XIV

The Mixture as Before

"Crime," explained Simon Templar, squeezing lemon-juice meditatively over a liberal slice of smoked salmon, "is a kind of Fourth Dimenson. The sucker moves and has his being completely enclosed in a sphere of limitations which he assumes to be the natural laws of the universe. When he is offered an egg, he expects to be given an egg — not a sewing machine. The bloke who takes the money off him is the bloke who breaks the rules — the bloke who hops outside the sucker's dimension, skids invisibly round ahead of him, and pops in again exactly at the point where the sucker would never dream of looking for him. But the bloke who takes money off the bloke who takes money off the sucker — the real aristocrat of the profession — is something even brighter. He duly delivers the egg; only it's also an aubergine. It's a plant."

He could have continued in the same strain for some time, and not infrequently did.

Those moods of contemplative contentment were an integral part of Simon Templar's enjoyment of life, the restful twilights between buccaneering days and adventurous nights. They usually came upon him when the second glass of dry sherry had been tasted and found good, when the initial delicacy of a chain of fastidiously chosen dishes had been set before him, and the surroundings of white linen and gleaming silver and glass had sunk into their proper place as the background of that epicurean luxuriousness which to him was the goal of all worth-while piracy. Those were the occasions on which the corsair put off his harness and discoursed on the philosophy of filibustering. It was a subject of which Simon Templar never tired. In the course of a flamboyant career which had been largely devoted to equalising what he had always considered to be a fundamentally unjust distribution of wealth he had developed many theories about his own chosen field of art; and these he was always ready to expound. It was at such times as this that the Saint's keen dark head took on its most challenging alertness of line, the mocking blue eyes danced with their gayest humour… when everything about him matched the irresponsible spirit of his nickname except the technical morality of his discourse.

"Successful crime," said the Saint, "is simply the Art of the Unexpected."

Louis Fallen had similar ideas, although he was no philosopher. The finer abstractions of lawlessness left Louie not only cold but in a condition to make ice cream shiver merely by breathing on it. Neither were Louie's interpretations of those essential ideas particularly novel; but he was a very sound practitioner.

"It's a waste of time tryin' to think up new stunts, Sol," Louie declared, "while there's all the mugs you want still fallin' for the old ones. Anyone with a good uncut diamond can draw a dividend from it every day."

"Anyone who could put down five-hundred quid could float a good uncut diamond, Louie," replied Mr. Solomon, sympathetic but cautious.

"Anyone who could put down five hundred quid could float a company and swindle people like a gentleman," said Louie.

Mr. Solomon shook his head sadly. His business was patronised by a small and exclusive clientele which was rarely in a position to bargain with him.

"Dot's a pity, Louie. I like to see a good man get on."

"Now listen to me, you old shark," said Louie amiably. "I want a diamond, a real classy bit of ice, and all I can afford is a hundred pounds. Look over your stock and see what you can find. And make it snappy — I want to get started this week."

"Vun honderd pounds iss for a cheap bit of paste," said Mr. Solomon pathetically. "You know I ain't got nothing like dot in my shop, Louie."

Half an hour later he parted grudgingly with an excellent stone, for which Louie Fallen was persuaded to pay a hundred and fifty pounds, and the business-like tension of the interview relaxed in an exchange of cheap cigars. In the estimation of Mr. Solomon, who had given thirty pounds for the stone, it was a highly satisfactory afternoon's work.

"You got a gift there, Louie," he said gloomily.

"I've got a gold-mine," said Louie confidently. "All I need beside this is psychology, and I don't have to pay for that. I'm just naturally psychological. You got to pick out the right kind of sucker. Then it goes like this."

The germ of that elusive quality which turns an otherwise normal and rational human being into a sucker has yet to be isolated. Louie Fallon, the man of action, had never bothered to probe into it: he recognised one when he saw one, without analyzing whys and wherefores, exactly as he was accustomed to recognizing a piece of cheese without a thought of the momentous dawn of life which it enshrines. Simon Templar himself had various theories.

