To H. H. GIbson Many years ago I resolved that you were one of the first people I must dedicate a book to. But time slips by, and it's sadly easy to lose touch with someone who lives hundreds of miles away. So this comes very late, but I hope not too late; because even though this may be a bad book, if I hadn't come tinder your guidance many years ago it would probably have been very much worse. The villains in this book are entirely imaginary, and have no relation to any living person.

I

The Ingenuous Colonel

Lieut.-Colonel Sir George Uppingdon, it must be admitted, was not a genuine knight; neither, as a matter of fact, was he a genuine colonel. This is not to say that he thought that sandbags contained the material for mixing trench mortar, or that an observation post was a species of flagpole on which inquisitive brigadiers hung at half-mast; but his military experience was certainly limited to a brief period during the latter days of the war when conscription had gathered him up and set him to the uncongenial task of peeling potatoes at Aldershot.

Apart from that not inglorious interlude of strengthening the stomachs of the marching armies, his career had been far less impressive than the name he passed under seemed to indicate. Pentonville had housed him on one occasion, and he had also taken one short holiday at Maidstone. Nevertheless, although the expensive public school which had taught him his practical arithmetic had long since erased his name from its register of alumni, he had never lost his well-educated and aristocratic bearing, and with the passing of time had added to them a magnificent pair of white moustachios which were almost as valuable to him in his career.

A slight tinge of the old-fashioned conservatism which characterised his style of dress clung equally limpet-like to the processes of his mind.

"These new-fangled stunts are all very well," he said doggedly. "But what happens to them? You work them once, and they receive a great deal of publicity, and then you can never use them again. How many of them will last as long as our tried and proved old friends?"

His companion on that occasion, an equally talented Mr. Sidney Immelbern — whose real name, as it happens, was Sidney Immelbern — regarded him gloomily.

"That's the trouble with you, George," he said. "It's the one thing which has kept you back from real greatness. You can't get it into your head that we've got to move with the times."

"It has also kept me out of a great deal of trouble," said the Colonel sedately. "If I remember rightly, Sid, when you last moved with the times, it was to Wormwood Scrubs."

Mr. Immelbern frowned. There were seasons when he felt that George Uppingdon's gentlemanly bearing had no real foundations of good taste.

"Well," he retorted, "your methods haven't made us millionaires. Here it's nearly two months since we made a click, and we only got eight hundred from that Australian at Brighton."

Mr. Irnmelbern's terse statement being irrefutable, a long and somewhat melancholy silence settled down upon the partnership.

Even by the elastic standards of the world in which they moved, it was an unusual combination. Mr. Sidney Immelbern had none of the Colonel's distinguished style — he was a stocky man with an unrefined and slightly oriental face, who affected check tweeds of more than dashing noisiness and had an appropriate air of smelling faintly of stables. But they had worked excellently together in the past, and only in such rare but human excesses of recrimination as that which has just been recorded did they fail to share a sublime confidence that their team technique would shine undimmed in brilliance through the future, as and when the opportunity arose.

The unfortunate part was that the opportunity did not arise. For close upon eight weeks it had eluded them with a relentlessness which savoured of actual malice. True, there had been an American at the Savoy who had seemed a hopeful proposition, but he had turned out to be one of those curious people who sincerely disapprove of gambling on principle; an equally promising leather merchant from Leicester had been recalled home by an ailing wife a few hours before they would have made their kill. The profession of confidence man requires capital — he must maintain a good appearance, invest lavishly in food and wine, and be able to wait for his profits. It was not surprising that Messrs. Uppingdon and Immelbern should watch the dwindling of their resources with alarm, and at times give way to moments of spleen which in more prosperous days would never have smirched their mutual friendship.

But with almost sadistic glee their opportunity continued to elude them. The lounge of the Palace Royal Hotel, where they sat sipping their expensive drinks, was a scene of life and gaiety; but the spirit of the place was not reflected in their faces. Among the lunch-time cocktail crowd of big business men, young well-groomed men, and all their chosen women, there appeared not one lonely soul with the unmistakable air of a forlorn stranger in the city whom they might tactfully accost, woo from his glum solitude with lunch and friendship, and in due course mulct of a contribution to their exchequer proportionate to his means. Fortune, they felt, had deserted them for ever. Nobody loved them.

"It is," admitted Lieut.-Colonel Uppingdon, breaking the silence, "pretty bloody."

"It is," concurred Mr. Immelbern, and suddenly scowled at him. "What's that?" he added.

Somewhat vaguely, the Colonel was inclining his head. But the remarkable point was that he was not looking at Mr. Immelbern.

"What is what?" he inquired, making sure of his ground.

"What's that you're staring at with that silly look on your face?" said Mr. Immelbern testily.

"That young fellow who just came in," explained the Colonel. "He seemed to know me."

Mr. Immelbern glanced over the room. The only man whom he was able to bring within the limits of his partner's rather unsatisfactory description was just then sitting down at a table by himself a few places away — a lean and somehow dangerous-looking young man with a keen tanned face and very clear blue eyes. Instinctively Mr. Immelbern groped around for his hat.

"D'you mean he's a fellow you swindled once?" he demanded hastily.

Uppingdon shook his head.

"Oh, no. I'm positive about that. Besides, he smiled at me quite pleasantly. But I can't remember him at all."

Mr. Immelbern relaxed slowly. He looked at the young man again with diminished apprehension. And gradually, decisively, a certain simple deduction registered itself in his practised mind.

The young man had money. There was no deception about that. Everything about him pointed unobtrusively but unequivocally towards that one cardinal fact. His clothes, immaculately kept, had the unostentatious seal of Savile Row on every stitch of them. His silk shirt had the cachet of St. James's. His shoes, brightly polished and unspotted by the stains of traffic, could never have been anything but bespoke. He had just given his order to the waiter, and while he waited for it to arrive he was selecting a cigarette from a thin case which to the lay eye might have been silver, but which Mr. Immelbern knew beyond all doubt was platinum.

