Out across the blackness in front of him suddenly flashed a white saber of light. For one moment it circled and wavered restlessly about, feeling like a great finger along the gray surface of the water. Then it smote full on Blake and the deck where he stood, blinding him with its glare, picking out every object and every listening figure as plainly as a calcium picks out a scene on the stage.

Without conscious thought Blake dropped lower behind the ship's rail. He sank still lower, until he found himself down on his hands and knees beside a rope coil. As he did so he heard the call of a challenging Spanish voice, a murmur of voices, and then a repeated command.

There was no answer to this challenge. Then came another command and then silence again. Then a faint thrill arrowed through Blake's crouching body, for from somewhere close behind him a gun-shot rang out and was repeated again and again. Blake knew, at that sound, that Tankred or one of his men was firing straight into the dial of the searchlight, that Tankred himself intended to defy what must surely be an Ecuadorean gunboat. The detective was oppressed by the thought that his own jealously nursed plan might at any moment get a knock on the head.

At almost the same time the peevishly indignant Blake could hear the tinkle of the engine-room bell below him and then the thrash of the screw wings. The boat began to move forward, dangling the knocking and rocking flotilla of lanchas and surf-boats at her side, like a deer-mouse making off with its young. Then came sharp cries of protest, in Spanish, and more cries and curses in harbor-English, and a second engine-room signal and a cessation of the screw thrashings. This was followed by a shower of carbine-shots and the plaintive whine of bullets above the upper-works, the crack and thud of lead against the side-plates. At the same time Blake heard the scream of a denim-clad figure that suddenly pitched from the landing-ladder into the sea. Then came an answering volley, from somewhere close below Blake. He could not tell whether it was from the boat-flotilla or from the port-holes above it. But he knew that Tankred and his men were returning the gunboat's fire.

Blake, by this time, was once more thinking lucidly. Some of the cases in those surf-boats, he remembered, held giant-caps and dynamite, and he knew what was likely to happen if a bullet struck them. He also remembered that he was still exposed to the carbine fire from behind the searchlight.

He stretched out, flat on the deck-boards, and wormed his way slowly and ludicrously aft. He did not bring those uncouth vermiculations to a stop until he was well back in the shelter of a rusty capstan, cut off from the light by a lifeboat swinging on its davits. As he clambered to his feet again he saw this light suddenly go out and then reappear. As it did so he could make out a patrol-boat, gray and low-bodied, slinking forward through the gloom. He could see that boat crowded with men, men in uniform, and he could see that each man carried a carbine. He could also see that it would surely cut across the bow of his own steamer. A moment later he knew that Tankred himself had seen this, for high above the crack and whine of the shooting and the tumult of voices he could now hear Tankred's blasphemous shouts.

"Cut loose those boats!" bellowed the frantic gun-runner. Then he repeated the command, apparently in Spanish. And to this came an answering babel of cries and expostulations and counter-cries. But still the firing from behind the searchlight kept up. Blake could see a half-naked seaman with a carpenter's ax skip monkey-like down the landing-ladder. He saw the naked arm strike with the ax, the two hands suddenly catch at the bare throat, and the figure fall back in a huddle against the red-stained wooden steps.

Blake also saw, to his growing unrest, that the firing was increasing in volume, that at the front of the ship sharp volley and counter-volley was making a pandemonium of the very deck on which he knelt. For by this time the patrol-boat with the carbineers had reached the steamer's side and a boarding-ladder had been thrown across her quarter. And Blake began to comprehend that he was in the most undesirable of situations. He could hear the repeated clang of the engine-room telegraph and Tankred's frenzied and ineffectual bellow of "Full steam ahead! For the love o' Christ, full ahead down there!"

Through all that bedlam Blake remained resentfully cool, angrily clear-thoughted. He saw that the steamer did not move forward. He concluded the engine-room to be deserted. And he saw both the futility and the danger of remaining where he was.

He crawled back to where he remembered the rope-coil lay, dragging the loose end of it back after him, and then lowering it over the ship's side until it touched the water. Then he shifted this rope along the rail until it swung over the last of the line of surf-boats that bobbed and thudded against the side-plates of the gently rolling steamer. About him, all the while, he could hear the shouts of men and the staccato crack of the rifles. But he saw to it that his rope was well tied to the rail-stanchion. Then he clambered over the rail itself, and with a double twist of the rope about his great leg let himself ponderously down over the side.

He swayed there, for a moment, until the roll of the ship brought him thumping against the rusty plates again. At the same moment the shifting surf-boat swung in under him. Releasing his hold, he went tumbling down between the cartridge-cases and the boat-thwarts.

This boat, he saw, was still securely tied to its mate, one of the larger-bodied lanchas, and he had nothing with which to sever the rope. His first impulse was to reach for his revolver and cut through the manilla strands by means of a half-dozen quick shots. But this, he knew, would too noisily announce his presence there. So he fell on his knees and peered and prodded about the boat bottom. There, to his surprise, he saw the huddled body of a dead man, face down. This body he turned over, running an exploring hand along the belt-line. As he had hoped, he found a heavy nine-inch knife there.

