Blake was eastbound on his way to St. Louis one hour after the receipt of this wire. And an hour after his arrival in St. Louis he was engaged in an apparently care free and leisurely game of pool with one Loony Ryan, an old-time “box man” who was allowed to roam with a clipped wing in the form of a suspended indictment. Loony, for the liberty thus doled out to him, rewarded his benefactors by an occasional indulgence in the “pigeon-act.”
“Draw for lead?” asked Blake, lighting a cigar.
“Sure,” said Loony.
Blake pushed his ball to the top cushion, won the draw, and broke.
“Seen anything of Wolf Yonkholm?” he casually inquired, as he turned to chalk his cue. But his eye, with one quick sweep, had made sure of every face in the room.
Loony studied the balls for a second or two. Wolf was a “dip” with an international record.
“Last time I saw Wolf he was out at ’Frisco, workin’ the Beaches,” was Loony’s reply.
Blake ventured an inquiry or two about other worthies of the underworld. The players went on with their game, placid, self-immured, matter-of-fact.
“Where’s Angel McGlory these days?” asked Blake, as he reached over to place a ball.
“What’s she been doin’?” demanded Loony, with his cue on the rail.
“She’s traveling with a bank sneak named Blanchard or Binhart,” explained Blake. “And I want her.”
Loony Ryan made his stroke.
“Hep Roony saw Binhart this mornin’, beatin’ it for N’ Orleans. But he wasn’t travelin’ wit’ any moll that Hep spoke of.”
Blake made his shot, chalked his cue again, and glanced down at his watch. His eyes were on the green baize, but his thoughts were elsewhere.
“I got ’o leave you, Wolf,” he announced as he put his cue back in the rack. He spoke slowly and calmly. But Wolf’s quick gaze circled the room, promptly checking over every face between the four walls.
“What’s up?” he demanded. “Who’d you spot?”
“Nothing, Wolf, nothing! But this game o’ yours blamed near made me forget an appointment o’ mine!”
Twenty minutes after he had left the bewildered Wolf Ryan in the pool parlor he was in a New Orleans sleeper, southward bound. He knew that he was getting within striking distance of Binhart, at last. The zest of the chase took possession of him. The trail was no longer a “cold” one. He knew which way Binhart was headed. And he knew he was not more than a day behind his man.
The moment Blake arrived in New Orleans he shut himself in a telephone booth, called up six somewhat startled acquaintances, learned nothing to his advantage, and went quickly but quietly to the St. Charles. There he closeted himself with two dependable “elbows,” started his detectives on a round of the hotels, and himself repaired to the Levee district, where he held off-handed and ponderously facetious conversations with certain unsavory characters. Then came a visit to certain equally unsavory wharf-rats and a call or two on South Rampart Street. But still no inkling of Binhart or his intended movements came to the detective’s ears.
It was not until the next morning, as he stepped into Antoine’s, on St. Louis Street just off the Rue Royal, that anything of importance occurred. The moment he entered that bare and cloistral restaurant where Monsieur Jules could dish up such startling uncloistral dishes, his eyes fell on Abe Sheiner, a drum snuffer with whom he had had previous and somewhat painful encounters. Sheiner, it was plain to see, was in clover, for he was breakfasting regally, on squares of toast covered with shrimp and picked crab meat creamed, with a bisque of cray-fish andpapa-bottesin ribbons of bacon, to say nothing of fruit andbruilleau.
Blake insisted on joining his old friend Sheiner, much to the latter’s secret discomfiture. It was obvious that the drum snuffer, having made a recent haul, would be amenable to persuasion. And, like all yeggs, he was an upholder of the “moccasin telegraph,” a wanderer and a carrier of stray tidings as to the movements of others along the undergrooves of the world. So while Blake breakfasted on shrimp and crab meat and French artichokes stuffed with caviar and anchovies, he intimated to the uneasy-minded Sheiner certain knowledge as to a certain recent coup. In the face of this charge Sheiner indignantly claimed that he had only been playing the ponies and having a run of greenhorn’s luck.
“Abe, I’ve come down to gather you in,” announced the calmly mendacious detective. He continued to sip his bruilleau with fraternal unconcern.
“You got nothingonme, Jim,” protested the other, losing his taste for the delicacies arrayed about him.
