“Okay, boss.”
“I thought so!” Inspector Fernack bared his teeth in uneasy triumph.
Hoppy shuffled to the divan, bent over, and reached under it.
“Here dey are!” he announced, hauling them out. He thrust the damp leather mitts at Fernack with all the graciousness of a dyspeptic mastodon. “Take ’em!”
The Saint selected a cigarette from the silver box on the table.
“I borrowed them for the same reason you want them,” he said. “I was afraid there’d be a substitution before you thought of it.”
He held a lighter to his cigarette, smiling at the Inspector over its little golden spear-point of flame.
Fernack scowled, staring at the Saint for a longish moment.
“So that’s your story!” he began, with an imminent crescendo. “Now let me tell you—”
And there, in a hopeless anti-climax, he stopped. Galling memories of past pitfalls into which his headlong suspicions had tripped him in previous encounters with the Saint seemed for once to take all the conviction out of his attack. What, after all, was he going to tell the Saint? That he was under arrest for stealing a pair of boxing gloves?