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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Shadow, by Arthur Stringer
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Shadow
+
+Author: Arthur Stringer
+
+Release Date: December 2, 2013 [EBook #44336]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SHADOW ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Stephen Hutcheson, Mardi Desjardins and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team at
+http://www.pgdpcanada.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                               THE SHADOW
+
+
+                                   BY
+                            ARTHUR STRINGER
+
+
+                                NEW YORK
+                            THE CENTURY CO.
+                                  1913
+
+                          Copyright, 1913, by
+                            The Century Co.
+                       _Published, January, 1913_
+
+
+
+
+                               THE SHADOW
+
+
+
+
+                                   I
+
+
+Blake, the Second Deputy, raised his gloomy hound's eyes as the door
+opened and a woman stepped in. Then he dropped them again.
+
+"Hello, Elsie!" he said, without looking at her.
+
+The woman stood a moment staring at him. Then she advanced thoughtfully
+toward his table desk.
+
+"Hello, Jim!" she answered, as she sank into the empty chair at the desk
+end. The rustling of silk suddenly ceased. An aphrodisiac odor of
+ambergris crept through the Deputy-Commissioner's office.
+
+The woman looped up her veil, festooning it about the undulatory roll of
+her hat brim. Blake continued his solemnly preoccupied study of the desk
+top.
+
+"You sent for me," the woman finally said. It was more a reminder than a
+question. And the voice, for all its quietness, carried no sense of
+timidity. The woman's pale face, where the undulating hat brim left the
+shadowy eyes still more shadowy, seemed fortified with a calm sense of
+power. It was something more than a dormant consciousness of beauty,
+though the knowledge that men would turn back to a face so wistful as
+hers, and their judgment could be dulled by a smile so narcotizing, had
+not a little to do with the woman's achieved serenity. There was nothing
+outwardly sinister about her. This fact had always left her doubly
+dangerous as a law-breaker.
+
+Blake himself, for all his dewlap and his two hundred pounds of lethargic
+beefiness, felt a vague and inward stirring as he finally lifted his head
+and looked at her. He looked into the shadowy eyes under the level brows.
+He could see, as he had seen before, that they were exceptional eyes,
+with iris rings of deep gray about the ever-widening and ever-narrowing
+pupils which varied with varying thought, as though set too close to the
+brain that controlled them. So dominating was this pupil that sometimes
+the whole eye looked violet, and sometimes green, according to the light.
+
+Then his glance strayed to the woman's mouth, where the upper lip curved
+outward, from the base of the straight nose, giving her at first glance
+the appearance of pouting. Yet the heavier underlip, soft and wilful,
+contradicted this impression of peevishness, deepened it into one of
+Ishmael-like rebellion.
+
+Then Blake looked at the woman's hair. It was abundant and nut-brown, and
+artfully and scrupulously interwoven and twisted together. It seemed to
+stand the solitary pride of a life claiming few things of which to be
+proud. Blake remembered how that wealth of nut-brown hair was daily
+plaited and treasured and coiled and cared for, the meticulous
+attentiveness with which morning by morning its hip-reaching abundance
+was braided and twisted and built up about the small head, an intricate
+structure of soft wonder which midnight must ever see again in ruins,
+just as the next morning would find idly laborious fingers rebuilding its
+ephemeral glories. This rebuilding was done thoughtfully and calmly, as
+though it were a religious rite, as though it were a sacrificial devotion
+to an ideal in a life tragically forlorn of beauty.
+
+He remembered, too, the day when he had first seen her. That was at the
+time of "The Sick Millionaire" case, when he had first learned of her
+association with Binhart. She had posed at the Waldorf as a trained
+nurse, in that case, and had met him and held him off and outwitted him
+at every turn. Then he had decided on his "plant." To effect this he had
+whisked a young Italian with a lacerated thumb up from the City Hospital
+and sent him in to her as an injured elevator-boy looking for first-aid
+treatment. One glimpse of her work on that thumb showed her to be
+betrayingly ignorant of both figure-of-eight and spica bandaging, and
+Blake, finally satisfied as to the imposture, carried on his
+investigation, showed "Doctor Callahan" to be Connie Binhart, the con-man
+and bank thief, and sent the two adventurers scurrying away to shelter.
+
+He remembered, too, how seven months after that first meeting Stimson of
+the Central Office had brought her to Headquarters, fresh from Paris,
+involved in some undecipherable way in an Aix-les-Bains diamond robbery.
+The despatches had given his office very little to work on, and she had
+smiled at his thunderous grillings and defied his noisy threats. But as
+she sat there before him, chic and guarded, with her girlishly frail body
+so arrogantly well gowned, she had in some way touched his lethargic
+imagination. She showed herself to be of finer and keener fiber than the
+sordid demireps with whom he had to do. Shimmering and saucy and debonair
+as a polo pony, she had seemed a departure from type, something above the
+meretricious termagants round whom he so often had to weave his
+accusatory webs of evidence.
+
+Then, the following autumn, she was still again mysteriously involved in
+the Sheldon wire-tapping coup. This Montreal banker named Sheldon, from
+whom nearly two hundred thousand dollars had been wrested, put a bullet
+through his head rather than go home disgraced, and she had straightway
+been brought down to Blake, for, until the autopsy and the production of
+her dupe's letters, Sheldon's death had been looked upon as a murder.
+
+Blake had locked himself in with the white-faced Miss Elsie Verriner,
+alias Chaddy Cravath, alias Charlotte Carruthers, and for three long
+hours he had pitted his dynamic brute force against her flashing and
+snake-like evasiveness. He had pounded her with the artillery of his
+inhumanities. He had beleaguered her with explosive brutishness. He had
+bulldozed and harried her into frantic weariness. He had third-degreed
+her into cowering and trembling indignation, into hectic mental
+uncertainties. Then, with the fatigue point well passed, he had marshaled
+the last of his own animal strength and essayed the final blasphemous
+Vesuvian onslaught that brought about the nervous breakdown, the ultimate
+collapse. She had wept, then, the blubbering, loose-lipped, abandoned
+weeping of hysteria. She had stumbled forward and caught at his arm and
+clung to it, as though it were her last earthly pillar of support. Her
+huge plaited ropes of hair had fallen down, thick brown ropes longer than
+his own arms, and he, breathing hard, had sat back and watched them as
+she wept.
+
+But Blake was neither analytical nor introspective. How it came about he
+never quite knew. He felt, after his blind and inarticulate fashion, that
+this scene of theirs, that this official assault and surrender, was in
+some way associated with the climacteric transports of camp-meeting
+evangelism, that it involved strange nerve-centers touched on in
+rhapsodic religions, that it might even resemble the final emotional
+surrender of reluctant love itself to the first aggressive tides of
+passion. What it was based on, what it arose from, he could not say. But
+in the flood-tide of his own tumultuous conquest he had watched her
+abandoned weeping and her tumbled brown hair. And as he watched, a vague
+and troubling tingle sped like a fuse-sputter along his limbs, and fired
+something dormant and dangerous in the great hulk of a body which had
+never before been stirred by its explosion of emotion. It was not pity,
+he knew; for pity was something quite foreign to his nature. Yet as she
+lay back, limp and forlorn against his shoulder, sobbing weakly out that
+she wanted to be a good woman, that she could be honest if they would
+only give her a chance, he felt that thus to hold her, to shield her, was
+something desirable.
+
+She had stared, weary and wide-eyed, as his head had bent closer down
+over hers. She had drooped back, bewildered and unresponsive, as his
+heavy lips had closed on hers that were still wet and salty with tears.
+When she had left the office, at the end of that strange hour, she had
+gone with the promise of his protection.
+
+The sobering light of day, with its cynic relapse to actualities, might
+have left that promise a worthless one, had not the prompt evidence of
+Sheldon's suicide come to hand. This made Blake's task easier than he had
+expected. The movement against Elsie Verriner was "smothered" at
+Headquarters. Two days later she met Blake by appointment. That day, for
+the first time in his life, he gave flowers to a woman.
+
+Two weeks later he startled her with the declaration that he wanted to
+marry her. He didn't care about her past. She'd been dragged into the
+things she'd done without understanding them, at first, and she'd kept on
+because there'd been no one to help her away from them. He knew he could
+do it. She had a fine streak in her, and he wanted to bring it out!
+
+A little frightened, she tried to explain that she was not the marrying
+kind. Then, brick-red and bull-necked, he tried to tell her in his
+groping Celtic way that he wanted children, that she meant a lot to him,
+that he was going to try to make her the happiest woman south of Harlem.
+
+This had brought into her face a quick and dangerous light which he found
+hard to explain. He could see that she was flattered by what he had said,
+that his words had made her waywardly happy, that for a moment, in fact,
+she had been swept off her feet.
+
+Then dark afterthought interposed. It crept like a cloud across her
+abandoned face. It brought about a change so prompt that it disturbed the
+Second Deputy.
+
+"You're--you're not tied up already, are you?" he had hesitatingly
+demanded. "You're not married?"
+
+"No, I'm not tied up!" she had promptly and fiercely responded. "My
+life's my own--my own!"
+
+"Then why can't you marry me?" the practical-minded man had asked.
+
+"I could!" she had retorted, with the same fierceness as before. Then she
+had stood looking at him out of wistful and unhappy eyes. "I could--if
+you only understood, if you could only help me the way I want to be
+helped!"
+
+She had clung to his arm with a tragic forlornness that seemed to leave
+her very wan and helpless. And he had found it ineffably sweet to enfold
+that warm mass of wan helplessness in his own virile strength.
+
+She asked for time, and he was glad to consent to the delay, so long as
+it did not keep him from seeing her. In matters of the emotions he was
+still as uninitiated as a child. He found himself a little dazed by the
+seemingly accidental tenderness, by the promises of devotion, in which
+she proved so lavish. Morning by jocund morning he built up his airy
+dreams, as carefully as she built up her nut-brown plaits. He grew
+heavily light-headed with his plans for the future. When she pleaded with
+him never to leave her, never to trust her too much, he patted her thin
+cheek and asked when she was going to name the day. From that finality
+she still edged away, as though her happiness itself were only
+experimental, as though she expected the blue sky above them to deliver
+itself of a bolt.
+
+But by this time she had become a habit with him. He liked her even in
+her moodiest moments. When, one day, she suggested that they go away
+together, anywhere so long as it was away, he merely laughed at her
+childishness.
+
+It was, in fact, Blake himself who went away. After nine weeks of
+alternating suspense and happiness that seemed nine weeks of inebriation
+to him, he was called out of the city to complete the investigation on a
+series of iron-workers' dynamite outrages. Daily he wrote or wired back
+to her. But he was kept away longer than he had expected. When he
+returned to New York she was no longer there. She had disappeared as
+completely as though an asphalted avenue had opened and swallowed her up.
+It was not until the following winter that he learned she was again with
+Connie Binhart, in southern Europe.
+
+He had known his one belated love affair. It had left no scar, he
+claimed, because it had made no wound. Binhart, he consoled himself, had
+held the woman in his power: there had been no defeat because there had
+been no actual conquest. And now he could face her without an eye-blink
+of conscious embarrassment. Yet it was good to remember that Connie
+Binhart was going to be ground in the wheels of the law, and ground fine,
+and ground to a finish.
+
+"What did you want me for, Jim?" the woman was again asking him. She
+spoke with an intimate directness, and yet in her attitude were subtle
+reservations, a consciousness of the thin ice on which they both stood.
+Each saw, only too plainly, the need for great care, in every step. In
+each lay the power to uncover, at a hand's turn, old mistakes that were
+best unremembered. Yet there was a certain suave audacity about the
+woman. She was not really afraid of Blake, and the Second Deputy had to
+recognize that fact. This self-assurance of hers he attributed to the
+recollection that she had once brought about his personal subjugation,
+"got his goat," as he had phrased it. She, woman-like, would never forget
+it.
+
+"There's a man I want. And Schmittenberg tells me you know where he is."
+Blake, as he spoke, continued to look heavily down at his desk top.
+
+"Yes?" she answered cautiously, watching herself as carefully as an
+actress with a role to sustain, a role in which she could never be quite
+letter-perfect.
+
+"It's Connie Binhart," cut out the Second Deputy.
+
+He could see discretion drop like a curtain across her watching face.
+
+"Connie Binhart!" she temporized. Blake, as his heavy side glance slewed
+about to her, prided himself on the fact that he could see through her
+pretenses. At any other time he would have thrown open the flood-gates of
+that ever-inundating anger of his and swept away all such obliquities.
+
+"I guess," he went on with slow patience, "we know him best round here as
+Charles Blanchard."
+
+"Blanchard?" she echoed.
+
+"Yes, Blanchard, the Blanchard we've been looking for, for seven months
+now, the Blanchard who chloroformed Ezra Newcomb and carried off a
+hundred and eighteen thousand dollars."
+
+"Newcomb?" again meditated the woman.
+
+"The Blanchard who shot down the bank detective in Newcomb's room when
+the rest of the bank was listening to a German band playing in the side
+street, a band hired for the occasion."
+
+"When was that?" demanded the woman.
+
+"That was last October," he answered with a sing-song weariness
+suggestive of impatience at such supererogative explanations.
+
+"I was at Monte Carlo all last autumn," was the woman's quick retort.
+
+Blake moved his heavy body, as though to shoulder away any claim as to
+her complicity.
+
+"I know that," he acknowledged. "And you went north to Paris on the
+twenty-ninth of November. And on the third of December you went to
+Cherbourg; and on the ninth you landed in New York. I know all that.
+That's not what I'm after. I want to know where Connie Binhart is, now,
+to-day."
+
+Their glances at last came together. No move was made; no word was
+spoken. But a contest took place.
+
+"Why ask _me_?" repeated the woman for the second time. It was only too
+plain that she was fencing.
+
+"Because you _know_," was Blake's curt retort. He let the gray-irised
+eyes drink in the full cup of his determination. Some slowly accumulating
+consciousness of his power seemed to intimidate her. He could detect a
+change in her bearing, in her speech itself.
+
+"Jim, I can't tell you," she slowly asserted. "I can't do it!"
+
+"But I've got 'o know," he stubbornly maintained. "And I'm going to."
+
+She sat studying him for a minute or two. Her face had lost its earlier
+arrogance. It seemed troubled; almost touched with fear. She was not
+altogether ignorant, he reminded himself, of the resources which he could
+command.
+
+"I can't tell you," she repeated. "I'd rather you let me go."
+
+The Second Deputy's smile, scoffing and melancholy, showed how utterly he
+ignored her answer. He looked at his watch. Then he looked back at the
+woman. A nervous tug-of-war was taking place between her right and left
+hand, with a twisted-up pair of ecru gloves for the cable.
+
+"You know me," he began again in his deliberate and abdominal bass. "And
+I know you. I've got 'o get this man Binhart. I've got 'o! He's been out
+for seven months, now, and they're going to put it up to me, to _me_,
+personally. Copeland tried to get him without me. He fell down on it.
+They all fell down on it. And now they're going to throw the case back on
+me. They think it'll be my Waterloo."
+
+He laughed. His laugh was as mirthless as the cackle of a guinea hen.
+"But I'm going to die hard, believe me! And if I go down, if they think
+they can throw me on that, I'm going to take a few of my friends along
+with me."
+
+"Is that a threat?" was the woman's quick inquiry. Her eyes narrowed
+again, for she had long since learned, and learned it to her sorrow, that
+every breath he drew was a breath of self-interest.
+
+"No; it's just a plain statement." He slewed about in his swivel chair,
+throwing one thick leg over the other as he did so. "I hate to holler
+Auburn at a girl like you, Elsie; but I'm going--"
+
+"Auburn?" she repeated very quietly. Then she raised her eyes to his.
+"Can you say a thing like that to me, Jim?"
+
+He shifted a little in his chair. But he met her gaze without a wince.
+
+"This is business, Elsie, and you can't mix business and--and other
+things," he tailed off at last, dropping his eyes.
+
+"I'm sorry you put it that way," she said. "I hoped we'd be better
+friends than that!"
+
+"I'm not counting on friendship in this!" he retorted.
+
+"But it might have been better, even in this!" she said. And the artful
+look of pity on her face angered him.
+
+"Well, we'll begin on something nearer home!" he cried.
+
+He reached down into his pocket and produced a small tinted oblong of
+paper. He held it, face out, between his thumb and forefinger, so that
+she could read it.
+
+"This Steinert check'll do the trick. Take a closer look at the
+signature. Do you get it?"
+
+"What about it?" she asked, without a tremor.
+
+He restored the check to his wallet and the wallet to his pocket. She
+would find it impossible to outdo him in the matter of impassivity.
+
+"I may or I may not know who forged that check. I don't _want_ to know.
+And when you tell me where Binhart is, I _won't_ know."
+
+"That check wasn't forged," contended the quiet-eyed woman.
+
+"Steinert will swear it was," declared the Second Deputy.
+
+She sat without speaking, apparently in deep study. Her intent face
+showed no fear, no bewilderment, no actual emotion of any kind.
+
+"You've got 'o face it," said Blake, sitting back and waiting for her to
+speak. His attitude was that of a physician at a bedside, awaiting the
+prescribed opiate to produce its prescribed effect.
+
+"Will I be dragged into this case, in any way, if Binhart is rounded up?"
+the woman finally asked.
+
+"Not once," he asserted.
+
+"You promise me that?"
+
+"Of course," answered the Second Deputy.
+
+"And you'll let me alone on--on the other things?" she calmly exacted.
+
+"Yes," he promptly acknowledged. "I'll see that you're let alone."
+
+Again she looked at him with her veiled and judicial eyes. Then she
+dropped her hands into her lap. The gesture seemed one of resignation.
+
+"Binhart's in Montreal," she said.
+
+Blake, keeping his face well under control, waited for her to go on.
+
+"He's been in Montreal for weeks now. You'll find him at 381 King Edward
+Avenue, in Westmount. He's there, posing as an expert accountant."
+
+She saw the quick shadow of doubt, the eye-flash of indecision. So she
+reached quietly down and opened her pocket-book, rummaging through its
+contents for a moment or two. Then she handed Blake a folded envelope.
+
+"You know his writing?" she asked.
+
+"I've seen enough of it," he retorted, as he examined the typewritten
+envelope postmarked "Montreal, Que." Then he drew out the inner sheet. On
+it, written by pen, he read the message: "Come to 381 King Edward when
+the coast is clear," and below this the initials "C. B."
+
+Blake, with the writing still before his eyes, opened a desk drawer and
+took out a large reading-glass. Through the lens of this he again studied
+the inscription, word by word. Then he turned to the office 'phone on his
+desk.
+
+"Nolan," he said into the receiver, "I want to know if there's a King
+Edward Avenue in Montreal."
+
+He sat there waiting, still regarding the handwriting with stolidly
+reproving eyes. There was no doubt of its authenticity. He would have
+known it at a glance.
+
+"Yes, sir," came the answer over the wire. "It's one of the newer avenues
+in Westmount."
+
+Blake, still wrapped in thought, hung up the receiver. The woman facing
+him did not seem to resent his possible imputation of dishonesty. To be
+suspicious of all with whom he came in contact was imposed on him by his
+profession. He was compelled to watch even his associates, his operatives
+and underlings, his friends as well as his enemies. Life, with him, was a
+_concerto_ of skepticisms.
+
+She was able to watch him, without emotion, as he again bent forward,
+took up the 'phone receiver, and this time spoke apparently to another
+office.
+
+"I want you to wire Teal to get a man out to cover 381 King Edward
+Avenue, in Montreal. Yes, Montreal. Tell him to get a man out there
+inside of an hour, and put a night watch on until I relieve 'em."
+
+Then, breathing heavily, he bent over his desk, wrote a short message on
+a form pad and pushed the buzzer-button with his thick finger. He
+carefully folded up the piece of paper as he waited.
+
+"Get that off to Carpenter in Montreal right away," he said to the
+attendant who answered his call. Then he swung about in his chair, with a
+throaty grunt of content. He sat for a moment, staring at the woman with
+unseeing eyes. Then he stood up. With his hands thrust deep in his
+pockets he slowly moved his head back and forth, as though assenting to
+some unuttered question.
+
+"Elsie, you're all right," he acknowledged with his solemn and
+unimaginative impassivity. "You're all right."
+
+Her quiet gaze, with all its reservations, was a tacit question. He was
+still a little puzzled by her surrender. He knew she did not regard him
+as the great man that he was, that his public career had made of him.
+
+"You've helped me out of a hole," he acknowledged as he faced her
+interrogating eyes with his one-sided smile. "I'm mighty glad you've done
+it, Elsie--for your sake as well as mine."
+
+"What hole?" asked the woman, wearily drawing on her gloves. There was
+neither open contempt nor indifference on her face. Yet something in her
+bearing nettled him. The quietness of her question contrasted strangely
+with the gruffness of the Second Deputy's voice as he answered her.
+
+"Oh, they think I'm a has-been round here," he snorted. "They've got the
+idea I'm out o' date. And I'm going to show 'em a thing or two to wake
+'em up."
+
+"How?" asked the woman.
+
+"By doing what their whole kid-glove gang haven't been able to do," he
+avowed. And having delivered himself of that ultimatum, he promptly
+relaxed into his old-time impassiveness, like a dog snapping from his
+kennel and shrinking back into its shadows. At the same moment that
+Blake's thick forefinger again prodded the buzzer-button at his desk end
+the watching woman could see the relapse into official wariness. It was
+as though he had put the shutters up in front of his soul. She accepted
+the movement as a signal of dismissal. She rose from her chair and
+quietly lowered and adjusted her veil. Yet through that lowered veil she
+stood looking down at Never-Fail Blake for a moment or two. She looked at
+him with grave yet casual curiosity, as tourists look at a ruin that has
+been pointed out to them as historic.
+
+"You didn't give me back Connie Binhart's note," she reminded him as she
+paused with her gloved finger-tips resting on the desk edge.
+
+"D'you want it?" he queried with simulated indifference, as he made a
+final and lingering study of it.
+
+"I'd like to keep it," she acknowledged. When, without meeting her eyes,
+he handed it over to her, she folded it and restored it to her
+pocket-book, carefully, as though vast things depended on that small
+scrap of paper.
+
+Never-Fail Blake, alone in his office and still assailed by the vaguely
+disturbing perfumes which she had left behind her, pondered her reasons
+for taking back Binhart's scrap of paper. He wondered if she had at any
+time actually cared for Binhart. He wondered if she was capable of caring
+for anybody. And this problem took his thoughts back to the time when so
+much might have depended on its answer.
+
+The Second Deputy dropped his reading-glass in its drawer and slammed it
+shut. It made no difference, he assured himself, one way or the other.
+And in the consolatory moments of a sudden new triumph Never-Fail Blake
+let his thoughts wander pleasantly back over that long life which (and of
+this he was now comfortably conscious) his next official move was about
+to redeem.
+
+
+
+
+                                   II
+
+
+It was as a Milwaukee newsboy, at the age of twelve, that "Jimmie" Blake
+first found himself in any way associated with that arm of constituted
+authority known as the police force. A plain-clothes man, on that
+occasion, had given him a two-dollar bill to carry about an armful of
+evening papers and at the same time "tail" an itinerant pickpocket. The
+fortifying knowledge, two years later, that the Law was behind him when
+he was pushed happy and tingling through a transom to release the
+door-lock for a house-detective, was perhaps a foreshadowing of that
+pride which later welled up in his bosom at the phrase that he would
+always "have United Decency behind him," as the social purifiers fell
+into the habit of putting it.
+
+At nineteen, as a "checker" at the Upper Kalumet Collieries, Blake had
+learned to remember faces. Slavic or Magyar, Swedish or Calabrian, from
+that daily line of over two hundred he could always pick his face and
+correctly call the name. His post meant a life of indolence and petty
+authority. His earlier work as a steamfitter had been more profitable.
+Yet at that work he had been a menial; it involved no transom-born
+thrills, no street-corner tailer's suspense. As a checker he was at least
+the master of other men.
+
+His public career had actually begun as a strike breaker. The monotony of
+night-watchman service, followed by a year as a drummer for an Eastern
+firearm firm, and another year as an inspector for a Pennsylvania powder
+factory, had infected him with the _wanderlust_ of his kind. It was in
+Chicago, on a raw day of late November, with a lake wind whipping the
+street dust into his eyes, that he had seen the huge canvas sign of a
+hiring agency's office, slapping in the storm. This sign had said:
+
+                             "MEN WANTED."
+
+Being twenty-six and adventurous and out of a job, he had drifted in with
+the rest of earth's undesirables and asked for work.
+
+After twenty minutes of private coaching in the mysteries of railway
+signals, he had been "passed" by the desk examiner and sent out as one of
+the "scab" train crew to move perishable freight, for the Wisconsin
+Central was then in the throes of its first great strike. And he had gone
+out as a green brakeman, but he had come back as a hero, with a _Tribune_
+reporter posing him against a furniture car for a two-column photo. For
+the strikers had stoned his train, half killed the "scab" fireman,
+stalled him in the yards and cut off two thirds of his cars and shot out
+the cab-windows for full measure. But in the cab with an Irish
+engine-driver named O'Hagan, Blake had backed down through the yards
+again, picked up his train, crept up over the tender and along the car
+tops, recoupled his cars, fought his way back to the engine, and there,
+with the ecstatic O'Hagan at his side, had hurled back the last of the
+strikers trying to storm his engine steps. He even fell to "firing" as
+the yodeling O'Hagan got his train moving again, and then, perched on the
+tender coal, took pot-shots with his brand-new revolver at a last pair of
+strikers who were attempting to manipulate the hand-brakes.
+
+That had been the first train to get out of the yards in seven days.
+Through a godlike disregard of signals, it is true, they had run into an
+open switch, some twenty-eight miles up the line, but they had moved
+their freight and won their point.
+
+Blake, two weeks later, had made himself further valuable to that hiring
+agency, not above subornation of perjury, by testifying in a court of law
+to the sobriety of a passenger crew who had been carried drunk from their
+scab-manned train. So naively dogged was he in his stand, so quick was he
+in his retorts, that the agency, when the strike ended by a compromise
+ten days later, took him on as one of their own operatives.
+
+Thus James Blake became a private detective. He was at first disappointed
+in the work. It seemed, at first, little better than his old job as
+watchman and checker. But the agency, after giving him a three-week try
+out at picket work, submitted him to the further test of a "shadowing"
+case. That first assignment of "tailing" kept him thirty-six hours
+without sleep, but he stuck to his trail, stuck to it with the blind
+pertinacity of a bloodhound, and at the end transcended mere animalism by
+buying a tip from a friendly bartender. Then, when the moment was ripe,
+he walked into the designated hop-joint and picked his man out of an
+underground bunk as impassively as a grocer takes an egg crate from a
+cellar shelf.
+
+After his initial baptism of fire in the Wisconsin Central railway yards,
+however, Blake yearned for something more exciting, for something more
+sensational. His hopes rose, when, a month later, he was put on "track"
+work. He was at heart fond of both a good horse and a good heat. He liked
+the open air and the stir and movement and color of the grand-stand
+crowds. He liked the "ponies" with the sunlight on their satin flanks,
+the music of the band, the gaily appareled women. He liked, too, the
+off-hand deference of the men about him, from turnstile to betting shed,
+once his calling was known. They were all ready to curry favor with him,
+touts and rail-birds, clockers and owners, jockeys and gamblers and
+bookmakers, placating him with an occasional "sure-thing" tip from the
+stables, plying him with cigars and advice as to how he should place his
+money. There was a tacit understanding, of course, that in return for
+these courtesies his vision was not to be too keen nor his manner too
+aggressive. When he was approached by an expert "dip" with the offer of a
+fat reward for immunity in working the track crowds, Blake carefully
+weighed the matter, pro and con, equivocated, and decided he would gain
+most by a "fall." So he planted a barber's assistant with whom he was
+friendly, descended on the pickpocket in the very act of going through
+that bay-rum scented youth's pocket, and secured a conviction that
+brought a letter of thanks from the club stewards and a word or two of
+approval from his head office.
+
+That head office, seeing that they had a man to be reckoned with,
+transferred Blake to their Eastern division, with headquarters at New
+York, where new men and new faces were at the moment badly needed.
+
+They worked him hard, in that new division, but he never objected. He was
+sober; he was dependable; and he was dogged with the doggedness of the
+unimaginative. He wanted to get on, to make good, to be more than a mere
+"operative." And if his initial assignments gave him little but
+"rough-neck" work to do, he did it without audible complaint. He did
+bodyguard service, he handled strike breakers, he rounded up freight-car
+thieves, he was given occasionally "spot" and "tailing" work to do. Once,
+after a week of upholstered hotel lounging on a divorce case he was sent
+out on night detail to fight river pirates stealing from the coal-road
+barges.
+
+In the meantime, being eager and unsatisfied, he studied his city.
+Laboriously and patiently he made himself acquainted with the ways of the
+underworld. He saw that all his future depended upon acquaintanceship
+with criminals, not only with their faces, but with their ways and their
+women and their weaknesses. So he started a gallery, a gallery of his
+own, a large and crowded gallery between walls no wider than the bones of
+his own skull. To this jealously guarded and ponderously sorted gallery
+he day by day added some new face, some new scene, some new name. Crook
+by crook he stored them away there, for future reference. He got to know
+the "habituals" and the "timers," the "gangs" and their "hang outs" and
+"fences." He acquired an array of confidence men and hotel beats and
+queer shovers and bank sneaks and wire tappers and drum snuffers. He made
+a mental record of dips and yeggs and till-tappers and keister-crackers,
+of panhandlers and dummy chuckers, of sun gazers and schlaum workers. He
+slowly became acquainted with their routes and their rendezvous, their
+tricks and ways and records. But, what was more important, he also grew
+into an acquaintanceship with ward politics, with the nameless Power
+above him and its enigmatic traditions. He got to know the Tammany
+heelers, the men with "pull," the lads who were to be "pounded" and the
+lads who were to be let alone, the men in touch with the "Senator," and
+the gangs with the fall money always at hand.
+
+Blake, in those days, was a good "mixer." He was not an "office" man, and
+was never dubbed high-brow. He was not above his work; no one accused him
+of being too refined for his calling. Through a mind such as his the Law
+could best view the criminal, just as a solar eclipse is best viewed
+through smoked glass.
+
+He could hobnob with bartenders and red-lighters, pass unnoticed through
+a slum, join casually in a stuss game, or loaf unmarked about a street
+corner. He was fond of pool and billiards, and many were the unconsidered
+trifles he picked up with a cue in his hand. His face, even in those
+early days, was heavy and inoffensive. Commonplace seemed to be the word
+that fitted him. He could always mix with and become one of the crowd. He
+would have laughed at any such foolish phrase as "protective coloration."
+Yet seldom, he knew, men turned back to look at him a second time.
+Small-eyed, beefy and well-fed, he could have passed, under his slightly
+tilted black boulder, as a truck driver with a day off.
+
+What others might have denominated as "dirty work" he accepted with heavy
+impassivity, consoling himself with the contention that its final end was
+cleanness. And one of his most valuable assets, outside his stolid
+heartlessness, was his speaking acquaintanceship with the women of the
+underworld. He remained aloof from them even while he mixed with them. He
+never grew into a "moll-buzzer." But in his rough way he cultivated them.
