"No."
Hoppy drew a deep breath.
"Chees, boss," he said, speaking from the heart, "dat's great!"
His bottle glugged again expressively.
"We haven't any other ideas," Peter explained dis-hearteningly, "but that doesn't matter."
The Saint's eyes mocked him with dancing pin points of silent laughter. During that day the Saint's cold anger of the night before seemed to have worn off, although the inexorable pith of it was still perceptible in the fine-drawn core of steel that seemed to underlie his outward languor. But now it was masked by something more vital: the mad gay recklessness that came around him like a mantle of sunlight when the hunt was up and the fanfares of adventure were sounding out in the open.
"You're wrong," he said. "We've got a much better idea. I had a telegram this afternoon — it was phoned through from Lyndhurst just before you arrived. I've been saving it up for you." He picked up the scrap of paper on which he had scribbled the message down. "It says: 'Your car will be at the Broken Sword in Tyneham at nine-fifteen tonight.' It isn't signed, and anyhow it wouldn't have mattered much who signed it. It didn't originate from any of these assorted gangs we've been talking about — otherwise why be so very accurate about the time? It means that the master mind is taking a hand, just as I prophesied last night, and whatever happens he won't be far away. It's bait of course; and we're going to bite!"
VIII
Simon wanted seventy-three to finish, and the babble of chaff and facetious comment died down through sporadic resurrections as he took over the darts and set his toe on the line. His first dart went in the treble nineteen; and the stillness lasted a couple of seconds after that before a roar of delight acknowledged the result of the mental arithmetic that had been working itself out in the heads of the onlookers. His second dart brushed the inside wire of the double eight on the wrong side as it went in; and the hush came down again, more breathless than before. Somebody in a corner bawled a second encouraging calculation, and the Saint smiled. Quite coolly and unhurriedly, as if he had no distracting thought in his mind, he balanced the third dart in his fingers, poised it and launched it at the board. It struck and stayed there — dead in the centre of the double four.
A huge burst of laughter and applause crashed through the silence like a breaking wave as he turned away; and his opponent, who had been pushed forward as the local champion, grinned under his grey moustache and said: "Well, zur, the beer's on me."