Free The Saint in Europe by Leslie Charteris Page A

of the Voyson Plastics Company was exposed by the sudden disappearance of the President, and ruined investors learned for the first time that the rock on which they had been lured to found their fortunes was nothing but a quicksand. Even the local sheet which the Saint had bought devoted an entire column to the first revelations of the crack-up.
    Simon drew a slow breath as if he had received a physical blow. There was nothing very novel about the story; there never will be anything very novel about these things, except for the scale of the disaster; and certainly there was nothing very novel about it in the Saint’s experience. But his heart went oddly heavy. For a second he thought that he would rather anyone but himself should bring the tragedy-anyone who hadn’t seen what he had seen, who hadn’t been taken into the warmth and radiance of the enchanted castle that had been opened to him. But he knew that the old man would have to know, sooner or later. And the girl would have to know.
    He held out his paper.
    “Maybe you haven’t read any news lately,” he said quietly, and turned away to the window because he preнferred not to see.
    2
    The lottery of travel had done a good job. It reached out into the world and threw lives and stories together, shufнfled them in a brief contact, and then left them altered forнever. An adventurer, a Rhine Maiden, an old man. Hope, romance, a crooked company promoter, a scrap of cheap newsprint, tragedy. Perhaps every route that carries human freight is the same, only one doesn’t often see the working .of it. Human beings conquering and falling and rising again, each in his own trivial little play, in the inscrutible loneliness which everything human makes for itself wherever crowds mingle and never know each other’s names. Simon Templar had loved the lottery for its own sake, because it was a gamble where such infinitely exciting things could happen; but now he thought that it looked on its handiwork and sneered. He could have punched it on the nose.
    After a long time the old man was speaking to him.
    “It isn’t true. It couldn’t be true. Der great big company like dot couldn’t break down!”
    Simon looked into the dazed honest eyes.
    “I’m afraid it must be true,” he said steadily.
    “But I spoke to him only a little vhile ago. I thank him. Und he shook hands with me.” The old man’s voice was pleading, pleading tremulously for the light that wasn’t there. “No man could have acted a lie like dot… Vait! I go to him myself, und he’ll tell me it isn’t true.”
    He stood up and dragged himself shakily to the door, holding the luggage rack to support himself.
    Simon filled his lungs.
    He fell back into the reality of it with a jolt like a plunge into cold water, which left him braced and tingling. Mentally, he shook himself like a dog. He realized that the fragнment of drama which had been flung before him had temнporarily obscured everything else; that because the tragedy had struck two people who had given him a glimpse of a rare loveliness that he had forgotten for many years, he had taken their catastrophe for his own. But they were only two of many thousands. One never feels the emotion of these things, except academically, until it touches the links of one’s own existence. Life was life. It had happened before, and it would happen again. Of the many crooked financiers whom the Saint had known to their loss, there was scarcely one whose victims he had ever considered. But Bruce Voyнson was actually on the train, and he must have been carryнing some wealth with him, and the old man knew what he looked like.
    The girl was rising to follow, but Simon put his hands on her shoulders and held her back.
    “I’ll look after him,” he said. “Perhaps you’d better stay here.”
    He swung himself through the door and went wafting down the corridor, long-limbed and alert. A man like Bruce Voyson would be fair game for any adventurer; and it was in