Follow the Saint Read Free

usual on his homeward way, feeling as if his face was a bright crimson
which would announce his shame to any passerby, and never dreaming that Destiny had already
grasped him firmly by the scruff of the
neck.
    Five
minutes later he was trudging through a narrow side street within a couple
of blocks of his apartment. The coma tose dusk of Sunday evening lay over it
like a shroud: not a single other human creature was in sight, and the only sound apart from the solid tread of his own regulation
boots was a patter of hurried footsteps coming up behind him. There was nothing in that to make him turn his head…. The
footsteps caught up until they were
almost on his heels; and then something hit him a terrific blow on the
side of the head and everything dissolved
into black darkness.
     
    II
    S IMON T EMPLAR’S views on
the subject of Chief Inspector Teal, unlike Chief Inspector Teal’s views on
the subject of the Saint, were apt to fluctuate between very
contradictory extremes.
There were times when he felt that life would lose half its savour if he were deprived of the perpetual joy of dodging Teal’s constant frantic efforts to put him
behind bars; but there were other
times when he felt that his life would
be a lot less strenuous if Teal’s cardinal ambition had been a little less tenacious. There had been times
when he had felt sincere remorse for
the more bitter humiliations which he
had sometimes been compelled to inflict on Mr Teal, even though these
times had been the only alternatives to his own defeat in their endless duel; there had been other times when he could have derived much satisfaction from
beating Teal over the head with a
heavy bar of iron with large knobs on the
end.
    One thing
which the Saint was certain about, however, was that his own
occasional urges to assault the detective’s cranium with a blunt
instrument did not mean that he was at any time prepared to
permit any common or garden thug to take the same liberties with that
long-suffering dome.
    This was
the last of the coincidences of which due warning has already been
given—that Simon Templar’s long sleek Hirondel chanced to be taking a short
cut through the back streets of the district at that fateful hour, and whirled round a corner into the one street where it was most needed
at the precise moment when Teal’s ample body was spreading itself over the pavement as flat as a body of that
architecture can conveniently be
spread without the aid of a steam roller.
    The Saint’s foot on the
accelerator gave the great car a last burst
in the direction of the spot where these exciting things were happening, and then he stood on the brakes.
The thug who had committed the assault
was already bending over Teal’s
prostrate form when the screech of skidding tyres made him stop and look
up in startled fear. For a split second he
hesitated, as if considering whether to stand his ground and give battle; but
something about the sinewy breadth of the Saint’s shoulders and the athletic
and purposeful speed with which the
Saint’s tall frame catapulted itself out of the still sliding car must have
discouraged him. A profound antipathy to the whole scene and everyone in it
appeared to overwhelm him; and he
turned and began to depart from it like
a stone out of a sling.
    The Saint
started after him. At that moment the Saint had no idea that the object of his timely
rescue was Chief Inspec tor Teal in person:
it was simply that the sight of one bloke hitting another bloke with a length of gaspipe was a spectacle which inevitably impelled him to join in the
festivities with the least possible delay. But as he started in pursuit
he caught his first glimpse of the fallen
victim’s face, and the surprise checked his stride as if he had run into a
wall. He paused involuntarily to
confirm the identification; and that brief delay lost him any chance he might have had of making a capture. The thug was already covering the ground
with quite remarkable velocity,