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 coöperation, 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 aToyo Kisen Kaishasteamer 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 thelingua Francaof 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.
Three hours after he had disembarked from his steamer at Rio, Blake was breakfasting at the Café 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 barroom 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 auto-busses, 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 themezcalof Guatemala and theanisadoof Ecuador had combined with thepulqueof 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 did n'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 green-backs," 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 theTrunella. He thought he 'd get down to Callao. But they tied theTrunellaup at Guayaquil."
"And you say he 's there now?"
"Yes!"
"And aboard theTrunella?"
"Sure! He's got to be aboard theTrunella!"
"Then why d' you say I can't get at him?"
"Because Guayaquil and theTrunellaand 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 could n't get a boat on all the Pacific to touch that port these days!"
"But there's got to besomethinggoing there!" contended Blake.
"They daren't do it! They couldn't get clearance—they couldn't even getpratique! 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 Signer Angelini's 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 tomorrow," 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 evengoin'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 heefin' 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 alanchaand 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!"
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 bunkhead. "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 theguinneya 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 theTrunellamust 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 firstlanchatied 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 oflanchasand 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 upper-works, 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-bodiedlanchas, 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 thelanchanext 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 owning 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 theTrunellashould 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.