Free Saint on Guard by Leslie Charteris Page A

iridium from my firm—in the good old days when we had some.”
    “And then?”
    Uttershaw spread his hands.
    “Then, I suppose, the poor devil dipped into the black market, with the results already noted. You probably know much more about that than I do. How deeply was he mixed up in it?”
    Simon waited until the sole was in front of them and he had enjoyed his first taste; and then he said directly, but with the same amiable presupposition of a common intelligence: “How would it be if you told me why I should tell you anything, before you ask too many questions?”
    “That’s fair enough,” Uttershaw agreed easily. “As I explained last night, I’ve got a financial interest. ‘The loss of wealth is loss of dirt’, if you believe John Heywood—or should I have said Christopher Morley?—but it happens to be my dirt, and I think that’s a responsibility as well as a privilege. The other interest is —well, I’ve got to be trite and call it patriotic. Then, I like you as a person; and I’d like you to bring this off. I’d like to help you, if I could; but I don’t want to sound foolish by making great revelations which might be all old and stale to you.”
    “For instance,” said the Saint, just as pleasantly, “what was the great revelation you had in mind?”
    “I was wondering if you’d formed any definite conclusions about Ourley.”
    Simon enjoyed more mouthfuls. He was hungry. But he didn’t miss any of the lines of sober anxiety in the other’s thinly sculptured face.
    “He appears to be a little man with a large wife,” he said trivially.
    ” ‘And though his favorite seat be feeble woman’s breast’,” quoted Uttershaw mournfully. “Milton really does prefer them feeble, and with all that—shall we say?—giddiness of hers, Tiny Titania is as tough as her own stays. And while she likes her own dancing partners, she watches him like a hawk. He isn’t even allowed to have a typist under forty in his office.”
    The Saint had a sudden strange creeping feeling in his spine.
    “Does Milton take it and like it,” he asked, “or does he still manage to get his fun?”
    LJttershaw shook his head deprecatingly.
    “I wouldn’t know about that,” he said. “I told you we were never very close.”
    “Didn’t he ever talk?”
    LJttershaw pursed his lips as he brought a hand up to his lean jaw and stroked his face meditatively.
    “There was one time …” he said slowly, and stopped.
    “Yes?”
    “Oh, hell, it doesn’t amount to anything. There was a stag affair at some escapist club for downtrodden business men that he belongs to, and he insisted on dragging me along. For some reason or other I couldn’t get out of it, or perhaps I didn’t think of an excuse quickly enough. Ourley … but it was all so alcoholic that it really doesn’t mean a thing.”
    To the Saint, it felt as if the air about the table was charged with the static electricity of an approaching storm, but he knew that it was only a mystic prescience within himself which was generating that sense of overloaded tension.
    “Suppose you give me a chance to decide that for myself,” he suggested genially.
    “Well, Ourley was pretty tight—most of them were—and he cornered me and babbled a lot of damn foolishness. I guess getting out from under Tiny’s iron fist for even that one night had unsettled him, and given him delusions of grandeur. ‘In vino veritas’, I suppose. Anyway, he was in quite a Casanova mood. Told me he had a key that Tiny didn’t know about, and how he was really much too smart for her, and all that sort of thing. I didn’t pay much attention, and I got away as soon as I could. Next morning he called me up and explained that he’d had too much to drink, which was obvious, and said he’d been talking a lot of nonsense and would I forget it. I never gave it another thought, and of course I wouldn’t …” Uttershaw broke off, and smiled rather sheepishly. “But that’s just what I