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

lips.
    “McGuire
calling,” said the burglar thickly.
    “Well?”
    “No
luck, guv’nor. It ain’t here. The Saint’s out, so I had plenty of
time. I couldn’t ‘ve helped findin’ it if it’d been here.”
    There was a
long pause.
    “All
right,” said the voice curtly. “Go home and wait for further
orders. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
    The line
went down with a click.
    “And
I wouldn’t mind betting,” said the Saint, as he put the
telephone back, “that that’s the easiest hundred quid you ever
earned.”
    “Well,
yer got wot yer wanted, didn’t yer?” he snarled. “Come on an’ take
orf these ruddy bracelets an’ let me go.”
    The Saint
shook his head.
    “Not
quite so fast, brother,” he said. “You might think of calling up your boss again and
having another chat with him before you went
to bed, and I’d hate him to get worried at this hour of the night. You stay right where you are and get some
of that beauty sleep which you need so badly, because after what I’m going to do tomorrow your boss may be looking for you with
a gun!”
     
    VII
     
    E ARLY RISING had never
been one of the Saint’s favourite virtues, but there were times when
business looked more important than leisure. It was eleven o’clock the
next morning—an hour at which he was usually beginning to think
drowsily about breakfast—when he sauntered into the apothecarium of Mr
Henry Osbett.
    In honour
of the occasion, he had put on his newest and most beautiful suit,
a creation in pearl-grey fresco over which his tailor had shed
tears of ecstasy in the fitting room; his piratically tilted hat was unbelievably
spotless; his tie would have humbled the
gaudiest hues of dawn. He had also put on,
at less expense, a vacuous expression and an inanely chirpy grin that completed the job of typing him
to the point where his uncle, the gouty duke, loomed almost visible in his background.
    The
shifty-eyed young assistant who came to the counter might have been
pardoned for keeling over backwards at the spectacle; but he
only recoiled half a step and uttered a perfunctory “Yes,
sir?”
    He looked
nervous and preoccupied. Simon wondered whether this
nervousness and preoccupation might have had some connection with a stout and
agitated-looking man who had entered the shop a few yards ahead of the Saint himself. Simon’s brightly vacant eyes took in the
essential items of the topography
without appearing to notice anything—the counter with its showcases and displays of patent pills and liver salts,
the glazed compartment at one end where presumably prescriptions were
dispensed, the dark doorway at the
other end which must have led to the intimate fastnesses of the establishment. Nowhere was the stout man
visible; therefore, unless he had
dissolved into thin air, or disguised himself
as a bottle of bunion cure, he must have passed through that one doorway.…
The prospects began to look even more
promising than the Saint had expected… .
    “This
jolly old tea, old boy,” bleated the Saint, producing a package
from his pocket. “A friend of mine—chappie named Teal, y’know,
great detective and all that sort of thing—bought it off you last night and
then he wouldn’t risk taking it. He was goin’ to throw it down the
drain; but I said to him ‘Why waste a perfectly good half-dollar, what?’ I said.
‘I’ll bet they’ll change it for a cake of soap, or something,’ I said. I’ll
take it in and change it myself,’ I told him. That’s right, isn’t
it? You will change it, won’t you?”
    The
shifty-eyed youth was a bad actor. His face had gone white, then red, and
finally compromised by remaining blotchy. He gaped at the packet as if he was really starting to believe that there were miracles in Miracle Tea.
    “We—we
should be glad to change it for you, sir,” he gibbered.
    “Fine!”
chortled the Saint. “That’s just what I told jolly old Teal.
You take the tea, and give me a nice box of soap. I expect Teal