The Saint Meets His Match (She was a Lady)

spite of herself with that mocking stare of his.

'Jill Trelawney,' he said, 'you're a fool. If there were degrees in pure, undiluted imbecility I should give you first prize. You're going to Birmingham with Weald. When you get there you're going to walk into a pile of trouble. Weald will be as much use to you as a tin tomb­stone. Not that the thought worries me, but I'm just telling you now, and I'd like you to remember it afterwards. Before to-night you're going to wish you'd been born with some sort of imitation of a brain. That's all. I shall see you again in Birmingham—don't worry.'

She smiled, with a lift of her eyebrows.

'Aren't you thoughtful for me, Simon Templar?'

'We don't mind doing these things for old customers,' said the Saint benignly.

He was still looking at her. The bantering gaze of his blue eyes from under the lazily drooping eyelids, the faint smile, the hint of a lilt of laughter in his voice—these things could rarely have been more airily perfect in their mockery.

'And while you're on your way,' said the Saint, 'you might have time to remember that I never asked you to become a customer. You're making the most blind paralytic fool of yourself that ever a woman made of anything that God had given her such a long start on! But that's your own idea, isn't it? Now go ahead and prove it's right. Go to Birmingham, take that diseased blot of a Stephen Weald with you——'

Weald stepped forward.

'What did you say, Templar?'

'I said 'diseased blot of a Stephen Weald,' ' said the Saint pleasantly. 'Any objection?'

'I have,' said Weald. 'This——'

He struck the Saint three times in the face with his fist.

'. . . and this---for the first time I met you.'

Simon sat like a rock.

'You've found some courage since then,' he remarked, in a voice of steel and granite. 'Been taking pink pills or something?'

Then the girl stepped between them.

'That'll do,' she said curtly. 'Weald, go and get your coat. Pinky, you and Dyson can carry Templar downstairs.'

'So it's to be the cellar and the hose pipe, is it?' drawled the Saint, unimpressed.           

'Just the cellar, for the present,' she answered coolly. 'I'll decide what else is to be done with you when I come back.' 

'If. If you come back,' said the Saint indulgently. 

 

2

 

Simon lay in the cellar where he had been carelessly dropped, and meditated his position by the light of the single dusty globe which provided the sole illumination in the place. Having dropped him there, Budd and Dyson departed, but the hope that they might have gone for good, thereby leaving him to try all the tricks of escape he knew upon the ropes with which he had been tied, was soon dispelled. They returned in a few moments, Budd carrying a table and Dyson a couple of chairs. Then they closed the door and sat down.

Clearly, the watch was intended to be a close one. Budd took a pack of greasy cards from his pocket, and the two men settled down to a game.