"Hi, boss," said Mr. Uniatz, rising stiffly from his unprofitable meditations. "Dijja get de dough?"
Simon shook his head, lighting a cigarette in his cupped hands.
"I didn't get to first base," he said. "A rabbit stopped me." He saw a vacuous expression of perplexity appear on Mr. Uniatz's'homely dial and extinguished his lighter with a faint grin. "Never mind, Hoppy. Pass it up. I'll tell you all about it next year. Let's get back to London."
He slid into the driving seat; and Mr. Uniatz put his flask away and followed him more slowly, glancing back doubtfully over his shoulder with a preoccupied air. As Simon pressed the starter, he coughed.
"Boss," said Mr. Uniatz diffidently, "is it oke leavin' de cop here?"
"Leaving the which?" ejaculated the Saint limply.
"De cop," said Mr. Uniatz.
Simon pushed the gear lever back into neutral and gazed at him.
"What are you talking about?" he inquired.
"Ya see, boss," said Mr. Uniatz, with the manner of Einstein solving a problem in elementary arithmetic, "de tire wasn't flat."
"What tire?" asked the Saint heroically.
"De tire you told me to change," explained Hoppy. "Ya told me to fix de flat, but it wasn't."
The Saint struggled with his vocabulary in an anguished silence, seeking words in which he might deal suitably with the situation; but before he had counted all the syllables in the phrases he proposed to use, Mr. Uniatz was ploughing on, as if determined, now that he had started, to make a clean breast of the matter.
"Well, boss, I put back de wheel an' sat down to wait for de cop. After a bit he rides up on a bicycle. 'Hi-yah, guy,' he says, 'whaddaya doin' here?' So I tells him I was fixin' a flat, but it wasn't. 'Well, whaddaya waitin' for?' he says. So I remembers what ya tells me, boss, an' I says: 'I'm t'inkin' of de little woman back home, waitin' for her man.' 'Ya big bum,' he says, 'ya drunk.' "
"I'll bet he didn't," said the Saint.
"Well, it was sump'n like dat," said Hoppy, dismissing the quibble, "only he talked wit' an accent."
"I see what you mean," said the Saint. "And what did you do?"
"Well, boss, I hauls off an' gives him a poke in. de jaw."
"And what does he say to that?"
"He don't say nut'n, boss." Mr. Uniatz jerked a nicotine-stained thumb backwards at an undistin-guishable quarter of the night. "I tucks him up in de bushes an' leaves him. Dat's what I mean, is it oke leavin' him here," said Hoppy, harking back to his original problem.
Simon Templar fought with his soul for a short time without speaking. If he had followed his most primitive instincts, there would probably have been a late lamented Mr. Uniatz tucked up in the bushes alongside the sleeping rural constable; but the Saint's sense of civic responsibility was improving.
"I guess we'll leave him," he said at length. "It can't make things any worse."
He drove back to London in, a thoughtful frame of mind. It was one of those times when the hundredth chance turned up in magnificent vindication of all harebrained enterprise; and when the established villain was a man in the position of Sir Hugo Renway, the Saint was inclined to have a few things to think about. There were only two forms of smuggling in which the rewards were high and the penalties heavy enough to justify such extreme measures as the murdered airman on the Brighton road and that lethally electrified wire fence at March House--it is curious that the Saint was still far from reading the real interpretation into the facts he knew.
The wandering policeman whom Hoppy Uniatz had poked in de jaw was a complication which had not been allowed for in his plan of campaign as seriously as it might; and he was not expecting the repercussions of it to reach him quite so quickly as they did.
He put the Hirondel back in its garage at about a quarter to four and walked round to his apartment on Piccadilly. A sleepy night porter took them up in the lift: he was a new employee of the building whom the Saint had not seen before, and Simon made a "mental note to learn more about him at an early date--he had found it a very sound principle to enlist the sympathies of the employees in any such building where he lived, for there were other detectives besides Mr. Teal who had visualized a cast-iron arrest of the Saint as a signpost to promotion. But he was not thinking of doing anything about it at that hour, and his mind was too much occupied with other matters to notice that the man looked at him with more than ordinary curiosity as he got in.
His apartment lay at the end of a short corridor. He strolled innocently towards it, taking out his key, with Hoppy following him; and he was on the point of putting his key in the lock when a voice that was only too familiar spoke behind him:
"Do you mind if we come in?"
The Saint turned rather slowly on his heel and looked at the two men who had appeared from somewhere to bar the way back along the corridor --there was something rather solid and purposeful about the way they stood shoulder to shoulder so as to fill the passage, something which put the glint of steel back in his eyes and set his heart ticking a fraction faster. Hoppy's hand was leaping automatically to his hip; but Simon caught it by the wrist and smiled.
"You know you're always welcome, Claud," he murmured. "But you do choose the most Bohemian hours for your visits."
He turned back to the door and unlocked it and led the way into the living room, spinning his hat onto a peg in the hall as he passed through. He took a cigarette from the box on the table and lighted it, facing round with one hand in his pocket and that thoughtful smile still on his lips.
"Well, what's the fun, boys?" he inquired genially. "Has somebody pinched the north side of Oxford Street and do you think I did it, or have you just dropped in to sing carols?"
"Where have you been tonight?" asked Mr. Teal.
His manner was not the manner of a man who had dropped in to sing carols. Even in his wildest flights of whimsy, the Saint had never thought of Chief Inspector Teal as the Skylark of Scotland Yard, but he had known him to look more like an embryonic warbler than he did just then. Simon smiled even more genially and even more thoughtfully and trickled out a lungful of blue smoke.
"We've been on a pub-crawl with Andrew Volstead and Lady Astor, and Hoppy came along to carry the bromo-seltzer."
Teal did not smile.
"If you've got another alibi," he said, "I'd like to hear it. But it had better be a good one."
The Saint pondered for a moment.
"You are getting particular," he said. "A story like that would always have kept you amused for hours in the old days. I suppose you've been taking a correspondence course in this detective business. All right. We haven't been on a pub-crawl. We've been splitting hairs on the dome of St. Paul's and looking for needles in the Haymarket."
Mr. Teal's hands remained in his pockets, but his whole attitude suggested that they were grasping something as heavy as a steam roller.
"Is that all you've got to say?" he demanded hoarsely.
"It'll do for the time being," said the Saint calmly. "That's what I say we've been doing; and what the hell does it matter to you?"
The detective appeared, somehow, in spite of his mountainous immobility, to approach the verge of gibbering. It may seem unkind of the chronicler to mention this, but he is conscientiously concerned to deal only with the bare facts, without apology or decoration. And yet he must admit that Mr. Teal had lately suffered much.
"Now listen," Mr. Teal got out through his teeth. "About half-past eleven tonight the watchman at Hawker's factory, down at Brooklands, was knocked on the head by someone he found prowling around the sheds. When he woke up and raised the alarm, one of the hangars had been forced open and an aeroplane had been stolen!"
Simon tapped his cigarette on the edge of an ashtray. His brain was starting to turn over like an electric motor responding to the touch of a switch, but no hint of that sudden mental commotion could have been seen in his face. His gaze went back to the detective from under quizzically slanting eyebrows.