luxurious hotels; and they had looked for him with commendable doggedness, refusing to be lured into any byways of fantasy. Mr. Valcross being indubitably sixty years old and by no stretch of imagination resembling the photograph with which they had been provided, they passed him over without loss of time—and, with him, his maidservant, his manservant, his ox, his ass, and the stranger within his gates.
'If they do find me,' remarked the Saint reflectively, 'there will probably be harsh words.'
He squinted approvingly down the shining barrel of his gun, secured the safety catch, and patted it affectionately into his pocket. Then he rose and stretched himself and went over to the window where Valcross was standing.
Before them was spread out the ragged panorama of south Manhattan, the wonder island of the West. A narrow hump of rock sheltered from the Atlantic by the broad shoulder of Brooklyn, a mere ripple of stone in the ocean's inroads, on which the indomitable cussedness of Man had elected to build a city—and, not contented with the prodigious feat of overcoming such a dimensional difficulty at all, had made monuments of its defiance. Because the city could not expand laterally, it had expanded upwards; but the upward movement was a leap sculptured in stone, a flight born of necessity that had soared far beyond the standards of necessity, in a magnificent impulse of levitation that obliterated its own source. Molehills had become mountains in an art begotten of pure artifice. In the shadow of those grey and white pinnacles had grown up a modern Baghdad where the ends of the earth came together. A greater Italian city than Rome, a greater Irish city than Dublin, a greater German city than Cologne; a city of dazzling wealth whose towers had once looked like peaks of solid gold to hungry eyes reaching beyond the horizons of the Old World; a place that had sprung up from a lonely frontier to a metropolis, a central city, bowing to no other. A place where civilization and savagery had climbed alternately on each other's shoulders and reached their crest together. . . .
'This has always been my home,' said Valcross, with a queer softness.
He turned his eyes from east to west in a glance that swept in the whole skyline.
'I know there are other cities; and they say that New York doesn't represent anything but itself. But this is where my life has been lived.'
Simon said nothing. He was three thousand miles from his own home; but as he stood there at the window he saw what the older man was seeing, and he could feel what the other felt. He had been there long enough to sense the spell that New York could lay on a man who looked at it with a mind not too tired for wonder—the pride and amazement at which cynical sophisticates laughed, which could still move the heart of a man who was not ashamed to sink below the surface and touch the common humanity that is the builder of cities. And because Simon could understand, he knew what was in the other's mind before it was spoken.
'I have to send for you,' Valcross said, 'because there are other people, more powerful than I am, who don't feel like that. The people to whom it isn't a home, but a battle-field to be looted. That is why you have to come here, from the other side of the world, to help an old man with a job that's too big for him.'
He turned suddenly and looked at the Saint again, taking him in from the sweep of his smoothly brushed hair to the stance of his tailored shoes—the rakish lines of the dark, reckless face, the level mockery of the clear blue eyes, the rounded poise of muscular shoulders and the curve of the chest under the thin, jaunty shirt, the steady strength of one brown half-raised hand with the cigarette clipped lightly between the first two fingers, the lean fighter's hips and the reach of long, immaculate legs. No man whom he had ever known could have been so elegantly at ease and at the same time so alert and dangerous—and he had known many men. No other man he had known could ever have measured up in his judgment to the stature of devil-may-care confidence that he had demanded in his own mind and set out to find—. and Valcross called himself a judge of men.
His hands fell on the Saint's shoulders; and they had to reach up to do it. He felt the slight, supple stir of the firm sinews and smiled.
'You might do it, son,' he said. 'You might clean up this rotten mess of crooks and grafters that's organizing itself to become the biggest thing this city of mine has ever had to fight. If you can't do it, I'll let myself be told for the first time that it's impossible. Just be a little bit careful. Don't swagger yourself into a jail or a shower of bullets before you've had a chance to do any good. I've seen those things happen before. Other fellows have tried—bigger men than you, son—stronger men than you, braver men than you, cleverer men than you——'
The Saint smiled back.
'Admitting for the moment that they ever lived,' he remarked amiably, 'you never saw anyone luckier than me.'