Probably the species Mug is the same as the common cold — there is no single bacillus to account for it. Nor is there likely to be any rigid definition of that precise shade of covetous innocence, that peculiarly grasping guilelessness, which stamps the hard-boiled West Country farmer, accustomed to prying into the pedigrees of individual oats before disgorging a penny on them, as a potential purchaser of the Tower of London for two hundred pounds down and the balance by installments. But whatever these symptoms may be, Simon Templar possessed them in their richest beauty. He had only to saunter in his most natural manner down the highways of the world immaculate and debonair, with his soft hat slanted blithely over one eye, and the passing pageant of humanity crystallised into men who had had their pockets picked and only needed five shillings to get home, men with gold bricks, men with oil wells in Texas, men needing assistance in the execution of eccentric wills, men with charts showing the authenticated cemetery of Captain Kidd's treasure, men with horses that could romp home on one leg and a crutch, and men who just thought he might like a game of cards. It was one of the Saint's most treasured assets; and he never ordered strawberries in December without a toast to the benign Providence that had endowed him with the gift of having all that he asked of life poured into his lap.

As a matter of fact he was sauntering down the Strand when he met Louie Fallon. He didn't actually run into him, but he did walk into him; but there was nothing particularly remarkable about that, for the Strand is a street which contains more crooks to the square yard than any other area of ground outside a prison wall — which may be partly accounted for by the fact that it also has the reputation of being the favourite promenading ground of more potential suckers than any other thoroughfare in the Metropolis.

Louie Fallon had a theory that he couldn't walk down the Strand on any day in the week without bumping into a perambulating gold-mine which only required skilful scratching to yield him its gilded harvest.

He walked towards the Saint, fumbling in his pockets with a preoccupied air and the kind of flurried abstraction of a man who has forgotten where he put his season ticket on his way down the platform, with his eyes fluttering over every item of the perspective except those which were included in the direction in which he was going. At any rate, the last person in the panorama whom he appeared to see was the Saint himself. Simon saw him, and swerved politely; but with the quickwitted agility of long practice, Louie Fallon blundered off to the same side. They collided with a slight bump, at the very moment when Louie had apparently discovered the article for which he had been searching.

It fell on to the pavement between them and rolled away between the Saint's feet, sparkling enticingly in the sunlight. Muttering profuse apologies, Louie scuffled round to retrieve it. The movement was so adroitly devised to entangle them that Simon would have had no chance to pass on and make his escape, even if he had wanted to.

But it is dawning — slowly and reluctantly, perhaps, but dawning, nevertheless — upon the chronicler that there can be very few students of these episodes who can still be cherishing any delusion that the Saint would ever want to escape from such a situation.

Simon stood by with a slight smile coming to his lips, while Louie wriggled round his legs and recovered his precious possession with a faint squeak of delight, and straightened up with the object clutched solidly in his hand.

"Phew!" said Mr. Fallon, fanning himself with his hat. "That was near enough. Did you see where it went? Right to the edge of that grating. If it had rolled down…" He blew out his cheeks and rolled up his eyes in an eloquent register of horror at the dreadful thought. "For a moment I thought I'd lost it," he said, clarifying his point conclusively.

Simon nodded. It did not require any peculiar keenness of vision to see that the object of so much concern was a very nice-looking diamond, for Louie was making no attempt to hide it — he was, on the contrary, blowing on it and rubbing it affectionately on his sleeve to remove the invisible specks of grime and dust which it had collected on its travels.

"You must be lucky."

Louie's face fell abruptly. The transition between his almost childish delight and the shadow of awful gloom which suddenly passed across his countenance was quite startling. Mr. Fallon's artistry had never been disputed even by his rivals in the profession.

"Lucky?" he practically yelped, in a rising crescendo of mournful indignation. "Why, I'm the unluckiest man that ever lived!"

