Simon made vague promises, and went thoughtfully back up the hill. Nestling into the bank of cool green, with the stippled shadows of the overhanging trees stirring lazily across it, the rambling black-timbered inn looked more than ever like the sort of place where the most sensational mystery should be a polite and courtly seventeenth-century ghost with a clanking chain and a head under its arm; and he wondered if that was one reason why it had been so ideally chosen.
He did not go indoors at once, but continued his stroll round to the garage. The lorry was back in its place, exactly as if it had never been moved; and it would not have required much self-deception to persuade him that he had dreamed its absence. But the Saint did very little dreaming of that kind; and he touched the radiator and felt that it was warm.
He put his foot on one of the rear wheels and pulled himself up to inspect the interior of the truck. There was a dusty layer of red earth on the bottom, and particles of the same soil clung to the sides: he smeared one between his finger and thumb, and it was damp.
"All very interesting," said the Saint to himself.
He squeezed in between the lorry and the wall, and saw other sprinklings of earth on the concrete floor. The wall against which the truck was parked was an exterior wall of the hotel itself-the bare oak beams and timbering and the rough yellowish plaster seemed to stare out miserably at the cheap modern brickwork and corrugated iron which had been stuck on to them to produce the garage. He spent some minutes in a minute examination of the wall, and used the blade of his penknife to make sure.
When he came out again he was humming gently under his breath, and his blue eyes were twinkling with a quiet and profound delight. The yard straggled off into a long grass slope flimsily cut off by a staked wire fence. He ducked through the wire and sauntered up the hill until he reached a slight prominence from which he had a considerable view of the road which ran past the inn, and the upper country towards which it led. He could see where the straight march of the silver power pylons dropped over the main ridge of hill, stepped carelessly over the road three hundred yards away, and sent its glistening wires in a long sweep over the gladed valley to climb sedately over the rise on the other side. For some time he stood with his hands in his pockets and the dreamiest ghost of a smile on his lips, gazing out over the landscape. There was a ditch at the foot of the hill, beside the road, and it was this that he made for when he walked down again. The bottom of the ditch was overgrown with weeds and couch-grass; but he felt about with his hand, and found what he had expected to find-a heavy insulated cable. He knew that he would find one end of the cable leading to the pylon nearest the road, if he cared to follow it. Walking slowly back to the inn, he came to a place where a slight hump in the road border indicated a comparatively recently filled excavation. It disappeared at the end of the concrete lane that led to the garage, and he knew that the insulated cable reached its destination somewhere very near.
At that moment he knew half the answer to the riddle of the Clevely Arms, and the solution staggered him.
Hoppy Uniatz was already in the dining-room, endeavouring to persuade a giggling waitress that a pound of fried steak garnished with three eggs and a half-dozen rashers of bacon was a very modest breakfast for a healthy man.
"Get him what he wants, Gladys," said the Saint, sinking into the other chair. "And call yourself lucky he's on a diet. If he was eating properly he'd spread you on a piece of toast and swallow you for an hors d'oeuvre."
"Dat bale of straw is fifty in de deck," growled Mr. Uniatz cryptically, reaching for the solace of the bottle of whisky which he had foresightedly brought into the room with him. "Where ya been, boss?"
Simon lighted a cigarette.
"I've been exploring. We'll go on and see some more when you've finished."
"I dunno, boss." Mr. Uniatz stared vacantly at the pink floral motif on the opposite wall. "Dis ain't such a bad flea-box. Whadda we have to pull de pin for?"
"We aren't pulling the pin, Hoppy," said the Saint. "This is just some local scenery we're going to take a look at. We may be staying here a long time-I don't know. Life has these uncertainties. But I think the trouble is coming fairly soon."
How soon the trouble was to come he had no means of knowing.
He went up the hill again, with Hoppy, after breakfast, but not in the same direction as he had gone before. This time he climbed the steeper slope due west from the back of the hotel. They struggled through winding paths among the trees and undergrowth to a muttered accompaniment of strange East Side expletives from Mr. Uniatz, who never took exercise out of doors, and presently broke clear of the patch of woodland into a broad bare tract of grass that rolled up to an undulating horizon against the blue sky. From the top of this rise he could see patches of the roof of the inn through the branches; but he was more interested in the view on the opposite side of the hill. He stood looking at this for a little while in silence while Mr. Uniatz recovered his breath, and then he sat down on the grass and took out his cigarette-case.
"If you can take your mind off poetry for a while and concentrate on what I'm saying, it may be useful," he said. "I want you to know what this is all about-just in case of accidents."
And he went on talking for about half an hour, sorting out the facts and putting them together with infinite deference to the limitations of Mr. Uniatz's cerebral system, until he had made sure that even Hoppy had assimilated as much of the secret as he knew himself. He had never expected to produce any sensational reactions; but Mr. Uniatz bit the end from a cigar and spat it out with a phlegmatic practicality which was equivalent to the flabbergasted incoherence of any lesser man.
"Whadda we do, boss?" he asked.
"We hang around," said the Saint. "It may happen tonight or it may happen a month from now; but we can take it as written that a job like this isn't planned and worked out on that scale without there's something pretty worthwhile in it, and when the balloon goes up we'll be around to inspect the boodle."
He had a cool estimate of his own danger. The Garthwait outfit had acquired bigger and better reasons to dislike him, whatever part they had decided he was playing in the pageant. The Jeffroll fraternity might be equally puzzled about his status, but in the next ten minutes he had three separate indications of their esteem.
While he sat talking on the hill his keen eyes had caught the stirring of a bush at the edge of the wooded patch below him, and he had seen the movement of a scrap of white behind it. Walking down again as casually as if he had noticed nothing, he let the path lead him towards the place where he had seen the watcher. It was Major Portmore, leaning against the bole of a tree where the shrubbery almost hid him from the hill-top-but for the flash of his white shirt, he might have been passed unobserved while he stood still. He had a pipe between his teeth and a shot-gun under his arm, and he nodded unconcernedly when the Saint greeted him.
"Thought I might get a rabbit," he said amiably. "You often see them sunning themselves up there."
Simon raised a faintly quizzical eyebrow.
"I should have thought tigers would have been more in your line," he murmured.
"Tigers," said the Major, taking out his pipe, "or rats. It's all the same to me."
The Saint let his eyes dwell gently on the other's shepherd's-warning complexion.
"If the rats are pink ones, on bicycles," he said gravely, "don't shoot."
He left the gallant Major a shade darker in colour, and bore thoughtfully to the left, towards the garage. Slipping into his car, he adjusted the throttle and ignition, and pressed the starter. The engine turned over several times without firing, and he abandoned the effort to save his batteries. Doubtless an expert investigation would show what had been done to put it out of action, but it required no investigation to tell him that Major Portmore's sudden transfer of interest from fishing to rabbiting had the same reason as the disabling of the Hirondel.