Blake panted and wheezed, not at the sight of the blood, but at the exertion to which his flabby muscles had been put. His body was moist with sweat. His asthmatic throat seemed stifling his lungs. A faint nausea crept through him, a dim ventral revolt at the thought that such things could take place so easily, and with so little warning.
His breast still heaved and panted and he was still fighting for breath when he saw the woman stoop and wipe the knife on one of the fallen Chinaman’s sleeves.
“We’ve got to get out of here!” she whimpered, as she caught up the mandarin coat and flung it over her shoulders, for in the struggle her body had been bared almost to the waist. Blake saw the crimson that dripped on her matting slippers and maculated the cream white of the mandarin coat.
“But where’s Binhart?” he demanded, as he looked stolidly about for his black boulder.
“Never mind Binhart,” she cried, touching the eviscerated body at her feet with one slipper toe, “or we’ll get whathegot!”
“I want that man Binhart!” persisted the detective.
“Not here! Not here!” she cried, folding the loose folds of the cloak closer about her body.
She ran to the matting curtain, looked out, and called back, “Quick! Come quick!” Then she ran back, slipped the bolt in the outer door and rejoined the waiting detective.
“Oh, white man!” she gasped, as the matting fell between them and the room incarnadined by their struggle. Blake was not sure, but he thought he heard her giggle, hysterically, in the darkness. They were groping their way along a narrow passage. They slipped through a second door, closed and locked it after them, and once more groped on through the darkness.
How many turns they took, Blake could not remember. She stopped and whispered to him to go softly, as they came to a stairway, as steep and dark as a cistern. Blake, at the top, could smell opium smoke, and once or twice he thought he heard voices. The woman stopped him, with outstretched arms, at the stair head, and together they stood and listened.
Blake, with nerves taut, waited for some sign from her to go on again. He thought she was giving it, when he felt a hand caress his side. He felt it move upward, exploringly. At the same time that he heard her little groan of alarm he knew that the hand was not hers.
He could not tell what the darkness held, but his movement was almost instinctive. He swung out with his great arm, countered on the crouching form in front of him, caught at a writhing shoulder, and tightening his grip, sent the body catapulting down the stairway at his side. He could hear a revolver go off as the body went tumbling and rolling down—Blake knew that it was a gun not his own.
“Come on, white man!” the girl in front of him was crying, as she tugged at his coat. And they went on, now at a run, taking a turn to the right, making a second descent, and then another to the left. They came to still another door, which they locked behind them. Then they scrambled up a ladder, and he could hear her quick hands padding about in the dark. A moment later she had thrust up a hatch. He saw it led to the open air, for the stars were above them.
He felt grateful for that open air, for the coolness, for the sense of deliverance which came with even that comparative freedom.
“Don’t stop!” she whispered. And he followed her across the slant of the uneven roof. He was weak for want of breath. The girl had to catch him and hold him for a moment.
“On the next roof you must take off your shoes,” she warned him. “You can rest then. But hurry—hurry!”
He gulped down the fresh air as he tore at his shoe laces, thrusting each shoe in a side pocket as he started after her. For by this time she was scrambling across the broken sloping roofs, as quick and agile as a cat, dropping over ledges, climbing up barriers and across coping tiles. Where she was leading him he had no remotest idea. She reminded him of a cream-tinted monkey in the maddest of steeplechases. He was glad when she came to a stop.
The town seemed to lay to their right. Before them were the scattered lights of the harbor and the mild crescent of the outer bay. They could see the white wheeling finger of some foreign gunboat as its searchlight played back and forth in the darkness.
She sighed with weariness and dropped cross-legged down on the coping tiles against which he leaned, regaining his breath. She squatted there, cooingly, like a child exhausted with its evening games.
“I’m dished!” she murmured, as she sat there breathing audibly through the darkness. “I’m dished for this coast!”
He sat down beside her, staring at the searchlight. There seemed something reassuring, something authoritative and comforting, in the thought of it watching there in the darkness.
The girl touched him on the knee and then shifted her position on the coping tiles, without rising to her feet.
