Leslie Charteris - Saint Errant

“Only fifty bucks and a couple of drinks, and it was worth that,” said the Saint, and the thought deepened in his blue eyes. “In fact, I think this is just what we needed to square accounts with Brother Rochborne and your swami.”

The Swami Yogadevi had never seen a Doodlebug, but he had his own effective methods of ascertaining the presence of precious metals. His techniques depended for their success upon certain paraphernalia unknown to electronics, such as a large spherical chunk of genuine optical glass; celestial charts populated by crabs, bulls, goats, virgins, and other mythological creatures; and many yards of expensive drapery embroidered with esoteric symbols, the whole enshrined in a gloomy and expensive apartment on Russian Hill.

There was nothing about the place to suggest that the Swami Yogadevi had once been Reuben Innowitz, known to the carnival circuit as Ah Pasha, the Mighty Mentalist. Mr Innowitz’s wants had been simple in those days, expressed mainly in terms of tall bottles and tall blondes, and they were much the same now, under his plush exterior. There were times, the Swami Yogadevi told himself, when he wished he hadn’t met Melville Rochborne, profitable though the partnership had turned out to be. For instance, there was this Professor Tattersall business.

“How should I know who’s Professor Simeon Tattersall?” he asked with asperity.

Mr Rochborne eyed the mystic with some distaste.

“I don’t expect you to know anything,” he said coldly. “All I want you to do is read it — if you can.”

The seer pushed his turban back on his forehead and picked up the newspaper clipping again. It was from the front page of the final afternoon edition of a San Francisco daily.

CLEMENTINE VALLEY, CALIF, [by a staff correspondent]—

There’s a lot of gold still lying around the long-abandoned Lucky Nugget mine near here if someone will just come along with the right kind of divining rod, water witch, or a sensitive nose.

Professor Simeon Tattersall not only says that the gold is there, but asserts freely that he has the gadget that will find it. Said gadget, his own invention, he modestly styles the Tattersall Magnetic Prospector, and he plans to demonstrate its worth at the Lucky Nugget Thursday morning at 10:30 P.S.T.—

“Say!” bleated the soothsayer. “Ain’t this Lucky Nugget mine the same one you sold that old Phelan dame?”

“It is,” said Mr Rochborne concisely. “What I want to know now, Rube, is who this Tattersall is and why he picks the Lucky Nugget to demonstrate his screwball gadget, just three weeks after we made a deal with it.”

“It says here he thinks there’s gold in it,” said the swami brightly.

“Baloney!” said Mr Rochborne. “There isn’t a nickel’s worth of gold in that mine and hasn’t been since 1907. There’s something about this Tattersall that smells.”

“He sounds mighty suspicious to me,” agreed the oracle sagely.

Mr Rochborne favored him with a look of contempt and got to his feet. He was a large man with hulking shoulders and a tanned kindly face, of the type which inspires instant trust in dogs, children, and old ladies.

“One thing I’d bet on — there’s no such person as Professor Simeon Tattersall. There never was a name like that. There couldn’t be.”

“What’re you going to do about it, Mel?” asked the sage.

“I don’t know,” said Mr Rochborne darkly. “Maybe nothing. Maybe something. But one thing I do know, I’m going to be there when this ‘Professor’ ” — he put quotation marks around the title — “holds his ‘demonstration’ tomorrow morning. It’s probably a lot of horseshoes, but we can’t afford to take any chances.”

Simon Templar might have hoped for a more impressive turnout in response to his carefully planted publicity, but he could also have been guilty of discounting Larry Phelan’s estimate of the skepticism of local wiseacres in the matter of Doodlebugs. The Lucky Nugget mine site on Thursday morning was fairly uncrowded by seven male and two female citizens of the nearby town of Clementine Valley, all more or less the worse for wear; four small boys; three cynical reporters, two dogs, and a passing hobo attracted by the crowd. But to Simon Templar the most important spectator was a large well-built man, conspicuous in city clothes, with a kindly face, to whom the dogs and small boys aforesaid were immediately attracted, and whose eyes missed no detail of the proceedings in the intervals of ministering to posterity and its pets.

The Saint had arrayed himself for the occasion in what seemed a likely professorial costume of Norfolk jacket, pith helmet, and riding boots, with the addition of a gray goatee which sat rather strangely on his youthful brown face.

He eyed the gathering individually and collectively with an equal interest as he stepped from Clementine Valley’s only taxicab, tenderly bearing the wooden box, replete with knobs and dials, which was obviously the one and only Tattersall Magnetic Prospector.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” he said.

“Hey, Prof,” queried a high thin voice from the group, “will she bring in London?”

This sally elicited a wave of home-town laughter, to which Simon professorially paid no heed. He reconnoitred situation and terrain with the bold eye and flaring nostril of an intrepid conquistador.

When one spoke of the Lucky Nugget mine, one meant nine hundred and twenty-eight feet of partially caved-in tunnel sunk into the bowels of a red-dirt pine-freckled hill. The tunnel entrance was half blocked by fallen dirt and broken timbers. From it emerged two streaks of rust which had once been rails for ore cars to run on, and which descended a gentle slope to the remains of a stamp mill.

Professor Simeon Tattersall sapiently eyed the tunnel mouth, grasped his device, and took a step toward the opening. “Mind if I look at your gadget, Professor?” said a genial voice.

Simon looked around, and found the man in the city clothes standing at his elbow.

“And who are you, sir?” he inquired frostily.

“Just an interested observer, Professor,” was the response, accompanied by a smile that crinkled the corners of the speaker’s eyes.

“Well, sir,” said the Saint, in his most precise pedantic voice, “in the first place, this is not a ‘gadget’; it is a highly involved and intricate extrapository reactodyne, operating according to an entirely new principle of electronics. Later, perhaps, after the demonstration is concluded, you may—”

“Not afraid I might find something phony, are you?” The big man stepped very close. “And haven’t I seen your picture somewhere before?”

Professor Simeon Tattersall lowered his eyes for a single fleeting instant, then raised their candid blue gaze to the stranger’s.

“You may have read about my work in mineral detection—”

“That’s what it said in the paper,” assented the large man jovially. “I must have been thinking about someone else. The name’s on the tip of my tongue — but you wouldn’t know about that.” He beamed. “Anyway, Prof — I’ve been in the mining game a long time. Know all the dodges. Thought some of them up myself. I’ll be watching your demonstration with great interest.”

He chuckled tranquilly and rejoined the motley gallery.

There followed what radio commentators call an “expectant hush.”

Simon picked up his instrument, with barely visible nervousness, and started up the slope from the mill to the small mountain of “muck” fanning out below the old mine entrance. He skirted around its base, his audience following, and approached the steep hillside itself.

Suddenly he grasped the handles on the box again and, to the obbligato of the resultant humming, began moving along the base of the hill, moving the device to and fro as he went. The humming continued in the same even key. The trailing onlookers listened breathlessly — or perhaps their concentrated breathing merely gave that impression.