“Will you get out of my compartment?” he grated. “I’ve stood as much from you as I intend to—”
“But you haven’t stood as much from me as I’ve got waiting for you, brother,” said the Saint.
His eyes opened suddenly, very clear and blue and reckless, like sapphires with steel rapier-points behind them. He smiled.
“I’m here on business, Bruce,” he said, in the same gentle voice with the tang of bared sword-blades behind its melting smoothness. “I won’t deceive you any longer — the Herald Tribune only knows me from the comic section. And I don’t like you, brother. I never have cared much for your line of business, anyway, and the way you spoke to that poor old man in the dining car annoyed me. Remember him? He was on the point of chucking himself off this train under another one just now when I happened along. Somehow, my pet, I don’t think it would have distressed me nearly so much if you’d had the same idea.”
“Who are you?” asked Voyson huskily.
“I am the Saint — you may have heard of me. Just a twentieth-century privateer. In my small way I try to put right a few of the things that are wrong with this cockeyed world, and clean up some of the excrescences I come across. You come into the category, comrade. You must be carrying quite a tidy bit of boodle along to comfort you in your exile, and I think I could spend it much more amusingly than you—”
Voyson’s lips whitened. His hand slipped behind him, and Simon looked down at the barrel of an automatic, levelled into the center of his chest. Only the Saint’s eyebrows moved.
“You’ve been getting notions from some of these gangster pictures,” he said. “May I go on with my eating?”
He put the sandwich on his knee and lifted off the top slice of bread. Then he felt in his pocket for the pepper-pot. The perforations in the top seemed inadequate, and he unscrewed the cap.
Voyson squinted at him.