He was dodging back to the bow of the surf-boat when a uniformed figure carrying a rifle came scuttling and shouting down the landing-ladder. Blake's spirits sank as he saw that figure. He knew now that his movement had been seen and understood. He knew, too, as he saw the figure come scrambling out over the rocking boats, what capture would mean.

He had the last strand of the rope severed before the Ecuadorean with the carbine reached the lancha next to him. He still felt, once he was free, that he could use his revolver and get away. But before Blake could push off a sinewy brown hand reached out and clutched the gunwale of the liberated boat. Blake ignored the clutching hand. But, relying on his own sheer strength, he startled the owning of the hand by suddenly flinging himself forward, seizing the carbine barrel, and wresting it free. A second later it disappeared beneath the surface of the water.

That impassioned brown hand, however, still clung to the boat's gunwale. It clung there determinedly, blindly—and Blake knew there was no time for a struggle. He brought the heavy-bladed knife down on the clinging fingers. It was a stroke like that of a cleaver on a butcher's block. In the strong white light that still played on them he could see the flash of teeth in the man's opened mouth, the upturn of the staring eye-balls as the severed fingers fell away and he screamed aloud with pain.

But with one quick motion of his gorilla-like arms Blake pushed his boat free, telling himself there was still time, warning himself to keep cool and make the most of every chance. Yet as he turned to take up the oars he saw that he had been discovered by the Ecuadoreans on the freighter's deck, that his flight was not to be as simple as he had expected. He saw the lean brown face, picked out by the white light, as a carbineer swung his short-barreled rifle out over the rail—and the man in the surf-boat knew by that face what was coming.

His first impulse was to reach into his pocket for his revolver. But that, he knew, was already too late, for a second man had joined the first and a second rifle was already swinging round on him. His next thought was to dive over the boat's side. This thought had scarcely formulated itself, however, before he heard the bark of the rifle and saw the puff of smoke.

At the same moment he felt the rip and tug of the bullet through the loose side-folds of his coat. And with that rip and tug came a third thought, over which he did not waver. He threw up his hands, sharply, and flung himself headlong across the body of the dead man in the bottom of the surf-boat.

He fell heavily, with a blow that shook the wind from his body. But as he lay there he knew better than to move. He lay there, scarcely daring to breathe, dreading that the rise and fall of his breast would betray his ruse, praying that his boat would veer about so his body would be in the shadow. For he knew the two waiting carbines were still pointed at him.

He lay there, counting the seconds, knowing that he and his slowly drifting surf-boat were still in the full white fulgor of the wavering searchlight. He lay there as a second shot came whistling overhead, spitting into the water within three feet of him. Then a third bullet came, this time tearing through the wood of the boat bottom beside him. And he still waited, without moving, wondering what the next shot would do. He still waited, his passive body horripilating with a vast indignation at the thought of the injustice of it all, at the thought that he must lie there and let half-baked dagoes shower his unprotesting back with lead. But he lay there, still counting the seconds, as the boat drifted slowly out on the quietly moving tide.

Then a new discovery disturbed him. It obliterated his momentary joy at the thought that they were no longer targeting down at him. He could feel the water slowly rising about his prostrate body. He realized that the boat in which he lay was filling. He calmly figured out that with the body of the dead man and the cartridge-cases about him it was carrying a dead weight of nearly half a ton. And through the bullet hole in its bottom the water was rushing in.

Yet he could do nothing. He could make no move. For at the slightest betrayal of life, he knew, still another volley would come from that ever-menacing steamer's deck. He counted the minutes, painfully, methodically, feeling the water rise higher and higher about his body. The thought of this rising water and what it meant did not fill him with panic. He seemed more the prey of a deep and sullen resentment that his plans should be so gratuitously interfered with, that his approach to the Trunella should be so foolishly delayed, that so many cross-purposes should postpone and imperil his quest of Binhart.

He knew, by the slowly diminishing sounds, that he was drifting further and further away from Tankred and his crowded fore-deck. But he was still within the area of that ever-betraying searchlight. Some time, he knew, he must drift beyond it. But until that moment came he dare make no move to keep himself afloat.

By slowly turning his head an inch or two he was able to measure the height of the gunwale above the water. Then he made note of where an oar lay, asking himself how long he could keep afloat on a timber so small, wondering how far he could be from land. Then he suddenly fell to questioning if the waters of that coast were shark infested.

He was still debating the problem when he became conscious of a change about him. A sudden pall of black fell like balm on his startled face. The light was no longer there. He found himself engulfed in a relieving, fortifying darkness, a darkness that brought him to his feet in the slowly moving boat. He was no longer visible to the rest of the world. At a breath, almost, he had passed into eclipse.

His first frantic move was to tug and drag the floating body at his feet to the back of the boat and roll it overboard. Then he waded forward and one by one carefully lifted the cases of ammunition and tumbled them over the side. One only he saved, a smaller wooden box which he feverishly pried open with his knife and emptied into the sea. Then he flung away the top boards, placing the empty box on the seat in front of him. Then he fell on his hands and knees, fingering along the boat bottom until he found the bullet-hole through which the water was boiling up.

Once he had found it he began tearing at his clothes like a madman, for the water was now alarmingly high. These rags and shreds of clothing he twisted together and forced into the hole, tamping them firmly into place with his revolver-barrel.

