Featuring the Saint Read Free

appearances, would never have believed them capable, four self-appointed ladies, in two pairs, and two other self-appointed ladies paired with an equal number of temporary gentlemen, were travelling in small circles round a minute section of inferior parquet. At other tables round the floor a scattering of other clients, apparently male and female, were absorbing divers brands of alcohol in the lugubrious fashion in which alcohol is ordinarily absorbed in England during the hours in which the absorption is legal. In fact, the Calumet Club was just yawning and stretching itself preparatory to waking up for the night’s festivities.
    The Saint sighed, inhaled cigarette smoke luxuriously, tasted the modest glass of beer which the waiter brought him, paid twice the usual retail price for it, added a fifty-percent bonus, and continued to inspect his fellow members with a somewhat jaundiced eye.
    One by one he dismissed them. Two men whom he had met there several times before saluted him, and he smiled back as if he loved them like brothers. An unattached damsel at an adjacent table smiled sweetly at him, and the Saint smiled back just as sweetly, for he had a reputation to keep up. And then, in another corner, his gaze came to rest upon a man he had seen before, and a girl he had never seen before, sitting together at a table beside the orchestra.
    Simon’s gaze rested upon them thoughtfully, as it had rested upon other people in that room; and it only rested upon them longer than it had rested upon anyone else that night, because at that moment, when his glance fell upon them, something stirred at the back of his brain and opened its in ward intangible eye upon the bare facts of the case as conveyed by the optic nerves. The Saint could not have said what it was. At that moment there was nothing about that corner of the scenery to attract such an attention. They were talking quite ordinarily, to judge by their faces; and, if the face of the girl was remarkably pleasant to look upon, even that was not unprecedented in the Calumet Club and the entourage of Baldy Mossiter. And yet, in spite of these facts rather than because of them, Simon Templar’s queer instinct for the raw material of his trade flicked up a ghostly eyelid in some dim recess of his mind, and forced him to look longer, without quite knowing why he looked. And it was only because of this that the Saint saw what he saw, when the almost imperceptible thing happened in the course of one of Mr. Mossiter’s frequent and expressive gestures.
    “Have you got a cigarette?” murmured the unattached damsel at the adjacent table, hopefully; but the sweetness of the smile which illuminated the Saint’s features as she spoke was not for her, and it is doubtful whether he even heard.
    He lounged out of his chair and wandered across the room with the long, lazy stride that covered ground with such an inconspicuous speed; and the man and the girl looked up together as he loomed over their table.
    “Hullo,” drawled the Saint.
    He sat down in a vacant chair between them, without waiting to be invited, and beamed from one to the other in a most Saintly way.
    “Beautiful weather we’re having, aren’t we, Baldy?”
    “What the devil do you want, Templar?” snarled Mr. Mossiter, with no cordiality. “I’m busy.”
    “I know, sweetheart,” said the Saint gently. “I saw you getting busy. That’s why I came over.”
    He contemplated Mr. Mossiter with innocent blue eyes; and yet there was something in the very innocence of that stare besides its prolonged steadiness that unaccountably prickled the short hairs on the back of Mossiter’s bull neck. It did not happen at once. The stare had focused on its object for some time before that cold draught of perplexedly dawning comprehension began to lap Mossiter’s spinal column. But the Saint read all that he wanted to read in the sudden darkening of the livid scar that ran down the side of Mossiter’s face from his left