Simon Templar propped one well-shod foot on the tarnished brass rail of the Bonanza City Hotel bar, and idly speculated on the assortment of footgear which had probably graced this brazen cylinder in its time — prospectors’ alkali-caked boots, miners’ hobnails, scouts’ buckskins, cowhands’ high heels... and now his own dully gleaming cordovan, resting there for a long cool one to break the baking monotony of the miles of steaming asphalt which had San Francisco as their goal.
But it was quite certain that none of the boots which in diverse decades had parked themselves on that time-mellowed prop had ever carried a more picturesque outlaw, even though there was no skull and crossbones on his softly battered hat, and no pearl-handled six-shooters clung to his thighs. For Simon Templar had made a new business out of buccaneering, and hardly one of the lawbreakers and law-enforcers who knew him better under his sobriquet of the Saint could have given a valid reason why the source of so much trouble should ever have acquired such a name. The Saint himself would have found that just as hard to answer: in his own estimation he was almost as good as his name, and he would have maintained at the stake that most of the things that happened to him were not of his inviting. The one remarkable thing was how regular they conspired to invite him.
Which was what started to happen again at that precise moment, although as it began he was still far from realizing where it might go.
He was examining the mirrored reflections of sundry characters draped along the mahogany rim (which still boasted the autograph of a Prince of Wales under a screwed-down glass plate) and wondering if any of them inhabited the paintless houses outside, when he felt a touch on his arm.
“Would it be worth a drink t’see the Marvel of the Age, stranger?”
An anticipatory hush seemed to settle gradually on the small dark room. Simon could see in the mirror that each of the characters who decorated the perimeter of the horseshoe stiffened a little as the reedy voice broke the quiet. Brown hands tensed a little around their glasses, and a covert wink was exchanged between the unmistakable cognoscenti.
The Saint turned to look down into a saddle-tanned seamed face studded with mild blue eyes and topped by this gray hair. The blue jeans were faded, so was the khaki shirt, and the red necktie ran through a carven bone clasp. The look in the blue eyes said that their owner expected an order to get the hell from underfoot — or at best the polite brush-off which was already on Simon Templar’s lips.
And then, almost as the words were forming, the mind’s eye of the Saint visualized a long succession of such brush-offs and he reflected on how small a price was the cost of a drink in return for gratitude in the mild eyes of a lonely old character.
“I don’t know the going rate on marvels in these degenerate times,” said the Saint gently, “but one drink sounds fair enough.”
“Double?” spoke the old-timer hopefully.
The bartender halted the bottle in mid-flight and again the Saint felt a tensing among the habitués along the brass rail.
“Double,” Simon agreed, and the bartender relaxed as if a great decision had been reached, and finished pouring the drink.
The little man lifted a battered canvas grip and placed it tenderly on the bar. He reached for the drink and lifted it toward his lips. Then he set the drink back on the bar and drew himself up to a dignified five feet five.
“Beggin’ your parding, mister — James Aloysius McDill, an’ your servant.”
“Simon Templar, and yours, sir,” the Saint said gravely.
He lifted his own drink and they clinked glasses in solemn ritual, after which James Aloysius McDill demonstrated just how quickly a double bourbon can slide down a human throat. Then he opened his shabby bag, and took out an oblong box of lovingly polished wood.
It was very much like a small table-model radio. A pair of broad-faced dials on its upper surface sported impressive indicator needles. There was a stirrup handle at either end of the box and a sort of sliding scale on top.
“Nice-lookin’ job, ain’t she?” the little man appealed to the Saint.
“Mighty pretty,” responded the Saint, gazing at it as intelligently as he would have surveyed a cyclotron.
The little man beamed. He spoke diffidently to the bartender.
“Got a silver dollar, Frank?”
The bartender obliged, with the air of one who has done this before, and the other customers duplicated his ennui. Once the Saint succumbed to the pitch for a double rye, the show was pretty well routined.
J. Aloysius McDill tossed the silver dollar across the room. It landed in the sawdust on the floor with a dull thump.
“Watch,” he said.
He turned a switch, made some adjustments, and grasped the handles on the varnished box, which thereupon emitted a low hymenopterous humming, and advanced upon the dollar like a hunter stalking skittish game. As he neared the coin, the humming began to keen up the scale. He stood still, and the sound held steady; again toward the dollar and the wail of the box slid up and up until, held directly above the coin, it gave forth the whine of a band saw eating into a pine knot.