"Too bad," said the Saint, with profound sympathy.

"Lucky!" repeated Mr Fallon, with all the pained disgust of a hypochondriac who has been accused of looking well. "Why, I'm the sort of fellow if I saw a five-pound note lying in the street and tried to pick it up, I'd fall down and break my neck!"

It was becoming clear to Simon Templar that Mr. Fallon felt that he was unlucky.

"There are people like that," he said, reminiscently. "I remembered an aunt of mine—"

"Lucky?" reiterated Mr. Fallon, who did not appear to be interested in anyone else's aunt. "Why, right at this moment I'm the unluckiest man in London. Look here" — he clasped the Saint by the arm with the pathetically appealing movement of a drowning man clutching at a straw—"do you think you could help me? If you haven't got anything particular to do?

I feel sort of — well — you look the sort of fellow who might have some ideas. Have you got time for a drink?"

Simon Templar could never have been called a toper, but on such occasions as this he invariably had time for a drink. "I don't mind if I do," he said obligingly.

As a matter of fact, they were standing outside a miraculously convenient hostel at that moment — Louie Fallon had always believed in bringing the mellowing influence of alcohol to bear as soon as he had scraped his acquaintance, and he staged his encounters with that idea in view.

With practised dexterity he steered the Saint towards the door of the saloon bar, cutting short the protest which Simon Templar had no intention whatsoever of making. In hardly any more time than it takes to record, he had got the Saint inside the bar, parked him at a table, invited him to name his poison, procured a double ration of the said poison from the barmaid, and settled himself in the adjoining chair to improve the shining hour. To the discerning critic it might seem that he rushed at the process rather like an unleashed investor plunging after an absconding company promoter; but Louie Fallen's conception of improving shining hours had never included any unnecessary waste of time, and he had learnt by experience that the willingness of the species Mug to listen is usually limited only by the ability of the flatcatcher to talk.

"Yes," said Mr. Fallon, reverting to his subject. "I am the unluckiest man you are ever likely to meet. Did you see that diamond I dropped just now?"

"Well," admitted the Saint truthfully, "I couldn't help seeing it."

Mr. Fallon nodded. He fumbled in his waistcoat pocket, brought out the jewel again, and laid it on the table.

"I made that myself," he said.

Simon eyed the stone and Mr. Fallon with the puzzled expression which was expected of him.

"What do you mean — you made it?"

"I made it myself," said Mr. Fallon. "It's what you would call synthetic. It took about half an hour, and it cost me exactly threepence. But there isn't a diamond merchant in London who could prove that it wasn't dug up out of the ground in South Africa. Take it to anyone you like, and see if he does swear that it's a perfectly genuine stone."

"You mean it's a fake?" said the Saint.

"Fake my eye!" said Mr. Fallon, with emphatic if inelegant expressiveness. "It's a perfectly genuine diamond, the same as any other stone you'll ever seen. The only difference is that I made it. You know how diamonds are made?"

The Saint had as good an idea of how diamonds are made as Louie Fallon was ever likely to have; but it seemed as if Louie liked talking, and in such circumstances as that Simon Templar was the last man on earth to interfere with anyone's enjoyment. He shook his head blankly.

"I thought they sort of grew," he said vaguely.

"I don't know that I should put it exactly like that," said Louie. "I'll tell you how diamonds happen. Diamonds are just carbon — like coal, or soot, or — or—"

"Paper?" suggested the Saint helpfully.

Louie frowned.

"They're carbon," he said, "which is crystallised under pressure. When the earth was all sort of hot, like you read about in your history books — before it sort of cooled down and people started to live in it and things grew on it — there was a lot of carbon. Being hot, it burnt things, and when you burn things you usually get carbon. Well, after a time, when the earth started to cool down, it sort of shrunk, like — like—"

"A shirt when it goes to the wash?" said the Saint.

