To H. H. GIbson Many years ago I resolved that you were one of the first people I must dedicate a book to. But time slips by, and it's sadly easy to lose touch with someone who lives hundreds of miles away. So this comes very late, but I hope not too late; because even though this may be a bad book, if I hadn't come tinder your guidance many years ago it would probably have been very much worse. The villains in this book are entirely imaginary, and have no relation to any living person.

I

The Ingenuous Colonel

Lieut.-Colonel Sir George Uppingdon, it must be admitted, was not a genuine knight; neither, as a matter of fact, was he a genuine colonel. This is not to say that he thought that sandbags contained the material for mixing trench mortar, or that an observation post was a species of flagpole on which inquisitive brigadiers hung at half-mast; but his military experience was certainly limited to a brief period during the latter days of the war when conscription had gathered him up and set him to the uncongenial task of peeling potatoes at Aldershot.

Apart from that not inglorious interlude of strengthening the stomachs of the marching armies, his career had been far less impressive than the name he passed under seemed to indicate. Pentonville had housed him on one occasion, and he had also taken one short holiday at Maidstone. Nevertheless, although the expensive public school which had taught him his practical arithmetic had long since erased his name from its register of alumni, he had never lost his well-educated and aristocratic bearing, and with the passing of time had added to them a magnificent pair of white moustachios which were almost as valuable to him in his career.

A slight tinge of the old-fashioned conservatism which characterised his style of dress clung equally limpet-like to the processes of his mind.

"These new-fangled stunts are all very well," he said doggedly. "But what happens to them? You work them once, and they receive a great deal of publicity, and then you can never use them again. How many of them will last as long as our tried and proved old friends?"

His companion on that occasion, an equally talented Mr. Sidney Immelbern — whose real name, as it happens, was Sidney Immelbern — regarded him gloomily.

"That's the trouble with you, George," he said. "It's the one thing which has kept you back from real greatness. You can't get it into your head that we've got to move with the times."

"It has also kept me out of a great deal of trouble," said the Colonel sedately. "If I remember rightly, Sid, when you last moved with the times, it was to Wormwood Scrubs."

Mr. Immelbern frowned. There were seasons when he felt that George Uppingdon's gentlemanly bearing had no real foundations of good taste.

"Well," he retorted, "your methods haven't made us millionaires. Here it's nearly two months since we made a click, and we only got eight hundred from that Australian at Brighton."

Mr. Irnmelbern's terse statement being irrefutable, a long and somewhat melancholy silence settled down upon the partnership.

Even by the elastic standards of the world in which they moved, it was an unusual combination. Mr. Sidney Immelbern had none of the Colonel's distinguished style — he was a stocky man with an unrefined and slightly oriental face, who affected check tweeds of more than dashing noisiness and had an appropriate air of smelling faintly of stables. But they had worked excellently together in the past, and only in such rare but human excesses of recrimination as that which has just been recorded did they fail to share a sublime confidence that their team technique would shine undimmed in brilliance through the future, as and when the opportunity arose.

The unfortunate part was that the opportunity did not arise. For close upon eight weeks it had eluded them with a relentlessness which savoured of actual malice. True, there had been an American at the Savoy who had seemed a hopeful proposition, but he had turned out to be one of those curious people who sincerely disapprove of gambling on principle; an equally promising leather merchant from Leicester had been recalled home by an ailing wife a few hours before they would have made their kill. The profession of confidence man requires capital — he must maintain a good appearance, invest lavishly in food and wine, and be able to wait for his profits. It was not surprising that Messrs. Uppingdon and Immelbern should watch the dwindling of their resources with alarm, and at times give way to moments of spleen which in more prosperous days would never have smirched their mutual friendship.

But with almost sadistic glee their opportunity continued to elude them. The lounge of the Palace Royal Hotel, where they sat sipping their expensive drinks, was a scene of life and gaiety; but the spirit of the place was not reflected in their faces. Among the lunch-time cocktail crowd of big business men, young well-groomed men, and all their chosen women, there appeared not one lonely soul with the unmistakable air of a forlorn stranger in the city whom they might tactfully accost, woo from his glum solitude with lunch and friendship, and in due course mulct of a contribution to their exchequer proportionate to his means. Fortune, they felt, had deserted them for ever. Nobody loved them.

"It is," admitted Lieut.-Colonel Uppingdon, breaking the silence, "pretty bloody."

"It is," concurred Mr. Immelbern, and suddenly scowled at him. "What's that?" he added.

Somewhat vaguely, the Colonel was inclining his head. But the remarkable point was that he was not looking at Mr. Immelbern.

"What is what?" he inquired, making sure of his ground.

"What's that you're staring at with that silly look on your face?" said Mr. Immelbern testily.

"That young fellow who just came in," explained the Colonel. "He seemed to know me."

Mr. Immelbern glanced over the room. The only man whom he was able to bring within the limits of his partner's rather unsatisfactory description was just then sitting down at a table by himself a few places away — a lean and somehow dangerous-looking young man with a keen tanned face and very clear blue eyes. Instinctively Mr. Immelbern groped around for his hat.

"D'you mean he's a fellow you swindled once?" he demanded hastily.

Uppingdon shook his head.

"Oh, no. I'm positive about that. Besides, he smiled at me quite pleasantly. But I can't remember him at all."

Mr. Immelbern relaxed slowly. He looked at the young man again with diminished apprehension. And gradually, decisively, a certain simple deduction registered itself in his practised mind.

The young man had money. There was no deception about that. Everything about him pointed unobtrusively but unequivocally towards that one cardinal fact. His clothes, immaculately kept, had the unostentatious seal of Savile Row on every stitch of them. His silk shirt had the cachet of St. James's. His shoes, brightly polished and unspotted by the stains of traffic, could never have been anything but bespoke. He had just given his order to the waiter, and while he waited for it to arrive he was selecting a cigarette from a thin case which to the lay eye might have been silver, but which Mr. Immelbern knew beyond all doubt was platinum.

There are forms of instinct which soar beyond all physical explanations into the clear realms of clairvoyance. The homing pigeon wings its way across sightless space to the old roost. The Arabian camel finds the water-hole, and the pig detects the subterranean truffle. Even thus was the clairvoyance of Mr. Immelbern.

If there was one thing on earth which he could track down it was money. The affinity of the pigeon for its roost, the camel for the water-hole, the pig for the truffle, were as nothing to the affinity of Mr. Immelbern for dough. He was in tune with it. Its subtle emanations floated through the ether and impinged on psychic aerials in his system which operated on a super-heterodyne circuit. And while he looked at the young man who seemed to know Lieut.-Colonel Uppingdon that circuit was oscillating over all its valves. He summarised his conclusions with an explicit economy of verbiage which La Bruyère could not have pruned by a single syllable.

"He's rich," said Mr. Immelbern.

"I wish I could remember where I met him," said the Colonel, frowning over his own train of thought. "I hate to forget a face."

"You doddering old fool!" snarled Mr. Immelbern, smiling at him affectionately. "What do I care about your memory? The point is that he's rich, and he seemed to recognise you. Well, that saves a lot of trouble, doesn't it?"

The Colonel turned towards him and blinked.

"What do you mean?"

"Will you never wake up?" moaned Mr. Immelbern, extending his cigarette-case with every appearance of affability. "Here you've been sitting whining and moping for half an hour because we don't get a chance to make a click, and when a chance does come along you can't see it. What do I care where you met the man? What do I care if you never met him? He nodded to you, and he's sitting two yards away — and you ask me what I mean!"

The Colonel frowned at him for a moment. He was, as we have explained, a born conservative. He never allowed himself to be carried away. He deliberated. He calculated. He explored. He would, but for the ever-present stimulus of Mr. Immelbern, have done as little as any other conservative.

But gradually the frown faded, and a dignified smile took its place.

"There may be something in what you say, Sid," he conceded.

"Go on," ordered Mr. Immelbern crudely. "Hop it. And try to wake your ideas up a bit. If somebody threw a purse into your lap, you'd be asking me what it was."

Lieut.-Colonel Uppingdon gave him an aristocratically withering look, and rose sedately from the table. He went over to where the young man sat and coughed discreetly.

"Excuse me, sir," he said, and the young man looked up from his idle study of the afternoon's runners at Sandown Park. "You must have thought me a trifle rude just now."

"Not at all," said the young man amiably. "I thought you were busy and didn't want to be bothered. How are things these days, George?"

The Colonel suppressed a start. The use of his Christian name implied an intimacy that was almost alarming, but the young man's pleasant features still struck no responsive chord in his memory.

"To tell you the truth," he said, "I'm afraid my eyes are not as good as they were. I didn't recognise you until you had gone by. Dear me! How long is it since I saw you last?"

The young man thought for a moment.

"Was it at Biarritz in 1929?"

"Of course!" exclaimed Uppingdon delightedly — he had never been to Biarritz in his life. "By Gad, how the times does fly! I never thought I should have to ask when I last saw you, my dear—"

He broke off short, and an expression of shocked dismay overspread his face.

"Good Gad!" he blurted. "You'll begin to think there's something the matter with me. Have you ever had a lapse of memory like that? I had your name on the tip of my tongue — I was just going to say it — and it slipped off! Wait — don't help me — didn't it begin with H?"

"I'm afraid not," said the young man pleasantly.

"Not either of your names?" pursued the Colonel hopefully.

"No."

"Then it must have been J."

"No."

"I mean T."

The young man nodded. Uppingdon took heart.

"Let me see. Tom — Thomson — Travers — Terrington—"

The other smiled.

"I'd better save you the trouble. Templar's the name — Simon Templar."

Uppingdon put a hand to his head.

"I knew it!" He was certain that he had never met anyone named Simon Templar. "How stupid of me! My dear chap, I hardly know how to apologise. Damned bad form, not even being able to remember a fellow's name. Look here, you must give me a chance to put it right. What about joining us for a drink? Or are you waiting for somebody?"

Simon Templar shook his head.

"No — I just dropped in."

"Splendid!" said the Colonel. "Splendid! Perfectly splendid!" He seized the young man's arm and led him across to where Mr. Immelbern waited. "By Gad, what a perfectly splendid coincidence. Simon, you must meet Mr. Immelbern. Sidney, this is an old friend of mine, Mr. Templar. By Gad!"

Simon found himself ushered into the best chair, his drink paid for, his health proposed and drunk with every symptom of cordiality.

"By Gad!" said the Colonel, mopping his brow and beaming.

"Quite a coincidence, Mr. Templar," remarked Immelbern, absorbing the word into his vocabulary.

"Coincidence is a marvellous thing," said the Colonel. "I remember when I was in Allahabad with the West Nottinghams, they had a quartermaster whose wife's name was Ellen. As a matter of fact, he wasn't really our quartermaster — we borrowed him from the Southwest Kents. Rotten regiment, the Southwest Kents. Old General Plushbottom was with them before he was thrown out of the service. His name wasn't really Plushbottom, but we called him Old General Plushbottom. The whole thing was a frightful scandal. He had a fight with a subaltern on the parade-ground at Poona — as a matter of fact, it was almost on the very spot where Reggie Carfew dropped dead of heart failure the day after his wife ran away with a bank clerk. And the extraordinary thing was that her name was Ellen too."

"Extraordinary," agreed the young man.

"Extraordinary!" concurred Mr. Immelbern, and trod viciously on Uppingdon's toe under the table.

"That was a marvellous trip we had on the Bremen — I mean to Biarritz — wasn't it?" said the Colonel, wincing.

Simon Templar smiled.

"We had some good parties, didn't we?"

"By Gad! And the casino!"

"The Heliopolis!"

"The races!" said the Colonel, seizing his cue almost too smartly, and moving his feet quickly out of range of Mr. Immelbern's heavy heel.

Mr. Immelbern gave an elaborate start. He pulled a watch from his waistcoat pocket and looked at it accusingly.

"By the way, Sir George," he interrupted with a faintly conspiratorial air. "I don't want to put you out at all, but it's getting a bit late."

"Late?" repeated the Colonel, frowning at him.

"You know," said Mr. Immelbern mysteriously.

"Oh," said the Colonel, grasping the point.

Mr. Immelbern turned to Simon.

"I'm really not being rude, Mr. Templar," he explained, "but Sir George has important business to attend to this afternoon, and I had to remind him about it. Really, Sir George, don't think I'm butting in, but it goes at two o'clock, and if we're going to get any lunch—"

"But that's outrageous!" protested the Colonel indignantly. "I've only just brought Mr. Templar over to our table, and you're suggesting that I should rush off and leave him!"

"Please don't bother about me," said Simon hastily. "If you have business to do—"

"My dear chap, I insist on bothering. The whole idea is absurd. I've put far too great a strain on your good nature already. This is preposterous. You must certainly join us in another drink. And in lunch. It's the very least I can do."

Mr. Immelbern did not look happy. He gave the impression of a man torn between politeness and frantic necessity, frustrated by having to talk in riddles, and perhaps pardonably exasperated by the obtuseness of his companion.

"But really, Sir George—"

"That's enough," said the Colonel, raising his hand. "I refuse to listen to anything more. Mr. Templar is an old friend of mine, and my guarantee should be good enough for you. And as far as you are concerned, my dear chap," he added, turning to Simon, "if you are not already engaged for lunch, I won't hear any other excuse."

Simon shrugged.

"It's very good of you. But if I'm in the way—"

"That," said the Colonel pontifically, "will do." He consulted his watch, drummed his fingers thoughtfully on the table for a moment, and said: "The very thing! We'll go right along to my rooms, and I'll have some lunch served there. Then Mr. Immelbern and I can do our business as well without being rushed about."

"But Sir George!" said Immelbern imploringly. "Won't you listen to reason? Look here, can I speak to you alone for a minute? Mr. Templar will excuse us."

He grabbed the spluttering Colonel by the arm and dragged him away almost by main force. They retreated to the other end of the lounge.

"We'll get him," said the Colonel, gesticulating furiously.

"I know," said Mr. Immelbern, beating his fist on the palm of his hand. "That is, if you don't scare him off with that imitation of a colonel. That stuff's so old-fashioned it makes me want to cry. Have you found out who he is?"

"No. I don't even recognise his name."

"Probably he's mistaken you for somebody else," said Mr. Immelbern, appearing to sulk.

The Colonel turned away from him and marched back to the table, with Mr. Immelbern following him glumly.

"Well, that's settled, by Gad," he said breezily. "If you've finished your drink, my dear fellow, we'll get along at once."

They went in a taxi to the Colonel's apartment, a small suite at the lower end of Clarges Street. Uppingdon burbled on with engaging geniality, but Mr. Immelbern kept his mouth tightly closed and wore the look of a man suffering from toothache.

"How about some caviar sandwiches and a bottle of wine?" suggested the Colonel. "I can fix those up myself. Or if you'd prefer something more substantial, I can easily get it sent in."

"Caviar sandwiches will do for me," murmured Simon accommodatingly.

There was plenty of caviar, and some excellent sherry to pass the time while the Colonel was preparing the sandwiches. The wine was impeccable, and the quantity apparently unlimited. Under its soothing influence even the morose Mr. Immelbern seemed to thaw slightly, although towards the end of the meal he kept looking at his watch and comparing it anxiously with the clock on the mantelpiece. At a quarter to two he caught his partner's eye in one of the rare lulls in the Colonel's meandering flow of reminiscence.

"Well, Sir George," he said grimly, "if you can spare the time now—"

"Of course," said the Colonel brightly.

Mr. Immelbern looked at their guest, and hesitated again.

"Er — to deal with our business."

Simon put down his glass and rose quickly.

"I'll leave you to it," he said pleasantly. "Really, I've imposed on you quite long enough."

"Sit down, my dear chap, sit down," commanded the Colonel testily. "Dammit, Sidney, your suspicions are becoming ridiculous. If you go on in this way I shall begin to believe you suffer from delusions of persecution. I've already told you that Mr. Templar is an old friend of mine, by Gad, and it's an insult to a guest in my house to suggest that you can't trust him. Anything we have to discuss can be said in front of him."

"But think, Sir George. Think of the risk!"

"Nonsense," snorted the Colonel. "It's all in your imagination. In fact" — the idea suddenly appeared to strike him — "I'm damned if I don't tell him what it's all about."

Mr. Immelbern opened his mouth, closed it again, and sank back wearily without speaking. His attitude implied that he had already exhausted himself in vain appeals to an obvious lunatic, and he was beginning to realise that it was of no avail. He could do no more.

"It's like this, my dear chap," said the Colonel, ignoring him. "All that this mystery amounts to — all that Immelbern here is so frightened of telling you — is that we are professional gamblers. We back racehorses."

"That isn't all of it," contradicted Mr. Immelbern sullenly.

"Well, we have certain advantages. I, in my social life, am very friendly with a large number of racehorse owners. Mr. Immelbern is friendly with trainers and jockeys. Between the two of us, we sometimes have infallible information, the result of piecing together everything we hear from various sources, of times when the result of a certain race has positively been arranged. Then all we have to do is to make our bets and collect the money. That happens to be our business this afternoon. We have an absolutely certain winner for the two o'clock race at Sandown Park, and in a few minutes we shall be backing it."

Mr. Immelbern dosed his eyes as if he could endure no more.

"That seems quite harmless," said Templar.

"Of course it is," agreed the Colonel. "What Immelbern is so frightened of is that somebody will discover what we're doing — I mean that it might come to the knowledge of some of our friends who are owners or trainers or jockeys, and then our sources of information would be cut off. But, by Gad, I insist on the privilege of being allowed to know when I can trust my own friends."

"Well, I won't give you away," Simon told him obligingly.

The Colonel turned to Immelbern triumphantly.

"There you are! So there's no need whatever for our little party to break up yet, unless Mr. Templar has an engagement. Our business will be done in a few minutes. By Gad, damme, I think you owe Mr. Templar an apology!"

Mr. Immelbern sighed, stared at his finger-nails for a while in grumpy silence, and consulted his watch again.

"It's nearly five to two," he said. "How much can we get on?"

"About a thousand, I think," said the Colonel judiciously.

Mr. Immelbern got up and went to the telephone, where he dialed a number.

"This is Immelbern," he said, in the voice of a martyr responding to the roll-call for the all-in lion-wrestling event. "I want two hundred pounds on Greenfly."

He heard his bet repeated, pressed down the hook, and dialed again.

"We have to spread it around to try and keep the starting price from shortening," explained the Colonel.

Simon Templar nodded, and leaned back with his eyes half-closed, listening to the click and tinkle of the dial and Immelbern's afflicted voice. Five times the process was repeated, and during the giving of the fifth order Uppingdon interrupted again.

"Make it two-fifty this time, Sidney," he said.

Mr. Immelbern said: "Just a moment, will you hold on?" to the transmitter, covered it with his hand, and turned aggrievedly.

"I thought you said a thousand. That makes a thousand and fifty."

"Well, I thought Mr. Templar might like to have fifty on." Simon hesitated.

"That's about all I've got on me," he said.

"Don't let that bother you, my dear boy," boomed Colonel Uppingdon. "Your credit's good with me, and I feel that I owe you something to compensate for what you've put up with. Make it a hundred if you like."

"But Sir George!" wailed Mr. Immelbern.

"Dammit, will you stop whining 'But Sir George!'?" exploded the Colonel. "That settles it. Make it three hundred — that will be a hundred on for Mr. Templar. And if the horse doesn't win, I'll stand the loss myself."

A somewhat strained silence prevailed after the last bet had been made. Mr. Immelbern sat down again and chewed the unlighted end of a cigar in morbid meditations. The Colonel twiddled his thumbs as if the embarrassment of these recurrent disputes was hard to shake off. Simon Templar lighted a cigarette and smoked calmly.

"Have you been doing this long?" he inquired. "For about two years," said the Colonel. "By Gad, though, we've made money at it. Only about one horse in ten that we back doesn't romp home, and most of 'em are at good prices. Sometimes our money does get back to the course and spoil the price, but I'd rather have a winner at evens than a loser at ten to one any day. Why, I remember one race meeting we had at Delhi. That was the year when old Stubby Featherstone dropped his cap in the Ganges — he was the fella who got killed at Cambrai…"

He launched off on another wandering reminiscence, and Simon listened to him with polite attention. He had some thinking to do, and he was grateful for the gallant Colonel's willingness to take all the strain of conversation away from him. Mr. Immelbern chewed his cigar in chronic pessimism until half an hour had passed; and then he glanced at his watch again, started up, and broke into the middle ofone of his host's rambling sentences.

"The result ought to be through by now," he said abruptly. "Shall we go out and get a paper?"

Simon stood up unhurriedly. He had done his thinking.

"Let me go," he suggested.

"That's awfully good of you, my dear boy. Mr. Immelbern would have gone. Never mind, by Gad. Go out and see how much you've won. I'll open another bottle. Damme, we must have a drink on this, by Gad!"

Simon grinned and sauntered out; and as the door dosed behind him the eyes of the two partners met.

"Next time you say 'damme' or 'by Gad,' George," said Mr. Immelbern, "I will knock your block off, so help me. Why don't you get some new ideas?"

But by that time Lieut-Colonel Sir George Uppingdon was beyond taking offence.

"We've got him," he said gleefully.

"I hope so," said Mr. Immelbern, more cautiously.

