The Saint's Getaway

equal him.

'What you boys and girls have got to remember, now and for evermore,' he said, 'is that the bushiest false whiskers on earth won't help you unless you can put on the authentic pride of whiskeredness. The hair has got to enter into your soul.'

He was working in front of the open bonnet of the lorry while he talked, rubbing a judicious blend of grease and grime into his hands and finger-nails and smearing artistic stains of it across his face. It seems a simple thing to write, and yet the bare truth of it is that when he turned round again he had literally annihilated Simon Templar—he was a German truckdriver, with a past and a present and a future and an aged aunt in Frankfort to whom he faithfully sent a card every Christmas.

Monty Hayward was just securing the last button of his own overalls, and the Saint lugged him boisterously over and smudged his immaculate face and hands with half a dozen similarly rapid master-strokes.

'Sit quiet and blow your nose on your sleeve occasionally,' he said, 'and we can't go wrong.'

He ran a hawk-like eye over the details of his protege's at­tire; and then he grinned boyishly and smote Monty a deto­nating blow between the shoulder blades.

'C'mon! Let's push these birds out of the way.'

They carried the two unconscious men into the wood and hid them in a thicket, after the Saint had bound and gagged them with strips of their own clothing. Simon's departing flour­ish was to pin a hundred-mark note to each of their shirt-fronts—the assault on their persons had been a regrettable ne­ cessity, but it was one of those little debts which the Saint never forgot. And in the corner of each note he sketched the quaint little haloed figure which had been the signature of more rol­licking outrages than Scotland Yard could discuss in polite lan­guage. It was a long time since the Saint had last used that flippant symbol, and the chance appealed to him as an omen that could not be passed by.

He returned jauntily to the road, and saw that Patricia and the Evening Gazette had already taken up their positions. Si­mon pulled up the starting handle and vaulted into the driv­ing seat.

As they lumbered clangorously round the next bend a car that was speeding towards them swerved peremptorily across their path and stopped broadside on. An officer in field grey climbed out and marched authoritatively over to the Saint's side. The stamp of his commission was branded all over him, and the flap of his revolver holster was unstrapped and turned back into his belt.

'Woher kommen Sie, bitte?' he demanded curtly; and the Saint drew a grubby hand across an even grubbier forehead.

'Aus Ingolstadt, Herr Hauptmann.'

'So. Haben Sie auf diesem Wege nicht zwei Manner und eine Frau gesehen? Der grossere Mann tragt einen hellgrauen Anzug, die Frau ist ganz hubsch und gut gekleidet——'

'Doch!'

'Kolossal!' The officer whipped out a notebook and sig­nalled vehemently to his men. 'Welche Richtung haben sie eingeschlagen?'

Simon took one hand from the wheel and pointed back over the fields.

'Sie sind soeben dort uber die Wiesen gegangen. Ich begreife es jetzt noch immer nicht, doss ich das Madchen nicht uberfahren habe, denn sie ist mir gerade aus der Hecke unter die Vorderrader gelaufen—— '

'Ihr Name?'

'Franz Schneider.'

'Adresse?'

'Nurnberg, Juliusstrasse, seibzehn.'

The police car rushed up alongside, and the officer stepped on the running board and called out a volley of instructions. He turned and shouted to Simon as the driver let in the clutch.

'Wenn wir diese Verbrecher fangen, behommen Sie viel­leicht eine hohe Belohnung!'