The Saint walked over and inspected the setup. He picked up the dollar and tossed it back to the bartender.
“Let’s see what it does about this change in my pocket,” he said, slapping his trouser leg.
Mr McDill moved the device over the indicated area, but the humming remained at a low murmur. He ceased his efforts and grinned.
“You ain’t got any change in your pocket, mister.”
Grinning in turn, the Saint pulled out the pocket. It was empty.
“Can’t fool the Doodlebug,” said McDill complacently. “See” — he held the box for the Saint to look at — “it works the same way for any other kind o’ metal.”
The Saint duly noted the markings etched along the sliding scale on top. He moved the indicator to “Gold,” and the Doodlebug, which had been humming like a happy bee, suddenly whined like an angry mosquito. The Saint jerked back his left wrist with the gold watch on it, and the machine dropped again to a gentle hum. McDill set it on the bar, and it fell completely silent.
“Ain’t she a beauty?” the little man demanded.
“Lovely,” Simon agreed. “Just what you need any time you drop a silver dollar.”
“She’s good for more than that,” said McDill. “She’ll find the stuff they make dollars out of. That’s why she’s so beautiful. Takes the guesswork out of prospectin’.”
“Aw, yes,” Simon said. “Have you tested her in the field yet, Mr McDill?”
A rattle of laughter cackled across the barroom. It was as though a whiplash had been laid across the face of the little man; he flinched.
“Ask him,” drawled one of the audience, “why his dingus ain’t located no claims yet, if it’s so good.”
McDill faced the speaker, his chin high.
“Jest ain’t happened to look in the right places, that’s all,” he said stoutly, but there was a quaver in his voice. He turned to Simon. “You’ve seen her, mister. You’ve seen what she can do. All I need’s a grubstake and a little equipment. If you was, maybe, interested in minin’, we c’d be pardners.”
The Saint saw the general merriment waxing along the bar again, and had one of his ready quixotic impulses.
“Well, Mr McDill,” he said in a loud clear voice, “mining’s a little out of my own line, but I have a friend I might be able to interest. I’m certainly impressed by your demonstration. Here’s my San Francisco address.” He scribbled on a card and handed it to James Aloysius McDill, then he dug into another pocket. “And here’s fifty dollars for a week’s option on your gadget.”
He was aware of glasses being set down all along the bar, of incredulous eyes appraising his well-cut gabardines and evaluating, but it was mostly McDill’s reaction that he cared about.
The blue eyes in the seamed old face flamed with happiness. They could not resist a single triumphant glance at the hangers-on, then the little man’s hand stuck straight out.
“Put ’er there, Mr Templar,” he said, with a ring in his voice. “I’ll be right here, any time your pardner wants me. Bonanza City Hotel.”
Simon shook the thin callused hand, and beckoned the bartender. No longer bored, a sycophant stepped up with alacrity.
“Yes, sir!”
“The same, for Mr McDill and myself,” ordered the Saint. “Double,” he added.
He drove away from the Bonanza City Hotel through the light bright California sunshine bearing within him a warmth entirely unconnected with alcoholic potations, and pondering on the varied expressions of man’s unending search for riches. Perhaps that was what had moved him to dawdle on back roads and in odd corners of the old gold-rush country for a full three days on his way to San Francisco. When the mood was on him, the Saint enjoyed the exploration of seemingly useless, if fascinating, trivia — in this instance, the dreaming gold camps and ghost towns of the forty-niners.
It was a penchant which sometimes paid surprising dividends, so that the Saint had come to have an almost superstitious faith in his infallible destiny, but in this case the connection came even faster and more unexpectedly than usual.
He had been installed in rooms in the Fairmont, high on Nob Hill, for the duration of a sleep and a breakfast, when his telephone asserted itself, for the first time since his arrival.
“I’ve called every day since I got your card,” said Larry Phelan, “and I was pretty sure you’d show up within the year. What trouble did you come here to stir up?”
“None at all,” said the Saint virtuously. “I am on a vacation, and I have taken a vow to right no wrong, rescue no young ladies in distress, and acquire no money by fair means or foul, until further notice.”
“That’s fine,” said Phelan. “There’s nothing in your vow about rescuing old ladies in distress, is there?”
“Not so fast,” said the Saint. “Whose old lady is in distress?”
