The Saint's Getaway

in our hands!'

'What game? What is this boodle that all the shindy's about, anyway? You keep us up all night chasing that wretched little box, and I don't suppose you've any more idea what's inside it than I have. For all you know, it's probably a couple of float­ing kidneys.'

Simon sank back in his corner and closed his eyes.

'I can tell you what they were. I've seen 'em. They're the larger half of the Montenegrin crown jewels. They disap­peared on their way to Christie's six weeks back. I was think­ing of having a dart at them myself. And we could have had 'em for the asking!'

'They wouldn't be any use to me,' said Monty, unmoved. 'I've given up wearing a crown.' He locked the car round a corner and drove on. 'What you ought to be doing is thank­ing God you're sitting here without a bullet in you.'

Simon sighed.

'Oh, well,' he said—'If you don't want any boodle, that's O. K. with me.'

He twisted his hands round and gazed moodily upwards at the stars.

'You know,' he said meditatively, 'it's extraordinary what bloomers people make in moments of crisis. Take dear old Rudolf, for example. You'd think he'd have remembered that even when you shut a combination lock that's just been opened, you still have to jigger the wheels round to seal it up. Otherwise the combination is still set at the key word. . . . But he didn't remember, which is perhaps as well.'

And Simon Templar took his hands from his coat pocket; and the car swerved giddily across the road as Monty Hayward stared from the scintillating jumble of stones in the Saint's hands to the laughing face of the Saint.

VI.     HOW MONTY HAYWARD SLEPT UNEASILY,

AND  SIMON TEMPLAR WARBLED ABOUT WORMS

'NEXT on the left is ours,' said the Saint mildly. 'I don't think we'll take the corner till we get there, if it's all the same to you.'

Monty straightened the car up viciously within a thumb's breadth of the ditch, and slackened the pressure of his foot on the accelerator. His eyes turned back to the road and stayed there ominously.

'Let me get this clear,' he said. 'Are you telling me that you've still got the whole total of the boodle?'

'Monty, I am.'

'And the Crown Prince is chasing back to his schloss with an entirely empty box.'

'You said it.'

'So that apart from the police being after us for assault, battery, murder, and stealing a car, your pal Rudolf will be turning round to come after us and slit our throats——'

'And with any luck,' supplemented the Saint cheerfully, 'Comrade Krauss will also be raising dust along the warpath. I left him with a pretty easy getaway in front of him; and if he roused up at any time while the complete garrison was occupied with the business of hallooing after me, the odds are that he made it. Which ought to keep the entertainment from freezing up.'

This third horn on the dilemma was new to Monty and Pa­tricia. Simon Templar explained. He gave a vigorously graphic account of his movements since he had left them to paddle their own canoes at the Konigshof, and threw in a bald description of the mediaeval sports and pastimes at the Crown Prince's castle which sent a momentary squirm of horror creep­ing over their scalps. It took exactly five lines of collocution to link up Comrade Krauss with the man who had vanished from the fateful Room Twelve above the Saint's own suite; and then the whole tangled structure of the amazing web of circumstance in which they were involved became as vividly apparent to the other two as it was to the Saint himself. And the Saint chuckled.

'Boys and girls, my idea of a quiet holiday is just this!'

'Well, it may be your idea of a quiet holiday, but it isn't mine,' said Monty Hayward morosely. 'I've got a wife and three kiddies in England, and what are they going to think?'

'Wire 'em to come out and join you,' said the Saint dispas­sionately. 'We may be wanting all the help we can get'