It was not so very long after Simon Templar had settled down in Baycombe that that peacefully sedate village became most unsettled, and things began to happen there that shocked and flabbergasted its peacefully sedate inhabitants, as will be related; but at first Simon Templar found Baycombe as dull as it had been for the last six hundred years.

Siman Templar — in some parts of the world he was quite well known, from his initials, as the Saint —was a man of twenty-seven, tall, dark, keen faced, deeply tanned, blue eyed. That is a rough description. It was not long before Baycombe had observed him more closely, and woven mysterious legcnds about him. Baycombe did that within the first two days of his arrival, and it must be admitted that he had given some grounds for speculation.

The house he lived in (it may perhaps be dignified with the title of "house," since a gang of workmen from Ilfracombe had worked without rest for thirty-six hours to make it habitable) had been built during the war as a coast defence station, at a time when the War Office were vaguely alarmed by rumours of a projected invasion at some unlikely point. Possibly because they thought Baycombe was the last point at which any enemy strategist would expect them to look for an invasion, the War Office had erected a kind of Pill Box on the tor above the village. The work had been efficiently carried out, and a small garrison had been installed; but apparently the War Office had been cleverer than the German tacticians, for no attempt was made to land an army at Baycombe. In 1918 the garrison and the guns had been removed, and the miniature concrete fortress had been abandoned to the games of the local children until Simon Templar, by some means known only to himself, had discovered that the Pill Box sand the quarter of a square mile of land in which it stood were still the property of the War Office, and in some secret way had managed to persuade the said War Office to sell him the freehold for twenty-five pounds.