Saint Intervenes

CONTENTS

I
     
The Ingenuous Colonel

II
   
The Unfortunate Financier

III
     
The Newdick Helicopter

IV
      
The Prince of Cherkessia
     
V
      
The Treasure of Turk’s Lane

VI
      
The Sleepless Knight

 
VII
       
The
Uncritical Publisher

VIII
      
The
Noble Sportsman

 
IX
      
The Damsel in Distress

X
      
The Loving Brothers

 
XI
      
The
Tall Timber

 
XII
      
The Art
Photographer

XIII
    
The Man Who Liked Toys

XIV
      
The
Mixture as Before

The villains in this
book are entirely imaginary,
and have no relation to any living
person.

I

The
Ingenuous Colonel

Lieut.-Colonel
Sir George Uppingdon, it must be admitted,
was not a genuine
knight; neither, as a matter of fact, was
he a genuine colonel.
This is not to say that he thought that
sandbags contained the
material for mixing trench mortar, or
that an observation post was a species
of flagpole on which
inquisitive brigadiers hung at half-mast; but
his military ex
perience was certainly limited to a brief period during
the lat
ter days of the war when conscription had gathered him up
and set him
to the uncongenial task of peeling potatoes at
Aldershot.

Apart from
that not inglorious interlude of strengthening
the stomachs of the
marching armies, his career had been far
less impressive than
the name he passed under seemed to in
dicate. Pentonville had housed him on
one occasion, and he
had also taken one short holiday at Maidstone.
Nevertheless,
although the expensive public school which had taught him
his practical arithmetic had long since erased his name from
its
register of alumni, he had never lost his well-educated and
aristocratic
bearing, and with the passing of time had added
to them a magnificent
pair of white moustachios which were
almost as valuable to him in his
career.

A slight
tinge of the old-fashioned conservatism which characterised his style of dress
clung equally limpet-like to the
processes of his mind.

“These
new-fangled stunts are all very well,” he said dog
gedly.
“But what happens to them? You work them once,
and they receive a
great deal of publicity, and then you can
never use them again.
How many of them will last as long as our tried and proved old friends?”

His
companion on that occasion, an equally talented Mr.
Sidney
Immelbern—whose real name, as it happens, was Sid
ney
Immelbern—regarded him gloomily.

“That’s
the trouble with you, George,” he said. “It’s the
one thing
which has kept you back from real greatness. You
can’t get it into
your head that we’ve got to move with the
times.”

“It
has also kept me out of a great deal of trouble,” said
the Colonel
sedately. “If I remember rightly, Sid, when you
last moved with the
times, it was to Wormwood Scrubs.”

Mr.
Immelbern frowned. There were seasons when he felt
that George Uppingdon’s gentlemanly
bearing had no real
foundations of good
taste.

“Well,”
he retorted, “your methods haven’t made us mil
lionaires. Here it’s nearly two months
since we made a click, and we only got eight hundred from that Australian at
Brighton.”

Mr.
Irnmelbern’s terse statement being irrefutable, a long
and somewhat
melancholy silence settled down upon the part
nership.

Even by
the elastic standards of the world in which they
moved, it was an
unusual combination. Mr. Sidney Immelbern
had none of the
Colonel’s distinguished style—he was a
stocky man with an
unrefined and slightly oriental face, who
affected check
tweeds of more than dashing noisiness and had an appropriate air of smelling
faintly of stables. But they had
worked excellently together in the past, and only in such rare
but human excesses of recrimination as that which
has just
been recorded did they fail
to share a sublime confidence that
their
team technique would shine undimmed in brilliance
through the future, as and when the opportunity
arose.

