“Just a minute, Mel,” he said. “Are you drunk, or what? First you send me a wire and tell me to meet you at the airport. I watch all the planes come in until my ears are buzzing. Then you send me another wire there about some new buyer for the Lucky Nugget, and tell me to phone the Phelan dame and tell her to hold out for seventy grand—”
A horrible presentiment crawled over Mr Rochborne.
“What are you talking about?” he asked weakly. “I never sent you—”
“I’ve got ’em right here in my pocket.” His colleague’s voice was harsh, edged with suspicion.
“Ohmigod,” breathed Mr Melville Rochborne. “He couldn’t have salted it twice... he couldn’t have...”
It was Simon Templar’s perpetual regret that he was seldom able to overhear these conversations. But perhaps that would have made his life too perfect to be borne.
Dawn
Introduction
I suppose no feat of cerebration exercises an imaginative person so much as the deathbed speech that he or she would make if he or she (and this ghastly grammar has got to stop somewhere) knew for sure that it was their (oh, goody!) positively final utterance, the crystallization of a life by which posterity would remember it, whatever else it might have lived. “It is a far, far better thing...” “Kiss me, Hardy...” Oh, great! You know what you’ll probably say? “Why the hell didn’t that fool dim his lights?” Or, “The Government should have done something about it!” A writer who was been writing for a long time may legitimately begin to feel even more apprehension about what might be his last story. And a lot more may well be expected of him. After all, his life has been built on nothing but words. His last ones should give a good account of him. They should summarize, somehow, everything he has thought and learned, every technique he had acquired. His last story, dramatically, should be his best. But who knows which will be his last story? Thus we come to the story in this book, at any rate. And it is certainly one of the latest written. And it is not the best. But it is placed here because there is an element in it which you will have to read to discover, which in a collection of this kind is almost impossible to top. Anyhow, I am not yet ready to try. — Leslie Charteris
Simon Templar looked up from the frying pan in which six mountain trout were developing a crisp golden tan. Above the gentle sputter of grease, the sound of feet on dry pine needles crackled through the cabin window.