started from less sinister openings than that, and she measured him now with a premonition that she had not yet heard the last of that random threat. For a whole month he had done nothing illegal, and in his life thirty days of untarnished virtue was a long time. She studied the buccaneering lines of his lean figure, sensed the precariously curbed restlessness under his lounging ease, and knew that even if no exterior adventure crossed his path that month of peace would come to spontaneous disruption. ...
And then he turned back with a smile that did nothing to reassure her.
'Well, we shall see,' he murmured, and glanced at his watch. 'It's time you were on your way to meet that moribund aunt of yours. You can make sure she hasn't changed her will, because we might stir up some excitement by bumping her off.'
She made a face at him and stood up.
'What are you going to do tonight ?'
'I called Claud Eustace this morning and made a date to take him out to dinner—maybe he'll know about something exciting that's going on. And it's time we were on our way too. Are you ready, Hoppy?'
The rudimentary assortment of features which constituted the hairless or front elevation of Hoppy Uniatz's head emerged lingeringly from behind the bottle of Caledonian dew with which he had been making another of his indomitable attempts to assuage the chronic aridity of his gullet.
'Sure, boss,' he said agreeably. 'Ain't I always ready? Where do we meet, dis dame we gotta bump off?'
The Saint sighed.
'You'll find out,' he said. 'Let's go.'
Mr Uniatz trotted placidly after him. In Mr Uniatz's mind, a delicate organ which he had to be careful not to overwork, there was room for none of the manifestations of philosophical indignation with which Simon Templar was sometimes troubled. By the time it had found space for the ever-present problems of quenching an insatiable thirst and finding a sufficient supply of lawfully bumpable targets to keep the rust from forming in the barrel of his Betsy, it really had room for only one other idea. And that other permanently comforting and omnipresent notion was composed entirely of the faith and devotion with which he clung to the intellectual pre-eminence of the Saint. The Saint, Mr Uniatz had long since realized, with almost religious awe, could Think. To Mr Uniatz, a man whose rare experiments with Thought had always given him a dull pain under the hat, this discovery had simplified life to the point where Paradise itself would have had few advantages to offer, except possibly rivers flowing with Scotch whisky. He simply did what he was told, and everything came out all right. Anything the Saint said was okay with him.
It is a lamentable fact that Chief-Inspector Claud Eustace Teal had no such faith to buoy him up. Mr Teal's views were almost diametrically the reverse of those which gave so much consolation to Mr Uniatz. To Mr Teal, the Saint was a perennial harbinger of woe, an everlasting time-bomb planted under his official chair—with the only difference that when ordinary bombs blew up they were at least over and done with, whereas the Saint was a bomb with the supernatural and unfair ability to blow up whenever it wanted to without in any way impairing its capacity for future explosions. He had accepted the Saint's invitation to dinner with an uneasy and actually unjustified suspicion that there was probably a catch in it, as there had been in most of his previous encounters with the Saint; and there was a gleam of something like smugness in his sleepy eyes as he settled more firmly behind his desk at Scotland Yard and shook his head with every conventional symptom of regret.
'I'm sorry, Saint,' he said. 'I ought to have phoned you, but I've been so busy. I'm going to have to ask you to fix another evening. We had a bank holdup at Staines today, and I've got to go down there and take over.'
Simon's brows began to rise by an infinitesimal hopeful fraction.
'A bank holdup, Claud? How much did they get away with?'
'About fifteen thousand pounds,' Teal said grudgingly. 'You ought to know.
