Featuring the Saint [antikvár]

THE LOGXCAL ADYENTUREThe most exciting stories of the Saint come, it seems to me, from among his laíer exploits, from the days when he was working practically alonealthough Patrícia Holm was never far away, and Roger Conway was always within call at times of need. I often think that it best suited the Saint's peculiar temper to be alone: he was so superbly capable himself, and so arrogantly coníident of his own capability, that it irked him to have to deputize the least item of any of his schemes to hands that might bungle it, and exasperated him beyond measure to have to expiain and discuss and wrangle his inspirations with minds that leaped to compre-hension and decision less swiftly and certainly than his own. These trials he suííered with characteristic good humour; yet there is no doubt that he suffered sometim.es, as may be read in other tales that have already been told of him. It is true that the Saint once became something perilously üke a gang; there came about him a band of reckless young men who followed him cheerfully into all his crimes, and these young men he led into gay and lawless audacities that made the name of the Saint famousor infamousover the whole world; but even those adventures were no more than episodes in the Saint's life. They were part of his development, but they were not the end. His ultimate destiny still lay ahead; he knew that it still lay ahead, but he did not then know what it was. "The Last Hero" he was called once; but the story of his last heroism is not to be told yet, and the manner of it he never foresaw even in his dreams.This story, then is one of a handful that I have unearthed from my records of those days of transition, when the Saint was waiting upon Fate. They were days when he seemed to be filling up time; and, as might have been expected of the man, he beguiled the time in his own incomparable fashion,