+He even helped some of them out of their troubles--in consideration for
+"tips" which were to be delivered when the emergency arose. They accepted
+his gruffness as simple-mindedness, as blunt honesty. One or two, with
+their morbid imaginations touched by his seeming generosities, made
+wistful amatory advances which he promptly repelled. He could afford to
+have none of them with anything "on" him. He saw the need of keeping cool
+headed and clean handed, with an eye always to the main issue.
+
+And Blake really regarded himself as clean handed. Yet deep in his nature
+was that obliquity, that adeptness at trickery, that facility in deceit,
+which made him the success he was. He could always meet a crook on his
+own ground. He had no extraneous sensibilities to eliminate. He mastered
+a secret process of opening and reading letters without detection. He
+became an adept at picking a lock. One of his earlier successes had
+depended on the cool dexterity with which he had exchanged trunk checks
+in a Wabash baggage car at Black Rock, allowing the "loft" thief under
+suspicion to carry off a dummy trunk, while he came into possession of
+another's belongings and enough evidence to secure his victim's
+conviction.
+
+At another time, when "tailing" on a badger-game case, he equipped
+himself as a theatrical "bill-sniper," followed his man about without
+arousing suspicion, and made liberal use of his magnetized tack-hammer in
+the final mix up when he made his haul. He did not shirk these mix ups,
+for he was endowed with the bravery of the unimaginative. This very
+mental heaviness, holding him down to materialities, kept his
+contemplation of contingencies from becoming bewildering. He enjoyed the
+limitations of the men against whom he was pitted. Yet at times he had
+what he called a "coppered hunch." When, in later years, an occasional
+criminal of imagination became his enemy, he was often at a loss as to
+how to proceed. But imaginative criminals, he knew, were rare, and
+dilemmas such as these proved infrequent. Whatever his shift, or however
+unsavory his resource, he never regarded himself as on the same basis as
+his opponents. He had Law on his side; he was the instrument of that
+great power known as Justice.
+
+As Blake's knowledge of New York and his work increased he was given less
+and less of the "rough-neck" work to do. He proved himself, in fact, a
+stolid and painstaking "investigator." As a divorce-suit shadower he was
+equally resourceful and equally successful. When his agency took over the
+bankers' protective work he was advanced to this new department, where he
+found himself compelled to a new term of study and a new circle of
+alliances. He went laboriously through records of forgers and check
+raisers and counterfeiters. He took up the study of all such gentry,
+sullenly yet methodically, like a backward scholar mastering a newly
+imposed branch of knowledge, thumbing frowningly through official
+reports, breathing heavily over portrait files and police records,
+plodding determinedly through counterfeit-detector manuals. For this book
+work, as he called it, he retained a deep-seated disgust.
+
+The outcome of his first case, later known as the "Todaro National Ten
+Case," confirmed him in this attitude. Going doggedly over the
+counterfeit ten-dollar national bank note that had been given him after
+two older operatives had failed in the case, he discovered the word
+"Dollars" in small lettering spelt "Ddllers." Concluding that only a
+foreigner would make a mistake of that nature, and knowing the activity
+of certain bands of Italians in such counterfeiting efforts, he began his
+slow and scrupulous search through the purlieus of the East Side. About
+that search was neither movement nor romance. It was humdrum, dogged,
+disheartening labor, with the gradual elimination of possibilities and
+the gradual narrowing down of his field. But across that ever-narrowing
+trail the accidental little clue finally fell, and on the night of the
+final raid the desired plates were captured and the notorious and
+long-sought Todaro rounded up.
+
+So successful was Blake during the following two years that the
+Washington authorities, coming in touch with him through the operations
+of the Secret Service, were moved to make him an offer. This offer he
+stolidly considered and at last stolidly accepted. He became an official
+with the weight of the Federal authority behind him. He became an
+investigator with the secrets of the Bureau of Printing and Engraving at
+his beck. He found himself a cog in a machinery that seemed limitless in
+its ramifications. He was the agent of a vast and centralized authority,
+an authority against which there could be no opposition. But he had to
+school himself to the knowledge that he was a cog, and nothing more. And
+two things were expected of him, efficiency and silence.
+
+He found a secret pleasure, at first, in the thought of working from
+under cover, in the sense of operating always in the dark, unknown and
+unseen. It gave a touch of something Olympian and godlike to his
+movements. But as time went by the small cloud of discontent on his
+horizon grew darker, and widened as it blackened. He was avid of
+something more than power. He thirsted not only for its operation, but
+also for its display. He rebelled against the idea of a continually
+submerged personality. He nursed a keen hunger to leave some record of
+what he did or had done. He objected to it all as a conspiracy of
+obliteration, objected to it as an actor would object to playing to an
+empty theater. There was no one to appreciate and applaud. And an
+audience was necessary. He enjoyed the unctuous salute of the patrolman
+on his beat, the deferential door-holding of "office boys," the quick
+attentiveness of minor operatives. But this was not enough. He felt the
+normal demand to assert himself, to be known at his true worth by both
+his fellow workers and the world in general.
+
+It was not until the occasion when he had run down a gang of Williamsburg
+counterfeiters, however, that his name was conspicuously in print. So
+interesting were the details of this gang's operations, so typical were
+their methods, that Wilkie or some official under Wilkie had handed over
+to a monthly known as _The Counterfeit Detector_ a full account of the
+case. A New York paper has printed a somewhat distorted and romanticized
+copy of this, having sent a woman reporter to interview Blake--while a
+staff artist made a pencil drawing of the Secret Service man during the
+very moments the latter was smilingly denying them either a statement or
+a photograph. Blake knew that publicity would impair his effectiveness.
+Some inner small voice forewarned him that all outside recognition of his
+calling would take away from his value as an agent of the Secret Service.
+But his hunger for his rights as a man was stronger than his discretion
+as an official. He said nothing openly; but he allowed inferences to be
+drawn and the artist's pencil to put the finishing touches to the sketch.
+
+It was here, too, that his slyness, his natural circuitiveness, operated
+to save him. When the inevitable protest came he was able to prove that
+he had said nothing and had indignantly refused a photograph. He
+completely cleared himself. But the hint of an interesting personality
+had been betrayed to the public, the name of a new sleuth had gone on
+record, and the infection of curiosity spread like a mulberry rash from
+newspaper office to newspaper office. A representative of the press,
+every now and then, would drop in on Blake, or chance to occupy the same
+smoking compartment with him on a run between Washington and New York, to
+ply his suavest and subtlest arts for the extraction of some final fact
+with which to cap an unfinished "story." Blake, in turn, became equally
+subtle and suave. His lips were sealed, but even silence, he found, could
+be made illuminative. Even reticence, on occasion, could be made to serve
+his personal ends. He acquired the trick of surrendering data without any
+shadow of actual statement.
+
+These chickens, however, all came home to roost. Official recognition was
+taken of Blake's tendencies, and he was assigned to those cases where a
+"leak" would prove least embarrassing to the Department. He saw this and
+resented it. But in the meantime he had been keeping his eyes open and
+storing up in his cabinet of silence every unsavory rumor and fact that
+might prove of use in the future. He found himself, in due time, the
+master of an arsenal of political secrets. And when it came to a display
+of power he could merit the attention if not the respect of a startlingly
+wide circle of city officials. When a New York municipal election brought
+a party turn over, he chose the moment as the psychological one for a
+display of his power, cruising up and down the coasts of officialdom with
+his grim facts in tow, for all the world like a flagship followed by its
+fleet.
+
+It was deemed expedient for the New York authorities to "take care" of
+him. A berth was made for him in the Central Office, and after a year of
+laborious manipulation he found himself Third Deputy Commissioner and a
+power in the land.
+
+If he became a figure of note, and fattened on power, he found it no
+longer possible to keep as free as he wished from entangling alliances.
+He had by this time learned to give and take, to choose the lesser of two
+evils, to pay the ordained price for his triumphs. Occasionally the
+forces of evil had to be bribed with a promise of protection. For the
+surrender of dangerous plates, for example, a counterfeiter might receive
+immunity, or for the turning of State's evidence a guilty man might have
+to go scott free. At other times, to squeeze confession out of a crook, a
+cruelty as refined as that of the Inquisition had to be adopted. In one
+stubborn case the end had been achieved by depriving the victim of sleep,
+this Chinese torture being kept up until the needed nervous collapse. At
+another time the midnight cell of a suspected murderer had been "set"
+like a stage, with all the accessories of his crime, including even the
+cadaver, and when suddenly awakened the frenzied man had shrieked out his
+confession. But, as a rule, it was by imposing on his prisoner's better
+instincts, such as gang-loyalty or pity for a supposedly threatened
+"rag," that the point was won. In resources of this nature Blake became
+quite conscienceless, salving his soul with the altogether jesuitic claim
+that illegal means were always justified by the legal end.
+
+By the time he had fought his way up to the office of Second Deputy he no
+longer resented being known as a "rough neck" or a "flat foot." As an
+official, he believed in roughness; it was his right; and one touch of
+right made away with all wrong, very much as one grain of pepsin properly
+disposed might digest a carload of beef. A crook was a crook. His natural
+end was the cell or the chair, and the sooner he got there the better for
+all concerned. So Blake believed in "hammering" his victims. He was an
+advocate of "confrontation." He had faith in the old-fashioned
+"third-degree" dodges. At these, in his ponderous way, he became an
+adept, looking on the nervous system of his subject as a nut, to be
+calmly and relentlessly gnawed at until the meat of truth lay exposed, or
+to be cracked by the impact of some sudden great shock. Nor was the
+Second Deputy above resorting to the use of "plants." Sometimes he had to
+call in a "fixer" to manufacture evidence, that the far-off ends of
+justice might not be defeated. He made frequent use of women of a certain
+type, women whom he could intimidate as an officer or buy over as a good
+fellow. He had his _aides_ in all walks of life, in clubs and offices, in
+pawnshops and saloons, in hotels and steamers and barber shops, in pool
+rooms and anarchists' cellars. He also had his visiting list, his
+"fences" and "stool-pigeons" and "shoo-flies."
+
+He preferred the "outdoor" work, both because he was more at home in it
+and because it was more spectacular. He relished the bigger cases. He
+liked to step in where an underling had failed, get his teeth into the
+situation, shake the mystery out of it, and then obliterate the underling
+with a half hour of blasphemous abuse. He had scant patience with what he
+called the "high-collar cops." He consistently opposed the new-fangled
+methods, such as the _Portrait Parle_, and pin-maps for recording crime,
+and the graphic-system boards for marking the movements of criminals. All
+anthropometric nonsense such as Bertillon's he openly sneered at, just as
+he scoffed at card indexes and finger prints and other academic
+innovations which were debilitating the force. He had gathered his own
+data, at great pains, he nursed his own personal knowledge as to habitual
+offenders and their aliases, their methods, their convictions and
+records, their associates and hang outs. He carried his own gallery under
+his own hat, and he was proud of it. His memory was good, and he claimed
+always to know his man. His intuitions were strong, and if he disliked a
+captive, that captive was in some way guilty--and he saw to it that his
+man did not escape. He was relentless, once his professional pride was
+involved. Being without imagination, he was without pity. It was, at
+best, a case of dog eat dog, and the Law, the Law for which he had such
+reverence, happened to keep him the upper dog.
+
+Yet he was a comparatively stupid man, an amazingly self-satisfied toiler
+who had chanced to specialize on crime. And even as he became more and
+more assured of his personal ability, more and more entrenched in his
+tradition of greatness, he was becoming less and less elastic, less
+receptive, less adaptive. Much as he tried to blink the fact, he was
+compelled to depend more and more on the office behind him. His personal
+gallery, the gallery under his hat, showed a tendency to become both
+obsolete and inadequate. That endless catacomb of lost souls grew too
+intricate for one human mind to compass. New faces, new names, new tricks
+tended to bewilder him. He had to depend more and more on the clerical
+staff and the finger-print bureau records. His position became that of a
+villager with a department store on his hands, of a country shopkeeper
+trying to operate an urban emporium. He was averse to deputizing his
+official labors. He was ignorant of system and science. He took on the
+pathos of a man who is out of his time, touched with the added poignancy
+of a passionate incredulity as to his predicament. He felt, at times,
+that there was something wrong, that the rest of the Department did not
+look on life and work as he did. But he could not decide just where the
+trouble lay. And in his uncertainty he made it a point to entrench
+himself by means of "politics." It became an open secret that he had a
+pull, that his position was impregnable. This in turn tended to coarsen
+his methods. It lifted him beyond the domain of competitive effort. It
+touched his carelessness with arrogance. It also tinged his arrogance
+with occasional cruelty.
+
+He redoubled his efforts to sustain the myth which had grown up about
+him, the myth of his vast cleverness and personal courage. He showed a
+tendency for the more turbulent centers. He went among murderers without
+a gun. He dropped into dives, protected by nothing more than the
+tradition of his office. He pushed his way in through thugs, picked out
+his man, and told him to come to Headquarters in an hour's time--and the
+man usually came. His appetite for the spectacular increased. He
+preferred to head his own gambling raids, ax in hand. But more even than
+his authority he liked to parade his knowledge. He liked to be able to
+say: "This is Sheeny Chi's coup!" or, "That's a job that only Soup-Can
+Charlie could do!" When a police surgeon hit on the idea of etherizing an
+obdurate "dummy chucker," to determine if the prisoner could talk or not,
+Blake appropriated the suggestion as his own. And when the "press boys"
+trooped in for their daily gist of news, he asked them, as usual, not to
+couple his name with the incident; and they, as usual, made him the hero
+of the occasion.
+
+For Never-Fail Blake had made it a point to be good to the press boys. He
+acquired an ability to "jolly" them without too obvious loss of dignity.
+He took them into his confidences, apparently, and made his disclosures
+personal matters, individual favors. He kept careful note of their names,
+their characteristics, their interests. He cultivated them, keeping as
+careful track of them from city to city as he did of the "big" criminals
+themselves. They got into the habit of going to him for their special
+stories. He always exacted secrecy, pretended reluctance, yet parceled
+out to one reporter and another those dicta to which his name could be
+most appropriately attached. He even surrendered a clue or two as to how
+his own activities and triumphs might be worked into a given story. When
+he perceived that those worldly wise young men of the press saw through
+the dodge, he became more adept, more adroit, more delicate in method.
+But the end was the same.
+
+It was about this time that he invested in his first scrap-book. Into
+this secret granary went every seed of his printed personal history. Then
+came the higher records of the magazines, the illustrated articles
+written about "Blake, the Hamard of America," as one of them expressed
+it, and "Never-Fail Blake," as another put it. He was very proud of those
+magazine articles, he even made ponderous and painstaking efforts for
+their repetition, at considerable loss of dignity. Yet he adopted the
+pose of disclaiming responsibility, of disliking such things, of being
+ready to oppose them if some effective method could only be thought out.
+He even hinted to those about him at Headquarters that this seeming
+garrulity was serving a good end, claiming it to be harmless pother to
+"cover" more immediate trails on which he pretended to be engaged.
+
+But the scrap-books grew in number and size. It became a task to keep up
+with his clippings. He developed into a personage, as much a personage as
+a grand-opera prima donna on tour. His successes were talked over in
+clubs. His name came to be known to the men in the street. His "camera
+eye" was now and then mentioned by the scientists. His unblemished record
+was referred to in an occasional editorial. When an ex-police reporter
+came to him, asking him to father a macaronic volume bearing the title
+"Criminals of America," Blake not only added his name to the title page,
+but advanced three hundred dollars to assist towards its launching.
+
+The result of all this was a subtle yet unmistakable shifting of values,
+an achievement of public glory at the loss of official confidence. He
+excused his waning popularity among his co-workers on the ground of envy.
+It was, he held, merely the inevitable penalty for supreme success in any
+field. But a hint would come, now and then, that troubled him. "You think
+you're a big gun, Blake," one of his underworld victims once had the
+temerity to cry out at him. "You think you're the king of the Hawkshaws!
+But if you were on _my_ side of the fence, you'd last about as long as a
+snowball on a crownsheet!"
+
+
+
+
+                                  III
+
+
+It was not until the advent of Copeland, the new First Deputy, that Blake
+began to suspect his own position. Copeland was an out-and-out "office"
+man, anything but a "flat foot." Weak looking and pallid, with the
+sedentary air of a junior desk clerk, vibratingly restless with no actual
+promise of being penetrating, he was of that indeterminate type which
+never seems to acquire a personality of its own. The small and bony and
+steel-blue face was as neutral as the spare and reticent figure that sat
+before a bald table in a bald room as inexpressive and reticent as its
+occupant. Copeland was not only unknown outside the Department; he was,
+in a way, unknown in his own official circles.
+
+And then Blake woke up to the fact that some one on the inside was
+working against him, was blocking his moves, was actually using him as a
+"blind." While he was given the "cold" trails, younger men went out on
+the "hot" ones. There were times when the Second Deputy suspected that
+his enemy was Copeland. Not that he could be sure of this, for Copeland
+himself gave no inkling of his attitude. He gave no inkling of anything,
+in fact, personal or impersonal. But more and more Blake was given the
+talking parts, the role of spokesman to the press. He was more and more
+posted in the background, like artillery, to intimidate with his remote
+thunder and cover the advance of more agile columns. He was encouraged to
+tell the public what he knew, but he was not allowed to know too much.
+And, ironically enough, he bitterly resented this role of "mouthpiece"
+for the Department.
+
+"You call yourself a gun!" a patrolman who had been shaken down for
+insubordination broke out at him. "A gun! why, you're only a _park_ gun!
+That's all you are, a broken-down bluff, an ornamental has-been, a park
+gun for kids to play 'round!"
+
+Blake raged at that, impotently, pathetically, like an old lion with its
+teeth drawn. He prowled moodily around, looking for an enemy on whom to
+vent his anger. But he could find no tangible force that opposed him. He
+could see nothing on which to centralize his activity. Yet something or
+somebody was working against him. To fight that opposition was like
+fighting a fog. It was as bad as trying to shoulder back a shadow.
+
+He had his own "spots" and "finders" on the force. When he had been
+tipped off that the powers above were about to send him out on the
+Binhart case, he passed the word along to his underlings, without loss of
+time, for he felt that he was about to be put on trial, that they were
+making the Binhart capture a test case. And he had rejoiced mightily when
+his dragnet had brought up the unexpected tip that Elsie Verriner had
+been in recent communication with Binhart, and with pressure from the
+right quarter could be made to talk.
+
+This tip had been a secret one. Blake, on his part, kept it well muffled,
+for he intended that his capture of Binhart should be not only a personal
+triumph for the Second Deputy, but a vindication of that Second Deputy's
+methods.
+
+So when the Commissioner called him and Copeland into conference, the day
+after his talk with Elsie Verriner, Blake prided himself on being
+secretly prepared for any advances that might be made.
+
+It was the Commissioner who did the talking. Copeland, as usual, lapsed
+into the background, cracking his dry knuckles and blinking his pale-blue
+eyes about the room as the voices of the two larger men boomed back and
+forth.
+
+"We've been going over this Binhart case," began the Commissioner. "It's
+seven months now--and nothing done!"
+
+Blake looked sideways at Copeland. There was muffled and meditative
+belligerency in the look. There was also gratification, for it was the
+move he had been expecting.
+
+"I always said McCooey wasn't the man to go out on that case," said the
+Second Deputy, still watching Copeland.
+
+"Then who _is_ the man?" asked the Commissioner.
+
+Blake took out a cigar, bit the end off, and struck a match. It was out
+of place; but it was a sign of his independence. He had long since given
+up plug and fine-cut and taken to fat Havanas, which he smoked audibly,
+in plethoric wheezes. Good living had left his body stout and his
+breathing slightly asthmatic. He sat looking down at his massive knees;
+his oblique study of Copeland, apparently, had yielded him scant
+satisfaction. Copeland, in fact, was making paper fans out of the
+official note-paper in front of him.
+
+"What's the matter with Washington and Wilkie?" inquired Blake,
+attentively regarding his cigar.
+
+"They're just where we are--at a standstill," acknowledged the
+Commissioner.
+
+"And that's where we'll stay!" heavily contended the Second Deputy.
+
+The entire situation was an insidiously flattering one to Blake. Every
+one else had failed. They were compelled to come to him, their final
+resource.
+
+"Why?" demanded his superior.
+
+"Because we haven't got a man who can turn the trick! We haven't got a
+man who can go out and round up Binhart inside o' seven years!"
+
+"Then what is your suggestion?" It was Copeland who spoke, mild and
+hesitating.
+
+"D' you want my suggestion?" demanded Blake, warm with the wine-like
+knowledge which, he knew, made him master of the situation.
+
+"Of course," was the Commissioner's curt response.
+
+"Well, you've got to have a man who knows Binhart, who knows him and his
+tricks and his hang outs!"
+
+"Well, who does?"
+
+"I do," declared Blake.
+
+The Commissioner indulged in his wintry smile.
+
+"You mean if you weren't tied down to your Second Deputy's chair you
+could go out and get him!"
+
+"I could!"
+
+"Within a reasonable length of time?"
+
+"I don't know about the time! But I could get him, all right."
+
+"If you were still on the outside work?" interposed Copeland.
+
+"I certainly wouldn't expect to dig him out o' my stamp drawer," was
+Blake's heavily facetious retort.
+
+Copeland and the Commissioner looked at each other, for one fraction of a
+second.
+
+"You know what my feeling is," resumed the latter, "on this Binhart
+case."
+
+"I know what _my_ feeling is," declared Blake.
+
+"What?"
+
+"That the right method would've got him six months ago, without all this
+monkey work!"
+
+"Then why not end the monkey work, as you call it?"
+
+"How?"
+
+"By doing what you say you can do!" was the Commissioner's retort.
+
+"How'm I going to hold down a chair and hunt a crook at the same time?"
+
+"Then why hold down the chair? Let the chair take care of itself. It
+could be arranged, you know."
+
+Blake had the stage-juggler's satisfaction of seeing things fall into his
+hands exactly as he had manoeuvered they should. His reluctance was
+merely a dissimulation, a stage wait for heightened dramatic effect.
+
+"How'd you do the arranging?" he calmly inquired.
+
+"I could see the Mayor in the morning. There will be no Departmental
+difficulty."
+
+"Then where's the trouble?"
+
+"There is none, if you are willing to go out."
+
+"Well, we can't get Binhart here by pink-tea invitations. Somebody's got
+to go out and _get_ him!"
+
+"The bank raised the reward to eight thousand this week," interposed the
+ruminative Copeland.
+
+"Well, it'll take money to get him," snapped back the Second Deputy,
+remembering that he had a nest of his own to feather.
+
+"It will be worth what it costs," admitted the Commissioner.
+
+"Of course," said Copeland, "they'll have to honor your drafts--in
+reason."
+
+"There will be no difficulty on the expense side," quietly interposed the
+Commissioner. "The city wants Binhart. The whole country wants Binhart.
+And they will be willing to pay for it."
+
+Blake rose heavily to his feet. His massive bulk was momentarily stirred
+by the prospect of the task before him. For one brief moment the
+anticipation of that clamor of approval which would soon be his stirred
+his lethargic pulse. Then his cynic calmness again came back to him.
+
+"Then what're we beefing about?" he demanded. "You want Binhart and I'll
+get him for you."
+
+The Commissioner, tapping the top of his desk with his gold-banded
+fountain pen, smiled. It was almost a smile of indulgence.
+
+"You _know_ you will get him?" he inquired.
+
+The inquiry seemed to anger Blake. He was still dimly conscious of the
+operation of forces which he could not fathom. There were things, vague
+and insubstantial, which he could not understand. But he nursed to his
+heavy-breathing bosom the consciousness that he himself was not without
+his own undivulged powers, his own private tricks, his own inner
+reserves.
+
+"I say I'll get him!" he calmly proclaimed. "And I guess that ought to be
+enough!"
+
+
+
+
+                                   IV
+
+
+The unpretentious, brownstone-fronted home of Deputy Copeland was
+visited, late that night, by a woman. She was dressed in black, and
+heavily veiled. She walked with the stoop of a sorrowful and middle-aged
+widow.
+
+She came in a taxicab, which she dismissed at the corner. From the house
+steps she looked first eastward and then westward, as though to make sure
+she was not being followed. Then she rang the bell.
+
+She gave no name; yet she was at once admitted. Her visit, in fact,
+seemed to be expected, for without hesitation she was ushered upstairs
+and into the library of the First Deputy.
+
+He was waiting for her in a room more intimate, more personal, more
+companionably crowded than his office, for the simple reason that it was
+not a room of his own fashioning. He stood in the midst of its warm
+hangings, in fact, as cold and neutral as the marble Diana behind him. He
+did not even show, as he closed the door and motioned his visitor into a
+chair, that he had been waiting for her.
+
+The woman, still standing, looked carefully about the room, from side to
+side, saw that they were alone, made note of the two closed doors, and
+then with a sigh lifted her black gloved hands and began to remove the
+widow's cap from her head. She sighed again as she tossed the black crepe
+on the dark-wooded table beside her. As she sank into the chair the light
+from the electrolier fell on her shoulders and on the carefully coiled
+and banded hair, so laboriously built up into a crown that glinted
+nut-brown above the pale face she turned to the man watching her.
+
+"Well?" she said. And from under her level brows she stared at Copeland,
+serene in her consciousness of power. It was plain that she neither liked
+him nor disliked him. It was equally plain that he, too, had his ends
+remote from her and her being.
+
+"You saw Blake again?" he half asked, half challenged.
+
+"No," she answered.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"I was afraid to."
+
+"Didn't I tell you we'd take care of your end?"
+
+"I've had promises like that before. They weren't always remembered."
+
+"But our office never made you that promise before, Miss Verriner."
+
+The woman let her eyes rest on his impassive face.
+
+"That's true, I admit. But I must also admit I know Jim Blake. We'd
+better not come together again, Blake and me, after this week."
+
+She was pulling off her gloves as she spoke. She suddenly threw them down
+on the table. "There's just one thing I want to know, and know for
+certain. I want to know if this is a plant to shoot Blake up?"
+
+The First Deputy smiled. It was not altogether at the mere calmness with
+which she could suggest such an atrocity.
+
+"Hardly," he said.
+
+"Then what is it?" she demanded.
+
+He was both patient and painstaking with her. His tone was almost
+paternal in its placativeness.
+
+"It's merely a phase of departmental business," he answered her. "And
+we're anxious to see Blake round up Connie Binhart."
+
+"That's not true," she answered with neither heat nor resentment, "or you
+would never have started him off on this blind lead. You'd never have had
+me go to him with that King Edward note and had it work out to fit a
+street in Montreal. You've got a wooden decoy up there in Canada, and
+when Blake gets there he'll be told his man slipped away the day before.
+Then another decoy will bob up, and Blake will go after that. And when
+you've fooled him two or three times he'll sail back to New York and
+break me for giving him a false tip."
+
+"Did you give it to him?"
+
+"No, he hammered it out of me. But you knew he was going to do that. That
+was part of the plant."
+
+She sat studying her thin white hands for several seconds. Then she
+looked up at the calm-eyed Copeland.
+
+"How are you going to protect me, if Blake comes back? How are you going
+to keep your promise?"
+
+The First Deputy sat back in his chair and crossed his thin legs.
+
+"Blake will not come back," he announced. She slewed suddenly round on
+him again.
+
+"Then it _is_ a plant!" she proclaimed.
+
+"You misunderstand me, Miss Verriner. Blake will not come back as an
+official. There will be changes in the Department, I imagine; changes for
+the better which even he and his Tammany Hall friends can't stop, by the
+time he gets back with Binhart."
+
+The woman gave a little hand gesture of impatience.
+
+"But don't you see," she protested, "supposing he gives up Binhart?
+Supposing he suspects something and hurries back to hold down his place?"
+
+"They call him Never-Fail Blake," commented the unmoved and dry-lipped
+official. He met her wide stare with his gently satiric smile.
+
+"I see," she finally said, "you're not going to shoot him up. You're
+merely going to wipe him out."
+
+"You are quite wrong there," began the man across the table from her.
+"Administration changes may happen, and in--"
+
+"In other words, you're getting Jim Blake out of the way, off on this
+Binhart trail, while you work him out of the Department."
+
+"No competent officer is ever worked out of this Department," parried the
+First Deputy.
+
+She sat for a silent and studious moment or two, without looking at
+Copeland. Then she sighed, with mock plaintiveness. Her wistfulness
+seemed to leave her doubly dangerous.
+
+"Mr. Copeland, aren't you afraid some one might find it worth while to
+tip Blake off?" she softly inquired.
+
+"What would you gain?" was his pointed and elliptical interrogation.
+
+She leaned forward in the fulcrum of light, and looked at him soberly.
+
+"What is your idea of me?" she asked.
+
+He looked back at the thick-lashed eyes with their iris rings of deep
+gray. There was something alert and yet unparticipating in their steady
+gaze. They held no trace of abashment. They were no longer veiled. There
+was even something disconcerting in their lucid and level stare.
+
+"I think you are a very intelligent woman," Copeland finally confessed.
+
+"I think I am, too," she retorted. "Although I haven't used that
+intelligence in the right way. Don't smile! I'm not going to turn
+mawkish. I'm not good. I don't know whether I want to be. But I know one
+thing: I've got to keep busy--I've got to be active. I've _got_ to be!"
+
+"And?" prompted the First Deputy, as she came to a stop.
+
+"We all know, now, exactly where we're at. We all know what we want, each
+one of us. We know what Blake wants. We know what you want. And I want
+something more than I'm getting, just as you want something more than
+writing reports and rounding up push-cart peddlers. I want my end, as
+much as you want yours."
+
+"And?" again prompted the First Deputy.
+
+"I've got to the end of my ropes; and I want to swing around. It's no
+reform bee, mind! It's not what other women like me think it is. But I
+can't go on. It doesn't lead to anything. It doesn't pay. I want to be
+safe. I've _got_ to be safe!"
+
+He looked up suddenly, as though a new truth had just struck home with
+him. For the first time, all that evening, his face was ingenuous.
+
+"I know what's behind me," went on the woman. "There's no use digging
+that up. And there's no use digging up excuses for it. But there _are_
+excuses--good excuses, or I'd never have gone through what I have,
+because I feel I wasn't made for it. I'm too big a coward to face what it
+leads to. I can look ahead and see through things. I can understand too
+easily." She came to a stop, and sat back, with one white hand on either
+arm of the chair. "And I'm afraid to go on. I want to begin over. And I
+want to begin on the right side!"
+
+He sat pondering just how much of this he could believe. But she
+disregarded his veiled impassivity.
+
+"I want you to take Picture 3,970 out of the Identification Bureau, the
+picture and the Bertillon measurements. And then I want you to give me
+the chance I asked for."
+
+"But that does not rest with me, Miss Verriner!"
+
+"It will rest with you. I couldn't stool with my own people here. But
+Wilkie knows my value. He knows what I can do for the service if I'm on
+their side. He could let me begin with the Ellis Island spotting. I could
+stop that Stockholm white-slave work in two months. And when you see
+Wilkie to-morrow you can swing me one way or the other!"
+
+Copeland, with his chin on his bony breast, looked up to smile into her
+intent and staring eyes.
+
+"You are a very clever woman," he said. "And what is more, you know a
+great deal!"
+
+"I know a great deal!" she slowly repeated, and her steady gaze succeeded
+in taking the ironic smile out of the corners of his eyes.
