Leslie Charteris - The Saint to the Rescue

It should be superfluous, after that sentence, for this chronicler to expatiate at much length upon the proportions and attractions of Hilda Mason, which in cold truth were not intrinsically different from those of any other girl who gets herself into these stories. They were, however, striking enough for him to have judged her at once to be the most interesting girl on the Interplanetary Hotel beach on the first day he cased it, with an outstanding chance of defending that title against all comers from plenty of other beaches and for quite a few orbits. Let it be on the record that she had light brown hair and light brown eyes and was almost criminally young and glowing, and that the puffy balding-gray man with her who looked easily old enough to be her father proved on investigation to be her father — a phenomenon which in Miami Beach in the season was not merely epochal but had also made the Saint’s casual campaign almost effortless.

“I’m not late, am I?” she said.

“Not one second,” he smiled. “And I’d allowed for half an hour. Which gives us time for just one family-style drink together.”

“I accept with pleasure,” said her father, sinking into another chair. “But I assure you, that’s as long as you’ll be stuck with me. I only came this far to keep Hilda company in case you happened to be late. I brought her up according to the old-fashioned doctrine that punctuality is the most inexpensive of grand gestures, but one can’t count on everyone else having the same philosophy.”

Simon ordered the drinks from a waiter who was already waiting, fortunately, for more customers were beginning to seep in. But the room was still populated sparsely enough for Mr Way’s discordantly jeering voice to snag the attention of the newcomers as it rose in raucous triumph a few minutes later.

“October! Here’s another guy born in October! And he’s only Number Five. Now who says I didn’t prove my point?”

“What is this all about?” George Mason asked.

Simon gave him a factual synopsis, untrimmed with any personal comment, and Mason shook his head.

“The man must be out of his mind. Or else he’s got money to burn and he’d rather burn it than admit he’s wrong.”

The group that was gravitating towards the noise focus of the bar evidently shared this opinion, and furthermore had no scruples about taking advantage of either contingency. Nor were they discouraged by the accident that had cost them a few dollars on the first sampling of nativities.

“Any fool can be lucky,” growled the good bridge player who had been finessed into becoming spokesman for the opposition. “But that doesn’t prove he’s right. If you want to convince me the odds are what you say, you’d have to win two out of three times. With six total strangers.”

“You think you aren’t strangers?” squawked Mr Way. “You think one of you is my stooge? I’d really hate to have such a dishonest mind as to even think that. Or to be such a bad loser as to say it. But don’t make any cracks about backing down until we see who’s doing it. You want to try this again twice more, or two hundred times, I’ll give you the same odds.”

“There aren’t that many people here—”

“Then we go out and ask any six guys in the street. And you pick ’em. Or easier still, we send out to the office for something like Who’s Who — they must have a copy in a joint like this. You name any six names, so long as they aren’t your ancestors. Or shut your eyes and pick ’em with a pin. Just show me the color of your money first!”

The debate progressed without any diminution of temperature towards the next inevitable showdown.

“If I’d known bars were such fun,” Hilda said, “I’d have lied about my age long before this.”

“You probably did, anyhow,” said her father tolerantly. “Only you were afraid to try it on the fancy places, which are much less willing to be fooled than certain others, I’m told.”

“I wonder who told you.”

The Saint grinned.

“I must hear more about this, George,” he murmured. “Some time when the child isn’t fanning us with its big shell-pink ears. Right now, I honestly hate to drink and run, but we’re stuck with the program I sold her. At this hour, it’ll be mostly a crawl down to the very end of the Beach for Joe’s immortal stone crabs. And from there, it’s another long haul over to Coral Gables and this show she wanted to see. Until the millennium when it dawns on theatrical producers that an eight-fifteen curtain is the ideal time to ensure a hostile and dyspeptic reception from anyone who also likes a nice peaceful dinner—”

“Don’t worry about me, my boy,” said Mr Mason expansively. “I shall stay here for a little while and improve my education.”

“Just don’t pay any padded tuition fees,” said the Saint frivolously.

It was not until after he had ordered their stone crabs at Joe’s, with a bottle of Willm Gewurtztraminer, and they were toying with cigarettes and Dry Sack while they waited, that he realized that he might have been a little too flippant.

“I only hope Papa doesn’t get into anything silly,” Hilda said.

“Is he likely to?” asked the Saint. “He seems a long way from being senile, to me.”

“He does like a little gamble, though. And he can’t forget that he was an insurance company statistician for thirty years. Of course that’s only a glorified kind of bookkeeping, but he sometimes thinks it makes him an authority on anything to do with figures. He might have a hard time staying out of that argument in the bar.”

“That shouldn’t get him in any serious trouble... Well, I admit I hadn’t thought of it that way. It sounded like a typical barroom argument, with nobody really knowing the score. They were all talking through their hats, I may tell you. Let’s find out what the odds really are.”

He turned a menu over, took out a ball-point pen, and began jotting.

“Do you really know how to work it out?” she asked.

“I don’t let on to everyone, but I had one of those dreary old out-dated educations. Lots of gruesomely hard study, and no credits at all for football, fretwork, or folk dancing. But I think I can figure it the text-book way.”

“You’ll have to tell me. I even flunked Domestic Science.”

“They must have tested you in the wrong domicile. But this is how you have to look at it. The first guy can be born in any month, as somebody said. When were you born?”

“April.”

“Okay. Then the second guy has eleven months to choose from, that’ll lose for Loud Mouth back there.”

“That sounds right.”

“So the second guy was born in May. Now up comes the third guy. He has two months to dodge, out of twelve. On any of the other ten, he still wins from Loud Mouth.”

“Even I can follow that. So it leaves the fourth man nine months, and the fifth man eight months, and the sixth man seven months. But—”

“Now according to the Law of Probabilities in my school book, and don’t ask me who made it or why it works that way, to find the odds against all those things happening in succession, you don’t add them up, you have to multiply them. Like this.”

He had written: “11/12 x 10/12 x 9/12 x 8/12 x 7/12.”

“Don’t forget that eight-fifteen curtain,” Hilda said.

“It’s not so hard as all that.”

He made a few quick cross-cancellations to simplify the problem, did a little rapid arithmetic, and ended up with the fraction: 385/1728.

“That’s fine,” she said. “But how does it give you the odds?”

“It means that theoretically, out of any 1728 batches of six people, there should only be 385 batches in which two of ’em weren’t born in the same month — meaning where Loud Mouth would lose his bet. 385 from 1728 leaves 1343. So the odds are 1343 to 385, which...”