quite a light pressure. In fact, it acts as a bell push. There are now three men in the garden as well as four bloodhounds, and two more in the passage outside this room. And the only dog I can imagine myself burying to- morrow morning is an insolent young puppy, who's chosen to poke his nose into my business.'
'Well, well,
Sir John Bittle settled himself comfortably in his armchair, pulled an ash stand to a convenient position, and continued the leisurely smoking of his cigar. The Saint, looking at him in a softly speculative fashion, had to admire the man's nerve. The Saint smiled; and then Patricia's hand on his arm brought him back with a jerk to the stern realities of the situation. He took the hand in his, pressed it, and turned the saintly smile on her in encouragement. Then he was weighing Bittle's automatic in a steady hand.
'Carrying on the little game of Let's Pretend,' suggested Simon, 'let's suppose that I sort of pointed this gun at you, all nervous and upset, and in my agitation I kind of twiddled the wrong knob. I mean, suppose it went off, and you were in the way? Wouldn't it be awkward!'
Bittle shook his head.
'Terribly,' he agreed. 'And you're such a mystery to Baycombe already that I'm afraid they'd talk. You know how unkind gossip can be. Why, they'd be quite capable of saying you did it on purpose.”
'There's something in that,' said Templar mildly, and he put the gun back in his pocket. 'Then suppose I took my little knife and began playing about with it, and it flew out of my hand and took off your ear? Or suppose it sliced off the end of your nose? It's rotten to have only half a nose or only one ear. People stop and stare at you in the street, and so forth.'
'And think of my servants,”' said Brttle. 'They're all very attached to me, and they might be quite unreasonably vindictive.'
'That's an argument,' conceded the Saint seriously. 'And now suppose you suggest a game?'
Bittle moved to a more comfortable position and thought carefully before replying. The time ticked over, but the Saint was too old a hand to be rattled by any such primitive device, and he leaned nonchalantly against the wall and waited patiently for Bittle to realize that the cat-and-mouse gag was getting no laughs that journey. At length Bittle said:
'I should be quite satisfied, Mr. Templar, if you would spend a day or two with me, and during that time we could decide on some adequate expression of your regret for your behaviour this evening. As for Miss Holm, she and I can finish our little chat uninterrupted, and then I will see her home myself.'
' 'Um,' murmured the Saint, lounging. 'Bit of an optimist, aren't you?''
'I won't take 'no' for an answer, Mr. Templar,' said Bittle cordially. 'In fact, I expect your room is already being prepared.'
The Saint smiled.
'You almost tempt me to accept,' he said. 'But it cannot be. If Miss Holm were not with us — well, I should be very boorish to refuse. But as a matter of fact I promised Miss Girton to join them in a sandwich and a glass of ale toward midnight, and I can't let them down.'
'Miss Holm will make your excuses,' urged Bit-lie, but the Saint shook his head regretfully.
'Another time.”
Bittle moved again in the chair, and went on with his cigar. And it began to dawn upon the Saint that, much as he was enjoying the sociable round of parlour sports, the game was becoming a trifle too one-sided. There was also the matter of Patricia, who was rather a handicap. He found that he was still holding her hand, and was reluctant to make any drastic change in the circumstances, but business was business.
With a sigh the Saint hitched himself off the wall which he had found such a convenient prop, released the hand with a final squeeze, and began to saunter round the room, humming light-heartedly under his breath and inspecting the general fixtures and fittings with a politely admiring eye.
'This room is under observation from two points,' Bittle informed him as a tactful precaution.
'Pity we haven't got a camera — the scene'd shoot fine for a shocker,' was the Saint's only criticism.
And Simon went on with his tour of the room. He had taken Bittle's warning with the utmost nonchalance, but its reactions on the problem in hand and his own tentative solution were even then being balanced up in his mind. Bittle, meanwhile, smoked away with a large languidness which indicated his complete satisfaction with the entertainment provided and a sublime disregard for the time spent on digesting it. Which was all that the Saint could have asked.
In its way, it was a classical performance. Anyone with any experience of such things, entering the room, would have sensed at once that both men were past masters. Nothing could have been calmer than their appearance, nothing more polished than their dispassionate exchange of backchat.
The Saint worked his unhurried way round the room. Now he stopped to examine a Benares bowl, now an etching, now a fine old piece of furniture. The patina on a Greek vase held him enthralled for half a minute: then he was absorbed in the workmanship of a Sheraton whatnot. In fact, an impartial observer would have gathered that the Saint had ao other interest in life than the study of various antiques, and that he was thoroughly enjoying a free invitation to take his time over a minute scrutiny of his host's treasures. And all the while the Saint's eyes, masked now by lazily drooping lids, were taking in all the details of the furnishing to which he did not devote any ostentatious attention, and searching every inch of the walls for the spyholes of which Bittle had spoken.
The millionaire was unperturbed, and the Saint once again permitted the shadow of a smile to touch the corners of his mouth as he caught Patricia's troubled eyes. The smile hardly moved a muscle of his face, but it drew an answering tremor of the girl's lips that showed him that her spirits were still keeping their end up.
The Saint was banking on Bittle's confidence as a bluffer, and he was not disappointed. Bittle knew that, for all the guards with whom he had surrounded himself, his personal safety hung by the slender thread of a simulated carelessness for it. Bittle knew that to show the least anxiety, the faintest flutter of uncertainty, would have been to throw an additional weapon into Templar's already dangerously comprehensive armoury, and that was exactly what Bittle dared not do. Therefore the millionaire affected not to notice the Saint's movements, and never changed his position a fraction or allowed his eyes to betray him by following Simon round the room. Bittle leaned back among the cushions and gazed abstractedly at a water colour on the opposite wall. At another time he studied the pattern on the carpet. Then he looked expressionlessly at Patricia. Once he pored over his fingernails, and measured the length of ash on his cigar against his cuff. All the while the Saint was behind him, but Bittle did not turn his head, and the Saint was filled with hope and misgiving at the same time. He had located one peephole, cunningly concealed below a pair of old horse pistols which hung on the wall, but the second he had failed to find. It might have been a bluff; in any case, the time was creeping on, and the Saint could not afford to carry his feigned languor too far. He would have to chance the second watcher.
He began a second circuit, deliberately passing in front of Bittle, and the millionaire looked up casually at him.
'Don't think I'm hurrying you,' said Bittle, “but it's getting late, and you might have rather a tiring day to- morrow.'
'Thanks,' murmured Simon. 'It takes a lot to tire me. But I've decided to spend the night with you, at any rate. You might tell the big stiff with the damaged proboscis to fill the hot-water bottle and lay out some nightshirts.'
Bittle nodded.
'I can only commend your discretion,' he remarked, 'as sincerely as I appreciate your simple tastes.'
'Not at all,' murmured the Saint, no less suave. 'Would it be troubling you too much to ask for the loan of a pair of bedsocks?'
The Saint was now behind Bittte again. He was standing a bare couple of feet from the millionaire's head, one hand resting lightly on the back of a small chair. The other hand was holding a bronze statuette up to the light, and the whole pose was so perfectly done that its hidden menace could not have struck the watchers outside until it was top late.
Bittle was a fraction quicker on the uptake. The Saint caught Patricia's eye and made an almost imperceptible motion toward the window; and at that moment the millionaire's nerve faltered for a split second, and he began to turn his head. In that instant the Saint sogged the statuette into the back of Bittle's skull — without any great force, but very scientifically. In another lightning movement, he had jerked up the chair and flung it crashing into the light, and blackness fell on the room with a totally blinding density.
