11 The Brighter Buccaneer

Slowly, stupidly, Major Bellingford Smart drew out the hard knobbly object. It was a very small automatic, and looped loosely round it was a diamond and sapphire pendant-one of the least valuable items in the Countess of Albury's vanished collection. He was still staring at it when the constable grabbed it quickly out of his hand.

"Carrying firearms, eh? And that talk about 'aving a lease in your pocket-just to get a chance to pull it out and shoot me! You've got it coming to you, all right."

He glanced round the room with a professional air, and saw the open window.

"Came in through there," he remarked, with some satisfac­tion at the admiring silence of his audience of butler and footman. "There'd be a lot of dust outside on that sill, wouldn't there? And look at 'is trousers."

The audience bent its awed eyes on Major Bellingford Smart's nether garments, and the Major also looked down. Clearly marked on each knee was a circular patch of sooty grime which had certainly not been there before the Saint cannoned into him in that very helpful darkness.

On the far side of the square, Simon Templar heard the constable's whistle shrilling into the night, and drifted on towards the refreshment that waited for him.

The New Swindle

MR. ALFRED TILLSON ("Broads" Tillson to the trade) was only one of many men who cherished the hope that one day they might be privileged to meet the Saint again. Usually those ambitions included a dark night, a canal, and a length of lead pipe, with various trimmings and decorations according to the whim of the man concerned. But no bliss so unalloyed as that had ever come the way of any of those men; for canals and lengths of lead pipe did not enter into Simon Templar's own plans for his brilliant future, and on dark nights he walked warily as a matter of habit.

Mr. Alfred Tillson, however, enjoyed the distinction of being a man who did achieve his ambition and meet the Saint for a second time; although the re-encounter did not by any means take place as he would have planned it.

He was a lean grey-haired man with a long horse-like face and the air of a retired churchwarden-an atmosphere which he had created for himself deliberately as an aid to business, and which he had practised for so long that in the end he could not have shaken it off if he had tried. It had become just as much a part of his natural make-up as the faintly ecclesiasti­cal style of dress which he affected; and over the years it had served him well. For Mr. "Broads" Tillson was acknowledged in the trade to be one of the greatest living card manipulators in the world. To see those long tapering fingers of his ruffling through a pack of cards and dealing out hands in which every pip had been considered and placed individually was an ed­ucation in itself. He could do anything with a pack of cards except make it talk. He could shuffle it once, apparently without looking at it, and in that shuffle sort it out suit by suit and card by card, stack up any sequence he wanted, and put it all together again, with one careless flick of his hands that was too quick for the eye to follow.

If you were in the trade, if you were "regular" and you could induce him to give you a demonstration of his magic, he would invite you to deal out four hands of bridge, write down a list of cards in every hand, shuffle the pack again as much as you cared to, and give it back to him; whereupon he would take one glance at your list, shuffle the pack once himself, and proceed to deal out the four hands again exactly as you had listed them. And if you were unlucky enough to be playing with him in the way of business you could order brand-new packs as often as you cared to pay for them, without inconven­iencing him in the least. Mr. Alfred Tillson had never marked a card in his life; and he could play any card game that had ever been invented with equal success.

On the stage he might have made a very comfortable income for himself, but his tastes had never led him that way. Mr. Tillson was partial to travel and sea air; and for many years he had voyaged the Atlantic and Pacific ocean routes, paying himself very satisfactory dividends on every trip, and invaria­bly leaving his victims with the consoling thought that they had at least evaded the wiles of sharpers and lost their money to an honest man.

He might have retired long ago, if he had not had a weak­ness for beguiling the times between voyages with dissipations of a highly unclerical kind; and as a matter of fact it was to this weakness of his that he owed his first meeting with the Saint.