There are forms of instinct which soar beyond all physical explanations into the clear realms of clairvoyance. The homing pigeon wings its way across sightless space to the old roost. The Arabian camel finds the water-hole, and the pig detects the subterranean truffle. Even thus was the clairvoyance of Mr. Immelbern.

If there was one thing on earth which he could track down it was money. The affinity of the pigeon for its roost, the camel for the water-hole, the pig for the truffle, were as nothing to the affinity of Mr. Immelbern for dough. He was in tune with it. Its subtle emanations floated through the ether and impinged on psychic aerials in his system which operated on a super-heterodyne circuit. And while he looked at the young man who seemed to know Lieut.-Colonel Uppingdon that circuit was oscillating over all its valves. He summarised his conclusions with an explicit economy of verbiage which La Bruyère could not have pruned by a single syllable.

"He's rich," said Mr. Immelbern.

"I wish I could remember where I met him," said the Colonel, frowning over his own train of thought. "I hate to forget a face."

"You doddering old fool!" snarled Mr. Immelbern, smiling at him affectionately. "What do I care about your memory? The point is that he's rich, and he seemed to recognise you. Well, that saves a lot of trouble, doesn't it?"

The Colonel turned towards him and blinked.

"What do you mean?"

"Will you never wake up?" moaned Mr. Immelbern, extending his cigarette-case with every appearance of affability. "Here you've been sitting whining and moping for half an hour because we don't get a chance to make a click, and when a chance does come along you can't see it. What do I care where you met the man? What do I care if you never met him? He nodded to you, and he's sitting two yards away — and you ask me what I mean!"

The Colonel frowned at him for a moment. He was, as we have explained, a born conservative. He never allowed himself to be carried away. He deliberated. He calculated. He explored. He would, but for the ever-present stimulus of Mr. Immelbern, have done as little as any other conservative.

But gradually the frown faded, and a dignified smile took its place.

"There may be something in what you say, Sid," he conceded.

"Go on," ordered Mr. Immelbern crudely. "Hop it. And try to wake your ideas up a bit. If somebody threw a purse into your lap, you'd be asking me what it was."

Lieut.-Colonel Uppingdon gave him an aristocratically withering look, and rose sedately from the table. He went over to where the young man sat and coughed discreetly.

"Excuse me, sir," he said, and the young man looked up from his idle study of the afternoon's runners at Sandown Park. "You must have thought me a trifle rude just now."

"Not at all," said the young man amiably. "I thought you were busy and didn't want to be bothered. How are things these days, George?"

The Colonel suppressed a start. The use of his Christian name implied an intimacy that was almost alarming, but the young man's pleasant features still struck no responsive chord in his memory.

"To tell you the truth," he said, "I'm afraid my eyes are not as good as they were. I didn't recognise you until you had gone by. Dear me! How long is it since I saw you last?"

The young man thought for a moment.

"Was it at Biarritz in 1929?"

"Of course!" exclaimed Uppingdon delightedly — he had never been to Biarritz in his life. "By Gad, how the times does fly! I never thought I should have to ask when I last saw you, my dear—"

He broke off short, and an expression of shocked dismay overspread his face.

"Good Gad!" he blurted. "You'll begin to think there's something the matter with me. Have you ever had a lapse of memory like that? I had your name on the tip of my tongue — I was just going to say it — and it slipped off! Wait — don't help me — didn't it begin with H?"

"I'm afraid not," said the young man pleasantly.

"Not either of your names?" pursued the Colonel hopefully.

"No."

"Then it must have been J."

"No."

"I mean T."

The young man nodded. Uppingdon took heart.

"Let me see. Tom — Thomson — Travers — Terrington—"

The other smiled.

"I'd better save you the trouble. Templar's the name — Simon Templar."

Uppingdon put a hand to his head.

"I knew it!" He was certain that he had never met anyone named Simon Templar. "How stupid of me! My dear chap, I hardly know how to apologise. Damned bad form, not even being able to remember a fellow's name. Look here, you must give me a chance to put it right. What about joining us for a drink? Or are you waiting for somebody?"

Simon Templar shook his head.

"No — I just dropped in."

"Splendid!" said the Colonel. "Splendid! Perfectly splendid!" He seized the young man's arm and led him across to where Mr. Immelbern waited. "By Gad, what a perfectly splendid coincidence. Simon, you must meet Mr. Immelbern. Sidney, this is an old friend of mine, Mr. Templar. By Gad!"

Simon found himself ushered into the best chair, his drink paid for, his health proposed and drunk with every symptom of cordiality.

"By Gad!" said the Colonel, mopping his brow and beaming.

"Quite a coincidence, Mr. Templar," remarked Immelbern, absorbing the word into his vocabulary.

"Coincidence is a marvellous thing," said the Colonel. "I remember when I was in Allahabad with the West Nottinghams, they had a quartermaster whose wife's name was Ellen. As a matter of fact, he wasn't really our quartermaster — we borrowed him from the Southwest Kents. Rotten regiment, the Southwest Kents. Old General Plushbottom was with them before he was thrown out of the service. His name wasn't really Plushbottom, but we called him Old General Plushbottom. The whole thing was a frightful scandal. He had a fight with a subaltern on the parade-ground at Poona — as a matter of fact, it was almost on the very spot where Reggie Carfew dropped dead of heart failure the day after his wife ran away with a bank clerk. And the extraordinary thing was that her name was Ellen too."

"Extraordinary," agreed the young man.

"Extraordinary!" concurred Mr. Immelbern, and trod viciously on Uppingdon's toe under the table.

"That was a marvellous trip we had on the Bremen — I mean to Biarritz — wasn't it?" said the Colonel, wincing.

Simon Templar smiled.

"We had some good parties, didn't we?"

"By Gad! And the casino!"

"The Heliopolis!"

"The races!" said the Colonel, seizing his cue almost too smartly, and moving his feet quickly out of range of Mr. Immelbern's heavy heel.

