Saint14 - The Saint Goes On by Leslie Charteris

Author:Leslie Charteris
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2012-08-29T12:44:46+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 hundred and eighty miles from London 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 Londoner 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 had its own rugged beauty, being very much 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

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