Garniman took a sudden step forward, and his lips twisted in a snarl.
"Look here——"
"Where?" asked the Saint excitedly.
Mr. Garniman swallowed. The Saint heard him distinctly.
"You thrust yourself in here under a false name—you behave like a raving lunatic—then you make the most wild and fantastic accusations—you——"
"Throw knives about the place——"
"What the devil," bellowed Mr. Garniman, "do you mean by it?"
"Sir," suggested the Saint mildly.
"What the devil," bellowed Mr. Garniman, "do you mean— 'sir'?"
"Thank you," said the Saint.
Mr. Garniman glared. "What the——"
"O.K.," said the Saint pleasantly. "I heard you the second time. So long as you go on calling me 'sir', I shall know that everything is perfectly respectable and polite. And now we've lost the place again. Half a minute. . . . Here we are: 'I have my income tax to pay'— "
"Will you get out at once," asked Garniman, rather quietly, "or must I send for the police?"
Simon considered the question.
"I should send for the police," he suggested at length.
He hitched himself off the book-case and sauntered leisurely across the room. He detached his little knife from the bell panel, tested the point delicately on his thumb, and restored the weapon to the sheath under his left sleeve; and Wilfred Garniman watched him without speaking. And then the Saint turned.
"Certainly—I should send for the police," he drawled. "They will be interested. It's quite true that I had a pardon for some old offences; but whether I've gone out of business, or whether I'm simply just a little cleverer than Chief Inspector Teal, is a point that is often debated at Scotland Yard. I think that any light you could throw on the problem would be welcomed."
Garniman was still silent; and the Saint looked at him, and laughed caressingly.
"On the other hand—if you're bright enough to see a few objections to that idea—you might prefer to push quietly on to your beautiful office and think over some of the other things I've said. Particularly those pregnant words about my income tax."
"Is that all you have to say?" asked Garniman, in the same low voice; and the Saint nodded.
"It'll do for now," he said lightly. "And since you seem to have decided against the police, I think I'll beetle off and concentrate on the method by which you're going to be induced to contribute to the Inland Revenue."
The slightest glitter of expression came to Wilfred Garniman's eyes for a moment, and was gone again. He walked to the door and opened it.
"I'm obliged," he said.
"After you, dear old reed-warbler," said the Saint courteously.
He permitted Garniman to precede him out of the room, and stood in the hall adjusting the piratical slant of his hat.
"I presume we shall meet again?" Garniman remarked.
His tone was level and conversational. And the Saint smiled.
"You might even bet on it," he said.
"Then—au revoir."
The Saint tilted back his hat and watched the other turn on his heels and go up the stairs.
Then he opened the door and stepped out; and the heavy ornamental stone flower-pot that began to gravitate earthwards at the same moment actually flicked the brim of his Stetson before it split thunderously on the flagged path an inch behind his right heel.
Simon revolved slowly, his hands still in his pockets, and cocked an eyebrow at the debris; and then he strolled back under the porch and applied his forefinger to the bell.
Presently the maid answered the door.
"I think Mr. Garniman has dropped the aspidistra," he murmured chattily, and resumed, his interrupted exit before the bulging eyes of an audience of one.
Chapter VIII
"But what on earth," asked Patricia helplessly, "was the point of that?"
"It was an exercise in tact," said the Saint modestly.
The girl stared.
"If I could only see it," she begun; and then the Saint laughed.
"You will, old darling," he said.
He leaned back and lighted another cigarette.
"Mr. Wilfred Garniman," he remarked, "is a surprisingly intelligent sort of cove. There was very little nonsense—and most of what there was was my own free gift to the nation. I grant you he added to his present charge-sheet by offering me a cigarette and then a drink; but that's only because, as I've told you before, he's an amateur. I'm afraid he's been reading too many thrillers, and they've put ideas into his head. But on the really important point he was most professionally bright. The way the calm suddenly broke out in the middle of the storm was quite astonishing to watch."
"And by this time," said Patricia, "he's probably going on being calm a couple of hundred miles away."
Simon shook his head.
"Not Wilfred," he said confidently. "Except when he's loosing off six-shooters and throwing architecture about, Wilfred is a really first-class amateur. And he is so rapid on the uptake that if he fell off the fortieth floor of the Empire Building he would be sitting on the roof before he knew what had happened. Without any assistance from me, he divined that I had no intention of calling in the police. So he knew he wasn't very much worse off than he was before."
"Why?"
"He may be an amateur, as I keep telling you, but he's efficient. Long before his house started to fall to pieces on me, he'd begun to make friendly attempts to bump me off. That was because he'd surveyed all the risks before he started in business, and he figured that his graft was exactly the kind of graft that would make me sit up and take notice. In which he was darned right. I just breezed in and proved it to him. He told me himself that he was unmarried; I wasn't able to get him to tell me anything about his lawful affairs, but the butcher told me that he was supposed to be 'something in the City'—so I acquired two items of information. I also verified his home address, which was the most important thing; and I impressed him with my own brilliance and charm of personality, which was the next most important. I played the perfect clown, because that's the way these situations always get me, but in the intervals between laughs I did everything that I set out to do. And he knew it—as I meant him to."
"And what happens next?"
"The private war will go on," said the Saint comfortably.
His deductions, as usual, were precisely true; but there was one twist in the affairs of Wilfred Garniman of which he did not know, and if he had known of it he might not have taken life quite so easily as he did for the next few days. That is just possible.
On the morning of that first interview, he had hung around in the middle distances of Mallaby Road with intent to increase his store of information; but Mr. Garniman had driven off to his righteous labours in a car which the Saint knew at a glance it would be useless to attempt to follow in a taxi. On the second morning, the Saint decorated the same middle distances at the wheel of his own car, but a traffic jam at Marble Arch baulked him of his quarry. On the third morning he tried again, and collected two punctures in the first half-mile; and when he got out to inspect the damage he found sharp steel spikes strewn all over the road. Then, fearing that four consecutive seven-o'clock breakfasts might affect his health, the Saint stayed in bed on the fourth morning and did some thinking.
One error in his own technique he perceived quite clearly.
"If I'd sleuthed him on the first morning, and postponed the backchat till the second, I should have been a bright lad," he said. "My genius seems to have gone off the boil."
That something of the sort had happened was also evidenced by the fact that during those four days the problem of evolving a really agile method of inducing Mr. Garniman to part with a proportion of his ill-gotten gains continued to elude him.
Chief Inspector Teal heard the whole story when he called in on the evening of that fourth day to make inquiries, and was almost offensive.