fell upon them, something stirred at the back of his brain and opened its in ward intangible eye upon the bare facts of the case as conveyed by the optic nerves. The Saint could not have said what it was. At that moment there was nothing about that corner of the scenery to attract such an attention. They were talking quite ordinarily, to judge by their faces; and, if the face of the girl was remarkably pleasant to look upon, even that was not unprecedented in the Calumet Club and the entourage of Baldy Mossiter. And yet, in spite of these facts rather than because of them, Simon Templar's queer instinct for the raw material of his trade flicked up a ghostly eyelid in some dim recess of his mind, and forced him to look longer, without quite knowing why he looked. And it was only because of this that the Saint saw what he saw, when the almost imperceptible thing happened in the course of one of Mr. Mossiter's frequent and expressive gestures.
'Have you got a cigarette?' murmured the unattached damsel at the adjacent table, hopefully; but the sweetness of the smile which illuminated the Saint's features as she spoke was not for her, and it is doubtful whether he even heard.
He lounged out of his chair and wandered across the room with the long, lazy stride that covered ground with such an inconspicuous speed; and the man and the girl looked up together as he loomed over their table.
'Hullo,' drawled the Saint.
He sat down in a vacant chair between them, without waiting to be invited, and beamed from one to the other in a most Saintly way.
'Beautiful weather we're having, aren't we, Baldy?'
'What the devil do you want, Templar?' snarled Mr. Mossiter, with no cordiality. 'I'm busy.'
'I know, sweetheart,' said the Saint gently. 'I saw you getting busy. That's why I came over.'
He contemplated Mr. Mossiter with innocent blue eyes; and yet there was something in the very innocence of that stare besides its prolonged steadiness that unaccountably prickled the short hairs on the back of Mossiter's bull neck. It did not happen at once. The stare had focused on its object for some time before that cold draught of perplexedly dawning comprehension began to lap Mossiter's spinal column. But the Saint read all that he wanted to read in the sudden darkening of the livid scar that ran down the side of Mossiter's face from his left temple to his chin; and the Saintly smile became dazzlingly seraphic.
'Exactly,' said the Saint.
His gaze shifted over to the girl. Her hand was still round her glass-she had been raising it when the Saint reached the table, and had put it down again untasted.
Still smiling, Simon took the girl's glass in one hand and Mossiter's in the other, and changed them over. Then he looked again at Mossiter.
'Drink up,' he said, and suddenly there was cold steel in his voice.
What d'you mean?'
'Drink,' said the Saint. 'Open your mouth, and induce the liquid to trickle down the gullet. You must have done it before. But whether you'll enjoy it so much on this occasion remains to be seen,'
'What the hell are you suggesting?'
'Nothing. That's just your guilty conscience. Drink it up, Beautiful.'
Mossiter seemed to crouch in his chair.
'Will you leave this table?' he grated.
'No,' said the Saint.
'Then you will have to leave the club altogether. . . . Waiter!'
The Saint took out his cigarette case and tapped a cigarette meditatively upon it. Then he looked up. He addressed the girl.
'If you had finished that drink,' he said, 'the consequences would have been very unpleasant indeed. I think I can assure you of that, though I'm not absolutely certain what our friend put in it. It is quite sufficient that I saw him drop something into your glass while he was talking just now.' He leaned back in his chair, with his back half turned to Mr. Mossiter, and watched the waiter returning across the floor with the porter who had been other things in his time, and added, in the same quiet tone: 'On account of the failure of this bright scheme, there will shortly be a slight disturbance of which I shall be the centre. If you think I'm raving mad, you can go to hell. If you've got the sense to see that I'm telling the truth, you'll stand by to make your bolt when I give the word, and meet me outside in a couple of minutes.'
Thus the Saint completed his remarks, quite unhurriedly, quite calmly and conversationally; and then the waiter and the porter were behind his chair.
'Throw this man out,' said Mossiter curtly. 'He's making a nuisance of himself.'
It was the porter who had been other things in his time who laid the first rough hand upon the Saint; and Simon grinned gently. The next moment Simon was on his feet, and the porter was not.
That remark needs little explanation. It would not be profitable to elaborate a description of the pile-driving properties of the left hook that connected with the porter's jaw as Simon rose from his chair; and, in fact, the porter himself knew little about it at the time. He left the ground momentarily and then he made contact with a lot more ground a little farther on, and then he slept.
The elderly waiter, also, knew little about that particular incident. The best and brightest years of his life were past and over, and it is probable that he was growing a little slow on the uptake in his late middle age. It is, at least, certain that he had not fully digested the significance of the spectacle to which he had just been treated, nor come to any decision about his own attitude to the situation, when he felt himself seized firmly by the collar and the seat of his pants. He seemed to rise astonishingly into the air, and, suspended horizontally in space at the full upward stretch of the Saint's arms, was for an instant in a position to contemplate the beauties of the low ceiling at close range. And the Saint chuckled.
'How Time flies,' murmured the Saint, and heaved the man bodily into the middle of the orchestra-where, it may be recorded, he damaged beyond repair, in his descent, a tenor saxophone, a guitar, and a device for imitating the moans of a stricken hyena.
Simon straightened his tie and looked about him. Action had been so rapid, during those few seconds, that the rest of the club's population and personnel had not yet completely awoken to understanding and reprisal. And the most important thing of all was that the sudden sleep of the porter who had been other things in his time had not only demoralized the two other officials who were standing in the middle distance, but had also left the way to the exit temporarily clear.
Simon touched the girl's shoulder.
'I should push along now, old dear,' he remarked, as if there were all the time in the world and nothing on earth to get excited about. 'Stop a taxi outside, if you see one. I'll be right along.'
She looked at him with a queer expression; and then she left her chair and crossed the floor quickly. To this day she is not quite sure why she obeyed; but it is enough that she did, and the Saint felt a certain relief as he watched her go.
Then he turned, and saw the gun in Mossiter's hand. He laughed-it was so absurd, so utterly fantastic, even in that place. In London, that sort of thing only happens in sensational fiction. But there it was; and the Saint knew that Baldy Mossiter must have been badly upset to make such a crude break. And he laughed; and his left hand fell on Mossiter's hand in a grip of steel, but with a movement so easy and natural that Mossiter missed the meaning of it until it was too late. The gun was pointed harmlessly down into the table, and all Mossiter's strength could not move it.
'You had better know me,' said Simon quietly. 'I'm called the Saint.'
Baldy Mossiter heard him, staring, and went white.
'And you must not try to drug little girls,' said the Saint A lot of things of no permanent importance have been mentioned in this episode; but the permanently important point of it is that Baldy Mossiter's beautiful front teeth are now designed to his measure by a gentleman in a white coat with a collection of antediluvian magazines in his waiting room.
3
A few moments later, the Saint strolled up into the street. A taxi was drawn up by the curb, and the Saint
