The Saint Meets His Match (She was a Lady)

The girl said, with cool contempt, as though she were dealing with a sulky child: "If it'll make you feel any happier to have him fixed——"

"It would," said Stephen Weald shamelessly. "I know there are always stories, but the stories I've heard about the Saint don't make me happy. He's uncanny. They say——"

The words were strangled in his throat in a kind of sob, so that the other two looked at him quickly, though they could not have made out his face in the gloom. But the girl saw, in an instant, what Weald had seen—the deeper shadow that had blacked out the grey square of one window.

Then there was something else in the car, something living, besides themselves. It was strangely eerie, that transient certainty that something had moved in the car that belonged to none of them. But it was only an arm—a swift sure arm that reached through one open window with a crisp rustle of tweed sleeve which they all heard clearly in the silence—and a hand that found a switch and flooded them with light from the panel bulb over their heads.

"What do they say, Weald?" drawled a voice.

There was a curious tang about that voice. It struck all of them before they had blinked the darkness out of their eyes sufficiently to make out its owner, who now had his head and shoulders inside the car, leaning on his forearms in the window. It was the most cavalierly insolent voice any of them had ever heard.

It sent Pinky Budd a dull pink, and Stephen Weald a clammy grey-white.

Jill Trelawney's cheeks went hot with a rising flush of anger. Perhaps because of her greater sensitiveness, she appreciated the mocking arrogance of that voice more than either of the others. It carried every conceivable strength and concentration of insolence and impudence and biting challenge.

"Well?"

That gentle drawl again. It was amazing what that voice could do with one simple syllable. It jagged and rawed it with the touch of a high-speed saw, and drawled it out over a bed of hot Saharan sand in a hint of impish laughter.

"Templar!"

Budd dropped the name huskily, and Weald inhaled sibilantly through his teeth. The girl's lip curled.

"You were talking about me," drawled the man in the window.

It was a flat statement. He made it to the girl, ignoring the two men after one sweeping stare. For a fleeting sec­ond her voice failed her, and she was furious with herself. Then—

"Mr. Templar, I presume?" she said calmly.

The Saint bowed as profoundly as his position in the window admitted.