“My old lady, if you must know.”
“Your mother?”
“None other.”
“This,” said the Saint, “is beginning to sound like a Gilbert and Sullivan duet. You can buy me lunch and tell me all about it.”
Larry Phelan was a little shorter than the Coit Tower and much more interesting to know. He had the face of a college sophomore and the mind of the top-drawer mining engineer that he was.
“My mother,” he explained gloomily, over écrevisses au vin blanc, “is in the situation of any elderly lady with an excess of both time and money. Especially money.”
“A rather pleasant situation,” commented the Saint, chewing. “Is there such a thing as too much money?”
“Some people seem to think so,” said Phelan. “Did you ever hear of a guy called Melville Rochborne?”
Simon shook his head.
“It sounds like the sort of phony name that I wouldn’t buy any gold mines from.”
“He sold Mother a gold mine,” Phelan said.
“Any gold in it?”
“I defy anyone to find any gold in this particular mine,” said Phelan sadly. “It’s the old Lucky Nugget. Opened up with a big whoop-de-do in 1906, beautiful vein of quartz, eighteen dollars to the ton; closed in 1907—no more quartz. No one’s made a nickel on it since — even the tailings are worked out. The stock, which is what Mother bought, wouldn’t even serve for wrapping fish.”
“There are laws,” suggested the Saint, “which take care of folks who misrepresent stocks and bonds to other people.”
“That’s the trouble,” said Phelan. “This Rochborne is an extremely smart operator. There’s nothing on record — including Mother’s own testimony — to prove he ever claimed there was any gold in the mine.”
“Didn’t she ask you about it?”
“What would you think? After all,” said Phelan bitterly, “I have only two degrees in engineering and one in mining. Why should anyone, even my own dear mother, consult me on such a topic? Obviously, a crystal ball and a turban put my credentials in the shade. I’ll admit,” he added, in less vehement tones, “I’ve been up to my ears in some very hush-hush stuff lately — uranium sources, if you must know. Top secret.”
“Keep your uranium,” said the Saint. “I don’t like the things they do with it. What is this stuff about crystal balls?”
“My blessed mother,” Phelan said reverently, “has developed an interest in the Occult. In this specific case, a soothsayer from the Mystic East.”
“Tea leaves, eh?” said the Saint. “Lucky numbers and cards and so forth?”
“And signs of the zodiac,” supplemented Phelan. “A swami, no less. The Swami Yogadevi.”
“Sounds like a new cocktail. Where does he come in?”
“The swami,” said Phelan sourly, “is the guy who advised Mom to buy the wretched stock. She’s sort of gotten into a habit of consulting him, I’m afraid. I suppose he makes a couple of passes at his crystal and evokes a genie, or something. Seems to lay Mother and several dozen other respectable old-ladies-about-town in the aisles, anyway.”
Simon cleaned up his plate and lighted a cigarette.
“One gathers, Larry, that Mama has been hornswoggled by a couple of pretty smooth operators. I almost think it’s a new combination.”
“Combination?”
“Of course. It must be. Don’t you see how it works? Your swami spots the suckers who have plenty of moola, and gets their confidence with his mumbo-jumbo. Which isn’t illegal if he doesn’t claim to predict futures. Your Mr Rochborne peddles stocks and makes no claim for them. You can’t prosecute a man for that. Separately, they mightn’t get too far. Working together, they’re terrific... How much,” asked the Saint gently, “did your mother pay for the Lucky Nugget mine?”
“Forty-five thousand smackers,” Phelan admitted glumly.
The Saint whistled. He proceeded to order coffee and then sank into a lethargy which might or might not have denoted deep thought.
“What are you looking stupid about?” inquired Larry Phelan after five minutes.
“About the vacation I was going to have until you tripped into my life,” said Simon wryly. “However,” he added thoughtfully, “if Comrade Rochborne has forty-five G’s of Mama’s, he might have several of someone else’s Gs, too. Do you know anything else about him?”
“He has an address — an insurance office — where he picks up his mail. The people there know nothing about him. On a hunch I checked the city business-license records. It seems he was licensed as an assayer from 1930 to 1939. That fits into your picture.”
“I’ll keep thinking about it,” said the Saint.