“Well, we got ’o go down to Headquarters and talk that over,” calmly persisted Blake.
“What’s the use of pounding me, when I’m on the square again?” persisted the ex-drum snuffer.
“That’s the line o’ talk they all hand out. That’s what Connie Binhart said when we had it out up in St. Louis.”
“Did you bump into Binhart in St. Louis?”
“We had a talk, three days ago.”
“Then why’d he blow through this town as though he had a regiment o’ bulls and singed cats behind him!”
Blake’s heart went down like an elevator with a broken cable. But he gave no outward sign of this inward commotion.
“Because he wants to get down to Colon before the Hamburg-American boat hits the port,” ventured Blake. “His moll’s aboard!”
“But he blew out for ’Frisco this morning,” contended the puzzled Sheiner. “Shot through as though he’d just had a rumble!”
“Oh, hesaidthat, but he went south, all right.”
“Then he went in an oyster sloop. There’s nothing sailing from this port to-day.”
“Well, what’s Binhart got to do with our trouble anyway? What I want—”
“But I saw him start,” persisted the other. “He ducked for a day coach and said he was traveling for his health. And he sure looked like a man in a hurry!”
Blake sipped his bruilleau, glanced casually at his watch, and took out a cigar and lighted it. He blinked contentedly across the table at the man he was “buzzing.” The trick had been turned. The word had been given. He knew that Binhart was headed westward again. He also knew that Binhart had awakened to the fact that he was being followed, that his feverish movements were born of a stampeding fear of capture.
Yet Binhart was not a coward. Flight, in fact, was his only resource. It was only the low-brow criminal, Blake knew, who ran for a hole and hid in it until he was dragged out. The more intellectual type of offender preferred the open. And Binhart was of this type. He was suave and artful; he was active bodied and experienced in the ways of the world. What counted still more, he was well heeled with money. Just how much he had planted away after the Newcomb coup no one knew. But no one denied that it was a fortune. It was ten to one that Binhart would now try to get out of the country. He would make his way to some territory without an extradition treaty. He would look for a land where he could live in peace, where his ill-gotten wealth would make exile endurable.
Blake, as he smoked his cigar and turned these thoughts over in his mind, could afford to smile. There would be no peace and no rest for Connie Binhart; he himself would see to that. And he would “get” his man; whether it was in a week’s time or a month’s time, he would “get” his man and take him back in triumph to New York. He would show Copeland and the Commissioner and the world in general that there was still a little life in the old dog, that there was still a haul or two he could make.
So engrossing were these thoughts that Blake scarcely heard the drum snuffer across the table from him, protesting the innocence of his ways and the purity of his intentions. Then for the second time that morning Blake completely bewildered him, by suddenly accepting those protestations and agreeing to let everything drop. It was necessary, of course, to warn Sheiner, to exact a promise of better living. But Blake’s interest in the man had already departed. He dropped him from his scheme of things, once he had yielded up his data. He tossed him aside like a sucked orange, a smoked cigar, a burnt-out match. Binhart, in all the movements of all the stellar system, was the one name and the one man that interested him.
Loony Sheiner was still sitting at that table in Antoine’s when Blake, having wired his messages to San Pedro and San Francisco, caught the first train out of New Orleans. As he sped across the face of the world, crawling nearer and nearer the Pacific Coast, no thought of the magnitude of that journey oppressed him. His imagination remained untouched. He neither fretted nor fumed at the time this travel was taking. In spite of the electric fans at each end of his Pullman, it is true, he suffered greatly from the heat, especially during the ride across the Arizona Desert. He accepted it without complaint, stolidly thanking his lucky stars that men weren’t still traveling across America’s deserts by ox-team. He was glad when he reached the Colorado River and wound up into California, leaving the alkali and sage brush and yucca palms of the Mojave well behind him. He was glad in his placid way when he reached his hotel in San Francisco and washed the grit and grime from his heat-nettled body.
But once that body had been bathed and fed, he started on his rounds of the underworld, seined the entire harbor-front without effect, and then set out his night-lines as cautiously as a fisherman in forbidden waters. He did not overlook the shipping offices and railway stations, neither did he neglect the hotels and ferries. Then he quietly lunched at Martenelli’s with the much-honored but most-uncomfortable Wolf Yonkholm, who promptly suspended his “dip” operations at the Beaches out of respect to Blake’s sudden call.
