The moment Blake arrived in New Orleans he shut himself in a telephone
booth, called up six somewhat startled acquaintances, learned nothing
to his advantage, and went quickly but quietly to the St. Charles.
There he closeted himself with two dependable "elbows," started his
detectives on a round of the hotels, and himself repaired to the Levee
district, where he held off-handed and ponderously facetious
conversations with certain unsavory characters. Then came a visit to
certain equally unsavory wharf-rats and a call or two on South Rampart
Street. But still no inkling of Binhart or his intended movements came
to the detective's ears.
It was not until the next morning, as he stepped into Antoine's, on St.
Louis Street just off the Rue Royal, that anything of importance
occurred. The moment he entered that bare and cloistral restaurant
where Monsieur Jules could dish up such startling uncloistral dishes,
his eyes fell on Abe Sheiner, a drum snuffer with whom he had had
previous and somewhat painful encounters. Sheiner, it was plain to
see, was in clover, for he was breakfasting regally, on squares of
toast covered with shrimp and picked crab meat creamed, with a bisque
of cray-fish and _papa-bottes_ in ribbons of bacon, to say nothing of
fruit and _bruilleau_.
Blake insisted on joining his old friend Sheiner, much to the tatter's
secret discomfiture. It was obvious that the drum snuffer, having made
a recent haul, would be amenable to persuasion. And, like all yeggs,
he was an upholder of the "moccasin telegraph," a wanderer and a
carrier of stray tidings as to the movements of others along the
undergrooves of the world. So while Blake breakfasted on shrimp and
crab meat and French artichokes stuffed with caviar and anchovies, he
intimated to the uneasy-minded Sheiner certain knowledge as to a
certain recent coup. In the face of this charge Sheiner indignantly
claimed that he had only been playing the ponies and having a run of
greenhorn's luck.
"Abe, I 've come down to gather you in," announced the calmly
mendacious detective. He continued to sip his _bruilleau_ with
fraternal unconcern.
"You got nothing _on_ me, Jim," protested the other, losing his taste
for the delicacies arrayed about him.
"Well, we got 'o go down to Headquarters and talk that over," calmly
persisted Blake.
"What's the use of pounding me, when I 'm on the square again?"
persisted the ex-drum snuffer.
"That's the line o' talk they all hand out. That's what Connie Binhart
said when we had it out up in St. Louis."
"Did you bump into Binhart in St. Louis?"
"We had a talk, three days ago."
"Then why 'd he blow through this town as though he had a regiment o'
bulls and singed cats behind him!"
Blake's heart went down like an elevator with a broken cable. But he
gave no outward sign of this inward commotion.
"Because he wants to get down to Colon before the Hamburg-American boat
hits the port," ventured Blake. "His moll's aboard!"
"But he blew out for 'Frisco this morning," contended the puzzled
Sheiner. "Shot through as though he 'd just had a rumble!"
"Oh, he _said_ that, but he went south, all right."
"Then he went in an oyster sloop. There 's nothing sailing from this
port to-day."
"Well, what's Binhart got to do with our trouble anyway? What I want--"
"But I saw him start," persisted the other. "He ducked for a day coach
and said he was traveling for his health. And he sure looked like a
man in a hurry!"
Blake sipped his bruilleau, glanced casually at his watch, and took out
a cigar and lighted it. He blinked contentedly across the table at the
man he was "buzzing." The trick had been turned. The word had been
given. He knew that Binhart was headed westward again. He also knew
that Binhart had awakened to the fact that he was being followed, that
his feverish movements were born of a stampeding fear of capture.
Yet Binhart was not a coward. Flight, in fact, was his only resource.
It was only the low-brow criminal, Blake knew, who ran for a hole and
hid in it until he was dragged out. The more intellectual type of
offender preferred the open. And Binhart was of this type. He was
suave and artful; he was active bodied and experienced in the ways of
the world. What counted still more, he was well heeled with money.
Just how much he had planted away after the Newcomb coup no one knew.
But no one denied that it was a fortune. It was ten to one that
Binhart would now try to get out of the country. He would make his way
to some territory without an extradition treaty. He would look for a
land where he could live in peace, where his ill-gotten wealth would
make exile endurable.
Blake, as he smoked his cigar and turned these thoughts over in his
mind, could afford to smile. There would be no peace and no rest for
Connie Binhart; he himself would see to that. And he would "get" his
man; whether it was in a week's time or a month's time, he would "get"
his man and take him back in triumph to New York. He would show
Copeland and the Commissioner and the world in general that there was
still a little life in the old dog, that there was still a haul or two
he could make.
So engrossing were these thoughts that Blake scarcely heard the drum
snuffer across the table from him, protesting the innocence of his ways
and the purity of his intentions. Then for the second time that
morning Blake completely bewildered him, by suddenly accepting those
protestations and agreeing to let everything drop. It was necessary,
of course, to warn Sheiner, to exact a promise of better living. But
Blake's interest in the man had already departed. He dropped him from
his scheme of things, once he had yielded up his data. He tossed him
aside like a sucked orange, a smoked cigar, a burnt-out match.
