There was a note enclosed:
Dere Mr. Templar,
Ole Jimmy McDill had one to meny double whiskeys an cash in his chips las nite his last rekest was send you this here dingus account of you are a reel good feller an he like you a lot same is inclose.
Yrs Truly
The Boys
Bonanza City
The Saint lifted the glass in his right hand.
“Jimmy McDill,” he said softly, “may there be double bourbons and unlimited credit, wherever you are.”
He was happily playing with the contraption when Larry Phelan arrived to pick him up for dinner that night, and the engineer gazed at him in somewhat condescending puzzlement.
“What the hell are you doing with a Doodlebug, Saint?” he demanded; and Simon was hardly less surprised.
“How the hell did you know what it was?”
“The lunatic fringes of the business were stiff with these things during the depression. I’ve seen ’em in all sizes and shapes. Trouble is, none of ’em are worth anything.”
“What do you mean, not worth anything?” Simon objected. “I’ll bet I can pick up a silver dollar at ten feet with this gadget.”
Simon produced a silver cartwheel and threw it on the carpet. Grasping the stirrup-handles, he lifted the box, and the same humming sound he had heard in the Bonanza City bar filled the room.
Simon made sure the scale pointer indicated “silver,” and advanced upon the dollar. Just as it had done for James Aloyisius McDill, the humming keened up the scale until, as The Saint stood over the dollar, a malignant whining came from between his hands. He turned to Phelan triumphantly.
“This one works,” he said.
“Sure,” rejoined Phelan. “Now let’s see how well it works.”
He picked up a San Francisco telephone directory and the classified directory and piled them on top of the dollar, and the humming stopped abruptly.
“They’re all the same,” Phelan said sympathetically. “It seems to be possible to bounce some kind of oscillation off different metals, and make it selective according to their atomic structure, but the beam hardly has any penetration. Your lode would have to be practically on the surface, where you could see it anyhow, before a thing like this would detect it at all. I hope you didn’t pay much for it.”
“Only fifty bucks and a couple of drinks, and it was worth that,” said The Saint: and the thought deepened in his blue eyes. “In fact, I think this is just what we needed to square accounts with Brother Rochborne and your swami.”
The Swami Yogadevi had never seen a Doodlebug, but he had his own effective methods of ascertaining the presence of precious metals. His techniques depended for their success upon certain paraphernalia unknown to electronics, such as a large, spherical chunk of genuine optical glass; celestial charts populated by crabs, bulls, goats, virgins, and other mythological creatures; and many yards of expensive drapery embroidered with esoteric symbols — the whole enshrined in a gloomy and expensive apartment on Russian Hill.
There was nothing about the place to suggest that the Swami Yogadevi had once been Reuben Haggitt, known to the carnival circuit as Ali Pasha, the Mighty Mentalist. Mr. Haggitt’s wants had been simple in those days, expressed mainly in terms of tall bottles and tall blondes, and they were much the same now, under his plush exterior. There were times, the Swami Yogadevi told himself, when he wished he hadn’t met Melville Koch borne, profitable though the partnership had turned out to be. For instance, there was this Professor Tattersall business.
“How should I know who’s Professor Simeon Tattersall?” he asked with asperity.
Mr. Rochborne eyed the mystic with some distaste.
”I don’t expect you to know anything.” he said coldly. “All I want you to do is read it — if you can.”
The seer pushed his turban back on his forehead and picked up the newspaper clipping again. It was from the front page of the final afternoon edition of a San Francisco daily.
CLEMENTINE VALLEY, Calif (by a staff correspondent) —
There’s a lot of gold still lying around the long abandoned Lucky Nugget Mine near here if someone will just come along with the light kind of divining rod, water witch, or a sensitive nose.
Professor Simeon Tattersall not only says that the gold is there, but asserts freely that he has the gadget that will find it. Said gadget, his own invention, he modestly styles the Tattersall Magnetic Prospector, and he plans to demonstrate its worth at the Lucky Nugget Thursday morning at 10:30 PST—
“Say!” bleated the soothsayer. “Ain’t this Lucky Nugget Mine the one you sold that Phelan dame?”
“It is,” said Mr. Rochborne concisely. “What I want to know now is who this Tattersall is and why he picks the Lucky Nugget to demonstrate his screwball gadget, just three weeks after we made a deal with it.”
“It says here he thinks there’s gold in it,” said the Swami brightly.
Mr. Rochborne favored him with a look of contempt and got to his feet. He was a large man with hulking shoulders and a tanned kindly face, of the type which inspires instant trust in dogs, children, and old ladies.
“One thing I’d bet on — there’s no such person as Professor Simeon Tattersall. There never was a name like that. There couldn’t be.”
“What’re you going to do about it, Mel?” asked the sage.
“I don’t know,” said Mr. Rochborne darkly. “Maybe nothing. May be something. But one thing I do know, I’m going to be there when this ‘Professor’ ” — he put quotation marks around the title — “holds his ‘demonstration’ tomorrow morning.”
Simon Templar might have hoped for a more impressive turn-out in response to his carefully planted publicity, but he could also have been guilty of discounting Larry Phelan’s estimate of the skepticism of local wiseacres in the matter of Doodlebugs. The Lucky Nugget mine site on Thursday morning was fairly uncrowded by seven male and two female citizens of the nearby town of Clementine Valley, all more or less the worse for wear, four small boys, three cynical reporters, two dogs, and a passing hobo attracted by the crowd. But to Simon Templar the most important spectator was a large well-built man, conspicuous in city clothes.
The Saint had arrayed himself for the occasion in what seemed a likely professorial costume of Norfolk jacket, pith helmet, and riding boots, with the addition of a gray goatee which sat rather strangely on his youthful brown face.
He eyed the gathering individually and collectively with an equal interest as he stepped from Clementine Valley’s only taxicab, tenderly bearing the wooden box.
“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” he said.
“Hey, Prof,” queried a high thin voice from the group, “will she bring in London?”
This sally elicited a wave of hometown laughter, to which Simon professorially paid no heed.
When one spoke of the Lucky Nugget mine, one meant 928 feet of partially caved-in tunnel sunk into the bowels of a red-dirt pine-freckled hill. The tunnel entrance was half blocked by fallen dirt and broken timbers.
“Professor Simeon Tattersall” sapiently eyed the tunnel mouth, grasped his device, and took a step toward the opening.
“Mind if I look at your gadget, Professor?” said a genial voice.
Simon looked around and found the man in the city clothes standing at his elbow.
“Well, sir,” said The Saint, in his most precise pedantic voice, “in the first place, this is not a ‘gadget’; it is a highly involved and intricate extrapository reactodyne, operating according to an entirely new principle of electronics. Later, perhaps, after the demonstration is concluded, you may—”