Blake could see the assistant engineers, with their eyes on the pointers that stood out against two white dials. He could see the Chief, the Chief whom he would so soon have to buy over and placate, moving about nervous and alert. Then he heard the tinkle of the telegraph bell, and the repeated gasp of energy as the engineers threw the levers. He could hear the vicious hum of the reversing-engines, and then the great muffled cough of power as the ponderous valve-gear was thrown into position and the vaster machinery above him was coerced into a motion that seemed languid yet relentless.
He could see the slow rise and fall of the great cranks. He could hear the renewed signals and bells tinkles, the more insistent clack of pumps, the more resolute rise and fall of the ponderous cranks. And he knew that they were at last under way. He gave no thought to the heat of the oil-dripping pit in which he stood. He was oblivious of the perilous steel that whirred and throbbed about him. He was unconscious of the hot hand rails and the greasy foot-ways and the mingling odor of steam and parching lubricant and ammonia-gas from a leaking “beef engine.” He quite forgot the fact that hisdungareejumper was wet with sweat, that his cap was already fouled with oil. All he knew was that he and Binhart were at last under way.
He was filled with a new lightness of spirit as he felt the throb of “full speed ahead” shake the steel hull about which he so contentedly climbed and crawled. He found something fortifying in the thought that this vast hull was swinging out to her appointed sea lanes, that she was now intent on a way from which no caprice could turn her. There seemed something appeasingly ordered and implacable in the mere revolutions of the engines. And as those engines settled down to their labors the intent-eyed men about him fell almost as automatically into the routines of toil as did the steel mechanism itself.
When at the end of the first four-houred watch a gong sounded and the next crew filed cluttering in from the half-lighted between-deck gangways and came sliding down the polished steel stair rails, Blake felt that his greatest danger was over.
There would still be an occasional palm to grease, he told himself, an occasional bit of pad money to be paid out. But he could meet those emergencies with the fortitude of a man already inured to the exactions of venal accomplices.
Then a new discovery came to him. It came as he approached the chief engineer, with the object in view of throwing a little light on his presence there. And as he looked into that officer’s coldly indignant eye he awakened to the fact that he was no longer on land, but afloat on a tiny world with an autocracy and an authority of its own. He was in a tiny world, he saw, where his career and his traditions were not to be reckoned with, where he ranked no higher than conch-niggers and beach-combers andcargadores. He was adungaree-clad greaser in an engine-room, and he was promptly ordered back with the rest of his crew. He was not even allowed to talk.
When his watch came round he went on duty again. He saw the futility of revolt, until the time was ripe. He went through his appointed tasks with the solemn precision of an apprentice. He did what he was commanded to do. Yet sometimes the heat would grow so intense that the great sweating body would have to shamble to a ventilator and there drink in long drafts of the cooler air. The pressure of invisible hoops about the great heaving chest would then release itself, the haggard face would regain some touch of color, and the new greaser would go back to his work again. One or two of the more observant toilers about him, experienced in engine-room life, marveled at the newcomer and the sense of mystery which hung over him. One or two of them fell to wondering what inner spirit could stay him through those four-houred ordeals of heat and labor.
Yet they looked after him with even more inquisitive eyes when, on the second day out, he was peremptorily summoned to the Captain’s room. What took place in that room no one in the ship ever actually knew.
But the large-bodied stowaway returned below-decks, white of face and grim of jaw. He went back to his work in silence, in dogged and unbroken silence which those about him knew enough to respect.
It was whispered about, it is true, that among other things a large and ugly-looking revolver had been taken from his clothing, and that he had been denied the use of the ship’s wireless service. A steward outside the Captain’s door, it was also whispered, had over-heard the shipmaster’s angry threat to put the stowaway in irons for the rest of the voyage and return him to the Ecuadorean authorities. It was rumored, too, that late in the afternoon of the same day, when the new greaser had complained of faintness and was seeking a breath of fresh air at the foot of a midships deck-ladder, he had chanced to turn and look up at a man standing on the promenade deck above him.
