The Saint and Mr Teal (Once More the Saint)

Young Harry Trape was sullen and frightened. The ways of violence were not new to him-he had been in prison three times, and once they would have flogged him with a nine-thonged lash if the doctors had not said he was too weak to endure the punishment. Young Harry had a grievance: he had not only been knocked out by the Saint and tied up in a stuffy sack, but he had been viciously kicked both unknowingly and knowingly by the man he had tried to serve, and he felt he had much to complain about. He had come to the saloon prepared to complain, but the snake-like impassiveness of the unblinking stare that fastened on his face held him mute and strangely terrified.

"You are a fool, Trape," said Osman, almost benevo­lently, "and I don't think I require your services any longer. Ali will take you back to St. Mary's in the speedboat. You will give up your room at Tregarthen's, make a parcel of all the cocaine you have and post it to the usual address, and then you will take yourself, your friend, and your luggage back to the speedboat, which will take you both to Penzance immediately. Your money will be waiting for you in London. You may go."

"Yes, sir," said Trape throatily.

He left the saloon quickly. The seaman was about to follow him, but Osman stayed him with a gesture.

"It will not really be necessary to go to Penzance, Ali," he remarked deliberately; and the man nodded and went out.

Stride's bloodshot eyes stared at the Egyptian.

'''My God-you're a cold-blooded devil!" he half gasped.

Osman chuckled wheezily.

"Oh, no, not cold-blooded, my dear Stride! You ought to know that. Far from it. But a dead fool is a safe fool, and I believe in safety first. But not cold­blooded. There are times when my flesh burns like fire- have I not told you?"

Galbraith Stride shuddered in spite of himself, for he knew what Osman meant.

"I came to see you about that," he said jerkily.

"Ah! You have decided?"

Stride nodded. He sat down at the table, helped him­self with nervous fingers from the inlaid cigarette box. The secretary stood by, ignored by both.

It was a strange venue for a peace conference, but that was what it was-and it explained also the terror which had come to Galbraith Stride that afternoon on the sunny deck of his yacht, the terror that had looked at him out of two cold reckless eyes that were as blue as the sea. Each of those two men was a power in an underground world of ugly happenings, though in their personal contact there was no question about which was the dominating personality. Even as Abdul Osman's tentacles of vice reached from Shanghai to Constanti­nople, so did Galbraith Stride's stretch from London south to the borders of the Adriatic and out west across the ocean to Rio.

Looking at Abdul Osman, one could build about him just such a mastery, but there was nothing about Galbraith Stride to show the truth. And yet it was true. Somehow, out of the restless cunning that evolved from the cowardice of his ineffectual physique, Stride had built up that subterranean kingdom and held it together, unknown to his stepdaughter, unknown to the police, unknown even to the princelings of his noisome empire, who communicated with him only through that silent Ramón Almido who passed as Stride's secretary. And thus, with the growth of both their dominions, it had come to a conference that must leave one of them supreme. Abdul Osman's insatiable lust for power dictated it, for Stride would have been content with his own boundaries. And with it, in the first meeting between them, had come to Abdul Osman the knowledge that he was Stride's master, that he need not be generous in treating for terms. The spectacle of Stride's uneasiness was another sop to Osman's pride.

"What a different conclusion there might have been if we had not both simultaneously thought of depositing the same letters with our solicitors!" said Osman re­flectively. "To think that if either of us died suddenly there would be left instructions to the police to investigate carefully the alibi of the. other! Quite a dramatic handicap, isn't it?"

Stride licked his lips.

"That's the only part of the bargain you've kept," he said. "Why, I've just heard you admit that your men have been landing cocaine here."

"I took the liberty of assuming our agreement to be a foregone conclusion," said Osman smoothly. Then his voice took on a harsher tone. "Stride, there's only one way out for you. For the last two years my agents have been steadily accumulating evidence against you- evidence which would prove absorbing reading to your good friends at Scotland Yard. That is the possibility for which you were not prepared, and it's too late now for you to think of laying the same trap for me. In another month that evidence can be brought to the point where it would certainly send you to prison for the rest of your life. You see, it was so much easier for me than for the police-they did not know whom to suspect, whereas I knew, and only had to prove it."