The Saint Meets His Match (She was a Lady)

The days had been when, to quote one flippant com­mentary, Chief Inspector Teal would have given ten years' salary for the privilege of leading the Saint gently by the arm into the nearest police station, and a number of gentlemen in the underworld would have given ten years' liberty for the pleasure of transporting the Saint to the top of the chute of a blast furnace and quietly back-heeling him into the stew. These things may be read in other volumes of the Saint Saga. But somehow the Saint had continued to go his pleasantly piratical way unscathed, to the rage and terror of the underworld and the despair of Chief Inspector Teal—buccaneer in the suits of Savile Row, amused, cool, debonair, with hell-for-leather blue eyes and a Saintly smile. . . .

And then, all at once, as it seemed, he had finished his work, and that should have been that. "The tumult and the shouting dies, the sinners and the Saints depart," as the Saint himself so beautifully put it. All adventures come to an end. But Jill Trelawney . . .

"Jill Trelawney," said the Saint dreamily, "is a new interest. I tell you, Teal, I was going to take the longest holiday of my life. But since Jill Trelawney is still at large, and your bunch of flat-footed nit-wits hasn't been able to do anything about it ..."

And after considerable elaboration of his point, the Saint was permitted to say much the same thing to the commissioner; but this interview was briefer.

"You can try," said the chief. "There are some photo­graphs and her dossier. We pulled her in last week, after the Angels wrecked the raid on Harp's dope joint—"

"And she showed up with a copper-bottomed alibi you could have sailed through a Pacific hurricane," drawled the Saint. "Yeah?"

"Get her," snapped the chief.

"Three weeks," drawled the Saint laconically, and walked out of Scotland Yard warbling a verse of the comedy song hit of the season—written by himself.

"I

Am the guy

Who killed  Capone ——"

 

As he passed the startled doorkeeper, he got a superb yodelling effect into the end of that last line.

And that was exactly thirty-six hours before he met Jill Trelawney for the first time.