Nothing of moment, however, was learned from the startled Wolf, and at Coppa’s six hours later, Blake dined with a Chink-smuggler named Goldie Hopper. Goldie, after his fifth glass of wine and an adroit decoying of the talk along the channels which most interested his portly host, casually announced that an Eastern crook named Blanchard had got away, the day before, on the Pacific mail steamerManchuria. He was clean shaven and traveled as a clergyman. That struck Goldie as the height of humor, a bank sneak having the nerve to deck himself out as a gospel-spieler.
His elucidation of it, however, brought no answering smile from the diffident-eyed Blake, who confessed that he was rounding up a couple of nickel-coiners and would be going East in a day or two.
Instead of going East, however, he hurriedly consulted maps and timetables, found a train that would land him in Portland in twenty-six hours, and started north. He could eventually save time, he found, by hastening on to Seattle and catching a Great Northern steamer from that port. When a hot-box held his train up for over half an hour, Blake stood with his timepiece in his hand, watching the train crew in their efforts to “freeze the hub.” They continued to lose time, during the night. At Seattle, when he reached the Great Northern docks, he found that his steamer had sailed two hours before he stepped from his sleeper.
His one remaining resource was a Canadian Pacific steamer from Victoria. This, he figured out, would get him to Hong Kong even earlier than the steamer which he had already missed. He had a hunch that Hong Kong was the port he wanted. Just why, he could not explain. But he felt sure that Binhart would not drop off at Manila. Once on the run, he would keep out of American quarters. It was a gamble; it was a rough guess. But then all life was that. And Blake had a dogged and inarticulate faith in his “hunches.”
Crossing the Sound, he reached Victoria in time to see theEmpress of Chinaunder way, and heading out to sea. Blake hired a tug and overtook her. He reached the steamer’s deck by means of a Jacob’s ladder that swung along her side plates like a mason’s plumbline along a factory wall.
Binhart, he told himself, was by this time in mid-Pacific, untold miles away, heading for that vast and mysterious East into which a man could so easily disappear. He was approaching gloomy and tangled waterways that threaded between islands which could not even be counted. He was fleeing towards dark rivers which led off through barbaric and mysterious silence, into the heart of darkness. He was drawing nearer and nearer to those regions of mystery where a white man might be swallowed up as easily as a rice grain is lost in a shore lagoon. He would soon be in those teeming alien cities as under-burrowed as a gopher village.
But Blake did not despair. Their whole barbaric East, he told himself, was only a Chinatown slum on a large scale. And he had never yet seen the slum that remained forever impervious to the right dragnet. He did not know how or where the end would be. But he knew there would be an end. He still hugged to his bosom the placid conviction that the world was small, that somewhere along the frontiers of watchfulness the impact would be recorded and the alarm would be given. A man of Binhart’s type, with the money Binhart had, would never divorce himself completely from civilization. He would always crave a white man’s world; he would always hunger for what that world stood for and represented. He would always creep back to it. He might hide in his heathen burrow, for a time; but there would be a limit to that exile. A power stronger than his own will would drive him back to his own land, back to civilization. And civilization, to Blake, was merely a rather large and rambling house equipped with a rather efficient burglar-alarm system, so that each time it was entered, early or late, the tell-tale summons would eventually go to the right quarter. And when the summons came Blake would be waiting for it.
It was by wireless that Blake made what efforts he could to confirm his suspicions that Binhart had not dropped off at any port of call between San Francisco and Hong Kong. In due time the reply came back to “Bishop MacKishnie,” on board the westboundEmpress of Chinathat the Reverend Caleb Simpson had safely landed from theManchuriaat Hong Kong, and was about to leave for the mission field in the interior.
The so-called bishop, sitting in the wireless-room of theEmpress of China, with a lacerated black cigar between his teeth, received this much relayed message with mixed feelings. He proceeded to send out three Secret Service code-despatches to Shanghai, Amoy and Hong Kong, which, being picked up by a German cruiser, were worried over and argued over and finally referred back to an intelligence bureau for explanation.