Then he caught up the empty wooden box from the boat seat and began to bale. He baled solemnly, as though his very soul were in it. He was oblivious of the strange scene silhouetted against the night behind him, standing out as distinctly as though it were a picture thrown on a sheet from a magic-lantern slide—a circle of light surrounding a drifting and rusty-sided ship on which tumult had turned into sudden silence. He was oblivious of his own wet clothing and his bruised body and the dull ache in his leg wound of many months ago. He was intent only on the fact that he was lowering the water in his surf-boat, that he was slowly drifting further and further away from the enemies who had interfered with his movements, and that under the faint spangle of lights which he could still see in the offing on his right lay an anchored liner, and that somewhere on that liner lay a man for whom he was looking.



XIII

Once assured that his surf-boat would keep afloat, Blake took the oars and began to row. But even as he swung the boat lumberingly about he realized that he could make no headway with such a load, for almost a foot of water still surged along its bottom. So he put down the oars and began to bale again. He did not stop until the boat was emptied. Then he carefully replugged the bullet-hole, took up the oars again, and once more began to row.

He rowed, always keeping his bow towards the far-off spangle of lights which showed where the Trunella lay at anchor.

He rowed doggedly, determinedly. He rowed until his arms were tired and his back ached. But still he did not stop. It occurred to him, suddenly, that there might be a tide running against him, that with all his labor he might be making no actual headway. Disturbed by this thought, he fixed his attention on two almost convergent lights on shore, rowing with renewed energy as he watched them. He had the satisfaction of seeing these two lights slowly come together, and he knew he was making some progress.

Still another thought came to him as he rowed doggedly on. And that was the fear that at any moment, now, the quick equatorial morning might dawn. He had no means of judging the time. To strike a light was impossible, for his matches were water-soaked. Even his watch, he found, had been stopped by its bath in sea-water. But he felt that long hours had passed since midnight, that it must be close to the break of morning. And the fear of being overtaken by daylight filled him with a new and more frantic energy.

He rowed feverishly on, until the lights of the Trunella stood high above him and he could hear the lonely sound of her bells as the watch was struck. Then he turned and studied the dark hull of the steamer as she loomed up closer in front of him. He could see her only in outline, at first, picked out here and there by a light. But there seemed something disheartening, something intimidating, in her very quietness, something suggestive of a plague-ship deserted by crew and passengers alike. That dark and silent hull at which he stared seemed to house untold possibilities of evil.

Yet Blake remembered that it also housed Binhart. And with that thought in his mind he no longer cared to hesitate. He rowed in under the shadowy counter, bumping about the rudder-post. Then he worked his way forward, feeling quietly along her side-plates, foot by foot.

He had more than half circled the ship before he came to her landing-ladder. The grilled platform at the bottom of this row of steps stood nearly as high as his shoulders, as though the ladder-end had been hauled up for the night.

Blake balanced himself on the bow of his surf-boat and tugged and strained until he gained the ladder-bottom. He stood there, recovering his breath, for a moment or two, peering up towards the inhospitable silence above him. But still he saw no sign of life. No word or challenge was flung down at him. Then, after a moment's thought, he lay flat on the grill and deliberately pushed the surf-boat off into the darkness. He wanted no more of it. He knew, now, there could be no going back.

He climbed cautiously up the slowly swaying steps, standing for a puzzled moment at the top and peering about him. Then he crept along the deserted deck, where a month of utter idleness, apparently, had left discipline relaxed. He shied away from the lights, here and there, that dazzled his eyes after his long hours of darkness. With an instinct not unlike that which drives the hiding wharf-rat into the deepest corner at hand, he made his way down through the body of the ship. He shambled and skulked his way down, a hatless and ragged and uncouth figure, wandering on along gloomy gangways and corridors until he found himself on the threshold of the engine-room itself.

He was about to back out of this entrance and strike still deeper when he found himself confronted by an engineer smoking a short brier-root pipe. The pale blue eyes of this sandy-headed engineer were wide with wonder, startled and incredulous wonder, as they stared at the ragged figure in the doorway.

"Where in the name o' God did you come from?" demanded the man with the brier-root pipe.

"I came out from Guayaquil," answered Blake, reaching searchingly down in his wet pocket. "And I can't go back."

The sandy-headed man backed away.

"From the fever camps?"

Blake could afford to smile at the movement.

"Don't worry—there 's no fever 'round me. That 's what I 've been through!" And he showed the bullet-holes through his tattered coat-cloth.

"How'd you get here?"

"Rowed out in a surf-boat—and I can't go back!"

The sandy-headed engineer continued to stare at the uncouth figure in front of him, to stare at it with vague and impersonal wonder. And in facing that sandy-headed stranger, Blake knew, he was facing a judge whose decision was to be of vast moment in his future destiny, whose word, perhaps, was to decide on the success or failure of much wandering about the earth.

"I can't go back!" repeated Blake, as he reached out and dropped a clutter of gold into the palm of the other man. The pale blue eyes looked at the gold, looked out along the gangway, and then looked back at the waiting stranger.

"That Alfaro gang after you?" he inquired.

