The Saint Meets His Match Read Free Page B

been when, to quote one flippant
com mentary, Chief Inspector Teal would have
given ten years’ salary for the
privilege of leading the Saint gently by
the arm into the nearest police station, and a number of gentlemen in the
underworld would have given ten years’
liberty for the pleasure of transporting the Saint to the top of the chute of a blast furnace and
quietly back-heeling him into the
stew. These things may be read in
other volumes of the Saint Saga. But somehow the Saint had continued to go his pleasantly piratical way unscathed, to the rage and terror of the underworld
and the despair of Chief Inspector
Teal—buccaneer in the suits of
Savile Row, amused, cool, debonair, with hell-for- leather blue eyes and a Saintly smile… .
    And then, all at once, as
it seemed, he had finished his work, and that should
have been that. “The tumult and the shouting dies, the sinners and the
Saints depart,” as the Saint himself
so beautifully put it. All adventures come
to an end. But Jill Trelawney …
    “Jill
Trelawney,” said the Saint dreamily, “is a new interest. I tell you, Teal, I was going to take the longest holiday of my life. But since Jill Trelawney is still
at large, and your bunch of flat-footed nit-wits hasn’t been able to do anything about it …”
    And after considerable
elaboration of his point, the Saint was permitted to
say much the same thing to the commissioner; but this
interview was briefer.
    “You can try,”
said the chief. “There are some photo graphs and her dossier.
We pulled her in last week, after the Angels
wrecked the raid on Harp’s dope joint—”
    “And she showed up
with a copper-bottomed alibi you could have sailed through
a Pacific hurricane,” drawled the Saint.
“Yeah?”
    “Get her,” snapped the chief.
    “Three weeks,”
drawled the Saint laconically, and walked out of Scotland Yard warbling a verse
of the comedy song hit of the season—written by himself.
    “I
    Am the guy
    Who killed   Capone —— ”
     
    As he passed the startled
doorkeeper, he got a superb yodelling effect into the
end of that last line.
    And that was exactly
thirty-six hours before he met Jill Trelawney for the
first time.
    And precisely at three
o’clock on the afternoon after he had first met her,
Simon Templar walked down Belgrave Street,
indisputably the most astonishingly immaculate and
elegant policeman that ever walked down Belgrave Street, was admitted to No.
97, was shown up the stairs, walked into the drawing
room. If possible, he was more dark and cavalier and
impudent by daylight than he had been by night. Weald and the girl were there.
    “Good-afternoon,” said the Saint.
    His voice stoked the
conventional greeting with an infinity of mocking arrogance. He was amused,
in his cheerful way. He judged that the
rankling thoughts of the intervening night and morning would not have im proved their affection for him, and he was amused.
    “Nice day,” he
drawled.
    “We hardly expected
you,” said the girl.
    “Your error,” said the Saint
comfortably.
    He tossed his hat into a chair and glanced back
at the door which had just closed behind him.
    “I don’t like your
line in butlers,” he said. “I suppose you know that Frederick
Wells has a very eccentric rec ord. Aren’t
you afraid he might disappear with the silver?”
    “Wells is an
excellent servant.”
    “Fine! And how’s
Pinky?”
    “Budd is out at the
moment. He’ll be right back.”
    “Fine again!”
The mocking blue eyes absorbed Stephen Weald
from the feet upwards. “And what position does this
freak hold in the establishment? Pantry boy?”
    Weald gnawed his lip and
said nothing. There was a cross of sticking plaster
over the bruised cut in his chin to remind him that a man like Simon Templar is
apt to confuse physical violence with abstract repartee.
Stephen Weald felt cautious.
    “Mr. Weald is a
friend of mine,” said the girl, “and I’d be obliged if you’d
refrain from insulting him in my