Orcread chewed on the stump of dead cigar in his mouth and hooked a thumb into his waistcoat. He looked the Saint up and down again with flinty eyes.
"Better not get too fresh," he advised. "I been wanting a talk with you, but I'll do the wisecracking. You've given us plenty of trouble. I suppose you know you could go to the chair for what you've done."
"Probably," admitted the Saint. "But that was just ignorance. When I first came here, I didn't know that I had to get an official license to kill people."
"You should have thought of that sooner," Orcread said. His voice had the rich geniality, of the professional orator, but underneath it the Saint's sensitive ears could detect a ragged edge of strain. "It's liable to be tough for a guy who comes here and thinks he can clean up the town by himself. You know what I ought to be doing now?"
The Saint's smile was very innocent.
"I can guess that one. You ought to be calling a cop and handing me over to him. But that would be a bit awkward for you—wouldn't it? I mean, people might want to know what you were doing here yourself."
"You know why I'm not calling a cop?"
"It must be the spring," Simon hazarded. "Or perhaps today was your old grandmother's birthday, and looking into her dear sweet face you felt the hard shell of worldliness that hides your better nature softening like an overripe banana."
Orcread took the cigar stub from between his teeth and rolled it in his fingers. The leaves crumpled and shredded under the roughness of his hand, but his voice did not rise.
"I'm trying to do something for you," he said. "You ain't so old, are you? You wouldn't want to get into a lot of trouble. It ain't right to go to the chair at your age. It ain't right to be taken for a ride. And why should you?"
"Don't ask me," said the Saint. "If I remember rightly, the suggestion was yours."
"I could do a lot for a guy like you. If you'd come and seen me first, none of this would have happened. But these things you've been doing don't make it easy for us. I don't say we got a grudge against you. Irboll was just a no-account hoodlum, and Ualino was getting too big for himself anyway—I guess he had it coming to him before long. But you're trying to go too fast, and you make too much noise about it. That sort of thing don't go with the public, and it's my job to stop it. It's Mr. Yeald's job to stop it—ain't it, Mark?"
"Certainly," said the lawyer's dry voice, like the voice of a parrot repeating a lesson. "These things have got to be stopped. They will be stopped."
Orcread tapped the Saint on the chest.
"That's it," he said impressively. "We have given our word to the electors that this sort of thing shall be stamped out, and we gotta keep our promises. But we don't want to be too hard on you. So I says to Mark: 'Look here, this Saint must be a sensible young guy. Let's make him an offer.' "
Simon nodded thoughtfully, but Orcread's words only touched the fringes of his attention. He had been trying to find a reason why Orcread and Yeald should ever have entered the conference at all; and in searching for that reason he had made a remarkable discovery. For about the first time in his career he had grossly underestimated himself. He knew that his spectacular advent upon the New York scene had caused no small stir in certain circles, as indeed it had been designed to do; but he had not realized that his modest efforts could have raised so much dust as Orcread's presence appeared to indicate.
And then he began to understand what a small disturbance could throw a complicated machine out of gear, when the machine was balanced on an unstable foundation of bluff and apathy and chicane, and the disturbance was of that one peculiar kind. The newspaper headlines, which he had enjoyed egotistically flashed across his mind's eye with a new meaning. He had not thought, until Orcread told him, that the coincidence of the right man and the right moment, coupled with the mercurial enthusiasms of the New World, could have flung the figure of the Saint almost overnight onto a pinnacle where the public imagination would see it as a rallying point and the banner of a reformation. He had not thought that his disinterested attempts to brighten the Manhattan and Long Island entertainments could have started a fresh wave of civic ambition whose advance ripples had already been felt under the sensitive thrones of the political rulers.
He listened to Orcread again with renewed interest.
"So you see, we're being pretty generous. Two hundred thousand bucks is worth something to any man. And we get you out of a tough spot. You get out of here without even feeling uncomfortable—you go to England or anywhere else you like. A young guy like you could have a good time with two hundred grand. And I'm here to tell you that it's on the up-and-up."
