“Not
that silly.”
“Perhaps
he was quite sure what had happened, and didn’t
want to give himself
away.”
“With
me sitting beside him ? If he’d even thought he’d
lost something
valuable, it wouldn’t have been quite so easy
for me to convince him
that I wasn’t the warrior with the
gaspipe. He could have arrested me
himself and searched
me on the spot without necessarily giving
anything away.”
The girl
shrugged despairingly.
“All
right. So you think of something.”
The Saint
lighted a cigarette.
“I
suppose I’m barmy, but there’s only one thing I can
think of. Claud
Eustace didn’t have the foggiest idea what
was in the packet. He
had a pain in his tum-tum, and he just
bought it for medicine
on the way home. It was meant to be
handed to someone else, and the
fellow in the shop got mixed
up. As soon as Teal’s gone out with it, the
right man comes
in, and there is a good deal of commotion. Somebody
realizes
what’s happened, and goes dashing after Teal to get
the packet back. He
bends his blunt instrument over Teal’s head, and is just about to frisk him
when I arrive and spoil
everything, and he has to lam. I take Teal
home, and Teal
has something else to think about besides his tummy-ache,
so he forgets all about his Miracle Tea, and I win it. And is
it
something to win!”
The Saint’s
eyes were kindling with an impish excitement that had no direct connection with
the windfall that had just
dropped into his lap. Patricia did not need
him to say any
more to tell her what was going on in his mind. To the
Saint,
any puzzle was a potential adventure; and the Saint on the trail of
adventure was a man transformed, a dynamic focus
of ageless and
superhuman forces against which no ordinary
mortal could argue.
She had known him so well for so many
years, had known so long that he was
beyond her power to
change, even if she had wished to change him.
She said
slowly: “But what is the racket?”
“That
would be worth knowing,” he said; and he had no
need to say that he
intended to know. He leaned back
ecstatically. “But just think of it,
darling I If we could only
see the uproar and agitation that must be
going on at this
minute in the place where this tea came from …”
As a matter
of record, the quality of the uproar and the
agitation in the shop
where Mr Teal had made his purchase
would not have disappointed him at all;
although in fact it
had preceded this conversation by some time.
Mr Henry
Osbett, registered proprietor of the drug store
at 909 Victoria
Street which was also the registered premises
of the Miracle Tea
Company, was normally a man of quite
distinguished and even haughty aspect,
being not only tall and erect, but also equipped with a pair of long and grace
fully
curved moustaches which stuck out on either side of
his face like the
wings of a soaring gull, which gave him a
rather old-fashioned
military air in spite of his horn-rimmed
glasses. Under the
stress of emotion, however, his dignity
was visibly frayed.
He listened to his shifty-eyed assistant’s
explanations with
fuming impatience.
“How
was I to know?” the young man was protesting.
“He came at
exactly the right time, and I’ve never seen Nancock before. I didn’t mean to
give him the packet without the password, but he snatched it right out of my
hand
and rushed off.”
“Excuses!”
snarled the chemist, absent-mindedly grab
bing handfuls of his
whiskers and tying them in knots.“Why
if you’d even known
who he was——
”
“I
didn’t know—not until Nancock told me. How could
I know?”
“At
least you could have got the package back.”
The other
swallowed.
“I’d
only have got myself caught,” he said sullenly.
“That chap who
jumped out of the car was twice my size.
He’d’ve killed
me!”
Mr Osbett
stopped maltreating his moustache and looked
at him for a long
moment in curiously contrasting immo
bility.
“That
might have saved someone else the trouble,” he
said; and the tone in
which he said it made the young man’s
face turn grey.
Osbett’s
cold stare lasted for a moment longer: and then
he took a fresh grip
on his whiskers and turned and scuttled
through to the back
of the shop. One might almost have thought that he had gone off in the full
flush of enthusiasm
to fetch an axe.
Beyond the
dispensing room there was a dark staircase.
As he mounted the
stairs his gait and carriage changed in
subtle ways until it was as if a different
man had entered his
entered his clothes. On
the upper landing his movements
were
measured and deliberate. He opened a door and went into a rather shabby and
nondescript room which served as
his
private office. There were two or three old-fashioned
filing cabinets, a littered desk with the polish
worn off at the
edges, a dingy carpet,
and a couple of junkstore chairs. Mr Osbett sat down at the desk and opened a
packet of cheap
cigarettes.
He was a
very worried man, and with good reason: but he
no longer looked
flustered. He had, at that moment, a very cold-blooded idea of his position. He
was convinced that Teal’s getaway with the packet of Miracle Tea had been
neither
premeditated nor intentional—otherwise there would
have been further
developments before this. It had simply
been one of those fantastic accidents
which lie in wait for the
most careful
conspiracies. That was a certain consolation;
but not much. As soon as the contents of the packet were
opened there would be questions to answer; and
while it was quite certain that nothing criminal could be proved from any
answers he cared to give, it would still make him
the object
of an amount of suspicious attention which might easily lead
to disaster later. There remained the chance that
Teal might
not decide to actually take
a dose of Miracle Tea for some hours yet, and it was a chance that had to be
seized quickly.
