Charteris, Leslie by The Saint Goes On

Author:The Saint Goes On
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2012-09-30T22:38:03.129000+00:00

Part III

THE CASE OF THE

FRIGHTENED

INNKEEPER

"BUSINESS" took Simon Templar to Penzance, though nobody ever knew exactly what he had to do there. He took Hoppy Uniatz with him for company. But Hoppy never saw him do it. Simon

parked him in the bar of a convenient pub for an hour, and that was that. For all that this story

can record, he may have spent the hour in another pub across the street, talking to nobody and

watching nothing. The Saint's business was as irregular as himself, and directed by the same

incalculable twists of motive: he was liable to do a great many important things with apparent

aimlessness, and a great many unimportant things with the most specious and circumstantial

parade of reasons.

It is about two hund red and eigh ty miles fro m Lon don to Penzance, which the Saint

drove in five hours, including one break for a cigarette and a drink in Taunton; and after

that one hour for which Hoppy Uniatz was alone, he climbed back into his car as if he was

cheerfully prepared to drive the same two hundred and eighty miles home without further

delay.

The chronicler, whose one object it is to conceal no fact which by its unfair suppression

might deceive any one of the two hundred and fifty thousand earnest readers of this epic, is able

to reveal that this performance had never entered Simon Templar's head; although the Saint

would have done it without turning a hair if it had happened to be necessary. But he did not

say so; and Mr. Uniatz, citizen of a country whose inhabitants regard a thousand-mile jaunt in

much the same light as the average London er regards a trip to Brighton, would have been

quite unperturbed whatever the Saint had announced for his programme. Hardly anything was

capable of perturbing Mr. Uniatz except a call for mental effort lasting more than five

consecutive seconds, and that was an ordeal to which he had never been known to submit himself

voluntarily.

He sat placidly at the Saint's side while the huge snarling Hirondel droned eastwards along

the coast, chewing the butt of an incredibly rank cigar in a paradise of utter intellectual vacancy which allowed his battered features to relax in a calm that h ad its own rugged beauty,

being very mu ch like something that Epstein might have conceived in a sportive mood. They

left the rocks of Cornwall behind them and entered the rolling pastures and red earth of Devon,

diving sometimes through the cool shadows of a wood, sometimes catching sight of a wedge

of sea sparkling in the sunlight between a fold of the hills. Simon Templar, who was

constitutionally unable to regard the highways of England as anything but a gigantic road-face

circuit laid out for his personal use, did nothing to encourage a placid relaxation in anybody

who rode with him; but Hoppy had sat in that car often enough to learn that any other atittude

could lead only to a nervous breakdown. Only once was he jarred out of his phlegmatic

fatalism, when the Saint sounded his horn and pulled out to pass a big speeding saloon on a

straight stretch beyond Sid-mouth.

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