and replenished the magazine. Then he went in search of the parcel which had stimulated so much unfriendly argument, and carried it back to his car without a second glance at the two sleeping warriors by the roadside.
Chapter 6
It seems scarcely necessary to explain that Mr. Ezekiel Inselheim was a Jew. He was a stoutish man with black hair surrounding a shiny bald pate, pleasant brown eyes, and a rather attractive smile; but his nose would have driven Hitler into frenzies of belligerent Aryanism. Confronted by that shamelessly Semitic proboscis, no well-trained Nazi could ever have been induced to believe that he was a kindly and honest man, shrewd without duplicity, self-made without arrogance, wealthy without offensive ostentation. It has always been difficult for such wild possibilities to percolate into the atrophied brain cells of second-rate crusaders, and a thousand years of self-styled civilization have made no more improvements in the Nordic crank than they have in any other type of malignant half-wit.
He sat slumping wearily before the table in his library. The white light of his desk lamp made his sallow face appear even paler than it was naturally; his hands were resting on the blotter in front of him, clenched into impotent fists, and he was staring at them, with a dull, almost childish hurt creasing deep grooves into the flesh on either side of his mouth.
Upstairs, his daughter slept peacefully, resting again in her own bed with the careless confidence of childhood; and for that privilege he had been compelled to pay the price. In spite of the fact that that strange Robin Hood of the twentieth century who was called the Saint had brought her back to him without a fee, Inselheim knew that the future safety of the girl still depended solely on his own ability to meet the payments demanded of him. He knew that his daughter had been kidnapped as a warning rather than for actual ransom, knew that there were worse weapons than kidnapping which the Terror would not hesitate to employ at the next sign of rebellion; if he had ever had any doubts on that score, they had been swept away by the cold guttural voice which had spoken to him over the telephone that morning; and it was the knowledge of those things that clenched his unpractised fists at the same time as that dull bitter pain of helplessness darkened his eyes.
Ezekiel Inselheim was wondering, as others no less rich and famous had wondered before him, why it was that in the most materially civilized country in the world an honoured and peaceful citizen had still to pay toll to a clique of organized bandits, like medieval peasants meeting the extortions of a feudal barony. He was wondering, with a grim intensity of revolt, why the police, who were so impressively adept at handing out summonses for traffic violations, and delivering perjured testimony against unfortunate women, were so plaintively incapable of holding the racketeers in check. And he knew the answers only too well.
He knew, as all America knew, that with upright legislators, with incorruptible police and judiciary, the gangster would long ago have vanished like the Western bad man. He knew that without the passive cooperation of a resigned and leaderless public, without the inbred cowardice of a terrorized population, the racketeers and the grafting political leaders who protected them could have been wiped off the face of the American landscape at a cost of one hundredth part of the tribute which they exacted annually. It was the latter part of that knowledge which carved the stunned, hurt lines deeper into his face and whitened the skin across his fleshy fists. It gave him back none of the money which had been bled out of him, returned him no jot of comfort or security, filled him with nothing but a cancerous ache of degradation which was curdling into a futile trembling agony of hopeless anger. If, at that moment, any of his extortioners had appeared before him, he would have tried to stand up and defy them, knowing that there could be only one outcome to his lonely, pitiful resistance. . . .
And it was at that instant that some sixth sense made him turn his head, with a gasp of fear wrenched from sheer overwrought nerves strangling in his throat.
A languid immaculate figure lolled gracefully on the windowsill, one leg flung carelessly into the room, the other remaining outside in the cool night. A pair of insolent blue eyes were inspecting him curiously, and a smile with a hint of mockery in it moved the gay lips of the stranger. It was a smile with humour in it which was not entirely humorous, blue eyes with an amused twinkle which did not belong to any conventional amusement. The voice, when it spoke, had a bantering lilt, but beneath the lilt was something harder and colder than Inselheim had ever heard before—something that reminded him of chilled steel glinting under a polar moon.
'Hullo, Zeke,' said the Saint.
At the sound of that voice the pathetic mustering of anger drained out of Inselheim as if a stopcock had been opened, leaving nothing but a horrible blank void. Upstairs was his child—sleeping. . . . And suddenly he was only a frightened old man again, staring with fear-widened eyes at the revival of