After another
moment’s intensive consideration, Mr
Osbett
picked up the telephone.
IV
S
IMON
T
EMPLAR
had been
out and come in again after a
visit to the nearest chemist. Now he was
industriously
stirring
an interesting mixture in a large basin borrowed from
the kitchen. Patricia Holm sat in an armchair and watched
him despairingly.
“Did
you ever hear a proverb about little things pleasing
little minds ?”
she said.
Unabashed,
the Saint put down his spoon and admired his
handiwork. To any but
the most minute examination, it
looked exactly like a high-grade small-leaf
tea. And some of
it was. The other ingredients were hardly less ordinary,
except in
that particular combination.
“Did
you ever hear another proverb about a prophet in
his own country
?” he answered. “If you had a little more reverence for my mind,
you’d see that it was nearly double its normal size. Don’t you get the idea
?”
“Not
yet.”
“This
is what I originally meant to do. Maybe it wasn’t such
a huge idea then;
although if I could get enough little ideas
that handed me
fifteen hundred quid a time I wouldn’t worry
so much about passing up the big stuff.
But still that was just
good clean fun. Now
it’s more than that. If I’m right, and
Teal
still doesn’t know what he had in his pocket this after
noon, we don’t want him to even start thinking
about it.
Therefore I just want to
return him his Miracle Tea, and I’ll
be
sure he won’t give it another thought. But I never had any Miracle Tea.
Therefore I’ve got to concoct a passable substitute. I don’t know the original
formula; but if this
recipe doesn’t
live up to the name I’ll drink a gallon of it.”
“Of
course,” she said, “you couldn’t just go out and buy
another
packet to give him.”
Simon gazed
at her in stunned admiration.
“Could
you believe that I never thought of that ?”
“No,”
said Patricia.
“Maybe
your right,” said the Saint ruefully.
He gave
the basin another stir, and shrugged.
“Anyway,”
he said, “it’d be a pity to waste all this work,
and the chance of a lifetime as
well.”
He sat
down at the table and cheerfully proceeded to pack his own remarkable version
of Miracle Tea into the original
carton. Having stuffed it full, he replaced
the seals and wrappings with as much care as he had removed them; and when he
had finished there was not a trace to show that the package had ever been
tampered with.
“What
will you do if he dies ?” asked the girl.
“Send a wreath of tea
roses to his funeral,” said the Saint.
He
put down the completed packet after he had inspected it
closely from every angle, and moved himself over
to a more
comfortable lounging site on
the settee. His eyes were alert
and hot with a gathering zest of
devilment. “Now we go into
the second
half of this brilliant conspiracy.”
“What
does that mean ?”
“Finding
out where Claud Eustace buys fifteen hundred quid for half a dollar. Just
think, sweetheart—we can go
shopping once a week and keep ourselves in
caviar without
ever doing another stroke of work!”
He reached
for the telephone and set it on his lap while he dialled Teal’s private number
with a swift and dancing fore
finger. The telephone, he knew, was beside Teal’s
bed; and
the promptness with which his ring was answered
established
the detective’s location with quite miraculous certainty.
“I
hope,” said the Saint, with instantaneous politeness, “that I haven’t
interrupted you in the middle of any import
ant business,
Claud.”
The
receiver did not actually explode in his ear. It was a
soundly constructed
instrument, designed to resist spontane
ous detonation. It
did, however, appear to feel some strain in reproducing the cracked-foghorn
cadence in which the
answering voice said: “Who’s that?”
“And how,” said the
Saint, “is the little tum-tum tonight ?”
Mr Teal
did not repeat his question. He had no need to. There was only one voice in the
whole world which was
capable of inquiring after his stomach with
the exact inflec
tion which was required to make that hypersensitive organ
curl up
into tight knots that sent red and yellow flashes
squirting across his
eyeballs.
Mr Teal
did not groan aloud; but a minute organic groan swept through him like a cramp
from his fingertips to his
toes.
It is true
that he was in bed, and it is also true that he had been interrupted in the
middle of some important business;
but that important business had been
simply and exclusively
concerned with trying to drown his
multitudinous woes in
sleep. For a man in the full bloom of health
to be smitten
over the knob with a blunt instrument is usually a
somewhat
trying experience; but for a man in Mr Teal’s dyspeptic
condition
to be thus beaned is ultimate disaster. Mr Teal
now had two fearful
pains rivalling for his attention, which
he had been trying to
give to neither. The only way of evad
ing this responsibility which he had been able to think of
had
been to go to bed and go to sleep, which
is what he had set out to do as soon as the Saint had left him at his door; but
sleep had steadfastly eluded him
until barely five minutes before the telephone bell had blared its recall to
conscious
suffering into his anguished ear. And when he became aware
that the emotions which he had been caused by that
recall
had been wrung out of him for
no better object than to
answer some
Saintly badinage about his abdomen, his throat
dosed up so that it was an effort for him to breathe.