Enter the Saint by Leslie Charteris Read Free Book Online Page B

next man was upon him. The waiter flung up his arms to guard his head, and tried to rush into a grapple; but the Saint stepped back and reversed the swing of his chair abruptly. It swerved under the man’s guard and crashed murderously into his ribs. Three… .
    The next man ran slap into a sledge-hammer left that hurled him a dozen feet away. The other two hesitated, but the Saint was giving no breathing space. He leapt in at the nearest man with a pile-driving, left-right-left tattoo to the solar plexus.
    As the tough crumpled up with a choking groan under that battering-ram assault, some sixth sense flashed the Saint a warning. He leapt to one side, and the chair Hayn had swung to his head swished harmlessly past him, the vigour of the blow toppling Hayn off his balance. The Saint assisted his downfall with an out-flung foot which sent the man hurtling headlong.
    The last man was still coming on, but warily. He ducked the Saint’s lead, and replied with a right swing to the side of the head which gingered the Saint up a peach. Simon Templar decided that his reputation was involved, and executed a beautiful feint with his left which gave him an opening to lash in a volcanic right squarely upon the gangster’s nose. As the man dropped, the Saint whipped round and caught Stannard.
    “Fight, you fool!” the Saint hissed in his ear. “This is for local colour!” Stannard clinched, and then the Saint broke away and firmly but regretfully clipped him on the ear.
    It was not one of the Saint’s heftiest punches, but it was hard enough to knock the youngster down convincingly; and then the Saint looked round hopefully for something else to wallop and found nothing.
    Hayn was rising again, shakily, and so were those of the five roughs who were in a fit state to do so, but there was no notable enthusiasm to renew the battle. “Any time any of you bad cheeses want any more lessons in rough-housing,” drawled the Saint, a little breathlessly, “you’ve only got to drop me a postcard and I’ll be right along.”
    This time, there was no attempt to bar his way.
    He collected hat, gloves, and stick from the cloakroom, and went through the upstairs lounge. As he reached the door, he met Braddon returning. “Hullo, Sweetness,” said the Saint genially. “Pass right down the car and hear the new joke the Boys of the Burg downstairs are laughing at.”
    Braddon was still trying to guess the cause for and meaning of this extraordinary salutation by a perfect stranger, when the Saint, without any haste or heat, but so swiftly and deftly that the thing was done before Braddon realized what was happening, had reached out and seized the brim of Braddon’s hat and forced it well down over his eyes. Then, with a playful tweak of Braddon’s nose, and a cheery wave of his hand to the dumbfounded Danny, he departed.
    Danny was not a quick mover, and the street outside was Saintless by the time Braddon had struggled out of his hat and reached the door.
    When his vocabulary was exhausted, Braddon went downstairs in search of Hayn, and stopped open-mouthed at the wreckage he saw.
    Mr. Hayn, turning from watching the Saint’s triumphant vanishment, had swung sharply on Stannard. The Saint’s unscathed exit had left Hayn in the foulest of tempers. All around him, it seemed, an army of tough waiters in various stages of disrepair were gathering themselves to their feet with a muttered obbligato of lurid oaths. Well, if there wasn’t an army of them, there were five-five bone-hard heavyweights-and that ought to have been enough to settle any ordinary man, even on the most liberal computation of odds. But the Saint had simply waded right through them, hazed and manhandled and roasted them, and walked out without a scratch. Hayn would have taken a bet that the Saint’s tie wasn’t even a millimetre out of a centre at the end of it. The Saint had made fools of them without turning a hair.
    Hayn vented his exasperation on Jerry, and even the