"Anyway, it shrunk," said Louie, yielding the point and passing on. "And what happened then?"

"It got smaller," hazarded the Saint.

"It caused terrific pressure," said Mr. Fallen firmly. "Just imagine it. Thousands of millions of tons of rock — and—"

"And rock."

"And rock, cooling down, and shrinking up, and getting hard. Well, naturally, any bits of carbon that were floating around in the rock got squeezed. So what happened?" demanded Louie, triumphantly reaching the climax of his lucid description.

He paused dramatically, and the Saint wondered whether he was expected to offer any serious solution to the riddle; but before he had really made up his mind, Mr. Fallon was solving the problem for him.

"I'll tell you what happened," said Mr. Fallon impressively, leaning over into a strategic position in which he could tap the Saint on the shoulder. Once again he paused, but there was no doubt that this hiatus at least was motivated solely by the requirements of theatrical suspense. "Diamonds!" said Mr. Fallon, with an air of patronizing pride which almost suggested that he personally had been responsible for the event.

The Saint took a draught from his glass, and gazed at him with that air of slightly perplexed awe which was one of the most precious assets in his infinitely varied stock of facial expressions. It was a gaze pregnant with so much ingenuous interest, such naive wonder and curiosity, that Mr. Fallon felt the cockles of his heart warming to a temperature at which, on a cold day, he would be tempted to dispense with his overcoat. Since he was not wearing an overcoat, he gave rein to his emotions by insisting that he should stand another round of drinks.

"Yes," he resumed, when he had refilled their glasses. "Diamonds. And that's how I make them — not," he admitted modestly, "that I mean I make the earth go hot and then cool down again. But I do the same thing on a smaller scale."

The Saint knitted his brows. It was the most ostentatious sign of a functioning brain that he could permit himself in the part he was playing.

"Now you tell me, I think I have heard something like that before," he said. "Hasn't somebody else done the same thing — I mean made synthetic diamonds by cooling chunks of iron under pressure?"

"I did hear of something on those lines," confessed Mr. Fallon magnanimously. "But the process wasn't any good. They could only make very small diamonds that weren't worth anything in the market and cost ten times as much as real ones. I make 'em with things that you can buy in any chemist's shop for a few pennies. I don't even need a proper laboratory. I could make 'em in your bathroom." He drank, wiped his lips and looked at the Saint suddenly with bright plaintive eyes. "You don't believe me," he said accusingly.

"Why — yes, of course I do," protested the Saint, changing his expression with a guilty start.

Mr. Fallon continued to shake his head.

"No, you don't," he insisted morbidly, "and I can't blame you. I know it sounds like a tall story. But I'm not a liar."

"Of course not," agreed the Saint hastily.

"I'm not a liar," insisted Mr. Fallon lingeringly, as if he was simply aching to be called one. "Anyone who calls me a liar is goin' to have to eat his words." He was silent for a moment, while the idea appeared to develop in his mind; and then he slued round in his seat abruptly, and tapped the Saint on the shoulder again.

"Look here — I'll prove it to you. You're a sport — we ran into each other just now as perfect strangers, and now here you are havin' a drink with me. I don't know whether you believe in concidences," said Louie, waxing metaphysical, "but you might be the very fellow I'm lookin' for. I like a chap who isn't too damned stand-offish to have a drink with another chap without being introduced, and when I like a chap there isn't a limit to what I wouldn't mind doin' for him. Why, you might be the very chap. Well, what d'you say?"

"I didn't say anything," said the Saint innocently.

"What d'you say I prove to you that I can make diamonds? If you can spare half an hour — it wouldn't take much more than that and you might find it interesting. Are you game?"

Simon Templar was game. To put it perhaps a trifle crudely, such occasions as this found him so game that a two-year-old pheasant would have had to rise exceedingly high to catch him. Life, he felt, was still very much worth living while blokes like Louie Fallen were almost falling over themselves with eagerness to call you a Chap. To follow up the metaphor with which he was allowed to open this episode, he considered that Mr. Fallon was certainly doing a swell line of clucking, and he was profoundly interested to find out exactly what brand of egg would be the fruit thereof.

