18 The Saint Bids Diamonds (Thieves' Picnic)

Simon turned the car slowly round into the Plaza de la Republica and tilted his head significantly towards the tonneau.

'I'm sure you will,' he agreed patiently. 'But I have to keep on reminding you about Uncle. Or will you carry him?'

'Is he all right?'

She turned round quickly, and the Saint also looked back as he brought the Hirondel to a stop outside the Hotel Orotava. The only person visible in the back seat was Hoppy Uniatz, who did not seem to have fully grasped his obligations as an administrator of first aid. Mr Uniatz was lighting a large cigar; and, for all the evidence to the contrary, he might have been sitting on his patient.

'Sure, de old buzzard is okay, miss,' said Mr Uni­atz cheerfully. 'He just took a bit of massage, but dat's nut'n. You oughta seen what de cops done to me one time when dey had me in de kitchen.'

Simon saw the pain in her eyes.

'We must take him to a doctor,' she said.

'By all means,' he assented amiably. 'Who is your doctor?'

She passed a hand shakily over her forehead.

'I'm afraid I don't know one --'

'Nor do I. And from what I do know about Spanish doctors, if he's not dead yet they'll soon find a way to finish him off. I could look after him much better myself. Why not let's take him in here and see about fixing him up?'

'I don't want to go on bothering you.'

The Saint chuckled and reached back to open the rear door.

'Take him inside, Hoppy,' he ordered. 'Pretend he's passed out, and get him up to my room-you'd better act a bit squiffy yourself to complete the pic­ture. We'll follow in a few minutes so it won't look too much like a party.'

Mr Uniatz nodded and hauled the patient out like a sack. As he started across the pavement, he lifted up his unmelodious voice in a song of which the distinguishable words made the Saint mildly thankful that no English- speaking residents were likely to be within earshot.

Again the girl made an involuntary movement of protest; but Simon took her by the arm.

'What's on your mind?' he asked quietly; and she shrugged helplessly.

He could feel the tenseness of her under his touch.

'Let me look at you,' she said.

He took off his hat and turned towards her. Her eyes searched his face. They were brown eyes, he noticed, and her hair shone copper-brown under the lamplight. He realised that if her mouth had been happy it would have been very happy, a soft, red, full-lipped mouth that would have tantalised the imagina­tion of any man whose impulses were human.

She saw a face coloured with the warm tan of un-walled horizons and lighted with the clearest blue eyes that she had ever seen. It was a face that might have leapt to life from the portrait of some sixteenth-century buccaneer; a face that managed to harmonise a dozen strange contradictions between the firm chin and finely chiselled lips and the broad artist's fore­head, and yet altogether cast in such a gay and reckless mould that it took all contradictions in its stride and made them insignificant. It was the face of a poet with the dare-devil humour of a cavalier, the face of an unrepentant outlaw with the calm straightforwardness of an idealist. It was the sort of face that she thought Robin Hood might have had-and did not know then that a thousand newspapers had unanimously named its owner the Robin Hood of modern crime.

But Simon Templar opened his face for inspection in the main square of Santa Cruz without a twinge of anxiety even for the two guardias who were strolling by; though he knew that photographic reproductions of it were to be found in the police archives of almost every civilised country in the world. For at that particular time the Saint was not officially wanted by the police of any country-a fact which many citizens who had met him in the past had reason to regard with grave indignation.

'I'm just-rather upset,' she said, as if she was satisfied with the result of her scrutiny.

'That's only natural,' said the Saint lightly. 'Getting beaten up by a bunch of toughs isn't what they usually recommend for soothing the nerves. Now let's go and see what we can do for Uncle.'

He got out and opened the door for her; and the music that was still lilting through the depths of his being opened itself up and sent its rapturous diapasons warbling towards the moon. He knew now that his inspiration must be right.

Somewhere in the vicinity of Santa Cruz there was the material for even more fun and games than he had optimistically expected-and he had come there in the definite expectation of a good deal. And he had tumbled straight into it within a few hours of getting off the boat. Which was only the normal course of events, for him. If there was trouble brewing any­where, he tumbled into it: it was his destiny, the sublime compensation for all the other things that his outlawry might have denied him.

It never occurred to him to doubt that it had hap­pened again. Otherwise, why had the three toughs been so very determined to beat up the old man whom he had rescued? And why, when he interfered, did they fight to the last man for the privilege of going on with the job? And why, when he had dealt with them once, had they brought their artillery into play to try and start the fight over again? And why was the girl still so afraid even of her rescuer, still suspicious of him even after he had indicated which side he was on in no uncertain manner? And why, most intriguing point of all, hadn't she volunteered one single word of explana­tion about how the fight started, as anyone else would automatically have done? The whole episode fairly bristled with questions, and none of them could be satisfactorily answered by the circumstances of commonplace highway robbery.

'You know,' Simon burbled genially on, 'these things always make me wonder for a bit whether it's safe to look a policeman in the eye for the next few days. I remember the last time anything like this happened to me-it was in Innsbruck, but it was almost exactly the same sort of thing. A friend of mine and myself horned in on a scrap where one harmless-looking little bird was getting the hide pasted off him by three large, ferocious-looking thugs. We laid them out and heaved them into the river, and it started no end of trouble. You see, it turned out that the harmless- looking little bird was carrying a bag full of stolen jewels, and the three ferocious-looking thugs were perfectly