Chapter 6

Then, for the first time, Blake grew into a comprehension of what surrounded him. He wheeled about, stooped and caught up the papier-mâché tea-tray from the floor and once more stood with his back to the wall. He stood there, on guard, for a second figure with a second steel icicle was sidling up to him. He swung viciously out and brought the tea-tray down on the hand that held this knife, crippling the fingers and sending the steel spinning across the room. Then with his free hand he tugged the revolver from his coat pocket, holding it by the barrel and bringing the metal butt down on the queue-wound head of the third man, who had no knife, but was struggling with the woman for the metal icicle she had caught up from the floor.

Then the five seemed to close in together, and the fight became general. It became a mêlée. With his swinging right arm Blake battered and pounded with his revolver butt. With his left hand he made cutting strokes with the heavy papier-mâché tea-tray, keeping their steel, by those fierce sweeps, away from his body. One Chinaman he sent sprawling, leaving him huddled and motionless against the orange-covered divan. The second, stunned by a blow of the tea-tray across the eyes, could offer no resistance when Blake's smashing right dealt its blow, the metal gun butt falling like a trip hammer on the shaved and polished skull.

As the white man swung about he saw the third Chinaman with his hand on the woman's throat, holding her flat against the wall, placing her there as a butcher might place a fowl on his block ready for the blow of his carver. Blake stared at the movement, panting for breath, overcome by that momentary indifference wherein a winded athlete permits without protest an adversary to gain his momentary advantage. Then will triumphed over the weakness of the body. But before Blake could get to the woman's side he saw the Chinaman's loose-sleeved right hand slowly and deliberately ascend. As it reached the meridian of its circular upsweep he could see the woman rise on her toes, rise as though with some quick effort, yet some effort which Blake could not understand.

At the same moment that she did so a look of pained expostulation crept into the staring slant eyes on a level with her own. The yellow jaw gaped, filled with blood, and the poised knife fell at his side, sticking point down in the flooring. The azure and lemon-yellow that covered the woman's body flamed into sudden scarlet. It was only as the figure with the expostulating yellow face sank to the ground, crumpling up on itself as it fell, that Blake comprehended. That quick sweep of scarlet, effacing the azure and lemon, had come from the sudden deluge of blood that burst over the woman's body. She had made use of the upstroke, Mexican style. Her knife had cut the full length of the man's abdominal cavity, clean and straight to the breastbone. He had been ripped up like a herring.

Blake panted and wheezed, not at the sight of the blood, but at the exertion to which his flabby muscles had been put. His body was moist with sweat. His asthmatic throat seemed stifling his lungs. A faint nausea crept through him, a dim ventral revolt at the thought that such things could take place so easily, and with so little warning.

His breast still heaved and panted and he was still fighting for breath when he saw the woman stoop and wipe the knife on one of the fallen Chinaman's sleeves.

"We 've got to get out of here!" she whimpered, as she caught up the mandarin coat and flung it over her shoulders, for in the struggle her body had been bared almost to the waist. Blake saw the crimson that dripped on her matting slippers and maculated the cream white of the mandarin coat.

"But where's Binhart?" he demanded, as he looked stolidly about for his black boulder.

"Never mind Binhart," she cried, touching the eviscerated body at her feet with one slipper toe, "or we 'll get what _he_ got!"

"I want that man Binhart!" persisted the detective.

"Not here! Not here!" she cried, folding the loose folds of the cloak closer about her body.

She ran to the matting curtain, looked out, and called back, "Quick! Come quick!" Then she ran back, slipped the bolt in the outer door and rejoined the waiting detective.

"Oh, white man!" she gasped, as the matting fell between them and the room incarnadined by their struggle. Blake was not sure, but he thought he heard her giggle, hysterically, in the darkness. They were groping their way along a narrow passage. They slipped through a second door, closed and locked it after them, and once more groped on through the darkness.

How many turns they took, Blake could not remember. She stopped and whispered to him to go softly, as they came to a stairway, as steep and dark as a cistern. Blake, at the top, could smell opium smoke, and once or twice he thought he heard voices. The woman stopped him, with outstretched arms, at the stair head, and together they stood and listened.

Blake, with nerves taut, waited for some sign from her to go on again. He thought she was giving it, when he felt a hand caress his side. He felt it move upward, exploringly. At the same time that he heard her little groan of alarm he knew that the hand was not hers.

He could not tell what the darkness held, but his movement was almost instinctive. He swung out with his great arm, countered on the crouching form in front of him, caught at a writhing shoulder, and tightening his grip, sent the body catapulting down the stairway at his side. He could hear a revolver go off as the body went tumbling and rolling down--Blake knew that it was a gun not his own.

