"I'll fence it all right," said Happy Fred. "We'll get four hundred for it easily. And then what happens? That other little packet I registered at the same time blows off and sets the mailbag on fire in the train, and when they've cleared up the mess they find your bracelet is missing. Then there's just another sensational mail-bag robbery for the newspapers, and everybody's wondering how it was done; while we just collect the insurance money. That's four hundred pounds profit for a couple of hours' work, and we can turn that over every week while it lasts."
Happy Fred slapped his thigh. "Gosh, Broads, when I think of the money we're going to make out of that idea of mine —"
"You might live to make it," remarked a very pleasant voice behind them, "if you both sat quite still."
The two men did not sit quite still. They would have been superhuman stoics if they had. They spun around as if they had each been hit on the side of the jaw with a blackjack. And they saw the Saint.
The door of Mr. Tillson's private bathroom had opened and closed while they were talking without them hearing it; and now it served as a neat white background for the lean and smiling man who was propping himself gracefully up against it. There was an automatic in his hand, and it turned from side to side in a lazy arc that gave each of them an opportunity to blink down its black uncompromising barrel.
"Possibly I intrude," murmured the Saint, very pleasantly; "but that's just too bad."
On the faces of the two men were expressions of mingled astonishment, fear, indignation, horror and simple wrath, which would have done credit to a pair of dyspeptic cows that had received an electric shock from a clump of succulent grass. And then Mr. Tillson's voice returned.
"Good God!" he squeaked. "It's the man I was telling you about —"
"The bloke I was telling you about!" ejaculated Happy Fred savagely. "The skunk who took thirty pounds of my money in the Alexandra, and then —"
The two men's heads revolved until they looked into each other's eyes and gazed into the souls beyond. And the Saint. hitched himself off the door and came towards them.