“And four.”
“Make it four more.”
“I’ll raise that ten.” The chips slithered and spilled across the board and hands were turned face downwards and sent spinning over the table to join the discard.
Intuccio, detached as a statue, turned his head as the game fell into the lull of a fresh deal.
“Mr Jupp, have you seen any bandits here?”
One of the players looked up.
“Since Roosevelt became President there have been no more bad men,” he said solemnly.
Another of the men leaned round in his chair.
“Yo’re new to these parts, I guess,” he drawled. “You oughta know that them stories belong back in the days of your grandfather. This is a peaceful country now.”
“By hookey,” erupted the third man, who wore a sheriff’s badge, “it had better be! You won’t see any bad men here while I’m responsible.”
Intuccio nodded. He turned to Urselli again, his eyes dispassionately intent, gleaming motionlessly in their hollow sockets like deep pools of stagnant water in a cave.
“You see, Amadeo?” he said. “At one time there were bad men and bandits here. Even now, sometimes, little things have happened. There are some who believe that the bad men are not altogether stamped out. But the times have changed.” The craglike head, inscrutable as a mask of rugged wax, held itself squarely in the field of Urselli’s shifting eyes. “Today you will find more robbers in the big cities of America than you will find here.”
Simon could still hear every intonation of the slow rough-hewn voice when he went up to bed, and he ran over it again and again in his mind while he smoked the last cigarette of the day. In spite of the recollection he lost no sleep. A glimpse of a pretty girl leads to an inn, and to the same inn comes an Americanized Italian who is not quite everything that an Americanized Italian should be, and all at once there is a mystery; that is how these things happen, but the Saint was still waiting for his own cue. Then he woke up late the next morning, and suddenly it dawned upon him, with dazzling simplicity, that the most elementary and obvious solution would be to lure Amadeo personally into a secluded spot, scratch him tactfully, and see what his subcutaneous ego looked like to the naked eye.
He went down to breakfast in the same exuberant spirits to which any promise of direct action always raised him. Simon Templar’s conception of a tactful approach was one which nobody else had ever been able to comprehend.
The girl asked him what he proposed to do that day.
“You will remember that I am an outlaw,” said the Saint. “I am going to make a raid.”
Through the kitchen window he caught sight of Mr Urselli, an earlier riser, sitting on the edge of the well at the back and filing his nails meditatively. He went out as soon as he had finished his coffee and nailed his fellow guest with every circumstance of affability.
“What cheer, Amadeo,” he said.
Mr Urselli jerked round sharply, identified him, and relaxed. “Morn’n’,” he said.
His manner was preoccupied, but it took more than that to deter Simon once he had reached a decision. The Saint traveled round and sank cheerfully onto a reach of parapet at his victim’s side. In a similar fashion one of Nero’s lions might have circumnavigated a plump martyr.
“Amadeo,” said the Saint, “will you tell me a secret? Why do you carry a gun?”
Urselli stopped filing abruptly. For a couple of seconds he did not move, and then his eyes slewed round, and they were narrowed to brown slits.
“Whaddaya mean?”
“I know you carry a gun,” said the Saint quietly.
Urselli’s gaze shifted first. He looked down at his hands.
“You gotta be able to take care of yourself in my business,” he explained, and if his voice was a shade louder than was necessary, many ears less delicately tuned than the Saint’s might not have noticed it. “Why, it was nothing to travel about the country with fifty grand worth of ice on me. Suppose I hadn’t packed a roscoe — hell, I’d of been heisted once a week!”
Simon nodded.
“But can you shoot with it?”
“I’m telling you I can shoot with it.”
“That tin can up on the slope, for instance,” Simon persisted innocently. “Do you think you could hit that?”
Urselli squinted upward.
“Sure.”
“I’d like to see you do it,” said the Saint airily.
The barb in his words was subtly smooth, but the other shot a quick glance sideways, his underlip jutting.
“Who says I’m a liar?” he questioned aggressively.
“Nobody I heard.” The Saint was as suave as velvet. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Intuccio standing in the door of the kitchen, watching them in silence, but he had no aversion to an audience. He put a hand in his pocket. “All the same, I’ve got a double saw that wonders whether you can.”
“And I’ve got a century that says I’m telling you I can.”
“Call it a bet.”
Urselli drew out his automatic fumblingly, as though he had started to regret his rashness, and then he caught the Saint’s blue gaze resting on him in gentle mockery, and snapped back the jacket with vicious resolution. He aimed carefully, and his first shot kicked up a spurt of dust six inches to the left of the target. His second was three inches to the right. Urselli cursed under his breath, and the third shot fell short. Intuccio drew nearer, and stood behind them with folded arms.
At that range it was reasonably good shooting, but the Saint smiled, and covered the weapon with a cool hand before Urselli could fire again.
“I mean like this,” he said.
He took the gun and fired without appearing to aim, but the tin leaped like a grasshopper; the third shot caught it in the air and spun it against the side of the hill. Urselli stared at him while the echoes rattled and died, and the can rolled tinkling down toward them till an outcrop of stone checked it.
“By the way,” Simon said, recalling the other’s peculiarly localized pronunciation of jernt and erled, “I thought you came from Chicago.”
“Well?”
“You wouldn’t have noticed it,” Simon said kindly, “but your accent betrays you. You spent some time in the East, didn’t you — on your jewelry business?” He was casually slipping the empty magazine out of the automatic while he talked, and then he suddenly let out an exclamation of dismay and peered anxiously down into the well. A faint splash came up from far below. “It slipped right through my fingers,” he said, looking at Urselli blankly.
The other sprang up, swiftly tearing the now useless weapon out of Simon’s hands.
“You did that on poipose!” he grated.
The Saint seemed to ponder the accusation.
“I might have,” he conceded. “You handle that rod just a little too well, and you wouldn’t want to be tempted to commit murder, would you? Now suppose you happened to run into the guy who told you that that white sapphire in your ring was a real diamond, and charged you five grand for it?”
Urselli’s eyes dilated incredulously towards the scintillation on his left hand.
“Why, the son of a—” He pulled himself together. “What’s the idea?” he snarled. “Are you tryin’ to put me on the spot?”
Simon shook his head.
“No,” he answered. “But maybe you left Chicago because you were already on it.”
Intuccio came up between them.
“You like shooting?” he said in his deep harsh voice.
“I’m always ready for a bit of fun,” said the Saint lightly. “Maybe Amadeo would like some hunting, too. D’you think we could find anything worth shooting around here?”
The innkeeper nodded hesitantly.
“Yesterday morning I saw the tracks of a mountain lion. If you like, we will go out and see what we can find.”