She looked at him with a queer expression; and then she left her chair and crossed the floor quickly. To this day she is not quite sure why she obeyed; but it is enough that she did, and the Saint felt a certain relief as he watched her go.
Then he turned, and saw the gun in Mossiter's hand. He laughed-it was so absurd, so utterly fantastic, even in that place. In London, that sort of thing only happens in sensational fiction. But there it was; and the Saint knew that Baldy Mossiter must have been badly upset to make such a crude break. And he laughed; and his left hand fell on Mossiter's hand in a grip of steel, but with a movement so easy and natural that Mossiter missed the meaning of it until it was too late. The gun was pointed harmlessly down into the table, and all Mossiter's strength could not move it.
"You had better know me," said Simon quietly. "I'm called the Saint."
Baldy Mossiter heard him, staring, and went white.
"And you must not try to drug little girls," said the Saint A lot of things of no permanent importance have been mentioned in this episode; but the permanently important point of it is that Baldy Mossiter's beautiful front teeth are now designed to his measure by a gentleman in a white coat with a collection of antediluvian magazines in his waiting room.
3
A few moments later, the Saint strolled up into the street. A taxi was drawn up by the curb, and the Saint briefly spoke an address to the driver and stepped in.
The girl was sitting in the far corner. Simon gave her a smile and cheerfully inspected a set of grazed knuckles. It stands to the credit of his happy disposition that he really felt at peace with the world, although the evening's amusement represented a distinct setback to certain schemes that had been maturing in his fertile brain. As a rough-house it had had its virtues; but the truth was that the Saint had marked down the Calumet Club for something more drastic and profitable than a mere rough-house, and that idea, if it was ever to be materialized now, would have to be tackled all over again from the very beginning and a totally different angle. A couple of months of shrewd and patient reconnaissance work had gone west that night along with Baldy Mossiter's dental apparatus, but Simon Templar was incapable of weeping over potential poultry annihilated in the egg.
"Have a cigarette," he suggested, producing his case, "and tell me your name."
"Stella Dornford." She accepted a light, and he affected not to notice the unsteadiness of her hand. "Did you-have much trouble?"
The Saint grinned over his match.
"Well-hardly! I seemed to get a bit popular all at once- that was all. Nobody seemed to want me to go. There was a short argument-nothing to speak of."
He blew out the match and slewed round, looking through the window at the back. There was another taxi close behind, which is not extraordinary in a London street; and, hanging out of the window of the taxi behind, was a man-or the head and shoulders of one-which, to Saint's suspicious mind, was quite extraordinary enough. But he was not particularly bothered about it at the moment, for he had directed his own driver to the Criterion, and nothing would happen there.
"Where are we going?" asked the girl.
"Towards coffee," said the Saint. "Or, if you prefer it, something with more kick. Praise be to the blessed laws of England, we can drink for another half-hour yet, if we hire a sandwich to put on the table. And you can tell me the story of your life."
In the better light of the restaurant, and at leisure which he had not had before, he was confirmed in the impression which he had formed at the Calumet. She was undeniably pretty, in a rather childish way, with a neat fair head and china-blue eyes. A certain grace of carriage saved her from mere fluffiness.
"You haven't told me your name," she remarked, when he had ordered refreshment.
"I thought you heard Mossiter address me. Templar-Simon Templar."
"You seem to be rather a remarkable man."
The Saint smiled. He had been told that before, but he had no objection to hearing it again. He really had very simple tastes, in some ways.
"It's rather lucky for you that I am," he answered. "And now, tell me, what were you doing at the Calumet with Baldy?"
He had some difficulty in extracting her story-in fact, it required all his ingenuity to avoid making the extraction look too much like a cross-examination, for it was evident that she had not yet made up her mind about him.
He learned, after a time, that she was twenty-one years old, that she was the only daughter of a retired bank manager, that she had run away from the dull suburban circle of her family to try to find fortune on the wrong side of the footlights. He might have guessed that much, but he liked to know. It took some much more astute questioning to elicit a fact in which he was really much more interested.
". . . He's a junior clerk in the branch that used to be Daddy's. He came to the house once or twice, and we saw each other occasionally afterwards. It was all rather sweet and silly. We used to go to the pictures together, and once we met at a dance."
"Of course, you couldn't possibly have married him," said the Saint cunningly, and waited thoughtfully on her reply.
"It would have meant that I'd never have got away from all the mildewed things that I most wanted to run away from. I wanted to see Life. . . . But he really was a nice boy."
She had got a job in a revue chorus, and another girl in the same show had taken her to the Calumet one night. There she had met Mossiter, and others. She was without friends in London, and sheer loneliness made her crave for any society rather than none. There had been difficulties, she admitted. One man, a guest of Mossiter's-a German-had been particularly unpleasant. Yes, he was reputed to be very rich. . . .
"Don't you see," said the Saint, "that Mossiter could only have wanted to drug you for one of two reasons?"
"One of two?"
"When does this German go back to Germany?"
"I think he said he was going back tomorrow-that's Friday, isn't it?"
Simon shrugged.
"Such is Life," he murmured; and she frowned.
"I'm not a child, Mr. Templar."
"No girl ever is, in her own estimation," said the Saint rudely. "That's why my friends and I have been put to so much trouble and expense in the past-and are likely to go on being bothered in the same way."
He had expected her to be troublesome-it was a premonition he had had about her from the first-and, as was his way, he had deliberately preferred to precipitate the explosion rather than fumble along through smouldering and smoke. But he was not quite prepared for the reaction that he actually provoked, which was that she simply rose and left the table.
"I'm perfectly capable of taking care of myself, thank you," was her parting speech.
He beckoned a waiter, and watched her go with a little smile of rueful resignation. It was not the first time that some thing of that sort had happened to him-cases of that type were always liable to be trying, and fulfilled their liability more often than not.
"And so she swep' out," murmured Simon wryly, as he pocketed his change; and then he remembered the men who had followed them from the Calumet. "Men"- it was unlikely to be "man." The Calumet bunch were not of that class.
There were, as a matter of fact, two of them, and their instructions had been definite. They were merely to obtain addresses. It was therefore doubly unfortunate for the one who was concerned to follow Stella Dornford that, when he grasped part of the situation, he should have elected to attempt a coup on his own.
Stella Dornford tenanted a minute apartment in a block close to the upper end of Wardour Street. The block was in the form of a hollow square, with a courtyard in the centre, communicating with the street by a short passage, and the entrances to all the main staircases opened onto this court yard. Standing in this courtyard, facing the doorway by which the girl had entered, the sleuth glanced up curiously at the windows. A moment later he saw one of the windows light up.