16 The Saint Overboard

'Then you were luckier than we were,' said Arnheim, with his round flabby face full of admiration and interest. 'Did he put up a fight?'

'He didn't have a chance——'

Simon looked up as Loretta came towards them along the deck. He had felt the beat of his heart when he saw her, had seemed to discover an absurb lightening of the perfect morning as if a screen had been taken away from before the sun. Vogel took her arm.

'My dear, Mr Tombs has been telling us what happened after he left us last night. He had one of those harbour thieves on board his own boat—and caught him!'

'But how exciting.' She was smiling coolly, but her eyes were steady with questions. 'How did you do it?'

'He came along to my bloke, Orace, and said I wanted him—it must have been while we were at the hotel. Orace was a bit suspicious and wanted to know more about it, and then this fellow hit him over the head with something. Orace came to again before the burglar had gone, and he went on with the fight. They were still at it when I got back. The burglar had a gun and everything, but it had misfired, so——'

'What happened?'

Vogel had asked the question, with his face as calm as stone; and the Saint had known that his answer would mark the sharp pinnacle of the moment which he had deliberately courted. He had allowed himself time to light a cigarette before he replied.

'Well, we were wrestling all over the saloon trying to get his gun away from him, and Orace grabbed hold of a stanchion that he'd brought down to clean and hit him over the head. Then we tied him up and took him ashore and lugged him along to the police station. But when they tried to give him first aid, they found he was—sort of dead.'

For a little while there was an absolute silence. Even in the most humdrum circumstances, a revelation like that would natu­rally have taken a few seconds to establish itself in the minds of the audience; but the Saint had been waiting for a more preg­nant silence than that. It was while he was actually on his way over to the Falkenberg that he had finally decided to bring his story as close to the truth as possible. If he had said that the burglar was lodged alive in jail, and Vogel's ingenuity had been equal to devising a way of putting through an inquiry, the fiction could have been exposed in an hour or two. But the truth would offer an obvious inducement to wait for confirmation in a news­paper story which could not appear for another twenty-four hours, and it might well dispose of direct inquiries by making their prospects manifestly unprofitable: and, as Simon had told it, it had a ring of authenticity which an invention might not have had.

Simon had been waiting for a pregnant silence, and he was not disappointed. Yet even he did not know until later how much that silence had contained.

'Dead?' Arnheim repeated at last, in a strained voice.

The Saint nodded.

'Orace must have underestimated his strength, or something— I suppose it's quite understandable, as we were fighting all over the place. He'd bashed the devil's skull right in.'

'But—but won't you be arrested?' faltered Loretta.

'Oh, no. They call it accidental death. It was the fellow's own fault for being a burglar. Still, it's rather a gruesome sort of thing to have on your conscience.'

Vogel put up a hand and stroked the side of his chin. His pas­sionless eyes, hard and unwinking as discs of jet, were fastened on the Saint with a terrible brightness of concentration. For the first time since they had been talking there seemed to be some­thing frozen and mechanical about his tight-lipped smile.

'Of course it must be,' he agreed. 'But as you say, the man brought it on himself. You mustn't let it worry you too much.'

'What's worrying him?'

The Professor came ambling along, with his rosy cheeks beam­ing and his premature grey beard fluttering in the breeze, and the story had to be started over again. While it was being repeated, a seaman came up and handed Vogel a telegram. Vogel opened it with a slow measured stroke of his thumb-nail: while he read it, and during the conclusion of the second telling of the adventure, he seemed to regain complete command of himself with a mental struggle that showed only in the almost imperceptibly whitened pallor of his face.

He buttoned his jacket and glanced along the