15 The Saint in New York

have you thrown out of the force! What do we have laws for when an armed hoodlum can hold me up in my own house under your very nose ——'

'And gangsters can shoot cops in broad daylight and get ac­quitted,' added the Saint brightly. 'Let's make it an indigna­tion meeting. I don't know what the country's coming to.'

Nather choked; and the Saint stood up. There was something in the air which told him that the interview might more profit­ably be adjourned—and the judge's blustering outburst had nothing to do with it. With that intuitive certainty in his mind, he acted on it in cool disregard of dramatic sequence. That was the way he liked best to work, along his own paths, following a trail without any attempt to dictate the way it should go. But his evening had only just begun.

He strolled to the desk and lifted the lid of a bronze humi­dor. Selecting a cigar, he crackled it at his ear and sniffed it appreciatively.

'You know good tobacco if you don't know anything else good, Algernon,' he murmured.

He discarded the stub of his cigarette and stuck the Corona-Corona at a jaunty angle between his teeth. As an after­thought, he tipped over the humidor and helped himself to a bonus handful of the same crop.

'Well, boys,' he said, 'you mustn't mind if I leave you. I never overstay my welcomes, and maybe you have some secrets to whisper in each other's ears.' He backed strategically to the window and paused there to button his coat. 'By the way,' he said, 'you needn't bother to rush up this window and wave me good-bye. These farewells always make me feel nervous.' He spun the automatic around his finger for the last time and hefted it in his hand significantly. 'I'd hate there to be any accidents at the last minute,' said the Saint; and was gone.

Fernack stared at the rectangle of empty blackness and emp­tied his lungs in a long sigh. After some seconds he got up. He walked without haste to the open casements and stood there looking silently out into the dark; then he turned back to the room.

'That's a guy I could like,' he said thoughtfully.

Nather squinted at him.

'You'd better get out, too,' snarled the judge. 'You'll hear more about this later ——'

'You'll hear more about it now,' Fernack said coldly; and there was something in his voice which made Nather listen.

What the detective had to say did not take long. Fernack on business was not a man to expand himself wordily at any time, and any euphemistic phrases which he might have revolved in his mind had been driven out of it entirely. He stowed his kid gloves high up on the shelves of his disgust, and pro­pounded his assessment of the facts with a profane brutality that left Nather white and shaking.

Three minutes after Simon Templar's departure, Inspector Fernack was also barging out of the room, but by a more or­thodox route. He thundered down the stairs and shouldered aside the obsequious butler who made to open the door for him, and flung himself in behind the wheel of his prowl car with a short-winded violence that could not be accounted for solely by an ardent desire to remove himself from those pur­lieus. But his evening was not finished, either; though he did not know this at that moment.

He slammed the door, switched on the ignition, and un­locked the steering column; and then something hard probed its way gently but firmly into his ribs, and the soft voice of the Saint wafted into his right ear.

'Hold on, Inspector. You and I are going for a little joy ride!'

*   *   *

Inspector Fernack's jaw sagged.

Under the stress of his unrelieved emotions, he had not no­ticed the Saint's arrival or the noiseless opening of the other door. There was no reason on earth why he should have looked for either. According to his upbringing, it was so baldly axi­omatic that the Saint would by that time be skating through the traffic three or four miles away that he had not even given the subject a thought. The situation in which he found himself for the second time was so deliriously unexpected that he was temporarily paralyzed. And in that space of time Simon slid in onto the cushions beside him and closed the door.

Fernack's jaw closed, and he looked into the level blue eyes behind the gun.

'What's your idea?'