13 The Saint Intervenes (Boodle)

'This must seem rather hard-hearted of me,' Simon re­marked, 'but I have to do it. You're a very talented family— if you really are a family—and you must console yourselves with the thought that you fooled me for a whole ten days. When I think how easily you might have fooled me for the rest of the way, it sends cold shivers up and down my spine. Really boys, it was a rather brilliant scheme, and I wish I'd thought of it myself.'

'You wait till I see you da next time, you pig,' said Domenick churlishly.

'I'll wait,' Simon promised him.

He backed discreetly out of the room and out of the house to his car; and they clustered in the doorway to watch him. It was not until he pressed the starter that the fullest realisa­tion dawned upon Signor Rolfieri.

'But what happens to me?' he screamed. 'How do I go back to San Remo?'

'I really don't know, Comrade,' answered the Saint callous­ly. 'Perhaps Domenick will help you again if you give him some more money. Twenty five thousand quid instead of five years' penal servitude was rather a bargain price, anyway.'

He let in the clutch gently, and the big car moved forward. But in a yard or two he stopped it again, and felt in one of his pockets. He brought out his souvenir of a certain fortu­nate kitchen, and lobbed it towards the empurpled Domenick.

'Sorry, brother,' he called back over his shoulder. 'I for-get-a da soap!'

 

 

X

The Loving Brothers

'You never saw a couple of brothers like 'em,' said the garrulous Mr. Penwick. 'They get enough pleasure out of doing anybody down, but if one of 'em can cheat the other out of anything it's a red-letter day.'

Dissension between brothers is unhappily nothing new in the world's history. Jacob and Esau, Cain and Abel, dis­agreed in a modest way, according to the limitations of their day. Walter and Willie Kinsall, living in times when a mess of pottage has no great bargaining value, disagreed on a much more lavish scale.

Naturally this lavishness of discord was a thing which grew up through the years. It was not achieved at one stroke. When Walter, aged four, realised that Willie, aged two months, was commanding the larger share of his parents' time and attention, and endeavored to brain him with a toy tomahawk, their mutual jealousy was merely embryonic. When Willie, aged seven, discovered that by lying awake at night until after Walter, aged eleven, had gone to sleep, he was able to rifle Walter's pockets of a judicious share of their current collection of sweets, pennies, pieces of string, and elastic bands, his ideas of retaliation were only passing through the experimental stage. But when Walter, aged twenty, found that he was able to imitate the handwriting of Willie, aged sixteen, so well that he succeeded in drawing out of Willie's savings bank account a quantity of money whose disappear­ance was ever afterwards a mystery, it might be said that their feud was at least within sight of the peaks to which it was destined later to rise.

The crude deceptions of youth, of course, gave place to subtler and less overtly illegal stratagems as the passing years gave experience and greater guile. Even their personal rela­tionship was glossed over with a veneer of specious affability which deceived neither.

'How about running down to my place for the week-end?' suggested Willie, aged twenty-seven.

Walter ran down; and at dead of night descended to the study and perused all of Willie's private correspondence that he could find, obtaining an insight into his brother's affairs which enabled him to snap up the bankrupt shoe repairing business which Willie was preparing to take over at a give­away price.