Mr. Fallon, it appeared, was the proud tenant of an apartment in one of those streets running down between the Tivoli and the River which fall roughly within the postal address known as "Adelphi" because it sounds so much better than W. C. The rooms were expensively and tastefully furnished, and the Saint surmised that Louie had not furnished them. Somewhere in London there would probably be an outraged landlord looking for his rent — and perhaps also the more valuable of his rented chattels — when Mr. Fallon had finished with the premises; but his was not immediately Simon Templar's concern. He followed Louie into the living-room, where a bottle of whisky and two glasses were produced and suitably dealt with, and cheerfully prepared to continue with the role of open-mouthed listener which the situation demanded of him. This called for no very fatiguing effort, for the role of open-mouthed listener was one in which the Saint had perfected himself more years ago than he could easily remember.

"I told you I could make my diamonds in a bathroom," said Louie, "and that's exactly what I am doin' at the moment."

He led the way onwards, glass in hand, and Simon followed him good-humouredly. It was quite a classy bathroom, with a green marble bath and generous windows looking out over rows of smoke-stained housetops towards the Thames; and the materials that Louie Fallon used in making his chemical experiments were the only incongruous note in it. These consisted of an ancient and shabby marble-topped washstand, which had obviously started its new lease of life in a secondhand sale room, a fireproof crucible on a metal tripod, and a litter of test-tubes, burners, bottles and other paraphernalia which Simon did not deny were most artistically arranged.

"Just to show you," said Mr. Fallon generously, "I'll make a diamond for you now."

He went over to the washstand and picked up one of the bottles. "Magnesium," he said. He picked up another bottle. "Iron filings," he said. He picked up a third bottle and tipped a larger quantity of greyish powder on top of what he had taken from the first two, stirring the mixture on the marble table-top with a commonplace Woolworth teaspoon. "And the last thing," he said, "is the actual stuff that I make my diamonds with."

He picked up the crucible and held it below the level of the table, scraped his little mound of assorted powders into it, and turned round with didactic air.

"Now I'll tell you what happens," he said. "When you burn magnesium with iron filings you produce a temperature of thousands of degrees Fahrenheit. It isn't quite as hot as the earth was when it was all molten, but it's nearly as hot. That melts the iron filings; and it also fuses the other mixture I put in which is exactly the same chemically as the stuff that diamonds are made of."

He struck a match and applied it to the crucible. There was a sudden spurt of eye-achingly brilliant flame, accompanied by a faint hissing sound. Simon could feel the intense heat of the flare on his cheeks, even though he was standing several feet away; and he watched the crucible becoming incandescent before his eyes, turning from a dull red through blazing pink to a blinding white glow.

"So there," said Mr. Fallon, gazing at his fireworks with almost equally incandescent pride, "you have the heat. Right now that diamond powder is wrappin' itself up inside the melted iron filings. The mixture isn't quite as hot as it ought to be, because nobody has discovered how to produce as much heat as there was in the world back in those times when it was molten; but we have to make up for that by coolin' the thing off quicker. That's the reason why all the other experimenters have failed — they've never been able to cool things off quick enough. But I got over that."

From under the washstand he dragged out a gadget which the Saint had not noticed before. To the callously uninitiated eye it might have looked rather like a Heath Robinson contraption made up of a couple of old oil-cans and bits of battered gaspipe; but Louie handled it as tenderly as an anarchist exhibiting his favourite bomb.

"This is the fastest cooler that's ever been made," he said. "I won't try to tell you how it works, because you probably wouldn't understand, but it's very scientific. When I throw this nugget that's forming in the crucible into it it'll be cooled off quicker than anything's ever been cooled off before. From four thousand degrees Fahrenheit down to a hundred below zero, in less than half a second! Have you any idea what that means?"