“Come here!” she commanded. And when he was close beside her she pointed with her thin white arm. “That’s Saint Poalo there—you can just make it out, up high, see. And those lights are the Boundary Gate. And this sweep of lights below here is thePraya. Now look where I’m pointing. That’s the Luiz Camoes lodging-house. You see the second window with the light in it?”
“Yes, I see it.”
“Well, Binhart’s inside that window.”
“You know it?”
“I know it.”
“So he’s there?” said Blake, staring at the vague square of light.
“Yes, he’s there, all right. He’s posing as a buyer for a tea house, and calls himself Bradley. Lee Fu told me; and Lee Fu is always right.”
She stood up and pulled the mandarin coat closer about her thin body. The coolness of the night air had already chilled her. Then she squinted carefully about in the darkness.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“I’m going to get Binhart,” was Blake’s answer.
He could hear her little childlike murmur of laughter.
“You’re brave, white man,” she said, with a hand on his arm. She was silent for a moment, before she added: “And I think you’ll get him.”
“Of course I’ll get him,” retorted Blake, buttoning his coat. The fires had been relighted on the cold hearth of his resolution. It came to him only as an accidental afterthought that he had met an unknown woman and had passed through strange adventures with her and was now about to pass out of her life again, forever.
“What’ll you do?” he asked.
Again he heard the careless little laugh.
“Oh, I’ll slip down through the Quarter and cop some clothes somewhere. Then I’ll have a sampan take me out to the German boat. It’ll start for Canton at daylight.”
“And then?” asked Blake, watching the window of the Luiz Camoes lodging-house below him.
“Then I’ll work my way up to Port Arthur, I suppose. There’s a navy man there who’ll help me!”
“Haven’t you any money?” Blake put the question a little uneasily.
Again he felt the careless coo of laughter.
“Feel!” she said. She caught his huge hand between hers and pressed it against her waist line. She rubbed his fingers along what he accepted as a tightly packed coin-belt. He was relieved to think that he would not have to offer her money. Then he peered over the coping tiles to make sure of his means of descent.
“You had better go first,” she said, as she leaned out and looked down at his side. “Crawl down this next roof to the end there. At the corner, see, is the end of the ladder.”
He stooped and slipped his feet into his shoes. Then he let himself cautiously down to the adjoining roof, steeper even than the one on which they had stood. She bent low over the tiles, so that her face was very close to his as he found his footing and stood there.
“Good-by, white man,” she whispered.
“Good-by!” he whispered back, as he worked his way cautiously and ponderously along that perilous slope.
She leaned there, watching him as he gained the ladder-end. He did not look back as he lowered himself, rung by rung. All thought of her, in fact, had passed from his preoccupied mind. He was once more intent on his own grim ends. He was debating with himself just how he was to get in through that lodging-house window and what his final move would be for the round up of his enemy. He had made use of too many “molls” in his time to waste useless thought on what they might say or do or desire. When he had got Binhart, he remembered, he would have to look about for something to eat, for he was as hungry as a wolf. And he did not even hear the girl’s second soft whisper of “Good-by.”
That stolid practicality which had made Blake a successful operative asserted itself in the matter of his approach to the Luiz Camoes house, the house which had been pointed out to him as holding Binhart.
He circled promptly about to the front of that house, pressed a gold coin in the hand of the half-caste Portuguese servant who opened the door, and asked to be shown to the room of the English tea merchant.
That servant, had he objected, would have been promptly taken possession of by the detective, and as promptly put in a condition where he could do no harm, for Blake felt that he was too near the end of his trail to be put off by any mere side issue. But the coin and the curt explanation that the merchant must be seen at once admitted Blake to the house.
The servant was leading him down the length of the half-lit hall when Blake caught him by the sleeve.
“You tell my rickshaw boy to wait! Quick, before he gets away!”
Blake knew that the last door would be the one leading to Binhart’s room. The moment he was alone in the hall he tiptoed to this door and pressed an ear against its panel. Then with his left hand, he slowly turned the knob, caressing it with his fingers that it might not click when the latch was released. As he had feared, it was locked.