The
unfortunate part was that the opportunity did not
arise. For close
upon eight weeks it had eluded them with a
relentlessness which
savoured of actual malice. True, there
had been an American
at the Savoy who had seemed a hope
ful proposition, but he had turned out
to be one of those
curious people who sincerely disapprove of gambling on prin
ciple; an
equally promising leather merchant from Leicester
had been recalled
home by an ailing wife a few hours before
they would have made
their kill. The profession of confidence
man requires capital—he must maintain a
good appearance, invest lavishly in food and wine, and be able to wait for his
profits. It was not surprising that Messrs.
Uppingdon and
Immelbern should watch the dwindling of their resources
with
alarm, and at times give way to moments
of spleen which in
more prosperous
days would never have smirched their mutual friendship.

But with
almost sadistic glee their opportunity continued to
elude them. The
lounge of the Palace Royal Hotel, where they
sat sipping their
expensive drinks, was a scene of life and gaiety; but the spirit of the place
was not reflected in their
faces. Among the lunch-time cocktail crowd of
big business
men, young well-groomed men, and all their chosen women,
there
appeared not one lonely soul with the unmistakable air of a forlorn stranger in
the city whom they might tactfully
accost, woo from his glum solitude
with lunch and friendship,
and in due course mulct of a contribution to
their exchequer
proportionate to his means. Fortune, they felt, had
deserted
them for ever. Nobody loved them.

“It
is,” admitted Lieut.-Colonel Uppingdon, breaking the
silence,
“pretty bloody.”

“It
is,” concurred Mr. Immelbern, and suddenly scowled
at him.
“What’s that?” he added.

Somewhat
vaguely, the Colonel was inclining his head. But the remarkable point was that
he was not looking at Mr. Im
melbern.

“What
is what?” he inquired, making sure of his ground.

“What’s
that you’re staring at with that silly look on your
face?” said Mr.
Immelbern testily.

“That
young fellow who just came in,” explained the Colo
nel.
“He seemed to know me.”

Mr.
Immelbern glanced over the room. The only man whom he was able to bring within
the limits of his partner’s rather
unsatisfactory description was just
then sitting down at a table
by himself a few places away—a lean and
somehow dangerous-looking young man with a keen tanned face and very clear
blue eyes.
Instinctively Mr. Immelbern groped around for his
hat.

“D’you
mean he’s a fellow you swindled once?” he de
manded hastily.

Uppingdon
shook his head.

“Oh,
no. I’m positive about that. Besides, he smiled at me
quite pleasantly. But
I can’t remember him at all.”

Mr.
Immelbern relaxed slowly. He looked at the young
man again with
diminished apprehension. And gradually,
decisively, a certain
simple deduction registered itself in his
practised mind.

The young
man had money. There was no deception about
that. Everything
about him pointed unobtrusively but unequiv
ocally towards that
one cardinal fact. His clothes, immacu
lately kept, had the
unostentatious seal of Savile Row on every
stitch of them. His
silk shirt had the cachet of St. James’s.
His shoes, brightly
polished and unspotted by the stains of
traffic, could never
have been anything but bespoke. He had
just given his order
to the waiter, and while he waited for it
to arrive he was
selecting a cigarette from a thin case which
to the lay eye might
have been silver, but which Mr. Immelbern
knew beyond all
doubt was platinum.

There are forms of instinct
which soar beyond all physical
explanations
into the clear realms of clairvoyance. The homing
pigeon wings its way across sightless space to the
old roost.
The Arabian camel finds the
water-hole, and the pig detects
the
subterranean truffle. Even thus was the clairvoyance of Mr. Immelbern.

If there
was one thing on earth which he could track down
it was money. The
affinity of the pigeon for its roost, the
camel for the
water-hole, the pig for the truffle, were as noth
ing to the affinity of
Mr. Immelbern for dough. He was in
tune with it. Its subtle emanations
floated through the ether
and impinged on psychic aerials in his system
which operated
on a super-heterodyne circuit. And while he looked at the
young man who seemed to know Lieut.-Colonel Uppingdon
that
circuit was oscillating over all its valves. He summarised
his
conclusions with an explicit economy of verbiage which
La Bruy
è
re could not have pruned by a single syllable.