Saint Intervenes (38 page)

The chill
wind that was playing tricks with Louie Fallon’s
backbone whistled up
into his head and brought out beads
of cold perspiration on his brow. For
a space of time that
seemed to him like three or four years, he
experienced all
the sensations of a man who has sold somebody a pup and
seen it
turn out into a pedigree prizewinner. The memory
of all the hours of
time, all the pounds of hard-earned money, and all the tormenting day-dreams,
which he had spent on his
own futile experiments, flooded back into his
mind in an in
terval of exquisite anguish that made him feel faintly
sick.
If he had never believed any of the stories he told about
his hard
luck before, he believed them all now, and more
also. The smile of
happy vindication on the Saint’s face was
in itself an insult
that made Louie’s blood ferment in his
veins. He felt
exactly as if he had been run over by a steam
roller and then
invited to admire his own remarkable flatness.

“Here,
wait a minute,” he said hoarsely. “That isn’t pos
sible!”

“Anyway,
it’s happened,” answered the Saint with irrefuta
ble logic.

Louie
swallowed, and picked up one of the stones which
the Saint was
holding. He knew enough about such things
to realise that it was
indubitably an uncut diamond—not quite
so big as the one
which he himself claimed to have made,
but easily worth a
hundred pounds in the ordinary market
nevertheless.

“Try
it again,” he said huskily. “Can you remember ex
actly what
you did last time?”

The Saint
thought he could remember. He tried it again,
while Louie watched
him with his eyes almost popping out of
his head, and his
mouth hungrily half open. He himself fished
in the cooling tank
as soon as the steam had dispersed, and
he found two more
diamonds embedded in the clinker at the
bottom.

Louie
Fallon had nothing to say for a long time. He paced
up and down the small
room, scratching his head, in the
throes of the fastest thinking he had
ever done in his life.
Somehow or other, heaven alone knew how, the
young sap
who was gloating inanely over his prowess had stumbled
accidentally
upon the formula which Mr. Fallon had sought
for half his life in
vain. And the young sap had just paid
over two thousand pounds, and received
in return his portion
of the signed contract which entitled him to
a half-share in
all the proceeds of the invention. By fair means or foul—
preferably
more or less fair, for Mr. Fallon was not by
nature a violent
man—that contract had to be recovered.
There was only one way
to recover it that Mr. Fallon could see; it was a painful way, but with so much
at stake Louie
Fallon was no piker.

Finally he
stopped his pacing,
 
and turned round.

“Look
here,” he said. “This is a tremendous business.”
The wave of
his hand embraced unutterably gigantic issues.
“I won’t try to
explain it all to you, because you’re not a
scientist and you
wouldn’t understand. But it’s—tremendous.
It means——
”

He waved his
hand again. It might have meant anything,
from William Randolph
Hearst advocating a cancellation of
war debts to a telephone subscriber
getting the right number
every time.

“At
any rate it makes a lot of difference to me. I—I don’t
know whether I will go
away after all. A thing like that’s
got to be investigated. You see, I’m a
scientist. If I didn’t
get to the bottom of it all, it’d be on my
conscience. I’d have
it preying on my mind.”

The
pathetic resignation on Mr. Fallon’s countenance spoke
of a mute and
glorious martyrdom to the cause of science
that was almost holy.
He was throwing himself heart and
soul into the job, acting as if his
very life depended on it—
which, in his estimation, it practically did.

“Look
here,” he burst out, taking the bull by the horns,
“will
you go on being a sport? Will you tear up that
agreement we’ve just
signed, and let me engage you as—as— as manager?”

It was here
that the sportiness of Simon Templar fell into
considerable
disrepute. He was quite unreasonably reluctant
to surrender his
share in a fortune for the sake of
science. He failed to see what all the
fuss was about. What,
he wanted to know, was there to prevent Mr.
Fallon continuing his scientific researches under the existing arrange
ment?
Louie, with the sweat streaming down inside his shirt,
ran through a
catalogue of excuses that would have made the
fortune of a
politician.

The Saint
became mercenary. This was a language which
Louie Fallon could
talk, much as he disliked it. He offered to return the money which Simon had
invested. He did, in fact,
actually return the money; and the Saint
wavered. Louie be
came reckless. He was not quite as broke as he had tried
to
tell Mr. Solomon.

“I
could give you five hundred pounds,” he said. “That’s
a quick
profit for you, isn’t it? And you would still have your
salary as
manager.”

“Five
hundred pounds isn’t a lot of money,” said the Saint
callously.

Louie
winced, but he held on. After some further argument, in which he played a
tragically unsuccessful part, a
bonus of fifteen hundred pounds was agreed
on.

“I’ll
go round to the bank and get it for you right away,”
he said.

He did not
go round to the bank, because he had no bank
account; but he went
to see Mr. Solomon, who on such oc
casions served an almost equally
useful purpose. Louie’s credit
was good, and he was able to secure a loan to
make up the
deficiencies in his own purse at a purely nominal fifty
per
cent interest. He hurried back to the flat where he had left
Simon
Templar and stuck the notes into his hand—it was the only time Mr. Fallon had
ever parted gladly with any
sum of money.

“Now I
shall have to get to work,” said Mr. Fallon, in
dicating that he
wished to be alone.

“What
about my contract as manager?” murmured the Saint.

“I’ll
ring up my solicitor and ask him to fix it right
away,” Louie promised him. “Come
round and see me again
tomorrow, and I’ll
have it waiting for you.”

Five
minutes after Simon Templar had left him, he was
tearing back to Mr.
Solomon in a taxi, with the paraphernalia
from his washstand
stacked up on the seat, and his suitcases
beside him.

“I’ve
made my fortune, Sol,” he declared somewhat hys
terically. “All
this thing needs is some proper financing.
Watch me, and I’ll
show you what I can do.”

He set out
to demonstrate what he could do; but something
seemed to have gone
wrong with the formula. He tried
again, with equally unsatisfactory results. He tried three and
four times more, but he produced no diamonds.
Something in
side him turned colder
every time he failed.

“I
tell you, I saw him do it, Sol,” he babbled frantically.
“He
mixed the things up himself, and somehow he hit on
the proportions that
I’ve been lookin’ for all these years.”

“Maybe
he has der diamonds palmed in his hand ven he
puts it in der tin,
Louie,” suggested Mr. Solomon cynically.

Louie sat
with his head in his hands. The quest for
synthetic wealth faded beside another
ambition which was
starting to monopolise
his whole horizon. The only thing he
asked of life at that moment was a
chance to meet the Saint
again—preferably
down a dark alley beside the river, with a
blunt instrument ready to his hand. But London was full of
men who cherished that ambition. It always would
be.

WATCH FOR
THE SIGN

OF THE
SAINT

HE WILL BE BACK