Mr. Immelbern gave an elaborate start. He pulled a watch from his waistcoat pocket and looked at it accusingly.

"By the way, Sir George," he interrupted with a faintly conspiratorial air. "I don't want to put you out at all, but it's getting a bit late."

"Late?" repeated the Colonel, frowning at him.

"You know," said Mr. Immelbern mysteriously.

"Oh," said the Colonel, grasping the point.

Mr. Immelbern turned to Simon.

"I'm really not being rude, Mr. Templar," he explained, "but Sir George has important business to attend to this afternoon, and I had to remind him about it. Really, Sir George, don't think I'm butting in, but it goes at two o'clock, and if we're going to get any lunch—"

"But that's outrageous!" protested the Colonel indignantly. "I've only just brought Mr. Templar over to our table, and you're suggesting that I should rush off and leave him!"

"Please don't bother about me," said Simon hastily. "If you have business to do—"

"My dear chap, I insist on bothering. The whole idea is absurd. I've put far too great a strain on your good nature already. This is preposterous. You must certainly join us in another drink. And in lunch. It's the very least I can do."

Mr. Immelbern did not look happy. He gave the impression of a man torn between politeness and frantic necessity, frustrated by having to talk in riddles, and perhaps pardonably exasperated by the obtuseness of his companion.

"But really, Sir George—"

"That's enough," said the Colonel, raising his hand. "I refuse to listen to anything more. Mr. Templar is an old friend of mine, and my guarantee should be good enough for you. And as far as you are concerned, my dear chap," he added, turning to Simon, "if you are not already engaged for lunch, I won't hear any other excuse."

Simon shrugged.

"It's very good of you. But if I'm in the way—"

"That," said the Colonel pontifically, "will do." He consulted his watch, drummed his fingers thoughtfully on the table for a moment, and said: "The very thing! We'll go right along to my rooms, and I'll have some lunch served there. Then Mr. Immelbern and I can do our business as well without being rushed about."

"But Sir George!" said Immelbern imploringly. "Won't you listen to reason? Look here, can I speak to you alone for a minute? Mr. Templar will excuse us."

He grabbed the spluttering Colonel by the arm and dragged him away almost by main force. They retreated to the other end of the lounge.

"We'll get him," said the Colonel, gesticulating furiously.

"I know," said Mr. Immelbern, beating his fist on the palm of his hand. "That is, if you don't scare him off with that imitation of a colonel. That stuff's so old-fashioned it makes me want to cry. Have you found out who he is?"

"No. I don't even recognise his name."

"Probably he's mistaken you for somebody else," said Mr. Immelbern, appearing to sulk.

The Colonel turned away from him and marched back to the table, with Mr. Immelbern following him glumly.

"Well, that's settled, by Gad," he said breezily. "If you've finished your drink, my dear fellow, we'll get along at once."

They went in a taxi to the Colonel's apartment, a small suite at the lower end of Clarges Street. Uppingdon burbled on with engaging geniality, but Mr. Immelbern kept his mouth tightly closed and wore the look of a man suffering from toothache.

"How about some caviar sandwiches and a bottle of wine?" suggested the Colonel. "I can fix those up myself. Or if you'd prefer something more substantial, I can easily get it sent in."

"Caviar sandwiches will do for me," murmured Simon accommodatingly.

There was plenty of caviar, and some excellent sherry to pass the time while the Colonel was preparing the sandwiches. The wine was impeccable, and the quantity apparently unlimited. Under its soothing influence even the morose Mr. Immelbern seemed to thaw slightly, although towards the end of the meal he kept looking at his watch and comparing it anxiously with the clock on the mantelpiece. At a quarter to two he caught his partner's eye in one of the rare lulls in the Colonel's meandering flow of reminiscence.

"Well, Sir George," he said grimly, "if you can spare the time now—"

"Of course," said the Colonel brightly.

Mr. Immelbern looked at their guest, and hesitated again.

"Er — to deal with our business."

Simon put down his glass and rose quickly.

"I'll leave you to it," he said pleasantly. "Really, I've imposed on you quite long enough."

"Sit down, my dear chap, sit down," commanded the Colonel testily. "Dammit, Sidney, your suspicions are becoming ridiculous. If you go on in this way I shall begin to believe you suffer from delusions of persecution. I've already told you that Mr. Templar is an old friend of mine, by Gad, and it's an insult to a guest in my house to suggest that you can't trust him. Anything we have to discuss can be said in front of him."

"But think, Sir George. Think of the risk!"

"Nonsense," snorted the Colonel. "It's all in your imagination. In fact" — the idea suddenly appeared to strike him — "I'm damned if I don't tell him what it's all about."

Mr. Immelbern opened his mouth, closed it again, and sank back wearily without speaking. His attitude implied that he had already exhausted himself in vain appeals to an obvious lunatic, and he was beginning to realise that it was of no avail. He could do no more.

"It's like this, my dear chap," said the Colonel, ignoring him. "All that this mystery amounts to — all that Immelbern here is so frightened of telling you — is that we are professional gamblers. We back racehorses."

"That isn't all of it," contradicted Mr. Immelbern sullenly.

"Well, we have certain advantages. I, in my social life, am very friendly with a large number of racehorse owners. Mr. Immelbern is friendly with trainers and jockeys. Between the two of us, we sometimes have infallible information, the result of piecing together everything we hear from various sources, of times when the result of a certain race has positively been arranged. Then all we have to do is to make our bets and collect the money. That happens to be our business this afternoon. We have an absolutely certain winner for the two o'clock race at Sandown Park, and in a few minutes we shall be backing it."

Mr. Immelbern dosed his eyes as if he could endure no more.

"That seems quite harmless," said Templar.

"Of course it is," agreed the Colonel. "What Immelbern is so frightened of is that somebody will discover what we're doing — I mean that it might come to the knowledge of some of our friends who are owners or trainers or jockeys, and then our sources of information would be cut off. But, by Gad, I insist on the privilege of being allowed to know when I can trust my own friends."

