'You can go to hell.'
'And the same applies,' said the Saint equably.
He stood up and came round the desk, poising himself on straddled feet a pace in front of the judge, lean and dynamically balanced as a panther.
'You're very dense, Algernon,' he remarked calmly. 'You don't seem to get the idea at all. Maybe our little interlude of song and badinage has led you up the wrong tree. You can make a good guess why I'm here. You know that I didn't drop in just for the pleasure of admiring your classic profile. You know who I am. I don't care what you pick on, but you can tell me something. Any of your maidenly secrets ought to be worth listening to. Come through, Nather—or else . . .'
'Or else what?'
The Saint's gun moved forward until it pressed deep into the judge's flabby navel.
'Or else find out what Ionetzki and Jack Irboll know!'
Nather's heavy, sullen lips twisted back from yellowed teeth. And Simon jabbed the gun a notch further into the judge's stomach.
'And don't lie,' said the Saint caressingly; 'because I'm friendly to undertakers and that funeral parlour looked as if it could do with some business.'
Nather passed a fevered tongue over hot dry lips. He had not lived through thirty years of intermittent contacts with the underworld without learning to recognize that queer bitter fibre in a man that makes him capable of murder. And the terrific inward struggle of that last moment before the telephone bell rang had blunted his vitality. The strength was not in him to screw himself to that desperate pitch again. He knew, beyond all question, that if he refused to talk, if he attempted to lie, that bantering tiger of a man who was squeezing the gun ever deeper into his vitals would destroy him as ruthlessly as he would have crushed an ant. Nather's larynx heaved twice, convulsively; and then, before he could speak, a muffled tread sounded beyond the locked door.
The Saint tautened, listening. From the ponderous, flat-footed measure of the stride he guessed it to belong to the butler. Nather looked up with a sudden gleam of hope; but the steady pressure of the gun muzzle in his yielding flesh did not vary by a milligram. The Saint's light whisper floated to his ears in an airy breath.
'Heroes die young,' it murmured pithily.
A knock sounded on the door—a discreet knock that could only have been made by a servant. Nather, with his vengeful eyes frozen on the Saint, lip-read the order rather than heard it. 'Ask him what he wants.'
'Well?' Nather growled out.
'Inspector Fernack is downstairs, sir. He says it's important.'
Nather stared at the Saint And the Saint smiled. Once again his reckless fighting lips shaped an almost inaudible command.
'Tell him to come up,' Nather repeated after him, and could not believe that he was obeying an order.
He sat silent and rigid as the butler's footsteps receded and died away; and at last Simon withdrew the gun barrel which had for so long been boring insidiously into the judge's abdomen.
'Better and better,' said the Saint amazingly, flipping a cigarette into his lips. 'I was wanting to meet Fernack.'
Nather gaped at him incredulously. The situation was grotesque, unbelievable; and yet it had occurred. The automatic had been eased out of his belly—it was even then circling around the Saint's forefinger in one of those carelessly confident gyrations—which it certainly would not have been if any of the Saint's instructions had been disobeyed. The thing was beyond Nather's understanding. The glacial recklessness of it was subtly disquieting, in a colder and more deadly way than the menace of the gun had ever been: it argued a self-assurance that was frightening, and with that fear went the crawling question of whether the Saint's mind had leapt to some strategy of lightning cunning that Nather could not see.
'You'll get your chance,' said the judge gruffly, searching for comprehension through a kind of fog.
Simon rasped the head of a match with his