The two men stood staring at each other for several moments, and for all the balmy air about him the great body of the stranger just up from the engine-room had shivered and shaken, as though with a malarial chill.
What it meant, no one quite knew. Nor could anything be added to that rumor, beyond the fact that the first-class passenger, who was known to be a doctor and who had stared so intently down at the quiet-eyed greaser, had turned the color of ashes and without a word had slipped away. And the bewilderment of the entire situation was further increased when theTrunellaswung in at Callao and the large-bodied man of mystery was peremptorily and none too gently put ashore. It was noted, however, that the first-class passenger who had stared down at him from the promenade-deck remained aboard the vessel as she started southward again. It was further remarked that he seemed more at ease when Callao was left well behind, although he sat smoking side by side with the operator in the wireless room until theTrunellahad steamed many miles southward on her long journey towards the Straits of Magellan.
Seven days after theTrunellaswung southward from Callao Never-Fail Blake, renewed as to habiliments and replenished as to pocket, embarked on a steamer bound for Rio de Janeiro.
He watched the plunging bow as it crept southward. He saw the heat and the gray sea-shimmer left behind him. He saw the days grow longer and the nights grow colder. He saw the Straits passed and the northward journey again begun. But he neither fretted nor complained of his fate.
After communicating by wireless with both Montevideo and Buenos Ayres and verifying certain facts of which he seemed already assured, he continued on his way to Rio. And over Rio he once more cast and pursed up his gently interrogative net, gathering in the discomforting information that Binhart had already relayed from that city to a Lloyd-Brazileiro steamer. This steamer, he learned, was bound for Ignitos, ten thousand dreary miles up the Amazon.
Five days later Blake followed in a Clyde-built freighter. When well up the river he transferred to a rotten-timbered sidewheeler that had once done duty on the Mississippi, and still again relayed from river boat to river boat, move by move falling more and more behind his quarry.
The days merged into weeks, and the weeks into months. He suffered much from the heat, but more from the bad food and the bad water. For the first time in his life he found his body shaken with fever and was compelled to use quinin in great quantities. The attacks of insects, of insects that flew, that crawled, that tunneled beneath the skin, turned life into a torment. His huge triple-terraced neck became raw with countless wounds. But he did not stop by the way. His eyes became oblivious of the tangled and overcrowded life about him, of the hectic orchids and huge butterflies and the flaming birds-of-paradise, of the echoing aisle ways between interwoven jungle growths, of the arching aërial roofs of verdure and the shadowy hanging-gardens from which by day parakeets chattered and monkeys screamed and by night ghostly armies of fireflies glowed. He was no longer impressed by that world of fierce appetites and fierce conflicts. He seemed to have attained to a secret inner calm, to an obsessional impassivity across which the passing calamities of existence only echoed. He merely recalled that he had been compelled to eat of disagreeable things and face undesirable emergencies, to drink of the severed water-vine, to partake of monkey-steak and broiled parrot, to sleep in poisonous swamplands. His spirit, even with the mournful cry of night birds in his ears, had been schooled into the acceptance of a loneliness that to another might have seemed eternal and unendurable.
By the time he had reached the Pacific coast his haggard hound’s eyes were more haggard than ever. His skin hung loose on his great body, as though a vampire bat had drained it of its blood. But to his own appearance he gave scant thought. For new life came to him when he found definite traces of Binhart. These traces he followed up, one by one, until he found himself circling back eastward along the valley of the Magdalena. And down the Magdalena he went, still sure of his quarry, following him to Bogota, and on again from Bogota to Barranquilla, and on to Savanilla, where he embarked on a Hamburg-American steamer for Limon.
At Limon it was not hard to pick up the lost trail. But Binhart’s movements, after leaving that port, became a puzzle to the man who had begun to pride himself on growing into knowledge of his adversary’s inmost nature. For once Blake found himself uncertain as to the other’s intentions. The fugitive now seemed possessed with an idea to get away from the sea, to strike inland at any cost, as though water had grown a thing of horror to him. He zigzagged from obscure village to village, as though determined to keep away from all main-traveled avenues of traffic. Yet, move as he might, it was merely a matter of time and care to follow up the steps of a white man as distinctly individualized as Binhart.
