Chapter 10

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 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 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.