heard her speak at once, the first definite knowledge that his intuition had been right; and a queer thrill leapt through him at the sound of her voice. It was as if he had been fascinated by a picture, and it had suddenly come to life.
'Good-evening, Fay,' he said.
She looked at him for a moment longer and then took a cigarette from her bag and struck a match. The movement veiled her eyes, and the spark which he thought he had seen there might have existed only in his imagination.
Kuhlmann nodded to a man who stood by the wall, and another door was unlocked and opened. Through it, after a brief pause, came two other men.
One of them was a big burly man with grey hair and a florid complexion on which the eyebrows stood out startlingly black and bushy, as if they had been gummed on by an absent-minded make-up artist. The other was a small bald-headed man with a heavy black moustache and gold-rimmed pince-nez, whose peering and fluttering manner reminded the Saint irresistibly of a weasel. Seen together, they looked rather like a vaudeville partnership which, either through mishap or design, had been obliged to share the props originally intended for one, and who had squabbled childishly over the division: between them they possessed the material for two normally sized men of normal hairiness, but on account of their disagreement they had both emerged with extravagant inequalities. Simon had an irreverent desire to remove the bushy eyebrows from the large man and glue them where it seemed they would be more appropriate, above the luxuriant moustache of the small one. Their bearing was subtly different from that of the others who were assembled in the room; and the Saint gave play to his flippant imaginings only for a passing second, for he had recognized them as soon as they came in and knew that the conference was almost complete. One of . them was the district attorney, Marcus Yeald; the other was the political boss of New York City himself, Robert Orcread— known by his own wish as 'Honest Bob.'
They studied the Saint with open interest while chairs were vacated for them at the table. Yeald did his scrutinizing from a safe distance, peering through his spectacles nervously— Simon barely overcame the temptation to say 'Boo!' to him and find out if he would jump as far as he seemed prepared to. Orcread, on the other hand, came round the table without sitting down.
'So you're the guy we've been looking for,' he said; and the Saint smiled.
'I guess you know whom you were looking for, Honest Bob,' he said.
Orcread's face hardened.
'How did you know my name?'
'I recognized you from your caricature in the
Orcread chewed on the stump of dead cigar in his mouth and hooked a thumb into his waistcoat. He looked the Saint up and down again with flinty eyes.
'Better not get too fresh,' he advised. 'I been wanting a talk with you, but I'll do the wisecracking. You've given us plenty of trouble. I suppose you know you could go to the chair for what you've done.'
'Probably,' admitted the Saint. 'But that was just ignorance. When I first came here, I didn't know that I had to get an official license to kill people.'
'You should have thought of that sooner,' Orcread said. His voice had the rich geniality, of the professional orator, but underneath it the Saint's sensitive ears could detect a ragged edge of strain. 'It's liable to be tough for a guy who comes here and thinks he can clean up the town by himself. You know what I ought to be doing now?'
The Saint's smile was very innocent.
'I can guess that one. You ought to be calling a cop and handing me over to him. But that would be a bit awkward for you—wouldn't it? I mean, people might want to know what you were doing here yourself.'
'You know why I'm not calling a cop?'
'It must be the spring,' Simon hazarded. 'Or perhaps today was your old grandmother's birthday, and looking into her dear sweet face you felt the hard shell of worldliness that hides your better nature softening like an overripe banana.'
Orcread took the cigar stub from between his