"I know what I'm talking about, Sid," said the Colonel stubbornly. "He's a serious young fellow, one of these conservative chaps like myself — but that's the best kind. None of this dashing around, keeping up with the times, going off like a firework and fizzling out like a pricked balloon. I'll bet you anything you like, in another hour he'll be looking around for a thousand pounds to give us to put on tomorrow's certainty. His kind starts slowly, but it goes a lot further than any of you fussy Smart Alecs."

Mr. Immelbern made a rude noise.

Simon Templar bought a Star at Devonshire House and turned without anxiety to the stop press. Greenfly had won the two o'clock at five to one.

As he strolled back towards Clarges Street he was smiling. It was a peculiarly ecstatic sort of smile; and as a matter of fact he had volunteered to go out and buy the paper, even though he knew what the result would be as certainly as Messrs. Uppingdon and Immelbern knew it, for the sole and sufficient reason that he wanted to give that smile the freedom of his face and let it walk around. To have been compelled to sit around any longer in Uppingdon's apartment and sustain the necessary mask of gravity and sober interest without a breathing spell would have sprained every muscle within six inches of his mouth.

"Hullo, Saint," said a familiar sleepy voice beside him.

A hand touched his arm, and he turned quickly to see a big baby-faced man in a bowler hat of unfashionable shape, whose jaws moved rhythmically like those of a ruminating cow.

"Hush," said the Saint. "Somebody might hear."

"Is there anybody left who doesn't know?" asked Chief Inspector Teal sardonically.

Simon Templar nodded.

"Strange as it may seem, there is. Believe it or not, Claud Eustace, somewhere in this great city — I wouldn't tell you where, for anything — there are left two trusting souls who don't even recognise my name. They have just come down from their hermits' caves in the mountains of Ladbroke Grove, and they haven't yet heard the news. The Robin Hood of modern crime," said the Saint oratorically, "the scourge of the ungodly, the defender of the faith — what are the newspaper headlines? — has come back to raise hell over the length and breadth of England — and they don't know."

"You look much too happy," said the detective suspiciously. "Who are these fellows?"

"Their names are Uppingdon and Immelbern, if you want to know — and you've probably met them before. They have special information about racehorses, and I am playing my usual role of the Sucker who does not Suck too long. At the moment they owe me five hundred quid."

Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal's baby blue eyes looked him over thoughtfully. And in Chief Inspector Teal's mind there were no illusions. He did not share the ignorance of Messrs. Uppingdon and Immelbern. He had known the Saint for many years, and he had heard that he was back. He knew that there was going to be a fresh outbreak of buccaneering through the fringes of London's underworld, exactly as there had been so many times before; he knew that the feud between them was going to start again, the endless battle between the gay outlaw and the guardian of the Law; and he knew that his troubles were at the beginning of a new lease of life. And yet one of his rare smiles touched his mouth for a fleeting instant.

"See that they pay you," he said, and went on his portly and lethargic way.

Simon Templar went back to the apartment on Clarges Street. Uppingdon let him in; and even the melancholy Mr. Immelbern was moved to jump up as they entered the living-room.

"Did it win?" they chorused.

The Saint held out the paper. It was seized, snatched from hand to hand, and lowered reverently while an exchange of rapturous glances took place across its columns.

"At five to one," breathed Lieut.-Colonel Uppingdon.

"Five thousand quid," whispered Mr. Immelbern.

"The seventh winner in succession."

"Eighty thousand quid in four weeks."

The Colonel turned to Simon.

"What a pity you only had a hundred pounds on," he said, momentarily crestfallen. Then the solution struck him, and he brightened. "But how ridiculous! We can easily put that right. On our next coup, you shall be an equal partner. Immelbern, be silent! I have put up with enough interference from you. Templar, my dear boy, if you care to come in with me next time—"

The Saint shook his head.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I don't mind a small gamble now and again, but for business I only bet on certainties."

"But this is a certainty!" cried the Colonel.

Simon frowned.

"Nothing," he said gravely, "is a certainty until you know the result. A horse may drop dead, or fall down, or be disqualified. The risk may be small, but it exists. I eliminate it." He gazed at them suddenly with a sober intensity which almost held them spellbound. "It sounds silly," he said, "but I happen to be psychic."

The two men stared back at him.

"Wha — what?" stammered the Colonel.

"What does that mean?" demanded Mr. Immelbern, more grossly.

"I am clairvoyant," said the Saint simply. "I can foretell the future. For instance, I can look over the list of runners in a newspaper and close my eyes, and suddenly I'll see the winners printed out in my mind, just as if I was looking at the evening edition. I don't know how it's done. It's a gift. My mother had it."

The two men were gaping at him dubiously. They were incredulous, wondering if they were missing a joke and ought to laugh politely; and yet something in the Saint's voice and the slight uncanny widening of his eyes sent a cold supernatural draught creeping up their spines.

"Haw!" ejaculated the Colonel uncertainly, feeling that he was called upon to make some sound; and the Saint smiled distantly.

He glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece.

"Let me show you. I wasn't going to make any bets today, but since I've started I may as well go on."

He picked up his lunch edition, which he had been reading in the Palace Royal lounge, and studied the racing card on the back page. Then he put down the paper and covered his eyes. For several seconds there was a breathless silence, while he stood there with his head in his hands, swaying slightly, in an attitude of terrific concentration.

Again the supernatural shiver went over the two partners; and then the Saint straightened up suddenly, opened his eyes, and rushed to the telephone.

He dialed his number rather slowly. He had watched the movements of Mr. Immelbern's fingers closely, on every one of that gentleman's five calls; and his keen ears had listened and calculated every click of the returning dial. It would not be his fault if he got the wrong number.

The receiver at the other end of the line was lifted. The voice spoke.

"Baby Face," it said hollowly.

Simon Templar drew a deep breath, and a gigantic grin of bliss deployed itself over his inside. But outwardly he did not bat an eyelid.

"Two hundred pounds on Baby Face for Mr. Templar," he said; and the partners were too absorbed with other things to notice that he spoke in a very fair imitation of Mr. Immelbern's deep rumble.

He turned back to them, smiling.

"Baby Face," he said, with the quietness of absolute certitude, "will win the three o'clock race at Sandown Park."

Lieut.-Colonel Uppingdon fingered his superb white moustachios.

"By Gad!" he said.

Half an hour later the three of them went out together for a newspaper. Baby Face had won — at ten to one.

"Haw!" said the Colonel, blinking at the result rather dazedly.

On the face of Mr. Immelbern was a look of almost superstitious awe. It is difficult to convey what was in his mind at that moment. Throughout his life he had dreamed of such things. Horseflesh was the one true love of his unromantic soul. The fashions of Newmarket ruled his clothes, the scent of stables hung around him like a subtle perfume; he might, in prosperous times, have been a rich man in his illegal way, if all his private profits had not inevitably gravitated on to the backs of unsuccessful horses as fast as they came into his pocket. And in the secret daydreams which coil through even the most phlegmatic bosom had always been the wild impossible idea that if by some miracle he could have the privilege of reading the next day's results every day for a week, he could make himself a fortune that would free him for the rest of his life from the sordid labours of the confidence game and give him the leisure to perfect that infallible racing system with which he had been experimenting ever since adolescence.

And now the miracle had come to pass, in the person of that debonair and affluent young man who did not even seem to realise the potential millions which lay in his strange gift.

"Can you do that every day?" he asked huskily.

"Oh, yes," said the Saint.

"In every race?" said Mr. Immelbern hoarsely.

"Why not?" said the Saint. "It makes racing rather a bore, really, and you soon get tired of drawing in the money."

Mr. Immelbern gulped. He could not conceive what it felt like to get tired of drawing in money. He felt stunned.

"Well," said the Saint casually, "I'd better be buzzing along—"

At the sound of those words something came over Lieut-Colonel Sir George Uppingdon. It was, in its way, the turning of a worm. He had suffered much. The gibes of Mr. Immelbern still rankled in his sedate aristocratic breast. And Mr. Immelbern was still goggling in a half-witted daze — he who had boasted almost naggingly of his accessibility to new ideas.

Lieut.-Colonel Sir George Uppingdon took the Saint's arm, gently but very firmly.

"Just a minute, my dear boy," he said, rolling the words succulently round his tongue. "We must not be old-fashioned. We must move with the times. This psychic gift of yours is truly remarkable. There's a fortune in it. Damme, if somebody threw a purse into Irnmelbern's lap, he'd be asking me what it was. Thank God, I'm not so dense as that, by Gad. My dear Mr. Templar, my dear boy, you must — I positively insist — you must come back to my rooms and talk about what you're going to do with this gift of yours. By Gad!"

Mr. Immelbern did not come out of his trance until halfway through the bargaining that followed.

It was nearly two hours later when the two partners struggled somewhat short-windedly up the stairs to a dingy one-roomed office off the Strand. Its furniture consisted of a chair, a table with a telephone on it, and a tape machine in one corner. It had not been swept for weeks, but it served its purpose adequately.

The third and very junior member of the partnership sat on the chair with his feet on the table, smoking a limp cigarette and turning the pages of Paris Plaisirs. He looked up in some surprise not unmixed with alarm at the noisy entrance of his confederates — a pimply youth with a chin that barely contrived to separate his mouth from his neck.

"I've made our fortunes!" yelled Mr. Immelbern, and, despite the youth's repulsive aspect, embraced him.

A slight frown momentarily marred the Colonel's glowing benevolence.

"What d'you mean — you've made our fortunes?" he demanded. "If it hadn't been for me—"

"Well, what the hell does it matter?" said Mr. Immelbern. "In a couple of months we'll all be millionaires."

"How?" asked the pimply youth blankly.

Mr. Immelbern broke off in the middle of an improvised hornpipe.

"It's like this," he explained exuberantly. "We've got a sike — sidekick—"

"Psychic," said the Colonel.

"A bloke who can tell the future. He puts his hands over his eyes and reads the winners off like you'd read them out of a paper. He did it four times this afternoon. We're going to take him in with us. We had a job to persuade him — he was going off to the South of France tonight — can you imagine it, a bloke with a gift like that going away while there's any racing here? We had to give him five hundred quid advance on the money we told him we were going to make for him to make him put it off. But it's worth it. We'll start tomorrow, and if this fellow Templar—"

"Ow, that's 'is nime, is it?" said the pimply youth brightly. "I wondered wot was goin' on."

There was a short puzzled silence.

"How do you mean — what was going on?" asked the Colonel at length.

"Well," said the pimply youth, "when Sid was ringing up all the afternoon, practic'ly every rice—"

"What d'you mean?" croaked Mr. Immelbern. "I rang up every race?"

"Yus, an' I was giving' you the winners, an' you were syin' 'Two 'undred pounds on Baby Face for Mr. Templar' — Tour 'undred pounds on Cellophane for Mr. Templar' — gettin' bigger an' bigger all the time an' never givin' 'im a loser — well, I started to wonder wot was 'appening."

The silence that followed was longer, much longer; and there were things seething in it for which the English language has no words.

It was the Colonel who broke it.

"It's impossible," he said dizzily. "I know the clock was slow, because I put it back myself, but I only put it back five minutes — and this fellow was telephoning ten minutes before the times of the races."

"Then 'e must 'ave put it back some more while you wasn't watchin' 'im," said the pimply youth stolidly.

The idea penetrated after several awful seconds.

"By Gad!" said Lieut.-Colonel Sir George Uppingdon in a feeble voice.

II

The Unfortunate Financier

"The secret of success," said Simon Templar profoundly, "is never to do anything by halves. If you try to touch someone for a tenner, you probably get snubbed; but if you put on a silk hat and a false stomach and go into the City to raise a million-pound loan, people fall over each other in the rush to hand you blank cheques. The wretched little thief who pinches a handful of silver spoons gets shoved into clink through a perfect orgy of congratulations to the police and the magistrates, but the bird who diddles the public of a few hundred thousands by legal methods gets knighthood. A sound buccaneering business has to be run on the same principles."

While he could not have claimed any earth-shaking originality for the theme of his sermon, Simon Templar was in the perhaps rarer position of being able to claim that he practised what he preached. He had been doing it for so long, with so much diligence and devotion, that the name of the Saint had passed into the Valhalla of all great names: it had become a household word, even as the name of Miss Amelia Bloomer, an earlier crusader, was absorbed into the tongue that Shakespeare did not live long enough to speak — but in a more romantic context. And if there were many more sharks in the broad lagoons of technically legal righteousness who knew him better by his chosen nom de guerre than by his real name, and who would not even have recognised him had they passed him in the street, that minor degree of anonymity was an asset in the Saint's profession which more than compensated him for the concurrent gaps in his publicity.

Mr. Wallington Titus Oates was another gentleman who did nothing by halves.

He was a large red-faced man who looked exactly like a City alderman or a master butcher, with a beefy solidity about him which disarmed suspicion. It was preposterous, his victims thought, in the early and extensive stages of their ignorance, that such an obvious rough diamond, such a jovial hail-fellow-well-met, such an almost startlingly lifelike incarnation of the cartoonist's figure of John Bull, could be a practitioner of cunning and deceit. Even about his rather unusual names he was delightfully frank. If he had been an American he would certainly have called himself Wallington T. Oates, and the "T" would have been shrouded in a mystery that might have embraced anything from Thomas to Tamerlane. In the more reserved manner of the Englishman, who does not have a Christian name until you have known him for twenty-five years, he might without exciting extraordinary curiosity have been known simply as W. T. Oates. But he was not. His cards were printed W. Titus Oates; and he was not even insistent on the preliminary "W." He was, in fact, best pleased to be known as plain Titus Oates, and would chortle heartily over his chances of tracing a pedigree back to the notorious inventor of the Popish Plot who was whipped from Aldgate to Newgate and from Newgate to Tyburn some three hundred years ago.

But apart from the fact that some people would have given much to apply the same discouraging treatment to Mr. Wallington Titus Oates, he had little else in common with his putative ancestor. For although the better-known Titus Oates stood in the pillory outside the Royal Exchange before his dolorous tour, it was not recorded that he was interested in the dealings within; whereas the present Stock Exchange was Mr. Wallington Titus Oates's happy hunting ground.

If there was anything that W. Titus Oates understood from A to whatever letter can be invented after Z, it was the manipulation of shares. Bulls and bears were his domestic pets. Mergers and debentures were his bedfellows. It might almost be said that he danced contangos in his sleep. And it was all very profitable — so profitable that Mr. Oates possessed not only three Rolls-Royces but also a liberal allowance of pocket-money to spend on the collection of postage stamps which was his joy and relaxation.

This is not to be taken to mean that Mr. Oates was known in the City as a narrow evader of the law. He was, on the contrary, a highly respected and influential man; for it is one of the sublime subtleties of the law of England that whilst the manipulation of the form of racehorses is a hideous crime, to be rewarded with expulsion from the most boring clubs and other forms of condign punishment, the manipulation of share values is a noble and righteous occupation by which the large entrance fees to such clubs may commendably be obtained, provided that the method of juggling is genteel and smooth. Mr. Oates's form as a juggler was notably genteel and smooth; and the ambition of certain citizens to whip Mr. Oates at a cart's tail from Aldgate to Newgate was based not so much on the knowledge of any actual fraud as on the fact that the small investments which represented the life savings had on occasion been skittled down the market in the course of Mr. Oates's important operations, which every right-thinking person will agree was a very unsporting and un-British attitude to take.

The elementary principles of share manipulation are, of course, simplicity itself. If large blocks of a certain share are thrown on the market from various quarters, the word goes round that the stock is bad, the small investor takes fright and dashes in to cut his losses, thereby making matters worse, and the price of the share falls according to the first law of supply and demand. If, on the other hand, there is heavy buying in a certain share, the word goes round that it is a "good thing," the small speculator jumps in for a quick profit, adding his weight to the snowball, and the price goes up according to the same law. This is the foundation system on which all speculative operators work; but Mr. Oates had his own ways of accelerating these reactions.

"Nobody can say that Titus Oates ain't an honest man," he used to say to the very exclusive circle of confederates who shared his confidence and a reasonable proportion of his profits. "P'raps I am a bit smarter than some of the others, but that's their funeral. You don't know what tricks they get up to behind the scenes, but nobody knows what tricks I get up to, either. It's all in the day's work."

He was thinking along the same lines on a certain morning, while he waited for his associates to arrive for the conference at which the final details of the manoeuvre on which he was working at that time would be decided. It was the biggest manipulation he had attempted so far, and it involved a trick that sailed much closer to the wind than anything he had done before; but it has already been explained that he was not a man who did things by halves. The economic depression which had bogged down the market for many months past, and the resultant steadfast refusal of stocks to soar appreciably however stimulated by legitimate and near-legitimate means, had been very bad for his business as well as others. Now, envisaging the first symptoms of an upturn, he was preparing to cash in on it to an extent that would compensate for many months of failure; and with so much lost ground to make up he had no time for half measures. Yet he knew that there were a few tense days ahead of him.

A discreet knock on his door, heralding the end of thought and the beginning of action, was almost a relief. His new secretary entered in answer to his curt summons, and his eyes rested on her slim figure for a moment with unalloyed pleasure — she was a remarkably beautiful girl with natural honey-golden hair and entrancing blue eyes which in Mr. Oates's dreams had sometimes been known to gaze with Dietrichesque yearning upon his unattractive person.

"Mr. Hammel and Mr. Costello are here," she said.

Mr. Oates nodded.

"Bring them in, my dear." He rummaged thoughtfully through his pockets and produced a crumpled five-pound note, which he pushed towards her. "And buy yourself some silk stockings when you go out to lunch — just as a little gift from me. You've been a good gal. Some night next week, when I'm not working so hard, we might have dinner together, eh?"

"Thank you, Mr. Oates," she said softly, and left him with a sweet smile which started strange wrigglings within him.

When they had dinner together he would make her call him Titus, he thought, and rubbed his hands over the romantic prospect. But before that happy night he had much to do; and the entrance of Hammel and Costello brought him back to the stern consideration of how that dinner and many others, with silk stockings and orchids to match, were to be paid for.

Mr. Jules Hammel was a small rotund gentleman whose rimless spectacles gave him a benign and owlish appearance, like somebody's very juvenile uncle. Mr. Abe Costello was longer and much more cadaverous, and he wore a pencil-line of hair across his upper lip with a certain undercurrent of self-consciousness which might have made one think that he went about in the constant embarrassing fear of being mistaken for Clark Gable. Actually their resemblance to any such harmless characters was illusory — they were nearly as cunning as Mr. Oates himself, and not even a trifle less unscrupulous.

"Well, boys," said Mr. Oates, breaking the ice jovially, "I found another good thing last night."

"Buy or sell?" asked Costello alertly.

"Buy," said Mr. Oates. "I bought it. As far as I can find out, there are only about a dozen in the world. The issue was corrected the day after it came out."

Hammel helped himself to a cigar and frowned puzzledly.

"What is this?"

"A German 5-pfenning with the Befreiungstag overprint inverted and spelt with a P instead of a B," explained Mr. Oates. "That's a stamp you could get a hundred pounds for any day."

His guests exchanged tolerant glances. While they lighted their Partagas they allowed Mr. Oates to expatiate on the beauties of his acquisition with all the extravagant zeal of the rabid collector; but as soon as the smokes were going Costello recalled the meeting to its agenda.

"Well," he said casually, "Midorients are down to 25."

"24," said Mr. Oates. "I rang up my brokers just before you came in and told them to sell another block. They'll be down to 23 or 22 after lunch. We've shifted them pretty well."

"When do we start buying?" asked Hammel.

"At 22. And you'll have to do it quickly. The wires are being sent off at lunch-time tomorrow, and the news will be in the papers before the Exchange closes."

Mr. Oates paced the floor steadily, marshalling the facts of the situation for an audience which was already conversant with them.

The Midorient Company owned large and unproductive concessions in Mesopotamia. Many years ago its fields had flowed with seemingly inexhaustible quantities of oil of excellent quality, and the stock had paid its original holders several thousand times over. But suddenly, on account of those abstruse and unpredictable geological causes to which such things are subject, the supply had petered out. Frenzied boring had failed to produce results. The output had dropped to a paltry few hundred barrels which sufficed to pay dividends of two per cent on the stock — no more, and, as a slight tempering of the wind to the shorn stockholders, no less. The shares had adjusted their market value accordingly. Boring had continued ever since, without showing any improvement; and indeed the shares had depreciated still further during the past fortnight as a result of persistent rumours that even the small output which had for a long while saved the stock from becoming entirely derelict was drying up — rumours which, as omniscient chroniclers of these events, we are able to trace back to the ingenious agency of Mr. Titus Oates.

That was sufficient to send the moribund stock down to the price at which Messrs. Oates, Costello, and Hammel desired to buy it. The boom on which they would make their profit called for more organisation, and involved the slight deception on which Mr. Oates was basing his gamble.

Travelling in Mesopotamia at that moment there was an English tourist named Ischolskov, and it is a matter of importance that he was there entirely at Mr. Oates's instigation and expense. During his visit he had contrived to learn the names of the correspondents of the important newspaper and news agencies in that region, and at the appointed time it would be his duty to send off similarly worded cablegrams, signed with the names of these correspondents, which would report to London that the Midorient Company's engineers had struck oil again — had, in fact, tapped a gigantic gusher of petroleum that would make the first phenomenal output of the Midorient Oil Fields look like the dribbling of a baby on its bib.

