Free The Saint and the Happy Highwayman by Leslie Charteris

to show for all you’ve done?”
    “There’s the Purdell Highway,” said Sam deprecatingly, “the Purdell Suspension Bridge, the Purdell–-“
    “That’s nothing,” said Mr Eisenfeld largely. “Those are just names. Why, in ten years after you die they won’t mean any more than Grant or—or Pocahontas. What you oughta have is a monument of your own. Something with an inscription on it. I’ll get the architect to design one.”
    The monument had duly been designed—a sort o’f square, tapering tower eighty feet high, crowned by an eagle with outspread wings, on the base of which was to be a great marble plaque on which the beneficence and public-spiritedness of Samuel Purdell would be recorded for all time. It was about the details of the construction of this monument that Mr Eisenfeld had come to confer with the mayor.
    “The thing is, Sam,” he explained, “if this monument is gonna last, we gotta make it solid. They got the outside all built up now; but they say if we’re gonna do the job properly, we got to fill it up with cement.”
    “That ‘11 take an awful lot of cement, Al,” Sam objected dubiously, casting an eye over the plans; but Mr Eisenfeld’s generosity was not to be balked.
    “Well, what if it does? If the job’s worth doin’ at all, it’s worth doin’ properly. If you won’t think of yourself, think of the city. Why, if we let this thing stay hollow and after a year or two it began to fall down, think what people from out of town would say.”
    “What would they say?” asked Mr Purdell obtusely.
    His adviser shuddered.
    “They’d say this was such a cheap place we couldn’t even afford to put up a decent monument for our mayor. You wouldn’t like people to say a thing like that about us, would you, Sam?”
    The mayor thought it over.
    “Okay, Al,” he said at length. “Okay. But I don’t deserve it, really I don’t.”
    Simon Templar would have agreed that the mayor had done nothing to deserve any more elaborate monument than a neat tombstone in some quiet worm cafeteria. But at that moment his knowledge of Elmford’s politics was not so complete as it was very shortly to become.
    When he saw Molly Provost slip the little automatic out of her bag he thought that the bullet was destined for the mayor; and in theory he approved. He had an engaging callousness about the value of political lives which, if universally shared, would make democracy an enchantingly simple business. But there were two policemen on motorcycles waiting to escort the mayoral car into the city, and the life of a good-looking girl struck him as being a matter for more serious consideration. He felt that if she were really determined to solve all of Elmford’s political problems by shooting the mayor in the duodenum, she should at least be persuaded to do it on some other occasion when she would have a better chance of getting away with it. Wherefore the Saint moved very quickly, so that his lean brown hand closed over hers just at the moment when she touched the trigger and turned the bullet down into the ground.
    Neither Sam Purdell nor Al Eisenfeld, who were climbing into the car at that moment, even so much as looked around; and the motorcycle escort mercifully joined with them in instinctively attributing the detonation to the backfire of a passing truck.
    It was such a small gun that the Saint’s hand easily covered it; and he held the gun and her hand together in a viselike grip, smiling as if he were just greeting an-old acquaintance, until the wail of the sirens died away.
    “Have you got a license to shoot mayors?” he inquired severely.
    She had a small pale face which under” a skillfully applied layer of cosmetics might have taken on a bright doll-like prettiness; but it was not like that yet. But he had a sudden illuminating vision of her face as it might have been, painted and powdered, with shaved eyebrows and blackened eyelashes, subtly hardened. It was a type which he had seen