The Saint and Mr Teal (Once More the Saint)

Simon watched him go, inhaling speculatively.

'Staying in the hotel?' he queried.

'Yes,' said Mr. Smithson Smith, with his eyes on the developments below. 'They're staying here.'

'Have they been here long?'

The question was put with perfect casualness.

'About a fortnight,' said Mr. Smithson Smith. 'I don't know much about them. They're out most of the day-I think they go bathing, but by the look of the basket they take with them you'd think they needed towels enough to dry a regiment.'

'They aren't very sunburnt,' said the Saint softly, almost as if he were speaking to himself.

He picked up his glass mechanically-and put it down again. The young man with the injured ankle was coming back, limping painfully and leaning on his companion's arm.

'Silly thing to do, wasn't it?' he said; and Mr. Smithson Smith nodded with some concern.

'Would you like me to get you a doctor?'

The young man shook his head.

'I'll just go and bathe it with cold water and rest it for a bit. I don't think it's anything serious.'

The three-legged party went on through into the hotel premises; and Simon sat down again and lighted another cigarette. Mr. Smithson Smith's gentle voice was continuing his interrupted anecdote, but the Saint scarcely heard a word. The narrative formed no more than a vague undercurrent of sound in his senses, a restful background to his working thoughts. In a life like the Saint's, a man's existence is prolonged from day to day by nothing but that ceaseless vigilance, that unsleeping activity of a system of question marks in the mind which are never satisfied with the obvious expla­nations that pass through the torpid consciousness of the average man. To him, anything out of the ordinary was a red light of possible danger, never to be dismissed as mere harmless eccentricity: nine times out of ten the alarm might be proved false, but it could never be ignored. And it seemed odd that two very respectable young men should have attracted attention by carrying an outsize basket of towels; odd, too, that after bathing every day for a fortnight they should still have the soft white bodies of men who have not been free of the muffling protection of clothes for many years. . . . And then the Saint's probing suspicions came to a head in a sudden flash of inspiration, and he pulled himself swiftly out of his chair. He was across the bar in a flash, over to the closed door through which the two respectable young men had disappeared; and Mr. Smithson Smith, startled to silence by his abrupt movement, noticed in an eerie moment of perplexity that the Saint's feet made no sound as they swung over the floor. It was like the charge of a leopard in its smooth powerful noiseless-ness; and then Simon Templar had his hand on the handle of the door, jerking it open, and the young man who had assisted the injured one stumbled and almost fell into the room.

'Come in, brother,' said the Saint heartily. 'Come in and have a drink.'

The young man's face went red, and his mouth opened in a weak grin.

'I-I'm sorry,' he stammered. 'I must have tripped or something --'

A thin smile cut into the corners of the Saint's mouth.

'Sure you must, brother.'

'I'll-I'll have a whisky and soda.'

'You'll have beer!'

The Saint caught up his own glass from the table and thrust it out. He was only a yard from the other, on his toes, indefinably dangerous.

'Drink this,' he said; and the young man went white.

'I-I don't --'

Simon's free fist caught him on the mouth and knocked him backwards.

'I'll have the police on you for this,' blustered the other; and the Saint smiled again.

'Go get him. And don't be too lavish with your plurals, because there is only one. But ask Abdul what he thinks of the idea first, or you may find yourself unpopular. Now amscray-and if you value your beauty, don't damage my beer again!'

He seized the respectable young man by the ear and propelled him deftly and vigorously out of the bar; then he turned back to face the outraged stare of Mr. Smithson Smith. The course of events had been so violently sudden and incomprehensible that the manager had been pardonably nonplussed; but by this point at least his path of duty seemed unmistakable.

'Why-really, Templar!' he said, with his quiet voice shaking. 'You can't behave like that here. I shall have to apologize to my guest. I'm afraid you'll have to leave this bar --'

Simon took his arm calmly, and pointed.

A fly was crawling down the inside of the half-emptied glass of beer which he had just replaced on the table. It was quite unhurried about the journey, after the impudent fashion of flies: perhaps its thirst was of no great dimensions, or perhaps it had been reared in scrupulously well-mannered circumstances. It moved downwards in short little runs, pausing once to wash its hands and once to rub its feet together, in a genteel ecstasy of anticipation. Mr. Smithson Smith's eye followed it because it was the only moving object in the direction which the Saint had indicated, and there seemed to be nothing else to look at.

Even so, it seemed an extremely trivial spectacle, and he moved his arm restlessly in the Saint's grasp. But Simon Templar continued to point at it, and there was something dynamic about the immobility of that ex­tended finger. Mr. Smithson Smith watched, and saw the fly reach the level of the beer. It looked around cautiously, and lowered its proboscis delicately into the liquid. For two or three seconds after that it was motionless. And then, without any kind of struggle, it pitched over in a limp somersault and floated quietly on its back, with its legs stretched stiffly upwards. . .

CHAPTER IV