The Saint and Mr. Teal: Formerly Called "Once More the Saint" by Leslie Charteris

apparatus that Simon Templar had ever seen; and yet in some ridiculously conventional way it seemed to have its perfect focus and presiding genius in the slender white-haired man in a stained and grimy white overall who stood at the bench with his back to the open door.
    Simon Templar walked very quietly into the room and closed the door noiselessly behind him. He stood with his back leaning against it and his right hand circling comfortably round the butt of the automatic in his pocket, and cleared his throat apologetically.
    “Hullo,” he said.
    The figure at the bench turned round sharply. He was a mild-faced man with a pair of thick gold-rimmed pince-nez perched slantwise on the end of a long fleshy nose; and his response was pitched in the last key on earth that the Saint had expected to hear.
    “What the devil do you want?” he demanded.
    To say that the Saint was taken aback means nothing. The effect on his emotional system was much the same as it would have been if the aged scientist had tittered a shrill war whoop and begun to turn cartwheels over the test tubes. Even in these days of free thought and speech the greeting seemed singularly unusual. When you have been at considerable pains, without appreciable hope of reward, to hunt along the trail of a kidnapped professor-when, in the process, you have been warned off the course with a couple of bullets, and have found it necessary to let yourself in for a charge of vulgar burglary in the good cause-you are definitely entitled to expect a fairly cordial welcome from the object of your rescue expedition, Once before the Saint had been greeted something like that in rather similar circumstances, and the memory of that adventure was still fresh with him. It cut short the involuntary upward jerk of his eye-brows; and when he found an answer his voice was absolutely level and natural. Only an ear that was listening for it would have sensed the rapier points that stroked in and out of its casual syllables. “I just came to see how you were getting on, Dr. Quell”
    “Well, why can’t you leave me alone? How do you expect me to get any work done while I’m being pestered with your absurd questions every ten minutes?” The old man was gesticulating his disgust with everything from his feet to his forehead, till the glasses on his nose quivered with indignation. “What d’you think I am-a lazy schoolboy? Eh? Dammit, haven’t you any work of your own ?”
    “You see, we don’t want you to have a breakdown, Professor,” said the Saint soothingly. “If you took a little rest now and then —”
    “I had seven hours’ rest last night. I’m not an invalid. And how would I get this done in time if I lay in bed all day? Think it would get done by itself? Eh?”
    Simon took out his cigarette case and moved over to sit down on a conveniently shaped dome of metal.
    “All the same, Professor, if you wouldn’t mind —”
    The old man leapt towards him with a kind of yelp Simon drew back hurriedly; and the professor glared at him, breathing heavily.
    ” Dammit, if you want to commit suicide, must you come and do it here?”
    “Suicide?” repeated the Saint vaguely. “I hadn’t —”
    ” Pish!” squawked the professor.
    He snatched up a loose length of wire and tossed it onto the dome on which Simon had been preparing to rest himself. There was a momentary crackle of hot blue flame-and the wire ceased to resemble anything like wire. It simply trickled down the side of the dome in the shape of a few incandescent drops of molten metal; and Simon Templar mopped his brow.
    He retreated towards the clear space around the door with some alacrity.
    “Thanks very much, Professor,” he remarked. “Have you any more firework effects like that?”
    “Bah!” croaked the professor huffily.
    He went back to his bench and wiped his hands on a piece of rag, with every symptom of a society welfare worker removing the contamination of an afternoon with the deserving