and approximately fifteen thousand pounds' worth of untraceable small change had vanished with them. Their car had been found abandoned only a few blocks from the bank premises, and there the trail ended; and the Saint knew that it was likely to stay ended there for all the clues contained in the printed story. England was a small country, but it contained plenty of room for two unidentified bank robbers to hide in.
Simon refolded the newspaper and dumped it resignedly on the bar; and as he did so it lay in such a way that the headlines summarizing the epochal utterance of Mr Ebenezer Hogsbotham stared up at him with a complacent prominence that added insult to injury.
The Saint stared malevolently back at them; and in the mood which circumstances had helped to thrust upon him their effect had an almost fateful inevitability. No other man on earth would have taken them in just that way; but there never had been another man in history so harebrained as the Saint could be when his rebellious instincts boiled over. The idea that was being born to him grew momentarily in depth and richness. He put down his glass, and went to the telephone booth to consult the directory. The action was rather like the mental tossing of a coin. And it came down heads. Mr Hogsbotham was on the telephone. And accordingly, decisively, his address was in the book. . . .
The fact seemed to leave no further excuse for hesitation. Simon went back to the bar, and his head sang carols with the blitheness of his own insanity.
'Put that poison away, Hoppy,' he said. 'We're going places.'
Mr Uniatz gulped obediently, and looked up with a contented beam.
'Dijja t'ink of sump'n to do, boss?' he asked eagerly.
The Saint nodded. His smile was extravagantly radiant.
'I did. We're going to burgle the house of Hogsbotham.'
II
IT WAS one of those lunatic ideas that any inmate of an asylum might have conceived, but only Simon Templar could be relied on to carry solemnly into execution. He didn't waste any more time on pondering over it, or even stop to consider any of its legal aspects. He drove his huge cream and red Hirondel snarling over the roads to Chertsey at an average speed that was a crime in itself, and which would probably have given a nervous breakdown to any passenger less impregnably phlegmatic than Mr Uniatz; but he brought it intact to the end of the trip without any elaborations on his original idea or any attempt to produce them. He was simply on his way to effect an unlawful entry into the domicile of Mr Hogsbotham, and there to do something or other that would annoy Mr Hogsbotham greatly and at the same time relieve his own mood of general annoyance; but what that something would be rested entirely with the inspiration of the moment. The only thing he was sure about was that the inspiration would be forthcoming.
The telephone directory had told him that Mr Hogsbotham lived at Chertsey. It also located Mr Hogsbotham's home on Greenleaf Road, which Simon found to be a narrow turning off Chertsey Lane running towards the river on the far side of the town. He drove the Hirondel into a field a hundred yards beyond the turning and left it under the broad shadow of a clump of elms, and returned to Greenleaf Road on foot. And there the telephone directory's information became vague. Following the ancient custom by which the Englishman strives to preserve the sanctity of his castle from strange visitors by refusing to give it a street number, hiding it instead under a name like 'Mon Repos', 'Sea View', 'The Birches', 'Dunrovin', 'Jusweetu', and other similar whimsies the demesne of Mr Hogsbotham was apparently known simply as 'The Snuggery'. Which might have conveyed volumes to a postman schooled in tracking self-effacing citizens to their lairs, but wasn't the hell of a lot of help to any layman who was trying to find the place for the first time on a dark night.
Simon had not walked very far down Greenleaf Road when that fact was brought home to him. Greenleaf Road possessed no street lighting to make navigation easier. It was bordered by hedges of varying heights and densities, behind which lighted windows could sometimes be seen and some times not. At intervals, the hedges yawned into gaps from which ran well-kept drives and things that looked like cart-tracks in about equal proportions. Some of the
