13 The Saint Intervenes (Boodle)

However hard it might have been for Mr. Parstone to place the name of Simon Templar, he was by no means igno­rant of the Saint. His watery eyes popped halfway out of their sockets, and his jaw hardened at the same time.

"So you're the Saind?" he said.

"Of course," murmured Simon.

"Id your very own words, a low cribidal——"

Simon shook his head.

"Oh, no, Herbert," he said. "By no means as low as that. My reputation may be bad, but it's only rumour. You may whisper it to your friends, but the law doesn't allow you to put it in writing. That's libel. And you couldn't even get Chief Inspector Teal to testify that my record would justify anything like the language this book of yours has used about me. My sins were always fairly idealistic and devoted to the squashing of beetles like yourself—not to trading in drugs and grinding the faces of the poor. But you haven't heard anything like the whole of it. Listen to some more."

He turned to another selected passage.

" 'The Saint'," he read, " 'always seemed to derive a pecul­iar malicious pleasure from robbing and swindling those who could least afford to lose. To my dying day, I shall be haunted by the memory of the fiendish glee which distorted his face when he told me that he had stolen five pounds from a woman with seven children, who had scraped and saved for months to get the money together. He accepted the money from her as a fee for trying to trace the grave of her father, who had been reported "missing" in 1917. Of course he never made any attempt to carry out his share of the bar­gain. He played this cruel trick on several occasions, and al­ways with the same sadistic pleasure, which I believe meant jar more to him than the actual cash which he derived from it.' "

"Is that id the book too?" asked Parstone hoarsely.

"Naturally," said the Saint. "That's what I'm reading it from. And there are lots more interesting things. Look here.'The bogus companies floated by Templar, in which thousands upon thousands of widows and orphans were deprived——' "

"Wait!" interrupted Parstone tremblingly. "This is terrible—a terrible coidcideds. The book will be withdrawd at wuds. Hardly eddywud will have had tibe to read it. Ad if eddy sball cobbensation I cad give——"

Simon closed his book with a smile and laid it on Mr. Parstone's desk.

"Shall we say fifty thousand pounds?" he suggested affably.

Mr. Parstone's face reddened to the verge of an apoplectic stroke, and he brought up his handkerchief with shaking hands.

"How buch?" he whispered.

"Fifty thousand pounds," repeated the Saint. "After all, that's a very small amount of damages to ask for a libel like this. If the case has to go to court, I think it will be admitted that never in the whole history of modern law has such a colossal libel been put on paper. If there is any crime under the sun of which I'm not accused in that book, I'll sit down right now and eat it. And there are three hundred and twenty pages of it—eighty thousand words of continuous and unbridled insult. For a thing like that, Herbert, I think fifty thousand pounds is pretty cheap."

"You could'n get it," said Parstone harshly. "It's the author's liability ——"

"I know that clause," answered the Saint coolly, "and you may be interested to know that it has no legal value what­ever. In a successful libel action, the author, printer, and publisher are joint tort-feasors, and none of them can in­demnify the other. Ask your solicitor. As a matter of fact," he added prophetically, "I don't expect I shall be able to recover anything from the author, anyway. Authors are usually broke. But you are both the printer and publisher, and I'm sure I can collect from you."

Mr. Parstone stared at him with blanched lips.

"But fifty thousad pouds is ibpossible," he whined. "It would ruid be!"

"That's what I mean to do, dear old bird," said the Saint gently. "You've gone on swindling a lot of harmless idiots for too long already, and now I want you to see what it feels like when it happens to you."

He stood up, and collected his hat.