+
+"Your knowledge," he said with a deliberation equal to her own, "will
+prove of great value to you--as an agent with Wilkie."
+
+"That's as you say!" she quietly amended as she rose to her feet. There
+was no actual threat in her words, just as there was no actual mockery in
+his. But each was keenly conscious of the wheels that revolved within
+wheels, of the intricacies through which each was threading a way to
+certain remote ends. She picked up her black gloves from the desk top.
+She stood there, waiting.
+
+"You can count on me," he finally said, as he rose from his chair. "I'll
+attend to the picture. And I'll say the right thing to Wilkie!"
+
+"Then let's shake hands on it!" she quietly concluded. And as they shook
+hands her gray-irised eyes gazed intently and interrogatively into his.
+
+
+
+
+                                   V
+
+
+When Never-Fail Blake alighted from his sleeper in Montreal he found one
+of Teal's men awaiting him at Bonaventure Station. There had been a hitch
+or a leak somewhere, this man reported. Binhart, in some way, had slipped
+through their fingers.
+
+All they knew was that the man they were tailing had bought a ticket for
+Winnipeg, that he was not in Montreal, and that, beyond the railway
+ticket, they had no trace of him.
+
+Blake, at this news, had a moment when he saw red. He felt, during that
+moment, like a drum-major who had "muffed" his baton on parade. Then
+recovering himself, he promptly confirmed the Teal operative's report by
+telephone, accepted its confirmation as authentic, consulted a timetable,
+and made a dash for Windsor Station. There he caught the Winnipeg
+express, took possession of a stateroom and indited carefully worded
+telegrams to Trimble in Vancouver, that all out-going Pacific steamers
+should be watched, and to Menzler in Chicago, that the American city
+might be covered in case of Binhart's doubling southward on him. Still
+another telegram he sent to New York, requesting the Police Department to
+send on to him at once a photograph of Binhart.
+
+In Winnipeg, two days later, Blake found himself on a blind trail. When
+he had talked with a railway detective on whom he could rely, when he had
+visited certain offices and interviewed certain officials, when he had
+sought out two or three women acquaintances in the city's sequestered
+area, he faced the bewildering discovery that he was still without an
+actual clue of the man he was supposed to be shadowing.
+
+It was then that something deep within his nature, something he could
+never quite define, whispered its first faint doubt to him. This doubt
+persisted even when late that night a Teal Agency operative wired him
+from Calgary, stating that a man answering Binhart's description had just
+left the Alberta Hotel for Banff. To this latter point Blake promptly
+wired a fuller description of his man, had an officer posted to inspect
+every alighting passenger, and early the next morning received a
+telegram, asking for still more particulars.
+
+He peered down at this message, vaguely depressed in spirit, discarding
+theory after theory, tossing aside contingency after contingency. And up
+from this gloomy shower slowly emerged one of his "hunches," one of his
+vague impressions, coming blindly to the surface very much like an
+earthworm crawling forth after a fall of rain. There was something wrong.
+Of that he felt certain. He could not place it or define it. To continue
+westward would be to depend too much on an uncertainty; it would involve
+the risk of wandering too far from the center of things. He suddenly
+decided to double on his tracks and swing down to Chicago. Just why he
+felt as he did he could not fathom. But the feeling was there. It was an
+instinctive propulsion, a "hunch." These hunches were to him, working in
+the dark as he was compelled to, very much what whiskers are to a cat.
+They could not be called an infallible guide. But they at least kept him
+from colliding with impregnabilities.
+
+Acting on this hunch, as he called it, he caught a Great Northern train
+for Minneapolis, transferred to a Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul express,
+and without loss of time sped southward. When, thirty hours later, he
+alighted in the heart of Chicago, he found himself in an environment more
+to his liking, more adaptable to his ends. He was not disheartened by his
+failure. He did not believe in luck, in miracles, or even in coincidence.
+But experience had taught him the bewildering extent of the resources
+which he might command. So intricate and so wide-reaching were the secret
+wires of his information that he knew he could wait, like a spider at the
+center of its web, until the betraying vibration awakened some
+far-reaching thread of that web. In every corner of the country lurked a
+non-professional ally, a secluded tipster, ready to report to Blake when
+the call for a report came. The world, that great detective had found,
+was indeed a small one. From its scattered four corners, into which his
+subterranean wires of espionage stretched, would in time come some
+inkling, some hint, some discovery. And at the converging center of those
+wires Blake was able to sit and wait, like the central operator at a
+telephone switchboard, knowing that the tentacles of attention were
+creeping and wavering about dim territories and that in time they would
+render up their awaited word.
+
+In the meantime, Blake himself was by no means idle. It would not be from
+official circles, he knew, that his redemption would come. Time had
+already proved that. For months past every police chief in the country
+had held his description of Binhart. That was a fact which Binhart
+himself very well knew; and knowing that, he would continue to move as he
+had been moving, with the utmost secrecy, or at least protected by some
+adequate disguise.
+
+It would be from the underworld that the echo would come. And next to New
+York, Blake knew, Chicago would make as good a central exchange for this
+underworld as could be desired. Knowing that city of the Middle West, and
+knowing it well, he at once "went down the line," making his rounds
+stolidly and systematically, first visiting a West Side faro-room and
+casually interviewing the "stools" of Custom House Place and South Clark
+Street, and then dropping in at the Cafe Acropolis, in Halsted Street,
+and lodging houses in even less savory quarters. He duly canvassed every
+likely dive, every "melina," every gambling house and yegg hang out. He
+engaged in leisurely games of pool with stone-getters and gopher men. He
+visited bucket-shops and barrooms, and dingy little Ghetto cafes. He
+"buzzed" tipsters and floaters and mouthpieces. He fraternized with till
+tappers and single-drillers. He always made his inquiries after Binhart
+seem accidental, a case apparently subsidiary to two or three others
+which he kept always to the foreground.
+
+He did not despair over the discovery that no one seemed to know of
+Binhart or his movements. He merely waited his time, and extended new
+ramifications into newer territory. His word still carried its weight of
+official authority. There was still an army of obsequious underlings
+compelled to respect his wishes. It was merely a matter of time and
+mathematics. Then the law of averages would ordain its end; the needed
+card would ultimately be turned up, the right dial-twist would at last
+complete the right combination.
+
+The first faint glimmer of life, in all those seemingly dead wires, came
+from a gambler named Mattie Sherwin, who reported that he had met
+Binhart, two weeks before, in the cafe of the Brown Palace in Denver. He
+was traveling under the name of Bannerman, wore his hair in a pomadour,
+and had grown a beard.
+
+Blake took the first train out of Chicago for Denver. In this latter city
+an Elks' Convention was supplying blue-bird weather for underground
+"haymakers," busy with bunco-steering, "rushing" street-cars and "lifting
+leathers." Before the stampede at the news of his approach, he picked up
+Biff Edwards and Lefty Stivers, put on the screws, and learned nothing.
+He went next to Glory McShane, a Market Street acquaintance indebted for
+certain old favors, and from her, too, learned nothing of moment. He
+continued the quest in other quarters, and the results were equally
+discouraging.
+
+Then began the real detective work about which, Blake knew, newspaper
+stories were seldom written. This work involved a laborious and
+monotonous examination of hotel registers, a canvassing of ticket
+agencies and cab stands and transfer companies. It was anything but
+story-book sleuthing. It was a dispiriting tread-mill round, but he was
+still sifting doggedly through the tailings of possibilities when a
+code-wire came from St. Louis, saying Binhart had been seen the day
+before at the Planters' Hotel.
+
+Blake was eastbound on his way to St. Louis one hour after the receipt of
+this wire. And an hour after his arrival in St. Louis he was engaged in
+an apparently care free and leisurely game of pool with one Loony Ryan,
+an old-time "box man" who was allowed to roam with a clipped wing in the
+form of a suspended indictment. Loony, for the liberty thus doled out to
+him, rewarded his benefactors by an occasional indulgence in the
+"pigeon-act."
+
+"Draw for lead?" asked Blake, lighting a cigar.
+
+"Sure," said Loony.
+
+Blake pushed his ball to the top cushion, won the draw, and broke.
+
+"Seen anything of Wolf Yonkholm?" he casually inquired, as he turned to
+chalk his cue. But his eye, with one quick sweep, had made sure of every
+face in the room.
+
+Loony studied the balls for a second or two. Wolf was a "dip" with an
+international record.
+
+"Last time I saw Wolf he was out at 'Frisco, workin' the Beaches," was
+Loony's reply.
+
+Blake ventured an inquiry or two about other worthies of the underworld.
+The players went on with their game, placid, self-immured,
+matter-of-fact.
+
+"Where's Angel McGlory these days?" asked Blake, as he reached over to
+place a ball.
+
+"What's she been doin'?" demanded Loony, with his cue on the rail.
+
+"She's traveling with a bank sneak named Blanchard or Binhart," explained
+Blake. "And I want her."
+
+Loony Ryan made his stroke.
+
+"Hep Roony saw Binhart this mornin', beatin' it for N' Orleans. But he
+wasn't travelin' wit' any moll that Hep spoke of."
+
+Blake made his shot, chalked his cue again, and glanced down at his
+watch. His eyes were on the green baize, but his thoughts were elsewhere.
+
+"I got 'o leave you, Wolf," he announced as he put his cue back in the
+rack. He spoke slowly and calmly. But Wolf's quick gaze circled the room,
+promptly checking over every face between the four walls.
+
+"What's up?" he demanded. "Who'd you spot?"
+
+"Nothing, Wolf, nothing! But this game o' yours blamed near made me
+forget an appointment o' mine!"
+
+Twenty minutes after he had left the bewildered Wolf Ryan in the pool
+parlor he was in a New Orleans sleeper, southward bound. He knew that he
+was getting within striking distance of Binhart, at last. The zest of the
+chase took possession of him. The trail was no longer a "cold" one. He
+knew which way Binhart was headed. And he knew he was not more than a day
+behind his man.
+
+
+
+
+                                   VI
+
+
+The moment Blake arrived in New Orleans he shut himself in a telephone
+booth, called up six somewhat startled acquaintances, learned nothing to
+his advantage, and went quickly but quietly to the St. Charles. There he
+closeted himself with two dependable "elbows," started his detectives on
+a round of the hotels, and himself repaired to the Levee district, where
+he held off-handed and ponderously facetious conversations with certain
+unsavory characters. Then came a visit to certain equally unsavory
+wharf-rats and a call or two on South Rampart Street. But still no
+inkling of Binhart or his intended movements came to the detective's
+ears.
+
+It was not until the next morning, as he stepped into Antoine's, on St.
+Louis Street just off the Rue Royal, that anything of importance
+occurred. The moment he entered that bare and cloistral restaurant where
+Monsieur Jules could dish up such startling uncloistral dishes, his eyes
+fell on Abe Sheiner, a drum snuffer with whom he had had previous and
+somewhat painful encounters. Sheiner, it was plain to see, was in clover,
+for he was breakfasting regally, on squares of toast covered with shrimp
+and picked crab meat creamed, with a bisque of cray-fish and
+_papa-bottes_ in ribbons of bacon, to say nothing of fruit and
+_bruilleau_.
+
+Blake insisted on joining his old friend Sheiner, much to the latter's
+secret discomfiture. It was obvious that the drum snuffer, having made a
+recent haul, would be amenable to persuasion. And, like all yeggs, he was
+an upholder of the "moccasin telegraph," a wanderer and a carrier of
+stray tidings as to the movements of others along the undergrooves of the
+world. So while Blake breakfasted on shrimp and crab meat and French
+artichokes stuffed with caviar and anchovies, he intimated to the
+uneasy-minded Sheiner certain knowledge as to a certain recent coup. In
+the face of this charge Sheiner indignantly claimed that he had only been
+playing the ponies and having a run of greenhorn's luck.
+
+"Abe, I've come down to gather you in," announced the calmly mendacious
+detective. He continued to sip his bruilleau with fraternal unconcern.
+
+"You got nothing _on_ me, Jim," protested the other, losing his taste for
+the delicacies arrayed about him.
+
+"Well, we got 'o go down to Headquarters and talk that over," calmly
+persisted Blake.
+
+"What's the use of pounding me, when I'm on the square again?" persisted
+the ex-drum snuffer.
+
+"That's the line o' talk they all hand out. That's what Connie Binhart
+said when we had it out up in St. Louis."
+
+"Did you bump into Binhart in St. Louis?"
+
+"We had a talk, three days ago."
+
+"Then why'd he blow through this town as though he had a regiment o'
+bulls and singed cats behind him!"
+
+Blake's heart went down like an elevator with a broken cable. But he gave
+no outward sign of this inward commotion.
+
+"Because he wants to get down to Colon before the Hamburg-American boat
+hits the port," ventured Blake. "His moll's aboard!"
+
+"But he blew out for 'Frisco this morning," contended the puzzled
+Sheiner. "Shot through as though he'd just had a rumble!"
+
+"Oh, he _said_ that, but he went south, all right."
+
+"Then he went in an oyster sloop. There's nothing sailing from this port
+to-day."
+
+"Well, what's Binhart got to do with our trouble anyway? What I want--"
+
+"But I saw him start," persisted the other. "He ducked for a day coach
+and said he was traveling for his health. And he sure looked like a man
+in a hurry!"
+
+Blake sipped his bruilleau, glanced casually at his watch, and took out a
+cigar and lighted it. He blinked contentedly across the table at the man
+he was "buzzing." The trick had been turned. The word had been given. He
+knew that Binhart was headed westward again. He also knew that Binhart
+had awakened to the fact that he was being followed, that his feverish
+movements were born of a stampeding fear of capture.
+
+Yet Binhart was not a coward. Flight, in fact, was his only resource. It
+was only the low-brow criminal, Blake knew, who ran for a hole and hid in
+it until he was dragged out. The more intellectual type of offender
+preferred the open. And Binhart was of this type. He was suave and
+artful; he was active bodied and experienced in the ways of the world.
+What counted still more, he was well heeled with money. Just how much he
+had planted away after the Newcomb coup no one knew. But no one denied
+that it was a fortune. It was ten to one that Binhart would now try to
+get out of the country. He would make his way to some territory without
+an extradition treaty. He would look for a land where he could live in
+peace, where his ill-gotten wealth would make exile endurable.
+
+Blake, as he smoked his cigar and turned these thoughts over in his mind,
+could afford to smile. There would be no peace and no rest for Connie
+Binhart; he himself would see to that. And he would "get" his man;
+whether it was in a week's time or a month's time, he would "get" his man
+and take him back in triumph to New York. He would show Copeland and the
+Commissioner and the world in general that there was still a little life
+in the old dog, that there was still a haul or two he could make.
+
+So engrossing were these thoughts that Blake scarcely heard the drum
+snuffer across the table from him, protesting the innocence of his ways
+and the purity of his intentions. Then for the second time that morning
+Blake completely bewildered him, by suddenly accepting those
+protestations and agreeing to let everything drop. It was necessary, of
+course, to warn Sheiner, to exact a promise of better living. But Blake's
+interest in the man had already departed. He dropped him from his scheme
+of things, once he had yielded up his data. He tossed him aside like a
+sucked orange, a smoked cigar, a burnt-out match. Binhart, in all the
+movements of all the stellar system, was the one name and the one man
+that interested him.
+
+Loony Sheiner was still sitting at that table in Antoine's when Blake,
+having wired his messages to San Pedro and San Francisco, caught the
+first train out of New Orleans. As he sped across the face of the world,
+crawling nearer and nearer the Pacific Coast, no thought of the magnitude
+of that journey oppressed him. His imagination remained untouched. He
+neither fretted nor fumed at the time this travel was taking. In spite of
+the electric fans at each end of his Pullman, it is true, he suffered
+greatly from the heat, especially during the ride across the Arizona
+Desert. He accepted it without complaint, stolidly thanking his lucky
+stars that men weren't still traveling across America's deserts by
+ox-team. He was glad when he reached the Colorado River and wound up into
+California, leaving the alkali and sage brush and yucca palms of the
+Mojave well behind him. He was glad in his placid way when he reached his
+hotel in San Francisco and washed the grit and grime from his
+heat-nettled body.
+
+But once that body had been bathed and fed, he started on his rounds of
+the underworld, seined the entire harbor-front without effect, and then
+set out his night-lines as cautiously as a fisherman in forbidden waters.
+He did not overlook the shipping offices and railway stations, neither
+did he neglect the hotels and ferries. Then he quietly lunched at
+Martenelli's with the much-honored but most-uncomfortable Wolf Yonkholm,
+who promptly suspended his "dip" operations at the Beaches out of respect
+to Blake's sudden call.
+
+Nothing of moment, however, was learned from the startled Wolf, and at
+Coppa's six hours later, Blake dined with a Chink-smuggler named Goldie
+Hopper. Goldie, after his fifth glass of wine and an adroit decoying of
+the talk along the channels which most interested his portly host,
+casually announced that an Eastern crook named Blanchard had got away,
+the day before, on the Pacific mail steamer _Manchuria_. He was clean
+shaven and traveled as a clergyman. That struck Goldie as the height of
+humor, a bank sneak having the nerve to deck himself out as a
+gospel-spieler.
+
+His elucidation of it, however, brought no answering smile from the
+diffident-eyed Blake, who confessed that he was rounding up a couple of
+nickel-coiners and would be going East in a day or two.
+
+Instead of going East, however, he hurriedly consulted maps and
+timetables, found a train that would land him in Portland in twenty-six
+hours, and started north. He could eventually save time, he found, by
+hastening on to Seattle and catching a Great Northern steamer from that
+port. When a hot-box held his train up for over half an hour, Blake stood
+with his timepiece in his hand, watching the train crew in their efforts
+to "freeze the hub." They continued to lose time, during the night. At
+Seattle, when he reached the Great Northern docks, he found that his
+steamer had sailed two hours before he stepped from his sleeper.
+
+His one remaining resource was a Canadian Pacific steamer from Victoria.
+This, he figured out, would get him to Hong Kong even earlier than the
+steamer which he had already missed. He had a hunch that Hong Kong was
+the port he wanted. Just why, he could not explain. But he felt sure that
+Binhart would not drop off at Manila. Once on the run, he would keep out
+of American quarters. It was a gamble; it was a rough guess. But then all
+life was that. And Blake had a dogged and inarticulate faith in his
+"hunches."
+
+Crossing the Sound, he reached Victoria in time to see the _Empress of
+China_ under way, and heading out to sea. Blake hired a tug and overtook
+her. He reached the steamer's deck by means of a Jacob's ladder that
+swung along her side plates like a mason's plumbline along a factory
+wall.
+
+Binhart, he told himself, was by this time in mid-Pacific, untold miles
+away, heading for that vast and mysterious East into which a man could so
+easily disappear. He was approaching gloomy and tangled waterways that
+threaded between islands which could not even be counted. He was fleeing
+towards dark rivers which led off through barbaric and mysterious
+silence, into the heart of darkness. He was drawing nearer and nearer to
+those regions of mystery where a white man might be swallowed up as
+easily as a rice grain is lost in a shore lagoon. He would soon be in
+those teeming alien cities as under-burrowed as a gopher village.
+
+But Blake did not despair. Their whole barbaric East, he told himself,
+was only a Chinatown slum on a large scale. And he had never yet seen the
+slum that remained forever impervious to the right dragnet. He did not
+know how or where the end would be. But he knew there would be an end. He
+still hugged to his bosom the placid conviction that the world was small,
+that somewhere along the frontiers of watchfulness the impact would be
+recorded and the alarm would be given. A man of Binhart's type, with the
+money Binhart had, would never divorce himself completely from
+civilization. He would always crave a white man's world; he would always
+hunger for what that world stood for and represented. He would always
+creep back to it. He might hide in his heathen burrow, for a time; but
+there would be a limit to that exile. A power stronger than his own will
+would drive him back to his own land, back to civilization. And
+civilization, to Blake, was merely a rather large and rambling house
+equipped with a rather efficient burglar-alarm system, so that each time
+it was entered, early or late, the tell-tale summons would eventually go
+to the right quarter. And when the summons came Blake would be waiting
+for it.
+
+
+
+
+                                  VII
+
+
+It was by wireless that Blake made what efforts he could to confirm his
+suspicions that Binhart had not dropped off at any port of call between
+San Francisco and Hong Kong. In due time the reply came back to "Bishop
+MacKishnie," on board the westbound _Empress of China_ that the Reverend
+Caleb Simpson had safely landed from the _Manchuria_ at Hong Kong, and
+was about to leave for the mission field in the interior.
+
+The so-called bishop, sitting in the wireless-room of the _Empress of
+China_, with a lacerated black cigar between his teeth, received this
+much relayed message with mixed feelings. He proceeded to send out three
+Secret Service code-despatches to Shanghai, Amoy and Hong Kong, which,
+being picked up by a German cruiser, were worried over and argued over
+and finally referred back to an intelligence bureau for explanation.
+
+But at Yokohama, Blake hurried ashore in a _sampan_, met an agent who
+seemed to be awaiting him, and caught a train for Kobe. He hurried on,
+indifferent to the beauties of the country through which he wound,
+unimpressed by the oddities of the civilization with which he found
+himself confronted. His mind, intent on one thing, seemed unable to react
+to the stimuli of side-issues. From Kobe he caught a _Toyo Kisen Kaisha_
+steamer for Nagasaki and Shanghai. This steamer, he found, lay over at
+the former port for thirteen hours, so he shifted again to an outbound
+boat headed for Woosung.
+
+It was not until he was on the tender, making the hour-long run from
+Woosung up the Whangpoo to Shanghai itself, that he seemed to emerge from
+his half-cataleptic indifference to his environment. He began to realize
+that he was at last in the Orient.
+
+As they wound up the river past sharp-nosed and round-hooded sampans, and
+archaic Chinese battle-ships and sea-going junks and gunboats flying
+their unknown foreign flags, Blake at last began to realize that he was
+in a new world. The very air smelt exotic; the very colors, the tints of
+the sails, the hues of clothing, the forms of things, land and sky
+itself--all were different. This depressed him only vaguely. He was too
+intent on the future, on the task before him, to give his surroundings
+much thought.
+
+Blake had entirely shaken off this vague uneasiness, in fact, when twenty
+minutes after landing he found himself in a red-brick hotel known as The
+Astor, and guardedly shaking hands with an incredulously thin and
+sallow-faced man of about forty. Although this man spoke with an English
+accent and exile seemed to have foreigneered him in both appearance and
+outlook, his knowledge of America was active and intimate. He passed over
+to the detective two despatches in cipher, handed him a confidential list
+of Hong Kong addresses, gave him certain information as to Macao, and an
+hour later conducted him down the river to the steamer which started that
+night for Hong Kong.
+
+As Blake trod that steamer's deck and plowed on through strange seas,
+surrounded by strange faces, intent on his strange chase, no sense of
+vast adventure entered his soul. No appreciation of a great hazard
+bewildered his emotions. The kingdom of romance dwells in the heart, in
+the heart roomy enough to house it. And Blake's heart was taken up with
+more material things. He was preoccupied with his new list of addresses,
+with his new lines of procedure, with the men he must interview and the
+dives and clubs and bazars he must visit. He had his day's work to do,
+and he intended to do it.
+
+The result was that of Hong Kong he carried away no immediate personal
+impression, beyond a vague jumble, in the background of consciousness, of
+Buddhist temples and British red-jackets, of stately parks and granite
+buildings, of mixed nationalities and native theaters, of anchored
+warships and a floating city of houseboats. For it was the same hour that
+he landed in this orderly and strangely English city that the discovery
+he was drawing close to Binhart again swept clean the slate of his
+emotions. The response had come from a consulate secretary. One wire in
+all his sentinel network had proved a live one. Binhart was not in Hong
+Kong, but he had been seen in Macao; he was known to be still there. And
+beyond that there was little that Never-Fail Blake cared to know.
+
+His one side-movement in Hong Kong was to purchase an American revolver,
+for it began to percolate even through his indurated sensibilities that
+he was at last in a land where his name might not be sufficiently
+respected and his office sufficiently honored. For the first time in
+seven long years he packed a gun, he condescended to go heeled. Yet no
+minutest tingle of excitement spread through his lethargic body as he
+examined this gun, carefully loaded it, and stowed it away in his
+wallet-pocket. It meant no more to him than the stowing away of a
+sandwich against the emergency of a possible lost meal.
+
+
+
+
+                                  VIII
+
+
+By the time he was on the noon boat that left for Macao, Blake had quite
+forgotten about the revolver. As he steamed southward over smooth seas,
+threading a way through boulder-strewn islands and skirting mountainous
+cliffs, his movements seemed to take on a sense of finality. He stood at
+the rail, watching the hazy blue islands, the forests of fishing-boats
+and high-pooped junks floating lazily at anchor, the indolent figures
+which he could catch glimpses of on deck, the green waters of the China
+Sea. He watched them with intent, yet abstracted, eyes. Some echo of the
+witchery of those Eastern waters at times penetrated his own preoccupied
+soul. A vague sense of his remoteness from his old life at last crept in
+to him.
+
+He thought of the watching green lights that were flaring up, dusk by
+dusk, in the shrill New York night, the lamps of the precinct stations,
+the lamps of Headquarters, where the great building was full of moving
+feet and shifting faces, where telephones were ringing and detectives
+were coming and going, and policemen in uniform were passing up and down
+the great stone steps, clean-cut, ruddy-faced, strong-limbed policemen,
+talking and laughing as they started out on their night details. He could
+follow them as they went, those confident-striding "flatties" with their
+ash night-sticks at their side, soldiers without bugles or banner, going
+out to do the goodly tasks of the Law, soldiers of whom he was once the
+leader, the pride, the man to whom they pointed as the Vidoc of America.
+
+And he would go back to them as great as ever. He would again compel
+their admiration. The newspaper boys would again come filing into his
+office and shake hands with him and smoke his cigars and ask how much he
+could tell them about his last haul. And he would recount to them how he
+shadowed Binhart half way round the world, and gathered him in, and
+brought him back to Justice.
+
+It was three o'clock in the afternoon when Blake's steamer drew near
+Macao. Against a background of dim blue hills he could make out the green
+and blue and white of the houses in the Portuguese quarters, guarded on
+one side by a lighthouse and on the other by a stolid square fort.
+Swinging around a sharp point, the boat entered the inner harbor, crowded
+with Chinese craft and coasters and dingy tramps of the sea.
+
+Blake seemed in no hurry to disembark. The sampan into which he stepped,
+in fact, did not creep up to the shore until evening. There, ignoring the
+rickshaw coolies who awaited him as he passed an obnoxiously officious
+trio of customs officers, he disappeared up one of the narrow and
+slippery side streets of the Chinese quarter.
+
+He followed this street for some distance, assailed by the smell of its
+mud and rotting sewerage, twisting and turning deeper into the darkness,
+past dogs and chattering coolies and oil lamps and gaming-house doors.
+Into one of these gaming houses he turned, passing through the blackwood
+sliding door and climbing the narrow stairway to the floor above. There,
+from a small quadrangular gallery, he could look down on the "well" of
+the fan-tan lay out below.
+
+He made his way to a seat at the rail, took out a cigar, lighted it, and
+let his veiled gaze wander about the place, point by point, until he had
+inspected and weighed and appraised every man in the building. He
+continued to smoke, listlessly, like a sightseer with time on his hands
+and in no mood for movement. The brim of his black boulder shadowed his
+eyes. His thumbs rested carelessly in the arm-holes of his waistcoat. He
+lounged back torpidly, listening to the drone and clatter of voices
+below, lazily inspecting each newcomer, pretending to drop off into a
+doze of ennui. But all the while he was most acutely awake.
+
+For somewhere in that gathering, he knew, there was a messenger awaiting
+him. Whether he was English or Portuguese, white or yellow, Blake could
+not say. But from some one there some word or signal was to come.
+
+He peered down at the few white men in the pit below. He watched the man
+at the head of the carved blackwood table, beside his heap of brass
+"cash," watched him again and again as he took up his handful of coins,
+covered them with a brass hat while the betting began, removed the hat,
+and seemed to be dividing the pile, with the wand in his hand, into
+fours. The last number of the last four, apparently, was the object of
+the wagers.
+
+Blake could not understand the game. It puzzled him, just as the yellow
+men so stoically playing it puzzled him, just as the entire country
+puzzled him. Yet, obtuse as he was, he felt the gulf of centuries that
+divided the two races. These yellow men about him seemed as far away from
+his humanity, as detached from his manner of life and thought, as were
+the animals he sometimes stared at through the bars of the Bronx Zoo
+cages.
+
+A white man would have to be pretty far gone, Blake decided, to fall into
+their ways, to be satisfied with the life of those yellow men. He would
+have to be a terrible failure, or he would have to be hounded by a
+terrible fear, to live out his life so far away from his own kind. And he
+felt now that Binhart could never do it, that a life sentence there would
+be worse than a life sentence to "stir." So he took another cigar,
+lighted it, and sat back watching the faces about him.
+
+For no apparent reason, and at no decipherable sign, one of the yellow
+faces across the smoke-filled room detached itself from its fellows. This
+face showed no curiosity, no haste. Blake watched it as it calmly
+approached him. He watched until he felt a finger against his arm.
+
+"You clum b'long me," was the enigmatic message uttered in the
+detective's ear.
+
+"Why should I go along with you?" Blake calmly inquired.
+
+"You clum b'long me," reiterated the Chinaman. The finger again touched
+the detective's arm. "Clismas!"
+
+Blake rose, at once. He recognized the code word of "Christmas." This was
+the messenger he had been awaiting.
+
+He followed the figure down the narrow stairway, through the sliding
+door, out into the many-odored street, foul with refuse, bisected by its
+open sewer of filth, took a turning into a still narrower street, climbed
+a precipitous hill cobbled with stone, turned still again, always
+overshadowed and hemmed in by tall houses close together, with
+black-beamed lattice doors through which he could catch glimpses of
+gloomy interiors. He turned again down a wooden-walled hallway that
+reminded him of a Mott Street burrow. When the Chinaman touched him on
+the sleeve he came to a stop.
+
+His guide was pointing to a closed door in front of them.
+
+"You sabby?" he demanded.
+
+Blake hesitated. He had no idea of what was behind that door, but he
+gathered from the Chinaman's motion that he was to enter. Before he could
+turn to make further inquiry the Chinaman had slipped away like a shadow.
+
+
+
+
+                                   IX
+
+
+Blake stood regarding the door. Then he lifted his revolver from his
+breast pocket and dropped it into his side pocket, with his hand on the
+butt. Then with his left hand he quietly opened the door, pushed it back,
+and as quietly stepped into the room.
+
+On the floor, in the center of a square of orange-colored matting, he saw
+a white woman sitting. She was drinking tea out of an egg-shell of a cup,
+and after putting down the cup she would carefully massage her lips with
+the point of her little finger. This movement puzzled the newcomer until
+he suddenly realized that it was merely to redistribute the rouge on
+them.
+
+She was dressed in a silk petticoat of almost lemon yellow and an
+azure-colored silk bodice that left her arms and shoulders bare to the
+light that played on them from three small oil lamps above her. Her feet
+and ankles were also bare, except for the matting sandals into which her
+toes were thrust. On one thin arm glimmered an extraordinarily heavy
+bracelet of gold. Her skin, which was very white, was further albificated
+by a coat of rice powder. She was startlingly slight. Blake, as he
+watched her, could see the oval shadows under her collar bones and the
+almost girlish meagerness of breast half-covered by the azure silk
+bodice.
