Read Online Featuring the Saint by Leslie Charteris - Free Book Online Page B

before the crook had opened his mouth to deny it.
    “I never ‘eard of ‘im, guv’nor. I was near starvin’—”
    “What were you told to do?”
    “I never—”
    On those words, Johnny’s voice trailed away. For he had heard, quite distinctly, the stealthy footfall in the passage outside.
    The Saint also had heard it. He had not expected a man like Johnny Anworth to be on a job like that alone.
    “You’re telling naughty stories, Precious… .”
    The Saint spoke gently and dreamily, stepping back towards the door with the silence of a hunting leopard; but there was neither gentleness or dreaminess in the eyes that held the burglar half hypnotized, and Johnny did not need to be told what would happen to him if he attempted to utter a warning.
    “Naughty, naughty stories-you’ve brought me out of my beautiful bed to tell me those. I think I shall have to be very cross with you, Johnny—”
    And then, like an incarnate whirlwind, the Saint whipped open the door and sprang out into the passage. Baldy Mossiter had a gun, but the Saint was too quick for him, and Baldy only just relaxed his trigger finger in time to avoid shooting himself in the stomach.
    “Step right in and join the merry throng, Hairy Harold,” murmured Simon; and Mossiter obeyed, the Saint speeding him on his way.
    That Johnny Anworth, having started forward with the idea of taking the Saint in the rear, should have been directly in the trajectory of his chief, was unfortunate for both parties. Simon smiled beatifically upon them, and allowed them to regain their feet under their own power.
    “You wait, Templar!” Mossiter snarled; and the Saint nodded encouragingly.
    “Were you starving, too?” he asked.
    There was some bad language-so bad that the Saint, who was perhaps unduly sensitive about these things, found it best to bind and gag both his prisoners.
    “When you decide to talk, you can wag your ears,” he said.
    There was a gas fire in the sitting room, and this the Saint lighted, although the night was already torrid enough. In front of the burners, with ponderous deliberation, he set an ornamental poker to heat.
    The two men watched with bulging eyes.
    Simon finished his cigarette; and then he solemnly tested the temperature of the poker, holding it near his cheek as a laundryman tests an iron.
    “Do you sing your song, Baldy?” he inquired-so mildly that Mossiter, who had an imagination, understood quite clearly that his own limits of bluff were likely to be reached long before the Saint’s.
    The story came with some profane trimmings which need not be recorded.
    “It was Lemuel. We were to cosh you, and take your girl away. Lemuel said he knew for certain you’d got a lot of money hidden away, and we were going to make you pay it all over-while we held the girl to keep you quiet. We were going shares in whatever we got— What are you doing?”
    “Phoning for the police,” said the Saint calmly. “You must not commit burglary-particularly with guns.”
    The law arrived in ten minutes in the shape of a couple of men from Vine Street; but before they came the Saint had made some things painfully plain.
    “I’d guessed what you told me, but I always like to be sure. And let me tell you, you pair of second-hand sewer-skunks, that that sort of game doesn’t appeal to me. Personally, I expect the most strenuous efforts to be made to bump me off -I’d be disappointed if they weren’t-but my girl friends are in baulk. Get that. And if at any time the idea should come back to you that that would be a good way of getting at me- forget it. Because I promise you that anyone who starts that stuff on me is going for a long ride, and he’ll die in a way that’ll make him wish he’d never been born. Think that over while you’re carving rocks on the Moor!”
    Then the police came and took them away. They said nothing then, and went down for three years without speaking.
    But the Saint was a thoughtful man at breakfast the next