The Saint Closes the Case

studied, as if she had never seen it before, the keen, vivid intentness of his profile as he steered the hurtling car through the night, and realised that she had never felt him so sheathed and at the same time shaken with such a dynamic savagery of purpose. Yet even she, who knew him better than anyone in the world, could not have explained what she sensed about him. She had seen, often before, the inspired wild leaps of his genius; but she could not know that this time that genius had rocketed into a more frantic flight than it had ever taken in all his life. And she was silent.

It was not until they were turning into Brook Street that she voiced a thought that had been racking her brain for the past hour.

'I can't help feeling I've seen one of those men before—or a picture of him——'

'Which one?' asked the Saint, a trifle grimly, 'The young secretary bird—or Professor K. B. Vargan—or Sir Roland Hale—or Mr. Lester Hume Smith, His Majesty's Secretary of State for War?'

He marked her puzzlement, turning to meet her eyes. Now Patricia Holm was very lovely; and the Saint loved her. At that moment, for some reason, her loveliness took him by the throat.

He slipped an arm around her shoulders, and drew her close to him.

'Saint,' she said, 'you're on the trail of more trouble. I know the signs.'

'It's even more than that, dear,' said the Saint softly. 'To­night I've seen a vision. And if it's a true vision it means that I'm going to fight something more horrible than I've ever fought before; and the name of it may very well be the same as the name of the devil himself.'

2. How Simon Templar read newspapers, and understood what was not written

Here may conveniently be quoted an item from one of the stop press columns of the following morning.

'The Clarion is officially informed that at a late hour last night Mr. Lester Hume Smith, the Secretary for War, and Sir Roland Hale, Director of Chemical Research to the War Of­fice, attended a demonstration of Professor K. B. Vargan's 'electroncloud.' The demonstration was held secretly, and no details will be disclosed. It is stated further that a special meeting of the Cabinet will be held this morning to receive Mr. Hume Smith's report, and, if necessary, to consider the Government's attitude towards the invention.'

Simon Templar took the paragraph in his stride, for it was no more than a confirmation and amplification of what he al­ready knew.

This was at ten o'clock—an extraordinary hour for the Saint to be up and dressed. But on this occasion he had risen early to break the habits of a lifetime and read every page of every newspaper that his man could buy.

He had suddenly become inordinately interested in politics; the news that an English tourist hailing from Manchester and rejoicing in the name of Pinheedle had been arrested for punching the nose of a policeman in Wiesbaden fascinated him; only such articles as 'Why Grandmothers Leave Home' (by Ethelred Sapling, the brilliant author of Lovers in Leeds) continued to leave him entirely icebound.

But he had to wait for an early edition of the Evening Rec­ord for the account of his own exploit.

'. . . From footprints found this morning in the soft soil, it appears that three persons were involved—one of them a woman. One of the men, who must have been of exceptional stature, appears to have tripped and fallen in his flight, and then to have made off in a different direction from that taken by his companions, who finally escaped by car.

'Mr. Hume Smith's chauffeur, who attempted to arrest these two, and was knocked down by the man, recovered too late to reach the road in time to take the number of their car. From the sound of the exhaust, he judges it to have been some kind of high-powered sports model. He had not heard its approach or the entrance of the three intruders, and he admits that when he first saw the man and the woman he had just woken from a doze.

'The second man, who has been tracked across two fields at the back of Professor Vargan's house, is believed to have been picked up by his confederates further along the road. The fact of his presence was not discovered until the arrival of the detectives from London this morning.

'Chief Inspector Teal, who is in charge of the case, told an Evening Record representative that the police have as yet formed no theory as to what was the alarm which caused the hurried and clumsy departure of the spies. It is believed, how­ever, that they were in a position to observe the conclusion of the experiment. ...'

There was much more, stunted across the two middle col­umns of the front page.

This blew in with Roger Conway, of the Saint's very dear acquaintance, who had been rung up in the small hours of that morning to be summoned to a conference; and he put the sheet before Simon Templar at once.

'Were you loose in England last night?' he demanded ac­cusingly.

'There are rumours,' murmured the Saint, 'to that effect.'

Mr. Conway sat down in his usual chair, and produced ciga­rettes and matches.

'Who was your pal—the cross-country expert?' he inquired calmly.

The Saint was looking out of the window.

'No one I know,' he answered. 'He kind of horned in on the party. You'll have the whole yarn in a moment. I phoned Norman directly after I phoned you; he came staggering under the castle walls a few seconds ago.'

A peal on the bell announced that Norman Kent had reached the door of the apartment, and the Saint went out to admit him. Mr. Kent carried a copy of the Evening Record, and his very first words showed how perfectly he understood the Saint's eccentricities.

'If I thought you'd been anywhere near Esher last night——'

'You've been sent for to hear a speech on the subject,' said the Saint.

He waved Norman to a chair, and seated himself on the edge of a littered table which Patricia Holm was trying to reduce to some sort of order. She came up and stood beside him, and he slid an arm round her waist.

'It was like this,' he said.

And he plunged into the story without preface, for the time when prefaces had been necessary now lay far behind those four. Nor did he need to explain the motives for any of his actions. In clipped, slangy, quiet, and yet vivid sentences he told what he had seen in the greenhouse of the house near Esher; and the two men listened without interruption.

Then he stopped, and there was a short silence.

'It's certainly a marvellous invention,' said Roger Conway at length, smoothing his fair hair. 'But what is it?'

'The devil.'

Conway blinked.

'Explain yourself.'

'It's what the Clarion called it,' said the Saint; 'something we haven't got simple words to describe. A scientist will pre­tend to understand it, but whether he will or not is another matter. The best he can tell us is that it's a trick of so modify­ing the structure of a gas that it can be made to carry a tre­mendous charge of electricity, like a thunder-cloud does— only it isn't a bit like a thunder-cloud. It's also something to do with a ray—only it isn't a ray. If you like, it's something entirely impossible—only it happens to exist. And the point is that this gas just provides the flimsiest sort of sponge in the atmosphere, and Vargan knows how to saturate the pores in the sponge with millions of volts and amperes of compressed lightning.'

'And when the goat got into the cloud——'

'It was exactly the same as if it had butted into a web of live wires. For the fraction of a second that goat burnt like a scrap of coal in a blast furnace. And then it was ashes. Sweet idea, isn't it?'

Norman Kent, the dark and saturnine, took his eyes off the ceiling. He was a most unsmiling man, and he spoke little and always to the point.

'Lester Hume Smith has seen it,' said Norman Kent. 'And Sir Roland Hale. Who else?'

'Angel Face,' said the Saint; 'Angel Face saw it. The man our friend Mr. Teal assumes to have been one of us—-not hav­ing seen him wagging a Colt at me. An adorable pet, built on the lines of something between Primo