The Saint Closes the Case

tremendous understanding, and sees at once a vision of the darkness that would lie over the world if the sun ceased from shining.

The Saint said, very softly, to file fat man: 'Son of a pig to you, sweetheart. And now listen. I'm going to ask you some questions. You can either answer them, or die slowly and painfully, just as you like—but you'll do one or the other be­fore you leave this room.'

The fat man was in a different class from that of the wretched little weed in the pot hat from whom Simon Templar had extracted information before. There was a certain brute resolution in the fat man's beady eyes, a certain snarling defiance in the twist of the thin lips, like the desperate determina­tion of a beast at bay. Simon took no count of that.

'Do you understand, you septic excrescence?' said the Saint gently.

And there was hatred in the Saint's heart, a hatred that was his very own, that no one else could have understood; but there was another kind of devilry in the Saint's eyes and in the purring gentleness of his voice, a kind of devilry that no one could have helped understanding, that the man in front of him understood with terror, an outward and visible and ma­lignant hatred; and it was plainly centred upon the fat man; and the fat man recoiled slowly, step by step, as the Saint advanced, until he came up against the table and could not move backwards any farther.

'I hope you don't think I'm bluffing, dear little fat one,' the Saint went on, in the same velvety voice. 'Because that would be foolish of you. You've done, or had a hand in doing, something which I object to very much. I object to it in a gen­eral way, and always have; but this time I object to it even more, in a personal way, because this time it involves someone who means more to me than your gross mind will ever under­stand. Do you follow the argument, you miserable wart?'

The man was trying to edge away backwards round the ta­ble, but he could not break away, for the Saint moved side­ways simultaneously. And he could not break away from the Saint's eyes—those clear blue eyes that were ordinarily so full of laughter and bubbling mischief that were then so bleak and pitiless.

And the Saint went on speaking.

'I'm not concerned with the fact that you're merely the agent of Dr. Rayt Marius—ah, that makes you jump! I know a little more than you thought I did, don't I? ... But we're not concerned with that, either. ... If you insist on mixing with people like that, you must be prepared to take the conse­quences. And if you think the game's worth the candle, you must also be prepared for an accident with the candle. That's fair, isn't it? ... So that the point we're going to disagree about is that you've had a share in annoying me—and I object very much to being annoyed. . . . No, you don't, sonny boy!' There was a gun in the fat man's hand, and then there was not a gun in the fat man's hand; for the Saint moved forwards and to one side with a swift, stealthy, cat-like movement, and this time the fat man could not help screaming as he dropped the gun.

'Ach! You would my wrist break——'

'Cheerfully, beloved,' said Simon. 'And your neck later on. But first ...'

Tightening instead of slackening that grip on the fat man's wrist, the Saint bent him backwards over the table, holding him easily with fingers of incredible strength; and the man saw the blade of the knife flash before his eyes.

'Once upon a time, when I was in Papua,' said the Saint, in that dispassionately conversational way which was inde­scribably more terrifying than any loud-voiced anger, 'a man came out of the jungle into the town where I was. He was a prospector, and a pig-headed prospector, and he had insisted on prospecting a piece of country that all the old hands had warned him against. And the natives had caught him at the time of the full moon. They're always very pleased to catch white men at that time, because they can be used in the scheme of festivities and entertainment. They have primitive forms of amusement—very. And one of their ways of amusing them­selves with this man had been to cut off his eyelids. Before I start doing the same thing to you, will you consider for a mo­ment the effect that that operation will probably have on your beauty sleep?'

'God!' babbled the man shrilly. 'You cannot——'

The man tried to struggle, but he was held with a hand of iron. For a little while he could move his head, but then the Saint swung on to the table on top of him and clamped the head between his knees.

'Don't talk so loud,' said the Saint, and his fingers left the wrist and sidled round the throat. 'There are other people in this building, and I should hate you to alarm them. With regard to this other matter, now—did I hear you say I couldn't do it? I beg to differ. I could do it very well. I shall be very gentle, and you should not feel very much pain—just at the moment. It's the after-effects that will be so unpleasant. So think. If you talk, and generally behave like a good boy, I might be persuaded to let you off. I won't promise you any­thing, but it's possible.'

'I will not——'

'Really not? . . . Are you going to be difficult, little one? Are you going to sacrifice your beautiful eyelids and go slowly blind? Are you going to force me to toast the soles of your feet at the gas-fire, and drive chips of wood under your fingernails, and do other crude things like that—before you come to your senses? Really, you'll be giving yourself a lot of unnecessary pain. ...'

And the Saint held the knife quite close to the man's eyes and brought it downwards very slowly. The point gleamed like a lonely star, and the man stared at it, hypnotised, mute with horror. And Roger Conway was also hypnotised, and stood like a man carved in ice.

'Do you talk?' asked the Saint caressingly.

Again the man tried to scream, and again the Saint's fingers choked the scream back into his windpipe. The Saint brought the knife down farther, and the point of it actually pricked the skin.

Roger Conway felt cold beads of perspiration breaking out on his forehead, but he could not find his voice. He knew that the Saint would do exactly what he had threatened to do, if he were forced to it. He knew the Saint. He had seen the Saint in a hundred strange situations and a hundred moods, but he had never seen the Saint's face chiselled into such an inexorable grimness as it wore then. It was like granite.

And Roger Conway knew then, in the blazing light of experi­ence, what before then he had only understood mistily, in the twilight of theory—that the wrath of saints can be a far more dreadful thing than the wrath of sinners.

The man on the table must have understood it also—the fantastic fact that a man of Simon Templar's calibre, in such an icy rage, even in civilised England, would stop for nothing. And the breath that the Saint let him take came in a kind of shuddering groan.

'Do you talk, beautiful?' asked the Saint again, ever so gently.

'I talk.'

It was not a voice—it was a whimper.

'I talk,' whimpered the man. 'I will do anything. Only take away that knife——'

For a moment the Saint did not move.

Then, very slowly, like a man in a trance, he took the knife away and looked at it as if he had never seen it before. And a queer little laugh trickled through his lips.

'Very dramatic,' he remarked. 'And almost horrible. I didn't know I had it in me.'

And he gazed at the man curiously, as he might have gazed at a fly on a window-pane in an idle moment and remembered stories of schoolboys who were amused to pull off their wings.

Then he climbed slowly down from the table and took out his cigarette-case.

The man he had left did not so much raise himself off the table as roll off it; and, when his feet touched the floor, it was seen that he could scarcely stand.

Roger pushed him roughly into a chair, from which, fin­gering his throat, he could see the man who still lay where he had fallen.

'Don't look so surprised,' said Roger. 'The last man the Saint hit like that was out for half an hour, and your pal's only been out twenty minutes.'

Simon flicked a match into the fireplace and returned to face the prisoner.

'Let's hear your little song, honeybunch,' he said briefly.

'What do you want to know?'

'First thing of all, I want to know what's been done with the girl who was taken to-night.'

'That I do not know.'

The Saint's cigarette tilted up to a dangerous angle between his lips, and his hands went deep into his trousers pockets.