paper which he had opened. It was not a banknote. It was simply a piece of perforated tissue on which had been stamped in red the drawing of a quaint little figure with straight lines for body and legs and arms and an elliptical halo slanted over his round featureless head. . . . Osbett tore open the other papers with suddenly savage hands. Every one of them was the same, stamped with the same symbolic figure....
'The Saint!' he whispered.
Nancock goggled stupidly at the scattered drawings.
'I—I don't understand,' he faltered, and he was white at the lips.
Osbett looked up at him.
'Then you'd better start thinking!' he rasped, and his eyes had gone flat and emotionless again. 'The Saint sent this, and if he knows about the money——'
'Not 'sent', dear old Whiskers, not 'sent',' a coolly mocking voice corrected him from the doorway. 'I brought it along myself, just for the pleasure of seeing your happy faces.'
The Saint stood leaning against the jamb of the door smiling and debonair.
VIII
THE TWO men stood and gawped at him as if he had been a visitor from Mars. A gamut of emotions that must have strained their endocrine glands to bursting point skittered over their faces like foam over a waterfall. They looked as if they had been simultaneously goosed with high-voltage wires and slugged in the solar plexus with invisible sledgehammers. Simon had to admit that there was some excuse for them. In fact, he had himself intentionally provided the excuse. There were certain reactions which only the ungodly could perform in their full richness that never failed to give him the same exquisite and fundamental joy that the flight and impact of a well-aimed custard pie gives to a movie audience; and for some seconds he was regaled with as ripe and rounded an exhibition of its kind as the hungriest heart could desire.
The Saint propped himself a little more comfortably against his backrest, and flicked a tiny bombshell of ash from his cigarette.
'I hope you don't mind my asking myself in like this,' he remarked engagingly. 'But I thought we ought to get together on this tea business. Maybe I could give you some new ideas. I was mixing a few odds and ends together myself yesterday——'
Credit must be given to Mr Osbett for making the first recovery. He was light-years ahead of Nancock, who stood as if his feet had sunk into the floor above the ankles, looking as though his lower jaw had dislocated itself at its fullest stretch. In one sheeting flash of dazzling clarity it dawned upon him that the man who stood there was unarmed—that the Saint's hands were empty except for a cigarette. His mouth shut tight under the spreading plumes of his moustache as he made a lightning grab towards the inside of his coat.
'Really!' protested the Saint. 'Weren't you ever taught not to scratch yourself in public ?'
Osbett had just time to blink—once. And then he felt as if a cyclone had hit him. His fingers had not even closed on the butt of the automatic in his shoulder holster when he found himself full in the path of what seemed like a ton of incarnate dynamite moving with the speed of an express train. Something like a chunk of teak zoomed out of the cyclone and collided with his jaw: as if from a great distance, he heard it make a noise like a plank snapping in half. Then his head seemed to split open and let in a gash of light through which his brain sank down into cottony darkness.
The rest of him cannoned soggily into Nancock, bounded sideways, and cascaded over a chair. Osbett and the chair crashed to the floor together; and the stout man reeled drunkenly.
'Here,' he began.
Perhaps he did not mean the word as an invitation, but it appeared to have that effect. Something possessed of staggering velocity and hardness accepted the suggestion and moved into his stomach. The stout man said
