Free The Saint vs Scotland Yard by Leslie Charteris Page B

deep—it was not filled up again. I shall fill it up tonight.”
    He picked up the girl and took her to the hole in the floor. Dropping on
one knee at the edge, he lowered her to the stretch of his arms
and let go… . He came back to the Saint, dusting his trousers.
    “Will you continue to walk?” he inquired.
    Simon stepped to the side of the pit, and turned. For a moment he gazed into the other
man’s eyes—the eyes of a man empty of the
bowels of compassion. But the Saint’s blue gaze was as cold and still as
a polar sea.
    “You’re an overfed, pot-bellied swamp-hog,” he said; and then
Garniman pushed him roughly backwards.
    Quite unhurriedly, Wilfred Garniman took off his coat, un fastened
his cuff-links, and rolled his sleeves up above his elbows. He opened the
sack of cement and tipped out its con tents into a hole that he trampled in
the heap of sand. He picked up a spade, looked about him, and put
it down again. Without the least variation of his heavily sedate stride he left the cellar, leaving the candle burning on the floor. In three or four
minutes he was back again, carrying a brimming pail of water in either hand;
and with the help of these he continued his unaccustomed
labour, splashing gouts of water on his mate rials and stirring
them carefully with the spade.
    It took him over half an hour to reduce the mixture to a consistency
smooth enough to satisfy him, for he was an inex perienced worker and
yet he could afford to make no mistake. At the end of that
time he was streaming with sweat, and his immaculate white collar and
shirt-front were grubbily wilting rags; but those facts did not trouble
him. No one will ever know what was in his mind while he did that work: perhaps he did not know himself, for his face was blank and tranquil.
    His flabby muscles must have been aching, but he did not stop to rest.
He took the spade over to the hole in the floor. The candle sent no light down
there, but in the darkness he could see an irregular blur of white—he was
not interested to gloat over it. Bending his back again, he began to shovel
the earth back into the hole. It took an astonishing time, and he was
breathing stertorously long before he had filled the pit up loosely
level with the floor. Then he dropped the spade and tramped over the
surface, packing it down tight and hard.
    And then he laid over it the cement that he had prepared, finishing
it off smoothly level with the floor.
    Even then he did not rest—he was busy for another hour, filling
the pails with earth and carrying them up the stairs and out into
the garden and emptying them over the flowerbeds. He had a placidly
accurate eye for detail and an enormous capacity for taking
pains, had Mr. Wilfred Garniman; but it is doubtful if he gave
more than a passing thought to the eternal meaning of what he had done.
    Chapter X
     
    To Mr. Teal, who in those days knew the Saint’s habits almost as
well as he knew his own, it was merely axiomatic that breakfast and
Simon Templar coincided somewhere be tween the hours of 11 a.m. and 1 p.m.;
and therefore it is not surprising that the visit which he paid to 7, Upper
Berkeley Mews on one historic morning resulted in a severe shock
to his system. For a few moments after the door had been opened to him he stood
bovinely rooted to the mat, looking like some watcher of the skies
who has just seen the Great Bear turn a back-somersault and
march rapidly over the horizon in column of all fours. And
when he had pulled himself together, he followed the Saint into
the sitting-room with the air of a man who is not at all
certain that there is no basin of water balanced over the door
to await his entrance.
    “Have some gum, old dear,” invited the Saint hospitably; and Mr.
Teal stopped by the table and blinked at him.
    “What’s the idea?” he demanded suspiciously.
    The Saint looked perplexed.
    “What idea, brother?”
    “Is your clock fast, or haven’t you been to bed yet?”
    Simon grinned.
    “Neither.