are running out. It had happened to Al Eisenfeld too suddenly for him to understand--he had no time to look back and count the incredible minutes in which his world had been turned upside down. Perhaps he himself had no clear idea what he was doing, but he knew that he was hearing death in the quiet voice that spoke out of the darkness in front of him.
His muscles carried him away without any conscious command from his brain, and he was unaware of the queer growling cry that rattled in his throat. There was a crash of sound in front of him as he sprang blindly forward, and a tongue of reddish-orange flame spat out of the darkness almost in his face. . . .
Simon Templar steadied himself on one of the scaffold poles and stared down into the square black mould of the monument; but there was nothing that he could see, and the silence was unbroken. After a while his fingers let go the gun, and a couple of seconds later the thud of its burying itself in the wet cement at the bottom of the shaft echoed hollowly back to him.
Presently he climbed up to the chute from which the monument was being filled. He found a great mound of sacks of cement stacked beside it ready for use, and, after a little more search, a hose conveniently arranged to provide water. He was busy for three hours before he decided that he had done enough.
'And knowing that these thoughts are beating in all our hearts,' boomed the voice of the Distinguished Personage through eight loud-speakers, 'it will always be my proudest memory that I was deemed worthy of the honour of unveiling this eternal testimonial to the man who has devoted his life to the task of making the people of Elmford proud and happy in their great city--the mayor whom you all know and love so well, Sam Purdell!'
The flag which covered the carved inscription on the base of the Purdell memorial fluttered down. A burst of well-organized cheering volleyed from five thousand throats. The cameramen dashed forward with clicking shutters. The bandmaster raised his baton. The brass and wood winds inflated their lungs. A small urchin close to the platform swallowed a piece of chewing gum, choked, and began to cry. . . ? The strains of the 'Star Spangled Banner' blasted throbbingly through the afternoon air.
Then, to the accompaniment of a fresh howl of cheering, Sam Purdell stepped to the microphone. He wiped his eyes and swallowed once or twice before he spoke.
'My friends,' he said, 'this is not a time when I would ask you to listen to a speecn. There ain't---isn't anything I can think of worthy of this honour you have done me. I can only repeat the promise which you have all heard me make before--that while I am Mayor of this city there will be only one principle in everything over which I have control: Honesty and a square deal for every man, woman and child in Elmford.'
The cheers followed his car as he drove away accompanied by his round perspiring wife and his round perspiring daughters. Mrs Purdell clutched his hand in a warm moist grip.
'That was such a beautiful speech you made, Sam,' she said a little tearfully.
Sam Purdell shook his head. He had one secret sorrow.
'I wish Al could have been there,' he said.
IV THE WICKED COUSIN
When simon templar arrived in Los Angeles there was a leaden ceiling of cloud over the sky and a cool wind blowing. A few drops of unenthusiastic rain moistened the pavements and speckled the shoulders of his coat. The porter who was loading his bags into a taxi assured him that it was most unusual weather, and he felt instantly at home.
Later on, comfortably stretched out on a divan in the sitting room of his suite at the hotel in Hollywood upon which he had chosen to confer the somewhat debatable honour of his tenancy, with a highball at his elbow and a freshly lighted cigarette smouldering contentedly between his lips, he turned the pages of the address book on his knee and considered what his next steps should be to improve that first feeling of a welcome return.
He was not there on business. To be quite accurate, none of the stages of the last few months of carefree wandering which had just completed their vague object of leading him across America from coast to coast had been undertaken with a view to business. If business had materialized on more than one occasion, it was be-cause there was something about Simon Templar which attracted adventure by the same kind of mysterious but inescapable cosmic law which compels a magnet to attract steel or a politician to attract attention; and if much of that business was not looked upon favourably by the Law--or would not have been favourably looked upon if the Law had known all that there was to know about it--this was because Simon Templar's business had an unfortunate habit of falling into categories which gave many people good reason to wonder what right he had to the nickname of the Saint by which he was far more widely known than he was by his baptismal titles. It is true that these buccaneering raids of his which had earned him the subtitle of 'The Robin Hood of Modern Crime' were invariably undertaken against the property, and occasionally the persons, of citizens who by no stretch of the imagination could have been called desirable; but the Law took no official cognizance of such small details. The Law, in the Saint's opinion, was a stodgy and elephantine institution which was chiefly justified in its existence by the pleasantly musical explosive noises which it made when he broke it. Certainly he was not thinking of business. In Hollywood he had many genuine friends, few of whom gave much consideration to the sensational legends that were associated with his name in less unsophisticated circles, and his only immediate problem was to which one of them he should first break the dazzling news of his arrival. He paused at one name after another, recalling its personality: movie executives, directors, writers, actors and actresses both great and small and a certain number of ordinary human beings. He wanted--what did he want? A touch of excitement, preferably feminine, beauty, a little of the glamour and gay unreality with which the very name of Hollywood is inseparably linked in imagination if not in fact. He wanted some of these things very much. His last stop had been made in the state of Utah.
There was a girl called Jacqueline Laine whom Simon remembered suddenly, as one does sometimes remember people, with a sense of startling familiarity and a kind of guilty amazement that he should have allowed her to slip out of his mind for so long. Once she was remembered, he had no more hesitation. No one else could have been so obviously the one person in the world whom he had to call up at that moment.
He picked up the telephone.
'Hello, Jacqueline,' he said when she answered. 'Do you know who this is?'
'I know,' she said. 'It's Franklin D. Roosevelt.'
'You have a marvellous memory. Do you still eat?'
'Whenever I'm thirsty. Do you?'
'I nibble a crumb now and then. Come out with me tonight and see if we can still take it.'
'Simon, I'd love to; but I'm in the most frantic muddle----'
'So is the rest of the world, darling. But it's two years since I've seen you, and that's about seven hundred and thirty days too long. Don't you realize that I've come halfway around the world, surviving all manner of perils and slaying large numbers of ferocious dragons, just to get here in time to take you out to dinner tonight?'
'I know, but-- Oh well. It would be so thrilling to see you. Come around about seven and I'll try to get a bit straightened out before then.'
'I'll be there,' said the Saint.
He spent some of the intervening time in making himself the owner of. a car, and shortly after half-past six he turned it westwards into the stream of studio traffic homing towards Beverly Hills. Somewhere along Sunset Boulevard he turned off to the right and began to climb one of the winding roads that led up into the hills. The street lights were just beginning to trace their twinkling geometrical network over the vast panorama of cities spread out beneath him, as the car soared smoothly higher into the luminous blue-grey twilight.
He found his way with the certainty of vivid remembrance; and he was fully ten minutes early when he pulled the car into a bay by the roadside before the gate of Jacqueline Laine's house. He climbed out and started towards the gate, lighting a cigarette as he went, and as he approached it he perceived that somebody else was approaching the same gate from the opposite side. Changing his course a little to the left so that the departing guest would have room to pass him, the Saint observed that he was a small and elderly gent arrayed in clothes so shapeless and ill fitting that they gave his figure a comical air of having been loosely and inaccurately strung together from a selection of stuffed bags of cloth. He wore a discolored Panama hat of weird and wonderful architecture, and carried an incongruous green umbrella furled, but still flapping in a bedraggled and forlorn sort of way, under his left arm; his face was rubicund and bulbous like his body, looking as if it had been carelessly slapped together out of a few odd lumps of pink plasticine.
As Simon moved to the left, the elderly gent duplicated the manoeuvre. Simon turned his feet and swerved politely to the right. The elderly gent did exactly the same, as if he were Simon's own reflection in a distorting mirror. Simon stopped altogether and decided to economize energy by letting the elderly gent make the next move
