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business as he had ever seen. He sat loose-limbed on his horse and went on enjoying it even when the impact was more than two hours old.
    It had a superb simplicity of perfection which appealed to his sardonic sense of humor. It was magnificent because it was so completely incalculable. You couldn’t argue with it or estimate it. There was absolutely no percentage in claimнing, as Freddie Pellman had done, in a loud voice and at great length, that Angelo had done it on purpose. There wasn’t a thing that could be proved one way or the other. Nobody had told Angelo anything. Nobody had asked Angelo to leave the knife alone, or spoken to him, about fingerprints. So he had simply seen it on the table, and figured that it had arrived there through some crude mistake, and he had discreetly picked it up to take it away. The fact that by the time it had been rescued from him, with all the attendant panic and excitement, any fingerprints that might have been on the handle would have been completely obscured or withнout significance, was purely a sad coincidence. And that was the literal and ineluctable truth. Angelo could have been as guilty as hell or as innocent as a newborn babe: the posнsibilities were exactly that, and if Sherlock Holmes had been resurrected- to take part in the argument his guess would have been worth no more than anyone else’s.
    So the Saint hooked one knee over the saddle horn and adнmired the pluperfect uselessness of the whole thing, while he lighted a cigarette and let his horse pick its own serpentine trail up the rocky slope towards Andreas Canyon.
    The ride had been Freddie’s idea. After two more brandies and ginger ale, an aspirin, and a waffle, Freddie Pellman had proclaimed that he wasn’t going to be scared into a cellar by any goddam gangster’s friends. He had hired the best godнdam bodyguard in the world, and so he ought to be able to do just what he wanted. And he wanted to ride. So they were going to ride.
    “Not me,” Lissa had said. “I’d rather have a gangster than a horse, any day. I’d rather lie out by the pool and read.”
    “All right,” Freddie said sourly. “You lie by the pool and read. That makes four of us, and that’s just right. We’ll take lunch and make a day of it. You can stay home and read.”
    So there were four of them riding up towards the cleft where the gray-green tops of tall palm trees painted the desert sign of water. Simon was in the lead, because he had known the trail years before and it came back to him as if he had only ridden it yesterday. Freddie was close behind him. Suddenly they broke over the top of the ridge, and easing out on to the dirt road that had been constructed since the Saint was last there to make the canyon more accessible to pioneers in gasoline-powered armchairs. But bordering the creek beyond the road stood the same tall palms, skirted with the dry drooped fronds of many years, but with their heads still rising proudly green and the same stream racing and gurgling around their roots. To the Saint they were still ageless beauty, unchanged, a visual awakening that flashed him back with none of the clumsy encumbrances of time machines to other more leisured days and other people who had ridden the same trail with him; and he reined his horse and thought about them, and in particular about one straight slim girl whom he had taken there for one stolen hour, and they had never said a word that was not casual and unimportant, and they had never met again, and yet they had given all their minds into each other’s hands, and he was utterly sure that if she ever came there again she would remember exactly as he was remembering … So that it was like the shock of a cold plunge when Freddie Pellman spurred up beside him on the road and said noisily: “Well, how’s the mystery coming along?”
    The Saint sighed inaudibly and tightened up, and said: “What mystery?”
    “Oh, go on,” Freddie insisted boisterously. “You know