Whitey glanced at him with no recognition, his wide, flexible mouth contorted curiously.
Hoppy blinked.
“Whitey! Whassamatter?”
Pat glanced at the ring with quick concern.
“Is Smith hurt badly?”
The tow-headed little man with the lean limber face stared at her a moment with twisting lips. When he spoke his high-pitched Brooklyn accent was routed with tragedy.
“He’s dead,” he said, and turned away.
The spectral cymbals of grim adventure clashed an eerie tocsin within the Saint, louder now than when first he heard their faint far notes in Connie Grady’s flustered appeal for him to search the sinister riddle of the Angel’s victories, and save her fiancé from unknown peril. They had rung in the nebulous confusion of her plea, in the tortured suspicions unvoiced within her haunted eyes... Now he heard their swelling beat again, a phantom reprise that prickled his skin with ghostly chills.
He spoke softly into Pat’s ear.
“Darling, I just remembered. Hoppy and I have some vitally urgent business to attend to immediately. Do you mind going home alone — at once?”