"They 're all after me!" answered the swaying figure in rags. They were talking together, by this time, almost in whispers, like two conspirators. The young engineer seemed puzzled. But a wave of relief swept through Blake when in the pale blue eyes he saw almost a look of pity.

"What d' you want me to do?" he finally asked.

Blake, instead of answering that question, asked another.

"When do you move out of here?"

The engineer put the coins in his pocket.

"Before noon to-morrow, thank God! The Yorktown ought to be here by morning—she 's to give us our release!"

"Then you'll sail by noon?"

"We 've got to! They 've tied us up here over a month, without reason. They worked that old yellow-jack gag—and not a touch of fever aboard all that time!"

A great wave of contentment surged through Blake's weary body. He put his hand up on the smaller man's shoulder.

"Then you just get me out o' sight until we 're off, and I 'll fix things so you 'll never be sorry for it!"

The pale-eyed engineer studied the problem. Then he studied the figure in front of him.

"There's nothing crooked behind this?"

Blake forced a laugh from his weary lungs. "I 'll prove that in two days by wireless—and pay first-class passage to the next port of call!"

"I 'm fourth engineer on board here, and the Old Man would sure fire me, if—"

"But you needn't even know about me," contended Blake. "Just let me crawl in somewhere where I can sleep!"

"You need it, all right, by that face of yours!"

"I sure do," acknowledged the other as he stood awaiting his judge's decision.

"Then I 'd better get you down to my bunk. But remember, I can only stow you there until we get under way—perhaps not that long!"

He stepped cautiously out and looked along the gangway. "This is your funeral, mind, when the row comes. You 've got to face that, yourself!"

"Oh, I 'll face it, all right!" was Blake's calmly contented answer. "All I want now is about nine hours' sleep!"

"Come on, then," said the fourth engineer. And Blake followed after as he started deeper down into the body of the ship. And already, deep below him, he could hear the stokers at work in their hole.



XIV

After seven cataleptic hours of unbroken sleep Blake awakened to find his shoulder being prodded and shaken by the pale-eyed fourth engineer. The stowaway's tired body, during that sleep, had soaked in renewed strength as a squeezed sponge soaks up water. He could afford to blink with impassive eyes up at the troubled face of the young man wearing the oil-stained cap.

"What's wrong?" he demanded, awakening to a luxurious comprehension of where he was and what he had escaped. Then he sat up in the narrow berth, for it began to dawn on him that the engines of the Trunella were not in motion. "Why are n't we under way?"

"They 're having trouble up there, with the Commandante. We can't get off inside of an hour—and anything's likely to happen in that time. That's why I 've got to get you out of here!"

"Where 'll you get me?" asked Blake. He was on his feet by this time, arraying himself in his wet and ragged clothing.

"That's what I 've been talking over with the Chief," began the young engineer. Blake wheeled about and fixed him with his eye.

"Did you let your Chief in on this?" he demanded, and he found it hard to keep his anger in check.

"I had to let him in on it," complained the other. "If it came to a hue up or a searching party through here, they 'd spot you first thing. You 're not a passenger; you 're not signed; you're not anything!"

"Well, supposing I 'm not?"

"Then they 'd haul you back and give you a half year in that Lazaretto o' theirs!"

"Well, what do I have to do to keep from being hauled back?"

"You 'll have to be one o' the workin' crew, until we get off. The Chief says that, and I think he's right!"

A vague foreboding filled Blake's soul. He had imagined that the ignominy and agony of physical labor was a thing of the past with him. And he was still sore in every sinew and muscle of his huge body.

"You don't mean stoke-hole work?" he demanded.

The fourth engineer continued to look worried.

"You don't happen to know anything about machinery, do you?" he began.

"Of course I do," retorted Blake, thinking gratefully of his early days as a steamfitter.

"Then why could n't I put you in a cap and jumper and work you in as one of the greasers?"

"What do you mean by greasers?"

"That's an oiler in the engine-room. It—it may not be the coolest place on earth, in this latitude, but it sure beats the stoke-hole!"

And it was in this way, thirty minutes later, that Blake became a greaser in the engine-room of the Trunella.

Already, far above him, he could hear the rattle and shriek of winch-engines and the far-off muffled roar of the whistle, rumbling its triumph of returning life. Already the great propeller engines themselves had been tested, after their weeks of idleness, languidly stretching and moving like an awakening sleeper, slowly swinging their solemn tons forward through their projected cycles and then as solemnly back again.

About this vast pyramid-shaped machinery, galleried like a Latin house-court, tremulous with the breath of life that sang and hissed through its veins, the new greaser could see his fellow workers with their dripping oil-cans, groping gallery by gallery up towards the square of daylight that sifted down into the oil-scented pit where he stood. He could see his pale-eyed friend, the fourth engineer, spanner in hand, clinging to a moving network of steel like a spider to its tremulous web—and in his breast, for the first time, a latent respect for that youth awakened. He could see other greasers wriggling about between intricate shafts and wheels, crawling cat-like along narrow steel ledges, mounting steep metal ladders guarded by hot hand rails, peering into oil boxes, "worrying" the vacuum pump, squatting and kneeling about iron floors where oil-pits pooled and pump-valves clacked and electric machines whirred and the antiphonal song of the mounting steam roared like music in the ears of the listening Blake, aching as he was for the first relieving throb of the screws. Stolidly and calmly the men about him worked, threatened by flailing steel, hissed at by venomously quiescent powers, beleaguered by mysteriously moving shafts, surrounded by countless valves and an inexplicable tangle of pipes, hemmed in by an incomprehensible labyrinth of copper wires, menaced by the very shimmering joints and rods over which they could run such carelessly affectionate fingers.

