The Saint Meets His Match (She was a Lady)

Gugliemi might get by where an ordinary plain-clothes man would be spotted a mile off. Also——'

He paused abruptly.

'Also?' prompted Teal.

Cullis closed his mouth.

'That will keep,' he said.

And he kept his idea to himself, and Teal had to go out with his curiosity unsatisfied.

Gugliemi was duly located in Brixton Prison half an hour later, and Cullis, receiving the information, spoke personally to the governor of the prison over the tele­phone.

Within the hour Gugliemi arrived at Scotland Yard in a taxicab between two warders, and was taken straight to the assistant commissioner's room. And a little while later the two warders returned alone.

Teal, an inquisitive man, returned to the assistant com­missioner's room later in the afternoon, and found that Gugliemi had mysteriously disappeared, although no escort had been detailed to conduct him back to the prison.

'The deportation order will be stayed for seven days,' said Cullis in answer to Teal's inquiry.

'What's the big idea?' asked Teal.

'Gugliemi,' said Cullis heavily, 'is an enthusiastic collector of butterflies. I've told him that a very rare specimen of butterfly, called Trelawney, has been seen in England, and I have agreed to let him go out with his butterfly net and try to find it before he's sent back to Italy.'

Mr. Teal was not amused.

 

 

 

Chapter X

HOW SIMON TEMPLAR SPOKE OF BIRDS-

NESTING,    AND   DUODECIMO   GUGLIEMI

ALSO BECAME AMOROUS

 

 

IT MUST be admitted at once that Duodecimo Gugliemi had never been cited as an advertisement for his native land. A sublime disregard for the laws of property would alone have been enough to disqualify him in that respect; as it was, he was affected also with an amorous tempera­ment which, combined with a sudden and jealous temper, had not taken long to make Italy too hot to hold him. Leaving Italy for the sake of his health, he had crossed the Alps into Austria; but the Austrian prisons did not agree with him, and, again for the sake of his health, he had taken another northward move into German territory. He had seen the insides of jails in Munich and Bonn, and had narrowly escaped even more unpleasant retribution in Leipzig. In Berlin he had led an unimpeachably re­spectable life for six weeks, during which time he was in hospital with double pneumonia. Recovering, he left Berlin with an unspotted escutcheon, and migrated into France; and from France, after some ups and downs, he came to England, from which country, but for the inter­vention of Mr. Assistant Commissioner Cullis, he would speedily have departed back to the land of his birth. Actually the thirteenth child of a family that had been christened in numerical order, he had been permitted to slip into the appellation of a brother who had died of a surfeit of pickled onions at the tender age of two; but that, according to his own story, was the only good for­tune that had come to him in a world that had mercilessly persecuted his most innocent enterprises.

He was a small and dapper little man, very amusing company in his perky way, with a fascination for barmaids and an innate skill with the stiletto; and certainly he looked less like an