"Well, I won't give you away," Simon told him obligingly.

The Colonel turned to Immelbern triumphantly.

"There you are! So there's no need whatever for our little party to break up yet, unless Mr. Templar has an engagement. Our business will be done in a few minutes. By Gad, damme, I think you owe Mr. Templar an apology!"

Mr. Immelbern sighed, stared at his finger-nails for a while in grumpy silence, and consulted his watch again.

"It's nearly five to two," he said. "How much can we get on?"

"About a thousand, I think," said the Colonel judiciously.

Mr. Immelbern got up and went to the telephone, where he dialed a number.

"This is Immelbern," he said, in the voice of a martyr responding to the roll-call for the all-in lion-wrestling event. "I want two hundred pounds on Greenfly."

He heard his bet repeated, pressed down the hook, and dialed again.

"We have to spread it around to try and keep the starting price from shortening," explained the Colonel.

Simon Templar nodded, and leaned back with his eyes half-closed, listening to the click and tinkle of the dial and Immelbern's afflicted voice. Five times the process was repeated, and during the giving of the fifth order Uppingdon interrupted again.

"Make it two-fifty this time, Sidney," he said.

Mr. Immelbern said: "Just a moment, will you hold on?" to the transmitter, covered it with his hand, and turned aggrievedly.

"I thought you said a thousand. That makes a thousand and fifty."

"Well, I thought Mr. Templar might like to have fifty on." Simon hesitated.

"That's about all I've got on me," he said.

"Don't let that bother you, my dear boy," boomed Colonel Uppingdon. "Your credit's good with me, and I feel that I owe you something to compensate for what you've put up with. Make it a hundred if you like."

"But Sir George!" wailed Mr. Immelbern.

"Dammit, will you stop whining 'But Sir George!'?" exploded the Colonel. "That settles it. Make it three hundred — that will be a hundred on for Mr. Templar. And if the horse doesn't win, I'll stand the loss myself."

A somewhat strained silence prevailed after the last bet had been made. Mr. Immelbern sat down again and chewed the unlighted end of a cigar in morbid meditations. The Colonel twiddled his thumbs as if the embarrassment of these recurrent disputes was hard to shake off. Simon Templar lighted a cigarette and smoked calmly.

"Have you been doing this long?" he inquired. "For about two years," said the Colonel. "By Gad, though, we've made money at it. Only about one horse in ten that we back doesn't romp home, and most of 'em are at good prices. Sometimes our money does get back to the course and spoil the price, but I'd rather have a winner at evens than a loser at ten to one any day. Why, I remember one race meeting we had at Delhi. That was the year when old Stubby Featherstone dropped his cap in the Ganges — he was the fella who got killed at Cambrai…"

He launched off on another wandering reminiscence, and Simon listened to him with polite attention. He had some thinking to do, and he was grateful for the gallant Colonel's willingness to take all the strain of conversation away from him. Mr. Immelbern chewed his cigar in chronic pessimism until half an hour had passed; and then he glanced at his watch again, started up, and broke into the middle ofone of his host's rambling sentences.

"The result ought to be through by now," he said abruptly. "Shall we go out and get a paper?"

Simon stood up unhurriedly. He had done his thinking.

"Let me go," he suggested.

"That's awfully good of you, my dear boy. Mr. Immelbern would have gone. Never mind, by Gad. Go out and see how much you've won. I'll open another bottle. Damme, we must have a drink on this, by Gad!"

Simon grinned and sauntered out; and as the door dosed behind him the eyes of the two partners met.

"Next time you say 'damme' or 'by Gad,' George," said Mr. Immelbern, "I will knock your block off, so help me. Why don't you get some new ideas?"

But by that time Lieut-Colonel Sir George Uppingdon was beyond taking offence.

"We've got him," he said gleefully.

"I hope so," said Mr. Immelbern, more cautiously.

"I know what I'm talking about, Sid," said the Colonel stubbornly. "He's a serious young fellow, one of these conservative chaps like myself — but that's the best kind. None of this dashing around, keeping up with the times, going off like a firework and fizzling out like a pricked balloon. I'll bet you anything you like, in another hour he'll be looking around for a thousand pounds to give us to put on tomorrow's certainty. His kind starts slowly, but it goes a lot further than any of you fussy Smart Alecs."

Mr. Immelbern made a rude noise.

Simon Templar bought a Star at Devonshire House and turned without anxiety to the stop press. Greenfly had won the two o'clock at five to one.

As he strolled back towards Clarges Street he was smiling. It was a peculiarly ecstatic sort of smile; and as a matter of fact he had volunteered to go out and buy the paper, even though he knew what the result would be as certainly as Messrs. Uppingdon and Immelbern knew it, for the sole and sufficient reason that he wanted to give that smile the freedom of his face and let it walk around. To have been compelled to sit around any longer in Uppingdon's apartment and sustain the necessary mask of gravity and sober interest without a breathing spell would have sprained every muscle within six inches of his mouth.

"Hullo, Saint," said a familiar sleepy voice beside him.

A hand touched his arm, and he turned quickly to see a big baby-faced man in a bowler hat of unfashionable shape, whose jaws moved rhythmically like those of a ruminating cow.

"Hush," said the Saint. "Somebody might hear."

"Is there anybody left who doesn't know?" asked Chief Inspector Teal sardonically.

Simon Templar nodded.

"Strange as it may seem, there is. Believe it or not, Claud Eustace, somewhere in this great city — I wouldn't tell you where, for anything — there are left two trusting souls who don't even recognise my name. They have just come down from their hermits' caves in the mountains of Ladbroke Grove, and they haven't yet heard the news. The Robin Hood of modern crime," said the Saint oratorically, "the scourge of the ungodly, the defender of the faith — what are the newspaper headlines? — has come back to raise hell over the length and breadth of England — and they don't know."

"You look much too happy," said the detective suspiciously. "Who are these fellows?"