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 his dungaree jumper 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 and cargadores. He was a dungaree-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 overheard 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 the Trunella swung 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 the Trunella had steamed many miles southward on her long journey towards the Straits of Magellan.



XV

Seven days after the Trunella swung 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 aerial 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 by niguas and coloradillas, mosquitoes and chigoes, 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 drank guaro and 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 satin-wood 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 senor 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, was n'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 one before. And his eyes remained closed as put the question.

"To the pen," was the answer which rose 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!"



XVI

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 does n'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. And you ought 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 do me?"

"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.

"Had n'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 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.



XVII

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 Senor Americano had been found in a dying condition, ten miles from the camp of the rubber company for which he acted as surgeon. The Senor 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 canon 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 cafes 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 Center 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 down-town 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-world Cabaret de Neant he 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!



XVIII

Blake did not look up as he heard the door open and the woman step into the room. There was an echo of his old-time theatricalism in that dissimulation of stolid indifference. But the old-time stage-setting, he knew, was no longer there. Instead of sitting behind an oak desk at Headquarters, he was staring down at a beer-stained card-table in the dingy back room of a dingy downtown hotel.

He knew the woman had closed the door and crossed the room to the other side of the card-table, but still he did not look up at her. The silence lengthened until it became acute, epochal, climactic.

"You sent for me?" his visitor finally said.

And as Elsie Verriner uttered the words he was teased by a vague sense that the scene had happened before, that somewhere before in their lives it had been duplicated, word by word and move by move.

"Sit down," he said with an effort at the gruffness of assured authority. But the young woman did not do as he commanded. She remained still standing, and still staring down at the face of the man in front of her.

So prolonged was this stare that Blake began to be embarrassingly conscious of it, to fidget under it. When he looked up he did so circuitously, pretending to peer beyond the white face and the staring eyes of the young woman confronting him. Yet she ultimately coerced his unsteady gaze, even against his own will. And as he had expected, he saw written on her face something akin to horror.

As he, in turn, stared back at her, and in her eyes saw first incredulity, and then, what stung him more, open pity itself, it came home to him that he must indeed have altered for the worse, that his face and figure must have changed. For the first time it flashed over him: he was only the wreck of the man he had once been. Yet at the core of that wreck burned the old passion for power, the ineradicable appetite for authority. He resented the fact that she should feel sorry for him. He inwardly resolved to make her suffer for that pity, to enlighten her as to what life was still left in the battered old carcass which she could so openly sorrow over.

"Well, I 'm back," he announced in his guttural bass, as though to bridge a silence that was becoming abysmal.

"Yes, you 're back!" echoed Elsie Verriner. She spoke absently, as though her mind were preoccupied with a problem that seemed inexplicable.

"And a little the worse for wear," he pursued, with his mirthless croak of a laugh. Then he flashed up at her a quick look of resentment, a look which he found himself unable to repress. "While you're all dolled up," he said with a snort, as though bent on wounding her, "dolled up like a lobster palace floater!"

It hurt him more than ever to see that he could not even dethrone that fixed look of pity from her face, that even his abuse could not thrust aside her composure.

"I 'm not a lobster palace floater," she quietly replied. "And you know it."

"Then what are you?" he demanded.

"I 'm a confidential agent of the Treasury Department," was her quiet-toned answer.

"Oho!" cried Blake. "So that's why we 've grown so high and mighty!"

The woman sank into the chair beside which she had been standing. She seemed impervious to his mockery.

"What do you want me for?" she asked, and the quick directness of her question implied not so much that time was being wasted on side issues as that he was cruelly and unnecessarily demeaning himself in her eyes.

It was then that Blake swung about, as though he, too, were anxious to sweep aside the trivialities that stood between him and his end, as though he, too, were conscious of the ignominy of his own position.

"You know where I 've been and what I 've been doing!" he suddenly cried out.

"I 'm not positive that I do," was the woman's guarded answer.

"That's a lie!" thundered Blake. "You know as well as I do!"

"What have you been doing?" asked the woman, almost indulgently.

"I 've been trailing Binhart, and you know it! And what's more, you know where Binhart is, now, at this moment!"

"What was it you wanted me for?" reiterated the white-faced woman, without looking at him.

Her evasions did more than anger Blake; they maddened him. For years now he had been compelled to face her obliquities, to puzzle over the enigma of her ultimate character, and he was tired of it all. He made no effort to hold his feelings in check. Even into his voice crept that grossness which before had seemed something of the body alone.

"I want to know where Binhart is!" he cried, leaning forward so that his head projected pugnaciously from his shoulders like the head of a fighting-cock.

"Then you have only wasted time in sending for me," was the woman's obdurate answer. Yet beneath her obduracy was some vague note of commiseration which he could not understand.

"I want that man, and I 'm going to get him," was Blake's impassioned declaration. "And before you get out of this room you 're going to tell me where he is!"