"Let's see," said Mr. Oates. "This is Tuesday. We buy today and tomorrow morning at 22 or even less. The shares'll start to go up tomorrow afternoon. They'll go up more on Thursday. By Friday morning they ought to be around 45 — they might even go to 50. They'll hang fire there. The first boom will be over, and people will be waiting for more information."

"What about the directors?" queried Hammel.

"They'll get a wire too, of course, signed by the manager on the spot. And don't forget that I'm a director. Every penny I have is tied up in that company — it's my company, lock, stock, and barrel. They'll call a special meeting, and I'll know exactly what they're doing about it. Of course they'll cable the manager for more details, but I can arrange to see that his reply don't get through to them before Friday lunch."

Costello fingered his wispy moustache.

"And we sell out on Friday morning," he said.

Mr. Oates nodded emphatically.

"We do more than sell out. We sell ourselves short, and unload twice as much stock as we're holding. The story'll get all over England over the week-end, and when the Exchange opens on Monday morning the shares'll be two a penny. We make our profit both ways."

"It's a big risk," said Hammel seriously.

"Well, I'm taking it for you, ain't I?" said Mr. Oates. "All you have to do is to help me spread the buying and selling about, so it don't look too much like a one-man deal. I'm standing to take all the knocks. But it can't go wrong. I've used Ischolskov before — I've got too much on him for him to try and double-cross me, and besides he's getting paid plenty. My being on the Midorient board makes it watertight. I'm taken in the same as the rest of 'em, and I'm hit as hard as they are. You're doing all the buying and selling from now on — there won't be a single deal in my name that anyone can prove against me. And whatever happens, don't sell till I give you the wire. I'll be the first to know when the crash is coming, and we'll hold out till the last moment."

They talked for an hour longer, after which they went out to a belated but celebratory lunch.

Mr. Oates left his office early that afternoon, and therefore he did not even think of the movements of his new secretary when she went home. But if he had been privileged to observe them, he would have been very little wiser; for Mr. Oates was one of the numerous people who knew the Saint only by name, and if he had seen the sinewy sunburned young man who met her at Piccadilly Circus and bore her off for a cocktail he might have suffered a pang of jealousy, but he would have had no cause for alarm.

"We must have an Old Fashioned, Pat," said the Saint, when they were settled in Oddenino's. "The occasion calls for one. There's a wicked look in your eye that tells me you have some news. Have you sown a few more wild Oates?"

"Must you?" she protested weakly.

"Shall we get him an owl?" Simon suggested.

"What for?" asked Patricia unguardedly.

"It would be rather nice," said the Saint reflectively, "to get Titus an owl."

Patricia Holm shuddered.

Over the cocktails and stuffed olives, however, she relented.

"It's started," she said. "Hammel and Costello had a long conference with him this morning. I suppose they finished it after lunch, but I'd heard enough before they went out."

She told him every detail of the discussion that had taken place in Mr. Titus Oates's private office, and Simon Templar smiled approvingly as he listened. Taken in conjunction with what he already knew, the summaries of various other conversations which she had reported to him, it left him with the whole structure of the conspiracy clearly catalogued in his mind.

"You must remember to take that microphone out of his office first thing in the morning," he remarked. "It might spoil things if Titus came across it, and I don't think you'll need to listen any more… Here, where did you get that from?"

"From sowing my wild Oates," said Patricia angelically, as the waitress departed with a five-pound note on her tray.

Simon Templar regarded her admiringly.

"Darling," he said at length, "there are no limits to your virtues. If you're as rich as that, you can not only buy me another Old Fashioned but you can take me to dinner at the Barcelona as well."

On the way to the restaurant he bought an Evening Standard and opened it at the table.

"Midorient closed at 21," he said. "It looks as if we shall have to name a ward in our Old Age Home for Retired Burglars after Comrade Oates."

"How much shall we make if we buy and sell with him?" asked the girl.

The Saint smiled.

"I'm afraid we should lose a lot of money," he said. "You see, Titus isn't going to sell."

She stared at him, mystified; and he closed the menu and laughed at her silently.

"Did you by any chance hear Titus boasting about a stamp he bought for his collection last night?" he asked, and she nodded. "Well, old darling, I'm the bird who sold it to him. I never thought I should sink to philatelism even in my dotage, but in this case it seemed the best way to work. Titus is already convinced that I'm the greatest stamp-sleuth in captivity, and when he hears about the twopenny blue Mauritius I've discovered for him he will be fairly purring through the town. I don't see any reason why our Mr. Oates should go unpunished for his sins and make a fortune out of this low swindle. He collects stamps, but I've got an even better hobby. I collect queer friends." The Saint was lighting a cigarette, and his blue eyes danced over the match. "Now listen carefully while I tell you the next move."

Mr. Wallington Titus Oates was gloating fruitily over the closing prices on the Friday evening when his telephone bell rang.

He had reason to gloat. The news story provided by the cablegrams of Mr. Ischolskov had been so admirably worded that it had hit the front page of every afternoon edition the previous day; and a jumpy market had done the rest. The results exceeded his most optimistic estimates. On the Wednesday night Midorients had closed at 32, and dealings in the street had taken them up to 34. They opened on Thursday morning at 38, and went to 50 before noon. One lunch edition ran a special topical article on fortunes made in oil, the sun shone brilliantly, England declared for 537 for six wickets in the first Test, all the brokers and jobbers felt happy, and Midorients finally went to 61 at the close. Moreover, in the evening paper which Mr. Oates was reading there could not be found a breath of suspicion directed against the news which had caused the boom. The Midorient directors had issued a statement declaring that they were awaiting further details, that their manager on the spot was a reliable man not given to hysterical exaggerations, and that for the moment they were satisfied that prosperity had returned to an oil field which, they pointed out, had merely been suffering a temporary set-back. Mr. Gates had had much to do with the wording of the statement himself; and if it erred somewhat on the side of optimism, the error could not by any stretch of imagination have been described as criminal misrepresentation.

And when Mr. Oates picked up his receiver and heard what it had to say, his cup was filled to overflowing.

"I've got you that twopenny blue," sad a voice which he recognised. "It's a peach! It must be one of the most perfect specimens in existence — and it'll only cost you nine hundred quid."

Mr. Oates gripped the receiver, and his eyes lighted up with the unearthly fire which illumines the stare of the collector when he sees a coveted trophy within his grasp. It was, in its way, a no less starkly primitive manifestation than the dilating nostrils of a bloodhound hot on the scent.

"Where is it?" barked Mr. Oates, in the baying voice of the same hound. "When can I see it? Can you bring it round? Have you got it yourself? Where is it?

"Well, that's the snag, Mr. Oates," said the Saint apologetically. "The owner won't let it go. He won't even let it out of his safe until it's paid for. He says he's got to have a cheque in his pocket before he'll let me take it away. He's a crotchety old bird, and I think he's afraid I might light a cigarette with it or something."

Mr. Oates fairly quivered with suppressed emotion.

"Well, where does he live?" he yelped. "I'll settle him. I'll go round and see him at once. What's his name? What's the address?"

"His name is Dr. Jethero," Simon answered methodically, "and he lives at 105 Matlock Gardens, Netting Hill. I think you'll catch him there — I've only just left him, and he said nothing about going out."

"Dr. Jethero — 105 — Matlock — Gardens — Notting — Hill," repeated Mr. Oates, reaching for a message pad and scribbling frantically.

"By the way," said the Saint, "I said he was crotchety, but you may think he's just potty. He's got some sort of a bee in his bonnet about people trying to get in and steal his stamp, and he told me that if you want to call and see him you've got to give a password."

"A password?" bleated Mr. Oates.

"Yes. I told him that everybody knew Titus Oates, but apparently that wasn't good enough for him. If you go there you've got to say 'I was whipped from Aldgate to Newgate and from Newgate to Tyburn.' Can you remember that?"

"Of course," said Mr. Oates indignantly. "I know all about that. Titus Oates was an ancestor of mine. Come and see me in the morning, my dear boy — I'll have a present waiting for you. Good-bye."

Mr. Oates slammed back the receiver and leapt up as if unleashed. Dithering with ecstasy and excitement, he stuffed his note of the address into his pocket, grabbed a cheque-book, and dashed out into the night.

The taxi ride to his destination seemed interminable, and when he got there he was in such a state of expectant rapture that he flung the driver a pound note and scurried up the steps without waiting for change. The house was one of those unwieldly Victorian edifices with which the west of London is encumbered against all hopes of modern development; and in the dim street lighting he did not notice that all the windows were barred, nor would he have been likely to speculate upon the reasons for that peculiar feature if he had noticed it.

The door was opened by a white-coated man, and Mr. Oates almost bowled him over as he dashed past him into the hall.

"I want Dr. Jethero," he bayed. "I'm Titus Oates!"

The man closed the door and looked at him curiously.

"Mr. Titus Oates, sir?"

"Yes!" roared the financier impatiently. "Titus Oates. Tell him I was whipped from Aldgate to Newgate, and from Newgate to Tyburn. And hurry up!"

The man nodded perfunctorily, and edged past him at a cautious distance of which Mr. Oates was too wrought up to see the implications.

"Yes, sir. Will you wait in here a moment, sir?"

Mr. Oates was ushered into a barely furnished distempered room and left there. With an effort he fussed himself down to a superficial calm — he was Titus Oates, a power in the City, and he must conduct himself accordingly. Dr. Jethero might misunderstand a blundering excitement. If he was crotchety, and perhaps even potty, he must be handled with tact. Mr. Oates strode up and down the room, working off his overflow of excitement. There was a faint characteristic flavour of iodoform in the air, but Mr. Oates did not even notice that.

Footsteps sounded along the hall, and the door opened again. This time it admitted a grey-bearded man who also wore a white coat. His keen spectacled eyes examined the financier calmly. Mr. Oates mustered all his self-control.

"I am Titus Oates," he said with simple dignity.

The grey-bearded man nodded.

"You wanted to see me?" he said; and Mr. Oates recalled his instructions again.

"Titus Oates," he repeated gravely. "I was whipped from Aldgate to Newgate, and from Newgate to Tyburn."

Dr. Jethero studied him for a moment longer, and glanced towards the door, where the white-coated attendant was waiting unobtrusively — Mr. Oates had not even noticed the oddity of that.

"Yes, yes," he said soothingly. "And you were pilloried in Palace Yard, weren't you?"

"That's right," said Mr. Oates eagerly. "And outside the Royal Exchange. They put me in prison for life, but they let me out at the Revolution and gave me my pension back."

Dr. Jethero made clucking noises with his tongue.

"I see. A very unfortunate business. Would you mind coming this way, Mr. Oates?"

He led the way up the stairs, and Mr. Oates followed him blissfully. The whole rigmarole seemed very childish, but if it pleased Dr. Jethero, Mr. Oates was prepared to go to any lengths to humour him. The white-coated attendant followed Mr. Oates. Dr. Jethero opened the door of a room on the second floor, and stood aside for Mr. Oates to pass in. The door had a barred grille in its upper panels through which the interior of the room could be observed from the outside, an eccentricity which Mr. Oates was still ready to accept as being in keeping with the character of his host.

It was the interior of the room into which he was shown that began to place an excessive strain on his adaptability. It was without furnishings of any kind, unless the thick kind of mattress in one corner could be called furnishings, and the walls and floor were finished in some extraordinary style of decoration which made them look like quilted upholstery.

Mr. Oates looked about him, and turned puzzledly to his host.

"Well," he said, "where's the stamp?"

"What stamp?" asked Dr. Jethero.

Mr. Oates's laboriously achieved restraint was wearing thin again.

"Don't you understand? I'm Titus Oates. I was whipped from Aldgate to Newgate, and from Newgate to Tyburn. Didn't you hear what I said?"

"Yes, yes, yes," murmured the doctor peaceably. "You're Titus Oates. You stood in the pillory and they pelted you with rotten eggs."

"Well," said Mr. Oates, "what about the stamp?"

Dr. Jethero cleared his throat.

"Just a minute, Mr. Oates. Suppose we go into that presently. Would you mind taking off your coat and shoes?"

Mr. Oates gaped at him.

"This is going too far," he protested. "I'm Titus Oates. Everybody know Titus Oates. You remember — the Popish Plot—"

"Mr. Oates," said the doctor sternly, "will you take off your coat and shoes?"

The white-coated attendant was advancing stealthily towards him, and a sudden vague fear seized on the financier. Now he began to see the reason for the man's extraordinary behaviour. He was not crotchety. He was potty. He was worse — he must be a raving homicidal lunatic. Heaven knew what he would be doing next. A wild desire to be away from number 105 Matlock Gardens gripped Mr. Oates — a desire that could not even be quelled by the urge to possess a twopenny blue Mauritius in perfect preservation.

"Never mind," said Mr. Oates liberally. "I'm not really interested. I don't collect stamps at all. I'm just Titus Oates. Everyone knows me. I'm sure you'll excuse me — I have an appointment—"

He was edging towards the door, but Dr. Jethero stood in the way.

"Nobody's going to hurt you, Mr. Oates," he said; and then he caught the desperate gleam in Mr. Oates's eye, and signed quickly to the attendant.

Mr. Oates was seized suddenly from behind in a deft grip. Overcome with terror, he struggled like a maniac, and he was a big man; but he was helpless in the expert hands that held him. He was tripped and flung to the floor, and pinioned there with practised skill. Through whirling mists of horror he saw the doctor coming towards him with a hypodermic syringe, and he was still yelling feebly about the Popish Plot when the needle stabbed into his arm…

Dr. Jethero went downstairs and rang up a number which he had been given.

"I've got your uncle, Mr. Tombs," he announced. "He gave us a bit of trouble, but he's quite safe now."

Simon Templar, who had found the name of Tombs a convenient alias before, grinned invisibly into the transmitter.

"That's splendid. Did he give you a lot of trouble?"

"He was inclined to be violent, but we managed to give him an injection, and when he wakes up he'll be in a strait-jacket. He's really a most interesting case," said the doctor with professional enthusiasm. "Quite apart from the delusion that he is Titus Oates, he seems to have some extraordinary hallucination about a stamp. Had you noticed that before?"

"I hadn't," said the Saint. "You may be able to find out some more about that. Keep him under observation, doctor, and call me again on Monday morning."

He rang off and turned gleefully to Patricia Holm, who was waiting at his elbow.

"Titus is in safe hands," he said. "And now I've got a call of my own to make."

"Who to?" she asked.

He showed her a scrap of paper on which he had jotted down the words of what appeared to be a telegram.

Amazing discovery stop have reason to believe boom may be based on genuine possibilities stop do not on any account sell without hearing from me.

"Dicky Tremayne's in Paris, and he'll send it for me," said the Saint. "A copy goes to Abe Costello and Jules Hammel tonight — I just want to make sure that they follow Titus down the drain. By the way, we shall clear about twenty thousand if Midorients are still at 61 when they open again tomorrow morning."

"But are you sure Jethero won't get into trouble?" she said.

Simon Templar nodded.

"Somehow I feel that Titus will prefer to keep his mouth shut after I've had a little chat with him on Monday, " he said; and it is a matter of history that he was absolutely right.

III

The Newdick Helicopter

"I'm afraid," said Patricia Holm soberly, "you'll be getting into trouble again soon."

Simon Templar grinned, and opened another bottle of beer. He poured it out with a steady hand, unshaken by the future predicted for him.

"You may be right, darling," he admitted. "Trouble is one of the things that sort of happen to me, like other people have colds."

"I've often heard you complaining about it," said the girl sceptically.

The Saint shook his head.

"You wrong me," he said. "Posterity will know me as a maligned, misunderstood, ill-used victim of a cruel fate. I have tried to be good. Instinctive righteousness glows from me likean inward light. But nobody gives it a chance. What do you suggest?"

"You might go into business."

"I know. Something safe and respectable, like manufacturing woollen combinations for elderly ladies and lorgnettes. We might throw in a pair of lorgnettes with every suit. You could knit them, and I'd do the fitting — the fitting of the lorgnettes, of course." Simon raised his glass and drank deeply. "It's an attractive idea, old darling, but all these schemes involve laying out a lot of capital on which you have to wait such a hell of a long time for a return. Besides, there can't be much of a profit in it. On a rough estimate, the amount of wool required to circumnavigate a fifty-four inch bust —"

Monty Hayward, who was also present, took out a tobacco-pouch and began to fill his pipe.

"I had some capital once," he said reminiscently, "but it didn't do me much good."

"How much can you lend me?" asked the Saint hopefully.

Monty brushed stray ends of tobacco from his lap and tested the draught through his handiwork cautiously.

"I haven't got it any more, but I don't think I'd lend it to you if I had," he said kindly. "Anyway, the point doesn't arise, because a fellow called Oscar Newdick has got it. Didn't I ever tell you about that?"

The Saint moved his head negatively, and settled deeper into his chair.

"It doesn't sound like you, Monty. D'you mean to say you were hornswoggled?"

Monty nodded.

"I suppose you might call it that. It happened about six years ago, when I was a bit younger and not quite so wise. It wasn't a bad swindle on the whole, though." He struck a match and puffed meditatively. "This fellow Newdick was a bloke I met on the train coming down from the office. He used to get into the same compartment with me three or four times a week, and naturally we took to passing the time of day — you know the way one does. He was an aeronautical engineer and a bit of an inventor, apparently. He was experimenting with autogiros, and he had a little one-horse factory near Walton where he was building them. He used to talk a lot of technical stuff about them to me, and I talked technical stuff about make-up and dummies to him — I don't suppose either of us understood half of what the other was talking about, so we got on famously."

With his pipe drawing satisfactorily, Monty possessed himself of the beer-opener and executed a neat flanking movement towards the source of supply.

"Well, one day this fellow Newdick asked me if I'd like to drop over and have a look at his autogiros, so the following Saturday afternoon I hadn't anything particular to do and I took a run out to his aerodrome to see how he was getting along. All he had there was a couple of corrugated-iron sheds and a small field which he used to take off from and land at, but he really had got a helicopter effect which he said he'd made himself. He told me all about it and how it worked, which was all double-Dutch to me; and then he asked me if I'd like to go up in it. So I said 'Thank you very much, I should simply hate to go up in it.' You know what these things look like — an ordinary aeroplane with the wings taken off and just a sort of large fan business to hold you up in the air — I never thought they looked particularly safe even when they're properly made, and I certainly didn't feel like risking my neck in this home-made version that he'd rigged up out of old bits of wood and angle iron. However, he was so insistent about it and seemed so upset when I refused that eventually I thought I'd better gratify the old boy and just keep on praying that the damn thing wouldn't fall to pieces before we got down again."

The Saint sighed.

"So that's what happened to your face," he remarked, in a tone of profound relief. "If you only knew how that had been bothering me—"

"My mother did that," said Monty proudly. "No — we didn't crash. In fact, I had a really interesting flight. Either it must have been a very good machine, or he was a very good flier, because he made it do almost everything except answer questions. I don't know if you've ever been up in one of these autogiros — I've never been up in any other make, but this one was certainly everything that he claimed for it. It went up exactly like going up in a lift, and came down the same way. I never have known anything about the mechanics of these things, but after having had a ride in this bus of his I couldn't help feeling that the Air Age had arrived — I mean, anyone with a reasonable sized lawn could have kept one of 'em and gone tootling off for week-ends in it."

"And therefore," said the Saint reproachfully, "when he asked you if you'd like to invest some money in a company he was forming to turn out these machines and sell them at about twenty pounds a time, you hauled out your cheque-book and asked him how much he wanted."

Monty chuckled good-humouredly.

"That's about it. The details don't really matter, but the fact is that about three weeks later I'd bought above five thousand quids' worth of shares."

"What was the catch?" Simon asked; and Monty shrugged.

"Well, the catch was simply that this helicopter wasn't his invention at all. He had really built it himself, apparently, but it was copied line for line from one of the existing makes. There wasn't a thing in it that he'd invented. Therefore the design wasn't his, and he hadn't any right at all to manufacture it. So the company couldn't function. Of course, he didn't put it exactly like that. He told me that he'd 'discovered' that his designs 'overlapped' the existing patents — he swore that it was absolutely a coincidence, and nearly wept all over my office because his heart was broken because he'd found out that all his research work had already been done before. I told him I didn't believe a word of it, but that wasn't any help towards getting my money back. I hadn't any evidence against him that I could have brought into a court of law. Of course he'd told me that his design was patented and protected in every way, but he hadn't put any of that in writing, and when he came and told me the whole thing was smashed he denied it. He said he'd told me he was getting the design patented. I did see a solicitor about it afterwards, but he told me I hadn't a chance of proving a deliberate fraud. Newdick would probably have been ticked off in court for taking money without reasonable precautions, but that wouldn't have brought any of it back."

"It was a private company, I suppose," said the Saint.

Monty nodded.

"If it had been a public one, with shares on the open market, it would have been a different matter," he said.

"What happened to the money?"

"Newdick had spent it — or he said he had. He told me he'd paid off all the old debts that had run up while he was experimenting, and spent the rest on some manufacturing plant and machinery for the company. He did give me about six or seven hundred back, and told me he'd work like hell to produce another invention that would really be original so he could pay me back the rest, but that was the last I heard of him. He's probably caught several other mugs with the same game since then." Monty grinned philosophically, looked at the clock, and got up. "Well, I must be getting along. I'll look in and see you on Saturday — if you haven't been arrested and shoved in clink before then."

