Featuring the Saint Read Free Page A

temple to his chin; and the Saintly smile became dazzlingly seraphic.
    “Exactly,” said the Saint.
    His gaze shifted over to the girl. Her hand was still round her glass-she had been raising it when the Saint reached the table, and had put it down again untasted.
    Still smiling, Simon took the girl’s glass in one hand and Mossiter’s in the other, and changed them over. Then he looked again at Mossiter.
    “Drink up,” he said, and suddenly there was cold steel in his voice.
    What d’you mean?”
    “Drink,” said the Saint. “Open your mouth, and induce the liquid to trickle down the gullet. You must have done it before. But whether you’ll enjoy it so much on this occasion remains to be seen,”
    “What the hell are you suggesting?”
    “Nothing. That’s just your guilty conscience. Drink it up, Beautiful.”
    Mossiter seemed to crouch in his chair.
    “Will you leave this table?” he grated.
    “No,” said the Saint.
    “Then you will have to leave the club altogether… . Waiter!”
    The Saint took out his cigarette case and tapped a cigarette meditatively upon it. Then he looked up. He addressed the girl.
    “If you had finished that drink,” he said, “the consequences would have been very unpleasant indeed. I think I can assure you of that, though I’m not absolutely certain what our friend put in it. It is quite sufficient that I saw him drop something into your glass while he was talking just now.” He leaned back in his chair, with his back half turned to Mr. Mossiter, and watched the waiter returning across the floor with the porter who had been other things in his time, and added, in the same quiet tone: “On account of the failure of this bright scheme, there will shortly be a slight disturbance of which I shall be the centre. If you think I’m raving mad, you can go to hell. If you’ve got the sense to see that I’m telling the truth, you’ll stand by to make your bolt when I give the word, and meet me outside in a couple of minutes.”
    Thus the Saint completed his remarks, quite unhurriedly, quite calmly and conversationally; and then the waiter and the porter were behind his chair.
    “Throw this man out,” said Mossiter curtly. “He’s making a nuisance of himself.”
    It was the porter who had been other things in his time who laid the first rough hand upon the Saint; and Simon grinned gently. The next moment Simon was on his feet, and the porter was not.
    That remark needs little explanation. It would not be profitable to elaborate a description of the pile-driving properties of the left hook that connected with the porter’s jaw as Simon rose from his chair; and, in fact, the porter himself knew little about it at the time. He left the ground momentarily and then he made contact with a lot more ground a little farther on, and then he slept.
    The elderly waiter, also, knew little about that particular incident. The best and brightest years of his life were past and over, and it is probable that he was growing a little slow on the uptake in his late middle age. It is, at least, certain that he had not fully digested the significance of the spectacle to which he had just been treated, nor come to any decision about his own attitude to the situation, when he felt himself seized firmly by the collar and the seat of his pants. He seemed to rise astonishingly into the air, and, suspended horizontally in space at the full upward stretch of the Saint’s arms, was for an instant in a position to contemplate the beauties of the low ceiling at close range. And the Saint chuckled.
    “How Time flies,” murmured the Saint, and heaved the man bodily into the middle of the orchestra-where, it may be recorded, he damaged beyond repair, in his descent, a tenor saxophone, a guitar, and a device for imitating the moans of a stricken hyena.
    Simon straightened his tie and looked about him. Action had been so rapid, during those few seconds, that the rest of the club’s population and personnel