"Too 'ot fer the post office, eh?" he ventured encouragingly.
"Not at all. I think you'd find them very dull. But there are still so many restrictions about importing antiques—"
"Just an honest spot o' smuggling wot?" The Saint screwed up one eye in another ponderous wink. "Well, guv'nor, Tom Simons is yer man. To 'ell wiv the customs, that's wot I always sye."
Dr. Zellermann stared at him contemplatively.
At which second the window curtains flew apart like the portals of some explosive genesis, permitting the irruptive return of Ferdinand Pairfield accompanied by a bloodcurdling wail of horrific anguish which had started in the outside distance and arrived in the room with him before anyone else had been able to identify and classify it.
Mr. Pairfield was a remarkable sight, too. He was practically naked. His coat and shirt had been split down the back, so that the two halves of them hung and flapped like limp wings around his wrists. His trousers had completely disappeared, thus revealing that he wore pale jade silk drawers with his initials embroidered on them.
He ran to Cookie like a little boy running to his mother.
"Cookie!" he bawled. "That dreadful man! He tore my clothes, and he — he threw me into — into a lot of poison ivy!"
In that immortal moment, before anyone else could say anything, Patrick Hogan strode through the window like a victorious hooligan, beaming across every inch of his irresponsible pug-nosed face.
"Shure, an' I was just waitin' for the chance," he said joyfully. He lurched over to the bar, still with the same broad grin, and put his left hand on the Saint's shoulder and turned him a little. "But as for you, Tom me boy, ye're no pal o' mine to have sent him afther me, bad cess to ye; an' if that's your idea of a joke, here's something that oughta tickle ye—"