+
+She looked up slowly as Blake stepped into the room. Her eyes widened,
+and she continued to look, with parted lips, as she contemplated the
+intruder's heavy figure. There was no touch of fear on her face. It was
+more curiosity, the wilful, wide-eyed curiosity of the child. She even
+laughed a little as she stared at the intruder. Her rouged lips were
+tinted a carmine so bright that they looked like a wound across her white
+face. That gash of color became almost clown-like as it crescented upward
+with its wayward mirth. Her eyebrows were heavily penciled and the lids
+of the eyes elongated by a widening point of blue paint. Her bare heel,
+which she caressed from time to time with fingers whereon the nails were
+stained pink with henna, was small and clean cut, as clean cut, Blake
+noticed, as the heel of a razor, while the white calf above it was as
+thin and flat as a boy's.
+
+"Hello, New York," she said with her foolish and inconsequential little
+laugh. Her voice took on an oddly exotic intonation, as she spoke. Her
+teeth were small and white; they reminded Blake of rice, while she
+repeated the "New York," bubblingly, as though she were a child with a
+newly learned word.
+
+"Hello!" responded the detective, wondering how or where to begin. She
+made him think of a painted marionette, so maintained were her poses, so
+unreal was her make up.
+
+"You're the party who's on the man hunt," she announced.
+
+"Am I?" equivocated Blake. She had risen to her feet by this time, with
+monkey-like agility, and showed herself to be much taller than he had
+imagined. He noticed a knife scar on her forearm.
+
+"You're after this man called Binhart," she declared.
+
+"Oh, no, I'm not," was Blake's sagacious response. "I don't want
+Binhart!"
+
+"Then what do you want?"
+
+"I want the money he's got."
+
+The little painted face grew serious; then it became veiled.
+
+"How much money has he?"
+
+"That's what I want to find out!"
+
+She squatted ruminatively down on the edge of her divan. It was low and
+wide and covered with orange-colored silk.
+
+"Then you'll have to find Binhart!" was her next announcement.
+
+"Maybe!" acknowledged Blake.
+
+"I can show you where he is!"
+
+"All right," was the unperturbed response. The blue-painted eyes were
+studying him.
+
+"It will be worth four thousand pounds, in English gold," she announced.
+
+Blake took a step or two nearer her.
+
+"Is that the message Ottenheim told you to give me?" he demanded. His
+face was red with anger.
+
+"Then three thousand pounds," she calmly suggested, wriggling her toes
+into a fallen sandal.
+
+Blake did not deign to speak. His inarticulate grunt was one of disgust.
+
+"Then a thousand, in gold," she coyly intimated. She twisted about to
+pull the strap of her bodice up over her white shoulder-blades. "Or I
+will kill him for you for two thousand pounds in gold!"
+
+Her eyes were as tranquil as a child's. Blake remembered that he was in a
+world not his own.
+
+"Why should I want him killed?" he inquired. He looked about for some
+place to sit. There was not a chair in the room.
+
+"Because he intends to kill _you_," answered the woman, squatting on the
+orange-covered divan.
+
+"I wish he'd come and try," Blake devoutly retorted.
+
+"He will not come," she told him. "It will be done from the dark. _I_
+could have done it. But Ottenheim said no."
+
+"And Ottenheim said you were to work with me in this," declared Blake,
+putting two and two together.
+
+The woman shrugged a white shoulder.
+
+"Have you any money?" she asked. She put the question with the
+artlessness of a child.
+
+"Mighty little," retorted Blake, still studying the woman from where he
+stood. He was wondering if Ottenheim had the same hold on her that the
+authorities had on Ottenheim, the ex-forger who enjoyed his parole only
+on condition that he remain a stool-pigeon of the high seas. He pondered
+what force he could bring to bear on her, what power could squeeze from
+those carmine and childish lips the information he must have.
+
+He knew that he could break that slim body of hers across his knee. But
+he also knew that he had no way of crushing out of it the truth he
+sought, the truth he must in some way obtain. The woman still squatted on
+the divan, peering down at the knife scar on her arm from time to time,
+studying it, as though it were an inscription.
+
+Blake was still watching the woman when the door behind him was slowly
+opened; a head was thrust in, and as quietly withdrawn again. Blake
+dropped his right hand to his coat pocket and moved further along the
+wall, facing the woman. There was nothing of which he stood afraid: he
+merely wished to be on the safe side.
+
+"Well, what word'll I take back to Ottenheim?" he demanded.
+
+The woman grew serious. Then she showed her rice-like row of teeth as she
+laughed.
+
+"That means there's nothing in it for me," she complained with
+pouting-lipped moroseness. Her venality, he began to see, was merely the
+instinctive acquisitiveness of the savage, the greed of the petted child.
+
+"No more than there is for me," Blake acknowledged. She turned and caught
+up a heavily flowered mandarin coat of plaited cream and gold. She was
+thrusting one arm into it when a figure drifted into the room from the
+matting-hung doorway on Blake's left. As she saw this figure she suddenly
+flung off the coat and stooped to the tea tray in the middle of the
+floor.
+
+Blake saw that the newcomer was a Chinaman. This newcomer, he also saw,
+ignored him as though he were a door post, confronting the woman and
+assailing her with a quick volley of words, of incomprehensible words in
+the native tongue. She answered with the same clutter and clack of
+unknown syllables, growing more and more excited as the dialogue
+continued. Her thin face darkened and changed, her white arms gyrated,
+the fires of anger burned in the baby-like eyes. She seemed
+expostulating, arguing, denouncing, and each wordy sally was met by an
+equally wordy sally from the Chinaman. She challenged and rebuked with
+her passionately pointed finger; she threatened with angry eyes; she
+stormed after the newcomer as he passed like a shadow out of the room;
+she met him with a renewed storm when he returned a moment later.
+
+The Chinaman now stood watching her, impassive and immobile, as though he
+had taken his stand and intended to stick to it. Blake studied him with
+calm and patient eyes. That huge-limbed detective in his day had
+"pounded" too many Christy Street Chinks to be in any way intimidated by
+a queue and a yellow face. He was not disturbed. He was merely puzzled.
+
+Then the woman turned to the mandarin coat, and caught it up, shook it
+out, and for one brief moment stood thoughtfully regarding it. Then she
+suddenly turned about on the Chinaman.
+
+Blake, as he stood watching that renewed angry onslaught, paid little
+attention to the actual words that she was calling out. But as he stood
+there he began to realize that she was not speaking in Chinese, but in
+English.
+
+"Do you hear me, white man? Do you hear me?" she cried out, over and over
+again. Yet the words seemed foolish, for all the time as she uttered
+them, she was facing the placid-eyed Chinaman and gesticulating in his
+face.
+
+"Don't you see," Blake at last heard her crying, "he doesn't know what
+I'm saying! He doesn't understand a word of English!" And then, and then
+only, it dawned on Blake that every word the woman was uttering was
+intended for his own ears. She was warning him, and all the while
+pretending that her words were the impetuous words of anger.
+
+"Watch this man!" he heard her cry. "Don't let him know you're listening.
+But remember what I say, remember it. And God help you if you haven't got
+a gun."
+
+Blake could see her, as in a dream, assailing the Chinaman with her
+gestures, advancing on him, threatening him, expostulating with him, but
+all in pantomime. There was something absurd about it, as absurd as a
+moving-picture film which carries the wrong text.
+
+"He'll pretend to take you to the man you want," the woman was panting.
+"That's what he will say. But it's a lie. He'll take you out to a sampan,
+to put you aboard Binhart's boat. But the three of them will cut your
+throat, cut your throat, and then drop you overboard. He's to get so much
+in gold. Get out of here with him. Let him think you're going. But drop
+away, somewhere, before you get to the beach. And watch them all the
+way."
+
+Blake stared at the immobile Chinaman, as though to make sure that the
+other man had not understood. He was still staring at that impassive
+yellow face, he was still absorbing the shock of his news, when the outer
+door opened and a second Chinaman stepped into the room. The newcomer
+cluttered a quick sentence or two to his countryman, and was still
+talking when a third figure sidled in.
+
+Those spoken words, whatever they were, seemed to have little effect on
+any one in the room except the woman. She suddenly sprang about and
+exploded into an angry shower of denials.
+
+"It's a lie!" she cried in English, storming about the impassive trio.
+"You never heard me peach! You never heard me say a word! It's a lie!"
+
+Blake strode to the middle of the room, towering above the other figures,
+dwarfing them by his great bulk, as assured of his mastery as he would
+have been in a Chatham Square gang fight.
+
+"What's the row here?" he thundered, knowing from the past that power
+promptly won its own respect. "What're you talking about, you two?" He
+turned from one intruder to another. "And you? And you? What do you want,
+anyway?"
+
+The three contending figures, however, ignored him as though he were a
+tobacconist's dummy. They went on with their exotic cackle, as though he
+was no longer in their midst. They did not so much as turn an eye in his
+direction. And still Blake felt reasonably sure of his position.
+
+It was not until the woman squeaked, like a frightened mouse, and ran
+whimpering into the corner of the room, that he realized what was
+happening. He was not familiar with the wrist movement by which the
+smallest bodied of the three men was producing a knife from his sleeve.
+The woman, however, had understood from the first.
+
+"White man, look out!" she half sobbed from her corner. "Oh, white man!"
+she repeated in a shriller note as the Chinaman, bending low, scuttled
+across the room to the corner where she cowered.
+
+Blake saw the knife by this time. It was thin and long, for all the world
+like an icicle, a shaft of cutting steel ground incredibly thin, so thin,
+in fact, that at first sight it looked more like a point for stabbing
+than a blade for cutting.
+
+The mere glitter of that knife electrified the staring white man into
+sudden action. He swung about and tried to catch at the arm that held the
+steel icicle. He was too late for that, but his fingers closed on the
+braided queue. By means of this queue he brought the Chinaman up short,
+swinging him sharply about so that he collided flat faced with the room
+wall.
+
+Then, for the first time, Blake grew into a comprehension of what
+surrounded him. He wheeled about, stooped and caught up the papier-mache
+tea-tray from the floor and once more stood with his back to the wall. He
+stood there, on guard, for a second figure with a second steel icicle was
+sidling up to him. He swung viciously out and brought the tea-tray down
+on the hand that held this knife, crippling the fingers and sending the
+steel spinning across the room. Then with his free hand he tugged the
+revolver from his coat pocket, holding it by the barrel and bringing the
+metal butt down on the queue-wound head of the third man, who had no
+knife, but was struggling with the woman for the metal icicle she had
+caught up from the floor.
+
+Then the five seemed to close in together, and the fight became general.
+It became a melee. With his swinging right arm Blake battered and pounded
+with his revolver butt. With his left hand he made cutting strokes with
+the heavy papier-mache tea-tray, keeping their steel, by those fierce
+sweeps, away from his body. One Chinaman he sent sprawling, leaving him
+huddled and motionless against the orange-covered divan. The second,
+stunned by a blow of the tea-tray across the eyes, could offer no
+resistance when Blake's smashing right dealt its blow, the metal gun butt
+falling like a trip hammer on the shaved and polished skull.
+
+As the white man swung about he saw the third Chinaman with his hand on
+the woman's throat, holding her flat against the wall, placing her there
+as a butcher might place a fowl on his block ready for the blow of his
+carver. Blake stared at the movement, panting for breath, overcome by
+that momentary indifference wherein a winded athlete permits without
+protest an adversary to gain his momentary advantage. Then will triumphed
+over the weakness of the body. But before Blake could get to the woman's
+side he saw the Chinaman's loose-sleeved right hand slowly and
+deliberately ascend. As it reached the meridian of its circular upsweep
+he could see the woman rise on her toes, rise as though with some quick
+effort, yet some effort which Blake could not understand.
+
+At the same moment that she did so a look of pained expostulation crept
+into the staring slant eyes on a level with her own. The yellow jaw
+gaped, filled with blood, and the poised knife fell at his side, sticking
+point down in the flooring. The azure and lemon-yellow that covered the
+woman's body flamed into sudden scarlet. It was only as the figure with
+the expostulating yellow face sank to the ground, crumpling up on itself
+as it fell, that Blake comprehended. That quick sweep of scarlet,
+effacing the azure and lemon, had come from the sudden deluge of blood
+that burst over the woman's body. She had made use of the upstroke,
+Mexican style. Her knife had cut the full length of the man's abdominal
+cavity, clean and straight to the breastbone. He had been ripped up like
+a herring.
+
+Blake panted and wheezed, not at the sight of the blood, but at the
+exertion to which his flabby muscles had been put. His body was moist
+with sweat. His asthmatic throat seemed stifling his lungs. A faint
+nausea crept through him, a dim ventral revolt at the thought that such
+things could take place so easily, and with so little warning.
+
+His breast still heaved and panted and he was still fighting for breath
+when he saw the woman stoop and wipe the knife on one of the fallen
+Chinaman's sleeves.
+
+"We've got to get out of here!" she whimpered, as she caught up the
+mandarin coat and flung it over her shoulders, for in the struggle her
+body had been bared almost to the waist. Blake saw the crimson that
+dripped on her matting slippers and maculated the cream white of the
+mandarin coat.
+
+"But where's Binhart?" he demanded, as he looked stolidly about for his
+black boulder.
+
+"Never mind Binhart," she cried, touching the eviscerated body at her
+feet with one slipper toe, "or we'll get what _he_ got!"
+
+"I want that man Binhart!" persisted the detective.
+
+"Not here! Not here!" she cried, folding the loose folds of the cloak
+closer about her body.
+
+She ran to the matting curtain, looked out, and called back, "Quick! Come
+quick!" Then she ran back, slipped the bolt in the outer door and
+rejoined the waiting detective.
+
+"Oh, white man!" she gasped, as the matting fell between them and the
+room incarnadined by their struggle. Blake was not sure, but he thought
+he heard her giggle, hysterically, in the darkness. They were groping
+their way along a narrow passage. They slipped through a second door,
+closed and locked it after them, and once more groped on through the
+darkness.
+
+How many turns they took, Blake could not remember. She stopped and
+whispered to him to go softly, as they came to a stairway, as steep and
+dark as a cistern. Blake, at the top, could smell opium smoke, and once
+or twice he thought he heard voices. The woman stopped him, with
+outstretched arms, at the stair head, and together they stood and
+listened.
+
+Blake, with nerves taut, waited for some sign from her to go on again. He
+thought she was giving it, when he felt a hand caress his side. He felt
+it move upward, exploringly. At the same time that he heard her little
+groan of alarm he knew that the hand was not hers.
+
+He could not tell what the darkness held, but his movement was almost
+instinctive. He swung out with his great arm, countered on the crouching
+form in front of him, caught at a writhing shoulder, and tightening his
+grip, sent the body catapulting down the stairway at his side. He could
+hear a revolver go off as the body went tumbling and rolling down--Blake
+knew that it was a gun not his own.
+
+"Come on, white man!" the girl in front of him was crying, as she tugged
+at his coat. And they went on, now at a run, taking a turn to the right,
+making a second descent, and then another to the left. They came to still
+another door, which they locked behind them. Then they scrambled up a
+ladder, and he could hear her quick hands padding about in the dark. A
+moment later she had thrust up a hatch. He saw it led to the open air,
+for the stars were above them.
+
+He felt grateful for that open air, for the coolness, for the sense of
+deliverance which came with even that comparative freedom.
+
+"Don't stop!" she whispered. And he followed her across the slant of the
+uneven roof. He was weak for want of breath. The girl had to catch him
+and hold him for a moment.
+
+"On the next roof you must take off your shoes," she warned him. "You can
+rest then. But hurry--hurry!"
+
+He gulped down the fresh air as he tore at his shoe laces, thrusting each
+shoe in a side pocket as he started after her. For by this time she was
+scrambling across the broken sloping roofs, as quick and agile as a cat,
+dropping over ledges, climbing up barriers and across coping tiles. Where
+she was leading him he had no remotest idea. She reminded him of a
+cream-tinted monkey in the maddest of steeplechases. He was glad when she
+came to a stop.
+
+The town seemed to lay to their right. Before them were the scattered
+lights of the harbor and the mild crescent of the outer bay. They could
+see the white wheeling finger of some foreign gunboat as its searchlight
+played back and forth in the darkness.
+
+She sighed with weariness and dropped cross-legged down on the coping
+tiles against which he leaned, regaining his breath. She squatted there,
+cooingly, like a child exhausted with its evening games.
+
+"I'm dished!" she murmured, as she sat there breathing audibly through
+the darkness. "I'm dished for this coast!"
+
+He sat down beside her, staring at the searchlight. There seemed
+something reassuring, something authoritative and comforting, in the
+thought of it watching there in the darkness.
+
+The girl touched him on the knee and then shifted her position on the
+coping tiles, without rising to her feet.
+
+"Come here!" she commanded. And when he was close beside her she pointed
+with her thin white arm. "That's Saint Poalo there--you can just make it
+out, up high, see. And those lights are the Boundary Gate. And this sweep
+of lights below here is the _Praya_. Now look where I'm pointing. That's
+the Luiz Camoes lodging-house. You see the second window with the light
+in it?"
+
+"Yes, I see it."
+
+"Well, Binhart's inside that window."
+
+"You know it?"
+
+"I know it."
+
+"So he's there?" said Blake, staring at the vague square of light.
+
+"Yes, he's there, all right. He's posing as a buyer for a tea house, and
+calls himself Bradley. Lee Fu told me; and Lee Fu is always right."
+
+She stood up and pulled the mandarin coat closer about her thin body. The
+coolness of the night air had already chilled her. Then she squinted
+carefully about in the darkness.
+
+"What are you going to do?" she asked.
+
+"I'm going to get Binhart," was Blake's answer.
+
+He could hear her little childlike murmur of laughter.
+
+"You're brave, white man," she said, with a hand on his arm. She was
+silent for a moment, before she added: "And I think you'll get him."
+
+"Of course I'll get him," retorted Blake, buttoning his coat. The fires
+had been relighted on the cold hearth of his resolution. It came to him
+only as an accidental afterthought that he had met an unknown woman and
+had passed through strange adventures with her and was now about to pass
+out of her life again, forever.
+
+"What'll you do?" he asked.
+
+Again he heard the careless little laugh.
+
+"Oh, I'll slip down through the Quarter and cop some clothes somewhere.
+Then I'll have a sampan take me out to the German boat. It'll start for
+Canton at daylight."
+
+"And then?" asked Blake, watching the window of the Luiz Camoes
+lodging-house below him.
+
+"Then I'll work my way up to Port Arthur, I suppose. There's a navy man
+there who'll help me!"
+
+"Haven't you any money?" Blake put the question a little uneasily.
+
+Again he felt the careless coo of laughter.
+
+"Feel!" she said. She caught his huge hand between hers and pressed it
+against her waist line. She rubbed his fingers along what he accepted as
+a tightly packed coin-belt. He was relieved to think that he would not
+have to offer her money. Then he peered over the coping tiles to make
+sure of his means of descent.
+
+"You had better go first," she said, as she leaned out and looked down at
+his side. "Crawl down this next roof to the end there. At the corner,
+see, is the end of the ladder."
+
+He stooped and slipped his feet into his shoes. Then he let himself
+cautiously down to the adjoining roof, steeper even than the one on which
+they had stood. She bent low over the tiles, so that her face was very
+close to his as he found his footing and stood there.
+
+"Good-by, white man," she whispered.
+
+"Good-by!" he whispered back, as he worked his way cautiously and
+ponderously along that perilous slope.
+
+She leaned there, watching him as he gained the ladder-end. He did not
+look back as he lowered himself, rung by rung. All thought of her, in
+fact, had passed from his preoccupied mind. He was once more intent on
+his own grim ends. He was debating with himself just how he was to get in
+through that lodging-house window and what his final move would be for
+the round up of his enemy. He had made use of too many "molls" in his
+time to waste useless thought on what they might say or do or desire.
+When he had got Binhart, he remembered, he would have to look about for
+something to eat, for he was as hungry as a wolf. And he did not even
+hear the girl's second soft whisper of "Good-by."
+
+
+
+
+                                   X
+
+
+That stolid practicality which had made Blake a successful operative
+asserted itself in the matter of his approach to the Luiz Camoes house,
+the house which had been pointed out to him as holding Binhart.
+
+He circled promptly about to the front of that house, pressed a gold coin
+in the hand of the half-caste Portuguese servant who opened the door, and
+asked to be shown to the room of the English tea merchant.
+
+That servant, had he objected, would have been promptly taken possession
+of by the detective, and as promptly put in a condition where he could do
+no harm, for Blake felt that he was too near the end of his trail to be
+put off by any mere side issue. But the coin and the curt explanation
+that the merchant must be seen at once admitted Blake to the house.
+
+The servant was leading him down the length of the half-lit hall when
+Blake caught him by the sleeve.
+
+"You tell my rickshaw boy to wait! Quick, before he gets away!"
+
+Blake knew that the last door would be the one leading to Binhart's room.
+The moment he was alone in the hall he tiptoed to this door and pressed
+an ear against its panel. Then with his left hand, he slowly turned the
+knob, caressing it with his fingers that it might not click when the
+latch was released. As he had feared, it was locked.
+
+He stood for a second or two, thinking. Then with the knuckle of one
+finger he tapped on the door, lightly, almost timidly.
+
+A man's voice from within cried out, "Wait a minute! Wait a minute!" But
+Blake, who had been examining the woodwork of the door-frame, did not
+choose to wait a minute. Any such wait, he felt, would involve too much
+risk. In one minute, he knew, a fugitive could either be off and away, or
+could at least prepare himself for any one intercepting that flight. So
+Blake took two quick steps back, and brought his massive shoulder against
+the door. It swung back, as though nothing more than a parlor match had
+held it shut. Blake, as he stepped into the room, dropped his right hand
+to his coat pocket.
+
+Facing him, at the far side of the room, he saw Binhart.
+
+The fugitive sat in a short-legged reed chair, with a grip-sack open on
+his knees. His coat and vest were off, and the light from the oil lamp at
+his side made his linen shirt a blotch of white.
+
+He had thrown his head up, at the sound of the opening door, and he still
+sat, leaning forward in the low chair in an attitude of startled
+expectancy. There was no outward and apparent change on his face as his
+eyes fell on Blake's figure. He showed neither fear nor bewilderment. His
+career had equipped him with histrionic powers that were exceptional. As
+a bank-sneak and confidence-man he had long since learned perfect control
+of his features, perfect composure even under the most discomforting
+circumstances.
+
+"Hello, Connie!" said the detective facing him. He spoke quietly, and his
+attitude seemed one of unconcern. Yet a careful observer might have
+noticed that the pulse of his beefy neck was beating faster than usual.
+And over that great body, under its clothing, were rippling tremors
+strangely like those that shake the body of a leashed bulldog at the
+sight of a street cat.
+
+"Hello, Jim!" answered Binhart, with equal composure. He had aged since
+Blake had last seen him, aged incredibly. His face was thin now, with
+plum-colored circles under the faded eyes.
+
+He made a move as though to lift down the valise that rested on his
+knees. But Blake stopped him with a sharp movement of his right hand.
+
+"That's all right," he said. "Don't get up!"
+
+Binhart eyed him. During that few seconds of silent tableau each man was
+appraising, weighing, estimating the strength of the other.
+
+"What do you want, Jim?" asked Binhart, almost querulously.
+
+"I want that gun you've got up there under your liver pad," was Blake's
+impassive answer.
+
+"Is that all?" asked Binhart. But he made no move to produce the gun.
+
+"Then I want you," calmly announced Blake.
+
+A look of gentle expostulation crept over Binhart's gaunt face.
+
+"You can't do it, Jim," he announced. "You can't take me away from here."
+
+"But I'm going to," retorted Blake.
+
+"How?"
+
+"I'm just going to take you."
+
+He crossed the room as he spoke.
+
+"Give me the gun," he commanded.
+
+Binhart still sat in the low reed chair. He made no movement in response
+to Blake's command.
+
+"What's the good of getting rough-house," he complained.
+
+"Gi' me the gun," repeated Blake.
+
+"Jim, I hate to see you act this way," but as Binhart spoke he slowly
+drew the revolver from its flapped pocket. Blake's revolver barrel was
+touching the white shirt-front as the movement was made. It remained
+there until he had possession of Binhart's gun. Then he backed away,
+putting his own revolver back in his pocket.
+
+"Now, get your clothes on," commanded Blake.
+
+"What for?" temporized Binhart.
+
+"You're coming with me!"
+
+"You can't do it, Jim," persisted the other. "You couldn't get me down to
+the water-front, in this town. They'd get you before you were two hundred
+yards away from that door."
+
+"I'll risk it," announced the detective.
+
+"And I'd fight you myself, every move. This ain't Manhattan Borough, you
+know, Jim; you can't kidnap a white man. I'd have you in irons for
+abduction the first ship we struck. And at the first port of call I'd
+have the best law sharps money could get. You can't do it, Jim. It ain't
+law!"
+
+"What t' hell do I care for law," was Blake's retort. "I want you and
+you're going to come with me."
+
+"Where am I going?"
+
+"Back to New York."
+
+Binhart laughed. It was a laugh without any mirth in it.
+
+"Jim, you're foolish. You couldn't get me back to New York alive, any
+more than you could take Victoria Peak to New York!"
+
+"All right, then, I'll take you along the other way, if I ain't going to
+take you alive. I've followed you a good many thousand miles, Connie, and
+a little loose talk ain't going to make me lie down at this stage of the
+game."
+
+Binhart sat studying the other man for a moment or two.
+
+"Then how about a little real talk, the kind of talk that money makes?"
+
+"Nothing doing!" declared Blake, folding his arms.
+
+Binhart flickered a glance at him as he thrust his own right hand down
+into the hand-bag on his knees.
+
+"I want to show you what you could get out of this," he said, leaning
+forward a little as he looked up at Blake.
+
+When his exploring right hand was lifted again above the top of the bag
+Blake firmly expected to see papers of some sort between its fingers. He
+was astonished to see something metallic, something which glittered
+bright in the light from the wall lamp. The record of this discovery had
+scarcely been carried back to his brain, when the silence of the room
+seemed to explode into a white sting, a puff of noise that felt like a
+whip lash curling about Blake's leg. It seemed to roll off in a shifting
+and drifting cloud of smoke.
+
+It so amazed Blake that he fell back against the wall, trying to
+comprehend it, to decipher the source and meaning of it all. He was still
+huddled back against the wall when a second surprise came to him. It was
+the discovery that Binhart had caught up a hat and a coat, and was
+running away, running out through the door while his captor stared after
+him.
+
+It was only then Blake realized that his huddled position was not a thing
+of his own volition. Some impact had thrown him against the wall like a
+toppled nine-pin. The truth came to him, in a sudden flash; Binhart had
+shot at him. There had been a second revolver hidden away in the hand
+bag, and Binhart had attempted to make use of it.
+
+A great rage against Binhart swept through him. A still greater rage at
+the thought that his enemy was running away brought Blake lurching and
+scrambling to his feet. He was a little startled to find that it hurt him
+to run. But it hurt him more to think of losing Binhart.
+
+He dove for the door, hurling his great bulk through it, tossing aside
+the startled Portuguese servant who stood at the outer entrance. He ran
+frenziedly out into the night, knowing by the staring faces of the
+street-corner group that Binhart had made the first turning and was
+running towards the water-front. He could see the fugitive, as he came to
+the corner; and like an unpenned bull he swung about and made after him.
+His one thought was to capture his man. His one obsession was to haul
+down Binhart.
+
+Then, as he ran, a small trouble insinuated itself into his mind. He
+could not understand the swishing of his right boot, at every hurrying
+stride. But he did not stop, for he could already smell the odorous
+coolness of the water-front and he knew he must close in on his man
+before that forest of floating sampans and native house-boats swallowed
+him up.
+
+A lightheadedness crept over him as he came panting down to the water's
+edge. The faces of the coolies about him, as he bargained for a sampan,
+seemed far away and misty. The voices, as the flat-bottomed little skiff
+was pushed off in pursuit of the boat which was hurrying Binhart out into
+the night, seemed remote and thin, as though coming from across foggy
+water. He was bewildered by a sense of dampness in his right leg. He
+patted it with his hand, inquisitively, and found it wet. He stooped down
+and felt his boot. It was full of blood. It was overrunning with blood.
+He remembered then. Binhart had shot him, after all.
+
+He could never say whether it was this discovery, or the actual loss of
+blood, that filled him with a sudden giddiness. He fell forward on his
+face, on the bottom of the rocking sampan.
+
+He must have been unconscious for some time, for when he awakened he was
+dimly aware that he was being carried up the landing-ladder of a steamer.
+He heard English voices about him. A very youthful-looking ship's surgeon
+came and bent over him, cut away his trouser-leg, and whistled.
+
+"Why, he's been bleeding like a stuck pig!" he heard a startled voice,
+very close to him, suddenly exclaim. And a few minutes later, after being
+moved again, he opened his eyes to find himself in a berth and the
+boyish-looking surgeon assuring him it was all right.
+
+"Where's Binhart?" asked Blake.
+
+"That's all right, old chap, you just rest up a bit," said the placatory
+youth.
+
+At nine the next morning Blake was taken ashore at Hong Kong.
+
+After eleven days in the English hospital he was on his feet again. He
+was quite strong by that time. But for several weeks after that his leg
+was painfully stiff.
+
+
+
+
+                                   XI
+
+
+Twelve days later Blake began just where he had left off. He sent out his
+feelers, he canvassed the offices from which some echo might come, he had
+Macao searched, and all westbound steamers which he could reach by
+wireless were duly warned. But more than ever, now, he found, he had to
+depend on his own initiative, his own personal efforts. The more official
+the quarters to which he looked for cooperation, the less response he
+seemed to elicit. In some circles, he saw, his story was even doubted. It
+was listened to with indifference; it was dismissed with shrugs. There
+were times when he himself was smiled at, pityingly.
+
+He concluded, after much thought on the matter, that Binhart would
+continue to work his way westward. That the fugitive would strike inland
+and try to reach Europe by means of the Trans-Siberian Railway seemed out
+of the question. On that route he would be too easily traced. The
+carefully guarded frontiers of Russia, too, would offer obstacles which
+he dare not meet. He would stick to the ragged and restless sea-fringes,
+concluded the detective. But before acting on that conclusion he caught a
+_Toyo Kisen Kaisha_ steamer for Shanghai, and went over that city from
+the Bund and the Maloo to the narrowest street in the native quarter. In
+all this second search, however, he found nothing to reward his efforts.
+So he started doggedly southward again, stopping at Saigon and Bangkok
+and Singapore.
+
+At each of these ports he went through the same rounds, canvassed the
+same set of officials, and made the same inquiries. Then he would go to
+the native quarters, to the gambling houses, to the water-front and the
+rickshaw coolies and half-naked Malay wharf-rats, holding the
+departmental photograph of Binhart in his hand and inquiring of stranger
+after stranger: "You know? You savvy him?" And time after time the
+curious yellow faces would bend over the picture, the inscrutable slant
+eyes would study the face, sometimes silently, sometimes with a
+disheartening jabber of heathen tongues. But not one trace of Binhart
+could he pick up.
+
+Then he went on to Penang. There he went doggedly through the same
+manoeuvers, canvassing the same rounds and putting the same questions.