Simon realised that it was time for him to show some rudimentary intelligence.

"I know," he said slowly. "It means—"

"It means," said Mr. Fallon, taking the words out of his mouth, "that you get a pressure of thousands of millions of tons inside that nugget of molten iron; and when you break it open the diamond's inside."

He lifted the lid of his oil-can contraption, picked up the crucible with a pair of long iron tongs, and poured out a blob of luminous liquid metal the size of a small pear. There was a loud fizzing noise accompanied by a great burst of steam; and Louie replaced the lid of his cooler and looked at the Saint triumphantly through the fog.

"Now," he said, "in half a minute you'll see it with your own eyes."

The Saint opened his cigarette-case and tapped a cigarette thoughtfully on his thumbnail.

"How on earth did you hit on that?" he asked, with wide-eyed admiration.

"I used to be an assistant in a chemist's shop when I was a boy," said Louie casually. As a matter of fact, this was perfectly true, but he did not mention that his employment had terminated abruptly when the chemist discovered that his assistant had been systematically whittling down the contents of the till whenever he was left alone in the shop.

"I always liked playin' around with things and tryin' experiments, and I always believed it'd be possible to make perfectly good synthetic diamonds whatever the other experts said. And now I've proved it."

This also, curiously enough, was partly true. Improbable as it may seem, Mr. Fallon had his dreams — dreams in which he could produce unlimited quantities of gold or diamonds simply by mixing chemicals together in a pail, or vast stacks of genuine paper money merely by turning a handle. The psychologist, delving into Louie's dream-life, would probably have found the particular form of swindle which Mr. Fallon had made his own inexorably predestined by these curiously childish fantasies — a kind of spurious and almost self-defensive satisfaction of a congenital urge for easy money.

He rolled up his sleeves and plunged his bare arms into the cooling gadget with the rather wistful expression which he always wore when performing that part of his task. When he stood up again he was clutching a round grey stone glistening with water; and for a moment or two he gazed at it dreamily. It was at this stage of the proceedings that Louie's histrionics invariably ran away with him — when, for two or three seconds, his imagination really allowed him to picture himself as the exponent of an earth-shaking scientific discovery, the genuine result of those futile experiments on which he had spent so much of his time and so much of the money which he had earned from the sham.

"There you are," he said. "There's your diamond — and any dealer in London would be glad to buy it. Here — take it yourself." He pressed the wet stone into Simon Templar's hand. "Show it to anyone you like, and if there's a dealer in London who wouldn't be glad to pay two hundred quid for it, I'll give you a thousand pounds." He picked up his glass again; and then, as if he had suddenly remembered the essential tone of his story, his face recovered its expression of uncontrollable gloom. "And I'm the unhappiest man in the world," he said lugubriously.

Simon raised his eyebrows.

"But good God!" he objected. "How on earth can you be unhappy if you can turn out a two-hundred-pound diamond every half-hour?"

Louie shook his head.

"Because I haven't a chance to spend the money," he replied.

He led the way back dejectedly into the living-room and threw himself into a chair, thoughtfully refilling his glass before he did so.

"You see," he said, when Simon Templar had taken the chair opposite him with his glass also refilled. "A thing like this has got to be handled properly. It's no good my just making diamonds and trying to sell them. I might get away with one or two, but if I brought a sackful of them into a shop and tried to sell 'em the buyer would start to wonder whether I was trying to get rid of some illicit stuff. He'd want to ask all sorts of questions about where I got 'em, and as likely as not he'd call in the police. And what does that mean? It means that either I've got to say nothing and probably get taken for a crook and put in prison—" Louie's features registered profound horror at this frightful possibility. "Or else I've got to give away my secret. And if I said that I made the diamonds myself, they'd want me to prove it; and if I proved it, everybody would know it could be done, and the bottom would fall out of the diamond market. If people knew that anybody could make diamonds for threepence a time, diamonds just wouldn't be worth anything any more."

