The Saint and Mr Teal (Once More the Saint)

"You will recall, perhaps, that Stride described how he was attacked in his cabin on the Claudette by this man Templar, and that significant mention of a knife that was alleged to have been thrown into a door. Did you hear Sergeant Hancock give evidence that he examined the door in the saloon of the Claudette, and found the mark of a" knife having been driven deeply into it?"

"Yes."

" How would you account for that ?"

"If you ask me, I should say that a man like Stride might well have foreseen the possibility of accidents, and he could easily have prepared that mark to sub­stantiate his story in case of trouble."

It was on this point that the greatest weakness of the case for the prosecution seemed to rest. Simon Templar was recalled before the end, and his evidence reëxamined.

"You have admitted that you went out to the Luxor on the night in question with the intention of assaulting Osman?"

"I've never denied it," said the Saint.

"Why, if you were so anxious to take the law into your own hands, did you confine your attentions to the deceased?"

"Because I'd heard of him, and I hadn't heard of Stride. Mr. Smithson Smith told me about Osman- that's already been given in evidence."

"And you," said counsel, with deliberate irony, "were immediately filled with such a passion for justice that you couldn't sleep until you had thrashed this monster that Osman was represented to you to be?"

"I thought it would be rather a rag," said the Saint, with a perfectly straight face.

"It has been suggested that you were the man who branded Osman five years ago-was that also intended to be rather a rag?"

"I never met the man before in my life."

"You have heard Galbraith Stride say that you told him that you had done that ?"

"He must be dotty," said the Saint-a reply that earned him a three-minute lecture from the learned judge.

In his closing speech, the counsel for the Crown suggested that the difficulty might not be so great as it appeared.

"In this case," he said, "the only discrepancies which you need to take into consideration are those between the evidence given by Mr. Clements and Mr. Templar, and the story told by the prisoner. It is my submission to you that the defense has in no way succeeded in shaking the credibility of those two witnesses; and when you remember, in discarding the evidence of the prisoner that it is not supported by any other witness at any point, and that the only alternative to discarding it as the fantastic story of a man lying desperately to save his neck is to regard all the stories of all the other witnesses as nothing short of a deliberate conspiracy to send an innocent man to the gallows-then, ladies and gentle­men of the jury, in my humble submission, there is only one conclusion at which any reasonable person can arrive."

The jury was away for three hours; but to the re­porters in the crowded press seats it was a foregone conclusion. The fingerprints of Galbraith Stride had been found on the gun, and that seemed to clinch it.

So they found him guilty, as we know; and the warders had to hold him up when the judge put on the black cap.

CHAPTER IX

THREE weeks later an early post brought Toby Hali­dom a letter.

He was awake to receive it; for during that night the story as it concerned him had dragged through its last intolerable lap. It was the end of three weeks of dreadful waiting-three weeks in which the lines of strain that had marked themselves on the face he loved had been etched in indelible lines of acid on his own memory. It was not that either of them bore any more affection for the man who had made his infamous bargain with Abdul Osman, and who was now awaiting the final irrevocable summons of the law; Galbraith Stride had placed himself beyond that; but they had known him personally, eaten at his table, seen him walking and talking as a human being of the same race as themselves instead of the impersonal deformed specimen in a glass case which the criminologists were already making of him, and they would not have been human themselves if that period of waiting for the relentless march of the law had not preyed on their waking and sleeping hours like an intermittent nightmare. And that night had been the last and worst of all.