15 The Saint in New York

'You shut your damn mouth!' he snarled.

He turned to the Saint again, the benevolent beam still hollowly half frozen on his face, as if he had started to wipe it off and had forgotten to finish the job, his jaw thrust out and his flinty eyes narrowed.

'See here,' he growled, 'I'm not kidding, and if you know what's good for you, you'll lay off that stuff. I'm giving you a chance to get out of this and save your skin. What's funny . about it?'

'Nothing,' said the Saint blandly, 'except that you're sitting on the wrong flagpole. Nobody's backing me, and I haven't got a mob—so what can I do about it? I hate to see these tender impulses of yours running away with you, but ——'

A vague anger began to darken Orcread's face.

'Will you talk English?' he grated. 'You ain't been run­ning this business by yourself just to pass the time. What are you getting out of it, and who's giving it to you?'

The Saint shrugged wearily.

'I've been .trying to tell you,' he said. 'Nobody's backing me, and I haven't got a mob. Ask any of this beauty chorus whether they've ever seen me with a mob. I, personally, am the whole works. I am the wheels, the chassis, and the gadget that squirts oil into the gudgeon pins. I am the one-man band. So all you've got to do is to hand me that two hundred grand and kiss me good-bye.'

Orcread stared at him for a moment longer and then turned away abruptly. He walked across the room and plumped himself into a chair between Yeald and Kuhlmann. In the voiceless pause that followed, the lips of Heimie Felder could be seen framing tireless dogmas about nuts.

The Saint smiled to himself and bummed a cigarette from the nearest member of the audience. He was obliged dis­passionately. Inhaling the smoke dreamily, he glanced around at the hard, emotionless faces under the lights and realized quite calmly that any amusement which he derived from the situation originated entirely in his own irresponsible sense of humour.

Not that he was averse to tight corners and dangerous games —his whole history, in fact, was composed of a long series of them. But it occurred to him that the profitable and amusing phase of the soiree, if there had ever been one, was now def­initely over. He had established beyond question the fact that Orcread and the district attorney were in the racket up to their necks, but the importance of that confirmation was almost entirely academic. More important than that was the concrete revelation of their surprisingly urgent interest in his own activities. Judged solely on its merits, the hippo­potamoid diplomacy of Honest Bob Orcread earned nothing but a sustained horselaugh—Simon had not once been under the delusion that any of the gentlemen present would have allowed him to be handed two hundred thousand dollars; under their noses, or that after the ceremony they would have escorted him to the next outward liner with mutual expres­sions of philanthropy and good will—but the fact that the offer had been made at all, and that Orcread had thought it worth while lending his own rhetorical genius to it, wanted some thinking over. And most certainly there were places in New York more conducive to calm and philosophic thought than the spot in which he was at present In short, he saw no good point in further dalliance at Charley's Place, and the real difficulty was how he could best take his leave.

From the fragments of conversation that reached him from the table, he gathered that altruistic efforts were being made to solve his problem for him. The booming voice of Honest Bob Orcread, even when lowered to what its owner believed to be an airy whisper, was penetrating enough to carry the general theme of the discussion to the Saint's ears.

'How do we know it ain't a stall?' he could be heard reiter­ating. 'A guy couldn't do all that by himself.'

The district attorney pursed his lips, and his answer rustled dustily like dry leaves.

'Personally, I believe he is telling the truth. I was watching him all the time. And nobody has seen anybody else with him.'

'Dot's right,' Kuhlmann agreed. 'It's chust von man mit a lot of luck, taking everybody by surprise. I can look after him.'

Orcread was worried, in a heavy and struggling way.

'I hope you're right. But that don't settle anything. We gotta do something that'll satisfy the public. If you make a martyr of him it'll only make things worse. Now, if we could get him in court an' make a monkey out of him, we could say: 'Well, we done our duty. We caught the guy that was making all the trouble. And now look at him. We could fix things