He departed after another bottle of beer had been lowered; and when he had gone Patricia Holm viewed the Saint doubtfully. She had not missed the quiet attention with which he had followed Monty Hayward's narrative; and she had known Simon Templar a long time. The Saint had a fresh cigarette slanting from the corner of his mouth, his hands were in his pockets, and he was smiling at her with a seraphic innocence which was belied by every facet of the twinkling tang of mockery in his blue eyes.

"You know what I told you," she said.

He laughed.

"About getting into trouble? My darling, when will you stop thinking these wicked thoughts? I'm taking your advice to heart. Maybe there is something to be said for going into business. I think I should look rather fetching in a silk hat and a pair of white spats with pearl buttons; and you've no idea how I could liven up a directors' meeting if I set my mind to it."

Patricia was not convinced.

She was even less convinced when the Saint went out the next morning. From his extensive wardrobe he had selected one of his most elegant suits, a creation in light-hued saxony of the softest and most expensive weave — a garment which could by no possible chance have been worn by a man who had to devote his day to honest toil. His tie was dashing, his silk socks would have made a Communist's righteous indignation swell to bursting point, and over his right eye he had tilted a brand new Panama which would have made one wonder whether the strange shapeless headgear of the same breed worn by old gents whilst pottering around their gardens could conceivably be any relation whatsoever of such a superbly stylish lid. Moreover he had taken out the car which was the pride of his stable — the new cream and red Hirondel which was in itself the hallmark of a man who could afford to pay five thousand pounds for a car and thereafter watch a gallon of petrol blown into smoke every three or four miles.

"Where's the funeral?" she asked; and the Saint smiled blandly.

"I'm a young sportsman with far more money than sense, and I'm sure Comrade Newdick will be pleased to see me," he said; and he kissed her.

Mr. Oscar Newdick was pleased to see him — Simon Templar would have been vastly surprised if he hadn't been. That aura of idle affluence which the Saint could put on as easily as he put on a coat was one of his most priceless accessories, and it was never worn for any honest purpose.

But this Mr. Oscar Newdick did not know. To him, the arrival of such a person was like an answer to prayer. Monty Hayward's guess at Mr. Newdick's activities since collecting five thousand pounds from him was fairly accurate, but only fairly. Mr. Newdick had not caught several other mugs, but only three; and one of them had only been induced to invest a paltry three hundred pounds. The helicopter racket had been failing in its dividends, and the past year had not shown a single pennyworth of profit. Mr. Newdick did not believe in accumulating pennies: when he made a touch, it had to be a big one, and he was prepared to wait for it — the paltry three hundred pound investor had been an error of judgment, a young man who had grossly misled him with fabulous accounts of wealthy uncles, which when the time came to make the touch had been discovered to be the purest fiction — but recently the periods of waiting had exceeded all reasonable limits. Mr. Newdick had travelled literally thousands of miles on the more prosperous suburban lines in search of victims — the fellow-passenger technique really was his own invention, and he practised it to perfection — but many moons had passed since he brought a prospective investor home from his many voyages.

When Simon Templar arrived, in fact, Mr. Newdick was gazing mournfully over the litter of spars and fabric and machinery in one of his corrugated-iron sheds, endeavouring to estimate its value in the junk market. The time had come, he was beginning to feel, when that particular stock-in-trade had paid the last percentage that could be squeezed out of it; it had rewarded him handsomely for his initial investment, but now it was obsolete. The best solution appeared to be to turn it in and concentrate his varied talents on some other subject. A fat insurance policy, of course, followed by a well-organized fire, would have been more profitable; but a recent sensational arson trial and the consequent publicity given to such schemes made him wary of taking that way out. And he was engrossed in these uninspiring meditations when the bell in his "office" rang and manna fell from Heaven.

Mr. Oscar Newdick, it must be acknowledged, did not instantly recognise it as manna. At first he thought it could only be the rate collector, or another summons for his unpaid electric light bill. He tiptoed to a grimy window which looked out on the road, with intent to escape rapidly across the adjacent fields if his surmise proved correct; and it was thus that he saw the imposing automobile which stood outside.

Mr. Newdick, a man of the world, was jerry to the fact that rate collectors and servers of summonses rarely arrive to their grim work in five-thousand-pound Hirondels; and it was with an easy conscience, if not yet admixed with undue optimism, that he went to open the door.

"Hullo, old bean," said the Saint.

"Er — hullo," said Mr. Newdick.

"I blew in to see if you could tell me anything about your jolly old company," said the Saint.

"Er — yes," said Mr. Newdick. "Er — why don't you come inside?"

His hesitation was not due to any bashfulness or even to offended dignity. Mr. Newdick did not mind being called an old bean. He had no instinctive desire to snub wealthy-looking young men with five-thousand-pound Hirondels who added jollity to his old company. The fact was that he was just beginning to recognise the manna for what it was, and his soul was suffering the same emotions as those which had afflicted,the Israelites in their time when they contemplated the miracle. The Saint came in. Mr. Newdick's "office" was a small roughly-fashioned cubicle about the size of a telephone booth, containing a small table littered with papers and overlaid with a thin film of dust — it scarcely seemed in keeping with the neatly engraved brass plate on the door which proclaimed it to be the registered offices of the Newdick Helicopter Company, Limited, but his visitor did not seem distressed by it.

"What did you want to know?" asked Mr. Newdick.

Simon observed him to be a middle-aged man of only vaguely military appearance, with sharp eyes that looked at him unwaveringly. That characteristic alone might have deceived most men; but Simon Templar had moved in disreputable circles long enough to know that the ability to look another man squarely in the eye is one of the most fallacious indices of honesty.

"Well," said the Saint amiably, tendering a platinum cigarette-case, "the fact is that I'm interested in helicopters. I happen to have noticed your little place several times recently when I've been passing, and I got the idea that it was quite a small show, and I wondered if there might by any chance be room for another partner in it."

"You mean," repeated Mr. Newdick, checking back on the incredible evidence of his ears, "that you wanted to take an interest in the firm?"

Simon nodded.

"That was the jolly old idea," he said. "In fact, if the other partners felt like selling out, I might take over the whole blinkin' show. I've got a good deal of time on my hands, and I like pottering about with aeroplanes and what not. A chap's got to do something to keep out of mischief, what? Besides, it doesn't look as if you were doing a lot of business here, and I might be able to wake the jolly old place up a bit. Sort of aerial roadhouse, if you know what I mean. Dinners — drinks — dancing — pretty girls… What?"

"I didn't say anything," said Mr. Newdick.

"All right. What about it, old bean?"

Mr. Newdick scratched his chin. The notion of manna had passed into his cosmogony. It fell from Heaven. It was real. Miracles happened. The world was a brighter, rosier place.

"One of your remarks, of course," he said, "is somewhat uninformed. As a matter of fact, we are doing quite a lot of business. We have orders, negotiations, tenders, contracts…" The eloquent movement of one hand, temporarily released from massaging his chin, indicated a whole field of industry of which the uninitiated were in ignorance. "However," he said, "if your proposition were attractive enough, it would be worth hearing."

Simon nodded.

"Well, old bean, who do I put it to?"

"You may put it to me, if you like," said Mr. Newdick. "I am Oscar Newdick."

"I see. But what about the other partners, Oscar, old sprout?"

Mr. Newdick waved his hand.

"They are largely figureheads," he explained. "A few friends, with very small interests — just enough to meet the technical requirements of a limited company. The concern really belongs to me."

Simon beamed.

"Splendid!" he said. "Jolly good! Well, well, well, dear old Newdick, what d'you think it's worth?"

"There is a nominal share value of twenty-five thousands pounds," said Mr. Newdick seriously. "But, of course, they are worth far more than that. Far more… I very much doubt," he said, "whether fifty thousand would be an adequate price. My patents alone are worth more than fifty thousand pounds. Sixty thousands pounds would scarcely tempt me. Seventy thousand would be a poor price. Eighty thousand—"

"Is quite a lot of money," said the Saint, interrupting Mr. Newdick's private auction.

Mr. Newdick nodded.

"But you haven't seen the place yet — or the machine we turn out. You ought to have a look round, even if we can't do business."

Mr. Newdick suffered a twinge of horror at the thought even while he uttered it.

He led the Saint out of his "office" to the junk shed. No one who had witnessed his sad survey of that collection of lumber a few minutes before would have believed that it was the same man who now gazed on it with such enthusiasm and affection.

"This," said Mr. Newdick, "is our workshop. Here you can see the parts of our machines in course of construction and assembly. Those lengths of wood are our special longerons. Over there are stay and braces…"

"By Jove!" said the Saint in awe. "I'd no idea helicopters went in for all those things. They must be quite dressed up when you've finished with them, what? By the way, talking of longerons, a girl friend of mine has the neatest pattern of step-ins…"

Mr. Newdick listened patiently.

Presently they passed on to the other shed. Mr. Newdick opened the door as reverently as if he had been unveiling a memorial.

"And this," he said, "is the Newdick helicopter."

Simon glanced over it vacuously, and looked about him.

"Where are all your workmen today?" he asked.

"They are on holiday," said Mr. Newdick, making a mental note to engage some picturesque mechanics the next day. "An old custom of the firm. I always give them a full day's holiday on the anniversary of my dear mother's death." He wiped away a tear and changed the subject. "How would you like to take a flight?"

"Jolly good idea," agreed the Saint.

The helicopter was wheeled out, and while it was warming up, Simon revealed that he also was a flier and possessed a license for helicopters. Mr. Newdick complimented him gravely. They made a ten-minute flight, and when they had landed again the Saint remained in his seat.

"D'you mind if I try her out myself?" he said. "I won't ask you to take the flight with me."

The machine was not fitted with dual control, but it was well insured. Mr. Newdick only hesitated a moment. He was very anxious to please.

"Certainly," he said. "Give her a thorough test yourself, and you'll see that she's a good bus."

Simon took the ship off and climbed towards the north. When Mr. Newdick's tiny aerodrome was out of sight he put the helicopter through every test he could think of, and the results amazed him even while they only confirmed the remarkable impression he had gained while Mr. Newdick was flying it.

When he saw the London Air Park below him he shut offthe engine and came down in a perfect vertical descent which set him down outside the Cierva hangars. Simon climbed out and button-holed one of the company's test pilots.

"Would you like to come on a short hop with me?" he asked. "I want to show you something."

As they walked back towards the Newdick helicopter the pilot studied it with a puzzled frown.

"Is that one of our machines?" he said.

"More or less," Simon told him.

"It looks as if it had been put together wrong," said the pilot worriedly. "Have you been having trouble with it?"

The Saint shook his head.

"I think you'll find," he answered, "that it's been put together right."

He demonstrated what he meant, and when they returned the test pilot took the machine up again himself and tried it a second time. Other test pilots tried it. Engineers scratched their heads over it and tried it. Telephone calls were made to London. A whole two hours passed before Simon Templar dropped the machine beside Mr. Newdick's sheds and relieved the inventor of the agonies of anxiety which had been racking him.

"I was afraid you'd killed yourself," said Mr. Newdick with emotion; and indeed the thought that his miraculous benefactor might have passed away before being separated from his money had brought Mr. Newdick out in several cold sweats.

The Saint grinned.

"I just buzzed over to Reading to look up a friend," he said untruthfully."I like your helicopter. Let us goinside and talk business."

When he returned to Patricia, much later that day, he was jubilant but mysterious. He spent most of the next day with Mr. Newdick, and half of the Saturday which came after, but he refused to tell her what he was doing. It was not until that evening, when he was pouring beer once more for Monty Hayward, that he mentioned Mr. Newdick again; and then his announcement took her breath away.

"I've bought that helicopter company," he said casually.

"You've what?" spluttered Monty.

"I've bought that helicopter company and everything it owns," said the Saint, "for forty thousand pounds."

They gaped at him for a while in silence, while he calmly continued with the essential task of opening bottles.

"The man's mad," said Patricia finally. "I always thought so."

"When did you do this?" asked Monty.

"We fixed up the last details of the deal today," said the Saint. "Oscar is due here at any minute to sign the papers."

Monty swallowed beer feverishly.

"I suppose you wouldn't care to buy my shares as well?" he suggested.

"Sure, I'll buy them," said the Saint affably. "Name your price. Oscar's contribution gives me a controlling interest, but I can always handle a bit more. As ordered by Patricia, I'm going into business. The machine is to be rechristened the Templar helicopter. I shall go down to history as the man who put England in the air. Bevies of English beauty, wearing their Templar longerons — stays, braces, and everything complete—"

The ringing of his door-bell interrupted the word-picture and took him from the room before any of the questions that were howling through their bewildered minds could be asked.

Mr. Newdick was on the mat, beaming like a delighted fox. Simon took his hat and umbrella, took Mr. Newdick by the arm, and led him through into the living-room.

"Boys and girls," he said cheerfully, "this is our fairy godmother, Mr. Oscar Newdick. This is Miss Holm, Oscar, old toadstool; and I think you know Mr. Hayward—"

The inventor's arm had stiffened under his hand, and his smile had vanished. His face was turning pale and nasty.

"What's the game?" he demanded hoarsely. "No game at all, dear old garlic-blossom," said the Saint innocently. "Just a coincidence. Mr. Hayward is going to sell me his shares too. Now, all the papers are here, and if you'll just sign on the dotted line —"

"I refuse!" babbled Newdick wildly. "It's a trap!"

Simon stepped back and regarded him blandly. "A trap, Oscar? What on earth are you talking about? You've got a jolly good helicopter, and you've nothing to be ashamed of. Come, now, be brave. Harden the Newdick heart. There may be a wrench at parting with your brainchild, but you can cry afterwards. Just a signature or two on the dotted line, and it's all over. And there's a cheque for forty thousand pounds waiting for you…"

He thrust a fountain-pen into the inventor's hand; and, half-hypnotised, Mr. Newdick signed. The Saint blotted the signatures carefully and put the agreements away in a drawer, which he locked. Then he handed Mr. Newdick a cheque. The inventor grasped it weakly and stared at the writing and figures on it as if he expected them to fade away under his eyes. He had the quite natural conviction that his brain had given way.

"Th-thank you very much," he said shakily, and was conscious of little more than an overpowering desire to remove himself from those parts — to camp out on the doorstep of a bank and wait there with his head in his hands until morning, when he could pass the cheque over the counter and see crisp banknotes clicking back to him in return to prove that his sanity was not entirely gone. "Weil, I must be going," he gulped out; but the Saint stopped him.

"Not a bit of it, Oscar," he murmured. "You don't intrude. In fact, you ought to be the guest of honour. Your class as an inventor really is A 1. When I showed the Cierva people what you'd done, they nearly collapsed."

Mr. Newdick blinked at him in a painful daze. "What do you mean?" he stammered.

"Why, the way you managed to build an autogiro that would go straight up and down. None of the ordinary ones will, of course — the torque of the vanes would make it spin round like a top if it didn't have a certain amount of forward movement to hold it straight. I can only think that when you got hold of some Cierva parts and drawings and built it up yourself, you found out that it didn't go straight up and down as you'd expected and thought you must have done something wrong. So you set about trying to put it right — and somehow or other you brought it off. It's a pity you were in such a hurry to tell Mr. Hayward that everything in your invention had been patented before, Oscar, because if you'd made a few more inquiries you'd have found that it hadn't." Simon Templar grinned, and patted the stunned man kindly on the shoulder. "But everything happens for the best, dear old bird; and when I tell you that the Cierva people have already made me an offer of a hundred thousand quid for the invention you've just sold me, I'm sure you'll stay and join us in a celebratory bottle of beer."

Mr. Oscar Newdick swayed slightly, and glugged a strangling obstruction out of his throat.

"I–I don't think I'll stay," he said. "I'm not feeling very well."

"A dose of salts in the morning will do you all the good in the world," said the Saint chattily, and ushered him sympathetically to the door.

IV

The Prince of Cherkessia

Of the grey hairs which bloomed in the thinning thatch of Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal, there were at least a couple of score which he could attribute directly to an equal number of encounters with the Saint. Mr. Teal did not actually go so far as to call them by name and celebrate their birthdays, for he was not by nature a whimsical man; but he had no doubts about their origin.

The affair of the Prince of Cherkessia gave him the forty-first — or it may have been the forty-second.

His Highness arrived in London without any preliminary publicity; but he permitted a number of reporters to interview him at his hotel after his arrival, and the copy which he provided had a sensation value which no self-respecting news editor could ignore.

It started before the assembled pressmen had drunk more than half the champagne which was provided for them in the Prince's suite, which still stands as a record for any reception of that type; and it was started by a cub reporter, no more ignorant than the rest, but more honest about it, who had not been out on that kind of assignment long enough to learn that the serious business of looking for a story is not supposed to mar the general conviviality while there is anything left to drink.

"Where," asked this revolutionary spirit brazenly, with his mouth full of foie gras, "is Cherkessia?"

The Prince raised his Mephistophelian eyebrows.

"You," he replied, with faint contempt, "would probably know it better as Circassia."

At the sound of his answer a silence spread over the room. The name rang bells, even in journalistic heads. The cub gulped down the rest of his sandwich without tasting it; and one reporter was so far moved as to put down a glass which was only half empty.

"It is a small country between the Caucasus Mountains and the Black Sea," said the Prince. "Once it was larger; but it has been eaten away by many invaders. The Turks and the Russians have robbed us piecemeal of most of our lands — although it was the Tatars themselves who gave my country its name, from their word Cherktkess, which means 'robbers.' That ancient insult was long since turned to glory by my ancestor Schamyl, whose name I bear; and in the paltry lands which are still left to me the proud traditions of our race are carried on to this day."

The head of the reporter who had put down his glass was buzzing with vague memories.

"Do you still have beautiful Circassians?" he asked hungrily.

"Of course," said the Prince. "For a thousand years our women have been famed for their beauty. Even today, we export many hundreds annually to the most distinguished harems in Turkey — a royal tax on these transactions," added the Prince, with engaging simplicity, "has been of great assistance to our national budget."

The reporter swallowed, and retrieved his glass hurriedly; and the cub who had started it all asked, with bulging eyes: "What other traditions do you have, Your Highness?"

"Among other things," said the Prince, "we are probably the only people today among whom the droit de seigneur survives. That is to say that every woman in my country belongs to me, if and when I choose to take her, for as long as I choose keep her in my palace."

"And do you still exercise that right?" asked another journalist, with estatic visions of headlines floating through his mind.

The Prince smiled, as he might have smiled at at naivety of a child.

"If the girl is sufficiently attractive — of course. It is a divine right bestowed upon my family by Mohammed himself. In my country it is considered an honour to be chosen, and the marriageable value of any girl on whom I bestow my right is greatly increased by it."

From that moment the reception was a historic success; and the news that one reason for the Prince's visit was to approve the final details of a new ₤100,000 crown which was being prepared for him by a West End firm of jewellers was almost an anticlimax.

Chief Inspector Teal read the full interview in his morning paper the following day; and he was so impressed with its potentialities that he made a personal call on the Prince that afternoon.

"Is this really the interview you gave, Your Highness?" he asked, when he had introduced himself, "or are you going to repudiate it?"

Prince Schamyl took the paper and read it through. He was a tall well-built man with a pointed black beard and twirled black moustaches like a seventeenth-century Spanish grandee; and when he had finished reading he handed the paper back with a slight bow, and fingered his moustaches in some perplexity.

"Why should I repudiate it?" he inquired. "It is exactly what I said."

Teal chewed for a moment on the spearmint which even in the presence of royalty he could not deny himself; and then he said: "In that case, Your Highness, would you be good enough to let us give you police protection?"

The Prince frowned puzzledly.

"But are not all people in this country protected by the police?"

"Naturally," said Teal. "But this is rather a special case. Have you ever heard of the Saint?"

Prince Schamyl shrugged.

"I have heard of several."

"I don't mean that kind of saint," the detective told him grimly. "The Saint is the name of a notorious criminal we have here, and something tells me that as soon as he sees this interview he'll be making plans to steal this crown you're buying. If I know anything about him, the story that you make some of your money out of selling girls to harems, and that you exercise this droit de seigneur, whatever that is, would be the very thing to put him on your tracks."

"But, please," said the Prince in ingenuous bewilderment, "what is wrong with our customs? My people have been happy with them for hundreds of years."

"The Saint wouldn't approve of them," said Teal with conviction, and realised the hopelessness of entering upon a discussion of morals with such a person. "Anyhow, sir, I'd be very much obliged if you would let us give you a special guard until you take your crown out of the country."

The Prince shook his head, as if the incomprehensible customs of England baffled him to speechlessness.

"In my country there are no notorious criminals," he said, "because as soon as a criminal is known he is beheaded. However, I shall be glad to help you in any way I can. The crown is to be delivered here tomorrow, and you may place as many guards in my suite as you think necessary."

The news that four special detectives had been detailed to guard the Prince of Cherkessia's crown was published in an evening paper which Simon Templar was reading at a small and exclusive dinner at which the morning paper's interview was also discussed.

"I knew you wouldn't be able to resist it," said Patricia Holm fatalistically, "directly I saw the headlines. You're that sort of idiot."

