The Saint and Mr Teal (Once More the Saint)

Simon took out his cigarette case and moved over to sit down on a conveniently shaped dome of metal.

"All the same, Professor, if you wouldn't mind --"

The old man leapt towards him with a kind of yelp Simon drew back hurriedly; and the professor glared at him, breathing heavily.

" Dammit, if you want to commit suicide, must you come and do it here?"

"Suicide?" repeated the Saint vaguely. "I hadn't --"

" Pish!" squawked the professor.

He snatched up a loose length of wire and tossed it onto the dome on which Simon had been preparing to rest himself. There was a momentary crackle of hot blue flame-and the wire ceased to resemble anything like wire. It simply trickled down the side of the dome in the shape of a few incandescent drops of molten metal; and Simon Templar mopped his brow.

He retreated towards the clear space around the door with some alacrity.

"Thanks very much, Professor," he remarked. "Have you any more firework effects like that?"

"Bah!" croaked the professor huffily.

He went back to his bench and wiped his hands on a piece of rag, with every symptom of a society welfare worker removing the contamination of an afternoon with the deserving poor.

"Is there anything else you want to know?" he barked; and the Saint braced himself for the shot that had to be taken in the dark.

"When are we going to see some gold?"

The professor seemed on the verge of an outburst beside which his former demonstrations would pale into polite tea-table chatter. And then with a tremen­dous effort he controlled himself. He addressed the Saint with the dreadfully laboured restraint of a doting mother taking an interest in the precocities of a rival parent's prodigy and thinking what an abominable little beast he is.

"When you can use your eyes. When you can get some glasses powerful enough to show you something smaller than a haystack. Or else when you can improve on my methods and make gold run out of the bathroom tap. That's when." The old man stalked across to a cupboard and flung it open. "There. Look again. Try to see it. Borrow a microscope if you have to. But for heaven's sake, young man"--the quavering voice lost some of its self-control and rose two shrill notes-"for heaven's sake, don't utter any more blithering idiocies like that in my laboratory."

Simon stared into the cupboard.

He had never dreamed of seeing wealth like that concentrated in tangible form under his eyes. From floor to ceiling the cupboard was stacked high with it --great glittering yellow ingots the size of bricks, reflecting the lamplight in one soaring block of tawny sleekness like the realization of a miser's dream. The sight of it dazed him. There must have been over a million pounds' worth of the metal heaped carelessly into that tall rectangular cavity in the wall. And back and forth across his memory flashed the inane repetition of the dying young roué in Paris: "He says Binks can make gold . . ."

The professor's cracked voice broke in on him through a kind of fog.

"Well? Can you see it? Have you found your eyes at last? Eh? Does it begin to satisfy you?" -- Simon had to fight for the smooth use of his tongue.

"Naturally, that's-er-very satisfactory, Dr. Quell; but --"

"Very satisfactory! I should think so." The professor snorted. "Half a hundred weight every hour. Very satisfactory. Faugh! You're a fool-that's what you are. Dammit, if the rest of the Secret Service are as thick-headed as you, I don't know why the country should bother to have a Secret Service."

The Saint stood very still.

But he felt as if a light bomb had exploded inside him. The mystery was opening out before his eyes with a suddenness that could only be compared with an explosion. The detached items of it whirled around like scattered aircraft in the beam of a searchlight and fell luminously into formation with a precision that was uncanny. Everything fitted in its place: the murder of Brian Quell, the King's Messenger who lay dead in an adjoining room, the man who could make gold . . . the man called "Binks"-a queer nickname to be given to such a brilliant and irritable old magician by his dissolute young brother! And that last mordant reference to the Secret Service: an idea that was worthy of the genius of Mr. Jones-so much simpler, so much more ingenious and effective than the obvious and hackneyed alternative of threats and torture. . . . Most astounding of all, the proof that the essential pivot of the thing was true. Sylvester Quell-"Binks" could make gold. He had made it-hundredweights of it. He was making more.

Simon heard him grousing on in the same cracked querulous voice.

"I don't know why I came here. I could have done better in my own laboratory. Look after me, eh? With the intelligence you've got, you couldn't look after yourself. What use d'you think you are? Why don't you go away and let me do my work? You're worse than that other man, with his stupid questions and his schoolroom tests. Does he think I don't know real gold when I make it ?"