The Saint and Mr Teal (Once More the Saint)

Mr. Ronald Nilder left London the next morning, as a matter of history-alone, and driving the modest two-year-old Buick which was the limit of his ostenta­tion on the road. Simon Templar, also as a matter of history, went with him-though Mr. Nilder did not know this.

The preparation of successful buccaneering raids on the aforesaid members of the ungodly requires an extensive knowledge of the victims' habits. The actual smacking of them on the nose is very spectacular and entertaining to behold; but although it is those high spots of privateering that the chronicler is happiest to record, it is still tediously true that if there were no dull periods of preparation there would be no high spots. You have to get to the top of the Eiffel Tower before you can dive off, and the elevator is often out of order.

Simon figured it was a nice day for a drive. London was in the grip of its brief summer. From Aldgate to the Brompton Road, locked lines of grumbling traffic edged along their routes in rackety crawls of a few feet at a time, and subsided again into jammed immobility with a ceaseless belching of blue smoke and mephitic fumes-an unforgettable procession of tribute to the singular genius of the authorities who had organized enormous gangs of workmen to dig up roads and excavate new and superfluous Underground stations at every point where their activities could set a cap­stone on the paralytic confusion. The slobbering sultans of Whitehall thought about the colossal tax on petrol, and rubbed their greasy hands gleefully at the idea of the tens of thousands of gallons that were being spewed out into space for the pleasure of keeping engines run­ning between two-yard snail's-rushes; while the perspir­ing public stifled in the fetid atmosphere, and wondered dumbly what it was all about-being constitutionally incapable of asking why their money should be paid into the bank balances of traffic commissioners nomi­nally employed to see that such conditions should not exist. London, in short, was just the same as it always was, except for the temperature; and the Saint felt almost kindly disposed towards Mr. Nilder as the dusty Buick picked up speed as they left Kingston, and he was led rapidly out into the cleaner air of Surrey.

With these bolshevistic reflections to divert him, the Saint had an easy part to play as the hind quarters of a loose tandem that headed by the most direct road to Bursledon. Mr. Nilder did not know the Saint's car, and he did not know the Saint; and Simon made no particular effort to hide himself. After all, there is nothing very startling about two motorists trailing to the same destination at approximately the same average speed, and the Saint did not feel furtive that morning.

They ran into Bursledon with fifty yards between them, and there Mr. Nilder's car swung off sharply to the right down a lane that led along the backs of the many dockyards that line the river. Simon drove on Across the bridge, parked at the side of the road, and returned on foot.

He stood in the middle of the bridge and leaned his elbows on the parapet, gazing down along the lines of houseboats and miscellaneous other craft that were moored in the stream. The mingled smells of paint and tar and sea water drifted to his nostrils down the slight sultry breeze, and he could hear the clunk of spasmodic hammering from one of the yards on his right. Somehow it brought back to him a nostalgia of other and perhaps better days when he had been free to go down to limpid tropical seas under the swelling white sails of a schooner and his forays against the ungodly had been fought under the changing skies of forbidden pearling grounds. All at once that twist of retrospect made him envy the men he had left behind-bad men and all. And for one moment of memory he felt tired of the grubby ratting through smirched city streets which had claimed him for so long. . . .

And then he saw a dinghy putting out from the shore, and Mr. Ronald Nilder in the stern.

His cigarette canted up alertly, and the blue far-seeing eyes ranged out over the water. In a few moments he was able to pick out the dinghy's objective-a trim white fifty-foot motor cruiser that rode lazily at its moorings in midstream. It looked fast-faster than anything else in the perspective-and at the same time it had a sweetly proportioned breadth of beam that guaranteed it seaworthy as well.

The Saint hunched himself off the parapet and strolled along to the lane down which Nilder's car had disappeared. Wandering through the yards, he had glimpses of the cruiser which showed him Ronald Nilder's progress in a series of illuminating snapshots.