Saint on Guard Read Free

melting eye traveled specu-latively over the Saint’s tall symmetrical frame. “You look as if you could do a wonderful rumba,” she said.
    Only the Saint’s incomparable valor, which is already so well known to the entire reading public of the English-speaking world, enabled him to face the revolting tenderness of her smile without quailing.
    “I hope I never disappoint you,” he said ambiguously. “Now, about your husband–-“
    “Oh, yes. Of course.” Her pronunciation of the last word was a caress. “Well, he uses a lot of iridium. I don’t know much about his business—I think business is so dull, don’t you?—but I know he uses it. So does Mr Linnet. Well, last night we had dinner with Mr Linnet, and—well, I had to powder my nose.”
    “Not really? Even you?”
    “Yes,” said Mrs Ourley vaguely. “Well, when I came back, I just couldn’t help hearing what Milton—that’s my husband, Milton—and Mr Linnet were talking about.”
    “Of course not.”
    “Well, Mr Linnet was saying: 1 don’t know what to do. I’ve got to have iridium to fulfil my contracts, and the market’s cornered. I don’t like any part of it, but they’ve got me over a barrel.’ Then Milton said: I’ll say they have. But you’ll buy it and pay through the nose, just like me. You can’t afford to do anything else.’ And Mr Linnet said: ‘I still don’t like it.’ Then I had to go into the room because the butler came out into the hall, so I couldn’t just stand there, and of course they stopped talking about it. But I can tell you it was a terrible shock to me.”
    “Naturally,” Simon agreed sympathetically.
    “I mean, if Milton and Mr Linnet are buying illegal iridium, that makes them almost criminals themselves, doesn’t it?”
    Simon studied her seriously for a moment.
    “Do you really want your husband to go to jail?” he asked bluntly.
    “Good Heavens, no!” She was righteously pained. “That’s why I came to you instead of telling the police or the FBI. If Milton went to jail I just wouldn’t know how to look my friends in the face. But as a patriotic citizen I have my duty to do. And it wouldn’t do any harm if you frightened him a bit. I think he deserves it. He’s been so mean to me lately. If you could only have heard what he said to the nicest boy that I met in Miami Beach–-“
    It seemed to the Saint, quite abstractly, that he might have enjoyed hearing that; but he was just tactful enough not to say so.
    He said: “What you’ve told me isn’t exactly enough to convict him. And for that matter, it doesn’t lay the black market in my lap either. But I’d like to have a talk with your husband.”
    “Oh, if you only would, Mr Templar! You’re sooo clever, I’m sure you could persuade him to tell you.”
    “I could try,” he said noncommittally. “Where do you live?”
    “We’ve got a little place out at Oyster Bay. Milton will be home by half past six. If you could manage to get out there—you could say you just happened to be passing and you dropped in for a drink–-“
    “Tell him we met in Havana,” said the Saint, “and put him in the right frame of mind.”
    He got her out of the door with some remarkably firm and adroit maneuvering, and came back to pour himself a healthy dose of Peter Dawson and restore his nerves.
    The fortunes of buccaneering had brought many women out of the wide world and thrown them into Simon Templar’s life, and it is a happy fact that most of them had been what any man would agree that a woman out of the wide world ought to be, which was young and decorative and quite undomesticated. But he had to realise that sooner or later such good luck had to end; and he had no idea of ignoring Titania Ourley, in spite of her unprepossessing appearance and even more dreadful charm.
    It was like that in the strange country of adventure where he had worn so many trails. When yo.u had no idea where your quarry was, there was nothing to bring it within