Bloem did not answer, and the Saint prattled on:
“Now, I must say you had me thinking very hard over that dud gold mine. Why should any sane man—you observe, Mynheer, that I credit you with being sane—why should any sane man want to get control of a gold mine that hasn’t turned up any gold for two years? That’s what I said to my broker, and he sent a cable out to the Transvaal especially to find out. Back comes the reply: We Don’t Know. The mine hasn’t been worked for ages, and only the greenhorn prospectors bother to look over the district—the old hands know that there isn’t enough pay dirt for a hundred square miles around the T. T. borings to stop a snail’s tooth. And yet our one and only Hans is raking in all the shares he can find, reminding ’Change of a stock they’d all forgotten existed, and every poor little rabbit of a mug investor is hunting up his scrip and wondering whether to unload while the unloading’s good or chance his arm for a fortune. All of which, to a nasty, suspicious mind like mine, is distinctly odd.”
“I’m glad to see that the worry hasn’t prematurely aged you, Mr. Templar,” said Bloem.
“Oh, not at all,” said the Saint. “You see, just when I was on the point of going off my rocker with the strain, and my relatives were booking a room for me in a nice quiet asylum, along comes a flash of inspiration. Just suppose, Bloem—only suppose—that a bunch of bad hats had brought off one of the biggest bank breaks in history. Suppose they’d got away with something over a cool million in gold. Suppose they’d humped the stuff all the way over the Atlantic, and fetched up and settled down and stowed the body away in an English village so far off the beaten track that it’d be lost for good if it wasn’t for the railway timetables. And then suppose—mind you, this is only a theory—suppose they felt quite happy that the dicks weren’t on the trail, and began to puzzle out how they were going to cash the proceeds of the dirty work. First of all, melt it down—there aren’t so many warriors hawking golden American Eagles around that the moneychangers don’t look twice at you when you try to pass off a sack of ’em. Right. But now you aren’t so much better off, because a golden million tots up to a hairy great ingot, and people would start asking where the stuff came from—whether you grow it in the kitchen garden or make it in the bathroom before breakfast. What then?”
“What, indeed?” prompted Bloem in a tired voice.
“Why,” exclaimed the Saint delightedly, as though he had caught Bloem with a conundrum, “what’s wrong with getting hold of a dead-as-mutton gold mine, losing a lot of gold in it, and then finding it again?”
“Quite,” said Bloem with purely perfunctory interest.
Simon shook his head.
“It won’t wash, Angel Face,” he said. “It won’t wash. Really it won’t. And you know it. They may have christened me Simon, but I’ve got a lot less simple since then.”
Bloem turned away very wearily, as if he found the Saint’s monologues so boring that he had great difficulty in keeping awake, but that did not stop him hearing the Saint’s soft chuckle of sheer merriment. Bloem was good, but he was not quite good enough. There had been few doubts in the Saint’s mind about the accuracy of his diagnosis, and those that had existed were now gloriously dispelled. Nearly all the threads were in his hands, and the tangle was gradually straightening out.