But those choices were over now, for her as they were for Uttershaw.
And as they might be over for him too, if he had been so preoccupied with other excessive cleverness that he had overdone his own, after all.
He said: 'This makes quite a curtain.'
He turned abruptly on his heel, and walked in an aimless way towards the bookcase.
And thought what an immortal laugh it would be if after so much staging the clock in his mind had never been really right.
And what a picturesque finale it all was. . . .
' 'Our death is but a sleep and a forgetting',' Uttershaw said gently; and the Saint stood still.
'I hope that will make you very happy,' he said.
He thought that Inspector Fernack had delayed his entrance to the last possible filament of suspense, doubtless with all conceivable malice aforethought, and then chosen a peculiarly dangerous moment for it. But he admitted to himself that he had helped to ask for that.
And the temptation to repay the performance was almost more than he could resist, but he knew at the same time that that filament was too fragile to risk even with a breath.
He seemed to have no emotional feeling at all; but he had his own. quality of mercy that was apart from all the other things.
As the door burst open, and Fernack lumbered in, and Utter-shaw whirled at the sound, Simon Templar took his gun out of the vase of chrysanthemums and fired as carefully as if he had been on a target range.
16 The Saint said: 'No.'
'Why?' wheedled Titania Ourley.
'Because you don't have to try and pump me for information like you did at the Algonquin, because I'm not investigating your personal nastiness or your husband's sub-rosa activities. That's been taken over by the--oh, Lord--proper authorities. Because you can read the newspapers for anything it's good for you to know. Because I hate to rumba. And,' said the Saint, with dispassionate deliberation, 'because you not only look like a cow, but you smell like tuberoses on a fresh grave.'
He put the telephone back on its rest and lighted a cigarette but he had barely brought it alive when the bell rang again.
The operator said: 'I have a call from Washington.'
'Hamilton,' said the telephone, with pleasant precision. 'Nice work, Simon.'
'Thank you,' said the Saint.
'I just wish that one of these days you'd bring 'em back alive. There is such a thing as good propaganda, if you don't know it.'
The Saint hitched himself more comfortably on to his bed, and adjusted his bathrobe over his long legs. His mind was clouded with many memories, and yet the core of it was clear and sure and without remorse.
'Uttershaw wasn't such a bad fellow, in his own way,' he said. 'I guess my hand must have slipped. But if he had any time to think, I think he would have liked that.'
The telephone played with its own static.
'What happens with Ourley?' it asked after a while.
'I just did a little more for him,' said the Saint. 'You could never hang anything on him in a court of law so far as this case is concerned; but he still has Titania, and I've come to the conclusion that as a life sentence she's even worse than Alcatraz. And with the encouragement I gave her a few minutes ago, she should be even better company than she was before.'
'That Sinclair girl ought to get about ten years, with Fernack's testimony of what he heard from outside the door before he broke in,' said the telephone callously. 'She's a good-looking number, though, isn't she? What happened to you? Are you slipping?'
'Maybe I am.'
'Well . . . Whenever you're ready, there is something else I'd like to talk to you about.'
The Saint laughed a little, and it was silent and all the way inside himself, and deep and unimportant and nothing that could be talked about ever.
'I'll catch a plane this afternoon and meet you at the Carlton for dinner. I was just wondering what I could find to do.'
He lay on the bed for a little while longer after he had hung up, smoking his cigarette and thinking about several things or perhaps not anything much. But he kept remembering a girl with hair that had been stroked by midnight, and eyes that were all darkness, and lips that were like orchid petals. And that was no damn good at all.
He got up and began to pack.
II
THE SIZZLING SABOTEUR
Simon templar had met a lot of unusual obstructions on the highway in the course of a long and varied career of eccentric traveling. They had ranged from migrant sheep to diamond necklaces, from circus parades to damsels in distress; and he had acquired a tolerant feeling towards most of them--particularly the damsels in distress. But a partly incinerated tree, he felt, was carrying originality a little far. He thought that the Texas Highway Department should at least have been able to eliminate such exotic hazards as that.
Especially since there were no local trees in sight to account for it, so that somebody must have taken considerable trouble to import it. The surrounding country was flat, marshy, and reedy; and the sourish salty smell of the sea was a slight stench in the nostrils. The road was a graveled affair with a high crown, possibly for drainage, and not any too wide although comparatively smooth. It wound and snaked along through alternating patches I of sand and reeds like an attenuated sea serpent which had crawled out of Galveston Bay to sun itself on that desolate stretch of beach, so that Simon had seen the log a longish while before he was obliged to brake his car on account of it.
The car was a nice shiny black sedan of the 1942 or BF (Before Freezing) vintage; but it was no more incongruous on this ribbon of road than its driver. However, Simon Templar was noted for doing incongruous things. Enroute to Galveston via Texas City on Highway 146, he hadn't even reached Texas City. Somehow, back where the highway forked left from the Southern Pacific right-of-way, Simon had taken an even lefter turn which now had him heading southwards along a most erratic observation tour of the Gulf coastline. A long way from the metropolitan crowding of New York, where he had recently wound up a job --or even of St Louis, where he had been even more recently. Now his only company was the purring motor and an occasional raucous gull that flapped or soared above the marshland on predatory business of its own. Which didn't necessarily mean that that business was any less predatory than that of Simon Templar, who under his more publicised nickname of The Saint had once left sundry police departments and local underworlds equally flatfooted in the face of new and unchallenged records of preda- toriality--if this chronicler may inflict such a word on the long-suffering Messieurs Funk, Wagnalls, and Webster. The most immediately noticeable difference between the Saint and the seagull was the seagull's protective parosmia, or perversion of the sense of smell. . . . Yet the sun was still three hours high, and it was still twenty miles to Galveston unless the cartographer who had concocted the Saint's road map was trying in his small way to cheer the discouraged pilgrim.
And there was the smouldering blackened log laid almost squarely across the middle of the road, as if some diehard vigilante had made it his business to see that no casehardened voyager rushed through the scenery without a pause in which its deeper fascinations might have a chance to make their due impression on the soul.
Simon considered his own problem with clear blue eyes as the sedan came to a stop.
The road was too narrow for him to drive around the log; and in view of the tire rationing situation it was out of the question to try and drive over it. Which meant that somebody had to get out and move it. Which meant that the Saint had to move it himself.
Simon Templar said a few casual things about greenhorns who mislaid such sizeable chunks of their camp fires; but at the same time his eyes were glancing left and right with the endless alertness hardening in their sapphire calm, and his tanned face setting into the bronze fighting mask to which little things like that could instantly reduce it.
He knew from all the pitiless years behind him how easily this could be an effective ambush. When he got out to move the smouldering log, it would be a simple job for a couple of hirelings of the ungodly to attack him. A
