Follow the Saint by Leslie Charteris Page B

have been if the
rubber-necking had continued. At that moment his mind was capable of absorb ing only
one fearful and calamitous realization. He had turned to see whether
the girl with the fair curly hair and the blue eyes had also
been listening, and whether she needed any more encouragement to
announce herself. And the girl was gone.
    She must
have got up and gone out even in the short time that the barman had been
talking. The Saint’s glance swept on to identify the other faces in the
room—faces that he had noted and automatically catalogued as he
came in. They were all
the same, but her face was not one of them. There was an empty glass beside her
chair, and the chair itself was already being
taken by a dark slender girl who had just entered.
    Interest
lighted the Saint’s eyes again as he saw her, awakened instantly as he appreciated the
subtle perfection of the sculptured cascade
of her brown hair, crystallized as he approved the contours of her slim
yet mature figure revealed by a simple
flowered cotton dress. Then he saw her face for the first time, and held his tankard a shade tighter. Here, indeed,
was something to call beautiful, something on which the word could be used without hesitation even under his most dispassionate scrutiny. She was
like—“Peaches in autumn,” he said to himself, seeing the fresh bloom
of her cheeks against the russet
shades of her hair. She raised her head with a smile, and his blood sang
carillons. Perhaps after all…
    And then he
saw that she was smiling and speaking to an ordinarily good-looking young man
in a striped blazer who stood possessively over her; and inward laughter
overtook him before he could feel the sourness of disappointment.
    He loosened one elbow from the
bar to run a hand through his dark hair, and
his eyes twinkled at Mr Uniatz.
    “Oh,
well, Hoppy,” he said. “It looks as if we can still be taken for a
ride, even at our age.”
    Mr Uniatz
blinked at him. Even in isolation, the face that Nature had planted on
top of Mr Uniatz’s bull neck could never have been mistaken for that of a
matinee idol with an inclination towards intellectual pursuits and
the cultivation of the soul; but when viewed in exaggerating contrast with the tanned piratical chiselling
of the Saint’s features it had a grotesqueness
that was sometimes completely shattering to those who beheld it for the
first time. To compare it with the face of a
gorilla which had been in violent contact with a variety of blunt instruments during its formative years would be
risking the justifiable resentment of any gorilla which had been in violent contact with a variety of blunt
instruments during its formative years. The best that can be said of it is that
it contained in mauled and primitive form all the usual organs of sight, smell, hearing, and ingestion,
and prayerfully let it go at that.
And yet it must also be said that Simon Templar had come to regard it with a fondness which even its mother could
scarcely have shared. He watched it with good-humoured patience, waiting for it to answer,
    “I
dunno, boss,” said Mr Uniatz.
    He had not
thought over the point very deeply. Simon knew this, because
when Mr Uniatz was thinking his face screwed itself into even more frightful contortions than
were stamped on it in repose. Thinking of
any kind was an activity which caused Mr Uniatz excruciating pain. On
this occasion he had clearly escaped much suffering because his mind—if such a word can be used without blasphemy in
connection with any of Mr Uniatz’s
cerebral processes—had been else where.
    “Something
is bothering you, Hoppy,” said the Saint. “Don’t keep it to
yourself, or your head will start aching.”
    “Boss,”
said Mr Uniatz gratefully, “do I have to drink dis wit’ de
paper on ?”
    He held up
the parcel he was nursing.
    Simon
looked at him blankly for a moment, and then felt weak in the middle.
    “Of
course not,” he said. “They only wrapped it up because they