Never-Fail Blake Part 13

"You tell me where he is," said Blake, striking a match. "I 'll attend to the rest of it!"

McGlade slowly and deliberately drank the last of his swizzle. Then he put down his empty gla.s.s and stared pensively and pregnantly into it.

"What's there in it for me?" he asked.

Blake, studying him across the small table, Weighed both the man and the situation.

"Two hundred dollars in American green-backs," he announced as he drew out his wallet. He could see McGlade moisten his flaccid lips. He could see the faded eyes fasten on the bills as they were counted out.

He knew where the money would go, how little good it would do. But that, he knew, was not his funeral. All he wanted was Binhart.

"Binhart's in Guayaquil," McGlade suddenly announced.

"How d' you know that?" promptly demanded Blake.

"I know the man who sneaked him out from Balboa. He got sixty dollars for it. I can take you to him. Binhart 'd picked up a medicine-chest and a bag of instruments from a broken-down doctor at Colon. He went aboard a Pacific liner as a doctor himself.

"What liner?"

"He went aboard the _Trunella_. He thought he 'd get down to Callao.

But they tied the _Trunella_ up at Guayaquil."

"And you say he 's there now?"

"Yes!"

"And aboard the _Trunella_?"

"Sure! He's got to be aboard the _Trunella_!"

"Then why d' you say I can't get at him?"

"Because Guayaquil and the _Trunella_ and the whole coast down there is tied up in quarantine. That whole harbor's rotten with yellow-jack.

It's tied up as tight as a drum. You could n't get a boat on all the Pacific to touch that port these days!"

"But there's got to be _something_ going there!" contended Blake.

"They daren't do it! They couldn't get clearance--they couldn't even get _pratique_! Once they got in there they 'd be held and given the blood-test and picketed with a gunboat for a month! And what's more, they 've got that Alfaro revolution on down there! They 've got boat-patrols up and down the coast, keeping a lookout for gun-runners!"

Blake, at this last word, raised his ponderous head.

"The boat-patrols wouldn't phase me," he announced. His thoughts, in fact, were already far ahead, marshaling themselves about other things.

"You 've a weakness for yellow fever?" inquired the ironic McGlade.

"I guess it 'd take more than a few fever germs to throw me off that trail," was the detective's abstracted retort. He was recalling certain things that the russet-faced Pip Tankred had told him. And before everything else he felt that it would be well to get in touch with that distributor of bridge equipment and phonograph records.

"You don't mean you 're going to try to get into Guayaquil?" demanded McGlade.

"If Connie Binhart 's down there I 've got to go and get him," was Never-Fail Blake's answer.

The following morning Blake, having made sure of his ground, began one of his old-time "investigations" of that unsuspecting worthy known as Pip Tankred.

This investigation involved a hurried journey back to Colon, the expenditure of much money in cable tolls, the examination of records that were both official and unofficial, the asking of many questions and the turning up of dimly remembered things on which the dust of time had long since settled.

It was followed by a return to Panama, a secret trip several miles up the coast to look over a freighter placidly anch.o.r.ed there, a dolorous-appearing coast-tramp with unpainted upperworks and a rusty red hull. The side-plates of this red hull, Blake observed, were as pitted and scarred as the face of an Egyptian obelisk. Her ventilators were askew and her funnel was scrofulous and many of her rivet-heads seemed to be eaten away. But this was not once a source of apprehension to the studious-eyed detective.

The following evening he encountered Tankred himself, as though by accident, on the veranda of the Hotel Angelini. The latter, at Blake's invitation, sat down for a c.o.c.ktail and a quiet smoke.

They sat in silence for some time, watching the rain that deluged the city, the warm devitalizing rain that unedged even the fieriest of Signer Angelini's stimulants.

"Pip," Blake very quietly announced, "you 're going to sail for Guayaquil to-morrow!"

"Am I?" queried the unmoved Pip.

"You 're going to start for Guayaquil tomorrow," repeated Blake, "and you 're going to take me along with you!"

"My friend," retorted Pip, emitting a curling geyser of smoke as long and thin as a pool-que, "you 're sure laborin' under the misapprehension this steamer o' mine is a Pacific mailer! But she ain't, Blake!"

"I admit that," quietly acknowledged the other man. "I saw her yesterday!"

"And she don't carry no pa.s.sengers--she ain't allowed to," announced her master.

"But she 's going to carry me," a.s.serted Blake, lighting a fresh cigar.

"What as?" demanded Tankred. And he fixed Blake with a belligerent eye as he put the question.

"As an old friend of yours!"

"And then what?" still challenged the other.

"As a man who knows your record, in the next place. And on the next count, as the man who 's wise to those phony bills of lading of yours, and those doped-up clearance papers, and those cases of carbines you 've got down your hold labeled bridge equipment, and that nitro and giant-caps, and that hundred thousand rounds of smokeless you 're running down there as phonograph records!"

Tankred continued to smoke.

"You ever stop to wonder," he finally inquired, "if it ain't kind o'

flirtin' with danger knowin' so much about me and my freightin'

business?"

"No, you 're doing the coquetting in this case, I guess!"

"Then I ain't standin' for no rivals--not on this coast!"

The two men, so dissimilar in aspect and yet so alike in their accidental att.i.tudes of an uncouth belligerency, sat staring at each other.

"You 're going to take me to Guayaquil," repeated Blake.