Saint Steps In Read Free

silly idea,
wasn’t it? But it was nice to have dinner with you, just
the same.”
    He sat there quite sympathetically while she walked away.
    The dining room seemed unusually dull after she had dis appeared. Perhaps, he thought, he had
been rather uncouthly hasty. After all,
he had been enjoying himself. He could have gone
along with the gag.
    But
then, life was so short, and there were so many impor tant things.
    He was sitting there, pondering over the more important things, when a group of men bore down
on him, crowding their way through the too-narrow aisles between the tables. In the van of the group was a large
person with a domineer ing air, and Simon knew that he was almost certain to be jostled, as he had been jostled in the cocktail lounge.
    He was getting
tired of being bumped and shoved by individuals who seemed to get the idea
that the “DC” after Wash ington
meant “disregard courtesy”. He prepared himself for the
inevitable encounter.
    The big man did not disappoint him. Simon felt the pressure on the back of his chair, and a coat
sleeve ruffled the hair on the
back of his head. He shoved back his chair quickly and beamed inwardly as he heard the involuntary
“oof” that the big man gave as
the chairback dug into his stomach. Templar stretched
his lean length upright and turned to the man he had effectively body-checked with his chair.
    “Terribly
sorry,” he said very politely.
    The
big man looked at him. He had the crimson-mottled face of a person who enjoyed
good food, good liquor, and good cigars, and
had had too many of each. His little eyes re garded
Simon speculatively for a moment, and there might have been a flare behind them, or there might not
have been, before he wreathed his face in a beaming smile.
    “It’s
all right,” he said. “Accidents will happen, you know.”
    “Yes,
indeed,” Simon murmured.
    The others in the
party, were waiting respectfully, almost reverently,
for the big man to proceed. The man whom Simon had prodded with the chair gave
the Saint another enigmatic glance and then turned away. His disciples
followed.
    “But Mr. Imberline,” one of them cried in a voice that ap proached awail. “Think of
the inconvenience that this pro gram will mean to certain parties.”
    “As the
fellow says,” announced the prow of the group, majestically. “This is war, arid it’s up to every one of us to put our shoulders to the wheel. Waste not, want
not, is my motto, and this is a case of too many cooks spoiling the
broth.”
    “Incredible,” the Saint told himself, gazing after the group as it barged its way to the long table
that had been reserved at the
further end of the room. “That must be the great Im berline himself.”
    He
put a cigarette between his lips, and felt in his coat pocket for a match.
    He didn’t find
the match, but his fingers encountered some thing
else that he knew at once didn’t belong there. It was a folded piece of paper which he knew quite
certainly he had never put in that
pocket. He took it out and opened it.
    It was the same clumsy style of block capitals that he had seen very recently, and it said:
     
    MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS
     
    He had a curious feeling in looking at it, like walking out of a rowdy
stifling honky-tonk into a silent snow night. Because all the time they had been in the cocktail lounge,
Madeline Gray had been on his
left, and he had been half turned towards her, so that his right-hand pocket was almost against the table, and it was impossible that she could have put that
paper into his pocket while they were there. And, aside from the fact that he had been surrounded by Imberline satellites
a few seconds earlier, there had
definitely been no chance since …
     
    2
     
    The doorman said:
“Yes, she went that way. She was walk ing.”
He put away the dollar bill that Simon handed him, and added: “She asked
me the way to Scott Circle.”
    Simon turned back into the lobby and found a telephone booth. The directory gave