strychnine.
'I may be prejudiced,' he remarked, 'but I didn't see them. It seemed a very respectable appeal to me, except for a certain unconventional familiarity at the end, where Leo's Christian name was used--but these are free-and- easy days. Otherwise I thought it was a model of restrained and touching eloquence. I have a book, of which it occurs to me that Leo might like to buy the section in which his name appears--you know what publicity hounds most of these politicians are. There-fore I offer to sell it to him, which I'm sure must be strictly legal.'
'Mr. Farwill's statement,' retorted Teal, 'is that the part of the book you're referring to is nothing hut a collection of libellous lies.'
Simon raised his eyebrows.
'He must have a guilty conscience,' he murmured. 'But you can't put me in jail for that. I didn't say anything in my letter to give him that impression. I defy you to find one threat, one word of abuse, one questionable insinuation. The whole epistle,' Simon said modestly, 'is couched in the most flattering and even obsequious terms. In ex-pecting his check to reach me before next Saturday midnight, I am, I feel sure, only anticipating his own natural urgent desire to benefit such a deserv-ing charity. Leo may have turned out to be not quite the eager philanthropist I took him for,' said the Saint regretfully, 'but I still hope he'll see the light of godliness in the end; and I don't see what you've got to do with it, Claud.'
Mr. Teal gulped in a breath that hurt him as it went down his windpipe.
'Oh, you don't, don't you?' he bit out.
'I'm afraid I don't, Claud,' said the Saint. 'Leo may have been caught in a hysterical moment, but other blokes have had the identical letter without feeling that way about it. Look at this.'
He picked up a slip of tinted paper from beside the coffee pot and held it out so that the detective could read the words. It was a check on the City & Continental Bank, dated that day, and it was made out for two hundred thousand pounds.
'Sir Barclay Edingham came here at half-past nine to give me that--he was in such a hurry to do his share. Major General Sir Humboldt Quipp blew in at half-past ten--he grumbled and thun-| dered a bit about the price, but he's gone away again to think it over, and I'm sure he'll pay it in the end. The other contributors will be coming through in the next day or two, and I wouldn't mind betting that Leo will be one of them as soon as he comes out of his tantrum. You ought to have another talk with him, Claud--it might help him to see the path of duty.'
'Never you mind what I ought to do,' Teal said hotly. His baby-blue eyes, with all the sleepiness knocked out of them, were goggling like young balloons at the check which Simon was dangling under his nose, as if his brain had flatly refused to believe their message and they had swollen to twice their normal size with proper indignation at the insult. With a genuine physical effort he .averted them from the astounding figures. 'Sir Barclay Edingham gave you that?' he repeated incredulously.
Simon inclined his head.
'And he was glad to. Sir Barclay Edingham has a very keen appreciation of literature. The pages I sold him are now his most treasured possession, and you couldn't buy them off him for twice as much as he gave me.'
He folded the check carefully and put it away in his wallet; and the detective straightened up. 'Where is this book?' he demanded. The Saint's eyebrows shifted again fractionally.
It was a gesture that Teal knew better than any other of the Saint's bar one, and that almost imperceptible change of alignment carried more meaning than a thousand words of description could convey.
'It's in England,' he answered.
'That's good,' said Teal grimly, 'because I want to see it.'
The Saint picked up a cigarette, spun it into the air, and caught it in his mouth without moving his head. He snapped a flame from his lighter and blew out a long feather of smoke.
'Do you?' he murmured interestedly. 'Yes, I do!' barked the detective. 'And I mean to see it before I go. I mayn't be much of a critic, but I'll soon find out whether this literary work is worth two hundred thousand pounds a chapter. I'll get my own ideas about whether it's libellous. Now are you going to show me that book or am I going to look for it?'
'Where's your search warrant?' inquired Simon imperturbably.
Teal gritted his teeth.
'I don't need a search warrant. You're a sue pected person------'
'Only in your wicked suspicious mind, Claud. And I'm telling you that you do need a search war-rant. Or, if you're going to take my home apart without one, you need three or four strong men with you. Because if you try to do it yourself, I shall pick you up by the scruff of your neck and the seat of your pants and throw you over the Ritz, and there's no magistrate in England who could give you a comeback!'
The Saint was smiling; but Mr. Teal had no illusions about that smile. It was not a smile of simple-hearted bonhomie and good will towards policemen. It was a smile that could have been worn by no one but that lean dangerous privateer who was never more dangerous than when he smiled.
And Mr. Teal knew that he hadn't a leg to stand on. The Saint had tied him in a knot again. There were no menaces, no threats of any kind, in the letter with which the Honourable Leo Farwill had gone to Scotland Yard--it was a pleasant polite epistle with no unlawful insinuations whatsoever, and any fairly clever advocate could have convinced a normally half-witted jury that the suspicions attached to it arose from nothing but the notorious Simon Templar's signature at the end. And without a definite charge of blackmail, there were no grounds at all for demanding an inspection of the literary work on which the whole case lunged.
Mr. Teal knew all these things as well as anyone and knew also that in spite of the strictly legal appearances no man had ever given the Saint two hundred thousand pounds except as the reward of some devilish and unlawful cunning that had been born in that gay unscrupulous brain. He knew all these things as well as he knew his own birthday; but they did not cheer him. And Simon Templar's forefinger went out and tapped him on the stomach in the Saintly gesture that Mr. Teal knew and hated best of all.
'You're too full of naughty ideas and uncharitable thoughts these days,' said the Saint. 'I was hoping that after I'd been away for a bit you might have got over them; but it seems as if you haven't. You're having one of your relapses into detectivo-sis, Claud; and it offends me. You stand there with your great stomach wobbling------'