She met his eyes, studiously, deliberately, as though it took a great effort to do so. Their glances seemed to close in and lock together.

"Jim!" said the woman, and it startled him to see that there were actual tears in her eyes. But he was determined to remain superior to any of her subterfuges. His old habit returned to him, the old habit of "pounding" a prisoner. He knew that one way to get at the meat of a nut was to smash the nut. And in all his universe there seemed only one issue and one end, and that was to find his trail and get his man. So he cut her short with his quick volley of abuse.

"I 've got your number, Elsie Verriner, alias Chaddy Cravath," he thundered out, bringing his great withered fist down on the table top. "I 've got every trick you ever turned stowed away in cold storage. I 've got 'em where they 'll keep until the cows come home. I don't care whether you 're a secret agent or a Secretary of War. There 's only one thing that counts with me now. And I 'm going to win out. I 'm going to win out, in the end, no matter what it costs. If you try to block me in this I 'll put you where you belong. I 'll drag you down until you squeal like a cornered rat. I 'll put you so low you 'll never even stand up again!"

The woman leaned a little forward, staring into his eyes.

"I did n't expect this of you, Jim," she said. Her voice was tremulous as she spoke, and still again he could see on her face that odious and unfathomable pity.

"There 's lots of things were n't expected of me. But I 'm going to surprise you all. I 'm going to get what I 'm after or I 'm going to put you where I ought to have put you two years ago!"

"Jim," said the woman, white-lipped hut compelling herself to calmness, "don't go on like this! Don't! You're only making it worse, every minute!"

"Making what worse?" demanded Blake.

"The whole thing. It was a mistake, from the first. I could have told you that. But you did then what you 're trying to do now. And see what you 've lost by it!"

"What have I lost by it?"

"You 've lost everything," she answered, and her voice was thin with misery. "Everything—just as they counted on your doing, just as they expected!"

"As who expected?"

"As Copeland and the others expected when they sent you out on a blind trail."

"I was n't sent out on a blind trail."

"But you found nothing when you went out. Surely you remember that."

It seemed like going back to another world to another life, as he sat there coercing his memory to meet the past, the abysmal and embittered past which he had grown to hate.

"Are you trying to say this Binhart case was a frame up?" he suddenly cried out.

"They wanted you out of the way. It was the only trick they could think of."

"That's a lie!" declared Blake.

"It's not a lie. They knew you 'd never give up. They even handicapped you—started you wrong, to be sure it would take time, to be positive of a clear field."

Blake stared at her, almost stupidly. His mind was groping about, trying to find some adequate motive for this new line of duplicity. He kept warning himself that she was not to be trusted. Human beings, all human beings, he had found, moved only by indirection. He was too old a bird to have sand thrown in his eyes.

"Why, you welched on Binhart yourself. You put me on his track. You sent me up to Montreal!"

"They made me do that," confessed the unhappy woman. "He was n't in Montreal. He never had been there!"

"You had a letter from him there, telling you to come to 881 King Edward when the coast was clear."

"That letter was two years old. It was sent from a room in the King Edward Hotel. That was part of their plant."

He sat for a long time thinking it over, point by point. He became disturbed by a sense of instability in the things that had once seemed most enduring, the sickening cataclysmic horror of a man who finds the very earth under his feet shaken by its earthquake. His sodden face appeared to age even as he sat there laboriously reliving the past, the past that seemed suddenly empty and futile.

"So you sold me out!" he finally said, studying her white face with his haggard hound's eyes.

"I could n't help it, Jim. You forced it on me. You wouldn't give me the chance to do anything else. I wanted to help you—but you held me off. You put the other thing before my friendship!"

"What do you know about friendship?" cried the gray-faced man.

"We were friends once," answered the woman, ignoring the bitter mockery in his cry.

He stared at her, untouched by the note of pathos in her voice. There was something abstracted about his stare, as though his mind had not yet adjusted itself to a vast new discovery. His inner vision seemed dazzled, just as the eye itself may be dazzled by unexpected light.

"So you sold me out!" he said for a third time. He did not move, but under that lava-like shell of diffidence were volcanic and coursing fires which even he himself could not understand.

"Jim, I would have done anything for you, once," went on the unhappy woman facing him. "You could have saved me—from him, from myself. But you let the chance slip away. I couldn't go on. I saw where it would end. So I had to save myself. I had to save myself—in the only way I could. Oh, Jim, if you 'd only been kinder!"

She sat with her head bowed, ashamed of her tears, the tears which he could not understand. He stared at her great crown of carefully coiled and plaited hair, shining in the light of the unshaded electric-bulb above them. It took him back to other days when he had looked at it with other eyes. And a comprehension of all he had lost crept slowly home to him. Poignant as was the thought that she had seemed beautiful to him and he might have once possessed her, this thought was obliterated by the sudden memory that in her lay centered everything that had caused his failure. She had been the weak link in his life, the life which he had so wanted to crown with success.