"Their names are Uppingdon and Immelbern, if you want to know — and you've probably met them before. They have special information about racehorses, and I am playing my usual role of the Sucker who does not Suck too long. At the moment they owe me five hundred quid."

Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal's baby blue eyes looked him over thoughtfully. And in Chief Inspector Teal's mind there were no illusions. He did not share the ignorance of Messrs. Uppingdon and Immelbern. He had known the Saint for many years, and he had heard that he was back. He knew that there was going to be a fresh outbreak of buccaneering through the fringes of London's underworld, exactly as there had been so many times before; he knew that the feud between them was going to start again, the endless battle between the gay outlaw and the guardian of the Law; and he knew that his troubles were at the beginning of a new lease of life. And yet one of his rare smiles touched his mouth for a fleeting instant.

"See that they pay you," he said, and went on his portly and lethargic way.

Simon Templar went back to the apartment on Clarges Street. Uppingdon let him in; and even the melancholy Mr. Immelbern was moved to jump up as they entered the living-room.

"Did it win?" they chorused.

The Saint held out the paper. It was seized, snatched from hand to hand, and lowered reverently while an exchange of rapturous glances took place across its columns.

"At five to one," breathed Lieut.-Colonel Uppingdon.

"Five thousand quid," whispered Mr. Immelbern.

"The seventh winner in succession."

"Eighty thousand quid in four weeks."

The Colonel turned to Simon.

"What a pity you only had a hundred pounds on," he said, momentarily crestfallen. Then the solution struck him, and he brightened. "But how ridiculous! We can easily put that right. On our next coup, you shall be an equal partner. Immelbern, be silent! I have put up with enough interference from you. Templar, my dear boy, if you care to come in with me next time—"

The Saint shook his head.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I don't mind a small gamble now and again, but for business I only bet on certainties."

"But this is a certainty!" cried the Colonel.

Simon frowned.

"Nothing," he said gravely, "is a certainty until you know the result. A horse may drop dead, or fall down, or be disqualified. The risk may be small, but it exists. I eliminate it." He gazed at them suddenly with a sober intensity which almost held them spellbound. "It sounds silly," he said, "but I happen to be psychic."

The two men stared back at him.

"Wha — what?" stammered the Colonel.

"What does that mean?" demanded Mr. Immelbern, more grossly.

"I am clairvoyant," said the Saint simply. "I can foretell the future. For instance, I can look over the list of runners in a newspaper and close my eyes, and suddenly I'll see the winners printed out in my mind, just as if I was looking at the evening edition. I don't know how it's done. It's a gift. My mother had it."

The two men were gaping at him dubiously. They were incredulous, wondering if they were missing a joke and ought to laugh politely; and yet something in the Saint's voice and the slight uncanny widening of his eyes sent a cold supernatural draught creeping up their spines.

"Haw!" ejaculated the Colonel uncertainly, feeling that he was called upon to make some sound; and the Saint smiled distantly.

He glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece.

"Let me show you. I wasn't going to make any bets today, but since I've started I may as well go on."

He picked up his lunch edition, which he had been reading in the Palace Royal lounge, and studied the racing card on the back page. Then he put down the paper and covered his eyes. For several seconds there was a breathless silence, while he stood there with his head in his hands, swaying slightly, in an attitude of terrific concentration.

Again the supernatural shiver went over the two partners; and then the Saint straightened up suddenly, opened his eyes, and rushed to the telephone.

He dialed his number rather slowly. He had watched the movements of Mr. Immelbern's fingers closely, on every one of that gentleman's five calls; and his keen ears had listened and calculated every click of the returning dial. It would not be his fault if he got the wrong number.

The receiver at the other end of the line was lifted. The voice spoke.

"Baby Face," it said hollowly.

Simon Templar drew a deep breath, and a gigantic grin of bliss deployed itself over his inside. But outwardly he did not bat an eyelid.

"Two hundred pounds on Baby Face for Mr. Templar," he said; and the partners were too absorbed with other things to notice that he spoke in a very fair imitation of Mr. Immelbern's deep rumble.

He turned back to them, smiling.

"Baby Face," he said, with the quietness of absolute certitude, "will win the three o'clock race at Sandown Park."

Lieut.-Colonel Uppingdon fingered his superb white moustachios.

"By Gad!" he said.

Half an hour later the three of them went out together for a newspaper. Baby Face had won — at ten to one.

"Haw!" said the Colonel, blinking at the result rather dazedly.

On the face of Mr. Immelbern was a look of almost superstitious awe. It is difficult to convey what was in his mind at that moment. Throughout his life he had dreamed of such things. Horseflesh was the one true love of his unromantic soul. The fashions of Newmarket ruled his clothes, the scent of stables hung around him like a subtle perfume; he might, in prosperous times, have been a rich man in his illegal way, if all his private profits had not inevitably gravitated on to the backs of unsuccessful horses as fast as they came into his pocket. And in the secret daydreams which coil through even the most phlegmatic bosom had always been the wild impossible idea that if by some miracle he could have the privilege of reading the next day's results every day for a week, he could make himself a fortune that would free him for the rest of his life from the sordid labours of the confidence game and give him the leisure to perfect that infallible racing system with which he had been experimenting ever since adolescence.

And now the miracle had come to pass, in the person of that debonair and affluent young man who did not even seem to realise the potential millions which lay in his strange gift.

"Can you do that every day?" he asked huskily.

"Oh, yes," said the Saint.

"In every race?" said Mr. Immelbern hoarsely.

"Why not?" said the Saint. "It makes racing rather a bore, really, and you soon get tired of drawing in the money."

Mr. Immelbern gulped. He could not conceive what it felt like to get tired of drawing in money. He felt stunned.

"Well," said the Saint casually, "I'd better be buzzing along—"

At the sound of those words something came over Lieut-Colonel Sir George Uppingdon. It was, in its way, the turning of a worm. He had suffered much. The gibes of Mr. Immelbern still rankled in his sedate aristocratic breast. And Mr. Immelbern was still goggling in a half-witted daze — he who had boasted almost naggingly of his accessibility to new ideas.

