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 did n'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 were n'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 hut 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 was n'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 was n't in Montreal. He never had been there!"
"You had a letter from him there, telling you to come to 881 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 could n'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 doyouknow 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.
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 brown stone 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," retorted, meeting Blake's stolid stare 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 has n'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 could n'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 makemeback down. I began this man-hunt, andI '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 ofmyhands!" 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.
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 new-comer 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 packmule 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.
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 southeast 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 mellowingpatinaof 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' yuhhaveto 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, have n'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 struck 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 gotwho?" 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 gotwho?" 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!"