Featuring the Saint by Leslie Charteris Read Free Book Online

which the Saint made no attempt to alleviate; and in the same spirit he took Stella Dornford by taxi to the address that Lemuel had given him.
    This was a huge, gloomy house nearly two miles away from the centre of fashionable gaiety, and anything less like a night club Simon Templar had rarely seen.
    He did not immediately open the door of the taxi. Instead, he surveyed the house interestedly through a window of the cab; and then he turned to the girl.
    “I’m sure Jacob Einsmann isn’t a very nice man,” he said. “In fact, he and I are definitely going to have words. But I’m ready to leave you at a hotel before I go in.”
    She tossed her head and opened the door herself.
    The Saint followed her up the steps of the house. She had rang the bell while he was paying off the taxi, and the door was unbarred as he reached her side.
    “Herr Einsmann wishes to see you also, sir.”
    The Saint nodded and passed in. The butler-he, like the porter at the Calumet Club, of hallowed memory, looked as if he had been other things in his time-led them down a bare, sombre hall, and opened a door.
    The girl passed through it first, and Simon heard her exclamation before he saw Einsmann.
    Then her hand gripped his arm.
    “I don’t like this,” she said.
    Simon smiled. He had read the doubt in her eyes when she first saw the house, and had liked the dam’-fool obstinacy that had marched her into it against his advice and her better judgment. But, while he approved her spirit, he had deliberately taken advantage of it to make sure that she should have her lesson.
    “So!” Jacob Einsmann rose from his chair, rubbing his hands gently together. His eyes were fixed upon the girl. “You vould not listen to it vot I say in London, no, you vere so prrroud, but now you yourself to me hof come, aind’t it?”
    6
“Aye, laad, we’ve coom,” drawled the Saint.
    “So you hof got it vot you vanted, yes, no, aind’t it?”
    Einsmann turned his head.
    “Ach! I remember you.”
    “And I you,” said the Saint comfortably. “In fact, I spent a considerable time on the trip over composing a little song about you, in the form of a nursery rhyme for the instruction of small children, which, with your permission, I will now proceed to sing. It goes like this:
” ‘Dear Jacob is an unwashed mamser,
We like not his effluvium, sir;
If we can tread on Jacob’s graft,
Das wird jja wirklich fabelhaft.’
    For that effort in trilingual verse I have already awarded myself the Swaffer Biscuit.” Einsmann leered.
    “For vonce, Herr Saint, you hof a misdake made.”
    “Saint?”
    The girl spoke, at Simon’s shoulder, startled, half incredulous. He smiled round at her.
    “That’s right, old dear. I am that well-known institution. Is this the Boche you mentioned at the Cri-the bird who got fresh at the Calumet?”
    She nodded.
    “I didn’t know—”
    “You weren’t meant to,” said Simon coolly. “That was just part of the deception. But I guessed it as soon as Lemuel gave me your name.”
    “You vos clever, Herr Saint,” Einsmann said suavely.
    “I vos,” the Saint admitted modestly. “It only wanted a little putting two and two together. There was that dinner the other day, for instance. Very well staged for my benefit, wasn’t it? All that trout-spawn and frog-bladder about your cabarets, and Lemuel warbling about the difficulty of getting English girls abroad. … I made a good guess at the game then; and I’d have laid anyone ten thousand bucks to a slush nickel, on the spot, that it wouldn’t be long before I was asked to ferry over a few fair maidens in Lemuel’s machine. I had your graft taped right out days ago, and I don’t see that the present variation puts me far wrong. The only real difference is that Francis is reckoning to have to find another aviator to carry through the rest of the contract-aind’t it?”
    His hand went lazily to his hip pocket; and then something jabbed him sharply in the ribs, and he looked