You don't need to run to seed in an office. You're not rich, but you can have all the fun in the world. You can go anywhere, do almost anything you like within reason. If I may talk to you like an uncle-don't be the pitcher that goes once too often to the well.'
'You've never stopped,' said Peter.
The Saint grinned.
'I never could. While I'm strong and alive, I've got to go on. When I stop crashing about the world and raising hell, I might as well die. Excitement, danger, living on tiptoe all the time- that's what life means to me. But it isn't the same for you.'
'What will you do now?'
'I'm blowed if I know. I think I shall travel south, and put my trust in the Lord. Something's sure to happen. Something always does happen, if you go out and challenge it. Adventure never comes. You have to lug it in by the ears. You might settle down in a nice house in England for fifty years, and nothing would ever happen. A few people would die, a few people would get married, they might change over from bridge to canasta or back again, the man next door might run off with his wife's sister and the grocer's assistant might run off with the till-that's all. But you won't find adventure unless you look for it, and that means living dangerously. Sometimes when I hear fools complaining that life is dull, I want to advise them to knock their bank manager on the head and grab a handful of money and run. After a fortnight, if they could keep running that long, they'd know what life meant. ... I expect I shall do something like that, and the chase will start all over again. But somewhere in the south it will be, Peter. Do you know, when I woke up this morning it was cold enough for me to see my breath going up like steam, and when that happens I feel the old call of long days and sunshine and blue skies.'
He stood up, twitched out the plug, and turned the tap of the cold shower. For a few seconds he stood under it, letting it stream down over him and laughing at the stinging brunt of it, rubbing the water over his arms and thighs and chest in a sheer pagan delight of hardiness; and then he climbed out and reached for a towel and cigarette, and his wet hand smote Peter between the shoulder-blades.
'And I feel like a million dollars on it,' he said. 'Come on- let's go and be rude to Julian!'
In a surprisingly short space of time he was dressed, immaculate and debonair as ever, and they walked up Piccadilly together.
'No alibi?' asked Peter.
'Why bother?' smiled the Saint. 'If anything could possibly go wrong, Julian would have a swell job trying to explain exactly why he had the entire capital of the firm in a bag in his room, with a one-way passage booked to Buenos Aires-and I don't think he'd take it on.'
He had a faultless sense of time, and Kate Allfield had also learned that in their profession punctuality may be more precious than many alibis. She had just paid off her taxi when they arrived at the Savoy; and Simon could understand the foolishness of Julian Lamantia no less than the foolishness of Peter Quentin. He had always thought her lovely, even at that first meeting at the airport when he had only just discovered the hypnotic powers of her cigarettes in time; and the affair of the Star of Mandalay had shown him something else about her that he saluted in his own way. But it was Peter Quentin's hand that she touched first; and Simon knew that with this adventure one more adventurer came to an end.
They went in together, and Peter and Simon stood aside while the girl approached the hall porter and had her name telephoned up to Mr. Lamantia's room. The reply came back, as they had expected, that she was to be shown up; and the two men strolled along and joined her quite naturally as she was escorted to the lift.
They got out on the third floor, and she stopped the pageboy who accompanied them with a smile.
'I know the way,' she said.
Simon slipped a half-crown into the midget's hand, and they brushed past him. In a few yards they had the corridor to themselves.
'You might wander downstairs and drift out, Kathleen,' said the Saint. 'Go to the Mayfair. We'll join you there in about half an hour.'
She nodded; and Peter's fingers slipped away from hers as they passed on.
They reached Mr. Lamantia's room, and Simon lifted his hand and knocked.
Using our renowned gifts of vivid description, it would be possible for us to dilate upon Mr. Lamantia's emotions at greater length; but we have not the time. Neither, in point of fact, had Mr. Lamantia. He suffered more or less what a happy bonfire would suffer if the bottom fell out of a reservoir suspended directly over it. With eighty-five thousand pounds in banknotes of small denominations in his bag, an express service to the tall timber mapped out in front of him, and his aesthetic soul ripe with the remembered beauty and tacit acquiescence of the most beautiful girl he had ever seen, he opened his door with the vision of her face rising before his eyes, and saw the vision smashed into a whirling kaleidoscope of fragments that came together again at the lean smiling figure of the man who had once come striding through the wet night to drag him out of his car and immerse him in the Thames. His eyes bulged and his jaw dropped; and then the lean' figure's hand pushed him kindly but firmly backwards and followed him on into the room, and Peter Quentin closed the door behind them and put his back to it.
'Well, Julian,' said the Saint breezily, 'how are all the little stocks and shares today?'
A tinge of colour squeezed slowly back into Mr. Lamantia's ashen face. When he had first seen the figures of men outside his door he had had one dreadful instant of the fear that perhaps after all he had left his retirement too late.
'How did you get up here?' he stammered.
'We flew,' said the Saint affably.
Suddenly his left fist shot over with the whole weight of his shoulder behind it. The upper knuckles came on the line of Mr. Lamantia's twitching mouth, the lower knuckles on the point of his jaw-bone, clean and crisp in the horizontal centre of his face; and Mr. Lamantia had a hazy feeling that his brain had been knocked off its moorings and was revolving slowly and painfully inside his skull. When it had settled down again to a rhythmic but stationary singing, he became aware that the automatic which he had been trying to pull from his hip pocket was gone.
'Tie him up, Peter,' said the Saint calmly.
Peter Quentin came off the door and produced a coil of stout cord from under his coat. Mr. Lamantia went down fighting, but Peter's muscular handling rapidly reduced him to mere verbal protest, which was largely biological in