This white man, it seemed, was at last giving way to the terror that must have been haunting him for months past. His movements became feverish, erratic, irrational. He traveled in strange directions and by strange means, by bullock-cart, by burro, by dug-out, sometimes on foot and sometimes on horseback. Sometimes he stayed over night at a rubber-gatherers’ camp, sometimes he visited a banana plantation, bought a fresh horse, and pushed on again. When he reached the Province of Alajuela he made use of the narrow cattle passes, pressing on in a northwesterly direction along the valleys of the San Juan and the San Carlos River. A madness seemed to have seized him, a madness to make his way northward, ever northward.
Over heartbreaking mountainous paths, through miasmic jungles, across sun-baked plateaus, chilled by night and scorched by day, chafed and sore, tortured byniguasandcoloradillas, mosquitoes andchigoes, sleeping in verminous hay-thatched huts of bamboo bound together with bejuco-vine, mislead by lying natives and stolen from by peons, Blake day by day and week by week fought his way after his enemy. When worn to lightheadedness he drankguaroand great quantities of black coffee; when ill he ate quinin.
The mere act of pursuit had become automatic with him. He no longer remembered why he was seeking out this man. He no longer remembered the crime that lay at the root of that flight and pursuit. It was not often, in fact, that his thoughts strayed back to his old life. When he did think of it, it seemed only something too far away to remember, something phantasmal, something belonging to another world. There were times when all his journeying through steaming swamplands and forests of teak and satinwood and over indigo lagoons and mountain-passes of moonlit desolation seemed utterly and unfathomably foolish. But he fought back such moods, as though they were a weakness. He let nothing deter him. He stuck to his trail, instinctively, doggedly, relentlessly.
It was at Chalavia that a peon named Tico Viquez came to Blake with the news of a white man lying ill of black-water fever in a native hut. For so much gold, Tico Viquez intimated, he would lead the señor to the hut in question.
Blake, who had no gold to spare, covered the startled peon with his revolver and commanded Viquez to take him to that hut. There was that in the white man’s face which caused the peon to remember that life was sweet. He led the way through a reptilious swamp and into the fringe of a nispero forest, where they came upon a hut with a roof of corrugated iron and walls of wattled bamboo.
Blake, with his revolver in his hand and his guide held before him as a human shield, cautiously approached the door of this hut, for he feared treachery. Then, with equal caution, he peered through the narrow doorway. He stood there for several moments, without moving.
Then he slipped his revolver back into his pocket and stepped into the hut. For there, in one corner of it, lay Binhart. He lay on a bed made of bull-hide stretched across a rough-timbered frame. Yet what Blake looked down on seemed more a shriveled mummy of Binhart than the man himself. A vague trouble took possession of the detective as he blinked calmly down at the glazed and sunken eyes, the gaunt neck, the childishly helpless body. He stood there, waiting until the man on the sagging bull-skin saw him.
“Hello, Jim!” said the sick man, in little more than a whisper.
“Hello, Connie!” was the other’s answer. He picked up a palmetto frond and fought away the flies. The uncleanness of the place turned his stomach.
“What’s up, Connie?” he asked, sitting calmly down beside the narrow bed.
The sick man moved a hand, weakly, as though it were the yellow flapper of some wounded amphibian.
“The jig’s up!” he said. The faint mockery of a smile wavered across the painfully gaunt face. It reminded the other man of heat-lightning on a dark skyline. “You got me, Jim. But it won’t do much good. I’m going to cash in.”
“What makes you say that?” argued Blake, studying the lean figure. There was a look of mild regret on his own sodden and haggard face. “What’s wrong with you, anyway?”
The man on the bed did not answer for some time. When he spoke, he spoke without looking at the other man.
“They said it was black-water fever. Then they said it was yellow-jack. But I know it’s not. I think it’s typhoid, or swamp fever. It’s worse than malaria. I dam’ near burn up every night. I get out of my head. I’ve done that three nights. That’s why the niggers won’t come near me now!”
