romance- a beauteous damsel in distress-anything. You never know. They may even have some good beer, which would do me almost as much good. C'mon, fella-let's have a look round.'
Mr. Uniatz disentangled himself from the bucket seat in which his muscular form had been wedged, and stepped stoically into the road. He was not by nature or upbringing a romantic man, and the only damsels in distress he had ever seen were those he distressed himself; but he had been afflicted since adolescence with a chronic parching of the gullet, and the place where they had stopped looked as if it might be able to assist him on his endless search for relief. It was an old rambling house of white plaster and oak timbering, with dormer windows breaking through a thatched roof and crimson ramblers straggling up the walls; a carved and painted sign over the door proclaimed it to be the Clevely Arms. Entering hopefully, Mr. Uniatz saw the Saint drawing off his gloves in a sort of lounge hall with a rough-hewn staircase at the far end, his dark head almost touching the beams and his blue eyes twinkling with an expectant humour that might well have been worn by an Elizabethan privateer standing in the same spot three hundred and fifty years ago. But no Elizabethan privateer could have had more right to that smile and the twinkling eye with it than the Saint, who had carved his name into the dull material of the twentieth century as a privateer on a scale that would have made Queen Elizabeth dizzy to think of.
'Over there,' he said, 'I think you'll find what you want.'
He swung across the hall and ducked under a low lintel on one side into a small but comfortable bar. A pleasant-looking grey-haired man with glasses came through a curtain behind the counter as he approached, and bade them good evening.
'I should like a pint of beer,' said the Saint, 'and half a bottle of whisky.'
The grey-haired man filled a pewter tankard from the wood, and turned back with it.
'And a whisky?' he queried.
He had a quiet and educated voice, and the Saint hated to shock him. But his first duty was to his friend.
'Half a bottle,' he repeated.
'Would you like me to wrap it up?'
'I hardly think,' said the Saint, with some regret, 'that that will ever be necessary.'
The landlord took down a half-bottle from the shelf behind him, and put it on the counter. Simon slid it along to Mr. Uniatz. Mr. Uniatz removed the cap, placed the neck in his mouth, and poured gratefully. His Adam's apple throbbed in rhythmic appreciation as the neat spirit flowed soothingly through the arid deserts of his throat in a stream that would have rapidly choked anyone with a less calloused esophagus.
Simon turned again to the landlord, who was watching the demonstration in a kind of dazed awe.
'You see why I find it cheaper to buy in bulk,' he remarked.
The grey-haired man blinked speechlessly; and Hoppy put down the empty bottle and wiped his lips with a sigh.
'You ain't seen nut'n yet, pal,' he declared. 'Where I come from, dey call me a fairy.'
It was the first time he had spoken since they entered the house, and Simon was utterly unprepared for the result.
All the colour drained out of the grey-haired man's face; and the ten-shilling note which Simon had laid on the bar, which he had just picked up, slipped through his shaking fingers and fluttered down out of sight. He stared at Hoppy with his nostrils twitching and his eyes dilated in stark terror, waiting without movement as if he expected sudden death to leap at him across the bar.
It only lasted for a moment, that startling transformation into terrified immobility; and then he stooped and clumsily retrieved the fallen note.
'Excuse me,' he muttered, and shuffled out through the curtain behind the counter.
The Saint put down his tankard and fished out a cigarette. Not even the most shameless flatterer had ever said that Hoppy's voice was vibrant with seductive music: such a statement, even with the kindest intentions, could not have been made convincingly about that rasping dialect of New York's lower East Side which was the only language Mr. Uniatz knew. Hoppy's voice was about as attractive and musical as a file operating on a sheet of jagged tinplate. But the Saint had never known it to strike anyone with such sheer paralysed horror as he had seen the landlord reduced to for that brief amazing moment.
Mr. Uniatz, who had been staring at the curtained opening with a blank fish-like expression which in its own way was no less cataleptic, turned perplexedly towards him, seeking light.
'Dijja see dat, boss?' he demanded. 'De guy looked like he was waitin' for us to turn de heat on him! Did I say anyt'ing I shouldn't of?'
Simon shook his head.
'I wouldn't know, Hoppy,' he answered thoughtfully. 'Maybe the bloke doesn't like fairies-you can never tell, in these great open spaces.'
He might have said more; but he heard a footstep beyond the curtain, and picked up his tankard again. And then, for the second time, he put it down untouched; for it was a girl who came through into the serving space behind the bar.
If there was to be a beauteous damsel in distress, Simon decided, the conventions insisted that it must be her role. She was tall and slender, with dark straight hair that took on an unexpected curl around her neck, steady grey eyes, and a mouth to which there was only one obvious way of paying tribute. Her skin reminded him vaguely of peaches and rose-petals, and the sway of her dress as she came in gave him a suggestion of her figure that filled his head with ideas of a kind to which he was quite amorally susceptible. She said 'good evening' in a voice that scarcely intruded itself into the quiet room, and turned to some mysterious business with the shelves behind her.
Simon left a drift of smoke float away from his cigarette, and his blue eyes returned with a trace of reluctance to the homely features of Mr. Uniatz.
'What would you think,' he asked, 'of a girl whose name was Julia?'
Out of the corner of his eye he saw her start, and turned round to face her with that gay expectant smile
