Never-Fail Blake Part 19

"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 antic.i.p.ation.

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 h.e.l.l 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 pa.s.sive 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 la.s.situde 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 gra.s.s 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 pa.s.sive-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 pa.s.sed 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 t.i.tle 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 a.s.suredly 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 a.s.sured 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 pa.s.senger 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 pa.s.sed 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 sc.r.a.ps 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 appet.i.te of the spirit for privilege had once been as amply fed as the appet.i.te 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.surance 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 a.s.sured 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.