"You welcher!" he suddenly gasped, as he continued to stare at her. His very contemplation of her white face seemed to madden him. In it he seemed to find some signal and sign of his own dissolution, of his lost power, of his outlived authority. In her seemed to abide the reason for all that he had endured. To have attained to a comprehension of her own feelings was beyond him. Even the effort to understand them would have been a contradiction of his whole career. She only angered him. And the hot anger that crept through his body seemed to smoke out of some inner recess of his being a hate that was as unreasonable as it was animal-like. All the instincts of existence, in that moment, reverted to life's one primordial problem, the problem of the fighting man to whom every other man must be an opponent, the problem of the feral being, as to whether it should kill or be killed.

Into that unreasoning blind rage flared all the frustration of months, of years, all the disappointments of all his chase, all the defeat of all his career. Even as she sat there in her pink and white frailty she knew and nursed the secret for which he had girdled the world. He felt that he must tear it from her, that he must crush it out of her body as the pit is squeezed from a cherry. And the corroding part of it was that he had been outwitted by a woman, that he was being defied by a physical weakling, a slender-limbed thing of ribbons and laces whose back he could bend and break across his great knee.

He lurched forward to his feet. His great crouching body seemed drawn towards her by some slow current which he could not control.

"Where's Binhart?" he suddenly gasped, and the explosive tensity of that wheezing cry caused her to look up, startled. He swayed toward her as she did so, swept by some power not his own. There was something leonine in his movement, something leonine in his snarl as he fell on her. He caught her body in his great arms and shook it. He moved without any sense of movement, without any memory of it.

"Where 's Binhart?" he repeated, foolishly, for by this time his great hand had closed on her throat and all power of speech was beyond her. He swung her about and bore her back across the table. She did not struggle. She lay there so passive in his clutch that a dull pride came to him at the thought of his own strength. This belated sense of power seemed to intoxicate him. He was swept by a blind passion to crush, to obliterate. It seemed as though the rare and final moment for the righting of vast wrongs, for the ending of great injustices, were at hand. His one surprise was that she did not resist him, that she did not struggle.

From side to side he twisted and flailed her body about, in his madness, gloating over her final subserviency to his will, marveling how well adapted for attack was this soft and slender column of the neck, on which his throttling fingers had fastened themselves. Instinctively they had sought out and closed on that slender column, guided to it by some ancestral propulsion, by some heritage of the brute. It was made to get a grip on, a neck like that! And he grunted aloud, with wheezing and voluptuous grunts of gratification, as he saw the white face alter and the wide eyes darken with terror. He was making her suffer. He was no longer enveloped by that mild and tragically inquiring stare that had so discomforted him. He was no longer stung by the thought that she was good to look on, even with her head pinned down against a beer-stained card-table. He was converting her into something useless and broken, into something that could no longer come between him and his ends. He was completely and finally humiliating her. He was breaking her. He was converting her into something corrupt. . . . Then his pendulous throat choked with a falsetto gasp of wonder. He was killing her!

Then, as suddenly as it had come, the smoke of that mental explosion seemed to clear away. Even as he gaped into the white face so close to his own he awoke to reason. The consciousness of how futile, of how odious, of how maniacal, it all was swept over him. He had fallen low, but he had never dreamed that he could fall so low as this.

A reaction of physical nausea left him weak and dizzy. The flexor muscles of his fingers relaxed. An ague of weakness crept through his limbs. A vertiginous faintness brought him half tumbling and half rolling back into his chair, wheezing and moist with sweat. He sat there looking about him, like a sheep killer looking up from the ewe it has captured.

Then his great chest heaved and shook with hysterical sobbing. When, a little later, he heard the shaken woman's antiphonal sobs, the realization of how low he had fallen kept him from looking at her. A great shame possessed him. He stumbled out of the room. He groped his way down to the open streets, a haggard and broken man from whom life had wrung some final hope of honor.



XIX

No catastrophe that was mental in its origin could oppress for long a man so essentially physical as Blake. For two desolate hours, it is true, he wandered about the streets of the city, struggling to medicine his depression of the mind by sheer weariness of the body. Then the habit of a lifetime of activity reasserted itself. He felt the need of focusing his resentment on something tangible and material. And as a comparative clarity of vision returned to him there also came back those tendencies of the instinctive fighter, the innate protest against injustice, the revolt against final surrender, the forlorn claim for at least a fighting chance. And with the thought of his official downfall came the thought of Copeland and what Copeland had done to him.

Out of that ferment of futile protest arose one sudden decision. Even before he articulated the decision he found it unconsciously swaying his movements and directing his steps. He would go and see Copeland! He would find that bloodless little shrimp and put him face to face with a few plain truths. He would confront that anemic Deputy-Commissioner and at least let him know what one honest man thought of him.

Even when Blake stood before Copeland's brownstone-fronted house, the house that seemed to wear a mask of staid discretion in every drawn blind and gloomy story, no hesitation came to him. His naturally primitive mind foresaw no difficulties in that possible encounter. He knew it was late, that it was nearly midnight, but even that did not deter him. The recklessness of utter desperation was on him. His purpose was something that transcended the mere trivialities of every-day intercourse. And he must see him. To confront Copeland became essential to his scheme of things.

He went ponderously up the brown stone steps and rang the bell. He waited patiently until his ring was answered. It was some time before the door swung open. Inside that door Blake saw a solemn-eyed servant in a black spiked-tailed service-coat and gray trousers.

