Mr. Uniatz had none of that ascetic nobility of character which enables the Englishman to suffer his legislators gladly. He spat mournfully into the road.
'Chees,' he said, with a gloomy emulsion of awe and disgust, 'it ain't human. De last joint we're in, dey snatch off all de glasses becos it's twelve-toity. We pay two bucks each to get into dis joint, an' then we gotta pay five bucks fer a jug of lemonade wit' a spoonful of gin in it; an' all they got is a t'ree-piece band an' no floor show. An' de guys sits an' takes it! Why, if any joint had tried to gyp guys like dat in New York, even when we had prohibition, dey'd of wrecked it in two minutes.' Mr. Uniatz sighed and reached for. the only apparent conclusion, unaware that other philosophers had reached it long before him: 'Well, maybe dem Limeys ain't human, at dat.'
'You forget that this is a free country, Hoppy,' murmured the Saint gently.
He lighted his cigarette and blew out a wreath of smoke at the stars. A few spots of rain were beginning to fall from a bank of cloud that was climbing up from the west, and he scanned the street for a taxi to take them home. As if it had been conjured up in answer to his wish, a cab swung round the corner of Burlington Gardens and chugged towards them; and the Saint watched its approach hopefully. It was fifteen yards away when he saw that the flag was down, and shrugged ruefully. The setback was only an apt epilogue to a consistently inauspicious evening.
'We'd better walk,' he said.
They turned down towards Piccadilly; and then, as they fell into step, he heard the rattle of the taxi die down and looked back over his shoulder. It had stopped outside the entrance of the Barnyard Club.
The Saint caught Hoppy's arm.
'Hold on,' he said. 'The luck's changed. We stay dry after all.'
They strolled back towards the spot where this minor miracle stood panting metallically while its passenger alighted. It was a girl, he saw as she stood, fumbling with her bag.
'I'm afraid I haven't anything smaller,' she was saying; and he heard that her voice was low and pleasant.
The driver grunted and climbed down laboriously from his box. Standing in the gutter, he unbuttoned his overcoat, his coat, his waistcoat, his cardigan, and part of his shirt, and began a slow and painful search through the various strange and inaccessible places where London taxi drivers secrete their small change. From scattered areas of his anatomy he collected over a period of time an assortment of coins and looked at them under the light.
'Sorry, miss, I can't do it,' he said at length and began phlegmatically to dress himself again.
'I'll get change inside,' said the girl.
But Simon Templar had other ideas. They had been growing on him while the driver disrobed, and the Saint had always been an opportunist. He liked the girl's voice and her slim figure and the way she wore her clothes; and that was enough for a beginning.
'Excuse me,' he said. 'Can I help?' She looked up with a start, and for the first time he saw her face clearly. It was small and oval, with a fascinatingly tip-tilted nose and a mouth that would smile easily; her deep brown hair, smooth and straight to the curled ends, framed her face in a soft halo of darkness. But even while he saw her brown eyes regarding him hesitantly he wondered if the dim light had deceived him--or if he had really seen, as he had thought he saw, a leap of sudden fear in them when she first looked up.
'We're only trying to change a pound,' she said.
He took the note from her fingers and spread out a line of silver coins on her palm in return. She paid off the driver, who proceeded to bury the money in the outlying regions of his clothing; and she would have thanked him and gone on, but the Saint's other ideas had scarcely been tapped.
'Are you determined to go in there?' he asked, waving his pound note disparagingly in the direction of the Barnyard Club. 'Hoppy and I didn't think much of it. Besides, you haven't got your pillow.'
'Why should I want a pillow?'
'For comfort. Everybody else in there is asleep,' he explained, 'but the management doesn't provide pillows. They just create the demand.'
The brown eyes searched his face doubtfully, with a glimpse of hunted suspicion that need not have been there. And once again he saw what he had seen before, the glimmering light of fear that went across her gaze--or was it across his own imagination?
'Thanks so much for helping me--good-night,' she said in a breath and left the Saint staring after her with a puzzled smile till the door of the club closed behind her.
Simon tilted back his hat and turned resignedly to take possession of the asthmatic cab which was left as his only consolation; and as he turned, a hand fell on his shoulder.
'Do you know that girl?' asked a sleepy voice.
'Apparently not, Claud,' answered the Saint sorrowfully. 'I tried to, but she didn't seem to be sold on the idea. Life has these mysteries.'
Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal studied him with half-closed eyes whose drowsiness was nothing but an affectation. His pudgy hand came down from the Saint's shoulder and took away the pound note which he was still holding; and the Saint's brows suddenly came down an invisible fraction of an inch.
'You don't mind if I have a look at this?' he said.
It was not so much a question as an authoritative demand; and a queer tingle of supernatural expectation touched Simon Templar's spine for an instant and was gone. For the first time since the . hand fell on his shoulder he looked beyond the detective's broad and portly form and saw another solid bowler-hatted figure, equally broad but a shade less portly, kicking its regulation rubber heels a few paces away, as if waiting for the conversation to conclude. The Saint's suddenly quiet and watchful eyes swerved along the sidewalk in the other direction, and saw two other men of the same unmistakable pattern engrossed in inaudible discussion in the shadow of a shop doorway on his right. All at once, without a sound that his unguarded ears had noticed, the deserted street had acquired a population. ...
A tiny pulse began to beat in the Saint's brain, a pulse that was little more than the echo of his own heart working steadily through a moment of utter physical stillness; and then he drew a deep lungful of air through his
