A military-looking man of about forty-five, with a strongly aquiline nose and a black guardee moustache, came slowly down the platform. He passed the window without looking round, walked on a little way, and turned. He stood there for a while, teetering toe to heel and gazing vacantly over the gallery of posters plastered on the opposite wall; then he came back, past the Saint's window again, circumnavigated a farewell party congre- gated outside the next carriage, and did the same thing on the other side.
The Saint's cool blue eyes never once looked directly at him; his brown keen-cut face never changed its expression from one of languid pa- tience; but he had seen every movement of the military-looking man's manoeuvres. And Simon Templar knew, beyond a shadow of doubt, that this was at least one of the welcomers whom he had been expecting.
Along the train came a bustle of belated activity, the banging of doors, the scream of the guard's whistle. Simon remained in his window, finishing his cigarette, and saw the military-looking man climb into an adjoining compartment. The engine let out a hiss of steam, and the platform began to slip back under his eyes.
Simon dropped his cigarette and settled back into his corner. He turned the pages of the black book in its new wrapper, refreshing his memory. The action was more automatic than deliberate, only different in degree from a nervous person's gesture in twiddling his thumbs while waiting on tenterhooks for some anticipated event to happen. The Saint already knew almost every line of that amazing volume by heart--he had had plenty of time to study it from cover to cover on the voyage over. The odds were about fifty to one that the military-looking man was mentioned somewhere in its pages; but it was rather difficult to decide, out of the available names, which one he was most likely to bear.
The conductor came round and collected tickets; and then fifteen minutes passed before the door of the Saint's compartment slid back again. Simon closed his book and looked up with exactly the conventional nuance of irritated curiosity which darkens the distinguished features of the railroad passenger who has contrived to secure a compartment to himself and who finds his privary illegitimately invaded at the last moment; but the military-looking man put his back to the door and stared at him with a grimness that was by no means conventional.
"Come on," he said grimly. Give me that book!"
"What, this?" said the Saint in innocent surprise, raising Her Wedding Secret. "You're welcome to it when I've finished, brother, but I hardly think it's in your line. I've only got to the part where she discovers that the man she has married is a Barbarian Lover-----"
The intruder pushed the unoffending volume roughly aside.
"I don't mean that," he said shortly. "You know perfectly well what book I mean."
"I'm afraid I don't," said the Saint.
"And you know perfectly well," continued the intruder, "what I'm going to do to you if I don't get it."
Simon shook his head.
"I can't guess that one, either," he remarked mildly. "What is it--slap my wrist and tell me to stand in the corner?"
The man's mouth was working under his moustache. He came further into the compartment, past the Saint, and jerked a small automatic from his pocket. It was an almost pathetically amateurish movement--Simon could have forestalled it easily, but he wanted to see how far the other would go.
"Very well," grated the man. "I'll have to take it myself. Put 'em up!"
"Up what?" asked the Saint, doing his best to understand.
"Put your hands up. And don't think of any more of that funny stuff, or you'll be sorry for it."
Simon put his hands up lazily. His bag was on the rack directly over his head, and the handle was within an inch of his fingers.
"I suppose the keepers will be along to collect you in a minute, old fruit," he drawled. "Or do you fancy yourself as a sort of highwayman?"
"Now listen, you bastard," came the snarling answer. "I'm going to allow you five seconds to give me that book. If I haven't got it in that time, I'm going to shoot. I'll start counting now. One . . . two . . ."
There was a crazy red glare in the intruder's eyes, and although the gun was shaking unsteadily something told Simon that he had permitted the melodrama to go far enough.
"You know all the rules, don't you, brother?" he said gently; and his fingers grasped the handle of his bag and hurled it full into the other's face.
The man reeled back with the force of the impact and went crashing against the outside door. It flew open under his weight; and the Saint's blue eyes turned to sudden ice as he realized that it could not have been properly latched when he got in. For one awful instant the man's fingers clawed at the frame; and then with a choking gasp he was gone, and there was only the drab streaked wall of the cutting roaring by the door. . . .
Simon's hand reached up instinctively towards the communication cord. And then it drew back.
The intruder, whoever he was, had asked for it: he had taken his own chances. And although Simon Templar had only done what was justified in self-defense, he knew his own reputation at Scotland Yard too well to believe for a moment that it would be a brief and simple task to impress that fact upon the suspicious hostility of the C. I. D. To stop the train would achieve nothing more helpful than his own immediate arrest; and of all the things which might happen to him while he had that black book in his possession, an inter= lude behind bars in Brixton Prison was the ieast exhilarating.
He caught the swinging door and closed it again and then restored his suitcase to the rack. The un- known casualty's gun had gone out with him-- there was no other evidence that he had ever entered the compartment.
The Saint lighted a cigarette and sat down again, listening to the rhythmic thrum and rattle of the wheels pounding over the metals towards London. There was nothing unusual about the fact that he was expecting trouble when he returned to Europe, or even about the fact that a fair sample of that trouble should have greeted him within such a short time of setting foot in England.
But it was perhaps more unusual that the par' ticular trouble he was expecting could not be blamed on any fault of his. And the queerest thing of all was that everything should hinge around the black book on his knee which was the legacy of Rayt Marius--the strangest and deadliest gift that any man ever received.
II
He WAS one of the first passengers to alight from the train at Waterloo, with his raincoat slung over his shoulder and the book in his hand; but he did not take the first available taxi. He allowed six to go by him, and boarded the seventh after taking a good look at it.
"Hyde Park Corner," he directed it clearly and watched the traffic out of the rear window as they drove away.
Another taxi swung in behind them, and he noted the number. Five minutes later he looked back again, and it was still there. Simon pressed the button of the telephone.
"Turn right round at Hyde Park Corner and go back the way we've come," he said.
He waited a short time after his instructions had been carried out, and looked back for the third time. The other taxi was plugging patiently along three yards behind, and the Saint's teeth gleamed in a thin smile. Coincidence of destination was one thing, but coincidence of such a radical change of direction as he had ordered his driver to carry out was quite another matter.
"Now we'll go through the Green Park and up St. James's Street," he said through the telephone.
The driver was so moved that he opened the door an inch and performed incredible contortions to yell back through it.
"Wot is this?" he demanded. "A game of 選'd and seek?"