He stood for a second or two, thinking. Then with the knuckle of one finger he tapped on the door, lightly, almost timidly.
A man’s voice from within cried out, “Wait a minute! Wait a minute!” But Blake, who had been examining the woodwork of the door-frame, did not choose to wait a minute. Any such wait, he felt, would involve too much risk. In one minute, he knew, a fugitive could either be off and away, or could at least prepare himself for any one intercepting that flight. So Blake took two quick steps back, and brought his massive shoulder against the door. It swung back, as though nothing more than a parlor match had held it shut. Blake, as he stepped into the room, dropped his right hand to his coat pocket.
Facing him, at the far side of the room, he saw Binhart.
The fugitive sat in a short-legged reed chair, with a grip-sack open on his knees. His coat and vest were off, and the light from the oil lamp at his side made his linen shirt a blotch of white.
He had thrown his head up, at the sound of the opening door, and he still sat, leaning forward in the low chair in an attitude of startled expectancy. There was no outward and apparent change on his face as his eyes fell on Blake’s figure. He showed neither fear nor bewilderment. His career had equipped him with histrionic powers that were exceptional. As a bank-sneak and confidence-man he had long since learned perfect control of his features, perfect composure even under the most discomforting circumstances.
“Hello, Connie!” said the detective facing him. He spoke quietly, and his attitude seemed one of unconcern. Yet a careful observer might have noticed that the pulse of his beefy neck was beating faster than usual. And over that great body, under its clothing, were rippling tremors strangely like those that shake the body of a leashed bulldog at the sight of a street cat.
“Hello, Jim!” answered Binhart, with equal composure. He had aged since Blake had last seen him, aged incredibly. His face was thin now, with plum-colored circles under the faded eyes.
He made a move as though to lift down the valise that rested on his knees. But Blake stopped him with a sharp movement of his right hand.
“That’s all right,” he said. “Don’t get up!”
Binhart eyed him. During that few seconds of silent tableau each man was appraising, weighing, estimating the strength of the other.
“What do you want, Jim?” asked Binhart, almost querulously.
“I want that gun you’ve got up there under your liver pad,” was Blake’s impassive answer.
“Is that all?” asked Binhart. But he made no move to produce the gun.
“Then I want you,” calmly announced Blake.
A look of gentle expostulation crept over Binhart’s gaunt face.
“You can’t do it, Jim,” he announced. “You can’t take me away from here.”
“But I’m going to,” retorted Blake.
“How?”
“I’m just going to take you.”
He crossed the room as he spoke.
“Give me the gun,” he commanded.
Binhart still sat in the low reed chair. He made no movement in response to Blake’s command.
“What’s the good of getting rough-house,” he complained.
“Gi’ me the gun,” repeated Blake.
“Jim, I hate to see you act this way,” but as Binhart spoke he slowly drew the revolver from its flapped pocket. Blake’s revolver barrel was touching the white shirt-front as the movement was made. It remained there until he had possession of Binhart’s gun. Then he backed away, putting his own revolver back in his pocket.
“Now, get your clothes on,” commanded Blake.
“What for?” temporized Binhart.
“You’re coming with me!”
“You can’t do it, Jim,” persisted the other. “You couldn’t get me down to the water-front, in this town. They’d get you before you were two hundred yards away from that door.”
“I’ll risk it,” announced the detective.
“And I’d fight you myself, every move. This ain’t Manhattan Borough, you know, Jim; you can’t kidnap a white man. I’d have you in irons for abduction the first ship we struck. And at the first port of call I’d have the best law sharps money could get. You can’t do it, Jim. It ain’t law!”
“What t’ hell do I care for law,” was Blake’s retort. “I want you and you’re going to come with me.”
“Where am I going?”
“Back to New York.”
Binhart laughed. It was a laugh without any mirth in it.
“Jim, you’re foolish. You couldn’t get me back to New York alive, any more than you could take Victoria Peak to New York!”
“All right, then, I’ll take you along the other way, if I ain’t going to take you alive. I’ve followed you a good many thousand miles, Connie, and a little loose talk ain’t going to make me lie down at this stage of the game.”
