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.
Blake stood regarding the door. The 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 killyou," 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.Icould 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-mâché 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 mêlée. 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-mâché 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 whathegot!"
"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 search-light. 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 thePraya. 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 after-thought 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!"
"Have n'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."
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 could n't get me down to the waterfront, 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 could n'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 waterfront 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.