Binhart, in all the movements of all the stellar system, was the one
name and the one man that interested him.
Loony Sheiner was still sitting at that table in Antoine's when Blake,
having wired his messages to San Pedro and San Francisco, caught the
first train out of New Orleans. As he sped across the face of the
world, crawling nearer and nearer the Pacific Coast, no thought of the
magnitude of that journey oppressed him. His imagination remained
untouched. He neither fretted nor fumed at the time this travel was
taking. In spite of the electric fans at each end of his Pullman, it
is true, he suffered greatly from the heat, especially during the ride
across the Arizona Desert. He accepted it without complaint, stolidly
thanking his lucky stars that men were n't still traveling across
America's deserts by ox-team. He was glad when he reached the Colorado
River and wound up into California, leaving the alkali and sage brush
and yucca palms of the Mojave well behind him. He was glad in his
placid way when he reached his hotel in San Francisco and washed the
grit and grime from his heat-nettled body.
But once that body had been bathed and fed, he started on his rounds of
the underworld, seined the entire harbor-front without effect, and then
set out his night-lines as cautiously as a fisherman in forbidden
waters. He did not overlook the shipping offices and railway stations,
neither did he neglect the hotels and ferries. Then he quietly lunched
at Martenelli's with the much-honored but most-uncomfortable Wolf
Yonkholm, who promptly suspended his "dip" operations at the Beaches
out of respect to Blake's sudden call.
Nothing of moment, however, was learned from the startled Wolf, and at
Coppa's six hours later, Blake dined with a Chink-smuggler named Goldie
Hopper. Goldie, after his fifth glass of wine and an adroit decoying
of the talk along the channels which most interested his portly host,
casually announced that an Eastern crook named Blanchard had got away,
the day before, on the Pacific mail steamer _Manchuria_. He was clean
shaven and traveled as a clergyman. That struck Goldie as the height
of humor, a bank sneak having the nerve to deck himself out as a
gospel-spieler.
His elucidation of it, however, brought no answering smile from the
diffident-eyed Blake, who confessed that he was rounding up a couple of
nickel-coiners and would be going East in a day or two.
Instead of going East, however, he hurriedly consulted maps and
timetables, found a train that would land him in Portland in twenty-six
hours, and started north. He could eventually save time, he found, by
hastening on to Seattle and catching a Great Northern steamer from that
port. When a hot-box held his train up for over half an hour, Blake
stood with his timepiece in his hand, watching the train crew in their
efforts to "freeze the hub." They continued to lose time, during the
night. At Seattle, when he reached the Great Northern docks, he found
that his steamer had sailed two hours before he stepped from his
sleeper.
His one remaining resource was a Canadian Pacific steamer from
Victoria. This, he figured out, would get him to Hong Kong even
earlier than the steamer which he had already missed. He had a hunch
that Hong Kong was the port he wanted. Just why, he could not explain.
But he felt sure that Binhart would not drop off at Manila. Once on
the run, he would keep out of American quarters. It was a gamble; it
was a rough guess. But then all life was that. And Blake had a dogged
and inarticulate faith in his "hunches."
Crossing the Sound, he reached Victoria in time to see the _Empress of
China_ under way, and heading out to sea. Blake hired a tug and
overtook her. He reached the steamer's deck by means of a Jacob's
ladder that swung along her side plates like a mason's plumbline along
a factory wall.
Binhart, he told himself, was by this time in mid-Pacific, untold miles
away, heading for that vast and mysterious East into which a man could
so easily disappear. He was approaching gloomy and tangled waterways
that threaded between islands which could not even be counted. He was
fleeing towards dark rivers which led off through barbaric and
mysterious silence, into the heart of darkness. He was drawing nearer
and nearer to those regions of mystery where a white man might be
swallowed up as easily as a rice grain is lost in a shore lagoon. He
would soon be in those teeming alien cities as under-burrowed as a
gopher village.
But Blake did not despair. Their whole barbaric East, he told himself,
was only a Chinatown slum on a large scale. And he had never yet seen
the slum that remained forever impervious to the right dragnet. He did
not know how or where the end would be. But he knew there would be an
end. He still hugged to his bosom the placid conviction that the world
was small, that somewhere along the frontiers of watchfulness the
impact would be recorded and the alarm would be given. A man of
Binhart's type, with the money Binhart had, would never divorce himself
completely from civilization. He would always crave a white man's
world; he would always hunger for what that world stood for and
represented. He would always creep back to it. He might hide in his
heathen burrow, for a time; but there would be a limit to that exile.
A power stronger than his own will would drive him back to his own
land, back to civilization. And civilization, to Blake, was merely a
rather large and rambling house equipped with a rather efficient
burglar-alarm system, so that each time it was entered, early or late,
the tell-tale summons would eventually go to the right quarter. And
when the summons came Blake would be waiting for it.