The Saint Meets His Match (She was a Lady)

"Cullis is getting the wind up," repeated the Saint com­fortably. "Our blithe and burbling Mr. Cullis is feeling the draught in the most southerly quarter of his B.V.D.'s. He's already afraid of the inquiry on your father being reopened, so he abstracted certain important papers from your dossier. And he knows you're dangerous, so he employed Duodecimo to move you off the map. Yes, I think we could say poetically that our Mr. Cullis is soaring rapidly aloft on the wings of an upward gale."

"I see," said Jill softly.

"But you didn't see before?" asked the Saint. "Didn't you realize that there were really only two men concerned in catching your father—the chief commissioner himself, and Superintendent Cullis as was. Putting the chief com­missioner above suspicion, we're left with Cullis. He could have written the raid letter on your father's typewriter. He could have telephoned the fake message which sent your father to Paris, and then taken the chief commission­er along to see the fun. And he was the man who took your father's strong box out of the safe deposit and opened it in the Yard. If Cullis was in league with Wald­stein, what could have been easier than for him to pretend to discover notes which could be traced back to Waldstein in your father's box?"

The girl had been gazing intently at nothing in partic­ular while the Saint released that brief theory. But now she turned suddenly with an extraordinarily keen query in her eyes.

"When did you figure all this out?" she asked.

"In my spare time," said the Saint airily. "But that doesn't matter. The thing that matters is that Assistant Commissioner Cullis has put himself in the cart. He has pulled his flivver, and you and I are the souls who are going to take the buggy ride. Partly by luck, and partly by our own good judgment, we've got the bulge on him—for the moment. And the letter I'm going to write to him to­night will let him know it. I'll put it in his letter box my­self, and sit in the garden and watch him read it—it'll be worth the rheumatism. And when he's thoroughly digest­ed that letter, I'm going to have an encore entertainment figured out for him that will make him feel like a small balloon that's floated in between an infuriated porcupine and a bent pin by the time the curtain comes down!"

 

2

 

He left soon afterwards, without elucidating his riddle, and she was alone with her perplexity.