'Enough to buy you a new pair of elastic-sided boots and an embroidered nightcap for Monty,' he said. 'And then you could write two cheques for six figures, and still have enough change left to stand yourself two steam yachts and a Rolls. That is, if you could sell the loot in the open market. As things are, Van Roeper'll probably beat me down to a lousy couple of million guilders, which means we shall have to pass up one of those cheques and Monty's nightcap. But all the same, lass, it's Boodle with the peach of a B!'
He knotted the corners of his handkerchief diagonally over the spoils, tested the firmness of the bundle, and tossed it effervescently into the air. Then it vanished into his pocket, and he helped himself to another cigarette and settled down in his corner to enjoy the drive.
Monty Hayward was the only one who seemed to have escaped the Saint's own contagious exhilaration. He concentrated his eyes on the task of guiding the car and thought that it was all a pretty bad show. He said so.
'If you'd only left that jewellery as it was, you chump,' he said—having only just thought of it himself—'we might have been able to tell the police we'd found it on the road and were on our way to return it.'
Simon shook his head.
'We couldn't have told them that, Monty.'
'Why not?'
'Because it wouldn't have been true,' answered the Saint, with awful solemnity.
'You owl!' snarled Monty Hayward; and relapsed into his nightmare.
It was a nightmare in which he had been groping about for so long that he had lost the power of protesting effectively against anything that it required him to do. Presently, at the Saint's bidding, he stopped the car for a moment while he removed his police uniform, which went into the nearest clump of bushes. Then he suffered himself to be told to drive unhesitatingly up to the frontier post which showed up in the glare of their headlights a few minutes later, where he obediently applied his brakes and waited in a kind of numb resignation while the guards stepped up and made their formal inquisitions. Every instinct that he possessed urged him to turn tail and fly—to leap out of the car and make a desperate attempt to plunge unseen into Germany through the darkness of the woods on their left—even, in one frantic moment, to let in the clutch again and smash recklessly through the flimsy barrier across the road into what looked like unassailable security beyond. That he remained ungalvanized by all these natural impulses was due solely to the paralytic inertia of the nightmare which had him inextricably in its grip. His, it appeared, not to reason why; his but to sit still and wait for somebody to clout him over the bean—and a more depressing fate for anyone who had passed unscathed through the entire excitement of the last war he found it difficult to imagine. He sat mute behind the wheel, endeavouring to make himself as invisible as possible, while the Saint exhibited passports and answered the usual questions. The Saint was as cool as a cucumber. He chattered affably throughout the delay, with an impermeable absence of self-consciousness, and smiled benignly into the light that was flashed over them. The eternity of prickling suspense which Monty Hayward endured passed over the Saint's unruffled head like a soothing zephyr; and when at last the signal was given and they moved on, and the Saint leaned back with a gentle exhalation of breath and searched for his cigarette case, his immutable serenity seemed little less than a deliberate affront.
'I suppose you know what you're doing, brother,' said Monty Hayward, as quietly as he could, 'but it seems pretty daft to me.'
'You bet I knew,' said the Saint, and to Monty's surprise he said it just as quietly. 'It was simply a matter of taking a chance on the clock. If you hadn't hit that cop at the Konigshof quite so hard, it wouldn't have been so easy; but we had to hope we were still a length or two in front of the hue and cry. There's no point in jumping your fences before you come to them. But, believe me, I had that patrol covered from my pocket the whole time, and what might have happened if we'd been unlucky is just nobody's business.'
Monty Hayward readjusted his impressions slowly and reluctantly. And then suddenly he shot one of his extraordinarily keen glances at the sober face of the man beside him—a glance that was tempered with the ghost of a smile.
'If we kept straight ahead and drove in relays,' he said, 'we might make the Dutch frontier to-day. But one gathers that it wouldn't be quite so simple as that.'
'Solomon said it first,' assented the Saint bluntly. 'We shan't take any more frontiers in our stride, and I don't think we shall enjoy much more friendly flapjaw with the constabulary. That was just our break. But there won't be a policeman in Central
