“Good morning, gentlemen,” he said.
“Hey, Prof,” queried a high thin voice from the group, “will she bring in London?”
This sally elicited a wave of home-town laughter, to which Simon professorially paid no heed. He reconnoitred situation and terrain with the bold eye and flaring nostril of an intrepid conquistador.
When one spoke of the Lucky Nugget mine, one meant nine hundred and twenty-eight 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. From it emerged two streaks of rust which had once been rails for ore cars to run on, and which descended a gentle slope to the remains of a stamp mill.
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.
“And who are you, sir?” he inquired frostily.
“Just an interested observer, Professor,” was the response, accompanied by a smile that crinkled the corners of the speaker’s eyes.
“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—”
“Not afraid I might find something phony, are you?” The big man stepped very close. “And haven’t I seen your picture somewhere before?”
Professor Simeon Tattersall lowered his eyes for a single fleeting instant, then raised their candid blue gaze to the stranger’s.
“You may have read about my work in mineral detection—”
“That’s what it said in the paper,” assented the large man jovially. “I must have been thinking about someone else. The name’s on the tip of my tongue — but you wouldn’t know about that.” He beamed. “Anyway, Prof — I’ve been in the mining game a long time. Know all the dodges. Thought some of them up myself. I’ll be watching your demonstration with great interest.”
He chuckled tranquilly and rejoined the motley gallery.
There followed what radio commentators call an “expectant hush.”
Simon picked up his instrument, with barely visible nervousness, and started up the slope from the mill to the small mountain of “muck” fanning out below the old mine entrance. He skirted around its base, his audience following, and approached the steep hillside itself.
Suddenly he grasped the handles on the box again and, to the obbligato of the resultant humming, began moving along the base of the hill, moving the device to and fro as he went. The humming continued in the same even key. The trailing onlookers listened breathlessly — or perhaps their concentrated breathing merely gave that impression.
Ahead of the exploration lay a large slide of loose dirt brought down by recent rains. He neared it, and all at once the box’s tone slid up an octave. The Saint stopped; he moved the box to the right, away from the hill, and the tone dropped; he swung it toward the slide, and it climbed infinitesimally; he moved toward the slide, and the tone mounted until at the base of the fresh clods it was a banshee wail.
Simon Templar put down the box. In the ensuing sinusoidal silence, he jointed a small collapsible spade and poked tentatively in the dirt.
Suddenly he dived down with one hand, and came up with it held high, and between his thumb and forefinger glittered a tiny pea-sized grain of yellow.
“The Tattersall Prospector never makes a mistake,” he began in his best classroom manner. “I hold in my hand a small nugget of gold. Obviously, somewhere on the hillside above, we will find the source of this nugget. I predict—”
His words were lost in a yell as the small crowd, like one man, started up the steep bank toward the source of the slide. As Simon turned to stare at them, he found the big city observer at his elbow.
“Not good.” The large man shook his head. “If I were you, Professor, I’d get the hell out of here before those boys up there find out that you salted this slide.” He shook his head again. “I just remembered where I saw your face — and I expected something better from the Saint,” he said. “Listen — you may have been a hot shot in your own league, but you didn’t really expect to take Melville Rochborne into camp, did you?”
“It was always worth trying,” said the Saint sheepishly. He poked his spade into the slide and turned over the loose earth.
“All right, Mel,” he said. “You win this time. Have yourself a shoeshine on the house.”
And with a rather childish gesture he spilled a shovelful of dirt deliberately over Mr Rochborne’s shining pointed toes before he threw down the spade and turned away.
Mr Rochborne’s geniality blacked out for a moment, and then he bent to dust off his shoes.
Suddenly he seemed to stiffen. He bent down and picked up a fragment of powdery pale yellow stuff, and crumbled it in his fingers.
A strange look came into his face, and he straightened up quickly, but the Saint was already surrounded by the bored but dutiful news hawks. Mr Rochborne recklessly scuffed his beautifully polished shoes more extensively into the loose earth, bent down to probe it deeper with his manicured fingers...
A mere few hours later, which seemed to him like a few years, he was clutching his hat to his bosom and trying to hold his temperature down to an engaging glow while Mrs Lawrence Phelan, Sr, gushed, “Why, Mr Rochborne! What a pleasant surprise!”
He still felt a little out of breath, but he tried to conceal it.
“As a matter of fact, Mrs Phelan,” he admitted, with the air of a schoolboy caught in the jam closet, “I’m here on business. I hate to impose on you, but...”
“Go on, Mr Rochborne,” she fluted. “Do go on. Business is business, isn’t it?”
“I might as well come right out with it,” Rochborne said wearily. “It’s about that Lucky Nugget stock you bought, Mrs Phelan. I — well, it turns out it was misrepresented to me. I’m not at all sure it’s a good investment.”
“Oh, dear!” Mrs Phelan sat down suddenly. “Oh, dear! But... my... my forty-five thou—”
“Now, Mrs Phelan, don’t excite yourself. If I weren’t prepared to—”
“Telephone, Mrs Phelan.” A maid stood in the doorway.
“Excuse me,” said Mrs Phelan. “Oh, dear!”
“Mrs Phelan,” said a deep mellifluous voice on the wire, “this is Swami Yogadevi.”
“Oh... oh, Swami!” The old lady sighed with relief. “Oh, I am so glad to hear from you!”
“Dear Mrs Phelan, you are in trouble. I know. I could feel the disturbance in your aura. That was why I called.”
“Oh, Swami! If you only knew... I — it’s my mining stock, Swami. The stock you said I should buy, remember? And now—”
“He wants to buy it back from you. Yes.”
“He... does...? Oh, then it’s all right...”
“Sell, Mrs Phelan. But for a profit, of course.”
“But how much should I—”
“Not a penny less than seventy thousand, Mrs Phelan. No, not a penny less. Peace be with you. Your star is in the ascendant. You will not say that I have talked to you, naturally. Good-bye.”
When Mr Melville Rochborne heard the price, he barely escaped being the first recorded case of human spontaneous combustion.
“But, Mrs Phelan... I’ve just told you. The stock is no — well, it’s been misrepresented. It’s not really worth the price you paid me. I thought if I gave you your money back...”