+And it was at Penang that a sharp-eyed young water-front coolie squinted
+at the well-thumbed photograph, squinted back at Blake, and shook his
+head in affirmation. A tip of a few English shillings loosened his
+tongue, but as Blake understood neither Malay nor Chinese he was in the
+dark until he led his coolie to a Cook's agent, who in turn called in the
+local officers, who in turn consulted with the booking-agents of the P. &
+O. Line. It was then Blake discovered that Binhart had booked passage
+under the name of Blaisdell, twelve days before, for Brindisi.
+
+Blake studied the map, cashed a draft, and waited for the next steamer.
+While marking time he purchased copies of "French Self-Taught" and
+"Italian Self-Taught," hoping to school himself in a speaking knowledge
+of these two tongues. But the effort was futile. Pore as he might over
+those small volumes, he could glean nothing from their laboriously
+pondered pages. His mind was no longer receptive. It seemed indurated,
+hard-shelled. He had to acknowledge to his own soul that it was beyond
+him. He was too old a dog to learn new tricks.
+
+The trip to Brindisi seemed an endless one. He seemed to have lost his
+earlier tendency to be a "mixer." He became more morose, more
+self-immured. He found himself without the desire to make new friends,
+and his Celtic ancestry equipped him with a mute and sullen antipathy for
+his aggressively English fellow travelers. He spent much of his time in
+the smoking-room, playing solitaire. When they stopped at Madras and
+Bombay he merely emerged from his shell to make sure if no trace of
+Binhart were about. He was no more interested in these heathen cities of
+a heathen East than in an ash-pile through which he might have to rake
+for a hidden coin.
+
+By the time he reached Brindisi he had recovered his lost weight, and
+added to it, by many pounds. He had also returned to his earlier habit of
+chewing "fine-cut." He gave less thought to his personal appearance,
+becoming more and more indifferent as to the impression he made on those
+about him. His face, for all his increase in flesh, lost its ruddiness.
+It was plain that during the last few months he had aged, that his
+hound-like eye had grown more haggard, that his always ponderous step had
+lost the last of its resilience.
+
+Yet one hour after he had landed at Brindisi his listlessness seemed a
+thing of the past. For there he was able to pick up the trail again, with
+clear proof that a man answering to Binhart's description had sailed for
+Corfu. From Corfu the scent was followed northward to Ragusa, and from
+Ragusa, on to Trieste, where it was lost again.
+
+Two days of hard work, however, convinced Blake that Binhart had sailed
+from Fiume to Naples. He started southward by train, at once, vaguely
+surprised at the length of Italy, vaguely disconcerted by the unknown
+tongue and the unknown country which he had to face.
+
+It was not until he arrived at Naples that he seemed to touch solid
+ground again. That city, he felt, stood much nearer home. In it were many
+persons not averse to curry favor with a New York official, and many
+persons indirectly in touch with the home Department. These persons he
+assiduously sought out, one by one, and in twelve hours' time his net had
+been woven completely about the city. And, so far as he could learn,
+Binhart was still somewhere in that city.
+
+Two days later, when least expecting it, he stepped into the wine-room of
+an obscure little pension hotel on the Via Margellina and saw Binhart
+before him. Binhart left the room as the other man stepped into it. He
+left by way of the window, carrying the casement with him. Blake
+followed, but the lighter and younger man out-ran him and was swallowed
+up by one of the unknown streets of an unknown quarter. An hour later
+Blake had his hired agents raking that quarter from cellar to garret. It
+was not until the evening of the following day that these agents learned
+Binhart had made his way to the Marina, bribed a water-front boatman to
+row him across the bay, and had been put aboard a freighter weighing
+anchor for Marseilles.
+
+For the second time Blake traversed Italy by train, hurrying self-immured
+and preoccupied through Rome and Florence and Genoa, and then on along
+the Riviera to Marseilles.
+
+In that brawling and turbulent French port, after the usual rounds and
+the usual inquiries down in the midst of the harbor-front forestry of
+masts, he found a boatman who claimed to have knowledge of Binhart's
+whereabouts. This piratical-looking boatman promptly took Blake several
+miles down the coast, parleyed in the _lingua Franca_ of the
+Mediterranean, argued in broken English, and insisted on going further.
+Blake, scenting imposture, demanded to be put ashore. This the boatman
+refused to do. It was then and only then that the detective suspected he
+was the victim of a "plant," of a carefully planned shanghaing movement,
+the object of which, apparently, was to gain time for the fugitive.
+
+It was only at the point of a revolver that Blake brought the boat
+ashore, and there he was promptly arrested and accused of attempted
+murder. He found it expedient to call in the aid of the American Consul,
+who, in turn, suggested the retaining of a local advocate. Everything, it
+is true, was at last made clear and in the end Blake was honorably
+released.
+
+But Binhart, in the meantime, had caught a Lloyd Brazileiro steamer for
+Rio de Janeiro, and was once more on the high seas.
+
+Blake, when he learned of this, sat staring about him, like a man facing
+news which he could not assimilate. He shut himself up in his hotel room,
+for an hour, communing with his own dark soul. He emerged from that
+self-communion freshly shaved and smoking a cigar. He found that he could
+catch a steamer for Barcelona, and from that port take a Campania
+Transatlantic boat for Kingston, Jamaica.
+
+From the American consulate he carried away with him a bundle of New York
+newspapers. When out on the Atlantic he arranged these according to date
+and went over them diligently, page by page. They seemed like echoes out
+of another life. He read listlessly on, going over the belated news from
+his old-time home with the melancholy indifference of the alien, with the
+poignant impersonality of the exile. He read of fires and crimes and
+calamities, of investigations and elections. He read of a rumored Police
+Department shake up, and he could afford to smile at the vitality of that
+hellbender-like report. Then, as he turned the worn pages, the smile died
+from his heavy lips, for his own name leaped up like a snake from the
+text and seemed to strike him in the face. He spelled through the
+paragraphs carefully, word by word, as though it were in a language with
+which he was only half familiar. He even went back and read the entire
+column for a second time. For there it told of his removal from the
+Police Department. The Commissioner and Copeland had saved their necks,
+but Blake was no longer Second Deputy. They spoke of him as being
+somewhere in the Philippines, on the trail of the bank-robber Binhart.
+They went on to describe him as a sleuth of the older school, as an
+advocate of the now obsolete "third-degree" methods, and as a product of
+the "machine" which had so long and so flagrantly placed politics before
+efficiency.
+
+Blake put down the papers, lighted a cigar, sat back, and let the truth
+of what he had read percolate into his actual consciousness. He was
+startled, at first, that no great outburst of rage swept through him. All
+he felt, in fact, was a slow and dull resentment, a resentment which he
+could not articulate. Yet dull as it was, hour by hour and day by idle
+day it grew more virulent. About him stood nothing against which this
+resentment could be marshaled. His pride lay as helpless as a whale
+washed ashore, too massive to turn and face the tides of treachery that
+had wrecked it. All he asked for was time. Let them wait, he kept telling
+himself; let them wait until he got back with Binhart! Then they would
+all eat crow, every last man of them!
+
+For Blake did not intend to give up the trail. To do so would have been
+beyond him. His mental fangs were already fixed in Binhart. To withdraw
+them was not in his power. He could no more surrender his quarry than the
+python's head, having once closed on the rabbit, could release its meal.
+With Blake, every instinct sloped inward, just as every python-fang
+sloped backward. The actual reason for the chase was no longer clear to
+his own vision. It was something no longer to be reckoned with. The only
+thing that counted was the fact that he had decided to "get" Binhart,
+that he was the pursuer and Binhart was the fugitive. It had long since
+resolved itself into a personal issue between him and his enemy.
+
+
+
+
+                                  XII
+
+
+Three hours after he had disembarked from his steamer at Rio, Blake was
+breakfasting at the Cafe Britto in the Ovidor. At the same table with him
+sat a lean-jawed and rat-eyed little gambler by the name of Passos.
+
+Two hours after this breakfast Passos might have been seen on the Avenida
+Central, in deep talk with a peddler of artificial diamonds. Still later
+in the day he held converse with a fellow gambler at the Paineiras,
+half-way up Mount Corcovado; and the same afternoon he was interrogating
+a certain discredited concession-hunter on the Petropolis boat.
+
+By evening he was able to return to Blake with the information that
+Binhart had duly landed at Rio, had hidden for three days in the
+outskirts of the city, and had gone aboard a German cargo-boat bound for
+Colon. Two days later Blake himself was aboard a British freighter
+northward bound for Kingston. Once again he beheld a tropical sun shimmer
+on hot brass-work and pitch boil up between bone-white deck-boards
+sluiced and resluiced by a half-naked crew. Once again he had to face an
+enervating equatorial heat that vitiated both mind and body. But he
+neither fretted nor complained. Some fixed inner purpose seemed to
+sustain him through every discomfort. Deep in that soul, merely filmed
+with its fixed equatorial calm, burned some dormant and crusader-like
+propulsion. And an existence so centered on one great issue found scant
+time to worry over the trivialities of the moment.
+
+After a three-day wait at Jamaica Blake caught an Atlas liner for Colon.
+And at Colon he found himself once more among his own kind. Scattered up
+and down the Isthmus he found an occasional Northerner to whom he was not
+unknown, engineers and construction men who could talk of things that
+were comprehensible to him, gamblers and adventurers who took him
+poignantly back to the life he had left so far behind him. Along that
+crowded and shifting half-way house for the tropic-loving American he
+found more than one passing friend to whom he talked hungrily and put
+many wistful questions. Sometimes it was a rock contractor tanned the
+color of a Mexican saddle. Sometimes it was a new arrival in Stetson and
+riding-breeches and unstained leather leggings. Sometimes it was a
+coatless dump-boss blaspheming his toiling army of spick-a-dees.
+
+Sometimes he talked with graders and car-men and track-layers in Chinese
+saloons along Bottle Alley. Sometimes it was with a bridge-builder or a
+lottery capper in the bar-room of the Hotel Central, where he would sit
+without coat or vest, calmly giving an eye to his game of "draw" or
+stolidly "rolling the bones" as he talked--but always with his ears open
+for one particular thing, and that thing had to do with the movements or
+the whereabouts of Connie Binhart.
+
+One night, as he sat placidly playing his game of "cut-throat" in his
+shirt-sleeves, he looked up and saw a russet-faced figure as stolid as
+his own. This figure, he perceived, was discreetly studying him as he sat
+under the glare of the light. Blake went on with his game. In a quarter
+of an hour, however, he got up from the table and bought a fresh supply
+of "green" Havana cigars. Then he sauntered out to where the russet-faced
+stranger stood watching the street crowds.
+
+"Pip, what're you doing down in these parts?" he casually inquired. He
+had recognized the man as Pip Tankred, with whom he had come in contact
+five long years before. Pip, on that occasion, was engaged in loading an
+East River banana-boat with an odd ton or two of cartridges designed for
+Castro's opponents in Venezuela.
+
+"Oh, I'm freightin' bridge equipment down the West Coast," he solemnly
+announced. "And transshippin' a few cases o' phonograph-records as a
+side-line!"
+
+"Have a smoke?" asked Blake.
+
+"Sure," responded the russet-faced bucaneer. And as they stood smoking
+together Blake tenderly and cautiously put out the usual feelers, plying
+the familiar questions and meeting with the too-familiar lack of
+response. Like all the rest of them, he soon saw, Pip Tankred knew
+nothing of Binhart or his whereabouts. And with that discovery his
+interest in Pip Tankred ceased.
+
+So the next day Blake moved inland, working his interrogative way along
+the Big Ditch to Panama. He even slipped back over the line to San
+Cristobel and Ancon, found nothing of moment awaiting him there, and
+drifted back into Panamanian territory. It was not until the end of the
+week that the first glimmer of hope came to him.
+
+It came in the form of an incredibly thin _gringo_ in an incredibly
+soiled suit of duck. Blake had been sitting on the wide veranda of the
+Hotel Angelini, sipping his "swizzle" and studiously watching the
+Saturday evening crowds that passed back and forth through Panama's
+bustling railway station. He had watched the long line of rickety cabs
+backed up against the curb, the two honking autobusses, the shifting army
+of pleasure-seekers along the sidewalks, the noisy saloons round which
+the crowds eddied like bees about a hive, and he was once more appraising
+the groups closer about him, when through that seething and bustling mass
+of humanity he saw Dusty McGlade pushing his way, a Dusty McGlade on whom
+the rum of Jamaica and the _mezcal_ of Guatemala and the _anisado_ of
+Ecuador had combined with the _pulque_ of Mexico to set their
+unmistakable seal.
+
+But three minutes later the two men were seated together above their
+"swizzles" and Blake was exploring Dusty's faded memories as busily as a
+leather-dip might explore an inebriate's pockets.
+
+"Who're you looking for, Jim?" suddenly and peevishly demanded the man in
+the soiled white duck, as though impatient of the other's indirections.
+
+Blake smoked for a moment or two before answering.
+
+"I'm looking for a man called Connie Binhart," he finally confessed, as
+he continued to study that ruinous figure in front of him. It startled
+him to see what idleness and alcohol and the heat of the tropics could do
+to a man once as astute as Dusty McGlade.
+
+"Then why didn't you say so?" complained McGlade, as though impatient of
+obliquities that had been altogether too apparent. He had once been
+afraid of this man called Blake, he remembered. But time had changed
+things, as time has the habit of doing. And most of all, time had changed
+Blake himself, had left the old-time Headquarters man oddly heavy of
+movement and strangely slow of thought.
+
+"Well, I'm saying it now!" Blake's guttural voice was reminding him.
+
+"Then why didn't you say it an hour ago?" contested McGlade, with his
+alcoholic peevish obstinacy.
+
+"Well, let's have it now," placated the patient-eyed Blake. He waited,
+with a show of indifference. He even overlooked Dusty's curt laugh of
+contempt.
+
+"I can tell you all right, all right--but it won't do you much good!"
+
+"Why not?" And still Blake was bland and patient.
+
+"Because," retorted McGlade, fixing the other man with a lean finger that
+was both unclean and unsteady, "_you can't get at him_!"
+
+"You tell me where he is," said Blake, striking a match. "I'll attend to
+the rest of it!"
+
+McGlade slowly and deliberately drank the last of his swizzle. Then he
+put down his empty glass and stared pensively and pregnantly into it.
+
+"What's there in it for me?" he asked.
+
+Blake, studying him across the small table, weighed both the man and the
+situation.
+
+"Two hundred dollars in American greenbacks," he announced as he drew out
+his wallet. He could see McGlade moisten his flaccid lips. He could see
+the faded eyes fasten on the bills as they were counted out. He knew
+where the money would go, how little good it would do. But that, he knew,
+was not _his_ funeral. All he wanted was Binhart.
+
+"Binhart's in Guayaquil," McGlade suddenly announced.
+
+"How d' you know that?" promptly demanded Blake.
+
+"I know the man who sneaked him out from Balboa. He got sixty dollars for
+it. I can take you to him. Binhart'd picked up a medicine-chest and a bag
+of instruments from a broken-down doctor at Colon. He went aboard a
+Pacific liner as a doctor himself."
+
+"What liner?"
+
+"He went aboard the _Trunella_. He thought he'd get down to Callao. But
+they tied the _Trunella_ up at Guayaquil."
+
+"And you say he's there now?"
+
+"Yes!"
+
+"And aboard the _Trunella_?"
+
+"Sure! He's got to be aboard the _Trunella_!"
+
+"Then why d' you say I can't get at him?"
+
+"Because Guayaquil and the _Trunella_ and the whole coast down there is
+tied up in quarantine. That whole harbor's rotten with yellow-jack. It's
+tied up as tight as a drum. You couldn't get a boat on all the Pacific to
+touch that port these days!"
+
+"But there's got to be _something_ going there!" contended Blake.
+
+"They daren't do it! They couldn't get clearance--they couldn't even get
+_pratique_! Once they got in there they'd be held and given the
+blood-test and picketed with a gunboat for a month! And what's more,
+they've got that Alfaro revolution on down there! They've got
+boat-patrols up and down the coast, keeping a lookout for gun-runners!"
+
+Blake, at this last word, raised his ponderous head.
+
+"The boat-patrols wouldn't phase me," he announced. His thoughts, in
+fact, were already far ahead, marshaling themselves about other things.
+
+"You've a weakness for yellow fever?" inquired the ironic McGlade.
+
+"I guess it'd take more than a few fever germs to throw me off that
+trail," was the detective's abstracted retort. He was recalling certain
+things that the russet-faced Pip Tankred had told him. And before
+everything else he felt that it would be well to get in touch with that
+distributor of bridge equipment and phonograph records.
+
+"You don't mean you're going to try to get into Guayaquil?" demanded
+McGlade.
+
+"If Connie Binhart's down there I've got to go and get him," was
+Never-Fail Blake's answer.
+
+                            * * * * * * * *
+
+The following morning Blake, having made sure of his ground, began one of
+his old-time "investigations" of that unsuspecting worthy known as Pip
+Tankred.
+
+This investigation involved a hurried journey back to Colon, the
+expenditure of much money in cable tolls, the examination of records that
+were both official and unofficial, the asking of many questions and the
+turning up of dimly remembered things on which the dust of time had long
+since settled.
+
+It was followed by a return to Panama, a secret trip several miles up the
+coast to look over a freighter placidly anchored there, a
+dolorous-appearing coast-tramp with unpainted upperworks and a rusty red
+hull. The side-plates of this red hull, Blake observed, were as pitted
+and scarred as the face of an Egyptian obelisk. Her ventilators were
+askew and her funnel was scrofulous and many of her rivet-heads seemed to
+be eaten away. But this was not once a source of apprehension to the
+studious-eyed detective.
+
+The following evening he encountered Tankred himself, as though by
+accident, on the veranda of the Hotel Angelini. The latter, at Blake's
+invitation, sat down for a cocktail and a quiet smoke.
+
+They sat in silence for some time, watching the rain that deluged the
+city, the warm devitalizing rain that unedged even the fieriest of Signor
+Angelinas stimulants.
+
+"Pip," Blake very quietly announced, "you're going to sail for Guayaquil
+to-morrow!"
+
+"Am I?" queried the unmoved Pip.
+
+"You're going to start for Guayaquil to-morrow," repeated Blake, "and
+you're going to take me along with you!"
+
+"My friend," retorted Pip, emitting a curling geyser of smoke as long and
+thin as a pool-que, "you're sure laborin' under the misapprehension this
+steamer o' mine is a Pacific mailer! But she ain't, Blake!"
+
+"I admit that," quietly acknowledged the other man. "I saw her
+yesterday!"
+
+"And she don't carry no passengers--she ain't allowed to," announced her
+master.
+
+"But she's going to carry me," asserted Blake, lighting a fresh cigar.
+
+"What as?" demanded Tankred. And he fixed Blake with a belligerent eye as
+he put the question.
+
+"As an old friend of yours!"
+
+"And then what?" still challenged the other.
+
+"As a man who knows your record, in the next place. And on the next
+count, as the man who's wise to those phony bills of lading of yours, and
+those doped-up clearance papers, and those cases of carbines you've got
+down your hold labeled bridge equipment, and that nitro and giant-caps,
+and that hundred thousand rounds of smokeless you're running down there
+as phonograph records!"
+
+Tankred continued to smoke.
+
+"You ever stop to wonder," he finally inquired, "if it ain't kind o'
+flirtin' with danger knowin' so much about me and my freightin'
+business?"
+
+"No, you're doing the coquetting in this case, I guess!"
+
+"Then I ain't standin' for no rivals--not on this coast!"
+
+The two men, so dissimilar in aspect and yet so alike in their accidental
+attitudes of an uncouth belligerency, sat staring at each other.
+
+"You're going to take me to Guayaquil," repeated Blake.
+
+"That's where you're dead wrong," was the calmly insolent rejoinder. "I
+ain't even _goin'_ to Guayaquil."
+
+"I say you are."
+
+Tankred's smile translated his earlier deliberateness into open contempt.
+
+"You seem to forget that this here town you're beefin' about lies a good
+thirty-five miles up the Guayas River. And if I'm gun-runnin' for Alfaro,
+as you say, I naturally ain't navigatin' streams where they'd be able to
+pick me off the bridge-deck with a fishin'-pole!"
+
+"But you're going to get as close to Guayaquil as you can, and you know
+it."
+
+"Do I?" said the man with the up-tilted cigar.
+
+"Look here, Pip," said Blake, leaning closer over the table towards him.
+"I don't give a tinker's dam about Alfaro and his two-cent revolution.
+I'm not sitting up worrying over him or his junta or how he gets his
+ammunition. But I want to get into Guayaquil, and this is the only way I
+can do it!"
+
+For the first time Tankred turned and studied him.
+
+"What d' you want to get into Guayaquil for?" he finally demanded. Blake
+knew that nothing was to be gained by beating about the bush.
+
+"There's a man I want down there, and I'm going down to get him!"
+
+"Who is he?"
+
+"That's my business," retorted Blake.
+
+"And gettin' into Guayaquil's your business!" Tankred snorted back.
+
+"All I'm going to say is he's a man from up North--and he's not in your
+line of business, and never was and never will be!"
+
+"How do I know that?"
+
+"You'll have my word for it!"
+
+Tankred swung round on him.
+
+"D' you realize you'll have to sneak ashore in a _lancha_ and pass a
+double line o' patrol? And then crawl into a town that's reekin' with
+yellow-jack, a town you're not likely to crawl out of again inside o'
+three months?"
+
+"I know all that!" acknowledged Blake.
+
+For the second time Tankred turned and studied the other man.
+
+"And you're still goin' after your gen'leman friend from up North?" he
+inquired.
+
+"Pip, I've got to get that man!"
+
+"You've got 'o?"
+
+"I've got to, and I'm going to!"
+
+Tankred threw his cigar-end away and laughed leisurely and quietly.
+
+"Then what're we sittin' here arguin' about, anyway? If it's settled,
+it's settled, ain't it?"
+
+"Yes, I think it's settled!"
+
+Again Tankred laughed.
+
+"But take it from me, my friend, you'll sure see some rough goin' this
+next few days!"
+
+
+
+
+                                  XIII
+
+
+As Tankred had intimated, Blake's journey southward from Panama was
+anything but comfortable traveling. The vessel was verminous, the food
+was bad, and the heat was oppressive. It was a heat that took the life
+out of the saturated body, a thick and burdening heat that hung like a
+heavy gray blanket on a gray sea which no rainfall seemed able to cool.
+
+But Blake uttered no complaint. By day he smoked under a sodden awning,
+rained on by funnel cinders. By night he stood at the rail. He stood
+there, by the hour together, watching with wistful and haggard eyes the
+Alpha of Argo and the slowly rising Southern Cross. Whatever his
+thoughts, as he watched those lonely Southern skies, he kept them to
+himself.
+
+It was the night after they had swung about and were steaming up the Gulf
+of Guayaquil under a clear sky that Tankred stepped down to Blake's
+sultry little cabin and wakened him from a sound sleep.
+
+"It's time you were gettin' your clothes on," he announced.
+
+"Getting my clothes on?" queried Blake through the darkness.
+
+"Yes, you can't tell what we'll bump into, any time now!"
+
+The wakened sleeper heard the other man moving about in the velvety black
+gloom.
+
+"What're you doing there?" was his sharp question as he heard the squeak
+and slam of a shutter.
+
+"Closin' this dead-light, of course," explained Tankred. A moment later
+he switched on the electric globe at the bunk-head. "We're gettin' in
+pretty close now and we're goin' with our lights doused!"
+
+He stood for a moment, staring down at the sweat-dewed white body on the
+bunk, heaving for breath in the closeness of the little cabin. His mind
+was still touched into mystery by the spirit housed in that uncouth and
+undulatory flesh. He was still piqued by the vast sense of purpose which
+Blake carried somewhere deep within his seemingly tepid-willed carcass,
+like the calcinated pearl at the center of an oyster.
+
+"You'd better turn out!" he called back as he stepped into the engulfing
+gloom of the gangway.
+
+Blake rolled out of his berth and dressed without haste or excitement.
+Already, overhead, he could hear the continuous tramping of feet, with
+now and then a quiet-noted order from Tankred himself. He could hear
+other noises along the ship's side, as though a landing-ladder were being
+bolted and lowered along the rusty plates.
+
+When he went up on deck he found the boat in utter darkness. To that
+slowly moving mass, for she was now drifting ahead under quarter-speed,
+this obliteration of light imparted a sense of stealthiness. This note of
+suspense, of watchfulness, of illicit adventure, was reflected in the
+very tones of the motley deckhands who brushed past him in the humid
+velvety blackness.
+
+As he stood at the rail, staring ahead through this blackness, Blake
+could see a light here and there along the horizon. These lights
+increased in number as the boat steamed slowly on. Then, far away in the
+roadstead ahead of them, he made out an entire cluster of lights, like
+those of a liner at anchor. Then he heard the tinkle of a bell below
+deck, and he realized that the engines had stopped.
+
+In the lull of the quieted ship's screw he could hear the wash of distant
+surf, faint and phantasmal above the material little near-by boat-noises.
+Then came a call, faint and muffled, like the complaining note of a
+harbor gull. A moment later the slow creak of oars crept up to Blake's
+straining ears. Then out of the heart of the darkness that surrounded
+him, not fifty feet away, he saw emerge one faint point of light, rising
+and falling with a rhythm as sleepy as the slow creak of the oars. On
+each side of it other small lights sprang up. They were close beside the
+ship, by this time, a flotilla of lights, and each light, Blake finally
+saw, came from a lantern that stood deep in the bottom of a boat, a
+lantern that had been covered with a square of matting or sail-cloth,
+until some prearranged signal from the drifting steamer elicited its
+answering flicker of light. Then they swarmed about the oily water,
+shifting and swaying on their course like a cluster of fireflies,
+alternately dark and luminous in the dip and rise of the ground-swell.
+Within each small aura of radiance the watcher at the rail could see a
+dusky and quietly moving figure, the faded blue of a denim garment, the
+brown of bare arms, or the sinews of a straining neck. Once he caught the
+whites of a pair of eyes turned up towards the ship's deck. He could also
+see the running and wavering lines of fire as the oars puddled and backed
+in the phosphorescent water under the gloomy steel hull. Then he heard a
+low-toned argument in Spanish. A moment later the flotilla of small boats
+had fastened to the ship's side, like a litter of suckling pigs to a
+sow's breast. Every light went out again, every light except a faint glow
+as a guide to the first boat at the foot of the landing-ladder. Along
+this ladder Blake could hear barefooted figures padding and grunting as
+cases and bales were cautiously carried down and passed from boat to
+boat.
+
+He swung nervously about as he felt a hand clutch his arm. He found
+Tankred speaking quietly into his ear.
+
+"There'll be one boat over," that worthy was explaining. "One boat--you
+take that--the last one! And you'd better give the _guinney_ a ten-dollar
+bill for his trouble!"
+
+"All right! I'm ready!" was Blake's low-toned reply as he started to move
+forward with the other man.
+
+"Not yet! Not yet!" was the other's irritable warning, as Blake felt
+himself pushed back. "You stay where you are! We've got a half-hour's
+hard work ahead of us yet!"
+
+As Blake leaned over the rail again, watching and listening, he began to
+realize that the work was indeed hard, that there was some excuse for
+Tankred's ill-temper. Most men, he acknowledged, would feel the strain,
+where one misstep or one small mistake might undo the work of months.
+Beyond that, however, Blake found little about which to concern himself.
+Whether it was legal or illegal did not enter his mind. That a few
+thousand tin-sworded soldiers should go armed or unarmed was to him a
+matter of indifference. It was something not of his world. It did not
+impinge on his own jealously guarded circle of activity, on his own task
+of bringing a fugitive to justice. And as his eyes strained through the
+gloom at the cluster of lights far ahead in the roadstead he told himself
+that it was there that his true goal lay, for it was there that the
+_Trunella_ must ride at anchor and Binhart must be.
+
+Then he looked wonderingly back at the flotilla under the rail, for he
+realized that every movement and murmur of life there had come to a
+sudden stop. It was a cessation of all sound, a silence as ominously
+complete as that of a summer woodland when a hawk soars overhead. Even
+the small light deep in the bottom of the first _lancha_ tied to the
+landing-ladder had been suddenly quenched.
+
+Blake, staring apprehensively out into the gloom, caught the sound of a
+soft and feverish throbbing. His disturbed mind had just registered the
+conclusion that this sound must be the throbbing of a passing
+marine-engine, when the thought was annihilated by a second and more
+startling occurrence.
+
+Out across the blackness in front of him suddenly flashed a white saber
+of light. For one moment it circled and wavered restlessly about, feeling
+like a great finger along the gray surface of the water. Then it smote
+full on Blake and the deck where he stood, blinding him with its glare,
+picking out every object and every listening figure as plainly as a
+calcium picks out a scene on the stage.
+
+Without conscious thought Blake dropped lower behind the ship's rail. He
+sank still lower, until he found himself down on his hands and knees
+beside a rope coil. As he did so he heard the call of a challenging
+Spanish voice, a murmur of voices, and then a repeated command.
+
+There was no answer to this challenge. Then came another command and then
+silence again. Then a faint thrill arrowed through Blake's crouching
+body, for from somewhere close behind him a gun-shot rang out and was
+repeated again and again. Blake knew, at that sound, that Tankred or one
+of his men was firing straight into the dial of the searchlight, that
+Tankred himself intended to defy what must surely be an Ecuadorean
+gunboat. The detective was oppressed by the thought that his own
+jealously nursed plan might at any moment get a knock on the head.
+
+At almost the same time the peevishly indignant Blake could hear the
+tinkle of the engine-room bell below him and then the thrash of the screw
+wings. The boat began to move forward, dangling the knocking and rocking
+flotilla of _lanchas_ and surf-boats at her side, like a deer-mouse
+making off with its young. Then came sharp cries of protest, in Spanish,
+and more cries and curses in harbor-English, and a second engine-room
+signal and a cessation of the screw thrashings. This was followed by a
+shower of carbine-shots and the plaintive whine of bullets above the
+upperworks, the crack and thud of lead against the side-plates. At the
+same time Blake heard the scream of a denim-clad figure that suddenly
+pitched from the landing-ladder into the sea. Then came an answering
+volley, from somewhere close below Blake. He could not tell whether it
+was from the boat-flotilla or from the port-holes above it. But he knew
+that Tankred and his men were returning the gunboat's fire.
+
+Blake, by this time, was once more thinking lucidly. Some of the cases in
+those surf-boats, he remembered, held giant-caps and dynamite, and he
+knew what was likely to happen if a bullet struck them. He also
+remembered that he was still exposed to the carbine fire from behind the
+searchlight.
+
+He stretched out, flat on the deck-boards, and wormed his way slowly and
+ludicrously aft. He did not bring those uncouth vermiculations to a stop
+until he was well back in the shelter of a rusty capstan, cut off from
+the light by a lifeboat swinging on its davits. As he clambered to his
+feet again he saw this light suddenly go out and then reappear. As it did
+so he could make out a patrol-boat, gray and low-bodied, slinking forward
+through the gloom. He could see that boat crowded with men, men in
+uniform, and he could see that each man carried a carbine. He could also
+see that it would surely cut across the bow of his own steamer. A moment
+later he knew that Tankred himself had seen this, for high above the
+crack and whine of the shooting and the tumult of voices he could now
+hear Tankred's blasphemous shouts.
