“Since Roosevelt became President there have been no more bad men,” he said solemnly.
Another of the men leaned round in his chair.
“Yo’re new to these parts, I guess,” he drawled. “You oughta know that them stories belong back in the days of your grandfather. This is a peaceful country now.”
“By hookey,” erupted the third man, who wore a sheriff’s badge, “it had better be! You won’t see any bad men here while I’m responsible.”
Intuccio nodded. He turned to Urselli again, his eyes dispassionately intent, gleaming motionlessly in their hollow sockets like deep pools of stagnant water in a cave.
“You see, Amadeo?” he said. “At one time there were bad men and bandits here. Even now, sometimes, little things have happened. There are some who believe that the bad men are not altogether stamped out. But the times have changed.” The craglike head, inscrutable as a mask of rugged wax, held itself squarely in the field of Urselli’s shifting eyes. “Today you will find more robbers in the big cities of America than you will find here.”
Simon could still hear every intonation of the slow rough-hewn voice when he went up to bed, and he ran over it again and again in his mind while he smoked the last cigarette of the day. In spite of the recollection he lost no sleep. A glimpse of a pretty girl leads to an inn, and to the same inn comes an Americanized Italian who is not quite everything that an Americanized Italian should be, and all at once there is a mystery; that is how these things happen, but the Saint was still waiting for his own cue. Then he woke up late the next morning, and suddenly it dawned upon him, with dazzling simplicity, that the most elementary and obvious solution would be to lure Amadeo personally into a secluded spot, scratch him tactfully, and see what his subcutaneous ego looked like to the naked eye.
He went down to breakfast in the same exuberant spirits to which any promise of direct action always raised him. Simon Templar’s conception of a tactful approach was one which nobody else had ever been able to comprehend.
The girl asked him what he proposed to do that day.
“You will remember that I am an outlaw,” said the Saint. “I am going to make a raid.”