Blake leaned forward and fought away the flies again.
“Then it’s a good thing I got up with you.”
The sick man rolled his eyes in their sockets, so as to bring his enemy into his line of vision.
“Why?” he asked.
“Because I’m not going to let you die,” was Blake’s answer.
“You can’t help it, Jim! The jig’s up!”
“I’m going to get a litter and get you up out o’ this hell-hole of a swamp,” announced Blake. “I’m going to have you carried up to the hills. Then I’m going back to Chalavia to get a doctor o’ some kind. Then I’m going to put you on your feet again!”
Binhart slowly moved his head from side to side. Then the heat-lightning smile played about the hollow face again.
“It was some chase, Jim, wasn’t it?” he said, without looking at his old-time enemy.
Blake stared down at him with his haggard hound’s eyes; there was no answering smile on his heavy lips, now furzed with their grizzled growth of hair. There seemed something ignominious in such an end, something futile and self-frustrating. It was unjust. It left everything so hideously incomplete. He revolted against it with a sullen and senseless rage.
“By God, you’re not going to die!” declared the staring and sinewy-necked man at the bedside. “I say you’re not going to die. I’m going to get you out o’ here alive!”
A sweat of weakness stood out on Binhart’s white face.
“Where to?” he asked, as he had asked once before. And his eyes remained closed as he put the question.
“To the pen,” was the answer which rose to Blake’s lips. But he did not utter the words. Instead, he rose impatiently to his feet. But the man on the bed must have sensed that unspoken response, for he opened his eyes and stared long and mournfully at his heavy-bodied enemy.
“You’ll never get me there!” he said, in little more than a whisper. “Never!”
Binhart was moved that night up into the hills. There he was installed in a bungalow of an abandoned banana plantation and a doctor was brought to his bedside. He was delirious by the time this doctor arrived, and his ravings through the night were a source of vague worry to his enemy. On the second day the sick man showed signs of improvement.
For three weeks Blake watched over Binhart, saw to his wants, journeyed to Chalavia for his food and medicines. When the fever was broken and Binhart began to gain strength the detective no longer made the trip to Chalavia in person. He preferred to remain with the sick man.
He watched that sick man carefully, jealously, hour by hour and day by day. A peon servant was paid to keep up the vigil when Blake slept, as sleep he must.
But the strain was beginning to tell on him. He walked heavily. The asthmatic wheeze of his breathing became more audible. His earlier touch of malaria returned to him, and he suffered from intermittent chills and fever. The day came when Blake suggested it was about time for them to move on.
“Where to?” asked Binhart. Little had passed between the two men, but during all those silent nights and days each had been secretly yet assiduously studying the other.
“Back to New York,” was Blake’s indifferent-noted answer. Yet this indifference was a pretense, for no soul had ever hungered more for a white man’s country than did the travel-worn and fever-racked Blake. But he had his part to play, and he did not intend to shirk it. They went about their preparations quietly, like two fellow excursionists making ready for a journey with which they were already over-familiar. It was while they sat waiting for the guides and mules that Blake addressed himself to the prisoner.
“Connie,” he said, “I’m taking you back. It doesn’t make much difference whether I take you back dead or alive. But I’m going to take you back.”
The other man said nothing, but his slight head-movement was one of comprehension.
“So I just wanted to say there’s no side-stepping, no four-flushing, at this end of the trip!”
“I understand,” was Binhart’s listless response.
“I’m glad you do,” Blake went on in his dully monotonous voice. “Because I got where I can’t stand any more breaks.”
“All right, Jim,” answered Binhart. They sat staring at each other. It was not hate that existed between them. It was something more dormant, more innate. It was something that had grown ineradicable; as fixed as the relationship between the hound and the hare. Each wore an air of careless listlessness, yet each watched the other, every move, every moment.
It was as they made their way slowly down to the coast that Blake put an unexpected question to Binhart.
“Connie, where in hell did you plant that haul o’ yours?”