But at Yokohama, Blake hurried ashore in asampan, met an agent who seemed to be awaiting him, and caught a train for Kobe. He hurried on, indifferent to the beauties of the country through which he wound, unimpressed by the oddities of the civilization with which he found himself confronted. His mind, intent on one thing, seemed unable to react to the stimuli of side-issues. From Kobe he caught aToyo Kisen Kaishasteamer for Nagasaki and Shanghai. This steamer, he found, lay over at the former port for thirteen hours, so he shifted again to an outbound boat headed for Woosung.
It was not until he was on the tender, making the hour-long run from Woosung up the Whangpoo to Shanghai itself, that he seemed to emerge from his half-cataleptic indifference to his environment. He began to realize that he was at last in the Orient.
As they wound up the river past sharp-nosed and round-hooded sampans, and archaic Chinese battle-ships and sea-going junks and gunboats flying their unknown foreign flags, Blake at last began to realize that he was in a new world. The very air smelt exotic; the very colors, the tints of the sails, the hues of clothing, the forms of things, land and sky itself—all were different. This depressed him only vaguely. He was too intent on the future, on the task before him, to give his surroundings much thought.
Blake had entirely shaken off this vague uneasiness, in fact, when twenty minutes after landing he found himself in a red-brick hotel known as The Astor, and guardedly shaking hands with an incredulously thin and sallow-faced man of about forty. Although this man spoke with an English accent and exile seemed to have foreigneered him in both appearance and outlook, his knowledge of America was active and intimate. He passed over to the detective two despatches in cipher, handed him a confidential list of Hong Kong addresses, gave him certain information as to Macao, and an hour later conducted him down the river to the steamer which started that night for Hong Kong.
As Blake trod that steamer’s deck and plowed on through strange seas, surrounded by strange faces, intent on his strange chase, no sense of vast adventure entered his soul. No appreciation of a great hazard bewildered his emotions. The kingdom of romance dwells in the heart, in the heart roomy enough to house it. And Blake’s heart was taken up with more material things. He was preoccupied with his new list of addresses, with his new lines of procedure, with the men he must interview and the dives and clubs and bazars he must visit. He had his day’s work to do, and he intended to do it.
The result was that of Hong Kong he carried away no immediate personal impression, beyond a vague jumble, in the background of consciousness, of Buddhist temples and British red-jackets, of stately parks and granite buildings, of mixed nationalities and native theaters, of anchored warships and a floating city of houseboats. For it was the same hour that he landed in this orderly and strangely English city that the discovery he was drawing close to Binhart again swept clean the slate of his emotions. The response had come from a consulate secretary. One wire in all his sentinel network had proved a live one. Binhart was not in Hong Kong, but he had been seen in Macao; he was known to be still there. And beyond that there was little that Never-Fail Blake cared to know.
His one side-movement in Hong Kong was to purchase an American revolver, for it began to percolate even through his indurated sensibilities that he was at last in a land where his name might not be sufficiently respected and his office sufficiently honored. For the first time in seven long years he packed a gun, he condescended to go heeled. Yet no minutest tingle of excitement spread through his lethargic body as he examined this gun, carefully loaded it, and stowed it away in his wallet-pocket. It meant no more to him than the stowing away of a sandwich against the emergency of a possible lost meal.
By the time he was on the noon boat that left for Macao, Blake had quite forgotten about the revolver. As he steamed southward over smooth seas, threading a way through boulder-strewn islands and skirting mountainous cliffs, his movements seemed to take on a sense of finality. He stood at the rail, watching the hazy blue islands, the forests of fishing-boats and high-pooped junks floating lazily at anchor, the indolent figures which he could catch glimpses of on deck, the green waters of the China Sea. He watched them with intent, yet abstracted, eyes. Some echo of the witchery of those Eastern waters at times penetrated his own preoccupied soul. A vague sense of his remoteness from his old life at last crept in to him.
He thought of the watching green lights that were flaring up, dusk by dusk, in the shrill New York night, the lamps of the precinct stations, the lamps of Headquarters, where the great building was full of moving feet and shifting faces, where telephones were ringing and detectives were coming and going, and policemen in uniform were passing up and down the great stone steps, clean-cut, ruddy-faced, strong-limbed policemen, talking and laughing as they started out on their night details. He could follow them as they went, those confident-striding “flatties” with their ash night-sticks at their side, soldiers without bugles or banner, going out to do the goodly tasks of the Law, soldiers of whom he was once the leader, the pride, the man to whom they pointed as the Vidoc of America.
