The Saint Closes the Case

speculation for the psychiatrist; but occasions will arise when the interest ceases to be the abstract diversion of the scientist, and be­comes the practical problem of those whose business it is to keep peace under the law.

The law awoke to this fact, and simultaneously to a rather alarmed recognition of the existence of the Black Wolves, after a week in which two factories in the North of England were the scenes of explosions which resulted in no little loss of life, and the bullet of an undiscovered sniper actually grazed across the back of the Home Secretary as he stepped into his car outside the House of Commons.

The law found Golter; but the man who had been detailed to follow him and report on his movements somehow contrived to lose him on the afternoon in which a Crown Prince drove in state through the streets of London on his way to a lunch­eon given by the Lord Mayor.

The procession was arranged to pass by way of the Strand and Fleet Street to the City. From a tiny office which he had rented for the purpose in Southampton Row, of which the police knew nothing, Golter had found an easy way to the roofs of the houses on the north side of Fleet Street. He sat there, in a more or less comfortable position, among the chim­ney-stacks, from which he could look down and see the street below, while armed men scoured London for a trace of him, and a worried Commissioner ordered a doubling of the plain-clothes detectives stationed along the route.

Golter was a careful and a thoughtful man, and he had a fair grounding in the principles of dynamics. He knew to an inch how high he was from the ground, and he had calculated exactly how many seconds a bomb would take to fall to the street; the fuses of the Mills bombs in his pockets were ad­justed accordingly. Again, in Fleet Street, a little farther down towards the Strand, he had measured the distance between two lamp-posts. With the aid of a stop-watch he would dis­cover how long the leading car took to pass between them; then, by consulting an elaborate chart which he had prepared, he would be able to learn at once, without further calcula­tion, exactly at what instant he had to launch his bombs so that they would fall directly into the back of the Crown Prince's car as it passed. Golter was proud of the scientific precision with which he had worked out every detail.

He smoked a cigarette, drumming his heels gently against the leads. It was fifteen minutes before the procession was due to arrive at that point, according to the official time-table, and already the street below was packed with a dense crowd which overflowed the pavements and wound hampering tentacles into the stream of traffic. The mass of people below looked like ants, Golter thought. Bourgeois insects. He amused him­self by picturing the ant-like confusion that would follow the detonation of his three bombs. . . .

'Yes, it should be an interesting spectacle.'

Golter's head snapped round as though it had been jerked . by an invisible wire.

He had heard nothing of the arrival of the man who now stood over him, whose gentle, drawling voice had broken into his meditations far more shatteringly than any explosion could have done. He saw a tall, trim, lean figure in a grey fresco suit of incredible perfection, with a soft grey felt hat whose wide brim shaded pleasant blue eyes. This man might have posed for any illustration of the latest and smartest effort of Savile Row in the way of gents' natty outfitting—that is, if he could have been persuaded to discard the automatic pistol, which is not generally considered to form an indispensable adjunct to What the Well?Dressed Man will Wear this Season.

'Extraordinarily interesting,' repeated the unknown, with his blue eyes gazing down in a rather dreamy way at the throng a hundred feet below. 'From a purely artistic point of view, it's a pity we shan't be able to watch it.'

Golter's right hand was sidling towards a bulging pocket. The stranger, with his automatic swinging in a lazy arc that centred over Golter's stomach, encouraged the movement.

'But leave the pins in, Beautiful,' he murmured, 'and pass 'em to me one by one. . . . That's a good boy!'

He took the bombs in his left hand as Golter passed them over, and handed them to someone whom Golter could not see—a second man who stood behind a chimney-stack.

A minute passed, in which Golter stood with his hands hanging loosely at his sides, waiting for a chance to make a grab at the gun which the stranger held with such an affectation of negligence. But the chance never came.

Instead, came a hand from behind the chimney-stack—a hand holding a bomb. The stranger took the bomb and handed it back to Golter.

'Put it in your pocket,' he directed.

The second and third followed, and Golter, with his coat once again dragged out of shape by the weight, stood staring at the stranger, who, he thought, must be a detective, and who yet behaved in such an incomprehensible manner.

'What did you do that for?' he demanded suspiciously.

'My own reasons,' answered the other calmly. 'I am now leaving you. Do you mind?'

Suspicion—fear—perplexity—all these emotions chased and mingled with one another over Golter's unshaven face. Then inspiration dawned in his pale eyes.

'So you aren't a busy!'

The stranger smiled.

'Unfortunately for you—no. You may have heard of me. I am called the Saint. . . .'

His left hand flashed in and out of his coat pocket in a swift movement, and Golter, in the grip of a sudden paralysis of terror, stared as if hypnotised while the Saint chalked his grotesque trade-mark on the chimney- stack.

The the Saint spoke again.

'You are not human. You are a destroyer—an insane killer without any justification but your own lust for blood. If you had had any motive, I might have handed you over to the police, who are at this moment combing London for you. I am not here to judge any man's creed. But for you there can be no excuse. ...'

He had vanished when Golter looked round for him, won­dering why the condemnation did not continue, and the roof was deserted. The Saint had a knack of disappearing like that.

The procession was approaching. Golter could hear the cheering growing rapidly louder, like the roar of many waters suddenly released from burst flood-gates. He peered down. A hundred yards away he could see the leading car crawling through the lane of human ants.

His brain was still reeling to encompass the understanding of what the Saint had come to do. The Saint had been there, accusing—and then he had gone, giving Golter back his bombs. Golter could have believed himself to have been the victim of a hallucination. But the fantastic sketch on the chimney-stack remained to prove that he had not been dream­ing.

With an hysterical sweep of his arm, he smeared his sleeve over the drawing, and took from his pocket his stop-watch and the time-chart he had made. The leading car had just reached the first of the two lamp-posts on which he had based his calculations. He watched it in a kind of daze.

The Crown Prince drove in the third car. Golter recognised the uniform. The Prince was saluting the crowd.

Golter found himself trembling as he took the first bomb from his pocket and drew the pin; but he threw it on the very instant that his stopwatch and chart indicated.

'The true details of the case,' wrote the Daily Record, some days later, 'are likely to remain a mystery for ever, un­less the Saint should one day elect to come out into the open and elucidate them. Until then the curiosity of the public must be satisfied with the findings of the committee of Scotland Yard experts who have been investigating the affair—'that in some way the Saint succeeded in so tampering with the fuses of the Mills Bombs with which Golter intended to attempt the life of the Crown Prince, that they exploded the moment he released the spring handle, thereby blowing him to pieces. . . .'

'Whatever the opinions which may be expressed concern­ing the arrogance of this gentleman who presumes to take the law into his own lawless hands, it cannot be denied that in this case his intervention undoubtedly saved the life of our royal guest; and few will be found to deny that justice was done—though perhaps it was justice of too poetic a character to be generally accepted as a precedent. . . .'

With this sensational climax, which put the name of the Saint on the lips of every man and woman in the civilised world, came the end of a clearly defined chapter in his history.

The sensation died down, as the most amazing sensations will die down for lack of re?stimulation. In an open letter which was published in every newspaper throughout Europe, the Crown Prince offered his thanks to the unknown, and promised that the debt should not be forgotten if at any time the Saint should stand in need of help from high places. The British Government followed almost immediately with the offer of a free pardon for all past offences on condition that the Saint revealed himself and took an oath to turn his energy and ingenuity into more