The Saint Goes On by Leslie Charteris Page B

lips, and then suddenly remained very still.
    Another early customer had entered the office. Simon heard his footsteps crossing the floor and passing behind him, but he did not look round at once. The footsteps travelled along to the Poste Restante section, a couple of yards away, and stopped there.
    “Have you anything for Pond?”
    The soft voice came clearly to Simon’s ears, and he lifted his eyes sidelong. The man was leaning on the counter, like himself, so that his back was half turned; but the Saint’s heart stopped beating for a moment.
    “What is the first name?” asked the clerk, clearing out the contents of one of the pigeon-holes behind him.
    “Joshua.”
    Rather slowly and dreamily, the Saint hitched himself up off his elbow and straightened up. Behind his heaped breakwater of reference books, the steaming telegraph official was muttering something profane and plaintive; but the Saint never heard it. He saw the cardboard box which he had posted pushed over to its claimant, and moved along the counter without a sound. His hand fell on the man’s shoulder.
    “Would you like to see a good-looking ghost?” he drawled, with a throb of uncontrollable beatitude in his voice.
    The man spun round with a kind of gasp that was almost a sob. It was Junior Inspector Desmond Pryke.
    X
    THE writer, whose positively Spartan economy of verbiage must often have been noted and admired by every cultured student, recoils instinctively from the temptation to embellish the scene with a well-chosen anthology of those apt descriptive adjectives with which his vocabulary is so richly stocked. The pallor of flabbergasted faces, the glinting of wild eyes, the beading of cold perspirations, the trembling of hands, the tingling of spines, the sinking of stomachs, the coming and going of breath in little short pants-all those facile cliches which might lure less ruggedly disciplined scribes into the pitfall of endeavouring to make every facet of the situation transparent to the most nit-witted reader-none of these things, on this occasion at least, have sufficient enticement to seduce him. His readers, he assures himself, are not nit-wits: they are highly gifted and intelligent citizens, of phenomenal perspicacity and acceleration on the uptake. The situation, he feels, stated even in the baldest terms, could hide none of its facets from them.
    It hid none of them from Simon Templar, or from Junior Inspector Pryke. But Simon Templar was the first to speak again.
    “What are you doing here, Desmond?” he asked gently.
    Pryke licked his lips, without answering. And then the question was repeated, but Simon Templar did not repeat it.
    Chief Inspector Teal stepped out from behind a screen which cut off the Savings Bank section of the counter, and repeated it. His hands were in the pockets of his unnecessary raincoat, and his movement had the same suggestion of weary and reluctant effort that his movements always had; but there was something in the set of his round plump jaw and the narrowness of his sleepy-lidded eyes which explained beyond any need of words that he had watched the whole brief incident from beginning to end, and had missed none of the reactions which a police officer on legitimate business need not have shown.
    “Yes-what are you doing?” he said.
    Pryke’s head jerked round again, and his face went another shade greyer. For a further interval of thrumming seconds he seemed to be struggling to find his voice; and the Saint smiled.
    “I told you the High Fence would be here to collect his boodle, Claud,” he said; and looked at Pryke again. “Qnincey told me,” he said.
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Pryke had got some kind of control over his throat, but there was a quiver in his breathing which made odd little breaks in the sentence. “I heard that there were some stolen jewels here–—”
    “Who from?” Teal asked quietly.
    “From a man I found on the theory I was working on. You told