'Extraordinary, isn't it?' agreed Simon, with his most saintly smile.
Then he was being introduced to a new arrival, Sir Michael Lapping. The ex-judge shook hands heartily, peering short-sightedly into the Saint's face.
'You remind me of a man I once met in the Old Bailey — and I'm hanged if I can remember whether it was a professional encounter or not.'
'I was just going to,' said the Saint blandly, if a trifle cryptically. 'His name was Harry the Duke, and you gave him seven years. He escaped abroad six years ago, but I hear he's been back in England some months. Be careful how you go out after dark.
It should have fallen to the Saint to take Miss Girton in to lunch, but his hostess passed him on to Patricia, and the girl was thus able to get a word with him aside.
'You've already broken your promise twice,'
she said. 'Do you have to go on like this?'
'I'm merely attracting attention,' he said. 'Having now become the centre of interest, I shall rest on my laurels.'
He was as good as his word, but Patricia was unreasonably irritated to observe that he had succeeded in attaining his shamelessly confessed object. The others of the party felt vaguely at a disadvantage, and favoured the Saint with furtive glances in which was betrayed not a little superstitious awe. Once the Saint caught Patricia's eye, and the silent mirth that was always bubbling up behind his eyes spread for a moment into an open grin. She frowned and tossed her pretty head, and entered upon an earnest discussion with Lapping;
but when she stole a look at the Saint to see how he had taken the snub she saw that beneath his dutifully decorous demeanour he was shaking with silent laughter, and she was furious.
The Saint had travelled. He talked interestingly — if with a strong egotistical bias — about places as far removed from civilization and from each other as Vladivostok, Armenia, Moscow, Lapland, Chungking, Pernambuco, and Sierra Leone. There seemed to be few of the wilder parts of the world which he had not visited, and few of those in which he had not had adventures. He had won a gold rush in South Africa and lost his holding in a poker game twenty-four hours later. He had run guns into China, whisky into the United States, and perfume into England. He had deserted after a year in the Spanish Foreign Legion. He had worked his passage across the Atlantic as a steward, tramped across America, fought his way across Mexico during a free-for-all revolution, picked up a couple of thousand pounds in the Argentine, and sailed home from Buenos Aires in a millionaire's suite — to lose nearly all the fruit of his wanderings on Epsom Downs.
'You'll find Baycombe very dull after such an exciting life,' said Miss Girton.
'Somehow, I don't agree,' said the Saint. I findthe air very bracing.'
Bloem adjusted his spectacles and inquired:
'And what might your employment be at the moment?'
'Just now,' said the Saint suavely, 'I'm looking for a million dollars. I feel that I should like to end my days in luxury, and I can't get along on less than fifteen thousand a year.'
Algy squawked with merriment.
'Haw-haw!' he yapped. 'Jolly good! Too awfully horribly priceless! What? What?'
'Quite,' the Saint concurred modestly.
'I fear,' said Lapping, 'that you will hardly find your million dollars in Bayeombe.'
The Saint put his hands on the tablecloth and studied his fingernails with a gentle smile.
; 'You depress me, Sir Michael,' he remarked. 'And I was feeling very optimistic. I was told that there was a million dollars to be picked up here, and one can hardly disbelieve the word of a dying man, especially when one has tried to save his life. It was at a place called Ayer Pahit, in the Malary States. He'd taken to the jungle — they'd hunted him through every town in the Peninsula, ever since they located him settling down in Singapore to enjoy an unjust share of the loot — and one of their Malay trackers had caught him and stuck a kris in him. I found him just before he passed but, and he told me most of the story..... But I'm boring you.'
'Not a bit, dear old sprout, not a bit!' rejoined Algy eagerly, and he was supported by a chorus of curiosity.
The Saint shook his head.
'But I'm quite certain I shall bore you if I go on,' he stated obstinately. 'Now suppose I'd been talking about Brazil — did you know there was a village behind an almost impassable range of hills covered with thick poisonous jungle where some descendants of Cortes' crowd still live? They're gradually being absorbed into native stock — Mayas — by intermarriage, but they still wear swords and talk good Castilian. They could hardly believe my rifle. I remember ...'
And it was impossible to wheedle him back to any further discussion of his million dollars.
He made his excuses as soon after coffee as was decently possible, and spoke last to Patricia.
'When you get to know me better — as you must — you'll learn to forgive my weakness.'
'I suppose it's nothing but a silly desire to cause a sensation,' she said coldly,
'Nothing but that,' said the Saint with disarming frankness, and went home with a comfortable feeling that he had had the better of the exchange.
In spite of the protestations of Orace, he took a walk during the afternoon. He wanted to be familiar with the territory for some distance around, and thus his route took him inland toward the uplands which sheltered the village on the south. It was the first time he had surveyed the ground, but his hunting experience had given him a good eye for country, and at the end of three hours' hard tramping he had every detail of the district mapped in his brain.
It was on the homeward hike that he met the stranger. His walk had been as solitary as a walk in North Devon can be: he had not even encountered any farm labourers, for the land for miles around was unclaimed moor. But this man was so obviously harmless, even at a distance of half a mile, that the Saint frowned thoughtfully.
The man was in plus-fours of a dazzling purple hue. He had a kind of haversack slung over his shoulder, and he carried a butterfly net. He moved aimlessly about — sometimes in short violent rushes, sometimes walking, sometimes crawling and rooting about on his hands and knees. He did not seem to notice Templar at all, and the Saint, moving very silently, came right up and stood over him during an exceptionally zealous burrowing exploration among some gorse bushes. While Simon watched, the naturalist made a sudden pounce, accompanied by a gasp of triumph, and wriggled back into the open with a small beetle held gingerly between his thumb and forefinger. The haversack was hitched round, a matchbox secured, the insect 'imprisoned therein, and the box carefully stowed away. Then the entomologist rose to his feet, perspiring and very red in the face.
'Good-afternoon, sir,' he remarked genially, mopping his brow with aa appallingly green silk handkerchief.
'So it is,' agreed the Saint.
Mr. Templar had a disconcerting trick of taking the most conventional speech quite literally — a device which he had adopted because it threw the onus of continuing the conservation upon the other party.
'An innocuous and healthy pastime,' explained the stranger, with a friendly and all-embracing sweep of his hand. 'Fresh air — exercise — and all in the most glorious scenery in England.'
He was half a head shorter than the Saint, but a good two stone heavier. His eyes were large and childlike behind a pair of enormous horn-rimmed glasses, and he wore a straggly pale walrus moustache. The sight of this big middle-aged man in the shocking clothes, with his ridiculous little butterfly net, was as diverting as anything the Saint could remember.
'Of course — you're Dr. Carn,' said the Saint, and the other started.
'How did you know?'
'I always seem to be giving people surprises,' complained Simon, completely at his ease. 'It's so simple. You look less like a doctor than anyone but a doctor could look, and there's only one doctor in Baycombe. How's trade?
Suddenly Carn was no longer genial.
'My profession?' he said stiffly, 'I don't quite understand.'
'You are one of many,' signed the Saint, 'Nobody ever quite understands me. And I wasn't talking about your new profession, but about your old trade.'
Carn looked very closely at the younger matt, but Simon was gazing at the sea, and his face was inscrutable except for a faintly mocking twist at the corners of his mouth — a twist, that might have meant
