13 The Saint Intervenes (Boodle)

And then, as if this scorching interchange of fraternal com­pliments made them realise that there was a third party present who had not been included, and who might have felt miserably neglected, they checked their murderous advance towards one another and swung round on him together.

Epithets seared through their minds and slavered on their jaws—ruder, unkinder, more malignant words than they had ever shaped into connected order in their lives. And then, with one accord, they realised that those words could not be spoken yet; and deprived of that outlet, they simmered in a second torrid silence.

Walter was the first to come out of it. He opened his aching throat and brought forth trembling speech.

"Penwick," he said, "whatever that snivelling squirt has given you, I'll pay twice as much."

"I'll pay three times that," said Willie feverishly. "Four times—five times—I'll give you twenty per cent of anything I get out of the estate—"

"Twenty-five per cent," Walter shrieked wildly. "Twenty-seven and a half——"

The Saint raised his hand.

"One minute, boys," he murmured. "Hadn't you better hear the terms of the will first?"

"I know them," barked Walter.

"So do I," bellowed Willie. "Thirty per cent ——"

The Saint smiled. He took a large sealed envelope from his breast pocket, and opened it.

"I may have misled you," he said, and held up the docu­ment for them to read.

They crowded closer, breathing stertorously, and read:

I, Joseph Kinsall, hereby give and bequeath everything of which I die possessed, without exception, to the Royal London Hospital, believing that it will be better spent than it would have been by my two worthless sons.

It was in the late Sir Joseph Kinsall's own hand; and it was properly signed, sealed, and witnessed.

Simon folded it up and put it carefully away again; and Willie looked at Walter, and Walter looked at Willie. For the first time in their lives they found themselves absolutely and unanimously in tune. Their two minds had but a single thought. They drew deep breaths, and turned. ...

It was unfortunate that neither of them was very athletic. Simon Templar was; and he had promised Mr. Penwick that the will should come to no harm.

XI

The Tall Timber

The queer things that have led Simon Templar into the paths of boodle would in themselves form a sizable volume of curiosities; but in the Saint's own opinion none of these strange starting-points could ever compare, in sheer intrinsic uniqueness, with the moustache of Mr. Sumner Journ.

Simon Templar's relations with Chief Inspector Teal were not always unpleasant. On that morning he had met Mr. Teal in Piccadilly Circus and insisted on standing him lunch; and both of them had enjoyed the meal.

"And yet you'll probably be trying to arrest me again next week," said the Saint.

"I shouldn't be surprised," said Mr. Teal heavily.

They stood in the doorway of Arthur's, preparing to sepa­rate; and Simon was idly scanning the street when the moustache of Mr. Sumner Journ hove into view.

Let it be said at once that it was no ordinarily overgrown moustache, attracting attention by nothing but its mere vulgar size. It was, in fact, the reverse. From a slight distance no moustache was visible at all; and the Saint was looking at Mr. Journ simply by accident, as a man standing in the street will sometimes absent-mindedly follow the movements of another. As Mr. Journ drew nearer, the moustache was still imperceptible; but there appeared to be a slight shadow on his upper lip, as if it were disfigured by a small mole. And it was not until he was passing a yard away that the really exquisite singularity of the growth dawned upon Simon Templar's mind.

On Mr. Sumner Journ's upper lip, approximately fourteen hairs had been allowed to grow, so close together that the area they occupied could scarcely have been larger than a shirt button. These fourteen hairs had been carefully parted in the middle; and each little clique of seven had been care­fully waxed and twisted together so that they stuck out about half an inch from their patron's face like the horns of a snail. In the whole of Simon Templar's life, which had en­countered a perhaps unusual variety of developments of facial hair, ranging from the handlebar protuberances of the South-shire Insurance Company's private detective to the fine walrus effect sported by a Miss Gertrude Tinwiddle who contributed the nature notes in the Daily Gazette, he had never seen any example of hair culture in which such passionate devotion to detail, such a concentrated ecstasy of miniaturism, such an unostentatious climax of originality, had simultaneously ar­rived at concrete consummation.