For the most part, he worked secretly and unseen, and his victims could give the police nothing tangible in the way of clues by which he might have been traced. Yet sometimes it was inevitable that he should be known to the man whose downfall he was engineering; and, when that happened, the grim silence of the injured party was one of the most surprising features of the mystery. Chief Inspector Teal, after a num­ber of fruitless attempts, had resigned himself to giving up as a bad job the task of trying to make the victims of the Saint give evidence.

"You might as well try to get a squeak out of a deaf-and-dumb oyster in a tank of chloroform," he told the Commis­sioner. "Either the Saint never tackles a man on one count unless he's got a second count against him by which he can blackmail him to silence, or else he's found the secret of threat­ening a man so convincingly that he still believes it the next day—and all the days after that."

His theory was shrewd and sound enough, but it would have been shrewder and sounder and more elaborate if he had been a more imaginative man; but Mr. Teal had little confidence in things he could not see and take hold of, and he had never had a chance of watching the Saint in action.

There were, however, other occasions when the Saint had no need to fall back upon blackmail or threats to insure the silence of those with whose careers he interfered.

There was, for instance, the case of a man named Golter, an anarchist and incorrigible firebrand, whose boast it was that he had known the inside of every prison in Europe. He belonged to no political faction, and apparently had no gospel to forward except his own mania for destruction; but he was anything but a harmless lunatic.

He was the leader of a society known as the Black Wolves, nearly every member of which had at some time or another served a heavy sentence for some kind of political offence— which, more often than not, consisted of an attempted assas­sination, usually by bomb.