"Come on, white man!" the girl in front of him was crying, as she tugged at his coat. And they went on, now at a run, taking a turn to the right, making a second descent, and then another to the left. They came to still another door, which they locked behind them. Then they scrambled up a ladder, and he could hear her quick hands padding about in the dark. A moment later she had thrust up a hatch. He saw it led to the open air, for the stars were above them.

He felt grateful for that open air, for the coolness, for the sense of deliverance which came with even that comparative freedom.

"Don't stop!" she whispered. And he followed her across the slant of the uneven roof. He was weak for want of breath. The girl had to catch him and hold him for a moment.

"On the next roof you must take off your shoes," she warned him. "You can rest then. But hurry--hurry!"

He gulped down the fresh air as he tore at his shoe laces, thrusting each shoe in a side pocket as he started after her. For by this time she was scrambling across the broken sloping roofs, as quick and agile as a cat, dropping over ledges, climbing up barriers and across coping tiles. Where she was leading him he had no remotest idea. She reminded him of a cream-tinted monkey in the maddest of steeplechases. He was glad when she came to a stop.

The town seemed to lay to their right. Before them were the scattered lights of the harbor and the mild crescent of the outer bay. They could see the white wheeling finger of some foreign gunboat as its searchlight played back and forth in the darkness.

She sighed with weariness and dropped cross-legged down on the coping tiles against which he leaned, regaining his breath. She squatted there, cooingly, like a child exhausted with its evening games.

"I 'm dished!" she murmured, as she sat there breathing audibly through the darkness. "I 'm dished for this coast!"

He sat down beside her, staring at the search-light. There seemed something reassuring, something authoritative and comforting, in the thought of it watching there in the darkness.

The girl touched him on the knee and then shifted her position on the coping tiles, without rising to her feet.

"Come here!" she commanded. And when he was close beside her she pointed with her thin white arm. "That's Saint Poalo there--you can just make it out, up high, see. And those lights are the Boundary Gate. And this sweep of lights below here is the _Praya_. Now look where I 'm pointing. That's the Luiz Camoes lodging-house. You see the second window with the light in it?"

"Yes, I see it."

"Well, Binhart 's inside that window."

"You know it?"

"I know it."

"So he 's there?" said Blake, staring at the vague square of light.

"Yes, he's there, all right. He's posing as a buyer for a tea house, and calls himself Bradley. Lee Fu told me; and Lee Fu is always right."

She stood up and pulled the mandarin coat closer about her thin body. The coolness of the night air had already chilled her. Then she squinted carefully about in the darkness.

"What are you going to do?" she asked.

"I 'm going to get Binhart," was Blake's answer.

He could hear her little childlike murmur of laughter.

"You 're brave, white man," she said, with a hand on his arm. She was silent for a moment, before she added; "And I think you 'll get him."

"Of course I 'll get him," retorted Blake, buttoning his coat. The fires had been relighted on the cold hearth of his resolution. It came to him only as an accidental after-thought that he had met an unknown woman and had passed through strange adventures with her and was now about to pass out of her life again, forever.

"What 'll you do?" he asked.

Again he heard the careless little laugh.

"Oh, I 'll slip down through the Quarter and cop some clothes somewhere. Then I 'll have a sampan take me out to the German boat. It 'll start for Canton at daylight."

"And then?" asked Blake, watching the window of the Luiz Camoes lodging-house below him.

"Then I 'll work my way up to Port Arthur, I suppose. There 's a navy man there who 'll help me!"

"Have n't you any money?" Blake put the question a little uneasily.

Again he felt the careless coo of laughter.

"Feel!" she said. She caught his huge hand between hers and pressed it against her waist line. She rubbed his fingers along what he accepted as a tightly packed coin-belt. He was relieved to think that he would not have to offer her money. Then he peered over the coping tiles to make sure of his means of descent.

"You had better go first," she said, as she leaned out and looked down at his side. "Crawl down this next roof to the end there. At the corner, see, is the end of the ladder."

He stooped and slipped his feet into his shoes. Then he let himself cautiously down to the adjoining roof, steeper even than the one on which they had stood. She bent low over the tiles, so that her face was very close to his as he found his footing and stood there.

"Good-by, white man," she whispered.

"Good-by!" he whispered back, as he worked his way cautiously and ponderously along that perilous slope.

She leaned there, watching him as he gained the ladder-end. He did not look back as he lowered himself, rung by rung. All thought of her, in fact, had passed from his preoccupied mind. He was once more intent on his own grim ends. He was debating with himself just how he was to get in through that lodging-house window and what his final move would be for the round up of his enemy. He had made use of too many "molls" in his time to waste useless thought on what they might say or do or desire. When he had got Binhart, he remembered, he would have to look about for something to eat, for he was as hungry as a wolf. And he did not even hear the girl's second soft whisper of "Good-by."

IX

That stolid practicality which had made Blake a successful operative asserted itself in the matter of his approach to the Luiz Camoes house, the house which had been pointed out to him as holding Binhart.

