The Saint on the Spanish Main Read Free Page B

which seemed to pull his eyes
closer together with their grip on
his nose. He ignored the Saint’s proffered hand and did not even seem to
have heard his name.
    “You’ve got a nerve!” he snarled.
    Simon looked down at his hand, saw nothing
obvious ly contaminating about it, and tried offering it to Mrs. Uckrose.
She took it.
    Politeness required him to look into her
eyes, which were interesting enough in a languorous brown-velvet way; but
it was not easy to keep his gaze from wandering too pointedly over
her other attractions, which were dis played as candidly as a pair of very
short shorts and bra to match could do it. From the roots of her chestnut hair to the
toes of her sandaled feet she was so evenly sun tanned that she looked like a golden
statue; but there was nothing statuesque
about the lingering softness of her
handshake. She could hardly have been more than half her husband’s age.
    Simon understood exactly what she made Patsy O’Kevin
think of. He was thinking the same way him self.
    “What made you think you should take
your friends joyriding while I’m waiting for you here?” Uckrose
was demanding of
the captain.
    “He was comin’ here anyhow,” Patsy
said, “so I thought it’d do no harm if he came wid me. O’ course, when we
got to fishin’—”
    “When you got to fishing, you took the
whole day instead of getting here as you were told to.”
Uckrose pointed up at the nearest outrigger. “And what does that flag
mean?”
    “It’s a release flag, sorr.”
    “It’s a release flag.” Uckrose had
a trick of repeating the last thing that had been said to him in
a tone that made it sound as if the speaker could only have uttered it as a
gratuitous affront. “What does that mean?”
    “Mr. Templar had a sailfish on, an’ we
turned it loose.”
    “You turned it loose.” Uckrose’s
jowls quivered. “How many days, how many weeks, have I fished with you, year
after year, and I’ve never yet caught a sail fish?”
    “That’s the luck o’ the game,
sorr.”
    “The luck of the game. But the very
least you could have
done was bring in the fish.”
    “It was Mr. Templar’s fish,” Patsy
said, with a little more emphasis on the name. “He said to break it off,
so I did.”
    “It was only a little one,” Simon
put in peaceable.
    “It was on my boat!” Uckrose
blared. “It belonged to me. I could have sent it back to be mounted. What
dif ference does it make who caught it?”
    Simon studied him with a degree of scientific
in credulity.
    “Do you seriously mean,” he inquired, “that you’d have had my fish stuffed, and hung over your mantelpiece,
and told everyone you caught it?”
    “You mind your own business!”
    The Saint nodded agreeably, and turned to
O’Kevin.
    “I’m sorry I got you into this, Patsy,” he said.
“But let’s just get you out again.”
He put a hand in his pocket, brought
out some money and peeled off two fifty-dollar
bills. “That should take care of today’s charter. Don’t charge Fat Stuff for it, and he can’t squawk. His time starts tomorrow. And thanks for
the fishing—it was fun.”
    As O’Kevin hesitated, Simon tucked the two
fifties into his
shirt pocket and picked up his suitcase.
    Gloria Uckrose said: “Did I get the
name right—Si mon Templar?”
    Simon nodded, looking at her again, and this
time taking no
pains to control where his eyes wandered. With
all his audacity he was not often crudely brash: there is a difference which the cut-rate Casanovas of the Mickey
Spillane school would never understand. But Clinton Uckrose’s egregious rudeness had sparked an answering insolence in him that burned up into
more outrageous devilment than
solemn outrage.
    “I’ll be staying at the Compleat
Angler,” he said. “Any time you can shake off this dull
slob, let’s have a drink.”
    He started to walk away.
    The third member of the party who had been
waiting on the pier intercepted him. He had been with the Uckroses
when Simon first