+
+"Cut loose those boats!" bellowed the frantic gun-runner. Then he
+repeated the command, apparently in Spanish. And to this came an
+answering babel of cries and expostulations and counter-cries. But still
+the firing from behind the searchlight kept up. Blake could see a
+half-naked seaman with a carpenter's ax skip monkey-like down the
+landing-ladder. He saw the naked arm strike with the ax, the two hands
+suddenly catch at the bare throat, and the figure fall back in a huddle
+against the red-stained wooden steps.
+
+Blake also saw, to his growing unrest, that the firing was increasing in
+volume, that at the front of the ship sharp volley and counter-volley was
+making a pandemonium of the very deck on which he knelt. For by this time
+the patrol-boat with the carbineers had reached the steamer's side and a
+boarding-ladder had been thrown across her quarter. And Blake began to
+comprehend that he was in the most undesirable of situations. He could
+hear the repeated clang of the engine-room telegraph and Tankred's
+frenzied and ineffectual bellow of "Full steam ahead! For the love o'
+Christ, full ahead down there!"
+
+Through all that bedlam Blake remained resentfully cool, angrily
+clear-thoughted. He saw that the steamer did not move forward. He
+concluded the engine-room to be deserted. And he saw both the futility
+and the danger of remaining where he was.
+
+He crawled back to where he remembered the rope-coil lay, dragging the
+loose end of it back after him, and then lowering it over the ship's side
+until it touched the water. Then he shifted this rope along the rail
+until it swung over the last of the line of surf-boats that bobbed and
+thudded against the side-plates of the gently rolling steamer. About him,
+all the while, he could hear the shouts of men and the staccato crack of
+the rifles. But he saw to it that his rope was well tied to the
+rail-stanchion. Then he clambered over the rail itself, and with a double
+twist of the rope about his great leg let himself ponderously down over
+the side.
+
+He swayed there, for a moment, until the roll of the ship brought him
+thumping against the rusty plates again. At the same moment the shifting
+surf-boat swung in under him. Releasing his hold, he went tumbling down
+between the cartridge-cases and the boat-thwarts.
+
+This boat, he saw, was still securely tied to its mate, one of the
+larger-bodied _lanchas_, and he had nothing with which to sever the rope.
+His first impulse was to reach for his revolver and cut through the
+manilla strands by means of a half-dozen quick shots. But this, he knew,
+would too noisily announce his presence there. So he fell on his knees
+and peered and prodded about the boat bottom. There, to his surprise, he
+saw the huddled body of a dead man, face down. This body he turned over,
+running an exploring hand along the belt-line. As he had hoped, he found
+a heavy nine-inch knife there.
+
+He was dodging back to the bow of the surf-boat when a uniformed figure
+carrying a rifle came scuttling and shouting down the landing-ladder.
+Blake's spirits sank as he saw that figure. He knew now that his movement
+had been seen and understood. He knew, too, as he saw the figure come
+scrambling out over the rocking boats, what capture would mean.
+
+He had the last strand of the rope severed before the Ecuadorean with the
+carbine reached the _lancha_ next to him. He still felt, once he was
+free, that he could use his revolver and get away. But before Blake could
+push off a sinewy brown hand reached out and clutched the gunwale of the
+liberated boat. Blake ignored the clutching hand. But, relying on his own
+sheer strength, he startled the owner of the hand by suddenly flinging
+himself forward, seizing the carbine barrel, and wresting it free. A
+second later it disappeared beneath the surface of the water.
+
+That impassioned brown hand, however, still clung to the boat's gunwale.
+It clung there determinedly, blindly--and Blake knew there was no time
+for a struggle. He brought the heavy-bladed knife down on the clinging
+fingers. It was a stroke like that of a cleaver on a butcher's block. In
+the strong white light that still played on them he could see the flash
+of teeth in the man's opened mouth, the upturn of the staring eye-balls
+as the severed fingers fell away and he screamed aloud with pain.
+
+But with one quick motion of his gorilla-like arms Blake pushed his boat
+free, telling himself there was still time, warning himself to keep cool
+and make the most of every chance. Yet as he turned to take up the oars
+he saw that he had been discovered by the Ecuadoreans on the freighter's
+deck, that his flight was not to be as simple as he had expected. He saw
+the lean brown face, picked out by the white light, as a carbineer swung
+his short-barreled rifle out over the rail--and the man in the surf-boat
+knew by that face what was coming.
+
+His first impulse was to reach into his pocket for his revolver. But
+that, he knew, was already too late, for a second man had joined the
+first and a second rifle was already swinging round on him. His next
+thought was to dive over the boat's side. This thought had scarcely
+formulated itself, however, before he heard the bark of the rifle and saw
+the puff of smoke.
+
+At the same moment he felt the rip and tug of the bullet through the
+loose side-folds of his coat. And with that rip and tug came a third
+thought, over which he did not waver. He threw up his hands, sharply, and
+flung himself headlong across the body of the dead man in the bottom of
+the surf-boat.
+
+He fell heavily, with a blow that shook the wind from his body. But as he
+lay there he knew better than to move. He lay there, scarcely daring to
+breathe, dreading that the rise and fall of his breast would betray his
+ruse, praying that his boat would veer about so his body would be in the
+shadow. For he knew the two waiting carbines were still pointed at him.
+
+He lay there, counting the seconds, knowing that he and his slowly
+drifting surf-boat were still in the full white fulgor of the wavering
+searchlight. He lay there as a second shot came whistling overhead,
+spitting into the water within three feet of him. Then a third bullet
+came, this time tearing through the wood of the boat bottom beside him.
+And he still waited, without moving, wondering what the next shot would
+do. He still waited, his passive body horripilating with a vast
+indignation at the thought of the injustice of it all, at the thought
+that he must lie there and let half-baked dagoes shower his unprotesting
+back with lead. But he lay there, still counting the seconds, as the boat
+drifted slowly out on the quietly moving tide.
+
+Then a new discovery disturbed him. It obliterated his momentary joy at
+the thought that they were no longer targeting down at him. He could feel
+the water slowly rising about his prostrate body. He realized that the
+boat in which he lay was filling. He calmly figured out that with the
+body of the dead man and the cartridge-cases about him it was carrying a
+dead weight of nearly half a ton. And through the bullet hole in its
+bottom the water was rushing in.
+
+Yet he could do nothing. He could make no move. For at the slightest
+betrayal of life, he knew, still another volley would come from that
+ever-menacing steamer's deck. He counted the minutes, painfully,
+methodically, feeling the water rise higher and higher about his body.
+The thought of this rising water and what it meant did not fill him with
+panic. He seemed more the prey of a deep and sullen resentment that his
+plans should be so gratuitously interfered with, that his approach to the
+_Trunella_ should be so foolishly delayed, that so many cross-purposes
+should postpone and imperil his quest of Binhart.
+
+He knew, by the slowly diminishing sounds, that he was drifting further
+and further away from Tankred and his crowded fore-deck. But he was still
+within the area of that ever-betraying searchlight. Some time, he knew,
+he must drift beyond it. But until that moment came he dare make no move
+to keep himself afloat.
+
+By slowly turning his head an inch or two he was able to measure the
+height of the gunwale above the water. Then he made note of where an oar
+lay, asking himself how long he could keep afloat on a timber so small,
+wondering how far he could be from land. Then he suddenly fell to
+questioning if the waters of that coast were shark infested.
+
+He was still debating the problem when he became conscious of a change
+about him. A sudden pall of black fell like balm on his startled face.
+The light was no longer there. He found himself engulfed in a relieving,
+fortifying darkness, a darkness that brought him to his feet in the
+slowly moving boat. He was no longer visible to the rest of the world. At
+a breath, almost, he had passed into eclipse.
+
+His first frantic move was to tug and drag the floating body at his feet
+to the back of the boat and roll it overboard. Then he waded forward and
+one by one carefully lifted the cases of ammunition and tumbled them over
+the side. One only he saved, a smaller wooden box which he feverishly
+pried open with his knife and emptied into the sea. Then he flung away
+the top boards, placing the empty box on the seat in front of him. Then
+he fell on his hands and knees, fingering along the boat bottom until he
+found the bullet-hole through which the water was boiling up.
+
+Once he had found it he began tearing at his clothes like a madman, for
+the water was now alarmingly high. These rags and shreds of clothing he
+twisted together and forced into the hole, tamping them firmly into place
+with his revolver-barrel.
+
+Then he caught up the empty wooden box from the boat seat and began to
+bale. He baled solemnly, as though his very soul were in it. He was
+oblivious of the strange scene silhouetted against the night behind him,
+standing out as distinctly as though it were a picture thrown on a sheet
+from a magic-lantern slide--a circle of light surrounding a drifting and
+rusty-sided ship on which tumult had turned into sudden silence. He was
+oblivious of his own wet clothing and his bruised body and the dull ache
+in his leg wound of many months ago. He was intent only on the fact that
+he was lowering the water in his surf-boat, that he was slowly drifting
+further and further away from the enemies who had interfered with his
+movements, and that under the faint spangle of lights which he could
+still see in the offing on his right lay an anchored liner, and that
+somewhere on that liner lay a man for whom he was looking.
+
+
+
+
+                                  XIV
+
+
+Once assured that his surf-boat would keep afloat, Blake took the oars
+and began to row. But even as he swung the boat lumberingly about he
+realized that he could make no headway with such a load, for almost a
+foot of water still surged along its bottom. So he put down the oars and
+began to bale again. He did not stop until the boat was emptied. Then he
+carefully replugged the bullet-hole, took up the oars again, and once
+more began to row.
+
+He rowed, always keeping his bow towards the far-off spangle of lights
+which showed where the _Trunella_ lay at anchor.
+
+He rowed doggedly, determinedly. He rowed until his arms were tired and
+his back ached. But still he did not stop. It occurred to him, suddenly,
+that there might be a tide running against him, that with all his labor
+he might be making no actual headway. Disturbed by this thought, he fixed
+his attention on two almost convergent lights on shore, rowing with
+renewed energy as he watched them. He had the satisfaction of seeing
+these two lights slowly come together, and he knew he was making some
+progress.
+
+Still another thought came to him as he rowed doggedly on. And that was
+the fear that at any moment, now, the quick equatorial morning might
+dawn. He had no means of judging the time. To strike a light was
+impossible, for his matches were water-soaked. Even his watch, he found,
+had been stopped by its bath in sea-water. But he felt that long hours
+had passed since midnight, that it must be close to the break of morning.
+And the fear of being overtaken by daylight filled him with a new and
+more frantic energy.
+
+He rowed feverishly on, until the lights of the _Trunella_ stood high
+above him and he could hear the lonely sound of her bells as the watch
+was struck. Then he turned and studied the dark hull of the steamer as
+she loomed up closer in front of him. He could see her only in outline,
+at first, picked out here and there by a light. But there seemed
+something disheartening, something intimidating, in her very quietness,
+something suggestive of a plague-ship deserted by crew and passengers
+alike. That dark and silent hull at which he stared seemed to house
+untold possibilities of evil.
+
+Yet Blake remembered that it also housed Binhart. And with that thought
+in his mind he no longer cared to hesitate. He rowed in under the shadowy
+counter, bumping about the rudder-post. Then he worked his way forward,
+feeling quietly along her side-plates, foot by foot.
+
+He had more than half circled the ship before he came to her
+landing-ladder. The grilled platform at the bottom of this row of steps
+stood nearly as high as his shoulders, as though the ladder-end had been
+hauled up for the night.
+
+Blake balanced himself on the bow of his surf-boat and tugged and
+strained until he gained the ladder-bottom. He stood there, recovering
+his breath, for a moment or two, peering up towards the inhospitable
+silence above him. But still he saw no sign of life. No word or challenge
+was flung down at him. Then, after a moment's thought, he lay flat on the
+grill and deliberately pushed the surf-boat off into the darkness. He
+wanted no more of it. He knew, now, there could be no going back.
+
+He climbed cautiously up the slowly swaying steps, standing for a puzzled
+moment at the top and peering about him. Then he crept along the deserted
+deck, where a month of utter idleness, apparently, had left discipline
+relaxed. He shied away from the lights, here and there, that dazzled his
+eyes after his long hours of darkness. With an instinct not unlike that
+which drives the hiding wharf-rat into the deepest corner at hand, he
+made his way down through the body of the ship. He shambled and skulked
+his way down, a hatless and ragged and uncouth figure, wandering on along
+gloomy gangways and corridors until he found himself on the threshold of
+the engine-room itself.
+
+He was about to back out of this entrance and strike still deeper when he
+found himself confronted by an engineer smoking a short brier-root pipe.
+The pale blue eyes of this sandy-headed engineer were wide with wonder,
+startled and incredulous wonder, as they stared at the ragged figure in
+the doorway.
+
+"Where in the name o' God did _you_ come from?" demanded the man with the
+brier-root pipe.
+
+"I came out from Guayaquil," answered Blake, reaching searchingly down in
+his wet pocket. "And I can't go back."
+
+The sandy-headed man backed away.
+
+"From the fever camps?"
+
+Blake could afford to smile at the movement.
+
+"Don't worry--there's no fever 'round me. _That's_ what I've been
+through!" And he showed the bullet-holes through his tattered coat-cloth.
+
+"How'd you get here?"
+
+"Rowed out in a surf-boat--and I can't go back!"
+
+The sandy-headed engineer continued to stare at the uncouth figure in
+front of him, to stare at it with vague and impersonal wonder. And in
+facing that sandy-headed stranger, Blake knew, he was facing a judge
+whose decision was to be of vast moment in his future destiny, whose
+word, perhaps, was to decide on the success or failure of much wandering
+about the earth.
+
+"I can't go back!" repeated Blake, as he reached out and dropped a
+clutter of gold into the palm of the other man. The pale blue eyes looked
+at the gold, looked out along the gangway, and then looked back at the
+waiting stranger.
+
+"That Alfaro gang after you?" he inquired.
+
+"They're _all_ after me!" answered the swaying figure in rags. They were
+talking together, by this time, almost in whispers, like two
+conspirators. The young engineer seemed puzzled. But a wave of relief
+swept through Blake when in the pale blue eyes he saw almost a look of
+pity.
+
+"What d' you want me to do?" he finally asked.
+
+Blake, instead of answering that question, asked another.
+
+"When do you move out of here?"
+
+The engineer put the coins in his pocket.
+
+"Before noon to-morrow, thank God! The _Yorktown_ ought to be here by
+morning--she's to give us our release!"
+
+"Then you'll sail by noon?"
+
+"We've _got_ to! They've tied us up here over a month, without reason.
+They worked that old yellow-jack gag--and not a touch of fever aboard all
+that time!"
+
+A great wave of contentment surged through Blake's weary body. He put his
+hand up on the smaller man's shoulder.
+
+"Then you just get me out o' sight until we're off, and I'll fix things
+so you'll never be sorry for it!"
+
+The pale-eyed engineer studied the problem. Then he studied the figure in
+front of him.
+
+"There's nothing crooked behind this?"
+
+Blake forced a laugh from his weary lungs. "I'll prove that in two days
+by wireless--and pay first-class passage to the next port of call!"
+
+"I'm fourth engineer on board here, and the Old Man would sure fire me,
+if--"
+
+"But you needn't even know about me," contended Blake. "Just let me crawl
+in somewhere where I can sleep!"
+
+"You need it, all right, by that face of yours!"
+
+"I sure do," acknowledged the other as he stood awaiting his judge's
+decision.
+
+"Then I'd better get you down to my bunk. But remember, I can only stow
+you there until we get under way--perhaps not that long!"
+
+He stepped cautiously out and looked along the gangway. "This is your
+funeral, mind, when the row comes. You've got to face that, yourself!"
+
+"Oh, I'll face it, all right!" was Blake's calmly contented answer. "All
+I want now is about nine hours' sleep!"
+
+"Come on, then," said the fourth engineer. And Blake followed after as he
+started deeper down into the body of the ship. And already, deep below
+him, he could hear the stokers at work in their hole.
+
+
+
+
+                                   XV
+
+
+After seven cataleptic hours of unbroken sleep Blake awakened to find his
+shoulder being prodded and shaken by the pale-eyed fourth engineer. The
+stowaway's tired body, during that sleep, had soaked in renewed strength
+as a squeezed sponge soaks up water. He could afford to blink with
+impassive eyes up at the troubled face of the young man wearing the
+oil-stained cap.
+
+"What's wrong?" he demanded, awakening to a luxurious comprehension of
+where he was and what he had escaped. Then he sat up in the narrow berth,
+for it began to dawn on him that the engines of the _Trunella_ were not
+in motion. "Why aren't we under way?"
+
+"They're having trouble up there, with the _Commandante_. We can't get
+off inside of an hour--and anything's likely to happen in that time.
+That's why I've got to get you out of here!"
+
+"Where'll you get me?" asked Blake. He was on his feet by this time,
+arraying himself in his wet and ragged clothing.
+
+"That's what I've been talking over with the Chief," began the young
+engineer. Blake wheeled about and fixed him with his eye.
+
+"Did you let your Chief in on this?" he demanded, and he found it hard to
+keep his anger in check.
+
+"I had to let him in on it," complained the other. "If it came to a line
+up or a searching party through here, they'd spot you first thing. You're
+not a passenger; you're not signed; you're not anything!"
+
+"Well, supposing I'm not?"
+
+"Then they'd haul you back and give you a half year in that _Lazaretto_
+o' theirs!"
+
+"Well, what do I have to do to keep from being hauled back?"
+
+"You'll have to be one o' the workin' crew, until we get off. The Chief
+says that, and I think he's right!"
+
+A vague foreboding filled Blake's soul. He had imagined that the ignominy
+and agony of physical labor was a thing of the past with him. And he was
+still sore in every sinew and muscle of his huge body.
+
+"You don't mean stoke-hole work?" he demanded.
+
+The fourth engineer continued to look worried.
+
+"You don't happen to know anything about machinery, do you?" he began.
+
+"Of course I do," retorted Blake, thinking gratefully of his early days
+as a steamfitter.
+
+"Then why couldn't I put you in a cap and jumper and work you in as one
+of the greasers?"
+
+"What do you mean by greasers?"
+
+"That's an oiler in the engine-room. It--it may not be the coolest place
+on earth, in this latitude, but it sure beats the stoke-hole!"
+
+And it was in this way, thirty minutes later, that Blake became a greaser
+in the engine-room of the _Trunella_.
+
+Already, far above him, he could hear the rattle and shriek of
+winch-engines and the far-off muffled roar of the whistle, rumbling its
+triumph of returning life. Already the great propeller engines themselves
+had been tested, after their weeks of idleness, languidly stretching and
+moving like an awakening sleeper, slowly swinging their solemn tons
+forward through their projected cycles and then as solemnly back again.
+
+About this vast pyramid-shaped machinery, galleried like a Latin
+house-court, tremulous with the breath of life that sang and hissed
+through its veins, the new greaser could see his fellow workers with
+their dripping oil-cans, groping gallery by gallery up towards the square
+of daylight that sifted down into the oil-scented pit where he stood. He
+could see his pale-eyed friend, the fourth engineer, spanner in hand,
+clinging to a moving network of steel like a spider to its tremulous
+web--and in his breast, for the first time, a latent respect for that
+youth awakened. He could see other greasers wriggling about between
+intricate shafts and wheels, crawling cat-like along narrow steel ledges,
+mounting steep metal ladders guarded by hot hand rails, peering into oil
+boxes, "worrying" the vacuum pump, squatting and kneeling about iron
+floors where oil-pits pooled and pump-valves clacked and electric
+machines whirred and the antiphonal song of the mounting steam roared
+like music in the ears of the listening Blake, aching as he was for the
+first relieving throb of the screws. Stolidly and calmly the men about
+him worked, threatened by flailing steel, hissed at by venomously
+quiescent powers, beleaguered by mysteriously moving shafts, surrounded
+by countless valves and an inexplicable tangle of pipes, hemmed in by an
+incomprehensible labyrinth of copper wires, menaced by the very
+shimmering joints and rods over which they could run such carelessly
+affectionate fingers.
+
+Blake could see the assistant engineers, with their eyes on the pointers
+that stood out against two white dials. He could see the Chief, the Chief
+whom he would so soon have to buy over and placate, moving about nervous
+and alert. Then he heard the tinkle of the telegraph bell, and the
+repeated gasp of energy as the engineers threw the levers. He could hear
+the vicious hum of the reversing-engines, and then the great muffled
+cough of power as the ponderous valve-gear was thrown into position and
+the vaster machinery above him was coerced into a motion that seemed
+languid yet relentless.
+
+He could see the slow rise and fall of the great cranks. He could hear
+the renewed signals and bells tinkles, the more insistent clack of pumps,
+the more resolute rise and fall of the ponderous cranks. And he knew that
+they were at last under way. He gave no thought to the heat of the
+oil-dripping pit in which he stood. He was oblivious of the perilous
+steel that whirred and throbbed about him. He was unconscious of the hot
+hand rails and the greasy foot-ways and the mingling odor of steam and
+parching lubricant and ammonia-gas from a leaking "beef engine." He quite
+forgot the fact that his _dungaree_ jumper was wet with sweat, that his
+cap was already fouled with oil. All he knew was that he and Binhart were
+at last under way.
+
+He was filled with a new lightness of spirit as he felt the throb of
+"full speed ahead" shake the steel hull about which he so contentedly
+climbed and crawled. He found something fortifying in the thought that
+this vast hull was swinging out to her appointed sea lanes, that she was
+now intent on a way from which no caprice could turn her. There seemed
+something appeasingly ordered and implacable in the mere revolutions of
+the engines. And as those engines settled down to their labors the
+intent-eyed men about him fell almost as automatically into the routines
+of toil as did the steel mechanism itself.
+
+When at the end of the first four-houred watch a gong sounded and the
+next crew filed cluttering in from the half-lighted between-deck gangways
+and came sliding down the polished steel stair rails, Blake felt that his
+greatest danger was over.
+
+There would still be an occasional palm to grease, he told himself, an
+occasional bit of pad money to be paid out. But he could meet those
+emergencies with the fortitude of a man already inured to the exactions
+of venal accomplices.
+
+Then a new discovery came to him. It came as he approached the chief
+engineer, with the object in view of throwing a little light on his
+presence there. And as he looked into that officer's coldly indignant eye
+he awakened to the fact that he was no longer on land, but afloat on a
+tiny world with an autocracy and an authority of its own. He was in a
+tiny world, he saw, where his career and his traditions were not to be
+reckoned with, where he ranked no higher than conch-niggers and
+beach-combers and _cargadores_. He was a _dungaree_-clad greaser in an
+engine-room, and he was promptly ordered back with the rest of his crew.
+He was not even allowed to talk.
+
+When his watch came round he went on duty again. He saw the futility of
+revolt, until the time was ripe. He went through his appointed tasks with
+the solemn precision of an apprentice. He did what he was commanded to
+do. Yet sometimes the heat would grow so intense that the great sweating
+body would have to shamble to a ventilator and there drink in long drafts
+of the cooler air. The pressure of invisible hoops about the great
+heaving chest would then release itself, the haggard face would regain
+some touch of color, and the new greaser would go back to his work again.
+One or two of the more observant toilers about him, experienced in
+engine-room life, marveled at the newcomer and the sense of mystery which
+hung over him. One or two of them fell to wondering what inner spirit
+could stay him through those four-houred ordeals of heat and labor.
+
+Yet they looked after him with even more inquisitive eyes when, on the
+second day out, he was peremptorily summoned to the Captain's room. What
+took place in that room no one in the ship ever actually knew.
+
+But the large-bodied stowaway returned below-decks, white of face and
+grim of jaw. He went back to his work in silence, in dogged and unbroken
+silence which those about him knew enough to respect.
+
+It was whispered about, it is true, that among other things a large and
+ugly-looking revolver had been taken from his clothing, and that he had
+been denied the use of the ship's wireless service. A steward outside the
+Captain's door, it was also whispered, had over-heard the shipmaster's
+angry threat to put the stowaway in irons for the rest of the voyage and
+return him to the Ecuadorean authorities. It was rumored, too, that late
+in the afternoon of the same day, when the new greaser had complained of
+faintness and was seeking a breath of fresh air at the foot of a midships
+deck-ladder, he had chanced to turn and look up at a man standing on the
+promenade deck above him.
+
+The two men stood staring at each other for several moments, and for all
+the balmy air about him the great body of the stranger just up from the
+engine-room had shivered and shaken, as though with a malarial chill.
+
+What it meant, no one quite knew. Nor could anything be added to that
+rumor, beyond the fact that the first-class passenger, who was known to
+be a doctor and who had stared so intently down at the quiet-eyed
+greaser, had turned the color of ashes and without a word had slipped
+away. And the bewilderment of the entire situation was further increased
+when the _Trunella_ swung in at Callao and the large-bodied man of
+mystery was peremptorily and none too gently put ashore. It was noted,
+however, that the first-class passenger who had stared down at him from
+the promenade-deck remained aboard the vessel as she started southward
+again. It was further remarked that he seemed more at ease when Callao
+was left well behind, although he sat smoking side by side with the
+operator in the wireless room until the _Trunella_ had steamed many miles
+southward on her long journey towards the Straits of Magellan.
+
+
+
+
+                                  XVI
+
+
+Seven days after the _Trunella_ swung southward from Callao Never-Fail
+Blake, renewed as to habiliments and replenished as to pocket, embarked
+on a steamer bound for Rio de Janeiro.
+
+He watched the plunging bow as it crept southward. He saw the heat and
+the gray sea-shimmer left behind him. He saw the days grow longer and the
+nights grow colder. He saw the Straits passed and the northward journey
+again begun. But he neither fretted nor complained of his fate.
+
+After communicating by wireless with both Montevideo and Buenos Ayres and
+verifying certain facts of which he seemed already assured, he continued
+on his way to Rio. And over Rio he once more cast and pursed up his
+gently interrogative net, gathering in the discomforting information that
+Binhart had already relayed from that city to a Lloyd-Brazileiro steamer.
+This steamer, he learned, was bound for Ignitos, ten thousand dreary
+miles up the Amazon.
+
+Five days later Blake followed in a Clyde-built freighter. When well up
+the river he transferred to a rotten-timbered sidewheeler that had once
+done duty on the Mississippi, and still again relayed from river boat to
+river boat, move by move falling more and more behind his quarry.
+
+The days merged into weeks, and the weeks into months. He suffered much
+from the heat, but more from the bad food and the bad water. For the
+first time in his life he found his body shaken with fever and was
+compelled to use quinin in great quantities. The attacks of insects, of
+insects that flew, that crawled, that tunneled beneath the skin, turned
+life into a torment. His huge triple-terraced neck became raw with
+countless wounds. But he did not stop by the way. His eyes became
+oblivious of the tangled and overcrowded life about him, of the hectic
+orchids and huge butterflies and the flaming birds-of-paradise, of the
+echoing aisle ways between interwoven jungle growths, of the arching
+aerial roofs of verdure and the shadowy hanging-gardens from which by day
+parakeets chattered and monkeys screamed and by night ghostly armies of
+fireflies glowed. He was no longer impressed by that world of fierce
+appetites and fierce conflicts. He seemed to have attained to a secret
+inner calm, to an obsessional impassivity across which the passing
+calamities of existence only echoed. He merely recalled that he had been
+compelled to eat of disagreeable things and face undesirable emergencies,
+to drink of the severed water-vine, to partake of monkey-steak and
+broiled parrot, to sleep in poisonous swamplands. His spirit, even with
+the mournful cry of night birds in his ears, had been schooled into the
+acceptance of a loneliness that to another might have seemed eternal and
+unendurable.
+
+By the time he had reached the Pacific coast his haggard hound's eyes
+were more haggard than ever. His skin hung loose on his great body, as
+though a vampire bat had drained it of its blood. But to his own
+appearance he gave scant thought. For new life came to him when he found
+definite traces of Binhart. These traces he followed up, one by one,
+until he found himself circling back eastward along the valley of the
+Magdalena. And down the Magdalena he went, still sure of his quarry,
+following him to Bogota, and on again from Bogota to Barranquilla, and on
+to Savanilla, where he embarked on a Hamburg-American steamer for Limon.
+
+At Limon it was not hard to pick up the lost trail. But Binhart's
+movements, after leaving that port, became a puzzle to the man who had
+begun to pride himself on growing into knowledge of his adversary's
+inmost nature. For once Blake found himself uncertain as to the other's
+intentions. The fugitive now seemed possessed with an idea to get away
+from the sea, to strike inland at any cost, as though water had grown a
+thing of horror to him. He zigzagged from obscure village to village, as
+though determined to keep away from all main-traveled avenues of traffic.
+Yet, move as he might, it was merely a matter of time and care to follow
+up the steps of a white man as distinctly individualized as Binhart.
+
+This white man, it seemed, was at last giving way to the terror that must
+have been haunting him for months past. His movements became feverish,
+erratic, irrational. He traveled in strange directions and by strange
+means, by bullock-cart, by burro, by dug-out, sometimes on foot and
+sometimes on horseback. Sometimes he stayed over night at a
+rubber-gatherers' camp, sometimes he visited a banana plantation, bought
+a fresh horse, and pushed on again. When he reached the Province of
+Alajuela he made use of the narrow cattle passes, pressing on in a
+northwesterly direction along the valleys of the San Juan and the San
+Carlos River. A madness seemed to have seized him, a madness to make his
+way northward, ever northward.
+
+Over heartbreaking mountainous paths, through miasmic jungles, across
+sun-baked plateaus, chilled by night and scorched by day, chafed and
+sore, tortured by _niguas_ and _coloradillas_, mosquitoes and _chigoes_,
+sleeping in verminous hay-thatched huts of bamboo bound together with
+bejuco-vine, mislead by lying natives and stolen from by peons, Blake day
+by day and week by week fought his way after his enemy. When worn to
+lightheadedness he drank _guaro_ and great quantities of black coffee;
+when ill he ate quinin.
+
+The mere act of pursuit had become automatic with him. He no longer
+remembered why he was seeking out this man. He no longer remembered the
+crime that lay at the root of that flight and pursuit. It was not often,
+in fact, that his thoughts strayed back to his old life. When he did
+think of it, it seemed only something too far away to remember, something
+phantasmal, something belonging to another world. There were times when
+all his journeying through steaming swamplands and forests of teak and
+satinwood and over indigo lagoons and mountain-passes of moonlit
+desolation seemed utterly and unfathomably foolish. But he fought back
+such moods, as though they were a weakness. He let nothing deter him. He
+stuck to his trail, instinctively, doggedly, relentlessly.
+
+It was at Chalavia that a peon named Tico Viquez came to Blake with the
+news of a white man lying ill of black-water fever in a native hut. For
+so much gold, Tico Viquez intimated, he would lead the senor to the hut
+in question.
+
+Blake, who had no gold to spare, covered the startled peon with his
+revolver and commanded Viquez to take him to that hut. There was that in
+the white man's face which caused the peon to remember that life was
+sweet. He led the way through a reptilious swamp and into the fringe of a
+nispero forest, where they came upon a hut with a roof of corrugated iron
+and walls of wattled bamboo.
+
+Blake, with his revolver in his hand and his guide held before him as a
+human shield, cautiously approached the door of this hut, for he feared
+treachery. Then, with equal caution, he peered through the narrow
+doorway. He stood there for several moments, without moving.
