Read Online Saint Intervenes by Leslie Charteris - Free Book Online Page B

conviction that his brain had given way.
    “Th-thank
you very much,” he said shakily, and was con scious of little more
than an overpowering desire to remove himself from those parts—to camp out on
the doorstep of a bank and wait there with his head in his hands until morn ing, when
he could pass the cheque over the counter and see crisp banknotes
clicking back to him in return to prove that his sanity was not
entirely gone. “Weil, I must be going,” he gulped out; but the
Saint stopped him.
    “Not
a bit of it,   Oscar,”   he murmured.   “You don’t in trude. In fact, you ought to be the guest of
honour. Your class as an inventor really is A 1. When I showed the
Cierva people what you’d done, they nearly collapsed.”
    Mr. Newdick
blinked at him in a painful daze. “What do you mean?” he
stammered.
    “Why,
the way you managed to build an autogiro that would go straight up and
down. None of the ordinary ones will, of course—the torque of the vanes would
make it spin round like a top if it didn’t have a certain amount of
forward movement to hold it straight. I can only think that when you got hold
of some Cierva parts and drawings and built it up yourself, you found
out that it didn’t go straight up and down as you’d expected and
thought you must have done something wrong. So you set about trying to put
it right—and somehow or other you brought it off. It’s a pity you
were in such a hurry to tell Mr. Hayward that everything in your
invention had been patented before, Oscar, because if you’d made a
few more inquiries you’d have found that it hadn’t.” Simon Templar
grinned, and patted the stunned man kindly on the shoulder. “But everything
happens for the best, dear old bird; and when I tell you that the Cierva
people have already made me an offer of a hundred thousand quid for the
invention you’ve just sold me, I’m sure you’ll stay and join us in
a celebratory bottle of beer.”
    Mr. Oscar
Newdick swayed slightly, and glugged a strangling
obstruction out of his throat.
    “I—I
don’t think I’ll stay,” he said. “I’m not feeling very well.”
    “A
dose of salts in the morning will do you all the good in the world,”
said the Saint chattily, and ushered him sympa thetically to the
door.
    IV
    The Prince of Cherkessia
     
    Of the
grey hairs which bloomed in the thinning thatch of Chief Inspector Claud
Eustace Teal, there were at least a couple of score which he could
attribute directly to an equal number of encounters with the Saint. Mr. Teal
did not ac tually go so far as to call them by name and celebrate
their birthdays, for he was not by nature a whimsical man; but he had no
doubts about their origin.
    The affair
of the Prince of Cherkessia gave him the forty- first—or it may have
been the forty-second.
    His
Highness arrived in London without any preliminary publicity; but he
permitted a number of reporters to inter view him at his hotel
after his arrival, and the copy which he provided had a
sensation value which no self-respecting news editor could ignore.
    It started
before the assembled pressmen had drunk more than half the
champagne which was provided for them in the Prince’s suite,
which still stands as a record for any reception of that type; and it was
started by a cub reporter, no more ignorant than the rest, but more honest
about it, who had not been out on that kind of assignment long enough
to learn that the serious business of looking for a story is not supposed to
mar the general conviviality while there is any thing left to drink.
    “Where,”
asked this revolutionary spirit brazenly, with his mouth full of foie
gras, “is Cherkessia?”
    The Prince
raised his Mephistophelian eyebrows.
    “You,”
he replied, with faint contempt, “would probably know it better as
Circassia.”
    At the
sound of his answer a silence spread over the room. The name rang
bells, even in journalistic heads. The cub gulped down the
rest of his sandwich without tasting