Mr Way thumbed through the very thin sheaf of currency that was still left to him.
“You’ll have to take my check, then. I don’t have any more folding stuff on me—”
“I’m terribly sorry, dear boy,” said the Saint earnestly. “But that’s against the vow I made to my dear old grandmother on her death-bed. I can see her now, with the setting sun lighting up her nose, and her poor tired trembling fingers hardly able to hold on to the gin bottle. ‘Promise me,’ she burped, ‘that whatever the bet is, you’ll never take any chiseling bastard’s IOU. Always make ’em lay it on the line, son,’ she said, and—”
“I’m just wondering,” snarled Mr Way, “if I should have another look at those chips.”
“Help yourself,” said the Saint aggrievedly. “But don’t forget, you were the one who said that some bum sports always think they’ve been robbed if they don’t win.”
What Tick Way had to contribute to the remainder of the debate is perhaps largely unsuited to verbatim quotation.
“But how did you do it?” pleaded Hilda Mason.
“I simply conned him into playing strictly by the odds,” said the Saint. “With a mentality like his, he was wide open.”
“I am probably nearing my dotage,” George Mason said, “but I still don’t see the catch.”
Simon reproduced the diagram he had drawn for Mr Way.
“It’s built right into the rules. As you see, there are two chips which you might call ‘doubles’—that is, if there’s an ‘X’ on one side there’s an ‘X’ on the other, or if it’s blank on one side it’s blank on the other. There’s only one chip that has two different sides. Now, the three chips are thrown into a hat and one is drawn at random. Therefore the odds are two to one that it’ll be a ‘double.’ So if you see a cross, you call a cross, and if you see a blank you call a blank, and two out of three times you’ll win. What you have to think of isn’t the chance of what could be on the other side, but the odds on which chip has been drawn. Your pal Tick was sharp enough to spot that.”
“Then why did he lose?”
“Because I cheated,” said the Saint proudly. “I changed the odds. Since he relies on his gift for figures instead of manual dexterity, I thought he might have a blind spot for physical hanky-panky — which I’m rather good at. I made him a bit blinder with his own technique of misdirection, rubbing it in about how there couldn’t be any funny juggling. But I was palming an extra chip with a cross on one side and blank on the other. I rung that in, so that there were two of that kind, and took out one of the doubles. Sometimes I changed them back, so he wouldn’t notice that there was one double that never showed up. But most of the time, the odds were the exact opposite of what he was counting on.” Simon began to peel layers off a thick bundle of green paper. “Now, it was about seven hundred dollars you lost, wasn’t it?”
“But we can’t take that,” Hilda objected, half laughing and half crying.
“Why not? It’s your money, isn’t it? And I made a small profit for myself. Besides, I only did it because I couldn’t let you pack up and go home before we got to know each other a lot better,” said the Saint.
The water merchant
“I’ll tell you what I think of Foreign Aid,” said the Saint, thoughtfully twisting the newspaper into the semblance of a short rope. “I think that if the Commies had assigned their best brains to inventing a gimmick that’d bleed America like a built-in leak in the economy, they couldn’t have come up with anything cleverer.”
“I don’t know about that,” Howard Mayne said. “But—”
“It saddles the poor squirming US taxpayer with an annual bill of buttons of dollars, for which he gets nothing but jobs for the gaggle of bureaucrats who administer it.”
“Perhaps, but—”
“The more advanced countries simply hate him a bit more, down inside, the way all proud people who are down on their luck react to being charity cases. The more backward ones simply insist more loudly that there must be no strings attached — which means that their bureaucrats want no check on how much of the gravy they can siphon off into their own pockets, while they personally take all the credit for what little trickles through to the populace, which is probably still out throwing rotten eggs at American ambassadors.”
“You’d better not let any Daily Worker correspondent hear you. He’d discover that you were an imperialist, colonialist—”
“I damn well am an imperialist colonialist,” Simon Templar agreed, warming to his subject. “I think the old British Empire, on the whole, was one of the best things this world has ever known. The good old colonialist went out into the wilderness and tamed a lot of unsanitary savages, brought them down out of trees or up out of mud huts, taught them to wash themselves and stop eating their elderly relatives for dinner, and with a few exceptions left them a hell of a lot better off than they would have made themselves in another three centuries, just in exchange for exploiting some natural resources that the benighted heathen didn’t know what to do with anyhow. So all they get for it is a lot of abuse, mostly from characters who wouldn’t know how to spell the word if it wasn’t for the education the wicked imperialists crammed into them. I think it’s an everlasting pity that more Englishmen didn’t have the guts to stand up and trumpet the facts, instead of being hustled into dropping their colonies like naughty boys caught with a fistful of stolen candy — by a lot of bloody-handed Russians, and sanctimonious Americans firmly settled in one of the biggest countries ever swiped from its aborigines.”
“You may be right,” Mayne said placatingly. “But I was talking about a matter of Domestic Aid. Just because I mentioned that there was some phony-sounding Arab in the background shouldn’t get us off on all these tangents.”
With his pleasantly ugly face and competent air, he looked like the very personification of the idealized detective familiar to every television watcher, and the fact that he was not playing such a part every week for a network sponsor was a commentary on the unpredictable hazards of acting as a profession rather than on his personal talent.
Mrs Sophie Yarmouth, his aunt, a determined woman who was also present, chimed in more forcefully, “Howard is right, Mr Templar. You’re only trying to dodge the issue. You set yourself up once as a guardian of society against racketeers and swindlers, so you have a duty to do something about them whenever a case is laid in your lap. Just as you did when you cleared up that affair that I got involved in.”
Because of his friendship with Howard Mayne the Saint had once recouped a ten thousand dollar investment that Mrs Yarmouth had once made with a good bunco artist, as has been recounted elsewhere in these chronicles. When he had phoned Mayne on this subsequent transit through Los Angeles, however, it had only been to invite himself for a sociable drink, with no suspicion that he might be drafted to bring succor to another sucker. But such inflictions were among the occupational overhead of the life he had chosen for himself, and sometimes they had to be accepted.
“Okay,” he said resignedly. “I’ll drop in on your poor relations from Texas on my way through La Jolla. Although trying to save an oil tycoon from being taken for a few grand, even if this proposition he’s interested in is a swindle, strikes me as almost as important a project as sending Foreign Aid to some Persian-Gulf Poobah who’s having trouble meeting the tab for a hundred-girl harem.”
Walt Jobyn, to do him justice even at the expense of flattery, could never have been seriously compared with the lord of a hundred-girl harem. He had quite enough to cope with in the person of his one lawful wedded wife, Felicity, a lady of Amazonian build and an equivalently positive personality, whose affectionate concern for his welfare had an intensity that might have made a strong man quail.