Binhart sat studying the other man for a moment or two.
“Then how about a little real talk, the kind of talk that money makes?”
“Nothing doing!” declared Blake, folding his arms.
Binhart flickered a glance at him as he thrust his own right hand down into the hand-bag on his knees.
“I want to show you what you could get out of this,” he said, leaning forward a little as he looked up at Blake.
When his exploring right hand was lifted again above the top of the bag Blake firmly expected to see papers of some sort between its fingers. He was astonished to see something metallic, something which glittered bright in the light from the wall lamp. The record of this discovery had scarcely been carried back to his brain, when the silence of the room seemed to explode into a white sting, a puff of noise that felt like a whip lash curling about Blake’s leg. It seemed to roll off in a shifting and drifting cloud of smoke.
It so amazed Blake that he fell back against the wall, trying to comprehend it, to decipher the source and meaning of it all. He was still huddled back against the wall when a second surprise came to him. It was the discovery that Binhart had caught up a hat and a coat, and was running away, running out through the door while his captor stared after him.
It was only then Blake realized that his huddled position was not a thing of his own volition. Some impact had thrown him against the wall like a toppled nine-pin. The truth came to him, in a sudden flash; Binhart had shot at him. There had been a second revolver hidden away in the hand bag, and Binhart had attempted to make use of it.
A great rage against Binhart swept through him. A still greater rage at the thought that his enemy was running away brought Blake lurching and scrambling to his feet. He was a little startled to find that it hurt him to run. But it hurt him more to think of losing Binhart.
He dove for the door, hurling his great bulk through it, tossing aside the startled Portuguese servant who stood at the outer entrance. He ran frenziedly out into the night, knowing by the staring faces of the street-corner group that Binhart had made the first turning and was running towards the water-front. He could see the fugitive, as he came to the corner; and like an unpenned bull he swung about and made after him. His one thought was to capture his man. His one obsession was to haul down Binhart.
Then, as he ran, a small trouble insinuated itself into his mind. He could not understand the swishing of his right boot, at every hurrying stride. But he did not stop, for he could already smell the odorous coolness of the water-front and he knew he must close in on his man before that forest of floating sampans and native house-boats swallowed him up.
A lightheadedness crept over him as he came panting down to the water’s edge. The faces of the coolies about him, as he bargained for a sampan, seemed far away and misty. The voices, as the flat-bottomed little skiff was pushed off in pursuit of the boat which was hurrying Binhart out into the night, seemed remote and thin, as though coming from across foggy water. He was bewildered by a sense of dampness in his right leg. He patted it with his hand, inquisitively, and found it wet. He stooped down and felt his boot. It was full of blood. It was overrunning with blood. He remembered then. Binhart had shot him, after all.
He could never say whether it was this discovery, or the actual loss of blood, that filled him with a sudden giddiness. He fell forward on his face, on the bottom of the rocking sampan.
He must have been unconscious for some time, for when he awakened he was dimly aware that he was being carried up the landing-ladder of a steamer. He heard English voices about him. A very youthful-looking ship’s surgeon came and bent over him, cut away his trouser-leg, and whistled.
“Why, he’s been bleeding like a stuck pig!” he heard a startled voice, very close to him, suddenly exclaim. And a few minutes later, after being moved again, he opened his eyes to find himself in a berth and the boyish-looking surgeon assuring him it was all right.
“Where’s Binhart?” asked Blake.
“That’s all right, old chap, you just rest up a bit,” said the placatory youth.
At nine the next morning Blake was taken ashore at Hong Kong.
After eleven days in the English hospital he was on his feet again. He was quite strong by that time. But for several weeks after that his leg was painfully stiff.
Twelve days later Blake began just where he had left off. He sent out his feelers, he canvassed the offices from which some echo might come, he had Macao searched, and all westbound steamers which he could reach by wireless were duly warned. But more than ever, now, he found, he had to depend on his own initiative, his own personal efforts. The more official the quarters to which he looked for cooperation, the less response he seemed to elicit. In some circles, he saw, his story was even doubted. It was listened to with indifference; it was dismissed with shrugs. There were times when he himself was smiled at, pityingly.
