“The stars,” said Mrs Phelan raptly, “control my business dealings. I am asking seventy thousand for the stock.”
“Oh, sure, the stars.” Mr Rochborne thought rapidly. “May I use your telephone?”
He dialed a certain unlisted number for nearly five minutes, with the same negative results that had rewarded him even before he called at Mrs Phelan’s house. At the end of that time he returned, slightly frantic and flushed of face.
“Mrs Phelan,” he said, “we can discuss this, I know. Suppose we say fifty-five thousand.”
“Seventy, Mr Rochborne,” said Mrs Phelan.
“Sixty-two fifty,” cozened Rochborne, in pleading tones.
“Seventy,” repeated the implacable old lady.
Mr Rochborne thought fleetingly of the mayhem he was going to perform upon the luckless frame of Reuben Innowitz when he caught him.
“Very well,” he groaned. “I’ll write you a check.”
“My swami told me all deals should be in cash,” said Mrs Phelan brightly. “I’ll get the stock and go with you to the bank.”
An hour later, minus practically his entire bank roll but grimly triumphant, with the stock of the Lucky Nugget mine in his pocket, Mr Melville Rochborne met Mr Reuben Innowitz on the doorstep of the apartment house on Russian Hill, and finally achieved a much-needed self-expression.
“You stupid worthless jerk!” he exploded. “What’s the idea of being out all day — and on a day like this? You just cost us twenty-five grand!”
“Listen,” shrilled the prophet, “who’s calling who a jerk! What did you do about that mine?”
“I got it back, of course,” Rochborne told him short-windedly. “Even though the old bag took me for twenty-five G’s more than she put into it — just because you weren’t around to cool her down. But I didn’t dare take a chance on waiting. There were some old-time prospectors around, and if any of them recognized the carnotite—”
“The what?” Innowitz said.
“Carnotite — that’s what uranium comes from. The Lucky Nugget is full of it. You know what that’s worth today. If any of those miners spotted it and the story was in the papers tomorrow morning, you couldn’t buy that stock for a million dollars... It was the Saint, of course,” Mr Rochborne explained, becoming even more incoherent, “and he was trying to put over the most amateurish job of mine-salting I ever saw, but when he reads about this—”
The swami was staring at him in a most unspiritual way.
“Just a minute, Mel,” he said. “Are you drunk, or what? First you send me a wire and tell me to meet you at the airport. I watch all the planes come in until my ears are buzzing. Then you send me another wire there about some new buyer for the Lucky Nugget, and tell me to phone the Phelan dame and tell her to hold out for seventy grand—”
A horrible presentiment crawled over Mr Rochborne.
“What are you talking about?” he asked weakly. “I never sent you—”
“I’ve got ’em right here in my pocket.” His colleague’s voice was harsh, edged with suspicion.
“Ohmigod,” breathed Mr Melville Rochborne. “He couldn’t have salted it twice... he couldn’t have...”
It was Simon Templar’s perpetual regret that he was seldom able to overhear these conversations. But perhaps that would have made his life too perfect to be borne.
Dawn
I suppose no feat of cerebration exercises an imaginative person so much as the deathbed speech that he or she would make if he or she (and this ghastly grammar has got to stop somewhere) knew for sure that it was their (oh, goody!) positively final utterance, the crystallization of a life by which posterity would remember it, whatever else it might have lived.
“It is a far, far better thing...”
“Kiss me, Hardy...”
Oh, great!
You know what you’ll probably say?
“Why the hell didn’t that fool dim his lights?”
Or, “The Government should have done something about it!”
A writer who was been writing for a long time may legitimately begin to feel even more apprehension about what might be his last story. And a lot more may well be expected of him. After all, his life has been built on nothing but words. His last ones should give a good account of him. They should summarize, somehow, everything he has thought and learned, every technique he had acquired.
His last story, dramatically, should be his best.
But who knows which will be his last story?
Thus we come to the story in this book, at any rate. And it is certainly one of the latest written. And it is not the best.
But it is placed here because there is an element in it which you will have to read to discover, which in a collection of this kind is almost impossible to top. Anyhow, I am not yet ready to try.
— Leslie Charteris
Simon Templar looked up from the frying pan in which six mountain trout were developing a crisp golden tan. Above the gentle sputter of grease, the sound of feet on dry pine needles crackled through the cabin window.
It didn’t cross his mind that the sound carried menace, for it was twilight in the Sierras, and the dusky calm stirred only with the rustlings of nature at peace.
The Saint also was at peace. In spite of everything his enemies would have said, there actually were times when peace was the main preoccupation of that fantastic freebooter; when hills and blue sky were high enough adventure, and baiting a hook was respite enough from baiting policemen or promoters. In such a mood he had jumped at the invitation to join a friend in a week of hunting and fishing in the High Sierras — a friend who had been recalled to town on urgent business almost as soon as they arrived, leaving the Saint in by no means melancholy solitude, for Simon Templar could always put up with his own company.
The footsteps came nearer with a kind of desperate urgency. Simon moved the frying pan off the flames and flowed, rather than walked, to where he could see through windows in two directions.
A man came out of the pines. He was traveling on the short side of a dead run, but straining with every gasping breath to step up his speed. He came, hatless and coatless, across the pine-carpeted clearing toward the cabin door.
He burst through it, and in spite of his relaxation the Saint felt a kind of simmer of anticipating approval. If his solitude had to be intruded on, this was the way it should happen. Unannounced. At a dead run.
The visitor slammed the door, shot the bolt, whirled around, and seemed about to fold in the middle. He saw the Saint. His jaw sagged, swung adrift on its hinges for a moment, then imitated a steel trap.
After the sharp click of his teeth, he said, “How did you get in here? Where’s Dawn?”
“Dawn?” Simon echoed lazily. “If you’re referring to the rosy-fingered goddess who peels away the darkness each morning, she’s on the twelve-hour shift, chum. She’ll be around at the regular time.”
“I never dreamed you here,” the man said. “Who are you?”
“You dropped a word,” the Saint said. “ ‘I never dreamed you were here’ makes more sense.”
“Nuts, brother. You’re part of my dream, and I never saw you before. You don’t even have a name. All the others have, complete with backgrounds. But I can’t place you. Funny... Look here, you’re not real, are you?”
“The last time I pinched myself, I yelped.”
“This is crazy,” the man muttered.
He walked across the pine floor to within a couple of feet of the Saint. He was breathing easier now, and the Saint examined him impassively.
He was big, only a shade under the Saint’s six feet two, with sandy hair, a square jaw, and hard brown eyes.