He circled promptly about to the front of that house, pressed a gold coin in the hand of the half-caste Portuguese servant who opened the door, and asked to be shown to the room of the English tea merchant.

That servant, had he objected, would have been promptly taken possession of by the detective, and as promptly put in a condition where he could do no harm, for Blake felt that he was too near the end of his trail to be put off by any mere side issue. But the coin and the curt explanation that the merchant must be seen at once admitted Blake to the house.

The servant was leading him down the length of the half-lit hall when Blake caught him by the sleeve.

"You tell my rickshaw boy to wait! Quick, before he gets away!"

Blake knew that the last door would be the one leading to Binhart's room. The moment he was alone in the hall he tiptoed to this door and pressed an ear against its panel. Then with his left hand, he slowly turned the knob, caressing it with his fingers that it might not click when the latch was released. As he had feared, it was locked.

He stood for a second or two, thinking. Then with the knuckle of one finger he tapped on the door, lightly, almost timidly.

A man's voice from within, cried out, "Wait a minute! Wait a minute!" But Blake, who had been examining the woodwork of the door-frame, did not choose to wait a minute. Any such wait, he felt, would involve too much risk. In one minute, he knew, a fugitive could either be off and away, or could at least prepare himself for any one intercepting that flight. So Blake took two quick steps back, and brought his massive shoulder against the door. It swung back, as though nothing more than a parlor match had held it shut. Blake, as he stepped into the room, dropped his right hand to his coat pocket.

Facing him, at the far side of the room, he saw Binhart.

The fugitive sat in a short-legged reed chair, with a grip-sack open on his knees. His coat and vest were off, and the light from the oil lamp at his side made his linen shirt a blotch of white.

He had thrown his head up, at the sound of the opening door, and he still sat, leaning forward in the low chair in an attitude of startled expectancy. There was no outward and apparent change on his face as his eyes fell on Blake's figure. He showed neither fear nor bewilderment. His career had equipped him with histrionic powers that were exceptional. As a bank-sneak and confidence-man he had long since learned perfect control of his features, perfect composure even under the most discomforting circumstances.

"Hello, Connie!" said the detective facing him. He spoke quietly, and his attitude seemed one of unconcern. Yet a careful observer might have noticed that the pulse of his beefy neck was beating faster than usual. And over that great body, under its clothing, were rippling tremors strangely like those that shake the body of a leashed bulldog at the sight of a street cat.

"Hello, Jim!" answered Binhart, with equal composure. He had aged since Blake had last seen him, aged incredibly. His face was thin now, with plum-colored circles under the faded eyes.

He made a move as though to lift down the valise that rested on his knees. But Blake stopped him with a sharp movement of his right hand.

"That's all right," he said. "Don't get up!"

Binhart eyed him. During that few seconds of silent tableau each man was appraising, weighing, estimating the strength of the other.

"What do you want, Jim?" asked Binhart, almost querulously.

"I want that gun you 've got up there under your liver pad," was Blake's impassive answer.

"Is that all?" asked Binhart. But he made no move to produce the gun.

"Then I want you," calmly announced Blake.

A look of gentle expostulation crept over Binhart's gaunt face.

"You can't do it, Jim," he announced. "You can't take me away from here."

"But I'm going to," retorted Blake.

"How?"

"I 'm just going to take you."

He crossed the room as he spoke.

"Give me the gun," he commanded.

Binhart still sat in the low reed chair. He made no movement in response to Blake's command.

"What's the good of getting rough-house," he complained.

"Gi' me the gun," repeated Blake.

"Jim, I hate to see you act this way," but as Binhart spoke he slowly drew the revolver from its flapped pocket. Blake's revolver barrel was touching the white shirt-front as the movement was made. It remained there until he had possession of Binhart's gun. Then he backed away, putting his own revolver back in his pocket.

"Now, get your clothes on," commanded Blake.

"What for?" temporized Binhart.

"You 're coming with me!"

"You can't do it, Jim," persisted the other. "You could n't get me down to the waterfront, in this town. They 'd get you before you were two hundred yards away from that door."

"I 'll risk it," announced the detective.

"And I 'd fight you myself, every move. This ain't Manhattan Borough, you know, Jim; you can't kidnap a white man. I 'd have you in irons for abduction the first ship we struck. And at the first port of call I 'd have the best law sharps money could get. You can't do it, Jim. It ain't law!"

"What t' hell do I care for law," was Blake's retort. "I want you and you 're going to come with me."

"Where am I going?"

"Back to New York."

Binhart laughed. It was a laugh without any mirth in it.

"Jim, you 're foolish. You could n't get me back to New York alive, any more than you could take Victoria Peak to New York!"

"All right, then, I 'll take you along the other way, if I ain't going to take you alive. I 've followed you a good many thousand miles, Connie, and a little loose talk ain't going to make me lie down at this stage of the game."

