Miles Hallin had survived being mauled by a tiger, and had killed an infuriated gorilla with a sheath knife. Miles Hallin had performed in bull fights before the King of Spain. Miles Hallin had gone into a tank and wrestled with a crocodile to oblige a Hollywood movie director. Miles Hallin had done everything dangerous that the most fertile imagination could conceive--and then some. So far as was known, Miles Hallin couldn't walk a tight rope; but the general impression was that if Miles Hallin could have walked a tight rope he would have walked a tight rope stretched across the crater of Vesuvius as a kind of appetizer before breakfast.
Miles Hallin bothered the Saint through the whole of that week-end.
Simon Templar, as he was always explaining, and usually explaining in such a way that his audience felt very sorry for him, had a sensitivity for anything the least bit out of the ordinary that was as tender as a gouty toe. The lightest touch, a touch that no one else would have felt, made him jump a yard. And when he boasted of his subtle discriminations, though he boasted flippantly, he spoke no less than the truth. That gift and nothing else had led him to fully half his adventures--that uncanny power of drawing a faultless line between the things that were merely eccentric and the things that were definitely wrong. And Miles Hallin struck him, in a way that he could not explain by any ordinary argument, as a thing that was definitely wrong.
Yet it so chanced, this time, that the Saint came to his story by a pure fluke--another and a wilder fluke than the one that had merely introduced him to a man whose brother had been a friend of Hallin's. But for that fluke, the Saint might to this day have been scowling at the name of Miles Hallin in the same hopeless puzzlement. And yet the Saint felt no surprise about the fluke. He had come to accept these accidents as a natural part of his life, in the same way that any other man accepts the accident of finding a newspaper on his breakfast table, with a sense (if he meditated it at all) that he was only seeing the inevitable outcome of a complicated organization of whose workings he knew nothing, but whose naturally continued existence he had never thought to question. These things were ordained.
In fact, there was an unexpected guest at a house party at which the Saint spent his week-end.
Simon Templar had met Teddy Everest in Kuala Lumpur, and again, years later, at Corfu. Teddy Everest was the unexpected guest at the house party; but it must be admitted that he was unexpected only by the Saint.
"This is my lucky day," murmured Simon, as he viewed the apparition. "I've been looking for you all over the world. You owe me ten cents. If you remember, when you had to be carried home after that farewell festival in K.L., I was left to pay for your rickshaw. You hadn't a bean. I know that, because I looked in all your pockets. Ten cents plus five percent compound interest for six years--"
"Comes to a lot less than you borrowed off me in Corfu," said Everest cheerfully. "How the hell are you?"
"My halo," said the Saint, "is clearly visible if you get a strong light behind me. , . . Well, damn your eyes!" The Saint was smiling as he crushed the other's hand in a long grip. "This is a great event, Teddy. Let's get drunk."
The party went with a swing from that moment.
Teddy Everest was a mining engineer, and the Saint could also tell a good story; between them, they kept the ball rolling as they pleased. And on Tuesday, since Everest had to go London on business, he naturally travelled in the Saint's car.
They lunched at Basingstoke; but it was before lunch that the incident happened which turned Teddy Everest's inexhaustible fund of reminiscence into a channel that was to make all the difference in the world to the Saint--and others.
Patricia and Simon had settled themselves in the lounge of the hotel where they pulled up, and Everest had proceeded alone into the bar to supervise the production of cocktails--Teddy Everest was something of a connoisseur in these matters. And in the bar he met a man.
"It's extraordinary how people crop up," he remarked, when he returned. "I've just seen a bloke who reminded me of a real O. Henry yarn."
And later, over the table, he told the yarn.
"I don't think I bored you with the details of my last job," he said. "As a matter of fact, this is the only interesting thing about it. There's a gold mine somewhere in South Africa that was keeping me pretty busy last year--it was going down steadily, and I was sent out to try and find a spark more life in it. Now, it happened that I'd come across that very mine the year before, and heard all about it, and I was rather bored with the job. Everyone on the spot knew that the mine was a dud, and it seemed to me that I was just going to waste my time. Still, the pay was good, and I couldn't afford to turn my nose up at it. I'd got into jolly low water over my last holiday, to tell you the truth, and I wasn't sorry to have something to do--even if it was boring. It was on the train to Marseilles, where I caught my boat, that I met this guy--he on his way to a luxurious week at Antibes, rot him! We got talking, and it turned out that he knew a bit about the game. I remember telling him about my dud mine, and asking him if he held any shares, because I said a rag-and-bone man might give him a price for them. He hadn't any shares, which rather spoils the story."
"Because the mine wasn't a dud," murmured Simon; and Everest nodded.
" It was anything but. Certainly the old borings were worked out, but I struck a new vein all on my own, and those shares are going up to the sky when my report's been passed. I gave Hallin the tip just now--I felt he deserved it."
The Saint sat still.
It was Patricia Holm who put the question.
"Did you say 'Hallin'?" she asked.
"That's right." Everest was scraping at his pipe with a penknife. "Miles Hallin--the racing chappie.
Patricia looked across at the Saint, but the overflow she was expecting did not take place.
"Dear me!" said the Saint, quite mildly.
They were sitting over coffee in the lounge when Hallin passed through. Simon recognized him at once--before he waved to Everest, s - -
"One of the world's lucky men, I believe," Everest said, as the clamour of Hallin's car died away outside,--
"So I hear," said the Saint.
And once again Patricia looked at him, remembering his discourse of a few days before. It was a characteristic of the Saint that no idea ever slipped out of his mind, once it had arrived there: any riddle that occurred to him tormented him until he had solved it. Anything that was as wrong as Miles Hallin, to his peculiar mind, was a perpetual irritation to him, much as a note out of tune on a piano would be a perpetual irritation to a musician; he had to look round it and into it and scratch it and finger it and jigger about with it until he'd got it into line with the rest of the scheme of things, and it gave him no peace until it was settled.
Yet he said nothing more about Miles Hallin that day.
Still he knew nothing. Afterwards ...
But those are the bare facts of the beginning of the story.
They are told as the Saint liimself would tell them, simply put forward for what they are worth. Afterwards, in the light of the knowledge to which he came he could have fitted them together much more coherently, much more comprehensively; but that would not have been his way. He would have told the story as it happened.
"And the longer I live," he would have said, "the more I'm convinced that there's no end to anything in my life. Or in anyone else's, probably. If you trace the most ordinary things back to their source, you find they have the queerest beginnings. It's just one huge fantastic game of consequences. You decide to walk home instead of taking a taxi, one night, and ten years later a man commits suicide. And if you had taken the taxi, perhaps ten years later the same man might have been a millionaire. Your father stayed at one hotel instead of another, in the same town, and at the age of fifty you become Prime Minister. If he had stayed at the other hotel you would probably have ended your life in prison. . . . Take this very story. If we hadn't lunched at Basingstoke that day, or if we'd never gone to that house party, or if I hadn't once gone out without a handkerchief, or even if I'd never gone to Kuala Lumpur . . . Leave out the same flukes in the lives of the other people involved. Well, I've given up trying to decide exactly in what year, 'way back in the dim and distant past, it was decided that two men would have to die to make this story."