The Saint Meets His Match (She was a Lady)

the key and put it in his trouser pocket. Then he slipped off his coat.

'And now, Pinky Budd, we have this fight, don't we?'

But Budd was coming on without any encouragement. He was on his toes, too. The fighting game had not dealt lightly with Pinky's face, but he had all the science and experience that he had won at the cost of his disfigure­ments.

He led off with a sledge-hammer left that would have ended the fight then and there if it had connected. But it did not connect. Simon ducked and landed a left-right beat to the body that made Budd grunt. Then the Saint was away again, sparring, and he also was on his toes.

Moreover, he was between Budd and the door, and he meant to stay there. Budd had asked for the fight, and he was going to get it. Budd might have been glad of the chance, or he might have wanted to get out of it, but he wasn't having the choice, anyway. Simon Templar was seeing to that. But to a certain extent that tactical necessity of keeping between Budd and the door was going to cramp his style. He appreciated the disadvantage in a fight which wasn't going to be an easy fight at any mo­ment. But it couldn't be helped.

Budd's next lead was another left, but it was a feint. The Saint divined that and changed his guard. But he was a little slow in divining that the right cross which came over after the left was a second feint, and the half-arm jolt to the short ribs which followed it caught him unpre­pared drove him back gasping against the wall.

Budd came in like a tiger, left and right, and Simon dropped to one knee.

He straightened up with a raking uppercut that must have ricked Budd's neck as though a horse had kicked him under the chin. That blow would have been the end of the average man for some time to come. But Budd had been trained in a tougher school. He fell into a clinch that the Saint, still rib-bound from the smashing blow he had taken, was not quick enough to avoid. There Budd's weight told. There was no referee to give them the break­away, and the professional was free to use every dirty trick of holding and heading and heeling for which a clinch gives openings. But the Saint also knew a few of those himself, and he broke the clinch eventually with a blow that would certainly have got him disqualified in any official contest. As he stepped out he swung up a pendu­lum left which should have caught Budd under the jaw. Pinky got his head back quickly enough, but not quite far enough, and the blow snicked up his nose.

It maddened him, but it also blinded him. No man, however tough, can have his nose snicked up in that particular way without having his vision momentarily fogged. And before Budd could see what was happening the Saint had sent in a pile-driving right-hander to the heart. Then he turned on his toes and followed through with a left to the solar plexus that had every ounce of his weight behind it, and Budd went smashing down as if a steam hammer had hit him.

Simon picked up his coat.

'We ought to be just in time to get that train, Slinky,' he remarked, and then he turned round to find that Slinky Dyson had already gone.

With a shrug the Saint went out, locking the door be­hind him.

A taxi took him to Paddington, and he arrived outside the platform barrier just as the guard was blowing his whistle.

He had no ticket, but such minor difficulties were never allowed to stand in Simon Templar's way. Nor was the ticket collector. Simon picked him. up and sat him on a convenient luggage trolley, and raced down the platform as the train was gathering way. He opened the door of the first convenient carriage and swung into it. Looking back through the window, he saw the chase of porters tailing off breathlessly. They might telephone to Birmingham and prepare a reception for him there, but that would not take long to deal with.

Then he turned to inspect the other occupants of the carriage, whose flabbergasted comments had been audible behind him as he looked back out of the window; but the first person he noticed was not a man in the carriage. It was a man who happened to be passing down the corridor.

The Saint strode over a barricade of legs, odd luggage, and a bird cage, and went down the corridor in