13 The Saint Intervenes (Boodle)

living-room.

'Boys and girls,' he said cheerfully, 'this is our fairy godmother, Mr. Oscar Newdick. This is Miss Holm, Oscar, old toadstool; and I think you know Mr. Hayward——'

The inventor's arm had stiffened under his hand, and his smile had vanished. His face was turning pale and nasty.

'What's the game?' he demanded hoarsely. 'No game at all, dear old garlic-blossom,' said the Saint innocently. 'Just a coincidence. Mr. Hayward is going to sell me his shares too. Now, all the papers are here, and if you'll just sign on the dotted line ——'

'I refuse!' babbled Newdick wildly. 'It's a trap!'

Simon stepped back and regarded him blandly. 'A  trap,  Oscar?  What on earth are you talking about? You've got a jolly good helicopter, and you've nothing to be ashamed of. Come, now, be brave. Harden the Newdick heart.  There may be a wrench at parting with your brain­child, but you can cry afterwards. Just a signature or two on the dotted line, and it's all over. And there's a cheque for forty thousand pounds waiting for you. . . .'

He thrust a fountain-pen into the inventor's hand; and, half-hypnotised, Mr. Newdick signed. The Saint blotted the signatures carefully and put the agreements away in a drawer, which he locked. Then he handed Mr. Newdick a cheque. The inventor grasped it weakly and stared at the writing and figures on it as if he expected them to fade away under his eyes. He had the quite natural conviction that his brain had given way.

'Th-thank you very much,' he said shakily, and was con­scious of little more than an overpowering desire to remove himself from those parts—to camp out on the doorstep of a bank and wait there with his head in his hands until morn­ing, when he could pass the cheque over the counter and see crisp banknotes clicking back to him in return to prove that his sanity was not entirely gone. 'Weil, I must be going,' he gulped out; but the Saint stopped him.

'Not a bit of it,  Oscar,'  he murmured.  'You don't in­trude. In fact, you ought to be the guest of honour. Your class as an inventor really is A 1. When I showed the Cierva people what you'd done, they nearly collapsed.'

Mr. Newdick blinked at him in a painful daze. 'What do you mean?' he stammered.

'Why, the way you managed to build an autogiro that would go straight up and down. None of the ordinary ones will, of course—the torque of the vanes would make it spin round like a top if it didn't have a certain amount of forward movement to hold it straight. I can only think that when you got hold of some Cierva parts and drawings and built it up yourself, you found out that it didn't go straight up and down as you'd expected and thought you must have done something wrong. So you set about trying to put it right—and somehow or other you brought it off. It's a pity you were in such a hurry to tell Mr. Hayward that everything in your invention had been patented before, Oscar, because if you'd made a few more inquiries you'd have found that it hadn't.' Simon Templar grinned, and patted the stunned man kindly on the shoulder. 'But everything happens for the best, dear old bird; and when I tell you that the Cierva people have already made me an offer of a hundred thousand quid for the invention you've just sold me, I'm sure you'll stay and join us in a celebratory bottle of beer.'

Mr. Oscar Newdick swayed slightly, and glugged a strangling obstruction out of his throat.

'I—I don't think I'll stay,' he said. 'I'm not feeling very well.'

'A dose of salts in the morning will do you all the good in the world,' said the Saint chattily, and ushered him sympa­thetically to the door.

IV

The Prince of Cherkessia

Of the grey hairs which bloomed in the thinning thatch of Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal, there were at least a couple of score which he could attribute directly to an equal number of encounters with the Saint. Mr. Teal did not ac­tually go so far as to call them by name and celebrate their birthdays, for he was not by nature a whimsical man; but he had no doubts about their origin.

The affair of the Prince of Cherkessia gave him the forty-first—or it may have been the forty-second.