15 The Saint in New York

teeth and rolled it in his fingers. The leaves crumpled and shredded under the roughness of his hand, but his voice did not rise.

'I'm trying to do something for you,' he said. 'You ain't so old, are you? You wouldn't want to get into a lot of trouble. It ain't right to go to the chair at your age. It ain't right to be taken for a ride. And why should you?'

'Don't ask me,' said the Saint. 'If I remember rightly, the suggestion was yours.'

'I could do a lot for a guy like you. If you'd come and seen me first, none of this would have happened. But these things you've been doing don't make it easy for us. I don't say we got a grudge against you. Irboll was just a no-account hoodlum, and Ualino was getting too big for himself anyway—I guess he had it coming to him before long. But you're trying to go too fast, and you make too much noise about it. That sort of thing don't go with the public, and it's my job to stop it. It's Mr. Yeald's job to stop it—ain't it, Mark?'

'Certainly,' said the lawyer's dry voice, like the voice of a parrot repeating a lesson. 'These things have got to be stopped. They will be stopped.'

Orcread tapped the Saint on the chest.

'That's it,' he said impressively. 'We have given our word to the electors that this sort of thing shall be stamped out, and we gotta keep our promises. But we don't want to be too hard on you. So I says to Mark: 'Look here, this Saint must be a sensible young guy. Let's make him an offer.' '

Simon nodded thoughtfully, but Orcread's words only touched the fringes of his attention. He had been trying to find a reason why Orcread and Yeald should ever have en­tered the conference at all; and in searching for that reason he had made a remarkable discovery. For about the first time in his career he had grossly underestimated himself. He knew that his spectacular advent upon the New York scene had caused no small stir in certain circles, as indeed it had been designed to do; but he had not realized that his modest efforts could have raised so much dust as Orcread's presence appeared to indicate.

And then he began to understand what a small disturbance could throw a complicated machine out of gear, when the machine was balanced on an unstable foundation of bluff and apathy and chicane, and the disturbance was of that one peculiar kind. The newspaper headlines, which he had enjoyed egotistically flashed across his mind's eye with a new meaning. He had not thought, until Orcread told him, that the coinci­dence of the right man and the right moment, coupled with the mercurial enthusiasms of the New World, could have flung the figure of the Saint almost overnight onto a pinnacle where the public imagination would see it as a rallying point and the banner of a reformation. He had not thought that his dis­interested attempts to brighten the Manhattan and Long Island entertainments could have started a fresh wave of civic am­bition whose advance ripples had already been felt under the sensitive thrones of the political rulers.

He listened to Orcread again with renewed interest.

'So you see, we're being pretty generous. Two hundred thousand bucks is worth something to any man. And we get you out of a tough spot. You get out of here without even feel­ing uncomfortable—you go to England or anywhere else you like. A young guy like you could have a good time with two hundred grand. And I'm here to tell you that it's on the up-and-up.'

Simon Templar looked at him with a slow and deceptive smile. The glitter of amusement in the Saint's eyes was faint.

'You're making me feel almost sentimental, Bob,' he said gravely. 'And what is the trivial service I have to do to earn all these benefits?'

Oscread threw his mauled cigar away, and parked the thumb thus released in the other armhole of his waistcoat. He rocked back on his heels, with his prosperous paunch thrown out, and beamed heartily.

'Well . . . nothing,' he said. 'All we want to do is stop this sort of thing going on. Well, naturally it wouldn't be any good packing you off if things went on just the same. So all we'd ask you to do is tell us who it is that's backing you— tell us who the other guys in your mob are—so we can make them the same sort of proposition, and that'll be the end of it. What d'you say? Do we call it a deal?'

The Saint shook his head regretfully.

'You may call it.a deal, if you like,' he said gently, 'but I'm afraid I call it bushwah. You see, I'm not that sort of a girl.'

'He's nuts,' said Heimie Felder doggedly, out of a deep silence; and Orcread swung round on him savagely.