He was going when she stopped him. It was odd to hear that nickname fall from her lips—the name wherewith the Saint had been christened in strange and ugly places, by hard and godless men. He had grown so used to it that he had come to accept it without question, but now the sound of it brought a flood of memories. Once again he stood in the Bosun’s smoky bar at the back of Mexico City, looking from the huddled corpse of Senhor Miguel Grasiento to the girl called Cherry, and heard the rurales pounding on the door. He had got her away, on an English tramp bound for Liverpool. “ ‘Saint,’ ” she had said—“that was a true word spoken in jest.” And he had never heard the name uttered in the same tone since until that moment. . . .
“Saint, did you really go to Bloem’s?”
“I did not,” he answered. “That was a frame-up. But Mynheer Bloem is certainly one of the Tiger Cubs. Watch him! I’ll tell you the whole yarn to-morrow. Bye-bye, kid.”
The Saint found Orace in the lane, curled up under the hedge, philosophically smoking his pipe.
“We’ll work inland round the village,” said Simon, “I’m hoping the Tiger’s had enough for one night, but you never know. Nobody’s got any proof that Bloem was lying about that hold-up merchant, except me, and a fairy tale like that cuts both ways. If our bodies were found in a field in the morning, the whole thing’d fit in beautifully.”
Nevertheless, they were not molested on the way back—a fact which might well have been due to the Saint’s foresight. It took an hour of the Saint’s killing pace to do the journey which would have lasted only fifteen minutes by the obvious route, and even then Simon was not satisfied.
When the outline of the Pill Box loomed dimly up against the dark sky, he stopped.
“Booby traps have caught mugs before now,” he murmured. “Just park yourself in the nettles here, Orace, while I snoop round.”
The Saint could have given most shikars points when it came to moving across country without being noticed. Orace simply saw a tall shape melt soundlessly away into the gloom, and thereafter could trace nothing until the tall shape materialised again beside him.
“All clear,” said Simon. “That means our Tiger’s burning the midnight oil thinking out something really slick and deadly.”