"What's the matter?" Peter Quentin demanded sharply.
"Well, we certainly won something," said, the Saint. "Look."
He took hold of the shabby tweed cap and jerked it off; and the ray of the torch in Peter's hand jumped wildly as a flood of golden hair broke loose to curl around the face of a girl whose sheer loveliness took his breath away.
II
Mr Uniatz sucked in his breath with a sound like an expiring soda siphon; and Peter Quentin sighed.
"Nunc dimittis," he said weakly. "I can't stand any more. The rest of my life would be an anticlimax. I always knew you were the luckiest man on earth, but there are limits. I believe if you trod on a toad it'd turn out to be a fairy princess."
"You ought to see what happens when I tread on a fairy," said the Saint.
Actually his thoughts were chasing far ahead of his words. The miracle had happened — if it was a miracle — and the story went on from there. He was too hardened a traveller in the strange country of adventure to be dumbfounded by any of the unpredictable twists in its trails. But he was wondering, with a tingle of inward exhilaration, where this particular twist was destined to lead.
He turned up the edge of his mask to light another cigarette, and his mind went back over the events that had brought him out that night, not for the first time, to make the raid that had culminated in this surprise… The laden trucks thundering northwards from the coast, filled to capacity with those easily marketable goods on which the English duties were highest — wines and spirits, cigars and cigarettes, silks and embroideries and Paris models… The rumours in the press, that leaked out in spite of the efforts of the police, of a supersmuggler whose cunning and audacity and efficient organization were cheating the revenue of thousands of pounds a week and driving baffled detectives to the verge of nervous breakdowns… The gossip in pubs along the coast and the whispers in certain exclusive circles to which no law-abiding citizen had access… The first realization that he had enough threads in his hands to be irrevocably committed to the adventure — that the grand old days of his outlawry had come back, as they must always go on coming back so long as he lived, when his name could be a holy terror to the police and the ungodly alike and golden galleons of boodle waited for his joyous buccaneering forays…
And now he was wondering whether he dared to hope that the clue he had been seeking for many weeks had fallen into his hands at last, in the shape of that slim golden beauty in the oil-stained overalls who lay unconscious under his hands.