The Saint's Getaway

shoulder; and he began to understand.

The Saint's eyes tore themselves away from the queer fasci­nation of the mirror. On its surface the figures of the men be­hind had swollen in grotesque distortion, until he knew that they were only a yard or two away. He felt their presence even more vividly after he had ceased to watch them, in an infinitely gentle little shiver that twitched up his back as if a couple of spiders had performed a rapid polka along his spine. It slith­ered coldly along his ganglions in a tingle of desperate alert­ness, an instinctive tautening of nerves that was beyond all hu­man power to control.

He took the cigarette from his mouth and looked Monty Hayward squarely in the face. Within that yard or two of where they sat, the menace of the Law had loomed up again, with a suddenness that took the breath away—a menace which it had always been so fatally easy to forget, even if the Saint himself had never quite forgotten. And Monty Hayward looked back at a man who, in some guises, still seemed a stran­ger to him. The Saint's eyes were as hard as flints, cold and blue and mercilessly clear; and yet somewhere in their grim depths there was a tiny glitter like shifting sunlight, a momentary twinkle of mockery that loved the wild twists of the game for their own sake.

'For many years, Monty,' said the Saint very quietly and distinctly, 'I've been meaning to tell you the Illuminating History of Wilbraham, the Wonderful Worm. Wilbraham was in the very act of becoming the high tea of a partridge named Theobald, when the cruel bird was brought down by a lucky shot from the gun of a certain Mr. Hugglesboom, who was a water-diviner by profession and generally considered to be eccentric. I said a lucky shot, because Mr. Hugglesboom believed that he was aiming his weapon at a rabbit that was nibbling his young lettuces. On retrieving the bird, Mr. Hugglesboom discovered Wilbraham in its beak. Being a kind-hearted gentleman, he released the unhappy reptile; and he would have thought nothing more about it, if Wilbraham had not had other views. Wilbraham, in fact, being overcome with gratitude to his deliverer, followed Mr. Hugglesboom home, and showed such symptoms of devotion that Mr. Hugglesboom's heart was touched. A lonely man, he adopted the small creature, and found much companionship on his solitary travels, in which Wilbraham would follow him like a faithful dog. Shortly afterwards Wilbraham thought that he might assist Mr. Hugglesboom in his work. He took it upon himself to spy out, by tireless burrowing, the land which his master was commissioned to survey; with the result that in course of time Mr. Hugglesboom attained such eminence in his vocation ——'

Monty Hayward's face had run through a sequence of ex­pressions that would have made a movie director skip like a young ram with joy; and then it had gone blank. The meaning and purpose of that astonishing cascade of imbecility were utterly beyond him. There came to him the hysterical belief that Simon Templar must have gone suddenly and irrevocably haywire. The strain of recent happenings had been too much for a brain that had never in its life been truly stable.

He looked up dumbly at the two men who were now stand­ing by the Saint's oblivious shoulder, and in their faces he saw the beginnings of an answering blankness that fairly kicked him between the eyes. It was so staggering that for a space of time he doubted the evidence of his own senses.

And then it dawned upon him that the two men were also listening, and at the same time running through a gamut of emotions similar to his own. As the Saint's beautifully articu­lated phrases reached their ears, their heavy-footed and pur­poseful advance had waned away. They had ended up behind the Saint's chair as if they were walking over pins; and there they stood, with their mouths hanging open, sucking in his drivelling discourse with both ears. Their awed entrancement was so obvious that for an awful interval Monty Hayward be­gan to wonder whether after all it was his own brain that had slipped its trolley.

'The climax came,' said the Saint, with that flute-like clarity which did every single thing in its power to render the words comprehensible to anyone whose knowledge of English might leave much fluency to be desired, 'at a garden party organized by Lady Tigworthy, at which Mr. Hugglesboom was to give a demonstration of his art by finding a receptacle of water which had been carefully hidden in the grounds. Keeping his usual rendezvous behind the refreshment tent, Mr. Huggles­boom was duly accosted by a worm who gave him explicit in­structions; and shortly afterwards, being a dim-sighted man, he faithfully made his find directly over a shiny pink globe which showed on the lee side of a grassy knoll. This was discov­ered to be the head of Lord Tigworthy, who was enjoying an afternoon siesta. Mr. Hugglesboom was expelled from the fete in disgrace; and the worm, which was reclining in an intoxi­cated condition under the tap of a barrel of mild ale, was thrown after him. It was not until he reached home that Mr. Hugglesboom perceived that this worm was not Wilbraham'— the Saint was looking Monty rigidly in the eyes—'but Wil­braham's twin brother, who, filled with jealousy of his luckier relation, had gone out of his way to discredit an unblemished record of unselfish service. Mr. Hugglesboom——'

Behind him, one of the detectives cleared his throat apolo­getically, and the Saint glanced round.

He glanced round absolutely at his leisure, as if he were no­ticing the presence of the detectives for the first time. He did it as if they meant nothing whatever in his life, and never could—with