And he would go back to them as great as ever. He would again compel their admiration. The newspaper boys would again come filing into his office and shake hands with him and smoke his cigars and ask how much he could tell them about his last haul. And he would recount to them how he shadowed Binhart half way round the world, and gathered him in, and brought him back to Justice.
It was three o’clock in the afternoon when Blake’s steamer drew near Macao. Against a background of dim blue hills he could make out the green and blue and white of the houses in the Portuguese quarters, guarded on one side by a lighthouse and on the other by a stolid square fort. Swinging around a sharp point, the boat entered the inner harbor, crowded with Chinese craft and coasters and dingy tramps of the sea.
Blake seemed in no hurry to disembark. The sampan into which he stepped, in fact, did not creep up to the shore until evening. There, ignoring the rickshaw coolies who awaited him as he passed an obnoxiously officious trio of customs officers, he disappeared up one of the narrow and slippery side streets of the Chinese quarter.
He followed this street for some distance, assailed by the smell of its mud and rotting sewerage, twisting and turning deeper into the darkness, past dogs and chattering coolies and oil lamps and gaming-house doors. Into one of these gaming houses he turned, passing through the blackwood sliding door and climbing the narrow stairway to the floor above. There, from a small quadrangular gallery, he could look down on the “well” of the fan-tan lay out below.
He made his way to a seat at the rail, took out a cigar, lighted it, and let his veiled gaze wander about the place, point by point, until he had inspected and weighed and appraised every man in the building. He continued to smoke, listlessly, like a sightseer with time on his hands and in no mood for movement. The brim of his black boulder shadowed his eyes. His thumbs rested carelessly in the arm-holes of his waistcoat. He lounged back torpidly, listening to the drone and clatter of voices below, lazily inspecting each newcomer, pretending to drop off into a doze of ennui. But all the while he was most acutely awake.
For somewhere in that gathering, he knew, there was a messenger awaiting him. Whether he was English or Portuguese, white or yellow, Blake could not say. But from some one there some word or signal was to come.
He peered down at the few white men in the pit below. He watched the man at the head of the carved blackwood table, beside his heap of brass “cash,” watched him again and again as he took up his handful of coins, covered them with a brass hat while the betting began, removed the hat, and seemed to be dividing the pile, with the wand in his hand, into fours. The last number of the last four, apparently, was the object of the wagers.
Blake could not understand the game. It puzzled him, just as the yellow men so stoically playing it puzzled him, just as the entire country puzzled him. Yet, obtuse as he was, he felt the gulf of centuries that divided the two races. These yellow men about him seemed as far away from his humanity, as detached from his manner of life and thought, as were the animals he sometimes stared at through the bars of the Bronx Zoo cages.
A white man would have to be pretty far gone, Blake decided, to fall into their ways, to be satisfied with the life of those yellow men. He would have to be a terrible failure, or he would have to be hounded by a terrible fear, to live out his life so far away from his own kind. And he felt now that Binhart could never do it, that a life sentence there would be worse than a life sentence to “stir.” So he took another cigar, lighted it, and sat back watching the faces about him.
For no apparent reason, and at no decipherable sign, one of the yellow faces across the smoke-filled room detached itself from its fellows. This face showed no curiosity, no haste. Blake watched it as it calmly approached him. He watched until he felt a finger against his arm.
“You clum b’long me,” was the enigmatic message uttered in the detective’s ear.
“Why should I go along with you?” Blake calmly inquired.
“You clum b’long me,” reiterated the Chinaman. The finger again touched the detective’s arm. “Clismas!”
Blake rose, at once. He recognized the code word of “Christmas.” This was the messenger he had been awaiting.
He followed the figure down the narrow stairway, through the sliding door, out into the many-odored street, foul with refuse, bisected by its open sewer of filth, took a turning into a still narrower street, climbed a precipitous hill cobbled with stone, turned still again, always overshadowed and hemmed in by tall houses close together, with black-beamed lattice doors through which he could catch glimpses of gloomy interiors. He turned again down a wooden-walled hallway that reminded him of a Mott Street burrow. When the Chinaman touched him on the sleeve he came to a stop.
His guide was pointing to a closed door in front of them.
“You sabby?” he demanded.
