A very old man, in his shirt and trousers, with a voluminous growth of white whisker almost covering his face, looked out at him.
Something insane and unprecedented took possession of Mr Teal — something which, if he had stopped to think about it, had already seized him on two previous similar occasions during his long feud with the Saint. But Mr Teal was not stopping to think. He was not really responsible for his actions. He was no longer the cold remorseless Nemesis that he liked to picture himself as he lurched forward with one wild movement, grasped a section of the old man's beard with one hand and pulled to tear it off.
The only trouble was that the beard did not come off; and the next thing that Mr Teal was aware of was that his face was stinging from a powerful smack.
"Well, dang me!" squalled the ancient. "I never did heeear of such a thing in all my liiife. Haven't you got nothing better to do, young man, than come around pulling respectable folks' beeeards? You wait till I fetch a policeman to ye. I'll see that you learn some manners, danged if I doan't!"
Mr Teal stood there, hardly conscious of his tingling cheek, hardly hearing the old man on the telephone inside the apartment as he upbraided the porter for letting in "danged young fules to come and pull my beeeard." The exultant delirium of a few seconds ago seemed to have curdled to a leaden mass in his stomach. He knew without stirring another muscle that the supreme moment he had dreamed of had not yet come. He knew that he was doomed to leave the Saint free once again to organize more tragedies for him. He didn't know how this one had been organized, but he knew that it had been done, and he knew that his very own watchdogs were the best evidence against him. And Mr Teal knew with the utter deadness of despair that it had always been fated to be the same.
Part Two
The Unlicensed Victuallers
I
Somewhere among the black hills to the southwest dawned a faint patch of light. It moved and grew, pulsing and brightening, like a palely luminous cloud drifting down from the horizon; and Simon Templar, with his eyes fixed on it, slid his cigarette case gently out of his pocket.
"Here it comes, Hoppy," he remarked.