He did exactly that, although for two days there was nothing to show for his thinking. But to the Saint a hiatus like that meant nothing. He knew better than anyone that those coups of his which seemed most spontaneous and effortless were usually the ones into which the hardest work had gone; that the machinery of his best buccaneering raids was labored and polished as devotedly as any master playwright’s plot structure. Even then there had to be an initial spark of inspiration to start the wheels turning, and in this instance the requisite spark eluded him tantalizingly for a full forty-eight hours.
When it came, it was nothing that he had even vaguely expected. It took the form of a chunky oblong package, crudely wrapped, which a bellboy delivered to his room. Simon scanned the label and found a postmark, and had a rather saddening premonition.
There was a note enclosed, printed in sprawling capitals on a sheet of blue-lined note paper.
Dere Mr. Templar, Ole Jimmy Mc Dill Had One To Meny Double Wiskeys An Cash In His Chips Las Nite His Last Rekest Was Send You Ths Here Dingus Account Of You Are A Reel Good Feller An He Like You A Lot Same Is Inclose. Yrs Truly The Boys Bonanza City
The Saint lifted the glass in his right hand.
“Jimmy McDill,” he said softly, “may there be double bourbons and unlimited credit wherever you are.”
He was happily playing with the contraption when Larry Phelan arrived to pick him up for dinner that night, and the engineer gazed at him in somewhat condescending puzzlement.
“What the hell are you doing with a Doodlebug, Saint?” he demanded, and Simon was hardly less surprised.
“How the hell did you know what it was?”
“The lunatic fringes of the business were stiff with these things during the Depression. I’ve seen ’em in all sizes and shapes. Trouble is, none of ’em are worth anything.”
“What do you mean, not worth anything?” Simon objected. “I’ll bet I can pick up a silver dollar at ten feet with this gadget.”
“I’ll bet you can too,” Phelan said. “I’ve seen it done, and by queerer-looking numbers than this one. I’ve seen ’em with loop aerials, knee action, and floating power.”
Simon produced a silver cartwheel and threw it on the carpet. Grasping the stirrup handles, he lifted the box, and the same humming sound he had heard in the Bonanza City bar filled the room.
“Listen to the hum,” he said.
“They all hum,” said Larry Phelan.
Simon made sure the scale pointer indicated “Silver,” and advanced upon the dollar. Just as it had done for James Aloysius McDill, the humming keened up the scale until, as the Saint stood over the dollar, a malignant whining came from between his hands. He turned to Phelan triumphantly.
“This one works,” he said.
“Sure,” rejoined Phelan. “Now let’s see how well it works.”
He picked up a San Francisco telephone directory and the classified directory and piled them on top of the dollar, and the humming stopped abruptly.
“They’re all the same,” Phelan said sympathetically. “It seems to be possible to bounce some kind of oscillation off different metals, and make it selective according to their atomic structure, but the beam hardly has any penetration. Your lode would have to be practically on the surface, where you could see it anyhow, before a thing like this would detect it at all. I hope you didn’t pay much for it.”
“Only fifty bucks and a couple of drinks, and it was worth that,” said the Saint, and the thought deepened in his blue eyes. “In fact, I think this is just what we needed to square accounts with Brother Rochborne and your swami.”
The Swami Yogadevi had never seen a Doodlebug, but he had his own effective methods of ascertaining the presence of precious metals. His techniques depended for their success upon certain paraphernalia unknown to electronics, such as a large spherical chunk of genuine optical glass; celestial charts populated by crabs, bulls, goats, virgins, and other mythological creatures; and many yards of expensive drapery embroidered with esoteric symbols, the whole enshrined in a gloomy and expensive apartment on Russian Hill.
There was nothing about the place to suggest that the Swami Yogadevi had once been Reuben Innowitz, known to the carnival circuit as Ah Pasha, the Mighty Mentalist. Mr Innowitz’s wants had been simple in those days, expressed mainly in terms of tall bottles and tall blondes, and they were much the same now, under his plush exterior. There were times, the Swami Yogadevi told himself, when he wished he hadn’t met Melville Rochborne, profitable though the partnership had turned out to be. For instance, there was this Professor Tattersall business.
“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 turnout 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 Doodlebugs. 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 reconnoitred 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, perhaps, 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 it 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, 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 pleasant 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 prepared 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 ascendant. You will not say that I have talked to you, naturally. Good-bye.”
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 G’s 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...”
It was Simon Templar’s perpetual regret that he was seldom able to overhear these conversations. But perhaps that would have made his life too perfect to be borne.