Saint Intervenes (26 page)

Walter was
the first to come out of it. He opened his
aching throat and
brought forth trembling speech.

“Penwick,”
he said, “whatever that snivelling squirt has
given you, I’ll pay
twice as much.”

“I’ll
pay three times that,” said Willie feverishly. “Four
times—five
times—I’ll give you twenty per cent of anything I
get out of the estate—”

“Twenty-five
per cent,” Walter shrieked wildly. “Twenty-
seven and a half——
”

The Saint
raised his hand.

“One
minute, boys,” he murmured. “Hadn’t you better
hear the
terms of the will first?”

“I
know them,” barked Walter.

“So do
I,” bellowed Willie. “Thirty per cent ——
”

The Saint
smiled. He took a large sealed envelope from
his breast pocket, and
opened it.

“I may
have misled you,” he said, and held up the docu
ment for them to
read.

They
crowded closer, breathing stertorously, and read:

I, Joseph Kinsall, hereby give and bequeath everything
of which I
die possessed, without exception, to the
Royal London Hospital,
believing that it will be better spent than it would have been by my two
worthless sons.

It was in
the late Sir Joseph Kinsall’s own hand; and it
was properly signed,
sealed, and witnessed.

Simon
folded it up and put it carefully away again; and
Willie looked at
Walter, and Walter looked at Willie. For
the first time in
their lives they found themselves absolutely
and unanimously in
tune. Their two minds had but a single
thought. They drew
deep breaths, and turned.
…

It was
unfortunate that neither of them was very athletic. Simon Templar was; and he
had promised Mr. Penwick that the will should come to no harm.

XI

The Tall Timber

The queer
things that have led Simon Templar into the paths of boodle would in themselves
form a sizable volume of
curiosities; but in the Saint’s own opinion
none of these
strange starting-points could ever compare, in sheer
intrinsic
uniqueness, with the moustache of Mr. Sumner Journ.

Simon
Templar’s relations with Chief Inspector Teal were
not always
unpleasant. On that morning he had met Mr. Teal
in Piccadilly Circus
and insisted on standing him lunch; and
both of them had
enjoyed the meal.

“And
yet you’ll probably be trying to arrest me again next
week,” said the
Saint.

“I
shouldn’t be surprised,” said Mr. Teal heavily.

They stood
in the doorway of Arthur’s, preparing to sepa
rate; and Simon was
idly scanning the street when the
moustache of Mr. Sumner Journ hove into
view.

Let it be
said at once that it was no ordinarily overgrown
moustache, attracting
attention by nothing but its mere vulgar
size. It was, in fact,
the reverse. From a slight distance no
moustache was visible
at all; and the Saint was looking at
Mr. Journ simply by accident, as a man
standing in the street
will sometimes absent-mindedly follow the
movements of
another. As Mr. Journ drew nearer, the moustache was
still
imperceptible; but there appeared to be a slight shadow on
his upper
lip, as if it were disfigured by a small mole. And
it was not until he
was passing a yard away that the really
exquisite singularity
of the growth dawned upon Simon
Templar’s mind.

On Mr.
Sumner Journ’s upper lip, approximately fourteen
hairs had been allowed
to grow, so close together that the area they occupied could scarcely have been
larger than a
shirt button. These fourteen hairs had been carefully
parted
in the middle; and each little clique of seven had been care
fully waxed
and twisted together so that they stuck out about
half an inch from
their patron’s face like the horns of a
snail. In the whole
of Simon Templar’s life, which had en
countered a perhaps unusual variety of
developments of facial
hair, ranging from the handlebar
protuberances of the South-
shire Insurance Company’s private detective to
the fine walrus
effect sported by a Miss Gertrude Tinwiddle who contributed
the nature notes in the
Daily Gazette,
he had never seen any
example of hair culture in which such passionate devotion to
detail, such a concentrated
ecstasy of miniaturism, such an
unostentatious
climax of originality, had simultaneously ar
rived at concrete consummation.

Thus did
the moustache of Mr. Journ enter the Saint’s
horizon and pass on,
accompanied by Mr. Journ, who looked
at them rather closely as he went by;
and lest any suspicious
reader should be starting to get ideas into
his head, the
historian desires to explain at once that this moustache
has
nothing more to do with the story, and has been described
at such
length solely on account of its own remarkable fea
tures
qua
face-hair.
But, as we claimed at the beginning, it is
an immutable fact that
if it had not been for this phenom
enal decoration the Saint would hardly
have noticed Mr.
Journ at all, and would thereby have been many thousands
of pounds poorer. For, shorn of that incomparable appen
dage, Mr.
Journ was quite an ordinary-looking business man,
thin, dark,
hatchet-faced, well and quietly dressed; and al
though he was
noticeably hard about the eyes and mouth,
there was really
nothing else about him which would have caused the Saint to stare fascinatedly
after him and ejaculate in a hushed voice: “Well, I am a piebald pelican
balancing
rubber balls on my beak!”

