She was cool and slim in white, and he thought he had never seen anyone half so lovely.
“Something might have,” he said. “And when I was a Boy Scout they taught me to Be Prepared.”
He rigged a chair for her and adjusted the cushions, and then he sat down again.
“I know you’re bursting with curiosity,” he said, “so I’ll come straight to the ’osses.”
And without further ado he started on the long history. He told her about Fernando, dying out in the jungle with a Tiger Cub’s kris in him, and he told her Fernando’s story. He told her about the Tiger, who was for years Chicago’s most brilliant and terrible gang leader. He told her about some of the Tiger’s exploits, and finally came to the account of the breaking of the Confederate Bank. Some of the details Fernando had told him; the rest he had gathered together by patient investigation; the accumulation worked up into a plot hair-raising enough to provide the basis of the wildest film serial that was ever made.
“The Tiger’s very nearly a genius,” he said. “The way he got away with that mint of money and carted it all the miles to here is just a sample of his brain.”
Then he told her about the more recent events—the little he had learned while he had been in Baycombe. How he had been suspected from the day of his arrival, and how he had done his best to encourage that suspicion, in the hope that the other side would give themselves away by trying to dispose of him. Gradually the lie of the land took shape in her mind, while the Saint talked on, putting in a touch of character here and there, recalling points that he had omitted and referring to details that he had not yet given. The story was not told smoothly—it rattled out, paused, and rattled on again, decorated with the Saint’s typical racy idiom and humorous egotism. Nevertheless, it held her, and it was a convincing story, for the Saint had a gift for graphic description. She saw the scenes at which she had been present in a new light.
He ended up with a flippant account of the sport chez Bittle after he had helped her get away.
“And there you have it,” he concluded. “Heard in cold blood, with the sun shining and all that, it sounds preposterous enough to make dear old Munchausen look like gospel. But you’ve seen a bit of it yourself, and perhaps that’ll make it easier for you to believe the rest. And what it boils down to is that the Tiger is in Baycombe, and so am I, and so are the pieces of eight; and the Tiger wants my head on a tin tray, and I want his ill-gotten gains, and we’re both pretty keen to hang on to our respective possessions. So, taken by and large, it looks like we shall come to blows and other Wild and Woolly Western expressions of mutual ill-feeling. And the point is, Pat, and the reason why I felt you had a right to know all the odds—is that you’ve gone and cut in on the game. By last night, the Tiger had to face the risk that I might have talked to you, and the way you behaved generally won’t have eased his mind any. You might be a danger or you might not, but he can’t afford to take chances. To be on the safe side, he’s got to assume that you and I are as thick as thieves. So you see, old soul, you’re slap in the middle of this here jamboree, whether you like it or not. You’re cast for second juvenile lead in the bloodcurdling melodrama now playing, and your name’s up in red lights all round the Tiger’s den—and the question before the house is, What Do We Do About It?”
He was leaning forward so that he could see her face, and she knew that he was desperately serious. She knew, also, instinctively, that he was not a man to exaggerate the situation, however much he might play the buffoon in other directions.