+
+Then he slipped his revolver back into his pocket and stepped into the
+hut. For there, in one corner of it, lay Binhart. He lay on a bed made of
+bull-hide stretched across a rough-timbered frame. Yet what Blake looked
+down on seemed more a shriveled mummy of Binhart than the man himself. A
+vague trouble took possession of the detective as he blinked calmly down
+at the glazed and sunken eyes, the gaunt neck, the childishly helpless
+body. He stood there, waiting until the man on the sagging bull-skin saw
+him.
+
+"Hello, Jim!" said the sick man, in little more than a whisper.
+
+"Hello, Connie!" was the other's answer. He picked up a palmetto frond
+and fought away the flies. The uncleanness of the place turned his
+stomach.
+
+"What's up, Connie?" he asked, sitting calmly down beside the narrow bed.
+
+The sick man moved a hand, weakly, as though it were the yellow flapper
+of some wounded amphibian.
+
+"The jig's up!" he said. The faint mockery of a smile wavered across the
+painfully gaunt face. It reminded the other man of heat-lightning on a
+dark skyline. "You got me, Jim. But it won't do much good. I'm going to
+cash in."
+
+"What makes you say that?" argued Blake, studying the lean figure. There
+was a look of mild regret on his own sodden and haggard face. "What's
+wrong with you, anyway?"
+
+The man on the bed did not answer for some time. When he spoke, he spoke
+without looking at the other man.
+
+"They said it was black-water fever. Then they said it was yellow-jack.
+But I know it's not. I think it's typhoid, or swamp fever. It's worse
+than malaria. I dam' near burn up every night. I get out of my head. I've
+done that three nights. That's why the niggers won't come near me now!"
+
+Blake leaned forward and fought away the flies again.
+
+"Then it's a good thing I got up with you."
+
+The sick man rolled his eyes in their sockets, so as to bring his enemy
+into his line of vision.
+
+"Why?" he asked.
+
+"Because I'm not going to let you die," was Blake's answer.
+
+"You can't help it, Jim! The jig's up!"
+
+"I'm going to get a litter and get you up out o' this hell-hole of a
+swamp," announced Blake. "I'm going to have you carried up to the hills.
+Then I'm going back to Chalavia to get a doctor o' some kind. Then I'm
+going to put you on your feet again!"
+
+Binhart slowly moved his head from side to side. Then the heat-lightning
+smile played about the hollow face again.
+
+"It was some chase, Jim, wasn't it?" he said, without looking at his
+old-time enemy.
+
+Blake stared down at him with his haggard hound's eyes; there was no
+answering smile on his heavy lips, now furzed with their grizzled growth
+of hair. There seemed something ignominious in such an end, something
+futile and self-frustrating. It was unjust. It left everything so
+hideously incomplete. He revolted against it with a sullen and senseless
+rage.
+
+"By God, you're not going to die!" declared the staring and sinewy-necked
+man at the bedside. "I say you're not going to die. I'm going to get you
+out o' here alive!"
+
+A sweat of weakness stood out on Binhart's white face.
+
+"Where to?" he asked, as he had asked once before. And his eyes remained
+closed as he put the question.
+
+"To the pen," was the answer which rose to Blake's lips. But he did not
+utter the words. Instead, he rose impatiently to his feet. But the man on
+the bed must have sensed that unspoken response, for he opened his eyes
+and stared long and mournfully at his heavy-bodied enemy.
+
+"You'll never get me there!" he said, in little more than a whisper.
+"Never!"
+
+
+
+
+                                  XVII
+
+
+Binhart was moved that night up into the hills. There he was installed in
+a bungalow of an abandoned banana plantation and a doctor was brought to
+his bedside. He was delirious by the time this doctor arrived, and his
+ravings through the night were a source of vague worry to his enemy. On
+the second day the sick man showed signs of improvement.
+
+For three weeks Blake watched over Binhart, saw to his wants, journeyed
+to Chalavia for his food and medicines. When the fever was broken and
+Binhart began to gain strength the detective no longer made the trip to
+Chalavia in person. He preferred to remain with the sick man.
+
+He watched that sick man carefully, jealously, hour by hour and day by
+day. A peon servant was paid to keep up the vigil when Blake slept, as
+sleep he must.
+
+But the strain was beginning to tell on him. He walked heavily. The
+asthmatic wheeze of his breathing became more audible. His earlier touch
+of malaria returned to him, and he suffered from intermittent chills and
+fever. The day came when Blake suggested it was about time for them to
+move on.
+
+"Where to?" asked Binhart. Little had passed between the two men, but
+during all those silent nights and days each had been secretly yet
+assiduously studying the other.
+
+"Back to New York," was Blake's indifferent-noted answer. Yet this
+indifference was a pretense, for no soul had ever hungered more for a
+white man's country than did the travel-worn and fever-racked Blake. But
+he had his part to play, and he did not intend to shirk it. They went
+about their preparations quietly, like two fellow excursionists making
+ready for a journey with which they were already over-familiar. It was
+while they sat waiting for the guides and mules that Blake addressed
+himself to the prisoner.
+
+"Connie," he said, "I'm taking you back. It doesn't make much difference
+whether I take you back dead or alive. But I'm going to take you back."
+
+The other man said nothing, but his slight head-movement was one of
+comprehension.
+
+"So I just wanted to say there's no side-stepping, no four-flushing, at
+this end of the trip!"
+
+"I understand," was Binhart's listless response.
+
+"I'm glad you do," Blake went on in his dully monotonous voice. "Because
+I got where I can't stand any more breaks."
+
+"All right, Jim," answered Binhart. They sat staring at each other. It
+was not hate that existed between them. It was something more dormant,
+more innate. It was something that had grown ineradicable; as fixed as
+the relationship between the hound and the hare. Each wore an air of
+careless listlessness, yet each watched the other, every move, every
+moment.
+
+It was as they made their way slowly down to the coast that Blake put an
+unexpected question to Binhart.
+
+"Connie, where in hell did you plant that haul o' yours?"
+
+This thing had been worrying Blake. Weeks before he had gone through
+every nook and corner, every pocket and crevice in Binhart's belongings.
+
+The bank thief laughed a little. He had been growing stronger, day by
+day, and as his spirits had risen Blake's had seemed to recede.
+
+"Oh, I left that up in the States, where it'd be safe," he answered.
+
+"What'll you do about it?" Blake casually inquired.
+
+"I can't tell, just yet," was Binhart's retort.
+
+He rode on silent and thoughtful for several minutes. "Jim," he said at
+last, "we're both about done for. There's not much left for either of us.
+We're going at this thing wrong. There's a lot o' money up there, for
+somebody. And _you_ ought to get it!"
+
+"What do you mean?" asked Blake. He resented the bodily weakness that was
+making burro-riding a torture.
+
+"I mean it's worth a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to you just to
+let me drop out. I'd hand you over that much to quit the chase."
+
+"It ain't me that's chasing you, Connie. It's the Law!" was Blake's
+quiet-toned response. And the other man knew he believed it.
+
+"Well, you quit, and I'll stand for the Law!"
+
+"But, can't you see, they'd never stand for you!"
+
+"Oh, yes they would. I'd just drop out, and they'd forget about me. And
+you'd have that pile to enjoy life with!"
+
+Blake thought it over, ponderously, point by point. For not one fraction
+of a second could he countenance the thought of surrendering Binhart. Yet
+he wanted both his prisoner and his prisoner's haul; he wanted his final
+accomplishment to be complete.
+
+"But how'd we ever handle the deal?" prompted the tired-bodied man on the
+burro.
+
+"You remember a woman called Elsie Verriner?"
+
+"Yes," acknowledged Blake, with a pang of regret which he could not
+fathom, at the mention of the name.
+
+"Well, we could fix it through her."
+
+"Does Elsie Verriner know where that pile is?" the detective inquired.
+His withered hulk of a body was warmed by a slow glow of anticipation.
+There was a woman, he remembered, whom he could count on swinging to his
+own ends.
+
+"No, but she could get it," was Binhart's response.
+
+"And what good would that do _me_?"
+
+"The two of us could go up to New Orleans. We could slip in there without
+any one being the wiser. She could meet us. She'd bring the stuff with
+her. Then, when you had the pile in your hand, I could just fade off the
+map."
+
+Blake rode on again in silence.
+
+"All right," he said at last. "I'm willing."
+
+"Then how'll you prove it? How'd I know you'd make good?" demanded
+Binhart.
+
+"That's not up to me! You're the man that's got to make good!" was
+Blake's retort.
+
+"But you'll give me the chance?" half pleaded his prisoner.
+
+"Sure!" replied Blake, as they rode on again. He was wondering how many
+more miles of hell he would have to ride through before he could rest. He
+felt that he would like to sleep for days, for weeks, without any thought
+of where to-morrow would find him or the next day would bring him.
+
+It was late that day as they climbed up out of a steaming valley into
+higher ground that Binhart pulled up and studied Blake's face.
+
+"Jim, you look like a sick man to me!" he declared. He said it without
+exultation; but there was a new and less passive timber to his voice.
+
+"I've been feeling kind o' mean this last day or two," confessed Blake.
+His own once guttural voice was plaintive, as he spoke. It was almost a
+quavering whine.
+
+"Hadn't we better lay up for a few days?" suggested Binhart.
+
+"Lay up nothing!" cried Blake, and he clenched that determination by an
+outburst of blasphemous anger. But he secretly took great doses of quinin
+and drank much native liquor. He fought against a mental lassitude which
+he could not comprehend. Never before had that ample machinery of the
+body failed him in an emergency. Never before had he known an illness
+that a swallow or two of brandy and a night's rest could not scatter to
+the four winds. It bewildered him to find his once capable frame
+rebelling against its tasks. It left him dazed, as though he had been
+confronted by the sudden and gratuitous treachery of a life-long servant.
+
+He grew more irritable, more fanciful. He changed guides at the next
+native village, fearing that Binhart might have grown too intimate with
+the old ones. He was swayed by an ever-increasing fear of intrigues. He
+coerced his flagging will into a feverish watchfulness. He became more
+arbitrary in his movements and exactions. When the chance came, he
+purchased a repeating Lee-Enfield rifle, which he packed across his
+sweating back on the trail and slept with under his arm at night. When a
+morning came when he was too weak and ill to get up, he lay back on his
+grass couch, with his rifle across his knees, watching Binhart, always
+watching Binhart.
+
+He seemed to realize that his power was slipping away, and he brooded on
+some plan for holding his prisoner, on any plan, no matter what it might
+cost.
+
+He even pretended to sleep, to the end that Binhart might make an effort
+to break away--and be brought down with a bullet. He prayed that Binhart
+would try to go, would give him an excuse for the last move that would
+leave the two of them lying there together. Even to perish there side by
+side, foolishly, uselessly, seemed more desirable than the thought that
+Binhart might in the end get away. He seemed satisfied that the two of
+them should lie there, for all time, each holding the other down, like
+two embattled stags with their horns inextricably locked. And he waited
+there, nursing his rifle, watching out of sullenly feverish eyes, marking
+each movement of the passive-faced Binhart.
+
+But Binhart, knowing what he knew, was content to wait.
+
+He was content to wait until the fever grew, and the poisons of the blood
+narcotized the dulled brain into indifference, and then goaded it into
+delirium. Then, calmly equipping himself for his journey, he buried the
+repeating rifle and slipped away in the night, carrying with him Blake's
+quinin and revolver and pocket-filter. He traveled hurriedly, bearing
+southeast towards the San Juan. Four days later he reached the coast,
+journeyed by boat to Bluefields, and from that port passed on into the
+outer world, where time and distance swallowed him up, and no sign of his
+whereabouts was left behind.
+
+
+
+
+                                 XVIII
+
+
+It was six weeks later that a slender-bodied young Nicaraguan known as
+Doctor Alfonso Sedeno (his right to that title resulting from four years
+of medical study in Paris) escorted into Bluefields the flaccid and
+attenuated shadow of Never-Fail Blake. Doctor Sedeno explained to the
+English shipping firm to whom he handed over his patient that the Senor
+Americano had been found in a dying condition, ten miles from the camp of
+the rubber company for which he acted as surgeon. The Senor Americano was
+apparently a prospector who had been deserted by his partner. He had been
+very ill. But a few days of complete rest would restore him. The sea
+voyage would also help. In the meantime, if the shipping company would
+arrange for credit from the hotel, the matter would assuredly be put
+right, later on, when the necessary despatches had been returned from New
+York.
+
+For three weeks of torpor Blake sat in the shadowy hotel, watching the
+torrential rains that deluged the coast. Then, with the help of a cane,
+he hobbled from point to point about the town, quaveringly inquiring for
+any word of his lost partner. He wandered listlessly back and forth,
+mumbling out a description of the man he sought, holding up strangers
+with his tremulous-noted inquiries, peering with weak and watery eyes
+into any quarter that might house a fugitive. But no hint or word of
+Binhart was to be gleaned from those wanderings, and at the end of a week
+he boarded a fruit steamer bound for Kingston.
+
+His strength came back to him slowly during that voyage, and when he
+landed at Kingston he was able to walk without a stick. At Kingston, too,
+his draft on New York was finally honored. He was able to creep out to
+Constant Spring, to buy new clothes, to ride in a carriage when he chose,
+to eat a white man's food again. The shrunken body under the flaccid skin
+slowly took on some semblance of its former ponderosity, the watery eyes
+slowly lost their dead and vapid stare.
+
+And with increase of strength came a corresponding increase of mental
+activity. All day long he kept turning things over in his tired brain.
+Hour by silent hour he would ponder the problem before him. It was more
+rumination than active thought. Yet up from the stagnating depths of his
+brooding would come an occasional bubble of inspiration.
+
+Binhart, he finally concluded, had gone north. It was the natural thing
+to do. He would go where his haul was hidden away. Sick of unrest, he
+would seek peace. He would fall a prey to man's consuming hunger to speak
+with his own kind again. Convinced that his enemy was not at his heels,
+he would hide away somewhere in his own country. And once reasonably
+assured that this enemy had died as he had left him to die, Binhart would
+surely remain in his own land, among his own people.
+
+Blake had no proof of this. He could not explain why he accepted it as
+fact. He merely wrote it down as one of his hunches. And with his
+old-time faith in the result of that subliminal reasoning, he counted
+what remained of his money, paid his bills, and sailed from Kingston
+northward as a steerage passenger in a United Fruit steamer bound for
+Boston.
+
+As he had expected, he landed at this New England port without detection,
+without recognition. Six hours later he stepped off a train in New York.
+
+He passed out into the streets of his native city like a ghost emerging
+from its tomb. There seemed something spectral in the very chill of the
+thin northern sunlight, after the opulent and oppressive heat of the
+tropics. A gulf of years seemed to lie between him and the actualities so
+close to him. A desolating sense of loneliness kept driving him into the
+city's noisier and more crowded drinking-places, where, under the lash of
+alcohol, he was able to wear down his hot ache of deprivation into a dim
+and dreary regretfulness. Yet the very faces about him still remained
+phantasmal. The commonplaces of street life continued to take on an alien
+aspect. They seemed vague and far away, as though viewed through a veil.
+He felt that the world had gone on, and in going on had forgotten him.
+Even the scraps of talk, the talk of his own people, fell on his ear with
+a strange sound.
+
+He found nothing companionable in that canon of life and movement known
+as Broadway. He stopped to stare with haggard and wistful eyes at a
+theater front buoyed with countless electric bulbs, remembering the proud
+moment when he had been cheered in a box there, for in his curtain-speech
+the author of the melodrama of crime being presented had confessed that
+the inspiration and plot of his play had come from that great detective,
+Never-Fail Blake.
+
+He drifted on down past the cafes and restaurants where he had once dined
+and supped so well, past the familiar haunts where the appetite of the
+spirit for privilege had once been as amply fed as the appetite of the
+body for food. He sought out the darker purlieus of the lower city, where
+he had once walked as a king and dictated dead-lines and distributed
+patronage. He drifted into the underworld haunts where his name had at
+one time been a terror. But now, he could see, his approach no longer
+resulted in that discreet scurry to cover, that feverish scuttling away
+for safety, which marks the blacksnake's progress through a
+gopher-village.
+
+When he came to Centre Street, at the corner of Broome, he stopped and
+blinked up at the great gray building wherein he had once held sway. He
+stood, stoop-shouldered and silent, staring at the green lamps, the green
+lamps of vigilance that burned as a sign to the sleeping city.
+
+He stood there for some time, unrecognized, unnoticed, watching the
+platoons of broad-chested "flatties" as they swung out and off to their
+midnight patrols, marking the plainly clad "elbows" as they passed
+quietly up and down the great stone steps. He thought of Copeland, and
+the Commissioner, and of his own last hour at Headquarters. And then his
+thoughts went on to Binhart, and the trail that had been lost, and the
+task that stood still ahead of him. And with that memory awakened the old
+sullen fires, the old dogged and implacable determination.
+
+In the midst of those reviving fires a new thought was fixed; the thought
+that Binhart's career was in some way still involved with that of Elsie
+Verriner. If any one knew of Binhart's whereabouts, he remembered, it
+would surely be this woman, this woman on whom, he contended, he could
+still hold the iron hand of incrimination. The first move would be to
+find her. And then, at any cost, the truth must be wrung from her.
+
+Never-Fail Blake, from the obscure downtown hotel, into which he crept
+like a sick hound shunning the light, sent out his call for Elsie
+Verriner. He sent his messages to many and varied quarters, feeling sure
+that some groping tentacle of inquiry would eventually come in touch with
+her.
+
+Yet the days dragged by, and no answer came back to him. He chafed anew
+at this fresh evidence that his power was a thing of the past, that his
+word was no longer law. He burned with a sullen and self-consuming anger,
+an anger that could be neither expressed in action nor relieved in words.
+
+Then, at the end of a week's time, a note came from Elsie Verriner. It
+was dated and postmarked "Washington," and in it she briefly explained
+that she had been engaged in Departmental business, but that she expected
+to be in New York on the following Monday. Blake found himself
+unreasonably irritated by a certain crisp assurance about this note, a
+certain absence of timorousness, a certain unfamiliar tone of
+independence. But he could afford to wait, he told himself. His hour
+would come, later on. And when that hour came, he would take a crimp out
+of this calm-eyed woman, or the heavens themselves would fall! And
+finding further idleness unbearable, he made his way to a drinking-place
+not far from that juncture of First Street and the Bowery, known as
+Suicide Corner. In this new-world _Cabaret de Neant_ he drowned his
+impatience of soul in a Walpurgis Night of five-cent beer and fusel-oil
+whiskey. But his time would come, he repeated drunkenly, as he watched
+with his haggard hound's eyes the meretricious and tragic merriment of
+the revelers about him--his time would come!
+
+
+
+
+                                  XIX
+
+
+Blake did not look up as he heard the door open and the woman step into
+the room. There was an echo of his old-time theatricalism in that
+dissimulation of stolid indifference. But the old-time stage-setting, he
+knew, was no longer there. Instead of sitting behind an oak desk at
+Headquarters, he was staring down at a beer-stained card-table in the
+dingy back room of a dingy downtown hotel.
+
+He knew the woman had closed the door and crossed the room to the other
+side of the card-table, but still he did not look up at her. The silence
+lengthened until it became acute, epochal, climactic.
+
+"You sent for me?" his visitor finally said. And as Elsie Verriner
+uttered the words he was teased by a vague sense that the scene had
+happened before, that somewhere before in their lives it had been
+duplicated, word by word and move by move.
+
+"Sit down," he said with an effort at the gruffness of assured authority.
+But the young woman did not do as he commanded. She remained still
+standing, and still staring down at the face of the man in front of her.
+
+So prolonged was this stare that Blake began to be embarrassingly
+conscious of it, to fidget under it. When he looked up he did so
+circuitously, pretending to peer beyond the white face and the staring
+eyes of the young woman confronting him. Yet she ultimately coerced his
+unsteady gaze, even against his own will. And as he had expected, he saw
+written on her face something akin to horror.
+
+As he, in turn, stared back at her, and in her eyes saw first
+incredulity, and then, what stung him more, open pity itself, it came
+home to him that he must indeed have altered for the worse, that his face
+and figure must have changed. For the first time it flashed over him: he
+was only the wreck of the man he had once been. Yet at the core of that
+wreck burned the old passion for power, the ineradicable appetite for
+authority. He resented the fact that she should feel sorry for him. He
+inwardly resolved to make her suffer for that pity, to enlighten her as
+to what life was still left in the battered old carcass which she could
+so openly sorrow over.
+
+"Well, I'm back," he announced in his guttural bass, as though to bridge
+a silence that was becoming abysmal.
+
+"Yes, you're back!" echoed Elsie Verriner. She spoke absently, as though
+her mind were preoccupied with a problem that seemed inexplicable.
+
+"And a little the worse for wear," he pursued, with his mirthless croak
+of a laugh. Then he flashed up at her a quick look of resentment, a look
+which he found himself unable to repress. "While you're all dolled up,"
+he said with a snort, as though bent on wounding her, "dolled up like a
+lobster palace floater!"
+
+It hurt him more than ever to see that he could not even dethrone that
+fixed look of pity from her face, that even his abuse could not thrust
+aside her composure.
+
+"I'm not a lobster palace floater," she quietly replied. "And you know
+it."
+
+"Then what are you?" he demanded.
+
+"I'm a confidential agent of the Treasury Department," was her
+quiet-toned answer.
+
+"Oho!" cried Blake. "So that's why we've grown so high and mighty!"
+
+The woman sank into the chair beside which she had been standing. She
+seemed impervious to his mockery.
+
+"What do you want me for?" she asked, and the quick directness of her
+question implied not so much that time was being wasted on side issues as
+that he was cruelly and unnecessarily demeaning himself in her eyes.
+
+It was then that Blake swung about, as though he, too, were anxious to
+sweep aside the trivialities that stood between him and his end, as
+though he, too, were conscious of the ignominy of his own position.
+
+"You know where I've been and what I've been doing!" he suddenly cried
+out.
+
+"I'm not positive that I do," was the woman's guarded answer.
+
+"That's a lie!" thundered Blake. "You know as well as I do!"
+
+"What have you been doing?" asked the woman, almost indulgently.
+
+"I've been trailing Binhart, and you know it! And what's more, you know
+where Binhart is, now, at this moment!"
+
+"What was it you wanted me for?" reiterated the white-faced woman,
+without looking at him.
+
+Her evasions did more than anger Blake; they maddened him. For years now
+he had been compelled to face her obliquities, to puzzle over the enigma
+of her ultimate character, and he was tired of it all. He made no effort
+to hold his feelings in check. Even into his voice crept that grossness
+which before had seemed something of the body alone.
+
+"I want to know where Binhart is!" he cried, leaning forward so that his
+head projected pugnaciously from his shoulders like the head of a
+fighting-cock.
+
+"Then you have only wasted time in sending for me," was the woman's
+obdurate answer. Yet beneath her obduracy was some vague note of
+commiseration which he could not understand.
+
+"I want that man, and I'm going to get him," was Blake's impassioned
+declaration. "And before you get out of this room you're going to tell me
+where he is!"
+
+She met his eyes, studiously, deliberately, as though it took a great
+effort to do so. Their glances seemed to close in and lock together.
+
+"Jim!" said the woman, and it startled him to see that there were actual
+tears in her eyes. But he was determined to remain superior to any of her
+subterfuges. His old habit returned to him, the old habit of "pounding" a
+prisoner. He knew that one way to get at the meat of a nut was to smash
+the nut. And in all his universe there seemed only one issue and one end,
+and that was to find his trail and get his man. So he cut her short with
+his quick volley of abuse.
+
+"I've got your number, Elsie Verriner, alias Chaddy Cravath," he
+thundered out, bringing his great withered fist down on the table top.
+"I've got every trick you ever turned stowed away in cold storage. I've
+got 'em where they'll keep until the cows come home. I don't care whether
+you're a secret agent or a Secretary of War. There's only one thing that
+counts with me now. And I'm going to win out. I'm going to win out, in
+the end, no matter what it costs. If you try to block me in this I'll put
+you where you belong. I'll drag you down until you squeal like a cornered
+rat. I'll put you so low you'll never even stand up again!"
+
+The woman leaned a little forward, staring into his eyes.
+
+"I didn't expect this of you, Jim," she said. Her voice was tremulous as
+she spoke, and still again he could see on her face that odious and
+unfathomable pity.
+
+"There's lots of things weren't expected of me. But I'm going to surprise
+you all. I'm going to get what I'm after or I'm going to put you where I
+ought to have put you two years ago!"
+
+"Jim," said the woman, white-lipped but compelling herself to calmness,
+"don't go on like this! Don't! You're only making it worse, every
+minute!"
+
+"Making what worse?" demanded Blake.
+
+"The whole thing. It was a mistake, from the first. I could have told you
+that. But you did then what you're trying to do now. And see what you've
+lost by it!"
+
+"What have I lost by it?"
+
+"You've lost everything," she answered, and her voice was thin with
+misery. "Everything--just as they counted on your doing, just as they
+expected!"
+
+"As who expected?"
+
+"As Copeland and the others expected when they sent you out on a blind
+trail."
+
+"I wasn't sent out on a blind trail."
+
+"But you found nothing when you went out. Surely you remember that."
+
+It seemed like going back to another world, to another life, as he sat
+there coercing his memory to meet the past, the abysmal and embittered
+past which he had grown to hate.
+
+"Are you trying to say this Binhart case was a frame up?" he suddenly
+cried out.
+
+"They wanted you out of the way. It was the only trick they could think
+of."
+
+"That's a lie!" declared Blake.
+
+"It's not a lie. They knew you'd never give up. They even handicapped
+you--started you wrong, to be sure it would take time, to be positive of
+a clear field."
+
+Blake stared at her, almost stupidly. His mind was groping about, trying
+to find some adequate motive for this new line of duplicity. He kept
+warning himself that she was not to be trusted. Human beings, all human
+beings, he had found, moved only by indirection. He was too old a bird to
+have sand thrown in his eyes.
+
+"Why, you welched on Binhart yourself. You put me on his track. You sent
+me up to Montreal!"
+
+"They made me do that," confessed the unhappy woman. "He wasn't in
+Montreal. He never had been there!"
+
+"You had a letter from him there, telling you to come to 381 King Edward
+when the coast was clear."
+
+"That letter was two years old. It was sent from a room in the King
+Edward Hotel. That was part of their plant."
+
+He sat for a long time thinking it over, point by point. He became
+disturbed by a sense of instability in the things that had once seemed
+most enduring, the sickening cataclysmic horror of a man who finds the
+very earth under his feet shaken by its earthquake. His sodden face
+appeared to age even as he sat there laboriously reliving the past, the
+past that seemed suddenly empty and futile.
+
+"So you sold me out!" he finally said, studying her white face with his
+haggard hound's eyes.
+
+"I couldn't help it, Jim. You forced it on me. You wouldn't give me the
+chance to do anything else. I wanted to help you--but you held me off.
+You put the other thing before my friendship!"
+
+"What do _you_ know about friendship?" cried the gray-faced man.
+
+"We were friends once," answered the woman, ignoring the bitter mockery
+in his cry.
+
+He stared at her, untouched by the note of pathos in her voice. There was
+something abstracted about his stare, as though his mind had not yet
+adjusted itself to a vast new discovery. His inner vision seemed dazzled,
+just as the eye itself may be dazzled by unexpected light.
+
+"So you sold me out!" he said for a third time. He did not move, but
+under that lava-like shell of diffidence were volcanic and coursing fires
+which even he himself could not understand.
+
+"Jim, I would have done anything for you, once," went on the unhappy
+woman facing him. "You could have saved me--from him, from myself. But
+you let the chance slip away. I couldn't go on. I saw where it would end.
+So I had to save myself. I had to save myself--in the only way I could.
+Oh, Jim, if you'd only been kinder!"
+
+She sat with her head bowed, ashamed of her tears, the tears which he
+could not understand. He stared at her great crown of carefully coiled
+and plaited hair, shining in the light of the unshaded electric-bulb
+above them. It took him back to other days when he had looked at it with
+other eyes. And a comprehension of all he had lost crept slowly home to
+him. Poignant as was the thought that she had seemed beautiful to him and
+he might have once possessed her, this thought was obliterated by the
+sudden memory that in her lay centered everything that had caused his
+failure. She had been the weak link in his life, the life which he had so
+wanted to crown with success.
+
+"You welcher!" he suddenly gasped, as he continued to stare at her. His
+very contemplation of her white face seemed to madden him. In it he
+seemed to find some signal and sign of his own dissolution, of his lost
+power, of his outlived authority. In her seemed to abide the reason for
+all that he had endured. To have attained to a comprehension of her own
+feelings was beyond him. Even the effort to understand them would have
+been a contradiction of his whole career. She only angered him. And the
+hot anger that crept through his body seemed to smoke out of some inner
+recess of his being a hate that was as unreasonable as it was
+animal-like. All the instincts of existence, in that moment, reverted to
+life's one primordial problem, the problem of the fighting man to whom
+every other man must be an opponent, the problem of the feral being, as
+to whether it should kill or be killed.
+
+Into that unreasoning blind rage flared all the frustration of months, of
+years, all the disappointments of all his chase, all the defeat of all
+his career. Even as she sat there in her pink and white frailty she knew
+and nursed the secret for which he had girdled the world. He felt that he
+must tear it from her, that he must crush it out of her body as the pit
+is squeezed from a cherry. And the corroding part of it was that he had
+been outwitted by a woman, that he was being defied by a physical
+weakling, a slender-limbed thing of ribbons and laces whose back he could
+bend and break across his great knee.
+
+He lurched forward to his feet. His great crouching body seemed drawn
+towards her by some slow current which he could not control.
+
+"Where's Binhart?" he suddenly gasped, and the explosive tensity of that
+wheezing cry caused her to look up, startled. He swayed toward her as she
+did so, swept by some power not his own. There was something leonine in
+his movement, something leonine in his snarl as he fell on her. He caught
+her body in his great arms and shook it. He moved without any sense of
+movement, without any memory of it.
+
+"Where's Binhart?" he repeated, foolishly, for by this time his great
+hand had closed on her throat and all power of speech was beyond her. He
+swung her about and bore her back across the table. She did not struggle.
+She lay there so passive in his clutch that a dull pride came to him at
+the thought of his own strength. This belated sense of power seemed to
+intoxicate him. He was swept by a blind passion to crush, to obliterate.
+It seemed as though the rare and final moment for the righting of vast
+wrongs, for the ending of great injustices, were at hand. His one
+surprise was that she did not resist him, that she did not struggle.
+
+From side to side he twisted and flailed her body about, in his madness,
+gloating over her final subserviency to his will, marveling how well
+adapted for attack was this soft and slender column of the neck, on which
+his throttling fingers had fastened themselves. Instinctively they had
+sought out and closed on that slender column, guided to it by some
+ancestral propulsion, by some heritage of the brute. It was made to get a
+grip on, a neck like that! And he grunted aloud, with wheezing and
+voluptuous grunts of gratification, as he saw the white face alter and
+the wide eyes darken with terror. He was making her suffer. He was no
+longer enveloped by that mild and tragically inquiring stare that had so
+discomforted him. He was no longer stung by the thought that she was good
+to look on, even with her head pinned down against a beer-stained
+card-table. He was converting her into something useless and broken, into
+something that could no longer come between him and his ends. He was
+completely and finally humiliating her. He was breaking her. He was
+converting her into something corrupt. . . . Then his pendulous throat
+choked with a falsetto gasp of wonder. _He was killing her!_
+
+Then, as suddenly as it had come, the smoke of that mental explosion
+seemed to clear away. Even as he gaped into the white face so close to
+his own he awoke to reason. The consciousness of how futile, of how
+odious, of how maniacal, it all was swept over him. He had fallen low,
+but he had never dreamed that he could fall so low as this.
