facts. I travelled down by the boat train from Waterloo this morning in order to keep an eye on a friend of ours whom we'll call Bertie. During the journey I lost sight of him. I tootled around to find out what was happening to him, and eventually located him in the luggage van and in the very act of throwing the last of Miss Lovedew's what's-its out of the window."

"It's a lie!" bleated the lady, faint but pursuing. "He stole my clothes, insulted me in my carriage——"

"We come to that in a minute," said the Saint imperturba­bly. "As I was saying, I found Bertie just crawling into the trunk he had so unceremoniously emptied. At great personal peril and inconvenience, Claud, I helped him towards his objective and locked him up for delivery to yourself. In order to do this, I was compelled to make a temporary alteration to the labels on the trunk, which I admit I borrowed for the good cause without Miss Lovedew's permission. I made one attempt to explain the circumstances to her, but was rejected with contumely. Then, while I was waiting for you to arrive, this argument about the rightful ownership of the property began. The trunk, as I've never denied, belongs to Miss Lovedew. The dispute seems to be about Bertie."

Miss Lovedew goggled at him.

"Do you mean to say that there's a man in that trunk?" she demanded hideously.

"Madam," said the Saint, "there is. Would you like him? Mr. Teal has the first claim, but I'm open to competitive offers. The specimen is in full running order, suffering at the moment from a black eye and an aching jaw, but otherwise complete and ready for the road. He is highly-strung and sensitive, but extremely virile. Fed on a diet of rye whisky and caviare——"

Teal bent over the trunk and examined the labels. The name on them was his own. He straightened up and levelled his gaze inflexibly upon the Saint.

"I'll talk to you alone for a moment," he said.

"Pleasure," said the Saint briefly.

The detective looked round.

"That trunk is not to be touched without my permission," he said.

He walked over to the rail, and Simon Templar strolled along by his side. They passed out of earshot of the crowd, and stopped. For a few seconds they eyed each other steadily.

"Is that Perrigo you've got in that trunk?" Teal asked pres­ently.

"None other."

"We've had a full confession from Elberman. Do you know what the penalty is for being in possession of illicit diamonds?"

"I know what the penalty is for being caught in possession of illicit diamonds," said the Saint circumspectly.

"Do you know where those diamonds are now?"

Simon nodded.

"They are sewn into the seat of Perrigo's pants," he said.

"Is that what you wanted Perrigo for?"

The Saint leaned on the rail.

"You know, Claud," he remarked, "you're the damnedest fool."

Teal's eyes hardened.

"Why?"

"Because you're playing the damnedest fool game with me. Have you ever known me be an accessory to wanton murder?"

"I've known you to be mixed up in some darned funny things."

"You've never known me to be mixed up in anything as darned funny as that. But you work yourself up to the point where you're ready to believe anything you want to believe. It's the racket. It's dog eating dog. I beat you to something, and you get mad. When you get mad, I have to bait you. The more I bait you, the madder you get. And the madder you get, the more I have to bait you. We get so's nothing's too bad for us to do to each other." The Saint smiled. "Well, Claud, I'm taking a little holiday, and before I go I'm giving you a break."

Teal shrugged mountainously, but for a moment he said nothing. And the Saint balanced his cigarette on his thumb­nail and flipped it far and wide.

"Let me do some thinking for you," he said. "I'm great on doing other people's thinking for them these days. . . . Over­night you thought over what I said to you last evening. This morning you verified that I hadn't been bluffing. And you knew there was only one thing for you to do. Your conscience wouldn't let you lie down under what I'd done. You'd got to take what was coming to you—arrest me, and face the music. You'd got to play square with yourself, even if it broke you. I know just how you felt. I admire you for it. But I'm not going to let you do it."

"No?"

"Not in these trousers," said the Saint. "Why should you? You've got Perrigo, and I'm ready for a short rest. And here's your surprise packet. Get busy on what it tells you, and you may be a superintendent before the end of the season."

Teal glanced at the book which the Saint had thrust into his hands, and turned it over thoughtfully.

Then he looked again at the Saint. His face was still as impassive as the face of a graven image, but a little of the chilled steel had gone out of his eyes. And, as he looked, he saw that the Saint was laughing again—the old, unchangeable, soundless, impudent Saintly laughter. And the blue imps in the Saint's eyes danced.

"I play the game by my own rules, Claud," said the Saint. "Don't you forget it. That profound philosophy covers the craziest things I do. It also makes me the only man in this bleary age who enjoys every minute of his life. And"—for the last time in that story, the Saintly forefinger drove gaily and debonairly to its mark—"if you take a leaf out of my book, Claud, one day, Claud, you will have fun and games for ever." And then the Saint was gone.

He departed in the Saintly way, with a last Saintly smile and the clap of a hand on the detective's shoulder; and Teal watched him go without a word.

Patricia was waiting for him farther along the deck. He fell into step beside her, and they went down the gangway and crossed the quay. At the corner of a warehouse Simon stopped. Quite quietly he looked at her, propping up the building with one hand.

And the girl knew what his silence meant. For him, the die was cast; and, being the man he was, he was ready to pay cash. His hand was in his pocket, and the smile hadn't wavered on his lips. But just for that moment he was taking his unflinching farewell of the fair fields of irresponsible adven­ture, understanding just what it would mean to him to pay the score, scanning the road ahead with the steady eyes that had never feared anything in this life. And he was ready to start the journey there and then.

And Patricia smiled. She had never loved him more than she did at that moment; but she smiled with nothing but the smile behind her eyes. And she answered before he had spoken.

"Boy," she said, "I couldn't be happier than I am now."

He did not move. She went on, quickly:

"Don't say it, Simon! I don't want you to. Haven't we both got everything we want as it is? Isn't life splendid enough? Aren't we going to have more adventures, and—and—"

"Fun and games for ever?"

"Yes! Aren't we? Why spoil the magic? I won't listen to you. Even if we've missed out on this adventure—"

Suddenly he laughed. His hands went to his hips. She had been waiting for that laugh. She had put all she was into the task of winning it. And, with that laugh, the spell that had held his eyes so quiet and steady was broken. She saw the leap of the old mirth and glamour lighting them again. She was happy.

"Pat, is that really what you want?"

"It's everything I want."

"To go on with the fighting and the fun? To go on racketing around the world, doing everything that's utterly and gloriously mad—swaggering, swashbuckling, singing—showing all these dreary old-dogs what can be done with life—not giving a damn for anyone—robbing the rich, helping the poor —plaguing the pompous—killing dragons, pulling policemen's legs——"

"I'm ready for it all!"

He caught her hands.

"Are you sure?"

"Positive."

"Not one tiny little doubt about it?"

"Not one."

"Then we can start this minute."

She stared.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

The Saint loosened his belt and pointed downwards. Even then, she didn't understand.

"Remember how I found Bertie? He was halfway into the Lovedew's wardrobe trunk. We had a short but merry scrap. And then he went on in. Well, during the tumult and the shouting, and the general excitement, in the course of which Bertie soaked up one of the juiciest K.O.s I've ever distrib­uted—"

He broke off and the girl turned round in amazed perplex­ity.

From somewhere on the Berengaria had pealed out the wild and frantic shriek of an irreparably outraged camel collapsing under the last intolerable straw.

Patricia turned again, her face blank with bewilderment.

"What on earth was that?" she asked.

The Saint smiled seraphically.

"That was the death-cry of old Pimply-face. They've just opened her trunk and discovered Bertie. And he has no trousers on. We can begin our travels right now," said the Saint.