Lieut.-Colonel Sir George Uppingdon took the Saint's arm, gently but very firmly.

"Just a minute, my dear boy," he said, rolling the words succulently round his tongue. "We must not be old-fashioned. We must move with the times. This psychic gift of yours is truly remarkable. There's a fortune in it. Damme, if somebody threw a purse into Irnmelbern's lap, he'd be asking me what it was. Thank God, I'm not so dense as that, by Gad. My dear Mr. Templar, my dear boy, you must — I positively insist — you must come back to my rooms and talk about what you're going to do with this gift of yours. By Gad!"

Mr. Immelbern did not come out of his trance until halfway through the bargaining that followed.

It was nearly two hours later when the two partners struggled somewhat short-windedly up the stairs to a dingy one-roomed office off the Strand. Its furniture consisted of a chair, a table with a telephone on it, and a tape machine in one corner. It had not been swept for weeks, but it served its purpose adequately.

The third and very junior member of the partnership sat on the chair with his feet on the table, smoking a limp cigarette and turning the pages of Paris Plaisirs. He looked up in some surprise not unmixed with alarm at the noisy entrance of his confederates — a pimply youth with a chin that barely contrived to separate his mouth from his neck.

"I've made our fortunes!" yelled Mr. Immelbern, and, despite the youth's repulsive aspect, embraced him.

A slight frown momentarily marred the Colonel's glowing benevolence.

"What d'you mean — you've made our fortunes?" he demanded. "If it hadn't been for me—"

"Well, what the hell does it matter?" said Mr. Immelbern. "In a couple of months we'll all be millionaires."

"How?" asked the pimply youth blankly.

Mr. Immelbern broke off in the middle of an improvised hornpipe.

"It's like this," he explained exuberantly. "We've got a sike — sidekick—"

"Psychic," said the Colonel.

"A bloke who can tell the future. He puts his hands over his eyes and reads the winners off like you'd read them out of a paper. He did it four times this afternoon. We're going to take him in with us. We had a job to persuade him — he was going off to the South of France tonight — can you imagine it, a bloke with a gift like that going away while there's any racing here? We had to give him five hundred quid advance on the money we told him we were going to make for him to make him put it off. But it's worth it. We'll start tomorrow, and if this fellow Templar—"

"Ow, that's 'is nime, is it?" said the pimply youth brightly. "I wondered wot was goin' on."

There was a short puzzled silence.

"How do you mean — what was going on?" asked the Colonel at length.

"Well," said the pimply youth, "when Sid was ringing up all the afternoon, practic'ly every rice—"

"What d'you mean?" croaked Mr. Immelbern. "I rang up every race?"

"Yus, an' I was giving' you the winners, an' you were syin' 'Two 'undred pounds on Baby Face for Mr. Templar' — Tour 'undred pounds on Cellophane for Mr. Templar' — gettin' bigger an' bigger all the time an' never givin' 'im a loser — well, I started to wonder wot was 'appening."

The silence that followed was longer, much longer; and there were things seething in it for which the English language has no words.

It was the Colonel who broke it.

"It's impossible," he said dizzily. "I know the clock was slow, because I put it back myself, but I only put it back five minutes — and this fellow was telephoning ten minutes before the times of the races."

"Then 'e must 'ave put it back some more while you wasn't watchin' 'im," said the pimply youth stolidly.

The idea penetrated after several awful seconds.

"By Gad!" said Lieut.-Colonel Sir George Uppingdon in a feeble voice.

II

The Unfortunate Financier

"The secret of success," said Simon Templar profoundly, "is never to do anything by halves. If you try to touch someone for a tenner, you probably get snubbed; but if you put on a silk hat and a false stomach and go into the City to raise a million-pound loan, people fall over each other in the rush to hand you blank cheques. The wretched little thief who pinches a handful of silver spoons gets shoved into clink through a perfect orgy of congratulations to the police and the magistrates, but the bird who diddles the public of a few hundred thousands by legal methods gets knighthood. A sound buccaneering business has to be run on the same principles."

While he could not have claimed any earth-shaking originality for the theme of his sermon, Simon Templar was in the perhaps rarer position of being able to claim that he practised what he preached. He had been doing it for so long, with so much diligence and devotion, that the name of the Saint had passed into the Valhalla of all great names: it had become a household word, even as the name of Miss Amelia Bloomer, an earlier crusader, was absorbed into the tongue that Shakespeare did not live long enough to speak — but in a more romantic context. And if there were many more sharks in the broad lagoons of technically legal righteousness who knew him better by his chosen nom de guerre than by his real name, and who would not even have recognised him had they passed him in the street, that minor degree of anonymity was an asset in the Saint's profession which more than compensated him for the concurrent gaps in his publicity.

Mr. Wallington Titus Oates was another gentleman who did nothing by halves.

He was a large red-faced man who looked exactly like a City alderman or a master butcher, with a beefy solidity about him which disarmed suspicion. It was preposterous, his victims thought, in the early and extensive stages of their ignorance, that such an obvious rough diamond, such a jovial hail-fellow-well-met, such an almost startlingly lifelike incarnation of the cartoonist's figure of John Bull, could be a practitioner of cunning and deceit. Even about his rather unusual names he was delightfully frank. If he had been an American he would certainly have called himself Wallington T. Oates, and the "T" would have been shrouded in a mystery that might have embraced anything from Thomas to Tamerlane. In the more reserved manner of the Englishman, who does not have a Christian name until you have known him for twenty-five years, he might without exciting extraordinary curiosity have been known simply as W. T. Oates. But he was not. His cards were printed W. Titus Oates; and he was not even insistent on the preliminary "W." He was, in fact, best pleased to be known as plain Titus Oates, and would chortle heartily over his chances of tracing a pedigree back to the notorious inventor of the Popish Plot who was whipped from Aldgate to Newgate and from Newgate to Tyburn some three hundred years ago.