Simon looked at her mockingly.

"Idiot?" he queried. "My dear Pat, have you ever known me to be anything but sober and judicious?"

"Often," said his lady candidly. "I've also known you to walk into exactly the same trap. I'll bet you anything you like that Teal made up the whole story just to get a rise out of you, and the Prince 'll turn out to be another detective with a false beard."

"You'd lose your money," said the Saint calmly. "Teal is as worried about it as you are, and if you like to drop in at Vazey's on Bond Street or make discreet inquiries at the Southshire Insurance Company, you'll find that that crown genuinely is costing a hundred thousand quid and is insured for the same amount. It's rather pleasant to think that Southshire will have to stand the racket, because their ninety per cent underwriter is a very scaly reptile named Percy Quiltan, whose morals are even more repulsive than Prince Schamyl's. And the Prince's are bad enough… No, Pat, you can't convince me that that tin hat isn't legitimate boodle; and I'm going to have it."

A certain Peter Quentin, who was also present, sighed, and turned the sigh into a resigned grin.

"But how d'you propose to do it?" he asked.

The Saint's blue eyes turned on him with an impish twinkle.

"I seem to remember that you retired from this business some months ago, Peter," he murmured. "A really respectable citizen wouldn't be asking that question with so much interest. However, since your beautiful wife is away — if you'd like to lend a hand, you could help me a lot."

"But what's the plan?" insisted Patricia.

Simon Templar smiled.

"We are going to dematerialise ourselves," he said blandly. "Covetous but invisible, we shall lift the crown of Cherkessia from under Claud Eustace's very nose, and put it on a shelf in the fourth dimension."

She was no wiser when the party broke up some hours later. Simon informed her that he and Peter Quentin would be moving into Prince Schamyl's hotel to take up residence there for a couple of days; but she knew that they would not be there under their own names, and the rest of his plan remained wrapped in the maddening mystery with which the Saint's sense of the theatrical too often required him to tantalise his confederates.

Chief Inspector Teal would have been glad to know even as little as Patricia; but the evidence which came before him was far less satisfactory. It consisted of a plain postcard, addressed to Prince Schamyl, on which had been drawn a skeleton figure crowned with a rakishly tilted halo. A small arrow pointed to the halo, and at the other end of the arrow was written in neat copperplate the single word: "Thursday."

"If the Saint says he's coming on Thursday, he's coming on Thursday," Teal stated definitely, in a private conference to which he was summoned when the card arrived.

Prince Schamyl elevated his shoulders and spread out his hands.

"I do not attempt to understand your customs, Inspector. In my country, if we require evidence, we beat the criminal with rods until he provides it."

"You can't do that in this country," said Teal, as if he wished you could. "That postcard wouldn't be worth tuppence in a court of law — not with the sort of lawyers the Saint could afford to engage. We couldn't prove that he sent it. We know it's his trade-mark, but the very fact that everybody in England knows the same thing would be the weakest point in our case. The prosecutor could never make the jury believe that a crook as clever as the Saint is supposed to be would sent out a warning that could be traced back to him so easily. The Saint knows it, and he's been trading on it for years — it's the strongest card in his hand. If we arrested him on evidence like that, he'd only have to swear that the card was a fake — that some other crook had sent it out as a blind — and he could make a fool of anyone who tried to prove it wasn't. Our only chance is to catch him more or less red-handed. One of these days he'll go too far, and I'm only hoping it'll be on Thursday."

Teal thumbed the pages of a cheap pocket diary, although he had no need to remind himself of dates.

"This is Wednesday," he said. "You can say that Thursday begins any time after midnight. I'll be here at twelve o'clock myself, and I'll stay here till midnight tomorrow."

Mr. Teal was worried more than he would have cared to admit. The idea that even such a satanic ingenuity as he knew the Saint to possess could contrive a way of stealing anything from under the eyes of a police guard who had been forewarned that he was coming for it was obviously fantastic. It belonged to sensational fiction, to the improbable world of Arsène Lupin. Arsène Lupin would have disguised himself as Chief Inspector Teal or the Chief Commissioner, and walked out with the crown under his arm; but Teal knew that such miracles of impersonation only happened in the romances of unscrupulous and reader-cheating authors. Yet he knew the Saint too well, he had crossed swords too often with that amazing brigand of the twentieth century, to derive any solid consolation from that thought.

When he came back to the hotel that night, he checked over his defences as seriously as if he had been guarding the emperor of a great European power from threatened assassination. There were men posted at the entrances of the hotel, and one at a strategic point in the lobby which covered the stairs and elevators. A Flying Squad car stood outside. Every member of the hotel staff who would be serving the Prince during the next twenty-four hours had been investigated. A burly detective paced the corridor outside the Prince's suite, and two more equally efficient men were posted inside. Teal added himself to the last number. The ₤100,000 crown of Cherkessia reposed in a velvet-lined box on a table in the sitting-room of the suite — Teal had unsuccessfully attempted more than once to induce Prince Schamyl to authorise its removal to a safe-deposit or even to Scotland Yard itself.

"Where is the necessity?" inquired the Prince blankly. "You have your detectives everywhere. Are you afraid that they will be unable to cope with this absurd criminal?"

Teal had no answer. He was afraid — there was a gloomy premonition creeping around his brain that the Saint could not have helped foreseeing all his precautions, and therefore must have discovered a loophole long in advance. That was the reason why he had studiously withheld even a rumour of the Saint's threat from the Press, for he had his own stolid vanity. But he could not tell the Prince that. He glowered morosely at the private detective who had been added to the contingent by the Southshire Insurance Company, a brawny broken-nosed individual with a moustache like the handlebars of a bicycle, who was pruning his nails with a penknife in the corner. He began to ask himself whether those battered and belligerently whiskered features could by any feat of make-up have been imposed with putty and spirit gum on the face of the Saint or any of his known associates; and then the detective looked up and encountered his devouring stare with symptoms of such pardonable alarm that Teal hastily averted his eyes.

"Surely," said the Prince, who still appeared to be striving to get his bearings, "if you are really anticipating an attack from this criminal, and he is so well known to you, his movements are being watched?"

"I wish I could say they were," said Teal glumly. "As soon as that postcard arrived I went after him myself, but he appears to have left the country. Anyhow, he went down to Hanworth last night, where he keeps an aeroplane, and went off in it; and he hasn't been back since. Probably he's only fixing up an alibi—"

Even as he uttered the theory, the vision of a helicopter flashed into his mind. The hotel was a large tall building, with the latest type of autogiro it might have been possible to land and take off there. Teal had a sudden wild desire to post more detectives on the roof — even to ask for special aeroplanes to patrol the skies over the hotel. He laughed himself out of the aeroplanes, but he went downstairs and picked up one of the men he had posted in the lobby.

"Go up and watch the roof," he ordered. "I'll send some-one to relieve you at eight o'clock."

The man nodded obediently and went off, but he gave Teal a queer look in parting which made the detective realise how deeply the Saint superstition had got into his system. The realisation did not make Mr. Teal any better pleased with himself, and his manner when he returned to the royal suite was almost surly.

"We'd better watch in turns," he said. "There are twenty-four hours to go, and the Saint may be banking on waiting until near the end of the time when we're all tired and thinking of giving it up."

Schamyl yawned.

"I am going to bed," he said. "If anything happens, you may inform me."

Teal watched the departure of the lean black-hawk figure, and wished he could have shared the Prince's tolerant boredom with the whole business. One of the detectives who watched the crown, at a sign from Teal, curled up on the settee and closed his eyes. The private watchdog of the Southshire Insurance lolled back in his chair; very soon his mouth fell open, and a soporific buzzing emanated from his throat and caused his handlebar moustaches to vibrate in unison.

Chief Inspector Teal paced up and down the room, fashioning a wodge of chewing gum into endless intricate shapes with his teeth and tongue. The exercise did not fully succeed in soothing his nerves. His brain was haunted by memories of the buccaneer whom he knew only too well — the rakish carving of the brown handsome face, the mockery of astonishingly clear blue eyes, the gay smile that came so easily to the lips, the satirical humour of the gentle dangerous voice. He had seen all those things too often ever to forget them — had been deceived, maddened, dared, defied, and outwitted by them in too many adventures to believe that their owner would ever be guilty of an empty hoax. And the thought that the Saint was roving at large that night was not comforting. The air above Middlesex had literally swallowed him up, and he might have been anywhere between Berlin and that very room.

When the dawn came Teal was still awake. The private detective's handlebars ceased vibrating with a final snort; the officer on the couch woke up, and the one who had kept the night watch took his place. Teal himself was far too wrought up to think of seizing his own chance to rest. Ten o'clock arrived before the Prince's breakfast, and Schamyl came through from his bedroom as the waiter was laying the table.

He peered into the box where the crown was packed, and stroked his beard with an ironical glint in his eyes.

"This is very strange, Inspector," he remarked. "The crown has not been stolen! Can it be that your criminal has broken his promise?"

With some effort, Teal kept his retort to himself. While the Prince attacked his eggs with a healthy appetite, Teal sipped a cup of coffee and munched on a slice of toast. For the hundredth time he surveyed the potentialities of the apartment. The bedroom and the sitting-room opened on either side of a tiny private hall, with the bathroom in between. The hall had a door into the corridor, outside which another detective was posted; there was no other entrance or exit except the open windows overlooking Hyde Park, through which the morning sun was streaming. The possibility of secret panels or passages was absurd. The furniture was modernistically plain, expensive, and comfortable. There was a chesterfield, three armchairs, a couple of smaller chairs, a writing desk, the centre table on which breakfast was laid, and a small side table on which stood the box containing the crown of Cherkessia. Not even a very small thief could have secreted himself in or behind any of the articles. Nor could he plausibly slip through the guards outside. Therefore, if he was to make good his boast, it seemed as if he must be inside already; and Teal's eyes turned again to the moustached representative of the Southshire Insurance Company. He would have given much for a legitimate excuse to seize the handlebars of that battle-scarred sleuth, one in each hand, and haul heftily on them; and he was malevolently deliberating whether such a manoeuvre could be justified in the emergency when the interruption came.

It was provided by Peter Quentin, who stood at another window of the hotel vertically above the Prince's suite, dangling a curious egg-shaped object at the end of a length of cotton. When it hung just an inch above Schamyl's window, he took up a yard of slack and swung the egg-shaped object cautiously outwards. As it started to swing back, he dropped the slack, and the egg plunged through the Prince's open window and broke the cotton in the jerk that ended its trajectory.

Chief Inspector Teal did not know this. He only heard the crash behind him, and swung around to see a pool of milky fluid spreading around a scattering of broken glass on the floor. Without stopping to think he made a dive towards it, and a gush of dense black smoke burst from the milky pool like a flame and struck him full in the face.

He choked and gasped, and groped around in a moment of utter blindness. In another instant the whole room was filled with a jet-black fog. The shouts and stumblings of the other men in the room came to him as if through a film of cotton-wool as he lumbered sightlessly towards the table where the crown had stood. He cannoned into it and ran over its surface with frantic hands. The box was not standing there any longer. In a sudden panic of fear he dropped to his knees and began to feel all over the floor around the table…

He had already made sure that the box had not been knocked over on to the floor in the confusion, when the smoke in his lungs forced him to stagger coughing and retching to the door. The corridor outside was black with the same smoke, and in the distance he could hear the tinkling of fire alarms. A man collided with him in the blackness, and Teal grabbed him in a vicious grip.

"Tell me your name," he snarled.

"Mason, sir," came the reply; and Teal recognised the voice of the detective he had posted in the corridor.

His chest heaved painfully.

"What happened?"

"I don't know, sir. The door — opened from the inside — one of those damn smoke-bombs thrown out — started all this. Couldn't see — any more, sir."

"Let's get some air," gasped Teal.

They reeled along the corridor for what seemed to be miles before the smoke thinned out, and after a while they reached a haven where an open corridor window reduced it to no more than a thin grey mist. Red-eyed and panting, they stared at one another.

"He's done it," said Teal huskily.

That was the bitter fact he had to face; and he knew without further investigation, even without the futile routine search that had to follow, that he would never see the crown of Cherkessia again.

The other members of the party were blundering down towards them through the fog. The first figure to loom up was that of Prince Schamyl himself, cursing fluently in an incomprehensible tongue; and after him came the form of the Southshire Insurance Company's private bloodhound. Teal's bloodshot eyes glared at that second apparition insanely through the murk. Mr. Teal had suffered much; he was not feeling himself, and in the last analysis he was only human. That is the only explanation this chronicle can offer for what he did. For with a kind of strangled grunt, Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal lurched forward and took hold of the offensive handlebar moustaches, one in each determined hand…

"Perhaps now you'll tell me how you did it," said Patricia Holm.

The Saint smiled. He had arrived only twenty minutes, before, fresh as a daisy, at the hotel in Paris where he had arranged to meet her; and he was unpacking.

From a large suitcase he had taken a small table, which was a remarkable thing for him to have even in his frequently eccentric luggage. He set it up before her, and placed on it a velvet-lined wooden box. The table was somewhat thicker in the top than most tables of that size, as if it might have contained a drawer; but she could not see any drawer.

"Watch," he said.

He touched a concealed spring somewhere in the side of the table — and the box vanished. Because she was watching it closely, she saw it go: it simply fell through a trapdoor into the hollow thickness of the top, and a perfectly fitted panel sprang up to fill the gap again. But it was all done in a split second; and even when she examined the top of the table closely it was hard to see the edges of the trapdoor. She shook the table, but nothing rattled. For all that any ordinary examination could reveal, the top might have been a solid block of mahogany.

"It was just as easy as that," said the Saint, with the air of a conjuror revealing a treasured illusion. "The crown never even left the room until I was ready to take it away. Fortunately the Prince hadn't actually paid for the crown. It was still insured by Vazey's themselves, so the Southshire Insurance Company's cheque will go direct to them — which saves me a certain amount of extra work. All I've got to do now is to finish off my alibi, and the job's done."

"But Simon," pleaded the girl, "when Teal grabbed your moustaches —"

"Teal didn't grab my moustaches," said the Saint with dignity. "Claud Eustace would never had dreamed of doing such a thing. I shall never forget the look on that bird's face when the moustaches were grabbed, though. It was a sight I hope to treasure to my dying day."

He had unpacked more of the contents of his large bag while he was talking; and at that moment he was laying out a pair of imperially curled moustachios with which was connected an impressively pointed black beard. Patricia's eyes suddenly opened wide.

"Good Lord!" she gasped. "You don't mean to say you kidnapped the Prince and pretended to be him?"

Simon Templar shook his head.

"I always was the Prince of Cherkessia — didn't you know?" he said innocently; and all at once Particia began to laugh.

V

The Treasure of Turk's Lane

There was a morning when Simon Templar looked up from his newspaper with a twinkle of unholy meditation in his blue eyes and a rather thoughtful smile barely touching the corners of his mouth; and to the privileged few who shared all his lawless moods there was only one deduction to be drawn when the Saint looked up from his newspaper in just that thoughtful and unholy way.

"I see that Vernon Winlass has bought Turk's Lane," he said.

Mr. Vernon Winlass was a man who believed in Getting Things Done. The manner of doing them did not concern him much, so long as it remained strictly within the law; it was only results which could be seen in bank accounts, share holdings, income tax returns, and the material circumstances of luxurious living, and with these things Mr. Winlass was very greatly and whole-heartedly concerned. This is not to say that he was more avaricious than any other business man, or more unscrupulous than any other financier. In his philosophy, the weakest went to the wall: the careless, the timid, the foolish, the simple, the hesitant, paid with their misfortunes for the rewards that came naturally to those of sharper and more aggressive talents. And in setting up that elementary principle for his only guiding standard, Mr. Winlass could justifiably claim that after all he was only demonstrating himself to be the perfect evolutionary product of a civilisation whose honours and amenities are given only to people who Get Things Done, whether they are worth doing or not — with the notable exception of politicians, who, of course, are exempted by election even from that requirement.

Simon Templar did not like Mr. Winlass, and would have considered him a legitimate victim for his illegitimate talents, on general principles that were only loosely connected with one or two things he had heard about Mr. Winlass's methods of Getting Things Done; but although the idea of devoting some time and attention to that hard-headed financier simmered at the back of his mind in a pleasant warmth of enthusiasm, it did not actually boil over until the end of the same week, when he happened to be passing Turk's Lane on his return from another business affair.

Turk's Lane is, or was, a narrow cul-de-sac of small two-storey cottages. That description is more or less as bald and unimaginative as anything a hard-headed financier would have found to say about it. In actual fact it was one of those curious relics of the past which may sometimes be discovered in London, submerged among tall modern buildings and ordered squares as if a new century had grown up around it without noticing its existence any more than was necessary to avoid treading on it. The passer-by who wandered into that dark lane at night might have fancied himself magically transported back over two centuries. He would have seen the low ceilings and tiny leaded windows of oak-beamed houses, the wrought-iron lamps glowing above the lintels of the narrow doors, the worn cobblestones gleaming underfoot, the naphtha flares flickering on a riot of foodstuffs spread out in unglazed shop fronts; and he might have thought himself spirited away into the market street of a village that had survived there unaltered from the days when Kensington was a hamlet three miles from London and there was a real Knights' Bridge across the Serpentine where it now flows through sanitary drainpipes to the Thames.

Mr. Winlass did not think any of these things; but he saw something far more interesting to himself, which was that Turk's Lane stood at the back of a short row of shabby early Victorian houses, which were for sale. He also saw that the whole of Turk's Lane — except for the two end houses, which were the freehold property of the occupants — was likewise for sale, and that the block comprised of these two principal properties totalled an area of about three-quarters of an acre, which is quite a small garden in the country, but which would allow plenty of space to erect a block of modern apartments with running hot and cold water in every room for the tenancy of fifty more sophisticated and highly civilised Londoners. He also saw that this projected building would have an impressive frontage on a most respectable road in a convenient situation which the westward trend of expansion was annually raising in value; and he bought the row of shabby early Victorian houses and the whole of Turk's Lane except the two end cottages, and called in his architects.

Those two cottages which had not been included in the purchase were the difficulty.

"If you don't get those two places the site's useless," Mr. Winlass was told. "You can't build a block of flats like you're proposing to put up with two old cottages in the middle."

"Leave it to me," said Mr. Winlass. "I'll Get It Done."

Strolling into Turk's Lane on this day when the ripeness of Mr. Winlass for the slaughter was finally made plain to him, Simon Templar learned how it was getting done.

It was not by any means the Saint's first visit to the picturesque little alley. He had an open affection for it, as he had for all such pathetic rearguards of the forlorn fight against dull mechanical modernity; and he had at least one friend who lived there.

Dave Roberts was a cobbler. He was an old grey-haired man with gentle grey eyes, known to every inhabitant of Turk's Lane as "Uncle Dave," who had plied his trade there since the oldest of them could remember, as his father and grandfather had done before him. It might almost be said that he was Turk's Lane, so wholly did he belong to the forgotten days that were preserved there. The march of progress to which Mr. Vernon Winlass belonged had passed him by. He sat in his tiny shop and mended the boots and shoes of the neighbourhood for microscopical old-world prices; he had a happy smile and a kind word for everyone; and with those simple things, unlike Mr. Vernon Winlass, his philosophy began and ended and was well content. To such pioneers as Mr. Winlass he was, of course, a dull reactionary and a stupid bumpkin; but to the Saint he was one of the few and dwindling relics of happier and cleaner days, and many pairs of Simon's own expensive shoes had gone to his door out of that queer affection rather than because they needed repairing.

Simon smoked a cigarette under the low beamed ceiling in the smell of leather and wax, while Dave Roberts wielded his awl under a flickering gas-jet and told him of the things that were happening in Turk's Lane.

"Ay, sir, Tom Unwin over the road, he's going. Mr. Winlass put him out o' business. Did you see that new shop next to Tom's? Mr. Winlass started that up, soon as he'd got the tenants out. Sold exactly the same things as Tom had in his shop for a quarter the price — practically give 'em away, he did. 'Course, he lost money all the time, but he can afford to. Tom ain't hardly done a bit o' business since then. 'Well,' Tom says to himself, 'if this goes on for another couple o' months I'll be broke,' so in the end he sells out to Mr. Win-lass an' glad to do it. I suppose I'll be the next, but Mr. Winlass won't get me out if I can help it."

The Saint looked across the lane at the garish makeshift shop front next door to Tom Unwin's store, and back again to the gentle old man straining his eyes under the feeble light.

"So he's been after you, has he?" he said.

"Ay, he's been after me. One of his men come in my shop the other day. 'Your place is worth five hundred pounds,' he says. 'We'll give you seven hundred to get out at once, an' Mr. Winlass is being very generous with you,' he says. Well, I told him I didn't want to get out. I been here, man an' boy, for seventy years now, an' I wasn't going to get out to suit him. 'You realise,' he says, 'your obstinacy is holding up an important an' valuable piece of building?' — 'Begging your pardon, sir,' I says, 'you're holding me up from mending these shoes.' —' Very well,' this chap says, 'if you're so stupid you can refuse two hundred pounds more than your place is worth, you're going to be glad to take two hundred less before you're much older, if you don't come to your senses quick,' he says, 'and them's Mr. Winlass's orders,' he says."

