'I dunno,' Hoppy confessed frankly. 'I ain't never done no boiglary. Whadda we have to wear dis costume for?'
Patricia looked at him blankly.
'What costume?'
'De top hat an' spats,' said Hoppy Uniatz.
The Saint covered his eyes.
Six hours later, braking the Hirondel to a smooth standstill under an overarching elm where the road touched the northwest boundary of March House, Simon felt more practically cautious about accepting Hoppy's offer of assistance. On such an expedition as he had undertaken, a sportive elephant would certainly have been less use; but not much less. All the same, he' had no wish to offend Mr. Uniatz, whose proud spirit was perhaps unduly sensitive on such points. He swung himself out into the road, detached the spare wheel, and opened up the tool kit, while Hoppy stared at him puzzledly.
'This is where you come in,' the Saint told him flatteringly. 'You're going to be an unfortunate motorist with a puncture, toiling over the wheel.'
Mr. Uniatz blinked at him dimly.
'Is dat part of de boiglary?' he asked.
'Of course it is,' said the Saint unscrupulously. 'It's probably the most important part. You never know when some village slop may come paddling around these parts, and if he saw a car standing by the road with nobody in it he'd naturally be suspicious.'
Hoppy reached round for his hip flask and nodded.
'Okay, boss,' he said. 'I get it. If de cop comes while you're gone, I give him de woiks.'
'You don't do anything of the sort,' said the Saint wearily. 'They don't allow you to kill policemen in this country. What you do is to give your very best imitation of a guy fixing a flat. You might possibly get into conversation with him. Talk sentimentally about the little woman at home, waiting for her man. Make him feel homesick and encourage him to push on. But you don't give him de woiks.'
'Okay, boss,' repeated Hoppy accommodatingly. 'I'll fix it.'
'God help you if you don't,' said the Saint har-rowingly and left him to it.
The frontier of the March House estate at that point consisted of a strong board fence about eight feet high topped with three lines of barbed wire carried on spiked iron brackets beetling outwards at an angle: the arrangement was effective enough to have checked any less experienced and determined trespasser than the Saint, and even Simon might have wasted some time over it if it had not been for the overhanging elm under which he had thoughtfully stopped his car. But by balancing himself precariously on the side of the tonneau and leaping upwards, he was able to get a fingerhold on one of the lower branches; and he swung himself up onto it as if Tarzan had been his grandfather.
Finding his way through the tree, in the dark, was not quite so easy; but he managed it more or less silently, and dropped from another branch onto a mat of short undergrowth on the inside of the fence.
From there, while the muffled mutterings of Hoppy Uniatz wrestling with a wheel drifted faintly to his ears, he surveyed the lay of the land ahead of him. He was in a spinney of young trees and brushwood; barred here and there with the boles of older trees similar to the one by,which he had made his entrance; a half-moon, peeping fitfully between squadrons of cirrus cloud, gave his night-hunter's eyes enough light to make out that broad impression and at the same time suggested an open space some distance farther on beyond the coppice. The house itself stood roughly in the same direction, according to his map-reading; and with a fleeting smile for the complete craziness of his intentions he began to pick his way through the scrub towards it.
A small bird let out a startled squeak at his feet and went whirring away into the dark, and from time to time he heard the rustlings of diminutive animal life scurrying away from his approach; but he encountered no pitfalls or trip wires or other unpleasant accidents. The clear space ahead was farther away than he had thought at first, and as he went on he seemed to make very little progress towards it. Presently he understood why, when he broke out through a patch of thinner shrubbery into what seemed to be a long narrow field laid out broadside to his route: twenty yards away, on the other side, was a single rank of taller trees linked by what appeared to be another fence --it was this wall of shadow and line of lifting tree trunks which he had never seemed to come any nearer to as he threaded his way through the spinney.
As he crossed the field and came close to this inner boundary, he saw that it was not a fence, but a loosely grown hedge about six feet high. He was able to see this without any difficulty because when he was still a couple of yards away the pattern of it was suddenly thrown up in silhouette by the kindling of a light behind it. At first his only impression was that the moon had chosen that moment for one of its periodical peeps from behind the drifting flotillas of cloud. Then, very quickly, the light flared up brighter. He saw the patchwork shadow of the hedge printed on his own clothes, and instinctively ducked behind the sheltering blackness of thej nearest tree. And as he did so he became aware that the humming noise he had been hearing had grown much louder.
It was a noise which had been going on, very faintly, for some time; but he had thought noth-ing of it. A car passing on another road half mile away might have caused it, and a subcon-scious suggestion of the same car drawing nearer had prevented him paying much attention to the first increase in its volume. But at this moment it had swelled into a steady drone that was too powerful and unvarying for any ordinary car to make, rising to the indefinable borderline of as-sertiveness at which his sense of hearing was jolted into sitting up and taking notice. He lis-tened to it, frowning, while it grew to sharp roar --and then stopped altogether.
The Saint remained as still as the tree beside which he stood, as if he had been an integral part of it, and looked out over the hedge at the field where the light was. Rising a little oh his toes, he was able to get a clear view of it and see the cause of the light.
A double row of flares was being kindled in the field, like a file of tiny brilliant bonfires--with a sudden jerk of understanding, he remembered other days in his life, and knew what they were. Mounds of cotton waste soaked in petrol or paraffin. Even while he watched, the last of them was lighted: a reddish glow danced in the dark, licked up into a tentative flame, and spring suddenly into blazing luminance. The shadow of the man who had lit it stretched out in a sudden long bar of blackness into the surrounding gloom where the light exhausted itself. The twin rank of flares was complete, forming a broad lane of light from northwest to southeast, six flares to each side, two hundred yards long at a rough guess. The dimension of the field beyond that was lost in the darkness which lapped the light.
Over his hear there was a rush of air and a dying hiss of wind as though a monstrous bird sighed across the