He concluded, after much thought on the matter, that Binhart would continue to work his way westward. That the fugitive would strike inland and try to reach Europe by means of the Trans-Siberian Railway seemed out of the question. On that route he would be too easily traced. The carefully guarded frontiers of Russia, too, would offer obstacles which he dare not meet. He would stick to the ragged and restless sea-fringes, concluded the detective. But before acting on that conclusion he caught 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 manœuvers, 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 bar-room of the Hotel Central, where he would sit without coat or vest, calmly giving an eye to his game of “draw” or stolidly “rolling the bones” as he talked—but always with his ears open for one particular thing, and that thing had to do with the movements or the whereabouts of Connie Binhart.
One night, as he sat placidly playing his game of “cut-throat” in his shirt-sleeves, he looked up and saw a russet-faced figure as stolid as his own. This figure, he perceived, was discreetly studying him as he sat under the glare of the light. Blake went on with his game. In a quarter of an hour, however, he got up from the table and bought a fresh supply of “green” Havana cigars. Then he sauntered out to where the russet-faced stranger stood watching the street crowds.
“Pip, what’re you doing down in these parts?” he casually inquired. He had recognized the man as Pip Tankred, with whom he had come in contact five long years before. Pip, on that occasion, was engaged in loading an East River banana-boat with an odd ton or two of cartridges designed for Castro’s opponents in Venezuela.
“Oh, I’m freightin’ bridge equipment down the West Coast,” he solemnly announced. “And transshippin’ a few cases o’ phonograph-records as a side-line!”
“Have a smoke?” asked Blake.
“Sure,” responded the russet-faced bucaneer. And as they stood smoking together Blake tenderly and cautiously put out the usual feelers, plying the familiar questions and meeting with the too-familiar lack of response. Like all the rest of them, he soon saw, Pip Tankred knew nothing of Binhart or his whereabouts. And with that discovery his interest in Pip Tankred ceased.
So the next day Blake moved inland, working his interrogative way along the Big Ditch to Panama. He even slipped back over the line to San Cristobel and Ancon, found nothing of moment awaiting him there, and drifted back into Panamanian territory. It was not until the end of the week that the first glimmer of hope came to him.
It came in the form of an incredibly thingringoin an incredibly soiled suit of duck. Blake had been sitting on the wide veranda of the Hotel Angelini, sipping his “swizzle” and studiously watching the Saturday evening crowds that passed back and forth through Panama’s bustling railway station. He had watched the long line of rickety cabs backed up against the curb, the two honking autobusses, the shifting army of pleasure-seekers along the sidewalks, the noisy saloons round which the crowds eddied like bees about a hive, and he was once more appraising the groups closer about him, when through that seething and bustling mass of humanity he saw Dusty McGlade pushing his way, a Dusty McGlade on whom the rum of Jamaica and 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 didn’t you say it an hour ago?” contested McGlade, with his alcoholic peevish obstinacy.
“Well, let’s have it now,” placated the patient-eyed Blake. He waited, with a show of indifference. He even overlooked Dusty’s curt laugh of contempt.
“I can tell you all right, all right—but it won’t do you much good!”
“Why not?” And still Blake was bland and patient.
“Because,” retorted McGlade, fixing the other man with a lean finger that was both unclean and unsteady, “you can’t get at him!”
“You tell me where he is,” said Blake, striking a match. “I’ll attend to the rest of it!”
McGlade slowly and deliberately drank the last of his swizzle. Then he put down his empty glass and stared pensively and pregnantly into it.
“What’s there in it for me?” he asked.
Blake, studying him across the small table, weighed both the man and the situation.
“Two hundred dollars in American greenbacks,” he announced as he drew out his wallet. He could see McGlade moisten his flaccid lips. He could see the faded eyes fasten on the bills as they were counted out. He knew where the money would go, how little good it would do. But that, he knew, was nothisfuneral. 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 couldn’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.