If he hadn't been able to judge men down to the last things that made them tick, he wouldn't have been what he was or where he was at that instant. He could be wrong often and anywhere, incidentally, but not in the fundamentals of situation and character.
He said quite casually then, as it seemed to him after his decision was made: "It's just one of those stories…"
He swung a leg over the arm of his chair, pillowed his chin or his knee, and went on through a drift of smoke when he was ready.
"I've got to admit that the theory I set up in the Times-Tribune didn't just spill out of my deductive genius. It was almost ancient history to me. That's what brought me to Galveston and into your hair. The only coincidence I wasn't expecting, and which I didn't even get on to for some time afterwards, was that the body I nearly ran over out there in the marshes would turn out to be Henry Stephen Matson — the guy I came here to find."
"What did you want him for?"
"Because he was a saboteur. He worked in two or three war plants where acts of sabotage occurred, although he was never suspected. No gigantic jobs, but good serious sabotage just the same. The FBI found that out when they checked back on him. But the way they got on to him was frankly one of those weird accidents that are always waiting to trip up the most careful villains. He had a bad habit of going out and leaving the lights on in his room. About the umpteenth time his landlady had gone up and turned them out, she thought of leaving a note for him about it. But she didn't have a pencil with her, and she didn't see one lying around. So she rummaged about a bit, and found an Eversharp in one of his drawers. She started to write, and then the lead broke. She tried to produce another one, and nothing happened. So she started fiddling with it and unscrewing things, and suddenly the pencil came apart and a lot of stuff fell out of it that certainly couldn't have been the inner workings of an Ever-sharp. She was a bright woman. She managed to put it together again, without blowing herself up, and put it back where she found it and went out and told the FBI — of course, she knew that Matson was working for a defense plant. But it's a strictly incredible story, and exactly the sort of thing that's always happening."
"One of these days it'll probably happen to you," Kinglake said; but his stern features relaxed in the nearest approximation to a smile that they were capable of.
The Saint grinned.
"It has," he said… "Anyway, Matson had an FBI man working next to him from then on, so he never had a chance to pull anything."
"Why wasn't he arrested?"