Blake hesitated. He had no idea of what was behind that door, but he gathered from the Chinaman’s motion that he was to enter. Before he could turn to make further inquiry the Chinaman had slipped away like a shadow.
Blake stood regarding the door. Then he lifted his revolver from his breast pocket and dropped it into his side pocket, with his hand on the butt. Then with his left hand he quietly opened the door, pushed it back, and as quietly stepped into the room.
On the floor, in the center of a square of orange-colored matting, he saw a white woman sitting. She was drinking tea out of an egg-shell of a cup, and after putting down the cup she would carefully massage her lips with the point of her little finger. This movement puzzled the newcomer until he suddenly realized that it was merely to redistribute the rouge on them.
She was dressed in a silk petticoat of almost lemon yellow and an azure-colored silk bodice that left her arms and shoulders bare to the light that played on them from three small oil lamps above her. Her feet and ankles were also bare, except for the matting sandals into which her toes were thrust. On one thin arm glimmered an extraordinarily heavy bracelet of gold. Her skin, which was very white, was further albificated by a coat of rice powder. She was startlingly slight. Blake, as he watched her, could see the oval shadows under her collar bones and the almost girlish meagerness of breast half-covered by the azure silk bodice.
She looked up slowly as Blake stepped into the room. Her eyes widened, and she continued to look, with parted lips, as she contemplated the intruder’s heavy figure. There was no touch of fear on her face. It was more curiosity, the wilful, wide-eyed curiosity of the child. She even laughed a little as she stared at the intruder. Her rouged lips were tinted a carmine so bright that they looked like a wound across her white face. That gash of color became almost clown-like as it crescented upward with its wayward mirth. Her eyebrows were heavily penciled and the lids of the eyes elongated by a widening point of blue paint. Her bare heel, which she caressed from time to time with fingers whereon the nails were stained pink with henna, was small and clean cut, as clean cut, Blake noticed, as the heel of a razor, while the white calf above it was as thin and flat as a boy’s.
“Hello, New York,” she said with her foolish and inconsequential little laugh. Her voice took on an oddly exotic intonation, as she spoke. Her teeth were small and white; they reminded Blake of rice, while she repeated the “New York,” bubblingly, as though she were a child with a newly learned word.
“Hello!” responded the detective, wondering how or where to begin. She made him think of a painted marionette, so maintained were her poses, so unreal was her make up.
“You’re the party who’s on the man hunt,” she announced.
“Am I?” equivocated Blake. She had risen to her feet by this time, with monkey-like agility, and showed herself to be much taller than he had imagined. He noticed a knife scar on her forearm.
“You’re after this man called Binhart,” she declared.
“Oh, no, I’m not,” was Blake’s sagacious response. “I don’t want Binhart!”
“Then what do you want?”
“I want the money he’s got.”
The little painted face grew serious; then it became veiled.
“How much money has he?”
“That’s what I want to find out!”
She squatted ruminatively down on the edge of her divan. It was low and wide and covered with orange-colored silk.
“Then you’ll have to find Binhart!” was her next announcement.
“Maybe!” acknowledged Blake.
“I can show you where he is!”
“All right,” was the unperturbed response. The blue-painted eyes were studying him.
“It will be worth four thousand pounds, in English gold,” she announced.
Blake took a step or two nearer her.
“Is that the message Ottenheim told you to give me?” he demanded. His face was red with anger.
“Then three thousand pounds,” she calmly suggested, wriggling her toes into a fallen sandal.
Blake did not deign to speak. His inarticulate grunt was one of disgust.
“Then a thousand, in gold,” she coyly intimated. She twisted about to pull the strap of her bodice up over her white shoulder-blades. “Or I will kill him for you for two thousand pounds in gold!”
Her eyes were as tranquil as a child’s. Blake remembered that he was in a world not his own.
“Why should I want him killed?” he inquired. He looked about for some place to sit. There was not a chair in the room.
“Because he intends to killyou,” answered the woman, squatting on the orange-covered divan.
“I wish he’d come and try,” Blake devoutly retorted.
“He will not come,” she told him. “It will be done from the dark.Icould have done it. But Ottenheim said no.”
“And Ottenheim said you were to work with me in this,” declared Blake, putting two and two together.
The woman shrugged a white shoulder.
