The Saint Meets His Match (She was a Lady)

With a sigh he climbed out and pulled on his dressing gown. One glance at the line between the star-shaped split in the window and the scar in the plaster was enough to show that the shot had come in at a wide angle. The Saint sighed again. Perhaps his estimate of himself had been wrong, It seemed that there was something else which annoyed him even more than to be interrupted after business hours—and that was to be taken for a fool.

He glanced round the room and selected a battered pickelhaube—relic of a grimmer warfare than that. Then he switched off the light. Returning to the window, he knelt down so, that he was below the level of the sill, and raised the lower sash. On one side of this opening he dis­played the pickelhaube, looped over the back of a chair which he edged into position with his foot, and awaited developments with a kindly interest.

The mews was deserted, and there were no pedestrians visible at the entrance in Berkeley Square at that moment, but he could pick out the shadowy bulk of a big saloon car parked in the cul-de-sac of the mews itself, and the second shot from it impinged accurately upon the pickel­haube with a noise like that of a dull gong.

Neither of the shots from outside had been accom­panied by a report, but Simon Templar, since acquiring the right to be as noisy as he pleased, had ceased to be of such a retiring disposition. He emptied his automatic without stealth, and crammed in a fresh magazine as he raced down the stairs.

His servant met him in the hall.

"Count ten, and then open the front door—but lie flat on the ground when you do it!" snapped the Saint, and vanished into the sitting room without explaining how this feat of contortion was to be performed.

He was edging back the window curtains when the door began to open.

He had no fear for the man who was opening it, for there were so few flies on Orace that even a short-sighted man would have had no excuse for mistaking him for a Chilean mule. Neither had he any fear of the agile gunman who was upsetting his evening. Either the car was an ordinary car, in which case the gunman was winged if Simon Templar had ever learnt anything about the art of shooting up automobiles; or the car was an extraordi­nary car, lined throughout with half-inch nickel steel, in which case the gunman was probably not winged. And, either way, if it came to a fight . . .

"Joke!" murmured the Saint, and lowered his head again quickly.