The roar of the crowd grew louder as the field entered the last furlong. Mackintyre raised his voice.
"Mandrake's out of it, and Rickaway's coming up! Hill Billy's flat out with Rickaway's nose at his saddle… Hill Billy's making a race of it. It's neck-and-neck now. Penterham left it a bit late. Rickaway's gaining slowly —"
The yelling of the crowd rose to a final crescendo, and suddenly died away. Mr. Mackintyre dropped his glasses and stepped down from his perch.
"Well," he said comfortably,"that's three thousand pounds."
The two men shook hands gravely and turned to find Simon Templar drifting towards them with a thin cigar in his mouth.
"Too bad about Hill Billy, Mr. Templar," remarked Mackintyre succulently. "Rickaway only did it by a neck, though I won't say he mightn't have done better if he'd started his sprint a bit sooner."
Simon Templar removed his cigar.
"Oh, I don't know," he said. "As a matter of fact, I rather changed my mind about Hill Billy's chance just before the 'off.' I was over at the telegraph office, and I didn't think I'd be able to reach you in time, so I wired another bet to your London office. Only a small one — six hundred pounds, if you want to know. I hope Vincent's winnings will stand it." He beamed seraphically at Mr. Lesbon, whose face had suddenly gone a sickly grey. "Of course you recognised Miss Holm — she isn't easy to forget, and I saw you noticing her at the Savoy the other night."
There was an awful silence.
"By the way," said the Saint, patting Mr. Lesbon affably on the shoulder, "she tells me you've got hot slimy hands. Apart from that, your technique makes Clark Gable look like something the cat brought in. Just a friendly tip, old dear."
He waved to the two stupefied men and wandered away; they stood gaping dumbly at his back.
It was Mr. Lesbon who spoke first, after a long and pregnant interval.
"Of course you won't settle, Joe," he said half-heartedly.
"Won't I?" snarled Mr. Mackintyre. "And let him have me up before Tattersall's Committee for welshing? I've got to settle, you fool!"
Mr. Mackintyre choked.
Then he cleared his throat. He had a great deal more to say, and he wanted to say it distinctly.
5. The Tough Egg
Chief inspector Teal caught Larry the Stick at Newcastle trying to board an outward-bound Swedish timber ship. He did not find the fifty thousand pounds' worth of bonds and jewellery which Larry took from the Temple Lane Safe Deposit; but it may truthfully be reported that no one was more surprised about that than Larry himself.
They broke open the battered leather suit-case to which Larry was clinging as affectionately as if it contained the keys of the Bank of England, and found in it a cardboard box which was packed to bursting-point with what must have been one of the finest collections of small pebbles and old newspapers to which any burglar had ever attached himself; and Larry stared at it with glazed and incredulous eyes.
"Is one of you busies saving up for a rainy day?" he demanded, when he could speak; and Mr. Teal was not amused.
"No one's been to that bag except when you saw us open it," he said shortly. "Come on, Larry — let's hear where you hid the stuff."
"I didn't hide it," said Larry flatly. He was prepared to say more, but suddenly he shut his mouth. He could be an immensely philosophic man when there was nothing left for him to do except to be philosophic, and one of his major problems had certainly been solved for him very providentially. "I hadn't anything to hide, Mr. Teal. If you'd only let me explain things I could've saved you busting a perfickly good lock and making me miss my boat."
Mr. Teal tilted back his bowler hat with a kind of weary patience.
"Better make it short, Larry," he said. "The night watchman saw you before you coshed him, and he said he'd recognize you again."
"He must've been seeing things," asserted Larry. "Now, if you want to know all about it, Mr. Teal, I saw the doctor the other day, and he told me I was run down. 'What you want, Larry, is a nice holiday,' he says — not that I'd let anyone call me by my first name, you understand, but this doc is quite a good-class gentleman. 'What you want is a holiday,' he says. 'Why don't you take a sea voyage?' So, seeing I've got an old aunt in Sweden, I thought I'd pay her a visit. Naturally, I thought, the old lady would like to see some newspapers and read how things were going in the old country —"
"And what did she want the stones for?" inquired Teal politely. "Is she making a rock garden?"
"Oh, them?" said Larry innocently. "Them was for my uncle. He's a geo — geo —"
"Geologist is the word you want," said the detective, without smiling. "Now let's go back to London, and you can write all that down and sign it."
They went back to London with a resigned but still chatty cracksman, though the party lacked some of the high spirits which might have accompanied it. The most puzzled member of it was undoubtedly Larry the Stick, and he spent a good deal of time on the journey trying to think how it could have happened.
He knew that the bonds and jewels had been packed in his suit-case when he left London, for he had gone straight back to his lodgings after he left the Temple Lane Safe Deposit and stowed them away in the bag that was already half-filled in anticipation of an early departure. He had dozed in his chair for a few hours, and caught the 7.25 from King's Cross — the bag had never been out of his sight. Except… once during the morning he had succumbed to a not unreasonable thirst, and spent half an hour in the restaurant car in earnest collaboration with a bottle of Worthington. But there was no sign of his bag having been tampered with when he came back, and he had seen no familiar face on the train.
It was one of the most mystifying things that had ever happened to him, and the fact that the police case against him had been considerably weakened by his bereavement was a somewhat dubious compensation.
Chief Inspector Teal reached London with a theory of his own. He expounded it to the Assistant Commissioner without enthusiasm.
"I'm afraid there's no doubt that Larry's telling the truth," he said. "He's no idea what happened to the swag, but I have. Nobody double-crossed him, because he always works alone, and he hasn't any enemies that I know of. There's just one man who might have done it — you know who I mean."
The Assistant Commissioner sniffed. He had an irritating and eloquent sniff.
"It would be very tiresome if anything happened to the Saint," he remarked pointedly. "The C.I.D. would have a job to find another stock excuse that would sound quite as convincing."
When Mr. Teal had cooled off in his own room, he had to admit that there was an element of truth in the Assistant Commissioner's acidulated comment. It did not mellow his tolerance of the most unpopular Police Chief of his day; he had had similar thoughts himself, without feeling as if he had discovered the elixir of life.
The trouble was that the Saint refused to conform to any of the traditions which make the capture of the average criminal a mere matter of routine. There was nothing stereotyped about his methods which made it easy to include him in the list of suspects for any particular felony. He was little more than a name in criminal circles; he had no jealous associates to give him away, he confided his plans to no one, he never boasted of his success in anyone's hearing — he did nothing which gave the police a chance to catch him red-handed. His name and address were known to every constable in the force; but for all any of them could prove in a court of law he was an unassailably respectable citizen who had long since left a rather doubtful past behind him, an amiable young man about town blessed with plentiful private means, who had the misfortune to be seen in geographically close proximity to various lawless events for which the police could find no suitable scapegoat. And no one protested their ignorance of everything to do with him more vigorously that his alleged or prospective victims. It made things very difficult for Mr. Teal, who was a clever detective but a third-rate magician.