“Have you any money?” she asked. She put the question with the artlessness of a child.
“Mighty little,” retorted Blake, still studying the woman from where he stood. He was wondering if Ottenheim had the same hold on her that the authorities had on Ottenheim, the ex-forger who enjoyed his parole only on condition that he remain a stool-pigeon of the high seas. He pondered what force he could bring to bear on her, what power could squeeze from those carmine and childish lips the information he must have.
He knew that he could break that slim body of hers across his knee. But he also knew that he had no way of crushing out of it the truth he sought, the truth he must in some way obtain. The woman still squatted on the divan, peering down at the knife scar on her arm from time to time, studying it, as though it were an inscription.
Blake was still watching the woman when the door behind him was slowly opened; a head was thrust in, and as quietly withdrawn again. Blake dropped his right hand to his coat pocket and moved further along the wall, facing the woman. There was nothing of which he stood afraid: he merely wished to be on the safe side.
“Well, what word’ll I take back to Ottenheim?” he demanded.
The woman grew serious. Then she showed her rice-like row of teeth as she laughed.
“That means there’s nothing in it for me,” she complained with pouting-lipped moroseness. Her venality, he began to see, was merely the instinctive acquisitiveness of the savage, the greed of the petted child.
“No more than there is for me,” Blake acknowledged. She turned and caught up a heavily flowered mandarin coat of plaited cream and gold. She was thrusting one arm into it when a figure drifted into the room from the matting-hung doorway on Blake’s left. As she saw this figure she suddenly flung off the coat and stooped to the tea tray in the middle of the floor.
Blake saw that the newcomer was a Chinaman. This newcomer, he also saw, ignored him as though he were a door post, confronting the woman and assailing her with a quick volley of words, of incomprehensible words in the native tongue. She answered with the same clutter and clack of unknown syllables, growing more and more excited as the dialogue continued. Her thin face darkened and changed, her white arms gyrated, the fires of anger burned in the baby-like eyes. She seemed expostulating, arguing, denouncing, and each wordy sally was met by an equally wordy sally from the Chinaman. She challenged and rebuked with her passionately pointed finger; she threatened with angry eyes; she stormed after the newcomer as he passed like a shadow out of the room; she met him with a renewed storm when he returned a moment later.
The Chinaman now stood watching her, impassive and immobile, as though he had taken his stand and intended to stick to it. Blake studied him with calm and patient eyes. That huge-limbed detective in his day had “pounded” too many Christy Street Chinks to be in any way intimidated by a queue and a yellow face. He was not disturbed. He was merely puzzled.
Then the woman turned to the mandarin coat, and caught it up, shook it out, and for one brief moment stood thoughtfully regarding it. Then she suddenly turned about on the Chinaman.
Blake, as he stood watching that renewed angry onslaught, paid little attention to the actual words that she was calling out. But as he stood there he began to realize that she was not speaking in Chinese, but in English.
“Do you hear me, white man? Do you hear me?” she cried out, over and over again. Yet the words seemed foolish, for all the time as she uttered them, she was facing the placid-eyed Chinaman and gesticulating in his face.
“Don’t you see,” Blake at last heard her crying, “he doesn’t know what I’m saying! He doesn’t understand a word of English!” And then, and then only, it dawned on Blake that every word the woman was uttering was intended for his own ears. She was warning him, and all the while pretending that her words were the impetuous words of anger.
“Watch this man!” he heard her cry. “Don’t let him know you’re listening. But remember what I say, remember it. And God help you if you haven’t got a gun.”
Blake could see her, as in a dream, assailing the Chinaman with her gestures, advancing on him, threatening him, expostulating with him, but all in pantomime. There was something absurd about it, as absurd as a moving-picture film which carries the wrong text.
“He’ll pretend to take you to the man you want,” the woman was panting. “That’s what he will say. But it’s a lie. He’ll take you out to a sampan, to put you aboard Binhart’s boat. But the three of them will cut your throat, cut your throat, and then drop you overboard. He’s to get so much in gold. Get out of here with him. Let him think you’re going. But drop away, somewhere, before you get to the beach. And watch them all the way.”
Blake stared at the immobile Chinaman, as though to make sure that the other man had not understood. He was still staring at that impassive yellow face, he was still absorbing the shock of his news, when the outer door opened and a second Chinaman stepped into the room. The newcomer cluttered a quick sentence or two to his countryman, and was still talking when a third figure sidled in.
