06 Alias the Saint

Patricia and Simon had settled themselves in the lounge of the hotel where they pulled up, and Everest had proceeded alone into the bar to supervise the production of cocktails--Teddy Everest was something of a connoisseur in these matters. And in the bar he met a man.

"It's extraordinary how people crop up," he remarked, when he returned. "I've just seen a bloke who reminded me of a real O. Henry yarn."

And later, over the table, he told the yarn.

"I don't think I bored you with the details of my last job," he said. "As a matter of fact, this is the only interesting thing about it. There's a gold mine somewhere in South Africa that was keeping me pretty busy last year--it was going down steadily, and I was sent out to try and find a spark more life in it. Now, it happened that I'd come across that very mine the year before, and heard all about it, and I was rather bored with the job. Everyone on the spot knew that the mine was a dud, and it seemed to me that I was just going to waste my time. Still, the pay was good, and I couldn't afford to turn my nose up at it. I'd got into jolly low water over my last holiday, to tell you the truth, and I wasn't sorry to have something to do--even if it was boring. It was on the train to Marseilles, where I caught my boat, that I met this guy--he on his way to a luxurious week at Antibes, rot him! We got talking, and it turned out that he knew a bit about the game. I remember telling him about my dud mine, and asking him if he held any shares, because I said a rag-and-bone man might give him a price for them. He hadn't any shares, which rather spoils the story."

"Because the mine wasn't a dud," murmured Simon; and Everest nodded.

" It was anything but. Certainly the old borings were worked out, but I struck a new vein all on my own, and those shares are going up to the sky when my report's been passed. I gave Hallin the tip just now--I felt he deserved it."

The Saint sat still.

It was Patricia Holm who put the question.

"Did you say 'Hallin'?" she asked.

"That's right." Everest was scraping at his pipe with a penknife. "Miles Hallin--the racing chappie.

Patricia looked across at the Saint, but the overflow she was expecting did not take place.

"Dear me!" said the Saint, quite mildly.

They were sitting over coffee in the lounge when Hallin passed through. Simon recognized him at once--before he waved to Everest, s - -

"One of the world's lucky men, I believe," Everest said, as the clamour of Hallin's car died away outside,--

"So I hear," said the Saint.

And once again Patricia looked at him, remembering his discourse of a few days before. It was a characteristic of the Saint that no idea ever slipped out of his mind, once it had arrived there: any riddle that occurred to him tormented him until he had solved it. Anything that was as wrong as Miles Hallin, to his peculiar mind, was a perpetual irritation to him, much as a note out of tune on a piano would be a perpetual irritation to a musician; he had to look round it and into it and scratch it and finger it and jigger about with it until he'd got it into line with the rest of the scheme of things, and it gave him no peace until it was settled.

Yet he said nothing more about Miles Hallin that day.

Still he knew nothing. Afterwards ...

But those are the bare facts of the beginning of the story.

They are told as the Saint liimself would tell them, simply put forward for what they are worth. Afterwards, in the light of the knowledge to which he came he could have fitted them together much more coherently, much more comprehensively; but that would not have been his way. He would have told the story as it happened.

"And the longer I live," he would have said, "the more I'm convinced that there's no end to anything in my life. Or in anyone else's, probably. If you trace the most ordinary things back to their source, you find they have the queerest beginnings. It's just one huge fantastic game of consequences. You decide to walk home instead of taking a taxi, one night, and ten years later a man commits suicide. And if you had taken the taxi, perhaps ten years later the same man might have been a millionaire. Your father stayed at one hotel instead of another, in the same town, and at the age of fifty you become Prime Minister. If he had stayed at the other hotel you would probably have ended your life in prison. . . . Take this very story. If we hadn't lunched at Basingstoke that day, or if we'd never gone to that house party, or if I hadn't once gone out without a handkerchief, or even if I'd never gone to Kuala Lumpur . . . Leave out the same flukes in the lives of the other people involved. Well, I've given up trying to decide exactly in what year, 'way back in the dim and distant past, it was decided that two men would have to die to make this story."

This is exactly the point at which Simon Templar would have paused to make his philosophical reflection.