"I get it," said the Saint quietly. "And in a day or two you'll have a Winlass shoe repair shop next door to you, working for nothing."

"They won't do work like I do," said Dave Roberts stolidly. "You can't do it, not with these machines. What did the Good Lord give us hands for, if it wasn't that they were the best tools in the world?.. But I wouldn't be surprised if Mr. Winlass tried it. But I wouldn't sell my house to him. I told this fellow he sent to see me: 'My compliments to Mr. Winlass,' I says, 'and I don't think much of his orders, nor the manner of anybody that carries 'em out. The way you talk to me,' I says, 'isn't the way to talk to any self-respecting man, an' I wouldn't sell you my house, not now after you've threatened me that way,' I says, 'not if you offered me seven thousands pounds.' An' I tells him to get out o' my shop an' take that message to Mr. Winlass."

"I see," said the Saint.

Dave Roberts finished off his sewing and put the shoe down in its place among the row of other finished jobs.

"I ain't afraid, sir," he said. "If it's the Lord's will that I go out of my house, I suppose He knows best. But I don't want Mr. Winlass to have it, an' the Lord helps them that helps themselves."

The Saint lighted a cigarette and stared out of the window.

"Uncle Dave," he said gently, "would you sell me your house?"

He turned round suddenly, and looked at the old man. Dave Roberts's hands had fallen limply in his lap, and his eyes were blinking mistily.

"You, sir?" he said.

"Me," said the Saint. "I know you don't want to go, and I don't know whether it's the Lord's will or not, but I know that you're going to have to. And you know it too. Winlass will find a way to get you out. But I can get more out of him than you could. I know you don't want money, but I can offer you something even better. I know a village out of London where I can buy you a house almost exactly like this, and you can have your shop and do your work there without anybody troubling you again. I'll give you that in exchange, and however much money there is in this house as well."

It was one of those quixotic impulses that often moved him, and he uttered it on the spur of the moment with no concrete plan of campaign in his mind. He knew that Dave Roberts would have to go, and that Turk's Lane must disappear, making room for the hygienic edifice of mass-production cubicles which Mr. Vernon Winlass had planned: he knew that, whatever he himself might wish, that individual little backwater must take the way of all such pleasant places, to be superseded by the vast white cube of Crescent Court, the communal sty which the march of progress demands for its armies. But he also knew that Mr. Vernon Winlass was going to pay more than seven hundred pounds to dear the ground for it.

When he saw Patricia Holm and Peter Quentin later that night, they had no chance to mistake the light of unlawful resolution on his face.

"Brother Vernon hasn't bought the whole of Turk's Lane," he announced, "because I've got some of it."

"Whatever for?" asked Patricia.

"For an investment," answered the Saint virtuously. "Crescent Court will be built only by kind permission of Mr. Simon Templar, and my permission is going to cost money."

Peter Quentin helped himself to another bottle of beer.

"We believe you," he said dryly. "What's the swindle?"

"You have a mind like Claud Eustace Teal," said the Saint offensively. "There is no swindle. I am a respectable real estate speculator, and if you had any money I'd sue you for slander. But I don't mind telling you that I am rather interested to know what hobby Vernon Winlass has in his spare moments. Go out and do some sleuthing for me in the morning, Peter, and I'll let you know some more."

In assuming that even such a hard-headed business man as Mr. Vernon Winlass must have some simple indulgence, Simon Templar was not taking a long chance. Throughout the ages, iron-gutted captains of industry have diverted themselves with rare porcelain, pewter, tram tickets, Venetian glass, first editions, second mortgages, second establishments, dahlias, stuffed owls, and such-like curios. Mr. Wallington Titus Oates, of precious memory, went into slavering raptures at the sight of pieces of perforated paper bearing the portraits of repulsive monarchs and the magic words "Postage Two Pence." Mr. Vernon Winlass, who entrenched himself during business hours behind a storm battalion of secretaries, under-secretaries, assistant secretaries, messengers, clerks, managers, and office-boys, put aside all his business and opened wide his defences at the merest whisper of old prints.

"It's just an old thing we came across when we were clearing out our old house," explained the man who had successfully penetrated these fortified frontiers — his card introduced him as Captain Tombs, which was an alias out of which Simon Templar derived endless amusement "I took it along to Busby's to find out if it was worth anything, and they seemed to get quite excited about it. They told me I'd better show it to you."

Mr. Winlass nodded.

"I buy a good many prints from Busby's," he said smugly. "If anything good comes their way, they always want me to see it."

He took the picture out of its brown paper wrapping and looked at it closely under the light. The glass was cracked and dirty, and the frame was falling apart and tied up with wire; but the result of his inspection gave him a sudden shock. The print was a discovery — if he knew anything at all about these things, it was worth at least five hundred pounds. Mr. Winlass frowned at it disparagingly.

"A fairly good specimen of a rather common plate," he said carelessly. "I should think it would fetch about ten pounds."

Captain Tombs looked surprised.

"Is that all?" he grumbled. "The fellow at Busby's told me I ought to get anything from three hundred up for it."

"Ah-hum," said Mr. Winlass dubiously. He peered at the print again, and raised his eyes from it in an elaborate rendering of delight. "By Jove," he exclaimed, "I believe you're right. Tricky things, these prints. If you hadn't told me that, I might have missed it altogether. But it looks as if — if it is a genuine… Well!" said Mr. Winlass expansively, "I almost think I'll take a chance on it. How about two hundred and fifty?"

"But the fellow at Busby's—"

"Yes, yes," said Mr. Winlass testily. "But these are not good times for selling this sort of thing. People haven't got the money to spend. Besides, if you wanted to get a price like that, you'd have to get the picture cleaned up — get experts to certify it — all kinds of things like that. And they all cost money. And when you'd done them all, it mightn't prove to be worth anything. I'm offering to take a gamble on it and save you a lot of trouble and expense."

Captain Tombs hesitated; and Mr. Winlass pulled out a cheque-book and unscrewed his fountain-pen.

"Come, now," he urged genially. "I believe in Getting Things Done. Make up your mind, my dear chap. Suppose we split it at two-seventy-five — or two hundred and eighty—"

"Make it two hundred and eighty-five," said Captain Tombs reluctantly, "and I suppose I'd better let it go."

Mr. Winlass signed the cheque with the nearest approach to glee that he would ever be able to achieve while parting with money in any quantity; and he knew that he was getting the print for half its value. When Captain Tombs had gone, he set it up against the inkwell and fairly gloated over it. A moment later he picked up a heavy paper-knife and attacked it with every evidence of ferocity.

But the scowl of pained indignation which darkened his brow was directed solely against the cracked glass and the dilapidated frame. The picture was his new-born babe, his latest ewe lamb; and it was almost inevitable that he should rise against the vandal disfigurement of its shabby trappings as a fond mother would rise in wrath against the throwing of mud pies at her beloved offspring. With the horrible cradle that had sheltered it stripped away and cast into the wastebasket, he set up the print again and gloated over it from every angle. After a long time he turned it over to stow it safely in an envelope — and it was when he did this that he noticed the writing on the back.

The reactions of an equally inevitable curiosity made him carry the picture over to the window to read the almost indecipherable scrawl. The ink was rusty with age, the spidery hand angular and old-fashioned, but after some study he was able to make out the words.

To my wife, On this day 16 Aprille did I lodge in ye houfe of one Thomaf Robertf a cobler and did hyde under hyf herthe in Turkes Lane ye feventy thoufande golde piecef wich I stole of Hyf Grace ye Duke. Finde them if thif letre come to thee and Godes blefsynge, John.

None of the members of Mr. Winlass's staff, some of whom had been with him through ten years of his hard-headed and dignified career, could remember any previous occasion when he had erupted from his office with so much violence. The big limousine which wafted him to Turk's Lane could not travel fast enough for him: he shuffled from one side of the seat to the other, craning forward to look for impossible gaps in the traffic, and emitting short nasal wuffs of almost canine impatience.

Dave Roberts was not in the little shop when Mr. Winlass walked in. A freckle-faced pug-nosed young man wearing the same apron came forward.

"I want to see Mr. Roberts," said Winlass, trembling with excitement, which he was trying not to show.

The freckle-faced youth shook his head.

"You can't see Mr. Roberts," he said. "He ain't here."

"Where can I find him?" barked Winlass.

"You can't find him," said the youth phlegmatically. "He don't want to be found. Want your shoes mended, sir?"

"No. I do not want my shoes mended!" roared Winlass, dancing in his impatience. "I want to see Mr. Roberts. Why can't I find him? Why don't he want to be found? Who the hell are you, anyhow?"

"I do be Mr. Roberts's second cousin, sir," said Peter Quentin, whose idea of dialects was hazy but convincing. "I do have bought Mr. Roberts's shop, and I'm here now, and Mr. Roberts ain't coming back, sir, that's who I be."

Mr. Winlass wrenched his features into a jovial beam.

"Oh, you're Mr. Roberts's cousin, are you?" he said, with gigantic affability. "How splendid! And you've bought his beautiful shop. Well, well. Have a cigar, my dear sir, have a cigar."

The young man took the weed, bit off the wrong end, and stuck it into his mouth with the band on — a series of motions which caused Mr. Winlass to shudder to his core. But no one could have deduced that shudder from the smile with which he struck and tendered a match.

"Thank 'ee, sir," said Peter Quentin, "Now, sir, can I mend thy shoes?"

He admitted afterwards to the Saint that the strain of maintaining what he fondly believed to be a suitable patois was making him a trifle light-headed; but Mr. Vernon Winlass was far too preoccupied to notice his aberrations.

"No, my dear sir," said Mr. Winlass, "my shoes don't want mending. But I should like to buy your lovely house."

The young man shook his head.

"I ain't a-wanting to sell 'er, sir."

"Not for a thousand pounds?" said Mr. Winlass calculatingly.

"Not for a thousand pounds, sir."

"Not even," said Mr. Winlass pleadingly, "for two thousand?"

"No, sir."

"Not even," suggested Mr. Winlass, with an effort which caused him acute pain, "if I offered you three thousand?"

The young man's head continued to shake.

"I do only just have bought 'er, sir. I must do my work somewhere. I wouldn't want to sell my house, not if you offered me four thousand for 'er, that I wouldn't."

"Five thousand," wailed Mr. Winlass, in dogged anguish.

The bidding rose to seven thousand five hundred before Peter Quentin relieved Mr. Winlass of further torture and himself of further lingual acrobatics. The cheque was made out and signed on the spot, and in return Peter attached his signature to a more complicated document which Mr. Win-lass had ready to produce from his breast pocket; for Mr. Vernon Winlass believed in Getting Things Done.

"That's splendid," he boomed, when the formalities had been completed. "Now then, my dear sir, how soon can you move out?"

"In ten minutes," said Peter Quentin promptly, and he was as good as his word.

He met the Saint in a neighbouring hostelry and exhibited his trophy. Simon Templar took one look at it, and lifted his tankard.

"So perish all the ungodly," he murmured. "Let us get round to the bank before they close.

It was three days later when he drove down to Hampshire with Patricia Holm to supervise the installation of Uncle Dave Roberts in the cottage which had been prepared for him. It stood in the street of a village that had only one street, a street that was almost an exact replica of Turk's Lane set down in a valley between rolling hills. It had the same oak-beamed cottages, the same wrought-iron lamps over the lintels to light the doors by night, the same rows of tiny shops clustering face to face with their wares spread out in unglazed windows; and the thundering main road traffic went past five miles away and never knew that there was a village there.

"I think you'll be happy here, Uncle Dave," he said; and he did not need an answer in words to complete his reward.

It was a jubilant return journey for him; and they were in Guildford before he recollected that he had backed a very fast outsider at Newmarket. When he bought a paper he saw that that also had come home, and they had to stop at the Lion for celebrations.

"There are good moments in this life of sin, Pat," he remarked, as he started up the car again; and then he saw the expression on her face, and stared at her in concern. "What's the matter, old darling — has that last Martini gone to your head?"

Patricia swallowed. She had been glancing through the other pages of the Evening News while he tinkered with the ignition; and now she folded the sheet down and handed it to him.

"Didn't you promise Uncle Dave whatever money there was in his house as well as that cottage?" she asked.

Simon took the paper and read the item she was pointing to.

TREASURE TROVE IN LONDON

EXCAVATION

—

Windfall for Winlass

—

The London clay, which has given up many strange secrets in its time, yesterday surrendered a treasure which has been in its keeping for 300 years. Ten thousand pounds is the estimated value of a hoard of gold coins and antique jewellery discovered by workmen engaged in demolishing an old house in Turk's Lane, Brompton, which is being razed to make way for a modern apartment building. The owner of the property, Mr. Vernon Winlass—

The Saint had no need to read any more; and as a matter of fact he did not want to. For several seconds he was as far beyond the power of speech as if he had been born dumb.

And then, very slowly, the old Saintly smile came back to his lips.

"Oh, well, I expect our bank account will stand it," he said cheerfully, and turned the car back again towards Hampshire.

VI

The Sleepless Knight

If a great many newspaper cuttings and references to newspapers find their way into these chronicles, it is simply because most of the interesting things that happen find their way into newspapers, and it is in these ephemeral sheets that the earnest seeker after unrighteousness will find many clues to his quest.

Simon Templar read newspapers only because he found collected in them the triumphs and anxieties and sins and misfortunes and ugly tyrannies which were going on around him, as well as the results of races in which chosen horses carried samples of his large supply of shirts; not because he cared anything about the posturing of Transatlantic fliers or the flatulence of international conferences. And it was solely through reading a newspaper that he became aware of the existence of Sir Melvin Flager.

It was an unpleasant case; and the news item may as well be quoted in full.

JUDGE CENSURES TRANSPORT

COMPANY

Driver's four hours' sleep a week

—

"MODERN SLAVERY"

—

Mr. Justice Goldie.

—

Scathing criticisms of the treatment of drivers by a road transport company were made by Mr. Justice Goldie during the trial of Albert Johnson, a lorry driver, at Guildford Assizes yesterday. Johnson was charged with manslaughter following the death of a cyclist whom he knocked down and fatally injured near Albury on March 28th. Johnson did not deny that he was driving to the danger of the public, but pleaded that his condition was due to circumstances beyond his control. Police witnesses gave evidence that the lorry driven by Johnson was proceeding in an erratic manner down a fairly wide road at about 30 miles an hour. There was a cyclist in front of it, travelling in the same direction, and a private car coming towards it. Swerving to make way for the private car, in what the witness described as "an unnecessarily exaggerated manner," the lorry struck the cyclist and caused fatal injuries. The police surgeon who subsequently examined Johnson described him as being "apparently intoxicated, although there were no signs of alcohol on his breath." "I was not drunk," said Johnson, giving evidence on his own behalf. "I was simply tired out. We are sent out on long journeys and forced to complete them at an average of over 30 miles an hour, including stops for food and rest. "Most of our work is done at night, but we are frequently compelled to make long day journeys as well. "During the week when the accident occurred, I had only had four hours' sleep. "It is no good protesting, because the company can always find plenty of unemployed drivers to take our places." Other employees of the Flager Road Transport Company, which employs Johnson, corroborated his statement. "This is nothing more or less than modern slavery," said Mr. Justice Goldie, directing the jury to return a verdict of Not Guilty. "It is not Johnson, but Sir Melvin Flager, the managing director of the company, who ought to be in the dock. "You have only to put yourselves in the position of having gone for a week on four hours' sleep, with the added strain of driving a heavy truck throughout that time, to be satisfied that no culpable recklessness of Johnson's was responsible for this tragedy. "I would like to see it made a criminal offence for employers to impose such inhuman conditions on their employees."

Sir Melvin Flager was not unnaturally displeased by this judicial comment; but he might have been infinitely more perturbed if he had known of the Saint's interest in the case.

Certain readers of these chronicles may have reached the impression that Simon Templar's motives were purely selfish and mercenary, but they would be doing him an injustice. Undoubtedly his exploits were frequently profitable; and the Saint himself would have been the first to admit that he was not a brigand for his health; but there were many times when only a very small percentage of his profits remained in his own pocket, and many occasions when he embarked on an episode of lawlessness with no thought of profit for himself at all.

The unpleasantness of Sir Melvin Flager gave him some hours of quite altruistic thought and effort.

"Actually," he said, "there's only one completely satisfactory way to deal with a tumour like that. And that is to sink him in a barrel of oil and light a fire underneath."

"The Law doesn't allow you to do that," said Peter Quentin pensively.

"Very unfortunately, it doesn't," Simon admitted, with genuine regret. "All the same, I used to do that sort of thing without the sanction of the Law, which is too busy catching publicans selling a glass of beer after hours to do anything about serious misdemeanours, anyway… But I'm afraid you're right, Peter — I'm much too notorious a character these days, and Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal isn't the bosom pal he was. We shall have to gang warily; but nevertheless, we shall certainly have to gang."

Peter nodded approvingly. Strangely enough, he had once possessed a thoroughly respectable reverence for the Law; but several months of association with the Saint had worked irreparable damage on that bourgeois inhibition.

"You can count me in," he said; and the Saint dapped him on the back.

"I knew it without asking you, you old sinner," he said contentedly. "Keep this next week-end free for me, brother, if you really feel that way — and if you want to be specially helpful you can push out this afternoon with a false beard tied round your ears and try and rent a large garage from which yells of pain cannot be heard outside."

"Is that all?" Peter asked suspiciously. "What's your share going to be — backing losers at Hurst Park?"

The Saint shook his head.

"Winners," he said firmly. "I always back winners. But I'm going to busy myself. I want to get hold of a Gadget. I saw it at a motor show once, but it may take me a couple of days to find out where I can buy one."

As a matter of fact it took him thirty-six hours and entailed a good deal of travelling and expense. Peter Quentin found and rented the garage which the Saint had demanded a little more quickly; but the task was easier and he was used to Simon Templar's eccentric commissions.

"I'm getting so expert at this sort of thing, I believe I could find you a three-humped camel overnight if you wanted it," Peter said modestly, when he returned to announce success.

Simon grinned.

The mechanical details of his scheme were not completed until the Friday afternoon, but he added every hour and penny to the private account which he had with Sir Melvin Flager, of which that slave-driving knight was blissfully in ignorance.

It was barely possible that there may survive a handful of simple unsophisticated souls who would assume that since Mr. Justice Goldie's candid criticism had been pronounced in open court and printed in every newspaper of importance, Sir Melvin Flager had been hiding his head in shame, shunned by his erstwhile friends and treated with deferential contempt even by his second footman. To these unfledged innocents we extend our kindly sympathy, and merely point out that nothing of the sort had happened. Sir Melvin Flager, of course, did not move in the very Highest Society, for an uncle of his on his mother's side still kept and served in a fried-fish shop near the Elephant and Castle; but the society in which he did move did not ostracise him. Once the first statement-seeking swarm of reporters had been dispersed, he wined and dined and diverted himself and ran his business exactly the same as he had done before; for the business and social worlds have always found it remarkably easy to forgive the trespasses of a man whose prices and entertainments are respectively cheaper and better than others.

On that Friday night Sir Melvin Flager entertained a small party to dinner, and took them on to a revue afterwards. Conscience had never troubled him personally; and his guests were perfectly happy to see a good show without worrying about such sordid trifles as how the money that paid for their seats was earned. His well-laden lorries roared through the night with red-eyed men at the wheel to add to his fortune; and Sir Melvin Flager sat in his well-upholstered seat and roared with carefree laughter at the antics of the comedian, forgetting all about his business until nearly the end of the first act, when a programme girl handed him a sealed envelope.

Flager slit it open and read the note.

One of our trucks has had another accident. Two killed. Afraid it may be bad for us if this comes out so soon after the last one. May be able to square it, but must see you first. Will wait in your car during the interval.

It was in his business manager's handwriting, and it was signed with his business manager's name.

Sir Melvin Flager tore the note into small pieces and dumped it in the ashtray before him. There was a certain forced quality about his laughter for the next five minutes; and as soon as the curtain came down he excused himself to his guests and walked down the line of cars parked in a side street adjoining the theatre. He found his own limousine, and peered in at the back.

"You there, Nyson?" he growled.

"Yes, sir."

Flager grunted, and opened the door. It was rather dark inside the car, and he could only just make out the shape of the man who sat there."

"I'll fire every damned driver I've got tomorrow," he swore, as he climbed in. "What the devil do they think I put them on the road for — to go to sleep? This may be serious."

"You've no idea how serious it's going to be, brother," said the man beside him.

But the voice was not the voice of Mr. Nyson, and the mode of address was not that which Sir Melvin Flager encouraged from his executives. For a moment the managing director of the Flager Road Transport Company did not move; and then he leaned sideways to stare more closely at his companion. His eyes were growing accustomed to the dark, but the movement did not help him at all, for with a sudden shock of fear he saw that the man's features were completely covered by a thin gauzy veil which stretched from his hat-brim down to his coat collar.

"Who the hell are you?" rasped Flager uncertainly.

"On the whole, I think it would be better for you not to know," said the Saint calmly.

Another man had climbed into the driver's seat, and the car vibrated almost imperceptibly as the engine started up. But this second man, although he wore a chauffeur's peaked cap, had a silhouette that in no way resembled that of the chauffeur whom Sir Melvin Flager employed.

