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of the suite. When it had stopped for the arrival of the prince
he had thought no more about it. He had taken it for nothing more than an
elementary ruse to enable the prince to make his en trance unobserved through
the sitting-room windows; he had cursed himself silently for being so simply
taken in, and there after had dismissed it from a mind that was fully
occupied with other problems. .
    And now he grasped his error.
    It was literally thrust upon him—jabbed firmly
and incontrovertibly into his spine, and purposefully left there. Before that, in
his irregular and energetic life, he had experienced the identical
sensation. The feel of a gun muzzle in one’s back leaves an indelible
imprint on one’s memory.
    Simon stood quite still.
    “Disappointing, in its way,” said
the prince silkily, “but satisfactory in most respects. I can recall
the days when you would have been more troublesome.”
    Unhurriedly he crossed the room and picked up
the strong box, and the Saint watched him coldly. There were two
chips of white-hot sapphire in the Saint’s eyes, twin lights of concen trated
wrath that blazed through a thin crust of glacial im mobility. The memory
of the old days was seething through his tissues like an
elixir of hot gall. The prince was right. Simon Templar had never
been so easy.
    The Saint’s mouth writhed into a grimly
tightening line. The softness had gone out of him. He felt as if he
had just woken up—as if he had been fumbling feebly through a stifling
fog, and suddenly the fog had vanished and he was stretching lim ber muscles
and gulping down great lungfuls of clear moun tain air. His brain
was as pellucid as an Alpine pool. It had room for only one
idea: to get his hands on to the contemptu ous faces of the party
that had made a fool of him, and hit them. Hit them, and keep on hitting… .
    The prince was smiling at him.
    “I can only repeat my assurance, Mr.
Templar, that there are times when ignorance is bliss and curiosity may be an expensive
pastime. Particularly in one whose hand has lost its cunning.”
    Simon Templar drew a deep breath.
    Then he fired from his pocket.
    His gun, with a half-charged cartridge in the
chamber, gave no more than an explosive little cough, which merged into the sharp smack of the bullet crashing home into the single electric
light switch by the door; and the room was plunged into impenetrable
blackness.
    The Saint hurled himself sideways. Right
behind him he heard the dull plop of an efficiently silenced gun, but
he was untouched. He twisted like an eel, and his hand brushed a pair of
legs. They heard his grim chuckle in the darkness. There was a
gasp, a strangled cry, and a terrific thud that mingled with the
slamming of a door.
    And after that there was a queer stillness in
the room; and in the stillness someone groaned harrowingly… .
    Monty Hayward dipped in his pocket and found
a box of matches. He struck one circumspectly, and looked about
him.
    Patricia Holm was standing quietly beside the
bed; and on the
floor the horse-faced gun-in-the-back guy was giving a life like imitation of a starfish in its death agony.
But the Crown Prince had gone—and so had Simon Templar.

III.      HOW   SIMON   TEMPLAR MADE   A   JOURNEY,
    AND   PRINCE   RUDOLPH SPOKE   OF   HIS APPENDIX
     
     
    THE Saint went through the sitting-room window in a flying leap that
landed him on the turf beyond like a crouching puma.
    He paused there for a moment with his eyes
and ears alert, sifting the shadows for the tell-tale movement which he knew he would
find somewhere. And while he paused he felt his spirits soaring upwards till
they knocked their heads against the stars.
    The bouncing of the gun artist had done him
good—more good even than the initial encounter with the thugs who had been
heaved in error into the river. On the whole, those three had only
been common, or garden, thugs; whereas the gun artist had prodded his gun into
the Saint’s spinal purlieus,