Free The Saint in Persuit by Leslie Charteris Page A

plunge.
    The said colleague, in the meantime, was dazedly scrambling to his feet, clawing at the Saint’s coat. The bigger thug gasping for breath, grabbed for Simon’s ankle. The battle, though now distinctly onesided in favor of the outnumbered force, was far from over, and it swayed and thudded along the whole length of the dark arcade.
    There was a fourth, unseen, participant in the episode, who then moved in to take advantage of the confusion for his own purposes. Only a single element in the drama interested him at all, and that was the white envelope which now lay abandoned in the deep shadows where the fight had begun. He waited his chance, then sidled swiftly along the stone wall, snatched the letter off the ground, and darted away again with an agility amazing in a man of his stout build.
    He emerged into one of the side streets on which the alley opened, and the faint rays of a street lamp fell across the whiteness of his Vandyke beard. At the opposite end of the alley he could see the combatants silhouetted in an archway. One of them fell heavily and cried out, and in a moment of sudden alarm the plump man with the beard was afraid he had been seen. He turned and ran, and was still running when he rounded the corner leading on to the main street and ran almost directly into the unsuspecting arms of a pair of damp-shouldered policemen whose minds, until that moment, had been on nothing more violent than the latest international football match.
    The bald and bearded runner, so obviously in full flight, knew that he had to come up with an instant explanation.
    “Policia!” he cried breathlessly. “In there! Murder! Men fighting!”
    His Portuguese left much to be desired so far as elegance of phrase was concerned, but the gist of his meaning was quite clear. The cops propped their caps more firmly into place and took off at a run, while the public-spirited civilian who had given the alarm was left behind shouting and pointing.
    “In there! Someone is being killed!”
    The policemen disappeared into the arched alley, and the bearded man, tucking the white envelope into an inside pocket, could not suppress a smile of unmitigated smugness. Then, like a busy fat crab, he scuttled away into the shadows.
    The gendarmerie, meanwhile, had arrived on the scene of the crime with billy clubs waving, only to find a single tall unruffled man turning from two groaning hulks prostrated at his feet. Sizing up the situation instantly, they each grabbed one of the arms of the tall man and pulled him away from his victims.
    “Villain!” keened one of the officers indignantly. “What are you doing assaulting these citizens?”
    Simon was able to reply in faultlessly colloquial Portuguese.
    “You’ve got it upside down, boys,” he answer calmly. “I’m the one who was getting assaulted.”
    On the face of it his assertion was not obviously credible, and the guardians of public order can perhaps not be censured for escorting him into the light at the end of the alley and demanding to inspect his papers.
    “You’ll see from my passport that I’m a simple tourist,” Simon assured them, with injured innocence. “Those thugs attacked me and tried to rob me. I’d suggest you grab hold of them instead of …”
    He looked towards the men he had left polishing the cobblestones with their shirt fronts. They were strugging to their feet and setting a course which would take them as fast as possible from any opportunity to congratulate their uniformed rescuers.
    The Saint pointed commandingly.
    “As you’ll notice,” he said, “they aren’t waiting like honest characters to register a complaint. Personally, I intend to report your behavior to my embassy.”
    The aristocratic appearance of their captive, as well as the evident justification of what he was saying, was enough to convince the policemen that they might very well be making a mistake of the sort that can have most embarrassing consequences. Without waiting to hear