This thing had been worrying Blake. Weeks before he had gone through every nook and corner, every pocket and crevice in Binhart’s belongings.
The bank thief laughed a little. He had been growing stronger, day by day, and as his spirits had risen Blake’s had seemed to recede.
“Oh, I left that up in the States, where it’d be safe,” he answered.
“What’ll you do about it?” Blake casually inquired.
“I can’t tell, just yet,” was Binhart’s retort.
He rode on silent and thoughtful for several minutes. “Jim,” he said at last, “we’re both about done for. There’s not much left for either of us. We’re going at this thing wrong. There’s a lot o’ money up there, for somebody. Andyouought to get it!”
“What do you mean?” asked Blake. He resented the bodily weakness that was making burro-riding a torture.
“I mean it’s worth a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to you just to let me drop out. I’d hand you over that much to quit the chase.”
“It ain’t me that’s chasing you, Connie. It’s the Law!” was Blake’s quiet-toned response. And the other man knew he believed it.
“Well, you quit, and I’ll stand for the Law!”
“But, can’t you see, they’d never stand for you!”
“Oh, yes they would. I’d just drop out, and they’d forget about me. And you’d have that pile to enjoy life with!”
Blake thought it over, ponderously, point by point. For not one fraction of a second could he countenance the thought of surrendering Binhart. Yet he wanted both his prisoner and his prisoner’s haul; he wanted his final accomplishment to be complete.
“But how’d we ever handle the deal?” prompted the tired-bodied man on the burro.
“You remember a woman called Elsie Verriner?”
“Yes,” acknowledged Blake, with a pang of regret which he could not fathom, at the mention of the name.
“Well, we could fix it through her.”
“Does Elsie Verriner know where that pile is?” the detective inquired. His withered hulk of a body was warmed by a slow glow of anticipation. There was a woman, he remembered, whom he could count on swinging to his own ends.
“No, but she could get it,” was Binhart’s response.
“And what good would that dome?”
“The two of us could go up to New Orleans. We could slip in there without any one being the wiser. She could meet us. She’d bring the stuff with her. Then, when you had the pile in your hand, I could just fade off the map.”
Blake rode on again in silence.
“All right,” he said at last. “I’m willing.”
“Then how’ll you prove it? How’d I know you’d make good?” demanded Binhart.
“That’s not up to me! You’re the man that’s got to make good!” was Blake’s retort.
“But you’ll give me the chance?” half pleaded his prisoner.
“Sure!” replied Blake, as they rode on again. He was wondering how many more miles of hell he would have to ride through before he could rest. He felt that he would like to sleep for days, for weeks, without any thought of where to-morrow would find him or the next day would bring him.
It was late that day as they climbed up out of a steaming valley into higher ground that Binhart pulled up and studied Blake’s face.
“Jim, you look like a sick man to me!” he declared. He said it without exultation; but there was a new and less passive timber to his voice.
“I’ve been feeling kind o’ mean this last day or two,” confessed Blake. His own once guttural voice was plaintive, as he spoke. It was almost a quavering whine.
“Hadn’t we better lay up for a few days?” suggested Binhart.
“Lay up nothing!” cried Blake, and he clenched that determination by an outburst of blasphemous anger. But he secretly took great doses of quinin and drank much native liquor. He fought against a mental lassitude which he could not comprehend. Never before had that ample machinery of the body failed him in an emergency. Never before had he known an illness that a swallow or two of brandy and a night’s rest could not scatter to the four winds. It bewildered him to find his once capable frame rebelling against its tasks. It left him dazed, as though he had been confronted by the sudden and gratuitous treachery of a life-long servant.
He grew more irritable, more fanciful. He changed guides at the next native village, fearing that Binhart might have grown too intimate with the old ones. He was swayed by an ever-increasing fear of intrigues. He coerced his flagging will into a feverish watchfulness. He became more arbitrary in his movements and exactions. When the chance came, he purchased a repeating Lee-Enfield rifle, which he packed across his sweating back on the trail and slept with under his arm at night. When a morning came when he was too weak and ill to get up, he lay back on his grass couch, with his rifle across his knees, watching Binhart, always watching Binhart.
