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have.”

 
    Chapter 2
    How Simon Templar Eavesdropped to Some Advantage, and Inspector Fernack
Went for a Ride
     
    Nather did not try to answer. His body was
sunk deep into his chair, and his eyes glared venomously up at the
Saint out of a face that was contorted into a mask of hate and fury; but Simon
had passed under glares like that before.
    “Just before I came in,” Simon
remarked conversationally, “you were reading a scrap of paper that
seemed to have some connection with those twenty grand I borrowed.”
    “I don’t know what you’re talking
about,” said the judge.
    “No?” Simon’s voice was honeyed,
but none of the chill had gone out of his blue eyes. “Let me remind you.
You screwed it up and plugged it into the wastebasket. It’s there still—and
I’d like to see it.”
    Nather’s eyelids flickered.
    “Why don’t you get it?”
    “Because I’d hate to give you the chance
to catch me bend ing—my tail’s tender today. Fetch out that paper!”
    His voice crisped up like the flick of a
whiplash, and Wallis Nather jerked under the sting of it. But he
made no move to obey.
    A throbbing stillness settled over the room.
The air was surcharged with the electric tension of it. The smile had faded from the
Saint’s lips when his voice tightened on that one curt command; and it
had not come back. There was no vari ation in the graceful ease with which
he held his precarious perch on the edge of the desk, but the gentle
rocking of his free foot had died away like the pendulum of a clock that
had run down. And a thin pin-prickling temblor frisked up the Saint’s
spine as he realized that Nather did not mean to obey.
    Instead, he realized that the judge was
marshalling the last fragments of his strength and courage to make
one desperate lunge for the automatic that held him crucified in his
chair. It was fantastic, incredible; but there could be no mistake.
The intuitive certainty had flashed through his mind at the same instant as
it was born in the brain of the man before him. And Simon knew, with the
same certainty, that just as surely as that desperate lunge was
made, his own finger would constrict on the trigger, ending
the argument beyond all human revision, without hesitation and without remorse.
    “You wouldn’t dare to shoot,” said
Nather throatily.
    He said it more as if he were trying to
convince himself; and the Saint’s eyes held him on needle points of
blue ice.
    “The word isn’t in my dictionary—and you
ought to know it! This isn’t a country where men carry guns for ornament, and I’m
just getting acclimatized… .”
    But even while Simon spoke, his brain was
racing ahead to explore the reasons for the insane resolution that was
whiten ing the knuckles of the judge’s twitching hands.
    He felt convinced that such a man as Wallis
Nather would not go up against that gaping automatic on account of a mere twenty
thousand dollars. That was a sum of money which any man might legitimately be
grieved to lose, but it was not large enough to tempt anyone but a starving
desperado to the gam ble that Nather was steeling himself to make.
    There could be only one other motive—the
words scrawled on that scrap of paper in the wastebasket. Something that
was written on that crumpled slip of milled rag held dynamite enough to
raise the ghostly hand of Nemesis itself. Something was recorded there that had
the power to drive Nather forward inch by inch in his chair into the face
of almost certain death… .
    With fascinated eyes Simon watched the slight,
nerve-tin gling movements of the judge’s body as Nather edged
himself up for that suicidal assault on the gun. For the first time in his long
and checkered career he felt himself a blind instru ment in the working
out of an inexorable fate. There was nothing more that he could do. The one
metallic warning that he had delivered had passed unheeded. Only
two things re mained. In another few seconds Nather would lunge; and in that instant