Those spoken words, whatever they were, seemed to have little effect on any one in the room except the woman. She suddenly sprang about and exploded into an angry shower of denials.
“It’s a lie!” she cried in English, storming about the impassive trio. “You never heard me peach! You never heard me say a word! It’s a lie!”
Blake strode to the middle of the room, towering above the other figures, dwarfing them by his great bulk, as assured of his mastery as he would have been in a Chatham Square gang fight.
“What’s the row here?” he thundered, knowing from the past that power promptly won its own respect. “What’re you talking about, you two?” He turned from one intruder to another. “And you? And you? What do you want, anyway?”
The three contending figures, however, ignored him as though he were a tobacconist’s dummy. They went on with their exotic cackle, as though he was no longer in their midst. They did not so much as turn an eye in his direction. And still Blake felt reasonably sure of his position.
It was not until the woman squeaked, like a frightened mouse, and ran whimpering into the corner of the room, that he realized what was happening. He was not familiar with the wrist movement by which the smallest bodied of the three men was producing a knife from his sleeve. The woman, however, had understood from the first.
“White man, look out!” she half sobbed from her corner. “Oh, white man!” she repeated in a shriller note as the Chinaman, bending low, scuttled across the room to the corner where she cowered.
Blake saw the knife by this time. It was thin and long, for all the world like an icicle, a shaft of cutting steel ground incredibly thin, so thin, in fact, that at first sight it looked more like a point for stabbing than a blade for cutting.
The mere glitter of that knife electrified the staring white man into sudden action. He swung about and tried to catch at the arm that held the steel icicle. He was too late for that, but his fingers closed on the braided queue. By means of this queue he brought the Chinaman up short, swinging him sharply about so that he collided flat faced with the room wall.
Then, for the first time, Blake grew into a comprehension of what surrounded him. He wheeled about, stooped and caught up the papier-mâché tea-tray from the floor and once more stood with his back to the wall. He stood there, on guard, for a second figure with a second steel icicle was sidling up to him. He swung viciously out and brought the tea-tray down on the hand that held this knife, crippling the fingers and sending the steel spinning across the room. Then with his free hand he tugged the revolver from his coat pocket, holding it by the barrel and bringing the metal butt down on the queue-wound head of the third man, who had no knife, but was struggling with the woman for the metal icicle she had caught up from the floor.
Then the five seemed to close in together, and the fight became general. It became a mêlée. With his swinging right arm Blake battered and pounded with his revolver butt. With his left hand he made cutting strokes with the heavy papier-mâché tea-tray, keeping their steel, by those fierce sweeps, away from his body. One Chinaman he sent sprawling, leaving him huddled and motionless against the orange-covered divan. The second, stunned by a blow of the tea-tray across the eyes, could offer no resistance when Blake’s smashing right dealt its blow, the metal gun butt falling like a trip hammer on the shaved and polished skull.
As the white man swung about he saw the third Chinaman with his hand on the woman’s throat, holding her flat against the wall, placing her there as a butcher might place a fowl on his block ready for the blow of his carver. Blake stared at the movement, panting for breath, overcome by that momentary indifference wherein a winded athlete permits without protest an adversary to gain his momentary advantage. Then will triumphed over the weakness of the body. But before Blake could get to the woman’s side he saw the Chinaman’s loose-sleeved right hand slowly and deliberately ascend. As it reached the meridian of its circular upsweep he could see the woman rise on her toes, rise as though with some quick effort, yet some effort which Blake could not understand.
At the same moment that she did so a look of pained expostulation crept into the staring slant eyes on a level with her own. The yellow jaw gaped, filled with blood, and the poised knife fell at his side, sticking point down in the flooring. The azure and lemon-yellow that covered the woman’s body flamed into sudden scarlet. It was only as the figure with the expostulating yellow face sank to the ground, crumpling up on itself as it fell, that Blake comprehended. That quick sweep of scarlet, effacing the azure and lemon, had come from the sudden deluge of blood that burst over the woman’s body. She had made use of the upstroke, Mexican style. Her knife had cut the full length of the man’s abdominal cavity, clean and straight to the breastbone. He had been ripped up like a herring.