Simon Templar looked at him with a slow and deceptive smile. The glitter of amusement in the Saint's eyes was faint.
"You're making me feel almost sentimental, Bob," he said gravely. "And what is the trivial service I have to do to earn all these benefits?"
Oscread threw his mauled cigar away, and parked the thumb thus released in the other armhole of his waistcoat. He rocked back on his heels, with his prosperous paunch thrown out, and beamed heartily.
"Well . . . nothing," he said. "All we want to do is stop this sort of thing going on. Well, naturally it wouldn't be any good packing you off if things went on just the same. So all we'd ask you to do is tell us who it is that's backing you— tell us who the other guys in your mob are—so we can make them the same sort of proposition, and that'll be the end of it. What d'you say? Do we call it a deal?"
The Saint shook his head regretfully.
"You may call it.a deal, if you like," he said gently, "but I'm afraid I call it bushwah. You see, I'm not that sort of a girl."
"He's nuts," said Heimie Felder doggedly, out of a deep silence; and Orcread swung round on him savagely.
"You shut your damn mouth!" he snarled.
He turned to the Saint again, the benevolent beam still hollowly half frozen on his face, as if he had started to wipe it off and had forgotten to finish the job, his jaw thrust out and his flinty eyes narrowed.
"See here," he growled, "I'm not kidding, and if you know what's good for you, you'll lay off that stuff. I'm giving you a chance to get out of this and save your skin. What's funny . about it?"
"Nothing," said the Saint blandly, "except that you're sitting on the wrong flagpole. Nobody's backing me, and I haven't got a mob—so what can I do about it? I hate to see these tender impulses of yours running away with you, but ——"
A vague anger began to darken Orcread's face.
"Will you talk English?" he grated. "You ain't been running this business by yourself just to pass the time. What are you getting out of it, and who's giving it to you?"
The Saint shrugged wearily.
"I've been .trying to tell you," he said. "Nobody's backing me, and I haven't got a mob. Ask any of this beauty chorus whether they've ever seen me with a mob. I, personally, am the whole works. I am the wheels, the chassis, and the gadget that squirts oil into the gudgeon pins. I am the one-man band. So all you've got to do is to hand me that two hundred grand and kiss me good-bye."
Orcread stared at him for a moment longer and then turned away abruptly. He walked across the room and plumped himself into a chair between Yeald and Kuhlmann. In the voiceless pause that followed, the lips of Heimie Felder could be seen framing tireless dogmas about nuts.
The Saint smiled to himself and bummed a cigarette from the nearest member of the audience. He was obliged dispassionately. Inhaling the smoke dreamily, he glanced around at the hard, emotionless faces under the lights and realized quite calmly that any amusement which he derived from the situation originated entirely in his own irresponsible sense of humour.
Not that he was averse to tight corners and dangerous games —his whole history, in fact, was composed of a long series of them. But it occurred to him that the profitable and amusing phase of the soiree, if there had ever been one, was now definitely over. He had established beyond question the fact that Orcread and the district attorney were in the racket up to their necks, but the importance of that confirmation was almost entirely academic. More important than that was the concrete revelation of their surprisingly urgent interest in his own activities. Judged solely on its merits, the hippopotamoid diplomacy of Honest Bob Orcread earned nothing but a sustained horselaugh—Simon had not once been under the delusion that any of the gentlemen present would have allowed him to be handed two hundred thousand dollars; under their noses, or that after the ceremony they would have escorted him to the next outward liner with mutual expressions of philanthropy and good will—but the fact that the offer had been made at all, and that Orcread had thought it worth while lending his own rhetorical genius to it, wanted some thinking over. And most certainly there were places in New York more conducive to calm and philosophic thought than the spot in which he was at present In short, he saw no good point in further dalliance at Charley's Place, and the real difficulty was how he could best take his leave.