Read Online The Saint and the Happy Highwayman by Leslie Charteris - Free Book Online Page A

it the Purdell Highway… .”
    The Purdell Highway duly came into being at a cost of four million dollars. Al Eisenfeld saw to it. In the process of pushing Sam Purdell up the political tree he had engineered himself into the strategic post of Chairman of the Board of Aldermen, a position which gave him an interfering interest in practically all the activities of the city. The fact that the cost was about twice as much as the original estimate was due to the unforeseen obstinacy of the owner of the land involved, who held out for about four times the price which it was worth. There were rumours that someone in the administration had acquired the territory under another name shortly before the deal was proposed, and had sold it to the city at his own price—rumours which shocked Sam Purdell to the core of his sensitive soul.
    “Do you hear what they say, Al?” he complained, as soon as these slanderous stories reached his ears. “They say I made one hundred thousand dollars graft out of the Purdell Highway I Now, why the hell should they say that?”
    “You don’t have to worry about what a few rats are saying, Sam,” replied Mr Eisenfcld soothingly. “They’re only jealous because you’re so popular with the city. Hell, there are political wranglers who’d tell stories about the Archangel Gabriel himself if he was Mayor, just to try and discredit the administration so they could shove their own crooked party in. I’ll look into it.”
    Mr Eisenfeld’s looking into it did not stop the same rumours circulating about the Purdell Bridge, which spanned the river from the southern end of the town and linked it with the State Highway, eliminating a detour of about twenty miles. What project, Sam Purdell asked, could he possibly have put forward that was more obviously designed for the convenience and prosperity of Elmford? But there were whispers that the Bennsville Steel Company, which had obtained the contract for the bridge, had paid somebody fifty thousand dollars to see that their bid was accepted. A bid which was exactly fifty percent higher than the one put in by their rivals.
    “Do you know anything about somebody taking fifty thousand dollars to put this bid through?” demanded Sam Purdell wrathfully, when he heard about it; and Mr Eisenfeld was shocked.
    “That’s a wicked idea, Sam,” he protested. “Everyone knows this is the straightest administration Elm-ford ever had. Why, if I thought anybody was taking graft, I’d throw him out of the City Hall with my own hands.”
    There were similar cases, each of which brought Sam a little nearer to the brink of bitter disillusion. Sometimes he said that it was only the unshaken loyalty of, his family which stopped him from resigning his thank-less labours and leaving Elmford to wallow in its own ungrateful slime. But most of all it was the loyalty and encouragement of Mr Eisenfeld.
    Mr Eisenfeld was a suave sleek man with none of Sam Purdell’s rubicund and open-faced geniality, but he had a cheerful courage in such trying moments which was always ready to renew Sam Purdell’s faith in human nature. This cheerful courage shone with its old unfailing luminosity when Sam Purdell thrust the offending copy of the Elmford News which we have already referred to under Mr Eisenfeld’s aggrieved and incredulous eyes.
    “I’ll show you what you do about that sort of writing, Sam,” said Mr Eisenfeld magnificently. “You just take it like this–-“
    He was going on to say that you tore it up, scattering the libellous fragments disdainfully to the four winds but as he started to perform this heroic gesture his eye was arrested by the next paragraph in the same column, and he hesitated.
    “Well, how do you take it?” asked the mayor peevishly.
    Mr Eisenfeld said nothing for a second and the mayor looked over his shoulder to see what he was reading.
    “Oh, that 1” he said irritably. “I don’t know what that means. Do you know what it means,