The Saint and the Happy Highwayman (27 page)

The doctor leered at him crookedly.

“You would like to burn my ants,” he whispered.

He turned and fumbled with the spring catch, his revolver swinging carelessly wide from its aim; and the door had started to move when Simon shot him twice through the heart.

Simon was stretched out on the veranda, sipping a highball and sniping mosquitoes with a cigarette end, when Nordsten came up the steps from his car. The Saint looked up with a smile.

“My dear fellow,” said Nordsten, “I thought you would be at the fire.”

“Is there a fire?” Simon asked innocently.

“Didn’t you know? Sardon’s whole laboratory has gone up in flames. I heard about it at the club, and when I left I drove back that way thinking I should meet you. Sardon and his niece were not there, either. It will be a terrible shock for him when he hears of it. The place was absolutely gutted—I’ve never seen such a blaze. It might have been soaked in gasoline. It was still too hot to go near, but I suppose all his work has been destroyed. Did you miss Carmen?”

The Saint pointed over his shoulder.

“At the present moment she’s sleeping in your best guest room,” he said. “I gave her enough of your sleeping tablets to keep her like that till breakfast time.”

Nordsten looked at him.

“And where is Sardon?” he asked at length.

“He is in his laboratory.”

Nordsten poured himself out a drink and sat down.

“Tell me,” he said.

Simon told him the story. When he had finished, Nordsten was silent for a while. Then he said: “It’s all right, of course. A fire like that must have destroyed all the evidence. It could all have been an accident. But what about the girl?”

“I told her that her uncle had locked the door and refused to let me in. Her evidence will be enough to show that Sardon was not in his right mind.”

“Would you have done it anyhow, Simon?”

The Saint nodded.

“I think so. That’s what I was worried about, ever since last night. It came to me at once that if any of these brutes could breed–-” He shrugged a little wearily. “And when I saw that great queen ant, I knew that it had gone too far. I don’t know quite how rapidly ants can breed, but I should imagine that they do it by thousands. If the thousands were all the same size as Sardon’s specimens, with the same intelligence, who knows what might have been the end of it?”

“But I thought you disliked the human race,” said Nordsten.

Simon got up and strolled across the veranda.

“Taken in the mass,” he said soberly, “it will probably go on nauseating me. But it isn’t my job to alter it. If Sardon was right, Nature will find her own remedy. But the world has millions of years left, and I think evolution can afford to wait.”

His cigarette spun over the rail and vanished into the dark like a firefly as the butler came out to announce dinner; and they went into the dining room together.

WATCH FOR THE SIGN OF THE SAINT!

o

HE WILL BE BACK!