The Saint Closes the Case

'Let me suggest,' said Marius suavely, 'that you're very sure I've got Miss Holm.'

'I haven't got him.'

'Then I have not got Miss Holm.'

Simon nodded.

'Very ingenious,' he murmured. 'Very ingenious. Not quite the way I expected it—but very ingenious, all the same. And quite unanswerable. Therefore——'

'Therefore, Mr. Templar, why not put the cards on the table? We have agreed not to waste time. I frankly admit that Miss Holm is my prisoner. Why don't you admit that Professor Vargan is yours?'

'Not so fast,' said the Saint. 'You've just admitted, before witnesses, that you are a party to an abduction. Now, suppose that became know to the police? Wouldn't that be awkward?'

Marius shook his head.

'Not particularly,' he said. 'I have a very good witness to deny any such admission——'

'A crook!'

'Oh no. A most respectable countryman of mine. I assure you, it would be quite impossible to discredit him.'

Simon lounged back against the table.

'I see,' he drawled. 'And that's your complete song-and-dance act, is it?'

'I believe I have stated all the important points.'

'Then,' said the Saint, 'I will now state mine.'

Carefully he replaced the little knife in its sheath and ad­justed his sleeve. A glance at the man on the floor told him that that unlucky servant of the Cause was recovering; but Simon was not interested. He addressed himself to the man in the chair.

'Tell your master about the game we were playing,' he in­vited. 'Confess everything, loveliness. He has a nice kind face, and perhaps he won't be too hard on you.'

The man spoke again in his own language. Marius listened woodenly. The Saint could not understand a word of what was being said; but he knew, when the giant interrupted the discourse with a movement of his hand and a sharp, harsh syl­lable of impatience, that the recital had passed through the stage of being a useful statement of facts, and had degenerated into a string of excuses.

Then Marius was looking curiously at Simon Templar. There seemed to be a kind of grim humour in that gaze.

'And yet you do not look a ferocious man, Mr. Templar.'

'I shouldn't rely too much on that.'

Again that jerky gesture of impatience.

'I am not relying on it. With a perspicacity which I should have expected, and which I can only commend, you have saved me many words, many tedious explanations. You have summed up the situation with admirable briefness. May I ask you to be as brief with your decision? I may say that the fortunate acci­dent of finding you at home, which I did not expect, has saved me the considerable trouble of getting in touch with you through the agony columns of the daily papers, and has en­abled me to put my proposition before you with the minimum of delay. Would it not be a pity, now, to mar such an excellent start with unnecessary paltering?'

'It would,' said the Saint.

And he knew at once what he was going to do. It had come to him in a flash—an inspiration, a summarising and deduc­tion and realisation that were instantaneous, and more clear and sure than anything of their kind which could have been produced by any mental effort:

That he was on toast, and that there was no ordinary way off the toast. That the situation was locked and double-locked into exactly the tangle of dithering subtleties and cross-causes and cross-menaces that he hated more than anything else in the world, as has been explained-—the kind of chess-problem tangle that was probably the one thing in the world capable of reeling him off his active mental balance and sending him raving mad. . . . That to think about it and try to scheme about it would be the one certain way of losing the game. That, obviously, he could never hope to stand up in the same class as Rayt Marius in a complicated intrigue—to try to enter into an even contest with such a past professional master of the art would be the act of a suicidal fool. That, therefore, his only chance to win out was to break the very rules of the game that Marius would least expect an opponent to break. That it was the moment when all the prejudices and convictions that made the Saint what he was must be put to the test. That all his fun­damental faith in the superiority of reckless action over labor­ious ratiocination must now justify itself, or topple down to destruction and take him with it into hell. . . . That, in fact, when all the pieces on the chessboard were so inweaved and dove-tailed and counter-blockaded, his only chance was to smash up the whole stagnant structure and sweep the board clean—with the slash of a sword. . . .

'Certainly,' said the Saint, 'I'll give you my decision at once. Roger, give me back that gun, and go and fetch some rope. You'll find some in the kitchen.'

As Conway went out, the Saint turned again to Marius.

'You have already observed, dear one,' he remarked gently, 'that I have a genius for summarising situations. But this one can be stated quite simply. The fact is, Angel Face, I propose to apply to you exactly the same methods of persuasion that I was about to employ on your servant. You observe that I have a gun. I can't shoot the pips out of a playing-card at thirty paces, or do any other Wild West stuff like that; but still, I don't think I'm such a bad shot that I could miss anything your size at this range. Therefore, you can either submit qui­etly to being tied up by my friend, or you can be killed at once. Have it whichever way you like.'

A flicker of something showed in the giant's eyes, and was gone as soon as it had come.

'You seem to have lost your grip on the situation, Mr. Templar,' he said urbanely. 'To anyone as expert in these matters as you appear to be, it should be unnecessary to ex­plain that I did not come here unprepared for such an obvi­ous riposte. Must I bore you with the details of what will hap­pen to Miss Holm if I fail to return to the place where she is being kept? Must I be compelled to make my conventional move still more conventional with a melodramatic exposition of her peril?'

'It's an odd thing,' said the Saint, in mild reminiscence, 'that more than half the crooks I've dealt with have been frantically anxious to avoid melodrama. Now, personally, I just love it. And we're going to have lots of it now —lots and lots and lots, Marius, my little ray of sunshine. . . .'

Marius shrugged.

'I thought better of your intelligence, Mr. Templar.'

The Saint smiled, a very Saintly smile.

His hands on his hips, teetering gently on his toes, he an­swered with the most reckless defiance of his life.

'You're wrong,' he said. 'You didn't think well enough of my intelligence. You thought it'd be feeble enough to let me be bluffed into meeting you on your own ground. And that's just what it isn't quite feeble enough to do.'

'I do not follow you,' said Marius.

'Then I'm not the one with softening of the brain,' said Simon sweetly, 'but you are. I invite you to apply your own admirable system of logic to the situation. I could tell the po­lice things about you, but you could tell the police things about me. Deadlock. You could harm Miss Holm, but I could deprive you of Vargan. Deadlock again—with a shade of odds in your favour on each count.'

'We can rule out the police for the present. If we did so, an exchange of prisoners——'

'But you don't get the point,' said Simon, with a terrible simplicity. 'That would be a surrender on my part. And I never surrender.'

Marius moved his hands.

'I also surrender Miss Holm.'

'And there's still a difference, loveliness,' said the Saint. 'You see, you don't really want Miss Holm, except as a hos­tage. And I do want Vargan very much indeed. I want to wash him and comb him and buy him a little velvet suit and adopt him. I want him to yadder childishly to me about the binomial theorem after breakfast. I want to be able to bring him into the drawing-room after dinner to amuse my guests with reci­tations from the differential calculus. But most of all I want one of his little toys. . . . And so, you see, if I let you go, Miss Holm would be in exactly the same danger as if I kept you here, since I couldn't agree to your terms of ransom. But the difference is that if I let you go I lose my one chance of finding her, and I should have to trust to luck to come on the scent again. While I keep you here, though, I hold a very good card —and I'm not letting it go.'