Louie Fallon had a theory that he couldn't walk down the Strand on any day in the week without bumping into a perambulating gold-mine which only required skilful scratching to yield him its gilded harvest.
He walked towards the Saint, fumbling in his pockets with a preoccupied air and the kind of flurried abstraction of a man who has forgotten where he put his season ticket on his way down the platform, with his eyes fluttering over every item of the perspective except those which were included in the direction in which he was going. At any rate, the last person in the panorama whom he appeared to see was the Saint himself. Simon saw him, and swerved politely; but with the quickwitted agility of long practice, Louie Fallon blundered off to the same side. They collided with a slight bump, at the very moment when Louie had apparently discovered the article for which he had been searching.
It fell on to the pavement between them and rolled away between the Saint's feet, sparkling enticingly in the sunlight. Muttering profuse apologies, Louie scuffled round to retrieve it. The movement was so adroitly devised to entangle them that Simon would have had no chance to pass on and make his escape, even if he had wanted to.
But it is dawning—slowly and reluctantly, perhaps, but dawning, nevertheless—upon the chronicler that there can be very few students of these episodes who can still be cherishing any delusion that the Saint would ever want to escape from such a situation.
Simon stood by with a slight smile coming to his lips, while Louie wriggled round his legs and recovered his precious possession with a faint squeak of delight, and straightened up with the object clutched solidly in his hand.
'Phew!' said Mr. Fallon, fanning himself with his hat. 'That was near enough. Did you see where it went? Right to the edge of that grating. If it had rolled down . . .' He blew out his cheeks and rolled up his eyes in an eloquent register of horror at the dreadful thought. 'For a moment I thought I'd lost it,' he said, clarifying his point conclusively.
Simon nodded. It did not require any peculiar keenness of vision to see that the object of so much concern was a very nice-looking diamond, for Louie was making no attempt to hide it—he was, on the contrary, blowing on it and rubbing it affectionately on his sleeve to remove the invisible specks of grime and dust which it had collected on its travels.
'You must be lucky.'
Louie's face fell abruptly. The transition between his almost childish delight and the shadow of awful gloom which suddenly passed across his countenance was quite startling. Mr. Fallon's artistry had never been disputed even by his rivals in the profession.
'Lucky?' he practically yelped, in a rising crescendo of mournful indignation. 'Why, I'm the unluckiest man that ever lived!'
'Too bad,' said the Saint, with profound sympathy.
'Lucky!' repeated Mr Fallon, with all the pained disgust of a hypochondriac who has been accused of looking well. 'Why, I'm the sort of fellow if I saw a five-pound note lying in the street and tried to pick it up, I'd fall down and break my neck!'
It was becoming clear to Simon Templar that Mr. Fallon felt that he was unlucky.
'There are people like that,' he said, reminiscently. 'I remembered an aunt of mine——'
'Lucky?' reiterated Mr. Fallon, who did not appear to be interested in anyone else's aunt. 'Why, right at this moment I'm the unluckiest man in London. Look here'—he clasped the Saint by the arm with the pathetically appealing movement of a drowning man clutching at a straw—'do you think you could help me? If you haven't got anything particular to do?
I feel sort of—well—you look the sort of fellow who might have some ideas. Have you got time for a drink?'
Simon Templar could never have been called a toper, but on such occasions as this he invariably had time for a drink. 'I don't mind if I do,' he said obligingly.
