The meal was completed with some grudging attempts at graciousness on the part of Intuccio at which Urselli gave Simon a covert grimace of relief and turned his attentions more openly to Lucia. When it was over the girl picked up a pail and went out to draw water from the well to wash the dishes, and Urselli followed her out with an offer of help. The old man’s shadowed eyes gazed after them fixedly.
“You have an attractive daughter,” Simon observed, with a touch of humorous significance.
Intuccio’s face turned slowly back to him, and the Saint was surprised by its darkness. There was a hunted flicker of fear and suspicion at the back of the innkeeper’s eyes, the same look that Simon might have expected if he had burst into the solitude of a hermit.
“Perhaps I should not have told that Amadeo that I had so much money,” he said, with an equal significance in the harshness of his reply.
“Why worry,” asked the Saint gently, “when it was not true?”
For the first time the semblance of a smile touched the innkeeper’s grim mouth.
“Amadeo does not know that. But I had to say it. I have not three hundred dollars, signor, but I have pride. Why should I let Amadeo boast against me?”
He raised himself from the table and stumped out of the kitchen. Simon went out and smoked a cigarette in the fresh air on the veranda. Later he found the old man serving the scanty orders of his evening customers in the big gloomy outer room, moving about his work in the same heavy unsmiling manner.
Simon drifted into a place at the long communal table which occupied the center of the room. The four customers were at the other end of it, grouped over a game of poker. Simon ordered himself a drink and listened abstractedly to the scuff of cards and the expressionless voices of the players. Intuccio called for the girl to come out and take over the serving; she came, composed and silent, and the old man joined Simon at the table. He sat there with his brawny arms spread forward and his glass held clumsily between his huge hands, without speaking, and the Saint wondered what thoughts were passing through the dark caverns of that heavy impenetrable mind. There was a sense of menace about that somber immobility, a dreadful inhumanity of aloofness, that sent an eerie ripple of half-understanding up Simon Templar’s spine. Suddenly he knew why so few men came to the inn.
Amadeo Urselli entered jauntily, and pulled out a chair beside them.