The Saint Meets His Match (She was a Lady)

once have given their ears to arrest him. 'Thus are the mighty fallen, and the weapons of walloping perished,' he said to Teal at another lunch, with a kind of wicked wistfulness; and the detective sighed, and kept his misgivings to himself. For the Saint, in his new disguise of a respectable citizen, seemed much too good to be true—much too good. . . . Teal had an uneasy feeling that no bad man who had sud­denly reformed would have been quite so overpoweringly sanctimonious about it. All that he had ever seen of the Saint, all that he had ever known of him, made Chief Inspector Teal feel like a performing elephant dancing a hornpipe over a thin glass dome in the presence of this inexplicable virtue. And in his mountainously bovine way Chief Inspector Teal watched the Saint enforcing the law by strictly legal methods, and wondered. . . .

Not that anyone's mystification would have worried Simon Templar in the least. If he had thought about it at all, he would have been impishly amused, in his serene­ly contented fashion. As it was, he went on with his life, and the job he had taken on, with a sublime disregard for the feelings and opinions of the world at large, seem­ing to be distressed only by the lack of an adequate sup­ply of victims for his exaggerated sense of humour.

One thing, however, could disturb his tranquillity, and that was to have business troubles intruded upon the hours which he had allotted to himself for rest or recrea­tion. At midnight of the day after his visit to Belgrave Street, for instance, when he was sitting up in bed, happily engaged in polishing the opening lines of a new song dealing with the shortcomings of the latest Honours List, and a bullet smacked through the window behind him and chipped a lump out of a perfectly good ceiling, he was distinctly bored.

With a sigh he climbed out and pulled on his dressing gown. One glance at the line between the star-shaped split in the window and the scar in the plaster was enough to show that the shot had come in at a wide angle. The Saint sighed again. Perhaps his estimate of himself had been wrong, It seemed that there was something else which annoyed him even more than to be interrupted after business hours—and that was to be taken for a fool.

He glanced round the room and selected a battered pickelhaube—relic of a grimmer warfare than that. Then he switched off the light. Returning to the window, he knelt down so, that he was below the level of the sill, and raised the lower sash. On one side of this opening he dis­played the pickelhaube, looped over the back of a chair which he edged into position with his foot, and awaited developments with a kindly interest.

The mews was deserted, and there were no pedestrians visible at the entrance in Berkeley Square at that moment, but he could pick out the shadowy bulk of a big saloon car parked in the cul-de-sac of the mews itself, and the second shot from it impinged accurately upon the pickel­haube with a noise like that of a dull gong.

Neither of the shots from outside had been accom­panied by a report, but Simon Templar, since acquiring the right to be as noisy as he pleased, had ceased to be of such a retiring disposition. He emptied his automatic without stealth, and crammed in a fresh magazine as he raced down the stairs.

His servant met him in the hall.

'Count ten, and then open the front door—but lie flat on the ground when you do it!' snapped the Saint, and vanished into the sitting room without explaining how this feat of contortion was to be performed.

He was edging back the window curtains when the door began to open.

He had no fear for the man who was opening it, for there were so few flies on Orace that even a short-sighted man would have had no excuse for mistaking him for a Chilean mule. Neither had he any fear of the agile gunman who was upsetting his evening. Either the car was an ordinary car, in which case the gunman was winged if Simon Templar had ever learnt anything about the art of shooting up automobiles; or the car was an extraordi­nary car, lined throughout with half-inch nickel steel, in which case the gunman was probably not winged. And, either way, if it came to a fight . . .

'Joke!' murmured the Saint, and lowered his head again quickly.

Ordinary guns he was prepared for, and ready to take on any time. Not that he particularly fancied himself with guns, but he reckoned he could just about pull his weight in most kinds of rough