Under his touch the car began to edge out of the line; and as he saw the movement Flager came back to life. In the stress of the moment he was unable to form a very clear idea of what was happening, but instinct told him that it was nothing to which he wanted to lend his tender person.

"Well, you won't kidnap me!" he shouted, and lashed out wildly at the veiled face of the man beside him.

Which was the last thing he knew about for the next half-hour, for his desperate swing was still far from its mark when a fist like a ball of iron struck him cleanly on the point of the jaw and lifted him back on to the cushions in a dreamless slumber.

When he woke up, his first impulse was to clasp his hands to his painfully singing head; but when he tried to carry it out his wrists refused to move — they felt as if they were anchored to some solid object. Blinking open his eyes, he looked down at them. They were handcuffed to what appeared to be the steering wheel of a car.

In another second the memory of what had happened to him before he fell asleep returned. He began to struggle frantically, but his body also refused to respond, and he saw that a broad leather strap like the safety belt of an aeroplane had been passed round his waist and fastened in front of his abdomen, locking him securely to his seat. Wildly he looked about him, and discovered that he was actually sitting in the driving seat of a lorry. He could see the bonnet in front of him, and, beyond it, a kind of white screen which seemed vaguely familiar.

The feeling that he had been plunged into some fantastic nightmare seized him, and he let out a stifled yell of fright.

"That won't help you," said a cool voice at his side; and Flager jerked his head round to see the veiled face of the unknown man who had sat at his side in the car.

"Damn you!" he raved. "What have you done to me?"

He was a large fleshy man, with one of those fleshy faces which look as if their owner had at some time invited God to strike him pink, and had found his prayer instantaneously answered. Simon Templar, who did not like large fleshy men with fleshy pink faces, smiled under his mask.

"So far, we haven't done very much," he said. "But we're going to do plenty."

The quietness of his voice struck Flager with a sudden chill, and instinctively he huddled inside his clothes. Something else struck him as unusual even as he did so, and in another moment he realised what it was. Above the waist, he had no clothes on at all — the whole of his soft white torso was exposed to the inclemency of the air.

The Saint smiled again.

"Start the machine, Peter," he ordered; and Flager saw that the chauffeur who had driven the car was also there, and that he was similarly masked.

A switch clicked over, and darkness descended on the garage. Then a second switch clicked, and the white screen in front of the truck's bonnet lighted up with a low whirring sound. Bewildered but afraid, Flager looked up and saw a free moving picture show.

The picture was of a road at night, and it unrolled towards him as if it had been photographed from behind the headlights of a car that was rushing over it. From time to time, corners, cross-roads, and the lights of other traffic proceeding in both direction swept up towards him — the illusion that he was driving the lorry in which he sat over that road was almost perfect.

"What's this for?" he croaked.

"You're taking the place of one of your own drivers for the week-end," answered the Saint. "We should have preferred to do it out on the road under normal working conditions, but I'm afraid you would have made too much noise. This is the best substitute we were able to arrange, and I think it'll work all right. Do you know what it is?"

Flager shook his head.

"I don't care what it is! Listen here, you "

"It's a gadget for testing people's ability to drive," said the Saint smoothly. "When I turn another switch, the steering wheel you have there will be synchronised with the film. You will then be driving over the road yourself. So long as you keep on the road and don't try to run into the other traffic, everything will be all right. But directly you make a movement that would have taken you off the road or crashed you into another car — or a cyclist, brother — the film will stop for a moment, a red light will light up on top of the screen, and I shall wake you up like this."

Something swished through the air, and a broad stinging piece of leather which felt like a razor strop fell resoundingly across Sir Melvin's well-padded shoulders.

Flager gave a yelp of anguish; and the Saint laughed softly.

"We'll start right away," he said. "You know the rules and you know the penalties — the rules are only the same as your own employees have to obey, and the penalties are really much less severe. Wake up, Flager — you're off!"

The third switch snapped into place, and Flager grabbed blindly at the steering wheel. Almost at once the picture faltered, and a red light glowed on top of the screen.

Smack! came the leather strap across his shoulders.

"Damn you!" bellowed Flager. "What are you doing this for?"

"Partly for fun," said the Saint. "Look out — you're going to hit that car!"

Flager did hit it, and the strop whistled through the darkness and curled over his back. This shriek tortured the echoes; but Simon was without mercy.

"You'll be in the ditch in a minute," he said. "No… Here comes a corner… Watch it!.. Nicely round, brother, nicely round. Now mind you don't run into the back of this cart — you've got plenty of room to pass… Stick to it… Don't hit the cyclist… You're going to hit him… Mind the fence — you're heading straight for it — look out… Look out!"

The strap whacked down again with a strong and willing arm behind it as the red light sprang up again.

Squealing like a stuck pig, Sir Melvin Flager tore the lorry back on to its course.

"How long are you keeping this up for?" he sobbed. "Until Monday morning," said the Saint calmly. "And I wish it could be a month. I've never seen a more responsive posterior than you have. Mind the cyclist."

"But you're making me drive too fast!" Flager almost screamed. "Can't you slow the machine up a bit?"

"We have to average over thirty miles an hour," answered the Saint remorselessly. "Look out!"

Sir Melvin Flager passed into a nightmare that was worse than anything he had thought of when he first opened his eyes. The mechanical device which he was strapped to was not quite the same as the cars he was used to; and Simon Templar himself would have been ready to admit that it might be more difficult to drive. Time after time the relentless leather lashed across his shouder-blades, and each time it made contact he let loose a howl of pain which in itself was a reward to his tormentors.

After a while he began to master the steering, and long periods went by when the red light scarcely showed at all. As these intervals of immunity lengthened, Flager shrugged his aching back and began to pluck up courage. These lunatics who had kidnapped him, whoever they were, had taken a mean advantage of him at the start. They had fastened him to an unfamiliar machine and promptly proceeded to shoot it through space at forty miles an hour: naturally he had made mistakes. But that could not go on for ever. He had got the hang of it at last, and the rest of it seemed more or less plain sailing. He even had leisure to ponder sadistically on what their fate would be when they let him go and the police caught them, as they undoubtedly would be caught. He seemed to remember that the cat-o'-nine-tails was the punishment invariably meted out by the Law for crimes of violence. Well, flogging him with that leather strap was a crime of violence. He brooded savagely over various tales he had heard of the horrors of that punishment…

Whack!

The red light had glowed, and the strap had swung home again. Flager pulled himself together with a curse. It was no good getting careless now that he had mastered the machine. But he was beginning to feel tired. His eyes were starting to ache a little with the strain of keeping themselves glued watchfully to the cinematograph screen ahead. The interminable unwinding of that senseless road, the shirr of the unseen projector, the physical effort of manipulating the heavy steering wheel, the deadly monotony of the task, combined with the heavy dinner he had eaten and a long sequence of other dinners behind it to produce a sensation of increasing drowsiness. But the unwinding of the road never slackened speed, and the leather strap never failed to find its mark every time his wearying attention caused him to make a mistake.

"You're getting careless about your corners," the Saint warned him tirelessly. "You'll be in the ditch at the next one. Look out!"

The flickering screen swelled up and swam in his vision. There was nothing else in the world — nothing but that endlessly winding road uncoiling out of the darkness, the lights of other traffic that leapt up from it, the red light above the screen, and the smack of the leather strop across his shoulders. His brain seemed to be spinning round like a top inside his head when at last, amazingly, the screen went black and the other bulbs in the garage lighted up.

"You can go to sleep now," said the Saint.

Sir Melvin Flager was incapable of asking questions. A medieval prisoner would have been no more capable of asking questions of a man who released him from the rack. With a groan he slumped back in his seat and fell asleep.

It seemed as if he had scarcely closed his eyes when he was roused again by someone shaking him. He looked up blearily and saw the strange chauffeur leaning over him.

"Wake up," said Peter Quentin. "It's five o'clock on Saturday morning, and you've got a lot more miles to cover."

Flager had no breath to dispute the date. The garage lights had gone out again, and the road was starting to wind out of the cinematograph screen again.

"But you told me I could sleep!" he moaned.

"You get thirty-five minutes every night," Peter told him pitilessly. "That averages four hour a week, and that's as much as you allowed Albert Johnson. Look out!"

Twice again Flager was allowed to sleep, for exactly thirty-five minutes; four times he watched his two tormentors change places, a fresh man taking up the task while the other lay down on the very comfortable bed which had been made up in one corner and slept serenely. Every three hours he had five minutes' rest and a glass of water, every six hours he had ten minutes' rest, a cup of coffee, and a sandwich. But the instant that these timed five or ten minutes had elapsed, the projector was started up again, the synchronisation switch was thrown over, and he had to go on driving.

Time ceased to have any meaning. When, after his first sleep, he was told that it was only five o'clock on Saturday morning, he could have believed that he had been driving for a week; before his ordeal was over, he felt as if he had been at the wheel for seven years. By Saturday night he felt he was going mad; by Sunday morning he thought he was going to die; by Sunday night he was a quivering wreck. The strap fell on his shoulders many times during the last few hours, when the recurrent sting of it was almost the only thing that kept his eyes open; but he was too weary even to cry out…

And then, at the end of what might have been centuries, Monday morning dawned outside; and the Saint looked at his watch and reversed the switches.

"You can go to sleep again now," he said for the last time; but Sir Melvin Flager was asleep almost before the last word was out of his mouth.

Sunken in the coma of utter exhaustion, Flager did not even feel himself being unstrapped and unhandcuffed from his perch; he did not feel the clothes being replaced on his inflamed back, nor did he even rouse as he was carried into his own car and driven swiftly away.

And then again he was being shaken by the shoulder, woken up. Whimpering, he groped for the steering wheel — and did not find it. The shaking at his shoulder went on.

"All right," he blubbered. "All right. I'm trying to do it. Can't you let me sleep a little — just once…"

"Sir Melvin! Sir Melvin!"

Flager forced open his bloodshot eyes. His hands were free. He was sitting in his own car, which was standing outside his own house. It was his valet who was shaking him.

"Sir Melvin! Try to wake up, sir. Where have you been? Are you ill, sir?"

Flager found strength to move his head from one side to the other.

"No," he said. "I just want to sleep."

And with a deep groan he let his swollen eyelids droop again, and sank back into soothing abysses of delicious rest.

When he woke up again he was in his own bed, in his own bedroom. For a long time he lay without moving, wallowing in the heavenly comfort of the soft mattress and cool linen, savouring the last second of sensual pleasure that could be squeezed out of the most beautiful awakening that he could remember.

"He's coming round," said a low voice at last; and with a sigh Flager opened his eyes.

His bed seemed to be surrounded with an audience such as a seventeenth-century monarch might have beheld at a levee. There was his valet, his secretary, his doctor, a nurse, and a heavy and stolid man of authoritative appearance who held an unmistakable bowler hat. The doctor had a hand on his pulse, and the others stood by expectantly.

"All right, Sir Melvin," said the physician. "You may talk for a little while now, if you want to, but you mustn't excite yourself. This gentleman here is a detective who wants to ask you a few questions."

The man with the bowler hat came nearer.

"What happened to you, Sir Melvin?" he asked.

Flager stared at him for several seconds. Words rose to his lips, but somehow he did not utter them.

"Nothing," he said at length. "I've been away for the week-end, that's all. What the devil's all this fuss about?"

"But your back, Sir Melvin!" protested the doctor. "You look as if you'd had a terrible beating—"

"I had a slight accident," snapped Flager. "And what the devil has it got to do with you, sir, anyway? Who the devil sent for all of you?"

His valet swallowed.

"I did, Sir Melvin," he stammered. "When I couldn't wake you up all day yesterday — and you disappeared from the theatre without a word to anybody, and didn't come back for two days—"

"And why the devil shouldn't I disappear for two days?" barked Flager weakly. "I'll disappear for a month if I feel like it. Do I pay you to pry into my movements? And can't I sleep all day if I want to without waking up to find a lot of quacks and policemen infesting my room like vultures? Get out of my house, the whole damned lot of you! Get out, d'you hear?"

Somebody opened the door, and the congregation drifted out, shaking its heads and muttering, to the accompaniment of continued exhortations in Flager's rasping voice.

His secretary was the last to go, and Flager called him back.

"Get Nyson on the telephone," he ordered. "I'll speak to him myself."

The secretary hesitated for a moment, and then picked up the bedside telephone and dialled the number dubiously.

Flager took the instrument as soon as his manager answered.

"Nyson?" he said. "Get in touch with all our branch depots immediately. From now on, all our drivers will be on a five-hour day, and they get a twenty per cent rise as from the date we took them on. Engage as many more men as you need to make up the schedules."

He heard Nyson's incredulous gasp over the line.

"I beg your pardon, Sir Melvin — did you say—"

"Yes, I did!" snarled Flager. "You heard me all right. And after that, you can find out if that cyclist Johnson killed left any dependents. I want to do something for them…"

His voice faded away, and the microphone slipped through his fingers. His secretary looked at him quickly, and saw that his eyes were closed and the hemispherical mound of his abdomen was rising and falling rhythmically.

Sir Melvin Flager was asleep again.

VII

The Uncritical Publisher

Even the strongest men have their weak moments.

Peter Quentin once wrote a book. Many young men do, but usually with more disastrous results. Moreover he did it without saying a word to anyone, which is perhaps even more uncommon; and even the Saint did not hear about it until after the crime had been committed.

"Next time you're thinking of being rude to me," said Peter Quentin, on that night of revelation, "please remember that you're talking to a budding novelist whose work has been compared to Dumas, Tolstoy, Conan Doyle, and others."

Simon Templar choked over his beer.

"Only pansies bud," he said severely. "Novelists fester. Of course, it's possible to be both."

"I mean it," insisted Peter seriously. "I was keeping it quiet until I heard the verdict, and I had a letter from the publishers this morning."

There was no mistaking his earnestness; and the Saint regarded him with affectionate gloom. His vision of the future filled him with overwhelming pessimism. He had seen the fate of other young men — healthy, upright, sober young men of impeccable character — who had had books published. He had seen them tread the downhill path of pink shirts, velvet coats, long hair, quill pens, cocktail parties, and beards, until finally they sank into the awful limbos of Bloomsbury and were no longer visible to the naked eye. The prospect of such a doom for anyone like Peter Quentin, who had been with him in so many bigger and better crimes, cast a shadow of great melancholy across his spirits.

"Didn't Kathleen try to stop you?" he asked.

"Of course not," said Peter proudly. "She helped me. I owe—"

"— it all to her," said the Saint cynically. "All right. I know the line. But if you ever come out with 'My Work' within my hearing, I shall throw you under a bus… You'd better let me see this letter. And order me some more beer while I'm reading it — I need strength."

He took the document with his fingertips, as if it were unclean, and opened it out on the bar. But after his first glance at the letter-head his twinkling blue eyes steadied abruptly, and he read the epistle through with more than ordinary interest.

Dear Sir, We have now gone into your novel THE GAY ADVENTURER, and our readers report that it is very entertaining and ably written, with the verve of Dumas, the dramatic power of Tolstoy, and the ingenuity of Conan Doyle. We shall therefore be delighted to set up same in best small pica type to form a volume of about 320 p.p., machine on good antique paper, bind in red cloth with title in gold lettering, and put up in specially designed artistic wrapper, at cost to yourself of only £300 (Three Hundred Pounds) and to publish same at our own expense in the United Kingdom at a net price of 5/- (Five Shillings); and believe it will form a most acceptable and popular volume which should command a wide sale. We will further agree to send you on date of publication twelve presentation copies, and to send copies for review to all principal magazines and newspapers, and further to pay you a royalty of 25 % (twenty-five per cent) on all copies sold of this Work. The work can be put in hand immediately on receipt of your acceptance of these terms. Trusting to hear from you at your earliest convenience, We beg to remain, dear Sir, Faithfully yours, for HERBERT G. PARSTONE & Co. Herbert G. Parstone, Managing Director

Simon folded the letter and handed it back with a sigh of relief.

"Okay, Peter," he said cheerfully. "I bought that one. What's the swindle, and can I come in on it?"

"I don't know of any swindle," said Peter puzzledly. "What do you mean?"

The Saint frowned.

"D'you mean to tell me you sent your book to Parstone in all seriousness?"

"Of course I did. I saw an advertisement of his in some literary paper, and I don't know much about publishers—"

"You've never heard of him before?"

"No."

Simon picked up his tankard and strengthened himself with a deep draught.

"Herbert G. Parstone," he said, "is England's premier exponent of the publishing racket. Since you don't seem to know it, Peter, let me tell you that no reputable publisher in this or any other country publishes books at the author's expense, except an occasional highly technical work which goes out for posterity rather than profit. I gather that your book is by no means technical. Therefore you don't pay the publisher: he pays you — and if he's any use he stands you expensive lunches as well."

"But Parstone offers to pay—"

"A twenty-five per cent royalty. I know. Well, if you were something like a best seller you might get that; but on a first novel no publisher would give you more than ten, and then he'd probably lose money. After six months Parstone would probably send you a statement showing a sale of two hundred copies, you'd get a cheque from him for twelve pounds ten, and that's the last trace you'd see of your three hundred quid. He's simply trading on the fact that one out of every three people you meet thinks he could write a book if he tried, one out of every three of 'em try it, and one out of every three of those tries to get it published. The very fact that a manuscript is sent to him tells him that the author is a potential sucker, because anyone who's going into the writing business seriously takes the trouble to find out a bit about publishers before he starts slinging his stuff around. The rest of his game is just playing on the vanity of mugs. And the mugs — mugs like yourself, Peter — old gents with political theories, hideous women with ghastly poems, schoolgirls with nauseating love stories — rush up to pour their money into his lap for the joy of seeing their repulsive tripe in print. I've known about Herbert for many years, old lad, but I never thought you'd be the sap to fall for him."

"I don't believe you," said Peter glumly.

An elderly mouse-like man who was drinking at the bar beside him coughed apologetically and edged bashfully nearer.

"Excuse me, sir," he said diffidently, "but your friend's telling the truth."

"How do you know?" asked Peter suspiciously. "I can usually guess when he's telling the truth — he makes a face as if it hurt him."

"He isn't pulling your leg this time, sir," said the man. "I happen to be a proof-reader at Parstone's."

The surprising thing about coincidences is that they so often happen. The mouse-like man was one of those amazing accidents on which the fate of nations may hinge, but there was no logical reason why he should not have been drinking at that bar as probably as at any other hostel in the district. And yet there is no doubt that if Mr. Herbert Parstone could have foreseen the accident he would have bought that particular public-house for the simple pleasure of closing it down lest any such coincidence should happen; but unhappily for him Mr. Herbert Parstone was not a clairvoyant.

This proof-reader — the term, by the way, refers to the occupation and not necessarily to the alcoholic content of the man — had been with Parstone for twelve years, and he was ready for a change.

"I was with Parstone when he was just a small jobbing printer," he said, "before he took up this publishing game. That's all he is now, really — a printer. But he's going to have to get along without me. In the last three years I've taken one cut after another, till I don't earn enough money to feed myself properly; and I can't stand it any longer. I've got four more months on my contract, but after that I'm going to take another job."

"Did you read my book?" asked Peter.

The man shook his head.

"Nobody read your book, sir — if you'll excuse my telling you. It was just put on a shelf for three weeks, and after that Parstone sent you his usual letter. That's what happens to everything that's sent to him. If he gets his money, the book goes straight into the shop, and the proof-reader's the first man who has to wade through it. Parstone doesn't care whether it's written in Hindustani."

"But surely," protested Peter half-heartedly, "he couldn't carry on a racket like that in broad daylight and get away with it?"

The reader looked at him with a rather tired smile on his mouse-like features.

"It's perfectly legal, sir. Parstone publishes the book. He prints copies and sends them around. It isn't his fault if the reviewers won't review it and the booksellers won't buy it. He carries out his legal undertaking. But it's a dirty business."

After a considerably longer conversation, in the course of which a good deal more beer was consumed, Peter Quentin was convinced; and he was so crestfallen on the way home that Simon took pity on him.

"Let me read this opus," he said, "if you've got a spare copy. Maybe it isn't so lousy, and if there's anything in it we'll send it along to some other place."

He had the book next day; and after ploughing through the first dozen pages his worst fears were realised. Peter Quentin was not destined to take his place in the genealogy of literature with Dumas, Tolstoy, and Conan Doyle. The art of writing was not in him. His spelling had a grand simplicity that would have delighted the more progressive orthographists, his grammatical constructions followed in the footsteps of Gertrude Stein, and his punctuation marks seemed to have more connection with intervals for thought and opening beer-bottles than with the requirements of syntax.

Moreover, like most first novels, it was embarrassingly personal.

It was this fact which made Simon follow it to the bitter end, for the hero of the story was one "Ivan Grail, the Robbin Hood of modern crime," who could without difficulty be identified with the Saint himself, his "beutifull wife," and "Frank Morris his acomplis whos hard-biten featurs consealed a very clever brain and witt." Simon Templar swallowed all the flattering evidences of hero-worship that adorned the untidy pages, and actually blushed. But after he had reached the conclusion — inscribed "FINNIS" in triumphant capitals — he did some heavy thinking.

Later on he saw Peter again.

"What was it that bit your features so hard?" he asked. "Did you try to kiss an alligator?"

Peter turned pink.

"I had to describe them somehow," he said defensively.

