'Gawd!' he said offensively. 'Can it be human?'
Shannet's fists swept back his coat and rested on his hips.
'What's your name, Cissy?' he demanded.
The Saint flicked some ash from his cigarette and rose to his feet delicately.
'Benito Mussolini,' he answered mildly. 'And you must be one of the corporation scavengers. How's the trade in garbage?' His gentle eyes swept Shannet from crown to toe. 'Archie, there must have been some mistake. The real scavenger has gone sick, and one of his riper pieces of refuse is deputizing for him. I'm sorry.'
'If you--'
'I said I was sorry,' the Saint continued, in the same smooth voice, 'because I'm usually very particular about the people I fight, and I hate soiling my hands on things like you.'
Shannet glowered.
'I don't know who you are,' he said, 'and I don't care. But if you're looking for a fight you can have it.'
'I am looking for a fight, dear one,' drawled the Saint. 'In fact, I'm looking for a lot of fights, and you're the first one that's offered. 'Cissy' is a name I particularly object to being called, O misbegotten of a pig!'
The last words were spoken in colloquial Spanish, and the Saint made more of them than it is possible to report in printable English. Shannet went white, then red.
'You--'
His answering stream of profanity merged into a left swing to the Saint's jaw, which, if it had landed, would have ended the fight there and then. But it did not land.
Simon Templar swayed back, and the swing missed by a couple of inches. As Shannet stumbled, momentarily off his balance, the Saint reached round and took the jug of ice water off the table behind him. Without any appearance of effort or haste, he sidestepped and poured most of the contents of the jug down the back of Shannet's neck.
Shannet swung again. The Saint ducked, and sent the man flying with a smashing jab to the nose.
'Look out, Saint!' Sheridan warned suddenly.
'Naughty!' murmured the Saint, without heat.
Shannet was getting to his feet, and his right hand was drawing something from his hip pocket.
The Saint took two steps and a flying leap over Shannet's head, turning in the air as he did so. Shannet had only got to his knees when the Saint landed behind him and caught his opponent's throat and right wrist in hands that had the strength of steel cables in their fingers. Shannet's wrist was twisted behind his back with an irresistible wrench. . . .
The gun cluttered to the floor simultaneously with Shannet's yelp of agony, and the Saint picked up the gun and stepped away.
'A trophy, Archie!' he cried, and tossed the weapon over to Sheridan. 'Guns I have not quite been shot with- there must be a drawer full of them at home. . . . Let's start, sweet Shannet!'
Shannet replied with a chair, but the Saint was ten feet away by the time it crashed into the opposite wall.
Then Shannet came in again with his fists. Any one of those whirling blows carried a kick that would have put a mule to sleep, but the Saint had forgotten more about ringcraft than many professionals ever learn. Shannet never came near touching him. Every rush Shannet made, somehow, expended itself on thin air, while he always seemed to be running his face slap into the Saint's stabbing left.
'Want a rest?' the Saint asked kindly.
'If you'd come in and fight like a man,' gasped Shannet, his tortured chest heaving, 'I'd kill you!'
'Oh, don't be silly!' said the Saint in a bored voice, as though he had no further interest in the affair. 'Hurry up and get out-I'm going to be busy.'
He turned away, but Shannet lurched after him.
'Get out yourself!' snarled the man thickly. 'D'you hear? I'm going right down to fetch the police--'
The Saint sat down.
'Listen to me, Shannet,' he said quietly. 'The less you talk about police when I'm around, the better for you. I'm telling you now that I believe you murdered a man named McAndrew not so long ago, and jumped his claim on a forged partnership agreement. I'm only waiting till I've got the proof. And then-well, it's too much to hope that the authorities of this benighted republic will execute the man who pays half their salaries, and so in the name of Justice I shall take you myself and hang you from a high tree.'
For a moment of silence the air seemed to tingle with the same electric tension as heralds the breaking of a thunder storm, while the Saint's ice-blue eyes quelled Shannet's reawakening fury; and then, with a short laugh, the Saint relaxed.
'You're a pawn in the game,' he said, with a contrasting carelessness which only emphasized the bleak implacability of his last speech. 'We won't waste good melodrama on you. We reserve that for clients with really important discredit accounts. Instead, you shall hear the epitaph I've just composed for you. It commemorates a pestilent tumour named Shannet, who disfigured the face of this planet. He started some fun, but before it was done he was wishing he'd never began it. That otherwise immortal verse is marred by a grammatical error, but I'm not expecting you to know any better. . . . Archibald-the door!'
Archie Sheridan had no reason to love Shannet, and the kick with which he launched the man into the garden was not gentle, but he seemed to derive no pleasure from it.
He came back with a grave face and resumed his chair facing the Saint.
'Well,' he said, 'you've done what you wanted. Now shall we sit down and make our wills, or shall we spend our last hours of life in drinking and song?'
'Of course, we may be shot,' admitted the Saint calmly. 'That's up to us. How soon can we expect the army?'
'Not before five. They'll all be asleep now, and an earth quake wouldn't make the Pasala policeman break off his siesta. Much less the army, who are inclined to give themselves airs. We might catch the Andalusia,' he added hope fully.
The Saint surveyed him seraphically.
'Sweetheart,' he said, 'that joke may now be considered over. We've started, and we've got to keep moving. As I don't see the fun of sitting here waiting for the other side to surround us, I guess we'll bounce right along and interview Kelly. And when you two have coached me thoroughly in the habits and topography of Santa Miranda, we'll just toddle along and capture the town.'
'Just toddle along and which?' repeated Sheridan dazedly.
The Saint spun a cigarette high into the air, and trapped it neatly between his lips as it fell.
'That is to say, I will capture the town,' he corrected him self, 'while you and Kelly create a disturbance somewhere to distract their attention. Wake up, sonny! Get your hat, and let's go!'
3
The Saint's breezy way of saying that he would 'just toddle along and capture the town' was a slight exaggeration. As a matter of fact, he spent nearly four days on the job.
There was some spade-work to be done, and certain preparations to be made, and the Saint devoted a considerable amount of care and sober thought to these details. Though his methods, to the uninformed observer, might always have seemed to savour of the reckless, tip-and-run, hit-first-and-ask-questions-afterwards school, the truth was that he rarely stepped out of any frying pan without first taking the temperature of the fire beyond.
Even in such a foolhardy adventure as that in which he was then engaged, he knew exactly what he was doing, and legislated against failure as well as he might; for, even in the most outlandish parts of the world, the penalty of unsuccessful revolution is death, and the Saint had no overwhelming desire to turn his interesting biography into an obituary notice.
He explained his plan to Kelly, and found the Irishman an immediate convert to the Cause.
'Shure, I've been thinkin' for years that it was time somebody threw out their crooked government,' said that worthy, ruffling a hand like a ham through his tousled mop of flaming hair. 'I'm just wonderin' now why I niver did it
