The grey-haired man filled a pewter tankard from the wood, and turned back with it.
"And a whisky?" he queried.
He had a quiet and educated voice, and the Saint hated to shock him. But his first duty was to his friend.
"Half a bottle," he repeated.
"Would you like me to wrap it up?"
"I hardly think," said the Saint, with some regret, "that that will ever be necessary."
The landlord took down a half-bottle from the shelf behind him, and put it on the counter. Simon slid it along to Mr. Uniatz. Mr. Uniatz removed the cap, placed the neck in his mouth, and poured gratefully. His Adam's apple throbbed in rhythmic appreciation as the neat spirit flowed soothingly through the arid deserts of his throat in a stream that would have rapidly choked anyone with a less calloused esophagus.
Simon turned again to the landlord, who was watching the demonstration in a kind of dazed awe.
"You see why I find it cheaper to buy in bulk," he remarked.
The grey-haired man blinked speechlessly; and Hoppy put down the empty bottle and wiped his lips with a sigh.
"You ain't seen nut'n yet, pal," he declared. "Where I come from, dey call me a fairy."
It was the first time he had spoken since they entered the house, and Simon was utterly unprepared for the result.
All the colour drained out of the grey-haired man's face; and the ten-shilling note which Simon had laid on the bar, which he had just picked up, slipped through his shaking fingers and fluttered down out of sight. He stared at Hoppy with his nostrils twitching and his eyes dilated in stark terror, waiting without movement as if he expected sudden death to leap at him across the bar.
It only lasted for a moment, that startling transformation into terrified immobility; and then he stooped and clumsily retrieved the fallen note.
"Excuse me," he muttered, and shuffled out through the curtain behind the counter.
The Saint put down his tankard and fished out a cigarette. Not even the most shameless flatterer had ever said that Hoppy's voice was vibrant with seductive music: such a statement, even with the kindest intentions, could not have been made convincingly about that rasping dialect of New York's lower East Side which was the only language Mr. Uniatz knew. Hoppy's voice was about as attractive and musical as a file operating on a sheet of jagged tinplate. But the Saint had never known it to strike anyone with such sheer paralysed horror as he had seen the landlord reduced to for that brief amazing moment.
Mr. Uniatz, who had been staring at the curtained opening with a blank fish-like expression which in its own way was no less cataleptic, turned perplexedly towards him, seeking light.
"Dijja see dat, boss?" he demanded. "De guy looked like he was waitin' for us to turn de heat on him! Did I say anyt'ing I shouldn't of?"
Simon shook his head.
"I wouldn't know, Hoppy," he answered thoughtfully. "Maybe the bloke doesn't like fairies-you can never tell, in these great open spaces."
He might have said more; but he heard a footstep beyond the curtain, and picked up his tankard again. And then, for the second time, he put it down untouched; for it was a girl who came through into the serving space behind the bar.
If there was to be a beauteous damsel in distress, Simon decided, the conventions insisted that it must be her role. She was tall and slender, with dark straight hair that took on an unexpected curl around her neck, steady grey eyes, and a mouth to which there was only one obvious way of paying tribute. Her skin reminded him vaguely of peaches and rose-petals, and the sway of her dress as she came in gave him a suggestion of her figure that filled his head with ideas of a kind to which he was quite amorally susceptible. She said "good evening" in a voice that scarcely intruded itself into the quiet room, and turned to some mysterious business with the shelves behind her.
Simon left a drift of smoke float away from his cigarette, and his blue eyes returned with a trace of reluctance to the homely features of Mr. Uniatz.
"What would you think," he asked, "of a girl whose name was Julia?"
Out of the corner of his eye he saw her start, and turned round to face her with that gay expectant smile coming back to his lips. He knew he had been right.
"I came right along," he said.
Her gaze flashed to Hoppy Uniatz, and then back to the Saint, in a second of frightened uncertainty.
"I don't understand," she said.
Simon picked up a burnt match-stick from the floor and leaned his elbows on the bar. As he moved his tankard to make room, it split a tiny puddle of beer on the scarred oak. He put the match-stick in the puddle and drew a moist line down from it towards her, branching out into a couple of legs. While he did it, he talked.
"My name is Tombs." He drew a pair of arms spreading out from his first straight line, so that the sketch suddenly became an absurd childish drawing of a man with the original spot of liquid from which it had developed for a head. "I booked a room the other day, by letter." He dipped the match again, and drew a neat elliptical halo of beer over the head of his figure. "Didn't you get it?" he asked, with perfectly natural puzzlement.
She stared down at his completed handiwork for a moment; and then she raised her eyes to his face with a sudden light of hope and relief in them. She picked up a cloth and wiped the drawing away with a hand that was not quite steady.
"Oh, yes," she said. "I'm sorry-I didn't recognise you. You haven't stayed here before, have you?"
"I'm afraid not," said the Saint. "But then, I didn't know what I was missing."
Once again she glanced nervously at Mr. Uniatz, who was gazing wistfully at a row of bottles whose smug fullness was reawakening the pangs of his incurable malady.
"I'll get the man to take your bags up," she said.
Taking in the grace of her slim young suppleness as she turned away, Simon Templar was more than ever convinced that he was not wasting his time. He had been lured into no wild-goose chase. In that quiet inn at the foot of Larkstone Vale there was a man in whose eyes he had seen the fear of death, and a damsel in distress who was as beautiful as anything he had seen for many moons; that was more or less what he had been promised, and it was only right that the promise should have been so accurately fulfilled. The dreary cynics were everlastingly wrong; such joyously perfect and improbable things did happen-they were always happening to him. He knew that he was once more on the frontiers of adventure; but even then he did not dream of anything so amazing as the offer that Bellamy Wage had made on the day when he was sentenced to ten years, penal servitude after the Neovision Radio Company failed for nearly two million pounds.
II "SAY," blurted Hoppy Uniatz, broaching a subject which had clearly been harassing him for some time, "is anyt'ing de matter wit' me?"
"I shouldn't be surprised," said the Saint pitilessly, from the basin where he was washing the dust of travel from his face. "All that whisky you sluice your system with must have its effect some day, even on a tin stomach like yours. What are the symptoms?"
Mr. Uniatz was not talking about ailments of that kind.
"De foist time I open my mout' in dis jernt, de barman looks at me like he t'inks I'm gonna take him for a ride. When de goil comes in, she looks at me just de same way, like I was some kinda snake. I ain't no Ronald Colman, boss, but I never fought my pan was dat bad. Have all dese guys here got de jitters, or is anyt'ing de matter wit' me?" he asked, working back to his original problem.
The Saint finished drying his face with a chuckle, and slung the towel round his neck. He took a cigarette from a packet on the table and lighted it.
"I'm afraid I've rather led you up the garden, Hoppy," he confessed.
"De garden?" repeated Mr. Uniatz dimly.
"I've been kidding you," said the Saint, hastily abandoning metaphor, in which Mr. Uniatz was always liable to lose his way. "We aren't stopping here just because I saw the place and thought we'd stay. I came here on purpose."