"I want to see Mr. Copeland," was Blake's calmly assured announcement.

"Mr. Copeland is not at home," answered the man in the service-coat. His tone was politely impersonal. His face, too, was impassive. But one quick glance seemed to have appraised the man on the doorstep, to have judged him, and in some way to have found him undesirable.

"But this is important," said Blake.

"I'm sorry, sir," answered, the impersonal-eyed servant. Blake made an effort to keep himself in perfect control. He knew that his unkempt figure had not won the good-will of that autocratic hireling.

"I 'm from Police Headquarters," the man on the doorstep explained, with the easy mendacity that was a heritage of his older days.

He produced the one official card that remained with him, the one worn and dog-eared and once water-soaked Deputy-Commissioner's card which still remained in his dog-eared wallet. "I 've got to see him on business, Departmental business!"

"Mr. and Mrs. Copeland are at the Metropolitan, sir," explained the servant. "At the Opera. And they are not back yet."

"Then I 'll wait for him," announced Blake, placated by the humbler note in the voice of the man in the service-coat.

"Very good, sir," announced the servant. And he led the way upstairs, switching on the electrics as he went.

Blake found himself in what seemed to be a library. About this softly hung room he peered with an acute yet heavy disdain, with an indeterminate envy which he could not control. It struck him as being feminine and over fine, that shadowy room with all its warm hangings and polished wood. It stood for a phase of life with which he had no patience. And he kept telling himself that it had not been come by honestly, that on everything about him, from the silver desk ornaments to the marble bust glimmering out of its shadowy background, he himself had some secret claim. He scowled up at a number of signed etchings and a row of diminutive and heavily framed canvases, scowled up at them with quick contempt. Then he peered uncomfortably about at the shelves of books, mottled streaks of vellum and morocco stippled with gold, crowded pickets of soft-lettered color which seemed to stand between him and a world which he had never cared to enter. It was a foolish world, that world of book reading, a lackadaisical region of unreality, a place for women and children, but never meant for a man with a man's work to do.

His stolidly contemptuous eyes were still peering about the room when the door opened and closed again. There was something so characteristically guarded and secretive in the movement that Blake knew it was Copeland even before he let his gaze wheel around to the newcomer. About the entire figure, in fact, he could detect that familiar veiled wariness, that enigmatic and self-concealing cautiousness which had always had the power to touch him into a quick irritation.

"Mr. Blake, I believe," said Copeland, very quietly. He was in full evening dress. In one hand he held a silk hat and over one arm hung a black top-coat. He held himself in perfect control, in too perfect control, yet his thin face was almost ashen in color, almost the neutral-tinted gray of a battle-ship's side-plates. And when he spoke it was with the impersonal polite unction with which he might have addressed an utter stranger.

"You wished to see me!" he said, as his gaze fastened itself on Blake's figure. The fact that he remained standing imparted a tentativeness to the situation. Yet his eyes remained on Blake, studying him with the cold and mildly abstracted curiosity with which he might view a mummy in its case.

"I do!" said Blake, without rising from his chair.

"About what?" asked Copeland. There was an acidulated crispness in his voice which hinted that time might be a matter of importance to him.

"You know what it's about, all right," was Blake's heavy retort.

"On the contrary," said Copeland, putting down his hat and coat, "I 'm quite in the dark as to how I can be of service to you."

Both his tone and his words angered Blake, angered him unreasonably. But he kept warning himself to wait, to hold himself in until the proper moment arrived.

"I expect no service from you," was Blake's curtly guttural response. He croaked out his mirthless ghost of a laugh. "You 've taught me better than that!"

Copeland, for all his iciness, seemed to resent the thrust.

"We have always something to learn," retorted, meeting Blake's stolid stare enmity.

"I guess I've learned enough!" said Blake.

"Then I hope it has brought you what you are looking for!" Copeland, as he spoke, stepped over to a chair, but he still remained on his feet.

"No, it has n't brought me what I 'm after," said the other man. "Not yet! But it's going to, in the end, Mr. Copeland, or I 'm going to know the reason why!"

He kept warning himself to be calm, yet he found his voice shaking a little as he spoke. The time was not yet ripe for his outbreak. The climactic moment was still some distance away. But he could feel it emerging from the mist just as a pilot sights the bell-buoy that marks his changing channel.

"Then might I ask what you are after?" inquired Copeland. He folded his arms, as though to fortify himself behind a pretense of indifferency.

"You know what I 've been after, just as I know what you 've been after," cried Blake. "You set out to get my berth, and you got it. And I set out to get Binhart, to get the man your whole push could n't round up—and I 'm going to get him!"

"Blake," said Copeland, very quietly, "you are wrong in both instances."

"Am I!"

"You are," was Copeland's answer, and he spoke with a studious patience which his rival resented even more than his open enmity. "In the first place, this Binhart case is a closed issue."

"Not with me!" cried Blake, feeling himself surrendering to the tide that had been tugging at him so long. "They may be able to buy off you cuff-shooters down at Headquarters. They may grease your palm down there, until you see it pays to keep your hands off. They may pull a rope or two and make you back down. But nothing this side o' the gates o' hell is going to make me back down. I began this man-hunt, and I 'm going to end it!"