Saint Errant (20 page)

“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 turn out 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 Doodle bugs. 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 reconnoitered 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, per haps, 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.

Ahead of the exploration lay a large slide of loose dirt brought down by recent rains. He neared it, and all at once the box’s tone slid up an octave. The Saint stopped; he moved the box to the right, away from the hill, and the tone dropped; he swung it toward the slide, and it climbed infinitesimally; he moved toward the slide, and the tone mounted until at the base of the fresh clods it was a banshee wail.

Simon Templar put down the box. In the ensuing sinusoidal silence, he jointed a small collapsible spade and poked tentatively in the dirt.

Suddenly he dived down with one hand, and came up with if held high; and between his thumb and forefinger glittered a tiny pea-sized grain of yellow.

“The Tattersall Prospector never makes a mistake,” he began in his best classroom manner. “I hold in my hand a small nugget of gold. Obviously, somewhere on the hillside above us, we will find the source of this nugget. I predict-“

His words were lost in a yell as the small crowd, like one man, started up the steep bank toward the source of the slide. As Simon turned to stare at them, he found the big city observer at his elbow.

“Not good.” The large man shook his head. “If I were you, Professor, I’d get the hell out of here before those boys up there find out that you salted this slide.” He shook his head again. “I just remembered where I saw your face-and I expected something better from the Saint,” he said. “Listen-you may have been a hot shot in your own league, but you didn’t really expect to take Melville Rochborne into camp, did you?”

“It was always worth trying,” said the Saint sheepishly.

He poked his spade into the slide and turned over the loose earth.

“All right, Mel,” he said. “You win this time. Have yourself a shoeshine on the house.”

And with a rather childish gesture he spilled a shovelful of dirt deliberately over Mr Rochborne’s shining pointed toes before he threw down the spade and turned away.

Mr Rochborne’s geniality blacked out for a moment; and then he bent to dust off his shoes.

Suddenly he seemed to stiffen. He bent down and picked up a fragment of powdery pale yellow stuff, and crumbled it in his fingers.

A strange look came into his face, and he straightened up quickly, but the Saint was already surrounded by the bored but dutiful news hawks. Mr Rochborne recklessly scuffed his beautifully polished shoes more extensively into the loose earth, bent down to probe it deeper with his manicured fingers …

A mere few hours later, which seemed to him like a few years, he was clutching his hat to his bosom and trying to hold his temperature down to an engaging glow while Mrs Lawrence Phelan, Sr., gushed: “Why, Mr Rochborne! What a pleas ant surprise!”

He still felt a little out of breath, but he tried to conceal it.

“As a matter of fact, Mrs Phelan,” he admitted, with the air of a schoolboy caught in the jam closet, “I’m here on business. I hate to impose on you, but…”

“Go on, Mr Rochborne,” she fluted. “Do go on. Business is business, isn’t it?”

“I might as well come right out with it,” Rochborne said wearily. “It’s about that Lucky Nugget stock you bought, Mrs Phelan. I-well, it turns out it was misrepresented to me. I’m not at all sure it’s a good investment.”

“Oh, dear!” Mrs Phelan sat down suddenly. “Oh, dear! But -my-my forty-five thou-“

“Now, Mrs Phelan, don’t excite yourself. If I weren’t pre pared to-“

“Telephone, Mrs Phelan.” A maid stood in the doorway.

“Excuse me,” said Mrs Phelan. “Oh, dear!”

“Mrs Phelan,” said a deep mellifluous voice on the wire, “this is Swami Yogadevi.”

“Oh-oh, Swami!” The old lady sighed with relief. “Oh, I am so glad to hear from you!”

“Dear Mrs Phelan, you are in trouble. I know. I could feel the disturbance in your aura. That was why I called.”

“Oh, Swami! If you only knew … I-it’s my mining stock, Swami. The stock you said I should buy, remember? And now-
“He wants to buy it back from you. Yes.”

“He … does … ? Oh, then it’s all right…”

“Sell, Mrs Phelan. But for a profit, of course.”

“But how much should I-“

“Not a penny less than seventy thousand, Mrs Phelan. No, not a penny less. Peace be with you. Your star is in the ascend ant. You will not say that I have talked to you, naturally. Good-by.”

When Mr Melville Rochborne heard the price, he barely escaped being the first recorded case of human spontaneous combustion.

“But, Mrs Phelan … I’ve just told you. The stock is no- well, it’s been misrepresented. It’s not really worth the price you paid me. I thought if I gave you your money back …”

“The stars,” said Mrs Phelan raptly, “control my business dealings. I am asking seventy thousand for the stock.”

“Oh, sure, the stars.” Mr Rochborne thought rapidly. “May I use your telephone?”

He dialed a certain unlisted number for nearly five minutes, with the same negative results that had rewarded him even before he called at Mrs Phelan’s house. At the end of that time he returned, slightly frantic and flushed of face.

“Mrs Phelan,” he said, “we can discuss this, I know. Suppose we say fifty-five thousand.”

“Seventy, Mr Rochborne,” said Mrs Phelan.

“Sixty-two fifty,” cozened Rochborne, in pleading tones.

“Seventy,” repeated the implacable old lady.

Mr Rochborne thought fleetingly of the mayhem he was going to perform upon the luckless frame of Reuben Innowitz when he caught him.

“Very well,” he groaned. “I’ll write you a check.”

“My swami told me all deals should be in cash,” said Mrs Phelan brightly. “I’ll get the stock and go with you to the bank.”

An hour later, minus practically his entire bank roll but grimly triumphant, with the stock of the Lucky Nugget mine in his pocket, Mr Melville Rochborne met Mr Reuben Innowitz on the doorstep of the apartment house on Russian Hill, and finally achieved a much-needed self-expression.

“You stupid worthless jerk!” he exploded. “What’s the idea of being out all day-and on a day like this? You just cost us twenty-five grand!”

“Listen,” shrilled the prophet, “who’s calling who a jerk! What did you do about that mine?”

“I got it back, of course,” Rochborne told him short-windedly. “Even though the old bag took me for twenty-five Gs more than she put into it-just because you weren’t around to cool her down. But I didn’t dare take a chance on waiting. There were some old-time prospectors around, and if any of them recognized the carnotite-“

“The what?” Innowitz said.

“Carnotite-that’s what uranium comes from. The Lucky Nugget is full of it. You know what that’s worth today. If any of those miners spotted it and the story was in the papers tomorrow morning, you couldn’t buy that stock for a million dollars. … It was the Saint, of course,” Mr Rochborne explained, becoming even more incoherent, “and he was trying to put over the most amateurish job of mine-salting I ever saw; but when he reads about this-“

The swami was staring at him in a most unspiritual way.

“Just a minute, Mel,” he said. “Are you drunk, or what? First you send me a wire and tell me to meet you at the airport. I watch all the planes come in until my ears are buzzing. Then you send me another wire there about some new buyer for the Lucky Nugget, and tell me to phone the Phelan dame and tell her to hold out for seventy grand-“

A horrible presentiment crawled over Mr Rochborne.

“What are you talking about?” he asked weakly. “I never sent you-“

“I’ve got ‘em right here in my pocket.” His colleague’s voice was harsh, edged with suspicion.

“Ohmigod,” breathed Mr Melville Rochborne. “He couldn’t have salted it twice … he couldn’t have …”