Simon nodded. The argument was logical and provided a very intriguing impasse. He waited for Mr. Fallon to point the way out.

"What this thing needs," said Louie, duly coming up to expectations, "is someone to run it in a businesslike way. It's got to be scientific, just like the way the diamonds are made." Mr. Fallon had worked all this out for himself in his daydreams, and the recital was mechanically easy. "Someone would have to go off somewhere — not to South Africa, because that's too much controlled, but to South America maybe — and do some prospectin'. After a while he'd report that he'd found diamonds, and set up a mine. We'd set up a company and sell shares to the public, and after a bit the diamonds'd start comin' home and they could all be sold in the regular market quite legitimate."

"Why don't you do that?" inquired the Saint perplexedly.

"I've got no heart for it," said Louie with a sigh. "I'm not so young as I was; and besides, I never had any kind of head for these things. And I don't want to do it. I don't want to get myself tied up in a lot of business worries and office work. I've had that all my life. I want to enjoy myself — travel around and meet some girls and have a good time. Between you and I," said Mr. Fallon with a catch in his voice and tears glistening in his eyes, "the doctors tell me that I haven't long to live. I've had a hard life, and I want to make the best of what I have got left. Now, if I had a young fellow like yourself to help me…"

He leaned further back in his chair, with his eyes half dosed, and went on as if talking to himself: "It'd have to be a chap who could keep his mouth shut, a sport who wouldn't mind doing a bit of hard work for a lot of money — someone that I could just leave to manage everything while I went off and had a good time. He'd have to have a bit of money of his own to invest in the company, just to make everything square and aboveboard and legal, and in a year or so he'd be a bloomin' millionaire ridin' around in a Rolls Royce with chauffeurs and everything. You'd think it'd be easy to find a fellow like that, but it isn't. There aren't many chaps that I take a likin' to — not chaps that I feel I could trust with anything as big as this. That's why when I took a fancy to you, I wondered…" Mr. Fallon sighed again, a sigh of heart-rending self-pity. "But I suppose it's no use. Here am I with the greatest discovery in modern science, and I can't do anything with it. I suppose I was just born unlucky, like I told you."

The Saint was sublimely sure that Louie Fallon was unlucky, but he did not dream of saying so. He allowed his face to become illumined with a light of breathless cupidity which was everything that Mr. Fallon had desired.

"Well," he said hesitantly, "if you've really taken a fancy to me and I can do anything to help you—"

Louie stared at him for a moment incredulously, as if he had never dared to hope that such a miracle could happen.

"No," he said at length, covering his eyes wearily, "it couldn't be true. My luck can't have changed. You wouldn't do a thing like that for a perfect stranger."

During the conversation that followed, however, it appeared that Louie's luck had indeed changed. His new-found friend, it seemed, was quite prepared to do such a service for a perfect stranger. They talked for another hour, discussing ways and means, and occasionally referring in a gentlemanly way to terms of business; then they went out to lunch in an aura of mutual admiration and regard, and discussed the fortunes which they would assist each other to make; and when they finally separated, the Saint had agreed to meet Mr. Fallon again the following day, bringing with him (in cash) the sum of two thousand pounds which he was to invest in the new industry, on an equal partership basis, as a guarantee of his good faith.

Simon went off with Louie Fallon's diamond in his pocket. As a purely formal precaution, he took it round to a diamond merchant of his acquaintance who pronounced it to be unquestionably genuine; and then he proceeded somewhat light-headedly to make some curious purchases.

The clouds of ill-starred melancholy seemed to have dispersed themselves from Mr. Fallon's sky overnight; for when he opened the door to Simon Templar the next day he was beaming. The flat, Simon noticed, was in some disorder, and there were three freshly labelled suitcases standing in the hall.

"I hope I'm not late," said the Saint anxiously.