But apart from the fact that some people would have given much to apply the same discouraging treatment to Mr. Wallington Titus Oates, he had little else in common with his putative ancestor. For although the better-known Titus Oates stood in the pillory outside the Royal Exchange before his dolorous tour, it was not recorded that he was interested in the dealings within; whereas the present Stock Exchange was Mr. Wallington Titus Oates's happy hunting ground.

If there was anything that W. Titus Oates understood from A to whatever letter can be invented after Z, it was the manipulation of shares. Bulls and bears were his domestic pets. Mergers and debentures were his bedfellows. It might almost be said that he danced contangos in his sleep. And it was all very profitable — so profitable that Mr. Oates possessed not only three Rolls-Royces but also a liberal allowance of pocket-money to spend on the collection of postage stamps which was his joy and relaxation.

This is not to be taken to mean that Mr. Oates was known in the City as a narrow evader of the law. He was, on the contrary, a highly respected and influential man; for it is one of the sublime subtleties of the law of England that whilst the manipulation of the form of racehorses is a hideous crime, to be rewarded with expulsion from the most boring clubs and other forms of condign punishment, the manipulation of share values is a noble and righteous occupation by which the large entrance fees to such clubs may commendably be obtained, provided that the method of juggling is genteel and smooth. Mr. Oates's form as a juggler was notably genteel and smooth; and the ambition of certain citizens to whip Mr. Oates at a cart's tail from Aldgate to Newgate was based not so much on the knowledge of any actual fraud as on the fact that the small investments which represented the life savings had on occasion been skittled down the market in the course of Mr. Oates's important operations, which every right-thinking person will agree was a very unsporting and un-British attitude to take.

The elementary principles of share manipulation are, of course, simplicity itself. If large blocks of a certain share are thrown on the market from various quarters, the word goes round that the stock is bad, the small investor takes fright and dashes in to cut his losses, thereby making matters worse, and the price of the share falls according to the first law of supply and demand. If, on the other hand, there is heavy buying in a certain share, the word goes round that it is a "good thing," the small speculator jumps in for a quick profit, adding his weight to the snowball, and the price goes up according to the same law. This is the foundation system on which all speculative operators work; but Mr. Oates had his own ways of accelerating these reactions.

"Nobody can say that Titus Oates ain't an honest man," he used to say to the very exclusive circle of confederates who shared his confidence and a reasonable proportion of his profits. "P'raps I am a bit smarter than some of the others, but that's their funeral. You don't know what tricks they get up to behind the scenes, but nobody knows what tricks I get up to, either. It's all in the day's work."

He was thinking along the same lines on a certain morning, while he waited for his associates to arrive for the conference at which the final details of the manoeuvre on which he was working at that time would be decided. It was the biggest manipulation he had attempted so far, and it involved a trick that sailed much closer to the wind than anything he had done before; but it has already been explained that he was not a man who did things by halves. The economic depression which had bogged down the market for many months past, and the resultant steadfast refusal of stocks to soar appreciably however stimulated by legitimate and near-legitimate means, had been very bad for his business as well as others. Now, envisaging the first symptoms of an upturn, he was preparing to cash in on it to an extent that would compensate for many months of failure; and with so much lost ground to make up he had no time for half measures. Yet he knew that there were a few tense days ahead of him.

A discreet knock on his door, heralding the end of thought and the beginning of action, was almost a relief. His new secretary entered in answer to his curt summons, and his eyes rested on her slim figure for a moment with unalloyed pleasure — she was a remarkably beautiful girl with natural honey-golden hair and entrancing blue eyes which in Mr. Oates's dreams had sometimes been known to gaze with Dietrichesque yearning upon his unattractive person.

"Mr. Hammel and Mr. Costello are here," she said.

Mr. Oates nodded.

"Bring them in, my dear." He rummaged thoughtfully through his pockets and produced a crumpled five-pound note, which he pushed towards her. "And buy yourself some silk stockings when you go out to lunch — just as a little gift from me. You've been a good gal. Some night next week, when I'm not working so hard, we might have dinner together, eh?"

"Thank you, Mr. Oates," she said softly, and left him with a sweet smile which started strange wrigglings within him.

When they had dinner together he would make her call him Titus, he thought, and rubbed his hands over the romantic prospect. But before that happy night he had much to do; and the entrance of Hammel and Costello brought him back to the stern consideration of how that dinner and many others, with silk stockings and orchids to match, were to be paid for.

Mr. Jules Hammel was a small rotund gentleman whose rimless spectacles gave him a benign and owlish appearance, like somebody's very juvenile uncle. Mr. Abe Costello was longer and much more cadaverous, and he wore a pencil-line of hair across his upper lip with a certain undercurrent of self-consciousness which might have made one think that he went about in the constant embarrassing fear of being mistaken for Clark Gable. Actually their resemblance to any such harmless characters was illusory — they were nearly as cunning as Mr. Oates himself, and not even a trifle less unscrupulous.

"Well, boys," said Mr. Oates, breaking the ice jovially, "I found another good thing last night."

"Buy or sell?" asked Costello alertly.

"Buy," said Mr. Oates. "I bought it. As far as I can find out, there are only about a dozen in the world. The issue was corrected the day after it came out."

Hammel helped himself to a cigar and frowned puzzledly.

"What is this?"

"A German 5-pfenning with the Befreiungstag overprint inverted and spelt with a P instead of a B," explained Mr. Oates. "That's a stamp you could get a hundred pounds for any day."

His guests exchanged tolerant glances. While they lighted their Partagas they allowed Mr. Oates to expatiate on the beauties of his acquisition with all the extravagant zeal of the rabid collector; but as soon as the smokes were going Costello recalled the meeting to its agenda.

"Well," he said casually, "Midorients are down to 25."

"24," said Mr. Oates. "I rang up my brokers just before you came in and told them to sell another block. They'll be down to 23 or 22 after lunch. We've shifted them pretty well."

"When do we start buying?" asked Hammel.