He seemed to realize that his power was slipping away, and he brooded on some plan for holding his prisoner, on any plan, no matter what it might cost.
He even pretended to sleep, to the end that Binhart might make an effort to break away—and be brought down with a bullet. He prayed that Binhart would try to go, would give him an excuse for the last move that would leave the two of them lying there together. Even to perish there side by side, foolishly, uselessly, seemed more desirable than the thought that Binhart might in the end get away. He seemed satisfied that the two of them should lie there, for all time, each holding the other down, like two embattled stags with their horns inextricably locked. And he waited there, nursing his rifle, watching out of sullenly feverish eyes, marking each movement of the passive-faced Binhart.
But Binhart, knowing what he knew, was content to wait.
He was content to wait until the fever grew, and the poisons of the blood narcotized the dulled brain into indifference, and then goaded it into delirium. Then, calmly equipping himself for his journey, he buried the repeating rifle and slipped away in the night, carrying with him Blake’s quinin and revolver and pocket-filter. He traveled hurriedly, bearing southeast towards the San Juan. Four days later he reached the coast, journeyed by boat to Bluefields, and from that port passed on into the outer world, where time and distance swallowed him up, and no sign of his whereabouts was left behind.
It was six weeks later that a slender-bodied young Nicaraguan known as Doctor Alfonso Sedeno (his right to that title resulting from four years of medical study in Paris) escorted into Bluefields the flaccid and attenuated shadow of Never-Fail Blake. Doctor Sedeno explained to the English shipping firm to whom he handed over his patient that the Señor Americano had been found in a dying condition, ten miles from the camp of the rubber company for which he acted as surgeon. The Señor Americano was apparently a prospector who had been deserted by his partner. He had been very ill. But a few days of complete rest would restore him. The sea voyage would also help. In the meantime, if the shipping company would arrange for credit from the hotel, the matter would assuredly be put right, later on, when the necessary despatches had been returned from New York.
For three weeks of torpor Blake sat in the shadowy hotel, watching the torrential rains that deluged the coast. Then, with the help of a cane, he hobbled from point to point about the town, quaveringly inquiring for any word of his lost partner. He wandered listlessly back and forth, mumbling out a description of the man he sought, holding up strangers with his tremulous-noted inquiries, peering with weak and watery eyes into any quarter that might house a fugitive. But no hint or word of Binhart was to be gleaned from those wanderings, and at the end of a week he boarded a fruit steamer bound for Kingston.
His strength came back to him slowly during that voyage, and when he landed at Kingston he was able to walk without a stick. At Kingston, too, his draft on New York was finally honored. He was able to creep out to Constant Spring, to buy new clothes, to ride in a carriage when he chose, to eat a white man’s food again. The shrunken body under the flaccid skin slowly took on some semblance of its former ponderosity, the watery eyes slowly lost their dead and vapid stare.
And with increase of strength came a corresponding increase of mental activity. All day long he kept turning things over in his tired brain. Hour by silent hour he would ponder the problem before him. It was more rumination than active thought. Yet up from the stagnating depths of his brooding would come an occasional bubble of inspiration.
Binhart, he finally concluded, had gone north. It was the natural thing to do. He would go where his haul was hidden away. Sick of unrest, he would seek peace. He would fall a prey to man’s consuming hunger to speak with his own kind again. Convinced that his enemy was not at his heels, he would hide away somewhere in his own country. And once reasonably assured that this enemy had died as he had left him to die, Binhart would surely remain in his own land, among his own people.
Blake had no proof of this. He could not explain why he accepted it as fact. He merely wrote it down as one of his hunches. And with his old-time faith in the result of that subliminal reasoning, he counted what remained of his money, paid his bills, and sailed from Kingston northward as a steerage passenger in a United Fruit steamer bound for Boston.
As he had expected, he landed at this New England port without detection, without recognition. Six hours later he stepped off a train in New York.
