“Then it would’ve been much more practical to kidnap her. Look, this way, the old man first has to die, and then either they’ve made him sign a new will leaving the ranch to them, which could be fought through every court in the country, or Jean inherits it and they have to start all over again working on her. Either way, the deal would be held up till there were whiskers on it that you could weave into blankets. They don’t want that. They want quick results. See their ultimatum. Any plot of that kind is much too complicated — it takes too long to work out, and it could spring leaks in too many places. Therefore they certainly wouldn’t kill Don Morland.”
The girl bit her lip.
“But if they just... tortured him and tried to make him sell—”
“Why go to all that trouble when there’s an easier way? Maybe they could break him — almost anybody can be broken if he doesn’t die on you first — but they’d have to kill him afterwards so he couldn’t tell about it. And that still wouldn’t keep the rest of us quiet. These people aren’t amateurs. If they’d wanted to work that angle they’d have tried to take Jean; then they could have had anything they wanted from her father, and the rest of us wouldn’t have dared to say a word.”
Reefe studied the Saint unexpressively over his spoon.
“You kept on saying ‘they,’ ” he observed. “You figure there’s somebody else in on this with Valmon?”
“I’m sure of it.”
“I figured you were,” the Texan said placidly, “from the way you talk. You seem to know quite a bit about them. You know they aren’t amateurs. You know they’re pretty clever. You knew this man Julius who was here this afternoon, Jean told me. An’ he seemed to know something about you. If we knew some of these things ourselves maybe we could’ve done quite a bit of figurin’ ourselves.”
His tone was reserved and sensible, exactly the same as he might have used to call a hand of poker. There was no belligerence or animosity in it. He was inquisitive and he could be wrong, but he had a right to find out what was sitting across the table, in a polite and impersonal way.
Simon Templar gazed back at him appreciatively, but still with flakes of steel resting in his eyes to match the challenge that was almost imperceptible in the foreman’s courteous simplicity.