+
+A reaction of physical nausea left him weak and dizzy. The flexor muscles
+of his fingers relaxed. An ague of weakness crept through his limbs. A
+vertiginous faintness brought him half tumbling and half rolling back
+into his chair, wheezing and moist with sweat. He sat there looking about
+him, like a sheep killer looking up from the ewe it has captured.
+
+Then his great chest heaved and shook with hysterical sobbing. When, a
+little later, he heard the shaken woman's antiphonal sobs, the
+realization of how low he had fallen kept him from looking at her. A
+great shame possessed him. He stumbled out of the room. He groped his way
+down to the open streets, a haggard and broken man from whom life had
+wrung some final hope of honor.
+
+
+
+
+                                   XX
+
+
+No catastrophe that was mental in its origin could oppress for long a man
+so essentially physical as Blake. For two desolate hours, it is true, he
+wandered about the streets of the city, struggling to medicine his
+depression of the mind by sheer weariness of the body. Then the habit of
+a lifetime of activity reasserted itself. He felt the need of focusing
+his resentment on something tangible and material. And as a comparative
+clarity of vision returned to him there also came back those tendencies
+of the instinctive fighter, the innate protest against injustice, the
+revolt against final surrender, the forlorn claim for at least a fighting
+chance. And with the thought of his official downfall came the thought of
+Copeland and what Copeland had done to him.
+
+Out of that ferment of futile protest arose one sudden decision. Even
+before he articulated the decision he found it unconsciously swaying his
+movements and directing his steps. He would go and see Copeland! He would
+find that bloodless little shrimp and put him face to face with a few
+plain truths. He would confront that anemic Deputy-Commissioner and at
+least let him know what one honest man thought of him.
+
+Even when Blake stood before Copeland's brownstone-fronted house, the
+house that seemed to wear a mask of staid discretion in every drawn blind
+and gloomy story, no hesitation came to him. His naturally primitive mind
+foresaw no difficulties in that possible encounter. He knew it was late,
+that it was nearly midnight, but even that did not deter him. The
+recklessness of utter desperation was on him. His purpose was something
+that transcended the mere trivialities of every-day intercourse. And he
+must see him. To confront Copeland became essential to his scheme of
+things.
+
+He went ponderously up the brownstone steps and rang the bell. He waited
+patiently until his ring was answered. It was some time before the door
+swung open. Inside that door Blake saw a solemn-eyed servant in a black
+spiked-tailed service-coat and gray trousers.
+
+"I want to see Mr. Copeland," was Blake's calmly assured announcement.
+
+"Mr. Copeland is not at home," answered the man in the service-coat. His
+tone was politely impersonal. His face, too, was impassive. But one quick
+glance seemed to have appraised the man on the doorstep, to have judged
+him, and in some way to have found him undesirable.
+
+"But this is important," said Blake.
+
+"I'm sorry, sir," answered the impersonal-eyed servant. Blake made an
+effort to keep himself in perfect control. He knew that his unkempt
+figure had not won the good-will of that autocratic hireling.
+
+"I'm from Police Headquarters," the man on the doorstep explained, with
+the easy mendacity that was a heritage of his older days. He produced the
+one official card that remained with him, the one worn and dog-eared and
+once water-soaked Deputy-Commissioner's card which still remained in his
+dog-eared wallet. "I've got to see him on business, Departmental
+business!"
+
+"Mr. and Mrs. Copeland are at the Metropolitan, sir," explained the
+servant. "At the Opera. And they are not back yet."
+
+"Then I'll wait for him," announced Blake, placated by the humbler note
+in the voice of the man in the service-coat.
+
+"Very good, sir," announced the servant. And he led the way upstairs,
+switching on the electrics as he went.
+
+Blake found himself in what seemed to be a library. About this softly
+hung room he peered with an acute yet heavy disdain, with an
+indeterminate envy which he could not control. It struck him as being
+feminine and over fine, that shadowy room with all its warm hangings and
+polished wood. It stood for a phase of life with which he had no
+patience. And he kept telling himself that it had not been come by
+honestly, that on everything about him, from the silver desk ornaments to
+the marble bust glimmering out of its shadowy background, he himself had
+some secret claim. He scowled up at a number of signed etchings and a row
+of diminutive and heavily framed canvases, scowled up at them with quick
+contempt. Then he peered uncomfortably about at the shelves of books,
+mottled streaks of vellum and morocco stippled with gold, crowded pickets
+of soft-lettered color which seemed to stand between him and a world
+which he had never cared to enter. It was a foolish world, that world of
+book reading, a lackadaisical region of unreality, a place for women and
+children, but never meant for a man with a man's work to do.
+
+His stolidly contemptuous eyes were still peering about the room when the
+door opened and closed again. There was something so characteristically
+guarded and secretive in the movement that Blake knew it was Copeland
+even before he let his gaze wheel around to the newcomer. About the
+entire figure, in fact, he could detect that familiar veiled wariness,
+that enigmatic and self-concealing cautiousness which had always had the
+power to touch him into a quick irritation.
+
+"Mr. Blake, I believe," said Copeland, very quietly. He was in full
+evening dress. In one hand he held a silk hat and over one arm hung a
+black top-coat. He held himself in perfect control, in too perfect
+control, yet his thin face was almost ashen in color, almost the
+neutral-tinted gray of a battle-ship's side-plates. And when he spoke it
+was with the impersonal polite unction with which he might have addressed
+an utter stranger.
+
+"You wished to see me!" he said, as his gaze fastened itself on Blake's
+figure. The fact that he remained standing imparted a tentativeness to
+the situation. Yet his eyes remained on Blake, studying him with the cold
+and mildly abstracted curiosity with which he might view a mummy in its
+case.
+
+"I do!" said Blake, without rising from his chair.
+
+"About what?" asked Copeland. There was an acidulated crispness in his
+voice which hinted that time might be a matter of importance to him.
+
+"You know what it's about, all right," was Blake's heavy retort.
+
+"On the contrary," said Copeland, putting down his hat and coat, "I'm
+quite in the dark as to how I can be of service to you."
+
+Both his tone and his words angered Blake, angered him unreasonably. But
+he kept warning himself to wait, to hold himself in until the proper
+moment arrived.
+
+"I expect no service from you," was Blake's curtly guttural response. He
+croaked out his mirthless ghost of a laugh. "You've taught me better than
+that!"
+
+Copeland, for all his iciness, seemed to resent the thrust.
+
+"We have always something to learn," he retorted, meeting Blake's stolid
+stare of enmity.
+
+"I guess I've learned enough!" said Blake.
+
+"Then I hope it has brought you what you are looking for!" Copeland, as
+he spoke, stepped over to a chair, but he still remained on his feet.
+
+"No, it hasn't brought me what I'm after," said the other man. "Not yet!
+But it's going to, in the end, Mr. Copeland, or I'm going to know the
+reason why!"
+
+He kept warning himself to be calm, yet he found his voice shaking a
+little as he spoke. The time was not yet ripe for his outbreak. The
+climactic moment was still some distance away. But he could feel it
+emerging from the mist just as a pilot sights the bell-buoy that marks
+his changing channel.
+
+"Then might I ask what you are after?" inquired Copeland. He folded his
+arms, as though to fortify himself behind a pretense of indifferency.
+
+"You know what I've been after, just as I know what you've been after,"
+cried Blake. "You set out to get my berth, and you got it. And I set out
+to get Binhart, to get the man your whole push couldn't round up--and I'm
+going to get him!"
+
+"Blake," said Copeland, very quietly, "you are wrong in both instances."
+
+"Am I!"
+
+"You are," was Copeland's answer, and he spoke with a studious patience
+which his rival resented even more than his open enmity. "In the first
+place, this Binhart case is a closed issue."
+
+"Not with me!" cried Blake, feeling himself surrendering to the tide that
+had been tugging at him so long. "They may be able to buy off you
+cuff-shooters down at Headquarters. They may grease your palm down there,
+until you see it pays to keep your hands off. They may pull a rope or two
+and make you back down. But nothing this side o' the gates o' hell is
+going to make _me_ back down. I began this man-hunt, and _I'm going to
+end it_!"
+
+He took on a dignity in his own eyes. He felt that in the face of every
+obstacle he was still the instrument of an ineluctable and incorruptible
+Justice. Uncouth and buffeted as his withered figure may have been, it
+still represented the relentlessness of the Law.
+
+"That man-hunt is out of our hands," he heard Copeland saying.
+
+"But it's not out of _my_ hands!" reiterated the detective.
+
+"Yes, it's out of your hands, too," answered Copeland. He spoke with a
+calm authority, with a finality, that nettled the other man.
+
+"What are you driving at?" he cried out.
+
+"This Binhart hunt is ended," repeated Copeland, and in the eyes looking
+down at him Blake saw that same vague pity which had rested in the gaze
+of Elsie Verriner.
+
+"By God, it's not ended!" Blake thundered back at him.
+
+"It _is_ ended," quietly contended the other. "And precisely as you have
+put it--Ended by God!"
+
+"It's what?" cried Blake.
+
+"You don't seem to be aware of the fact, Blake, that Binhart is
+dead--dead and buried!"
+
+Blake stared up at him.
+
+"Is what?" his lips automatically inquired.
+
+"Binhart died seven weeks ago. He died in the town of Toluca, out in
+Arizona. He's buried there."
+
+"That's a lie!" cried Blake, sagging forward in his chair.
+
+"We had the Phoenix authorities verify the report in every detail. There
+is no shadow of doubt about it."
+
+Still Blake stared up at the other man.
+
+"I don't believe it," he wheezed.
+
+Copeland did not answer him. He stepped to the end of the desk and with
+his scholarly white finger touched a mother-of-pearl bell button. Utter
+silence reigned in the room until the servant answered his summons.
+
+"Bridley, go to my secretary and bring me the portfolio in the second
+drawer."
+
+Blake heard and yet did not hear the message. A fog-like sense of
+unreality seemed to drape everything about him. The earth itself seemed
+to crumble away and leave him poised alone in the very emptiness of
+space. Binhart was dead!
+
+He could hear Copeland's voice far away. He could see the returning
+figure of the servant, but it seemed as gray and ghostlike as the entire
+room about him. In his shaking fingers he took the official papers which
+Copeland handed over to him. He could read the words, he could see the
+signatures, but they seemed unable to impart any clear-cut message to his
+brain. His dazed eyes wandered over the newspaper clippings which
+Copeland thrust into his unsteady fingers. There, too, was the same
+calamitous proclamation, as final as though he had been reading it on a
+tombstone. Binhart was dead! Here were the proofs of it; here was an
+authentic copy of the death certificate, the reports of the police
+verification; here in his hands were the final and indisputable proofs.
+
+But he could not quite comprehend it. He tried to tell himself it was
+only that his old-time enemy was playing some new trick on him, a trick
+which he could not quite fathom. Then the totality of it all swept home
+to him, swept through his entire startled being as a tidal-wave sweeps
+over a coast-shoal.
+
+Blake, in his day, had known desolation, but it had seldom been
+desolation of spirit. It had never been desolation like this. He tried to
+plumb it, to its deepest meaning, but consciousness seemed to have no
+line long enough. He only knew that his world had ended. He saw himself
+as the thing that life had at last left him--a solitary and unsatisfied
+man, a man without an aim, without a calling, without companionship.
+
+"So this ends the music!" he muttered, as he rose weakly to his feet. And
+yet it was more than the end of the music, he had to confess to himself.
+It was the collapse of the instruments, the snapping of the last string.
+It was the ultimate end, the end that proclaimed itself as final as the
+stabbing thought of his own death itself.
+
+He heard Copeland asking if he would care for a glass of sherry. Whether
+he answered that query or not he never knew. He only knew that Binhart
+was dead, and that he himself was groping his way out into the night, a
+broken and desolate man.
+
+
+
+
+                                  XXI
+
+
+Several days dragged away before Blake's mental clarity returned to him.
+Then block by unstable block he seemed to rebuild a new world about him,
+a new world which was both narrow and empty. But it at least gave him
+something on which to plant his bewildered feet.
+
+That slow return to the substantialities of life was in the nature of a
+convalescence. It came step by languid step; he knew no power to hurry
+it. And as is so often the case with convalescents, he found himself in a
+world from which time seemed to have detached him. Yet as he emerged from
+that earlier state of coma, his old-time instincts and characteristics
+began to assert themselves. Some deep-seated inner spirit of dubiety
+began to grope about and question and challenge. His innate skepticism
+once more became active. That tendency to cynical unbelief which his
+profession had imposed upon him stubbornly reasserted itself. His career
+had crowned him with a surly suspiciousness. And about the one thing that
+remained vital to that career, or what was left of it, these wayward
+suspicions arrayed themselves like wolves about a wounded stag.
+
+His unquiet soul felt the need of some final and personal proof of
+Binhart's death. He asked for more data than had been given him. He
+wanted more information than the fact that Binhart, on his flight north,
+had fallen ill of pneumonia in New Orleans, had wandered on to the dry
+air of Arizona with a "spot" on his lungs, and had there succumbed to the
+tubercular invasion for which his earlier sickness had laid him open.
+Blake's slowly awakening and ever-wary mind kept telling him that after
+all there might be some possibility of trickery, that a fugitive with the
+devilish ingenuity of Binhart would resort to any means to escape being
+further harassed by the Law.
+
+Blake even recalled, a few days later, the incident of the Shattuck
+jewel-robbery, during the first weeks of his regime as a Deputy
+Commissioner. This diamond-thief named Shattuck had been arrested and
+released under heavy bail. Seven months later Shattuck's attorney had
+appeared before the District Attorney's office with a duly executed
+certificate of death, officially establishing the fact that his client
+had died two weeks before in the city of Baltimore. On this he had based
+a demand for the dismissal of the case. He had succeeded in having all
+action stopped and the affair became, officially, a closed incident. Yet
+two months later Shattuck had been seen alive, and the following winter
+had engaged in an Albany hotel robbery which had earned for him, under an
+entirely different name, a nine-year sentence in Sing Sing.
+
+From the memory of that case Never-Fail Blake wrung a thin and ghostly
+consolation. The more he brooded over it the more morosely disquieted he
+became. The thing grew like a upas tree; it spread until it obsessed all
+his waking hours and invaded even his dreams. Then a time came when he
+could endure it no more. He faced the necessity of purging his soul of
+all uncertainty. The whimpering of one of his unkenneled "hunches" merged
+into what seemed an actual voice of inspiration to him.
+
+He gathered together what money he could; he arranged what few matters
+still remained to engage his attention, going about the task with that
+valedictory solemnity with which the forlornly decrepit execute their
+last will and testament. Then, when everything was prepared, he once more
+started out on the trail.
+
+                            * * * * * * * *
+
+Two weeks later a rough and heavy-bodied man, garbed in the rough apparel
+of a mining prospector, made his way into the sun-steeped town of Toluca.
+There he went quietly to the wooden-fronted hotel, hired a pack-mule and
+a camp-outfit and made purchase, among other things, of a pick and
+shovel. To certain of the men he met he put inquiries as to the best
+trail out to the Buenavista Copper Camp. Then, as he waited for the
+camp-partner who was to follow him into Toluca, he drifted with amiable
+and ponderous restlessness about the town, talking with the telegraph
+operator and the barber, swapping yarns at the livery-stable where his
+pack-mule was lodged, handing out cigars in the wooden-fronted hotel,
+casually interviewing the town officials as to the health of the locality
+and the death-rate of Toluca, acquainting himself with the local
+undertaker and the lonely young doctor, and even dropping in on the town
+officials and making inquiries about main-street building lots and the
+need of a new hotel.
+
+To all this amiable and erratic garrulity there seemed to be neither
+direction nor significance. But in one thing the town of Toluca agreed;
+the ponderous-bodied old newcomer was a bit "queer" in his head.
+
+A time came, however, when the newcomer announced that he could wait no
+longer for his belated camp-partner. With his pack-mule and a pick and
+shovel he set out, late one afternoon, for the Buenavista Camp. Yet by
+nightfall, for some strange reason, any one traveling that lonely trail
+might have seen him returning towards Toluca. He did not enter the town,
+however, but skirted the outer fringe of sparsely settled houses and
+guardedly made his way to a close-fenced area, in which neither light nor
+movement could be detected. This silent place awakened in him no trace of
+either fear or repugnance. With him he carried his pick and shovel, and
+five minutes later the sound of this pick and shovel might have been
+heard at work as the ponderous-bodied man sweated over his midnight
+labor. When he had dug for what seemed an interminable length of time, he
+tore away a layer of pine boards and released a double row of
+screw-heads. Then he crouched low down in the rectangular cavern which he
+had fashioned with his spade, struck a match, and peered with a
+narrow-eyed and breathless intentness at what faced him there.
+
+One glance at that tragic mass of corruption was enough for him. He
+replaced the screw-heads and the pine boards. He took up his shovel and
+began restoring the earth, stolidly tramping it down, from time to time,
+with his great weight.
+
+When his task was completed he saw that everything was orderly and as he
+had found it. Then he returned to his tethered pack-mule and once more
+headed for the Buenavista Camp, carrying with him a discovery which made
+the night air as intoxicating as wine to his weary body.
+
+Late that night a man might have been heard singing to the stars, singing
+in the midst of the wilderness, without rhyme or reason. And in the midst
+of that wilderness he remained for another long day and another long
+night, as though solitude were necessary to him, that he might adjust
+himself to some new order of things, that he might digest some victory
+which had been too much for his shattered nerves.
+
+On the third day, as he limped placidly back into the town of Toluca, his
+soul was torn between a great peace and a great hunger. He hugged to his
+breast the fact that somewhere in the world ahead of him a man once known
+as Binhart still moved and lived. He kept telling himself that somewhere
+about the face of the globe that restless spirit whom he sought still
+wandered.
+
+Day by patient day, through the drought and heat and alkali of an Arizona
+summer, he sought some clue, some inkling, of the direction which that
+wanderer had taken. But about Binhart and his movements, Toluca and
+Phoenix and all Arizona itself seemed to know nothing.
+
+Nothing, Blake saw in the end, remained to be discovered there. So in
+time the heavy-bodied man with the haggard hound's eyes took his leave,
+passing out into the world which in turn swallowed him up as completely
+as it had swallowed up his unknown enemy.
+
+
+
+
+                                  XXII
+
+
+Three of the busiest portions of New York, varying with the various hours
+of the day, may safely be said to lie in that neighborhood where Nassau
+Street debouches into Park Row, and also near that point where
+Twenty-third Street intercepts Fourth Avenue, and still again not far
+from where Broadway and Fifth Avenue meet at the southwest corner of
+Madison Square.
+
+About these three points, at certain hours of the day and on certain days
+of the week, an observant stranger might have noticed the strangely
+grotesque figure of an old cement seller. So often had this old
+street-peddler duly appeared at his stand, from month to month, that the
+hurrying public seemed to have become inured to the grotesqueness of his
+appearance. Seldom, indeed, did a face turn to inspect him as he blinked
+out at the lighted street like a Pribiloff seal blinking into an Arctic
+sun. Yet it was only by a second or even a third glance that the more
+inquisitive might have detected anything arresting in that forlornly
+ruminative figure with the pendulous and withered throat and cheek-flaps.
+
+To the casual observer he was merely a picturesque old street-peddler,
+standing like a time-stained statue beside a carefully arrayed exhibit of
+his wares. This exhibit, which invariably proved more interesting than
+his own person, consisted of a frame of gas-piping in the form of an
+inverted U. From the top bar of this iron frame swung two heavy pieces of
+leather cemented together. Next to this coalesced leather dangled a large
+Z made up of three pieces of plate glass stuck together at the ends, and
+amply demonstrating the adhesive power of the cementing mixture to be
+purchased there.
+
+Next to the glass Z again were two rows of chipped and serrated plates
+and saucers, plates and saucers of all kinds and colors, with holes
+drilled in their edges, and held together like a suspended chain-gang by
+small brass links. At some time in its career each one of these cups and
+saucers had been broken across or even shattered into fragments. Later,
+it had been ingeniously and patiently glued together. And there it and
+its valiant brothers in misfortune swung together in a double row, with a
+cobblestone dangling from the bottom plate, reminding the passing world
+of remedial beneficences it might too readily forget, attesting to the
+fact that life's worst fractures might in some way still be made whole.
+
+Yet so impassively, so stolidly statuesque, did this figure stand beside
+the gas-pipe that to all intents he might have been cemented to the
+pavement with his own glue. He seldom moved, once his frame had been set
+up and his wares laid out. When he did move it was only to re-awaken the
+equally plethoric motion of his slowly oscillating links of cemented
+glass and chinaware. Sometimes, it is true, he disposed of a phial of his
+cement, producing his bottle and receiving payment with the absorbed
+impassivity of an automaton.
+
+Huge as his figure must once have been, it now seemed, like his gibbeted
+plates, all battered and chipped and over-written with the marks of time.
+Like his plates, too, he carried some valiant sense of being still
+intact, still stubbornly united, still oblivious of every old-time
+fracture, still bound up into personal compactness by some power which
+defied the blows of destiny.
+
+In all seasons, winter and summer, apparently, he wore a long and
+loose-fitting overcoat. This overcoat must once have been black, but it
+had faded to a green so conspicuous that it made him seem like a bronze
+figure touched with the mellowing _patina_ of time.
+
+It was in the incredibly voluminous pockets of this overcoat that the old
+peddler carried his stock in trade, paper-wrapped bottles of different
+sizes, and the nickels and dimes and quarters of his daily trafficking.
+And as the streams of life purled past him, like water past a stone, he
+seemed to ask nothing of the world on which he looked out with such
+deep-set and impassive eyes. He seemed content with his lot. He seemed to
+have achieved a Nirvana-like indifferency towards all his kind.
+
+Yet there were times, as he waited beside his stand, as lethargic as a
+lobster in a fish-peddler's window, when his flaccid, exploring fingers
+dug deeper into one of those capacious side-pockets and there came in
+contact with two oddly shaped wristlets of polished steel. At such times
+his intent eyes would film, as the eyes of a caged eagle sometimes do.
+Sometimes, too, he would smile with the half-pensive Castilian smile of
+an uncouth and corpulent Cervantes.
+
+But as a rule his face was expressionless. About the entire moss-green
+figure seemed something faded and futile, like a street-lamp left burning
+after sunrise. At other times, as the patrolman on the beat sauntered by
+in his authoritative blue stippled with its metal buttons, the old
+peddler's watching eyes would wander wistfully after the nonchalant
+figure. At such times a meditative and melancholy intentness would fix
+itself on the faded old face, and the stooping old shoulders would even
+unconsciously heave with a sigh.
+
+As a rule, however, the great green-clad figure with its fringe of white
+hair--the fringe that stood blithely out from the faded hat brim like the
+halo of some medieval saint on a missal--did not permit his gaze to
+wander so far afield.
+
+For, idle as that figure seemed, the brain behind it was forever active,
+forever vigilant and alert. The deep-set eyes under their lids that hung
+as loose as old parchment were always fixed on the life that flowed past
+them. No face, as those eyes opened and closed like the gills of a dying
+fish, escaped their inspection. Every man who came within their range of
+vision was duly examined and adjudicated. Every human atom of that
+forever ebbing and flowing tide of life had to pass through an invisible
+screen of inspection, had in some intangible way to justify itself as it
+proceeded on its unknown movement towards an unknown end. And on the
+loose-skinned and haggard face, had it been studied closely enough, could
+have been seen a vague and wistful note of expectancy, a guarded and
+muffled sense of anticipation.
+
+Yet to-day, as on all other days, nobody stopped to study the old
+cement-seller's face. The pink-cheeked young patrolman, swinging back on
+his beat, tattooed with his ash night-stick on the gas-pipe frame and
+peered indifferently down at the battered and gibbeted crockery.
+
+"Hello, Batty," he said as he set the exhibit oscillating with a push of
+the knee. "How's business?"
+
+"Pretty good," answered the patient and guttural voice. But the eyes that
+seemed as calm as a cow's eyes did not look at the patrolman as he spoke.
+
+He had nothing to fear. He knew that he had his license. He knew that
+under the faded green of his overcoat was an oval-shaped street-peddler's
+badge. He also knew, which the patrolman did not, that under the lapel of
+his inner coat was a badge of another shape and design, the badge which
+season by season the indulgent new head of the Detective Bureau extended
+to him with his further privilege of a special officer's license. For
+this empty honor "Batty" Blake--for as "Batty" he was known to nearly all
+the cities of America--did an occasional bit of "stooling" for the
+Central Office, a tip as to a stray yeggman's return, a hint as to a
+"peterman's" activities in the shopping crowds, a whisper that a till
+tapper had failed to respect the Department's dead-lines.
+
+Yet nobody took Batty Blake seriously. It was said, indeed, that once, in
+the old regime, he had been a big man in the Department. But that
+Department had known many changes, and where life is unduly active,
+memory is apt to be unduly short.
+
+The patrolman tapping on the gas-pipe arch with his idle night-stick
+merely knew that Batty was placid and inoffensive, that he never
+obstructed traffic and always carried a license-badge. He knew that in
+damp weather Batty limped and confessed that his leg pained him a bit,
+from an old hurt he'd had in the East. And he had heard somewhere that
+Batty was a sort of Wandering Jew, patroling the whole length of the
+continent with his broken plates and his gas-pipe frame and his
+glue-bottles, migrating restlessly from city to city, striking out as far
+west as San Francisco, swinging round by Denver and New Orleans and then
+working his way northward again up to St. Louis and Chicago and
+Pittsburgh.
+
+Remembering these things the idle young "flatty" turned and looked at the
+green-coated and sunken-shouldered figure, touched into some rough pity
+by the wordless pathos of an existence which seemed without aim or
+reason.
+
+"Batty, how long're yuh going to peddle glue, anyway?" he suddenly asked.
+
+The glue-peddler, watching the crowds that drifted by him, did not
+answer. He did not even look about at his interrogator.
+
+"D' yuh _have_ to do this?" asked the wide-shouldered youth in uniform.
+
+"No," was the peddler's mild yet guttural response.
+
+The other prodded with his night-stick against the capacious overcoat
+pockets. Then he laughed.
+
+"I'll bet yuh've got about forty dollars stowed away in there," he
+mocked. "Yuh have now, haven't yuh?"
+
+"I don' know!" listlessly answered the sunken-shouldered figure.
+
+"Then what're yuh sellin' this stuff for, if it ain't for money?"
+persisted the vaguely piqued youth.
+
+"I don' know!" was the apathetic answer.
+
+"Then who does?" inquired the indolent young officer, as he stood humming
+and rocking on his heels and swinging his stick by its wrist-thong.
+
+The man known as Batty may or may not have been about to answer him. His
+lips moved, but no sound came from them. His attention, apparently, was
+suddenly directed elsewhere. For approaching him from the east his eyes
+had made out the familiar figure of old McCooey, the oldest plain-clothes
+man who still came out from Headquarters to "pound the pavement."
+
+And at almost the same time, approaching him from the west, he had caught
+sight of another figure.
+
+It was that of a dapper and thin-faced man who might have been anywhere
+from forty to sixty years of age. He walked, however, with a quick and
+nervous step. Yet the most remarkable thing about him seemed to be his
+eyes. They were wide-set and protuberant, like a bird's, as though years
+of being hunted had equipped him with the animal-like faculty of
+determining without actually looking back just who might be following
+him.
+
+Those alert and wide-set eyes, in fact, must have sighted McCooey at the
+same time that he fell under the vision of the old cement seller. For the
+dapper figure wheeled quietly and quickly about and stooped down at the
+very side of the humming patrolman. He stooped and examined one of the
+peddler's many-fractured china plates. He squinted down at it as though
+it were a thing of intense interest to him.
+
+As he stooped there the humming patrolman was the witness of a remarkable
+and inexplicable occurrence. From the throat of the huge-shouldered
+peddler, not two paces away from him, he heard come a hoarse and brutish
+cry, a cry strangely like the bawl and groan of a branded range-cow. At
+the same moment the gigantic green-draped figure exploded into sudden
+activity. He seemed to catapult out at the stooping dapper figure,
+bearing it to the sidewalk with the sheer weight of his unprovoked
+assault.
+
+There the struggle continued. There the two strangely diverse bodies
+twisted and panted and writhed. There the startlingly agile dapper figure
+struggled to throw off his captor. The arch of gas-pipe went over.
+Glue-bottles showered amid the shattered glass and crockery. But that
+once placid-eyed old cement seller stuck to the unoffending man he had so
+promptly and so gratuitously attacked, stuck to him as though he had been
+glued there with his own cement. And before the patrolman could tug the
+combatants apart, or even wedge an arm into the fight, the exulting
+green-coated figure had his enemy on his back along the curb, and,
+reaching down into his capacious pocket, drew out two oddly shaped steel
+wristlets. Forcing up his captive's arm, he promptly snapped one steel
+wring on his own wrist, and one on the wrist of the still prostrate man.
+
+"What're yuh tryin' to do?" demanded the amazed officer, still tugging at
+the great figure holding down the smaller man. In the encounter between
+those two embattled enemies had lurked an intensity of passion which he
+could not understand, which seemed strangely akin to insanity itself.
+
+It was only when McCooey pushed his way in through the crowd and put a
+hand on his shoulder that the old cement seller slowly rose to his feet.
+He was still panting and blowing. But as he lifted his face up to the sky
+his body rumbled with a Jove-like sound that was not altogether a cough
+of lungs overtaxed nor altogether a laugh of triumph.
+
+"I got him!" he gasped.
+
+About his once placid old eyes, which the hardened tear-ducts no longer
+seemed able to drain of their moisture, was a look of exultation that
+made the gathering street-crowd take him for a panhandler gone mad with
+hunger.
+
+"Yuh got _who_?" cried the indignant young officer, wheeling the bigger
+man about on his feet. As the cement seller, responding to that tug,
+pivoted about, it was noticeable that the man to whom his wrist was
+locked by the band of steel duly duplicated the movement. He moved when
+the other moved; he drew aside when the other drew aside, as though they
+were now two parts of one organism.
+
+"I got him!" calmly repeated the old street-peddler.
+
+"Yuh got _who_?" demanded the still puzzled young patrolman, oblivious of
+the quiescent light in the bewildered eyes of McCooey, close beside him.
+
+"Binhart!" answered Never-Fail Blake, with a sob. "_I've got Binhart!_"
+
+
+                                THE END
+
+
+
+
+                          Transcriber's Notes
+
+
+--Preserved the copyright notice from the printed edition, although this
+  book is in the public domain in the country of publication.
+
+--Silently corrected a few typos (but left nonstandard spelling and
+  dialect as is).
+
+--Renumbered the chapter numbers (there were two chapters numbered V).
+
+--Silently corrected two slight errors related to New York City place
+  names.
+
+--In the text versions, delimited text in italics by _underscores_.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Shadow, by Arthur Stringer
+
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