Leslie Charteris - The Happy Highwayman

He launched into a series of anecdotes that filled up the time until they had to separate to their compartments to collect their luggage. Mr. Naskill's pining for company was understandable after only a few minutes' acquaintance; it was clear that he was constitutionally incapable of surviving for long without an audience.

Simon Templar was not bored. He had already had his money's worth. Whether his friends would allow him to get very far with a programme of card tricks if he appeared before them in an unaccustomed set of horn-rimmed windows was highly doubtful; but the trick was worth knowing, just the same.

Almost every kind of craftsman has specialized journals to inform him of the latest inventions and discoveries and technical advances in his trade, but there is as yet no publication called the Grafter's Gazette and Weekly Skulldugger to keep a professional freebooter abreast of the newest devices for separating the sucker from his dough, and the Saint was largely dependent on his own researches for the encyclopedic knowledge of the wiles of the ungodly that had brought so much woe to the chevaliers d'industrie of two hemispheres. Mr. Naskill's conversation had yielded a scrap of information that would be filed away in the Saint's well-stocked memory against the day when it would be useful. It might lie fallow for a month, a year, five years, before it produced its harvest: the Saint was in no hurry. In the fulness of time he would collect his dividend — it was one of the cardinal articles of his faith that nothing of that kind ever crossed his path without a rendezvous for the future, however distant that future might be. But one of the things that always gave the Saint a particular affection for this story was the promptness with which his expectations were fulfilled.

There were some episodes in Simon Templar's life when all the component parts of a perfectly rounded diagram fell into place one by one with such a sweetly definitive succession of crisp clicks that mere coincidence was too pallid and anemic a theory with which to account for them — when he almost felt as if he was reclining passively in an armchair and watching the oiled wheels of Fate roll smoothly through the convolutions of a supernaturally engineered machine.

Two days later he was relaxing his long lean body on the private beach of the Roney Plaza, revelling in the clean sharp bite of the sun on his brown skin and lazily debating the comparative attractions of iced beer or a tinkling highball as a noon refresher, when two voices reached him sufficiently clearly to force themselves into his drowsy consciousness. They belonged to a man and a girl, and it was obvious that they were quarrelling.

Simon wasn't interested. He was at peace with the world. He concentrated on digging up a small sand castle with his toes and tried to shut them out. And then he heard the girl say: "My God, are you so dumb that you can't see that they must be crooks?"

It was the word "crooks" that did it. When the Saint heard that word, he could no more have concentrated on sand castles than a rabid egyptologist could have remained aloof while gossip of scarabs and sarcophagi shuttled across his head. A private squabble was one thing, but this was something else that to the Saint made eavesdropping not only pardonable but almost a moral obligation.

He rolled over and looked at the girl. She was only a few feet from him and even at that range it was easier to go on looking than to look away. From her loose raven hair down to her daintily enamelled toenails there wasn't an inch of her that didn't make its own demoralizing demands on the eye, and the clinging silk swimsuit she wore left very few inches any secrets.

"Why must they be crooks?" asked the man stubbornly. He was young and tow-headed but the Saint's keen survey traced hard and haggard lines in his face. "Just because I've been out of luck—"

"Luck!" The girl's voice was scornful and impatient. "You were out of luck when you met them. Two men that you know nothing about, who pick you up in a bar and suddenly discover that you're the bosom pal they've been looking for all their lives — who want to take you out to dinner every night, and take you out fishing every day, and buy you drinks and show you the town — and you talk about luck! D'you think they'd do all that if they didn't know they could get you to play cards with them every night and make you lose enough to pay them back a hundred times over?"

"I won plenty from them to begin with."

"Of course you did! They let you win — just to encourage you to play higher. And now you've lost all that back and a lot more that you can't afford to lose. And you're still going on, making it worse and worse." She caught his arm impulsively and her voice softened. "Oh, Eddie, I hate fighting with you like this, but can't you see what a fool you're being?"

"Well, why don't you leave me alone if you hate fighting? Anyone might think I was a kid straight out of school."

He shrugged himself angrily away from her, and as he turned he looked straight into the Saint's eyes. Simon was so interested that the movement caught him unprepared, still watching them, as if he had been hiding behind a curtain and it had been abruptly torn down.

It was so much too late for Simon to switch his eyes away without looking even guiltier that he had to go on watching, and the young man went on scowling, at him and said uncomfortably: "We aren't really going to cut each other's throats, but there are some things that women can't understand."

"If a man told him that elephants laid eggs he'd believe it, just because it was a man who told him," said the girl petulantly, and she also looked at the Saint. "Perhaps if you told him—"

"The trouble is, she won't give me credit for having any sense—"

"He's such a baby—"

"If she didn't read so many detective stories—"

"He's so damned pig-headed—"

The Saint held up his hands.

"Wait a minute," he pleaded. "Don't shoot the referee — he doesn't know what it's all about. I couldn't help hearing what you were saying, but it isn't my fight."

The young man rubbed his head shamefacedly, and the girl bit her lip.

Then she said quickly: "Well, please, won't you be a referee? Perhaps he'd listen to you. He's lost fifteen thousand dollars already, and it isn't all his own money—"

"For God's sake," the man burst out savagely, "are you trying to make me look a complete heel?"

The girl caught her breath, and her lip trembled. And then, with a sort of sob, she picked herself up and walked quickly away without another word.

The young man gazed after her in silence, and his fist clenched on a handful of sand as if he would have liked to hurt it.

"Oh hell," he said expressively.

Simon drew a cigarette out of the packet beside him and tapped it meditatively on his thumbnail while the awkward hiatus made itself at home. His eyes seemed to be intent on following the movements of a small fishing cruiser far out on the emerald waters of the Gulf Stream.

"It's none of my damn business," he remarked at length, "but isn't there just a chance that the girl friend may be right? It's happened before; and a resort like this is rather a happy hunting ground for all kinds of crooks."

"I know it is," said the other sourly. He turned and looked at the Saint again miserably. "But I am pigheaded, and I can't bear to admit to her that I could have been such a mug. She's my fiancée — I suppose you guessed that. My name's Mercer."

"Simon Templar is mine."

The name had a significance for Mercer that it apparently had not had for Mr. Naskill. His eyes opened wide.

"Good God, you don't mean — You're not the Saint?"

Simon smiled. He was still immodest enough to enjoy the sensation that his name could sometimes cause.