11 The Brighter Buccaneer

"Splendid," murmured Simon, and went back to the hotel to supervise the refuelling of his car without relieving Teal's curiosity.

At six o'clock that evening a very frightened man, who had undergone one of the slickest feats of abduction with violence that he could ever have imagined, and who had been very efficiently gagged, bound, blindfolded, and carried across coun­try by the masked bandit who was responsible, sat with his back to a tree where he had been roughly propped up in a deep glade of the New Forest and watched the movements of his captor with goggling eyes.

The Saint had kindled a small, crisp fire of dry twigs, and he was feeding more wood to it and blowing into it with the dex­terity of long experience, nursing it up into a solid cone of fierce red heat. Down there in the hollow where they were, the branches of the encircling trees filtered away the lingering twilight until it was almost as dark as midnight; but the glow of the fire showed up the Saint's masked face in macabre shad­ing of red and black as he worked over it, like the face of a pantomime devil illuminated on a darkened stage.

The Saint's voice, however, was far from devilish-it was almost affectionate.

"You don't seem to realize, brother," he said, "that stealing secret treaties is quite a serious problem, even when they're the daft sort of treaties that We Politicians amuse ourselves with. And it's very wrong of you to think that you can shift the blame for your crimes on to that unfortunate ass whom you dislike so much. So you're going to tell me just where you put that treaty, and then there'll be no more nonsense about it."

The prisoner's eyes looked as if they might pop out of his head at any moment, and strangled grunts came through the gag as he struggled with the ropes that bound his arms to his sides; but the Saint was unmoved. The fire had been heaped up to his complete satisfaction.

"Our friend Mr. Teal," continued the Saint, in the same oracular vein, as he began to unlace the captive's shoes, "has been heard to complain about there being no Third Degree in this country. Now that's obviously ridiculous, because you can see for yourself that there is a Third Degree, and I'm it. Our first experiment is the perfect cure for those who suffer from cold feet. I'll show it to you now-unless you'd rather talk voluntarily?"

The prisoner shook his head vigorously, and emitted further strangled grunts which the Saint rightly interpreted as a re­fusal. Simon sighed, and hauled the man up close to the fire.

"Very well, brother. There's no compulsion at all. Any state­ment you like to make will be made of your own free will." He drew one of the man's bared feet closer to his little fire. "If you change your mind," he remarked genially, "you need only make one of those eloquent gurgling noises of yours, and I ex­pect I shall understand."

It was only five minutes before the required gurgling noise came through the gag. But after the gag had been taken out it was another five minutes before the red-faced prisoner's speech became coherent enough to be useful.

Simon left him there, and met Teal in the hotel at half past seven. "The treaty is pushed under the carpet in Whipple­thwaite's study," he said.

The detective's pose of mountainous sleepiness failed him for once in his life. "As near as that?" he ejaculated. "Good Lord!"

The Saint nodded. "I don't think you'll have to worry your heads about whether he'll prosecute," he said. "The man's mentally deficient-I thought so from the beginning. And my special treatment hasn't improved his balance a lot ...

"As a general rule, problems in detection bore me stiff-it's so much more entertaining to commit the crime yourself-but this one had its interesting points. A man who could hate a harmless ass like that enough to try and ruin him in such an elaborate way is a bit of a museum specimen. You know, Claud, I've been thinking about those brilliant ideas you say policemen get sometimes; it strikes me that the only thing you want --"

"Tell me about it when I come back," said Teal, looking at his watch. "I'd better see Whipplethwaite at once and get it over with."

"Give him my love," drawled the Saint, dipping his nose into the pint of beer which the detective had bought for him. "He'll get his satisfaction all right when you arrest Vallance."

The detective stood stock still and stared at him with an owl-like face. "Arrest who?" he stammered.

"Mr. Spencer Vallance-the bloke who put insomnia tablets in Whipplethwaite's dyspepsia bottle at lunch-time, nipped up to Whipplethwaite's room for the key, opened the safe, replaced the key, and then staggered out of the study bellowing that he'd been sandbagged. The bloke I've just been having words with," said the Saint. -- Teal leaned back rather limply against the bar.

"Good Lord alive, Templar"