Leslie Charteris - The Saint Meets His Match

THE big car had been sliding through the night like a great black slug with wide, flaming eyes that seared the road and carved a blazing tunnel of light through the darkness under the over-arching trees; and then the eyes were suddenly blinded, and the smooth pace of the slug grew slower and slower until it groped itself to a shadowy standstill under the hedge.

The man who had watched its approach, sitting under a tree, with the glowing end of his cigarette carefully shielded in his cupped hands, stretched silently to his feet. The car had stopped only a few yards from him, as he had expected. He stooped and trod his cigarette into the grass and came down to the road without a sound. There was no sound at all except the murmur of leaves in the night air, for the subdued hiss of the car's eight cylinders had ceased.

Momentarily, inside the car, a match flared up, revealing everything there with a startling clearness.

The rich crimson upholstery, the handful of perfect roses in the crystal bracket, the gleaming silver fittings — those might have been imagined from the exterior. So also, perhaps, might have been imagined the man with the battered face who wore a chauffeur's livery; or the rather vacantly good-looking man who sat alone in the back, with his light overcoat swept back from his spotless white shirt front, and his silk hat on the seat beside him. Or, perhaps, the girl…

Or perhaps not the girl.

The light of the match focussed the attention upon her particularly, for she was using it to light a cigarette. On the face of it, of course, she was exactly what one would have looked for. On the face of it, she was the kind of girl who goes very well with an expensive car, and there was really no reason why she should not be sitting at the wheel. On the face of it…

But there was something about her that put superficial judgments uneasily in the wrong. Tall she must have been, guessed the man who watched her from the shadows, and of a willowy slenderness that still left her a woman. And beautiful she was beyond dispute, with a perfectly natural beauty which yet had in it nothing of the commonplace. Her face was all her own, as was the cornfield gold of her hair. And no artifice known to the deceptions of women could have given her those tawny golden eyes…

"So you're Jill Trelawney!" thought the man in the shadows.

The light was extinguished as he thought it; but he carried every detail of the picture it had shown indelibly photographed on his brain. This was a living photograph. He had been given mere camera portraits of her before-some of them were in his pocket at that moment — but they were pale and insignificant things beside the memory of the reality, and he wondered dimly at the impertinence which presumed to try to capture such a face in dispassionate halftone.

"On the face of it — hell!" thought the man in the shadows.

But in the car, the man in evening dress said, more elegantly: "You're an extraordinary woman, Jill. Every time I see you—"

"You get more maudlin," the girl took him up calmly. "This is work — not a mothers' meeting."

The man in evening dress grunted querulously.

"I don't see why you have to be so snappy, Jill. We're all in the same boat—"

"I've yet to sail in a sauceboat, Weald."

The end of her cigarette glowed more brightly as she inhaled, and darkened again in an uncontested silence. Then the man with the battered face said, diffidently: "As long as Templar isn't around—"

"Templar!" The girl's voice cut in on the name like the crack of a whip. "Templar!" she said scathingly. "What are you trying to do, Pinky? Scare me? That man's a bee in your bonnet—"

"The Saint," said the man with the battered face diffidently, "would be a bee in anybody's bonnet what was up against him. See?"

If there had been a light, he would have been seen to be blushing. Mr. Budd always blushed when anyone spoke to him sharply. It was this weakness that had given him the nickname of "Pinky."

"There's a story—" ventured the man in evening dress; but he got no further.

"Isn't there always a story about any fancy dick?" demanded the girl scornfully. "I suppose you've never heard a story about Henderson — or Peters — or Teal — or Bill Kennedy? Who is this man Templar, anyway?"

"Ever seen a man pick up another man fifty pounds above his weight 'n' heave him over a six-foot wall like he was a sack of feathers?" asked Mr. Budd, in his diffident way. "Templar does that as a kind of warming-up exercise for a real fight. Ever seen a man stick a visiting card up edgeways 'n' cut it in half with a knife at fifteen paces? Templar does that standing on his head with his eyes shut. Ever seen a man take all the punishment six hoodlums can hand out to him 'n' come back smiling to qualify the whole half-dozen for an ambulance ride? Templar—"

"Frightened of him, Pinky?" inquired the girl quietly.

Mr. Budd sniffed.

"I been sparring partner — which is the same as saying human punchbag — to some of the best heavyweights what ever stepped into a ring," he answered, "but I always been paid handsome for the hidings I've took. I don't expect the Saint 'ud be ready to pay so much for the pleasure of beating me up. See?"

Mr. Budd did not add that since his sparring-partner days he had seen service in Chicago with "Blinder" Kellory and other gang leaders almost as notorious — men who shot on sight and asked questions at the inquest. He had acquitted himself with distinction in Kellory's "war" with "Scarface" Al Capone — and he said nothing about that, either. There was a peculiarly impressive quality about his reticence.

"Nobody's gonna say I'm frightened to fight anybody," said Mr. Budd pinkly, "but that don't stop me knowing when I'm gonna be licked. See?"

"If you take my advice, Jill," yapped the man in evening dress, "you'll settle with Templar before he gets the chance to do any mischief. It ought to be easy—"

The man in the shadows shook with a chuckle of pure amusement. It was a warm evening, and all the windows of the car were open. He could hear every word that was said. He was standing so near the car that he could have taken a pace forward, reached out a hand, and touched it. But he took two paces forward.

The girl said, with cool contempt, as though she were dealing with a sulky child: "If it'll make you feel any happier to have him fixed—"

"It would," said Stephen Weald shamelessly. "I know there are always stories, but the stories I've heard about the Saint don't make me happy. He's uncanny. They say—"

The words were strangled in his throat in a kind of sob, so that the other two looked at him quickly, though they could not have made out his face in the gloom. But the girl saw, in an instant, what Weald had seen — the deeper shadow that had blacked out the grey square of one window.

Then there was something else in the car, something living, besides themselves. It was strangely eerie, that transient certainty that something had moved in the car that belonged to none of them. But it was only an arm — a swift sure arm that reached through one open window with a crisp rustle of tweed sleeve which they all heard clearly in the silence — and a hand that found a switch and flooded them with light from the panel bulb over their heads.

"What do they say, Weald?" drawled a voice.

There was a curious tang about that voice. It struck all of them before they had blinked the darkness out of their eyes sufficiently to make out its owner, who now had his head and shoulders inside the car, leaning on his forearms in the window. It was the most cavalierly insolent voice any of them had ever heard.