coming back to his lips. He knew he had been right.
'I came right along,' he said.
Her gaze flashed to Hoppy Uniatz, and then back to the Saint, in a second of frightened uncertainty.
'I don't understand,' she said.
Simon picked up a burnt match-stick from the floor and leaned his elbows on the bar. As he moved his tankard to make room, it split a tiny puddle of beer on the scarred oak. He put the match-stick in the puddle and drew a moist line down from it towards her, branching out into a couple of legs. While he did it, he talked.
'My name is Tombs.' He drew a pair of arms spreading out from his first straight line, so that the sketch suddenly became an absurd childish drawing of a man with the original spot of liquid from which it had developed for a head. 'I booked a room the other day, by letter.' He dipped the match again, and drew a neat elliptical halo of beer over the head of his figure. 'Didn't you get it?' he asked, with perfectly natural puzzlement.
She stared down at his completed handiwork for a moment; and then she raised her eyes to his face with a sudden light of hope and relief in them. She picked up a cloth and wiped the drawing away with a hand that was not quite steady.
'Oh, yes,' she said. 'I'm sorry-I didn't recognise you. You haven't stayed here before, have you?'
'I'm afraid not,' said the Saint. 'But then, I didn't know what I was missing.'
Once again she glanced nervously at Mr. Uniatz, who was gazing wistfully at a row of bottles whose smug fullness was reawakening the pangs of his incurable malady.
'I'll get the man to take your bags up,' she said.
Taking in the grace of her slim young suppleness as she turned away, Simon Templar was more than ever convinced that he was not wasting his time. He had been lured into no wild-goose chase. In that quiet inn at the foot of Larkstone Vale there was a man in whose eyes he had seen the fear of death, and a damsel in distress who was as beautiful as anything he had seen for many moons; that was more or less what he had been promised, and it was only right that the promise should have been so accurately fulfilled. The dreary cynics were everlastingly wrong; such joyously perfect and improbable things did happen-they were always happening to him. He knew that he was once more on the frontiers of adventure; but even then he did not dream of anything so amazing as the offer that Bellamy Wage had made on the day when he was sentenced to ten years, penal servitude after the Neovision Radio Company failed for nearly two million pounds.
II 'SAY,' blurted Hoppy Uniatz, broaching a subject which had clearly been harassing him for some time, 'is anyt'ing de matter wit' me?'
'I shouldn't be surprised,' said the Saint pitilessly, from the basin where he was washing the dust of travel from his face. 'All that whisky you sluice your system with must have its effect some day, even on a tin stomach like yours. What are the symptoms?'
Mr. Uniatz was not talking about ailments of that kind.
'De foist time I open my mout' in dis jernt, de barman looks at me like he t'inks I'm gonna take him for a ride. When de goil comes in, she looks at me just de same way, like I was some kinda snake. I ain't no Ronald Colman, boss, but I never fought my pan was dat bad. Have all dese guys here got de jitters, or is anyt'ing de matter wit' me?' he asked, working back to his original problem.
The Saint finished drying his face with a chuckle, and slung the towel round his neck. He took a cigarette from a packet on the table and lighted it.
'I'm afraid I've rather led you up the garden, Hoppy,' he confessed.
'De garden?' repeated Mr. Uniatz dimly.
'I've been kidding you,' said the Saint, hastily abandoning metaphor, in which Mr. Uniatz was always liable to lose his way. 'We aren't stopping here just because I saw the place and thought we'd stay. I came here on purpose.'
Hoppy Uniatz digested this statement. Simon could watch the idea percolating gradually into his skull.
'Oah ... I see ... So when you says de name is Tombs 'That's the name I'm using here, as long it takes in anybody. And don't you forget it.'
'I get it, boss. An' de room you booked'
Simon laughed.
'That requires a little more explanation,' he said.
He took up his coat from where he had thrown it over a chair, and slipped out an envelope from the breast pocket. The lamplight gleamed on a ripple of his bare biceps as he sprawled himself over the bed with it.
'Listen to this,' he commanded:
'Dear Saint, I've no right to be writing this letter to you, and probably you'll never even read it. I've never met you, and I don't even know what you look like. But I've read about some of the things you've done, and if you're the sort of man I think you are you might listen to me for a minute.
This is an old sixteenth century inn which belongs to my uncle, who's a retired engineer. My father died in South Africa five months ago, and I came here to live because there was nowhere else for me to go.
Queer things have been happening here, Saint. I don't know how to go on, because it sounds such utter nonsense. But I've heard people walking around the place at night, when I know perfectly well there's nobody about; and sometimes there are sort of rumbling noises underground that I can't account for. Lately there have been some horrible men here-I know you must be thinking I'm raving already, it sounds so childish and hysterical, but if only 1 could talk to you myself, I might be able to convince you.
I can't go on writing like this, Saint. You'll just think, 'Oh, another neurotic female who wants a good smacking,' and throw it into the wastepaper basket. But if you're ever travelling this way, and you have a little time to spare, I'd give anything to see you drop in. You can stay here as an ordinary guest, and find out for yourself whether I'm