"You're too modest," said the Saint, after inspecting him again. "They were not merely bitten — they were thoroughly chewed."

"Well, what about the book?" said Peter hopefully. "Was it any good?"

"It was lousy," Simon informed him, with the privileged candour of friendship. "It would have made Dumas turn in his grave. All the same, it may be more readable after I've revised it for you. And perhaps we will let Comrade Par-stone publish it after all."

Peter blinked.

"But I thought—"

"I have an idea," said the Saint. "Parstone has published dud books too long. It's time he had a good one. Will you get your manuscript back from him, Peter — tell him you want to make a few corrections, and after that you'll send him his money and let him print it. For anyone who so successfully conceals a very clever brain and wit," he added cruelly, "there are much more profitable ways of employing them than writing books, as you ought to know."

For two weeks after that the Saint sat at his typewriter for seven hours a day, hammering out page after page of neat manuscript at astonishing speed. He did not merely revise Peter Quentin's story — he rewrote it from cover to cover, and the result would certainly not have been recognised by its original creator.

The book was sent in again from his own address, and consequently Peter did not see the proofs. Simon Templar read them himself; and his ribs were aching long before he had finished.

The Gay Adventurer, by Peter Quentin, was formally pushed out upon a callous world about two months later. The Times did not notice it, the library buyers did not refill their fountain pens to sign the order forms, Mr. James Douglas did not take it as the text of a centre-page denunciation in the Sunday Express, the lynx-eyed scouts of Hollywood did not rush in with open contracts; but nevertheless it was possible for a man with vast patience and dogged determination to procure a copy, by which achievement Mr. Parstone had fulfilled the letter of his contract.

Simon Templar did not need to exercise patience and determination to obtain his copy, because the author's presentation dozen came to his apartment; and it happened that Peter Quentin came there on the same morning.

Peter noticed the open parcel of books, and fell on them at once, whinnying like an eager stallion. But he had scarcely glanced over the first page when he turned to the Saint with wrathful eyes.

"This isn't my book at all," he shouted indignantly.

"We'll call it a collaboration if you like," said the Saint generously. "But I thought you might as well have the credit. My name is so famous already—"

Peter had been turning the pages frantically.

"But this — this is unlawful!" he expostulated. "It's — it's—"

"Of course it is," agreed the Saint. "And that's why you must never tell anyone that I had anything to do with it. When the case conies to court, I shall expect you to perjure yourself blue in the face on that subject."

After the revelations that have been made in the early stages of this chapter, no one will imagine that on the same morning Mr. Herbert Parstone was pacing feverishly up and down his office, quivering with anxiety and parental pride, stopping every now and then to peer at the latest circulation figures rushed in by scurrying office-boys, and bawling frantic orders to an excited staff of secretaries, salesmen, shippers, clerks, exporters, and truck drivers. As a matter of fact, even the most important and reputable publishers do not behave like that. They are usually too busy concentrating on mastering that loose shoulder and smooth follow-through which carries the ball well over that nasty bunker on the way to the fourteenth.

Mr. Herbert Parstone was not playing golf, because he had a bad cold; and he was in his office when the Saint called. The name on the card that was sent in to him was unfamiliar, but Mr. Parstone never refused to see anyone who was kind enough to walk into his parlour.

He was a short ginger-haired man with the kind of stomach without which no morning coat and gold watch-chain can be seen to their best advantage; and the redness of his nose was not entirely due to his temporary affliction.

"Mr. Teblar?" he said, with great but obstructed geniality. "Please sit down. I dode thig I've had the pleasure to beetig you before, have I?"

"I don't think so," said the Saint pleasantly. "But any real pleasure is worth waiting for." He took the precious volume which he was carrying from under his arm, and held it up. "Did you publish this?"

Mr. Parstone looked at it.

"Yes," he said, "that is one of our publicashuds. A bost excelledd ad ibportad book, if I bay perbid byself to say so. A book, I bight say, which answers problebs which are dear to every wud of us today."

"It will certainly have some problems to answer," said the Saint; "and I expect they'll be dear enough. Do you know the name of the principal character in this book? Do you know who this biography is alleged to be about?"

"Biography?" stammered Mr. Parstone, blinking at the cover. "The book is a dovel. A work of fickshud. It is clearly explaid—"

"The book is supposed to be a biography," said the Saint "And do you know the name of the principal character?"

Mr. Parstone's brow creased with thought.

"Pridcipal character?" he repeated. "Led be see, led be see. I ought to dough, oughtud I?" He blew his nose several times, sniffed, sighed, and spread out his hand uncertainly. "Iddn it abazing?" he said. "The dabe was od the tip of by tug, but dow I card rebember id."

"The name is Simon Templar," said the Saint grimly; and Mr. Parstone sat up.

"What?" he ejaculated.

Simon opened the book and showed him the name in plain print. Then he took it away to a chair and lighted a cigarette.

"Rather rude of you, wasn't it?" he murmured.

"Well, by dear Bister Teblar," said Parstone winningly. "I trust you are dot thinkig that any uncomblibendary referedds was intended. Far frob id. These rebarkable coidcidedces will happud. Ad yet it is dot every yug bad of your age who fides his dabe preserved for posterity id such a work as that. The hero of that book, as I rebember him, was a fellow of outstaddig charb—"

"He was a low criminal," said the Saint virtuously. "Your memory is failing you, Herbert. Let me read you some of the best passages."

He turned to a page he had marked.

"Listen to this, Herbert," he said. " 'Simon Templar was never particular about how he made money, so long as he made it. The drug traffic was only one of his many sources of income, and his conscience was never touched by the thought of the hundreds of lives he ruined by his insatiable avarice. Once, in a night club, he pointed out to me a fine and beautiful girl on whose lovely face the ravages of dope were already beginning to make their mark. "I've had two thousand pounds from her since I started her on the stuff," he said gloatingly, "and I'll have five thousand more before it kills her." 1 could multiply instances of that kind by the score, and refrain only from fear of nauseating my readers. Sufficient, at least, has already been said to show what an unspeakable ruffian was this man who called himself the Saint.' "

However hard it might have been for Mr. Parstone to place the name of Simon Templar, he was by no means ignorant of the Saint. His watery eyes popped halfway out of their sockets, and his jaw hardened at the same time.

"So you're the Saind?" he said.

"Of course," murmured Simon.

"Id your very own words, a low cribidal—"

Simon shook his head.

"Oh, no, Herbert," he said. "By no means as low as that. My reputation may be bad, but it's only rumour. You may whisper it to your friends, but the law doesn't allow you to put it in writing. That's libel. And you couldn't even get Chief Inspector Teal to testify that my record would justify anything like the language this book of yours has used about me. My sins were always fairly idealistic and devoted to the squashing of beetles like yourself — not to trading in drugs and grinding the faces of the poor. But you haven't heard anything like the whole of it. Listen to some more."

He turned to another selected passage.

" 'The Saint'," he read, " 'always seemed to derive a peculiar malicious pleasure from robbing and swindling those who could least afford to lose. To my dying day, I shall be haunted by the memory of the fiendish glee which distorted his face when he told me that he had stolen five pounds from a woman with seven children, who had scraped and saved for months to get the money together. He accepted the money from her as a fee for trying to trace the grave of her father, who had been reported "missing" in 1917. Of course he never made any attempt to carry out his share of the bargain. He played this cruel trick on several occasions, and always with the same sadistic pleasure, which I believe meant jar more to him than the actual cash which he derived from it.' "

"Is that id the book too?" asked Parstone hoarsely.

"Naturally," said the Saint. "That's what I'm reading it from. And there are lots more interesting things. Look here. 'The bogus companies floated by Templar, in which thousands upon thousands of widows and orphans were deprived— ' "

"Wait!" interrupted Parstone tremblingly. "This is terrible — a terrible coidcideds. The book will be withdrawd at wuds. Hardly eddywud will have had tibe to read it. Ad if eddy sball cobbensation I cad give—"

Simon closed his book with a smile and laid it on Mr. Parstone's desk.

"Shall we say fifty thousand pounds?" he suggested affably.

Mr. Parstone's face reddened to the verge of an apoplectic stroke, and he brought up his handkerchief with shaking hands.

"How buch?" he whispered.

"Fifty thousand pounds," repeated the Saint. "After all, that's a very small amount of damages to ask for a libel like this. If the case has to go to court, I think it will be admitted that never in the whole history of modern law has such a colossal libel been put on paper. If there is any crime under the sun of which I'm not accused in that book, I'll sit down right now and eat it. And there are three hundred and twenty pages of it — eighty thousand words of continuous and unbridled insult. For a thing like that, Herbert, I think fifty thousand pounds is pretty cheap."

"You could'n get it," said Parstone harshly. "It's the author's liability—"

"I know that clause," answered the Saint coolly, "and you may be interested to know that it has no legal value whatever. In a successful libel action, the author, printer, and publisher are joint tortfeasors, and none of them can indemnify the other. Ask your solicitor. As a matter of fact," he added prophetically, "I don't expect I shall be able to recover anything from the author, anyway. Authors are usually broke. But you are both the printer and publisher, and I'm sure I can collect from you."

Mr. Parstone stared at him with blanched lips.

"But fifty thousad pouds is ibpossible," he whined. "It would ruid be!"

"That's what I mean to do, dear old bird," said the Saint gently. "You've gone on swindling a lot of harmless idiots for too long already, and now I want you to see what it feels like when it happens to you."

He stood up, and collected his hat.

"I'll leave you the book," he said, "in case you want to entertain yourself some more. But I've got another copy; and if I don't receive your cheque by the first post on Friday morning it will go straight to my solicitors. And you can't kid yourself about what that will mean."

For a long time after he had gone Mr. Herbert Parstone sat quivering in his chair. And then he reached out for the book and began to skim through its pages. And with every page his livid face went greyer. There was no doubt about it. Simon Templar had spoken the truth. The book was the most monumental libel that could ever have found its way into print. Parstone's brain reeled before the accumulation of calumnies which it unfolded.

His furious ringing of the bell brought his secretary running.

"Fide me that proof-reader!" he howled. "Fide be the dab fool who passed this book!" He flung the volume on to the floor at her feet. "Sed hib to be at wuds! I'll show bib. I'll bake hib suffer. By God, I'll—"

The other things that Mr. Parstone said he would do cannot be recorded in such a respectable publication as this.

His secretary picked up the book and looked at the title.

"Mr. Timmins left yesterday — he was the man you fired four months ago," she said; but even then Mr. Parstone was no wiser.

VIII

The Noble Sportsman

It would be difficult to imagine two more ill-assorted guests at a country house party than Simon Templar and Chief Inspector Teal. The Saint, of course, was in his element. He roared up the drive in his big cream and red sports car and a huge camel-hair coat as if he had been doing that sort of thing for half his life, which he had. But Mr. Teal, driving up in the ancient and rickety station taxi, and alighting cumbrously in his neat serge suit and bowler hat, fitted less successfully into the picture. He looked more like a builder's foreman who had called to take measurements for a new bathroom, which he was not.

But that they should have been members of the same house party at all was the most outstanding freak of circumstance; and it was only natural that one of them should take the first possible opportunity to inquire into the motives of the other.

Mr. Teal came into the Saint's room while Simon was dressing for dinner, and the Saint looked him over with some awe.

"I see you've got a new tie," he murmured. "Did your old one come undone?"

The detective ran a finger round the inside of his collar, which fitted as if he had bought it when he was several years younger and measured less than eighteen inches around the neck.

"How long have you known Lord Yearleigh?" he asked bluntly.

"I've met him a few times," said the Saint casually.

He appeared to be speaking the truth; and Mr. Teal was not greatly surprised — the Saint had a habit of being acquainted with the most unlikely people. But Teal's curiosity was not fully satisfied.

"I suppose you're here for the same reason as I am," he said.

"More or less, I take it," answered Simon. "Do you think Yearleigh will be murdered?"

"You've seen the anonymous letters he's been receiving?"

"Some of 'em. But lots of people get anonymous threatening letters without getting a Chief Inspector of Scotland Yard sent down as a private pet."

"They aren't all M.P.'s, younger sons of dukes, and well-known influential men," said the detective rather cynically. "What do you think about it?"

"If he is murdered, I hope it's exciting," said the Saint callously. "Poison is so dull. A hail of machine-gun bullets through the library window would be rather diverting, though… What are you getting at, Claud — are you trying to steal my act or are you looking for an alliance?"

Mr. Teal unwrapped a wafer of chewing gum and stuck it in his mouth, and watched the Saint fixing buttons in a white waistcoat with a stolid air of detachment that he was far from feeling. It was sometimes hard for him to remember that that debonair young brigand with the dangerous mouth and humorous blue eyes had personally murdered many men, beyond all practical doubt but equally beyond all possibility of legal proof; and he found it hard to remember then. But nevertheless he remembered it. And the fact that those men had never died without sound reason did not ease his mind — the Saint had a disconcerting habit of assassinating men whose pollution of the universe was invisible to anyone else until he unmasked it.

"I'd like to know why you were invited," said Mr. Teal.

Simon Templar put on his waistcoat, brushed his tuxedo, and put that on also. He stood in front of the dressing-table, lighting a cigarette.

"If I suggested that Yearleigh may have thought that I'd be more use than a policeman, you wouldn't be flattered," he remarked. "So why worry about suspecting me until he really is dead? I suppose you've already locked up the silver and had the jewels removed to the bank, so I don't see how I can bother you any other way."

They went downstairs together, with Chief Inspector Teal macerating his spearmint in gloomy silence. If the Saint had not been a fellow-guest he would have taken his responsibilities less seriously; and yet he was unable to justify any suspicion that the Saint was against him. He knew nothing about his host which might have inspired the Saint to take an unlawful interest in his expectation of life.

The public, and what was generally known of the private, life of Lord Thornton Yearleigh was so far above reproach that it was sometimes held up as a model for others. He was a man of about sixty-five with a vigour that was envied by men who were twenty-five years his junior, a big-built natural athlete with snow-white hair that seemed absurdly premature as a crown for his clear ruddy complexion and erect carriage. At sixty-five, he was a scratch golfer, a first-class tennis player, a splendid horseman, and a polo player of considerable skill. In those other specialised pastimes which in England are particularly dignified with the name of "sport," hunting, shooting, and fishing, his name was a by-word. He swam in the sea throughout the winter, made occasional published comments on the decadence of modern youth, could always be depended on to quote 'mens sana in corpore sano' at the right moment, and generally stood as the living personification of those robust and brainless spartan ideals of cold baths and cricket which have contributed so much to England's share in the cultural progress of the world. He was a jovial and widely popular figure; and although he was certainly a member of the House of Commons, the Saint had not yet been known to murder a politician for that crime alone — even if he had often been known to express a desire to do so.

There was, of course, no reason at all why the prospective assassin should have been a member of the party; but his reflections on the Saint's character had started a train of thought in the detective's mind, and he found himself weighing up the other guests speculatively during dinner.

The discussion turned on the private bill which Yearleigh was to introduce, with the approval of the Government, when Parliament reassembled during the following week; and Teal, who would have no strong views on the subject until his daily newspaper told him what he ought to think, found that his role of obscure listener gave him an excellent chance to study the characters of the others who took part.

"I shouldn't be surprised if that bill if mine had something to do with these letters I've been getting," said Yearleigh."Those damned Communists are capable of anything. If they only took some exercise and got some fresh air they'd work all that nonsense out of their systems. Young Maurice is a bit that way himself," he added slyly.

Maurice Vould flushed slightly. He was about thirty-five, thin and spectacled and somewhat untidy, with a curiously transparent ivory skin that was the exact antithesis of Yearleigh's weather-beaten complexion. He was, Teal had already ascertained, a cousin of Lady Yearleigh's; he had a private income of about £800 a year, and devoted his time to writing poems and essays which a very limited public acclaimed as being of unusual worth.

"I admit that I believe in the divine right of mankind to earn a decent wage, to have enough food to eat and a decent house to live in, and to be free to live his life without interference," he said in a rather pleasant quiet voice. "If that is, Communism, I suppose I'm a Communist."

"But presumably you wouldn't include armed attack by a foreign power under your heading of interference," said a man on the opposite side of the table.

He was a sleek well-nourished man with heavy sallow cheeks and a small diamond set in the ring on his third finger; and Teal knew that he was Sir Bruno Walmar, the chairman and presiding genius of the Walmar Oil Corporation and all its hundred subsidiaries. His voice was as harsh as his appearance was smooth, with an aggressive domineering quality to it which did not so much offer argument as defy it; but the voice did not silence Vould.

"That isn't the only concern of Yearleigh's bill," he said.

The Right Honourable Mark Ormer, War Minister in the reigning Government, scratched the centre of his grey moustache in the rather old-maidish gesture which the cartoonist had made familiar to everyone in England, and said: "The National Preparedness Bill merely requires a certain amount of military training to be included in the education of every British boy, so that if his services should be needed in the defence of his country in after life, he should be qualified to play his part without delay. No other eventuality has been envisaged."

"How can you say that no other eventuality has been envisaged?" asked Vould quietly. "You take a boy and teach him the rudiments of killing as if they were a desirable thing to know. You give him a uniform to wear and impress upon him the fact that he is a fighting man in the making. You make him shoot blank cartridges at other boys, and treat the whole pantomime as a good joke. You create a man who will instinctively answer a call to arms whenever the call is made; and how can you sit there tonight and say that you know exactly and only in what circumstances somebody will start to shout the call?"

"I think we can depend on the temperament of the English people to be sure of that," said Ormer indulgently.

"I think you can also depend on the hysteria of most mobs when their professional politicians wave a flag," answered Maurice Vould. "There probably was a time when people fought to defend their countries, but now they have to fight to save the faces of their politicians and the bank balances of their business men."

"Stuff and nonsense!" interjected Lord Yearleigh heartily. "Englishmen have got too much sense. A bit of military training is good for a boy. Teaches him discipline. Besides, you can't stop people fighting — healthy people — with that watery pacifist talk. It's human nature."

"Like killing your next-door neighbour because you want to steal his lawn mower," said Vould gently. "That's another primitive instinct which human nature hasn't been able to eradicate."

Yearleigh gave a snort of impatience; and Sir Bruno Walmar rubbed his smooth hands over each other and said in his rasping voice: "I suppose you were a conscientious objector during the last war, Mr. Vould?"

"I'm sorry to disappoint you," said Vould, with a pale smile, "but I was enjoying the experience of inhaling poison gas when I was sixteen years old. While you, Ormer, were making patriotic speeches, and you, Walmar, were making money. That's the difference between us. I've seen a war, and so I know what it's like; and I've also lived long enough after it to know how much good it does."

"What's your opinion, Mr. Templar?" asked Yearleigh. "Don't you think Maurice is talking like one of these damned street-corner Reds?" The Saint nodded.

"Yes, I do," he said. There was a moment's silence; and then he added thoughtfully: "I rather like these street-corner Reds — one or two of them are really sincere."

Chief Inspector Teal nibbled a crust of bread secure in his voluntary self-effacement, while Mrs. Ormer made some twittering remark and the thread of conversation drifted off into a less dangerously controversial topic. He had, he admitted, failed dismally in his little solitaire game of spotting the prospective murderer. A Cabinet Minister, a multi-millionaire, and a poet did not seem to comprise a gathering amongst whom a practical detective could seek hopefully for felons. The only suspect left for him was still the Saint; and yet even when the meal was finished, after the ladies had retired and the port and cigars had been passed around, he had no reason, actual or intuitive, to believe that Simon Templar was meditating the murder of his host.

Yearleigh rose, and there was a general pushing back of chairs. The noble sportsman caught the detective's eye; and for the first time since Teal's arrival the object of his invitation was brought up again.

"I've had another of those damned letters," he said.

He produced it from his pocket, and held it out in a movement that was a general announcement that anyone who cared to might peruse it. Vould and the Saint, who were nearest, shared it with Mr. Teal.—

The message contained two lines in laboured script.

Since you have ignored my previous warnings, you will learn your lesson tonight.

There was no signature — not even the skeleton haloed figure which Teal had half expected to see.

The detective folded the letter and put it away in his wallet. His faded sleepy eyes turned back to his host.

"I'd like to have a talk with you later on, sir," he said. "I have some men in the village, and with your permission I'd like to post special guards."

"Certainly," agreed Yearleigh at once. "Have your talk now. I'm sure the others will excuse us… Wait a moment, though." He turned to Maurice Vould. "You wanted to have a talk with me as well, didn't you?"

Vould nodded.

"But it can wait a few minutes," he said; and both Teal and the Saint saw that his pale face was even paler, and the eyes behind his big glasses were bright with sudden strain.

"Why should it?" exclaimed Yearleigh good-humouredly. "You modern young intellectuals are always in a hurry, and I promised you this talk three or four days ago. You should have had it sooner if I hadn't had to go away. Inspector Teal won't mind waiting, and I don't expect to be murdered for another half-hour."

Simon fell in at Teal's side as they went down the hall, leaving the other two on their way to Yearleigh's study; and quite naturally the detective asked the question which was uppermost in his mind.

"Have you any more ideas?"

"I don't know," was the Saint's unsatisfactory response. "Who were you most interested in at dinner?"

"I was watching Vould," Teal confessed.

"You would be," said the Saint. "I don't suppose you even noticed Lady Yearleigh."