Wherefore
Mr. Teal would have had no reason to turn his
somnolent gaze back
to the Saint with a certain dour and
puzzled humour, and to say: “I
should have thought he was
a fellow you’d be sure to know.”

“Never
set eyes on him in my life,” said the Saint. “Do
you know
who he is?”

“His
name’s Sumner Journ,” Mr. Teal said reluctantly,
after a slight pause.

Simon
shook his head.

“Even
that doesn’t ring a bell,” he said. “What does he
do? No
bloke who cultivated a nose-tickler like that could do
anything
ordinary.”

“Sumner
Journ doesn’t,” stated the detective flatly.

He seemed
to have realised that he had said too much al
ready; and it was
impossible to draw any further information
from him. He took his
leave rather abruptly, and Simon
gazed after his plump departing back with a
tiny frown. The
only plausible explanation of Teal’s sudden taciturnity
was
that Mr. Journ was engaged in some unlawful or nearly unlawful activities—Teal
had had enough trouble with the vic
tims whom the Saint found for himself,
without conceiving
any ambition to press fresh material into his hands. But
if Chief Inspector Teal did not want the Saint to know more
about Mr.
Sumner Journ, that was sufficient reason for the
Saint to become
abnormally inquisitive; and as a matter of fact, his investigations had not
proceeded very far when a
minor coincidence brought them up to date
without further
effort.

“This
might interest you,” said Monty Hayward one eve
ning.

“This”
was a very tastefully prepared booklet, on the cover
of which was printed:
“B
RAZILIAN
T
IMBER
B
ONDS:
A Gold
Mine for
the Small Investor.”
Simon took it and glanced
at it
casually; and then he saw something on the first page
of the pamphlet which
brought him to attention with a de
lighted start:

Managing Director:

SUMNER JOURN Esq.,
Associate of the Institute of
Timber
Planters, Fellow of the International Association of Wood Pulp Producers; formerly
Chairman of South American Mineralogical Investments, Ltd., etc.,
etc.

“How
did you get hold of this, Monty?” he asked.

“A
young fellow in the office gave it to me,” said Monty.
“Apparently
he was trying to make a bit of money on the
side by selling these
bonds; but lots of people seem to have
heard about ‘em. I
pinched the book, and told him not be an
ass because he’d
probably find himself in clink with the
organisers when it
blew up; but I thought you might like to have a look at it.”

“I
would,” said the Saint thoughtfully, and opened an
other
bottle of beer.

He read the booklet through at
his leisure, later, and felt
tempted to
send Monty Hayward a complimentary case of
Carlsberg on the strength of it; for the glow of contentment
and
goodwill towards men which spreads over the rabid
entomologist who digs a new kind of beetle out of a log is
as the frosts of Siberia to the glow which warms
the heart of the professional buccaneer who uncovers a new swindle.

For the
stock-in-trade of Mr. Sumner Journ was Trees.

It may be true, as the poet
bleats, that Only God Can Make
A Tree; but
it is also true that only a man capable of grow
ing such a moustache as lurked coyly beneath the sheltering
schnozzola of Mr. Sumner Journ could have invented
such
an enticing method of making
God’s creation pay gigantic
dividends.

The
exposition started off with a picture of some small
particles of matter
collected in a teacup; and it was explained
that these were the
seeds of
pinus palustris,
or the long-
leaved pine.
“Obviously,” said the writer, “even a child must
know that
these can only be worth a matter of pennies.”
There followed an
artistic photograph of some full-grown
pines rearing towards
the sky. “Just as obviously,” said the
writer, “everyone
must see that these trees must have
some
value worth
mentioning; probably a value that would run
into pounds.”
The actual value, it was explained, did indeed
run into pounds; in
fact, the value of the trees illustrated
would be £3 or more.
Furthermore, declared the writer,
whereas in Florida these trees took
45 years to reach maturity,
in the exceptional climate of the Brazilian
mountains they at
tained their full growth in about 10 years. The one great
drain on
timber profits hitherto had been the cost of trans
port; but this the Brazilian Timber
Company had triumphant
ly eliminated by
purchasing their ground along the banks of
the Parana River (inset photograph of large river) which by
the force of its current would convey all logs
thrown into it
to the coast at no
cost at all.

Investors
were accordingly implored, in their own inter
ests, to gather
together at least £30 and purchase with it a
Brazilian Timber Bond—which could be
arranged, if neces
sary, by installments. On
buying this bond, they would be
come
the virtual owners of an acre of ground in this terri
tory, and the seeds of trees would be planted in it
without further charge. It was asserted that twenty-five trees could
easily grow on this acre, which when cut down at
maturity
would provide 100 cords of
wood. Taking the price of wood
at £3
a cord, it was therefore obvious that in about 10 years’
time this acre
would be worth £300—“truly,” said the pro
spectus, “a golden return on such a modest investment.” The
theme was developed at great length with no little
literary skill, even going so far as to suggest
that on the
figures quoted, the investor who bought one £30 bond every
year for 10 years would in the 11th year commence
to draw
an annuity of £300 per annum
for
ever,
since as soon as the
trees
had been felled in the first acre
it could be planted out again.