"Only a minute or two," said Louie heartily. "It's my own fault that it seems longer. I was just nervous. I guess I couldn't believe that my luck had really changed until I saw you on the step. You see, I've got my tickets and everything — I'm ready to go as soon as everything's fixed up."

The Saint believed him. As soon as everything had been fixed up in the way Louie intended, Mr. Fallon would be likely to go as fast and far as the conveniences of modern travel would take him. Simon made vague noises of sympathy and encouragement, and followed his benefactor into the living-room.

"There's the contract, all drawn up ready," said Louie, producing a large and impressive-looking document with fat red seals attached to it. "All you've got to do is to sign on the dotted line and put in your capital, and you're in charge of the whole business. After that, if you send me two or three hundred pounds a week out of the profits, I'll be quite happy, and I don't much care what you do with the rest."

With all the eagerness that was expected of him, Simon sat down at the table, glanced over the document, and signed his name over the dotted line as requested. Then he took out his wallet and counted out a sheaf of crisp new banknotes; and Louie picked them up and counted them again with slightly unsteady fingers.

"Well, now," said the Saint, "if that's all settled, hadn't you better show me your process?"

"I've written it all out for you—"

"Oh, yes, I'd want that. But couldn't we try it over now just to make sure that I understand it properly?"

"Certainly, my dear chap — certainly." Mr. Fallon pushed up his sleeve to look at his watch, and appeared to make a calculation. "I don't know whether I'll have time to see the experiment right through to the end, but once you've got it started you can't possibly go wrong. It's absolutely foolproof. Come along."

They went into the bathroom and Simon poured out magnesium and iron filings into the crucible exactly as he had seen Louie doing the previous day. The composition of the powder from which the diamonds were actually made gave him more trouble — it was apparently made up of the contents of various other unlabelled bottles, mixed up in certain complicated proportions. It was at this stage in the proceedings that the Saint appeared to become unexpectedly stupid and clumsy. He poured out too much from one bottle and spilt most of the contents of another on to the floor.

"You'll have to be more careful than that," said Louie, pursing his lips, "but I can see you've got the idea. Well, now, if I'm goin' to catch my train—"

"I'd like to finish the job," said the Saint, "even if the mixture has gone wrong. After all, I may as well know if there are any other mistakes I'm likely to make." He put a match to his mixture and stepped back while it flared up. Louie watched this studiously.

"I don't expect you'll get any results," he said, "but it can't do any harm for you to get some practice. Now as soon as the thing's properly white hot—"

He supervised the tipping of the contents of the crucible into the cooler indulgently. He had no cause for alarm. The proportions of the mixture were admittedly wrong, which was a perfectly sound reason to give for the inevitable failure of the experiment. He puffed at his cigar complacently, while the Saint went down on his knees and groped around in the cooling tank.

Then something seemed to go wrong with the mechanism of Mr. Fallon's heart, and for a full five seconds he was unable to breathe. His eyes bulged, and the smug tolerance froze out of his face as if it had been nipped in the bud by the same antarctic zephyr that was playing weird tricks up and down his spine. For the Saint had straightened up again with an exclamation of delight; and in the palm of his hand he displayed three little round grey pebbles.

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

"Here, wait a minute," he said hoarsely. "That isn't possible!"

"Anyway, it's happened," answered the Saint with irrefutable logic.

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

"Try it again," he said huskily. "Can you remember exactly what you did last time?"

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

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

Finally he stopped his pacing, and turned round.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Five hundred pounds isn't a lot of money," said the Saint callously.

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

"I'll go round to the bank and get it for you right away," he said.

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

"Now I shall have to get to work," said Mr. Fallon, indicating that he wished to be alone.

"What about my contract as manager?" murmured the Saint.

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

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

"I've made my fortune, Sol," he declared somewhat hysterically. "All this thing needs is some proper financing. Watch me, and I'll show you what I can do."

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

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

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

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