"At 22. And you'll have to do it quickly. The wires are being sent off at lunch-time tomorrow, and the news will be in the papers before the Exchange closes."

Mr. Oates paced the floor steadily, marshalling the facts of the situation for an audience which was already conversant with them.

The Midorient Company owned large and unproductive concessions in Mesopotamia. Many years ago its fields had flowed with seemingly inexhaustible quantities of oil of excellent quality, and the stock had paid its original holders several thousand times over. But suddenly, on account of those abstruse and unpredictable geological causes to which such things are subject, the supply had petered out. Frenzied boring had failed to produce results. The output had dropped to a paltry few hundred barrels which sufficed to pay dividends of two per cent on the stock — no more, and, as a slight tempering of the wind to the shorn stockholders, no less. The shares had adjusted their market value accordingly. Boring had continued ever since, without showing any improvement; and indeed the shares had depreciated still further during the past fortnight as a result of persistent rumours that even the small output which had for a long while saved the stock from becoming entirely derelict was drying up — rumours which, as omniscient chroniclers of these events, we are able to trace back to the ingenious agency of Mr. Titus Oates.

That was sufficient to send the moribund stock down to the price at which Messrs. Oates, Costello, and Hammel desired to buy it. The boom on which they would make their profit called for more organisation, and involved the slight deception on which Mr. Oates was basing his gamble.

Travelling in Mesopotamia at that moment there was an English tourist named Ischolskov, and it is a matter of importance that he was there entirely at Mr. Oates's instigation and expense. During his visit he had contrived to learn the names of the correspondents of the important newspaper and news agencies in that region, and at the appointed time it would be his duty to send off similarly worded cablegrams, signed with the names of these correspondents, which would report to London that the Midorient Company's engineers had struck oil again — had, in fact, tapped a gigantic gusher of petroleum that would make the first phenomenal output of the Midorient Oil Fields look like the dribbling of a baby on its bib.

"Let's see," said Mr. Oates. "This is Tuesday. We buy today and tomorrow morning at 22 or even less. The shares'll start to go up tomorrow afternoon. They'll go up more on Thursday. By Friday morning they ought to be around 45 — they might even go to 50. They'll hang fire there. The first boom will be over, and people will be waiting for more information."

"What about the directors?" queried Hammel.

"They'll get a wire too, of course, signed by the manager on the spot. And don't forget that I'm a director. Every penny I have is tied up in that company — it's my company, lock, stock, and barrel. They'll call a special meeting, and I'll know exactly what they're doing about it. Of course they'll cable the manager for more details, but I can arrange to see that his reply don't get through to them before Friday lunch."

Costello fingered his wispy moustache.

"And we sell out on Friday morning," he said.

Mr. Oates nodded emphatically.

"We do more than sell out. We sell ourselves short, and unload twice as much stock as we're holding. The story'll get all over England over the week-end, and when the Exchange opens on Monday morning the shares'll be two a penny. We make our profit both ways."

"It's a big risk," said Hammel seriously.

"Well, I'm taking it for you, ain't I?" said Mr. Oates. "All you have to do is to help me spread the buying and selling about, so it don't look too much like a one-man deal. I'm standing to take all the knocks. But it can't go wrong. I've used Ischolskov before — I've got too much on him for him to try and double-cross me, and besides he's getting paid plenty. My being on the Midorient board makes it watertight. I'm taken in the same as the rest of 'em, and I'm hit as hard as they are. You're doing all the buying and selling from now on — there won't be a single deal in my name that anyone can prove against me. And whatever happens, don't sell till I give you the wire. I'll be the first to know when the crash is coming, and we'll hold out till the last moment."

They talked for an hour longer, after which they went out to a belated but celebratory lunch.

Mr. Oates left his office early that afternoon, and therefore he did not even think of the movements of his new secretary when she went home. But if he had been privileged to observe them, he would have been very little wiser; for Mr. Oates was one of the numerous people who knew the Saint only by name, and if he had seen the sinewy sunburned young man who met her at Piccadilly Circus and bore her off for a cocktail he might have suffered a pang of jealousy, but he would have had no cause for alarm.

"We must have an Old Fashioned, Pat," said the Saint, when they were settled in Oddenino's. "The occasion calls for one. There's a wicked look in your eye that tells me you have some news. Have you sown a few more wild Oates?"

"Must you?" she protested weakly.

"Shall we get him an owl?" Simon suggested.

"What for?" asked Patricia unguardedly.

"It would be rather nice," said the Saint reflectively, "to get Titus an owl."

Patricia Holm shuddered.

Over the cocktails and stuffed olives, however, she relented.

"It's started," she said. "Hammel and Costello had a long conference with him this morning. I suppose they finished it after lunch, but I'd heard enough before they went out."

She told him every detail of the discussion that had taken place in Mr. Titus Oates's private office, and Simon Templar smiled approvingly as he listened. Taken in conjunction with what he already knew, the summaries of various other conversations which she had reported to him, it left him with the whole structure of the conspiracy clearly catalogued in his mind.

"You must remember to take that microphone out of his office first thing in the morning," he remarked. "It might spoil things if Titus came across it, and I don't think you'll need to listen any more… Here, where did you get that from?"

"From sowing my wild Oates," said Patricia angelically, as the waitress departed with a five-pound note on her tray.

Simon Templar regarded her admiringly.

"Darling," he said at length, "there are no limits to your virtues. If you're as rich as that, you can not only buy me another Old Fashioned but you can take me to dinner at the Barcelona as well."

On the way to the restaurant he bought an Evening Standard and opened it at the table.

"Midorient closed at 21," he said. "It looks as if we shall have to name a ward in our Old Age Home for Retired Burglars after Comrade Oates."

"How much shall we make if we buy and sell with him?" asked the girl.

The Saint smiled.

"I'm afraid we should lose a lot of money," he said. "You see, Titus isn't going to sell."

She stared at him, mystified; and he closed the menu and laughed at her silently.