Binhart sat studying the other man for a moment or two.

"Then how about a little real talk, the kind of talk that money makes?"

"Nothing doing!" declared Blake, folding his arms.

Binhart flickered a glance at him as he thrust his own right hand down into the hand-bag on his knees.

"I want to show you what you could get out of this," he said, leaning forward a little as he looked up at Blake.

When his exploring right hand was lifted again above the top of the bag Blake firmly expected to see papers of some sort between its fingers. He was astonished to see something metallic, something which glittered bright in the light from the wall lamp. The record of this discovery had scarcely been carried back to his brain, when the silence of the room seemed to explode into a white sting, a puff of noise that felt like a whip lash curling about Blake's leg. It seemed to roll off in a shifting and drifting cloud of smoke.

It so amazed Blake that he fell back against the wall, trying to comprehend it, to decipher the source and meaning of it all. He was still huddled back against the wall when a second surprise came to him. It was the discovery that Binhart had caught up a hat and a coat, and was running away, running out through the door while his captor stared after him.

It was only then Blake realized that his huddled position was not a thing of his own volition. Some impact had thrown him against the wall like a toppled nine-pin. The truth came to him, in a sudden flash; Binhart had shot at him. There had been a second revolver hidden away in the hand bag, and Binhart had attempted to make use of it.

A great rage against Binhart swept through him. A still greater rage at the thought that his enemy was running away brought Blake lurching and scrambling to his feet. He was a little startled to find that it hurt him to run. But it hurt him more to think of losing Binhart.

He dove for the door, hurling his great bulk through it, tossing aside the startled Portuguese servant who stood at the outer entrance. He ran frenziedly out into the night, knowing by the staring faces of the street-corner group that Binhart had made the first turning and was running towards the water-front. He could see the fugitive, as he came to the corner; and like an unpenned bull he swung about and made after him. His one thought was to capture his man. His one obsession was to haul down Binhart.

Then, as he ran, a small trouble insinuated itself into his mind. He could not understand the swishing of his right boot, at every hurrying stride. But he did not stop, for he could already smell the odorous coolness of the waterfront and he knew he must close in on his man before that forest of floating sampans and native house-boats swallowed him up.

A lightheadedness crept over him as he came panting down to the water's edge. The faces of the coolies about him, as he bargained for a sampan, seemed far away and misty. The voices, as the flat-bottomed little skiff was pushed off in pursuit of the boat which was hurrying Binhart out into the night, seemed remote and thin, as though coming from across foggy water. He was bewildered by a sense of dampness in his right leg. He patted it with his hand, inquisitively, and found it wet.

He stooped down and felt his boot. It was full of blood. It was overrunning with blood. He remembered then. Binhart had shot him, after all.

He could never say whether it was this discovery, or the actual loss of blood, that filled him with a sudden giddiness. He fell forward on his face, on the bottom of the rocking sampan.

He must have been unconscious for some time, for when he awakened he was dimly aware that he was being carried up the landing-ladder of a steamer. He heard English voices about him. A very youthful-looking ship's surgeon came and bent over him, cut away his trouser-leg, and whistled.

"Why, he 's been bleeding like a stuck pig!" he heard a startled voice, very close to him, suddenly exclaim. And a few minutes later, after being moved again, he opened his eyes to find himself in a berth and the boyish-looking surgeon assuring him it was all right.

"Where's Binhart?" asked Blake.

"That's all right, old chap, you just rest up a bit," said the placatory youth.

At nine the next morning Blake was taken ashore at Hong Kong.

After eleven days in the English hospital he was on his feet again. He was quite strong by that time. But for several weeks after that his leg was painfully stiff.

X

Twelve days later Blake began just where he had left off. He sent out his feelers, he canvassed the offices from which some echo might come, he had Macao searched and all westbound steamers which he could reach by wireless were duly warned. But more than ever, now, he found, he had to depend on his own initiative, his own personal efforts. The more official the quarters to which he looked for coöperation, the less response he seemed to elicit. In some circles, he saw, his story was even doubted. It was listened to with indifference; it was dismissed with shrugs. There were times when he himself was smiled at, pityingly.

He concluded, after much thought on the matter, that Binhart would continue to work his way westward. That the fugitive would strike inland and try to reach Europe by means of the Trans-Siberian Railway seemed out of the question. On that route he would be too easily traced. The carefully guarded frontiers of Russia, too, would offer obstacles which he dare not meet. He would stick to the ragged and restless sea-fringes, concluded the detective. But before acting on that conclusion he caught a _Toyo Kisen Kaisha_ steamer for Shanghai, and went over that city from the Bund and the Maloo to the narrowest street in the native quarter. In all this second search, however, he found nothing to reward his efforts. So he started doggedly southward again, stopping at Saigon and Bangkok and Singapore.