He passed out into the streets of his native city like a ghost emerging from its tomb. There seemed something spectral in the very chill of the thin northern sunlight, after the opulent and oppressive heat of the tropics. A gulf of years seemed to lie between him and the actualities so close to him. A desolating sense of loneliness kept driving him into the city’s noisier and more crowded drinking-places, where, under the lash of alcohol, he was able to wear down his hot ache of deprivation into a dim and dreary regretfulness. Yet the very faces about him still remained phantasmal. The commonplaces of street life continued to take on an alien aspect. They seemed vague and far away, as though viewed through a veil. He felt that the world had gone on, and in going on had forgotten him. Even the scraps of talk, the talk of his own people, fell on his ear with a strange sound.
He found nothing companionable in that cañon of life and movement known as Broadway. He stopped to stare with haggard and wistful eyes at a theater front buoyed with countless electric bulbs, remembering the proud moment when he had been cheered in a box there, for in his curtain-speech the author of the melodrama of crime being presented had confessed that the inspiration and plot of his play had come from that great detective, Never-Fail Blake.
He drifted on down past the cafés and restaurants where he had once dined and supped so well, past the familiar haunts where the appetite of the spirit for privilege had once been as amply fed as the appetite of the body for food. He sought out the darker purlieus of the lower city, where he had once walked as a king and dictated dead-lines and distributed patronage. He drifted into the underworld haunts where his name had at one time been a terror. But now, he could see, his approach no longer resulted in that discreet scurry to cover, that feverish scuttling away for safety, which marks the blacksnake’s progress through a gopher-village.
When he came to Centre Street, at the corner of Broome, he stopped and blinked up at the great gray building wherein he had once held sway. He stood, stoop-shouldered and silent, staring at the green lamps, the green lamps of vigilance that burned as a sign to the sleeping city.
He stood there for some time, unrecognized, unnoticed, watching the platoons of broad-chested “flatties” as they swung out and off to their midnight patrols, marking the plainly clad “elbows” as they passed quietly up and down the great stone steps. He thought of Copeland, and the Commissioner, and of his own last hour at Headquarters. And then his thoughts went on to Binhart, and the trail that had been lost, and the task that stood still ahead of him. And with that memory awakened the old sullen fires, the old dogged and implacable determination.
In the midst of those reviving fires a new thought was fixed; the thought that Binhart’s career was in some way still involved with that of Elsie Verriner. If any one knew of Binhart’s whereabouts, he remembered, it would surely be this woman, this woman on whom, he contended, he could still hold the iron hand of incrimination. The first move would be to find her. And then, at any cost, the truth must be wrung from her.
Never-Fail Blake, from the obscure downtown hotel, into which he crept like a sick hound shunning the light, sent out his call for Elsie Verriner. He sent his messages to many and varied quarters, feeling sure that some groping tentacle of inquiry would eventually come in touch with her.
Yet the days dragged by, and no answer came back to him. He chafed anew at this fresh evidence that his power was a thing of the past, that his word was no longer law. He burned with a sullen and self-consuming anger, an anger that could be neither expressed in action nor relieved in words.
Then, at the end of a week’s time, a note came from Elsie Verriner. It was dated and postmarked “Washington,” and in it she briefly explained that she had been engaged in Departmental business, but that she expected to be in New York on the following Monday. Blake found himself unreasonably irritated by a certain crisp assurance about this note, a certain absence of timorousness, a certain unfamiliar tone of independence. But he could afford to wait, he told himself. His hour would come, later on. And when that hour came, he would take a crimp out of this calm-eyed woman, or the heavens themselves would fall! And finding further idleness unbearable, he made his way to a drinking-place not far from that juncture of First Street and the Bowery, known as Suicide Corner. In this new-worldCabaret de Neanthe drowned his impatience of soul in a Walpurgis Night of five-cent beer and fusel-oil whiskey. But his time would come, he repeated drunkenly, as he watched with his haggard hound’s eyes the meretricious and tragic merriment of the revelers about him—his time would come!
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 didn’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.