Seven days after the _Trunella_ swung southward from Callao Never-Fail
Blake, renewed as to habiliments and replenished as to pocket, embarked
on a steamer bound for Rio de Janeiro.
He watched the plunging bow as it crept southward. He saw the heat and
the gray sea-shimmer left behind him. He saw the days grow longer and
the nights grow colder. He saw the Straits passed and the northward
journey again begun. But he neither fretted nor complained of his fate.
After communicating by wireless with both Montevideo and Buenos Ayres
and verifying certain facts of which he seemed already assured, he
continued on his way to Rio. And over Rio he once more cast and pursed
up his gently interrogative net, gathering in the discomforting
information that Binhart had already relayed, from that city to a
Lloyd-Brazileiro steamer. This steamer, he learned, was bound for
Ignitos, ten thousand dreary miles up the Amazon.
Five days later Blake followed in a Clyde-built freighter. When well
up the river he transferred to a rotten-timbered sidewheeler that had
once done duty on the Mississippi, and still again relayed from river
boat to river boat, move by move falling more and more behind his
quarry.
The days merged into weeks, and the weeks into months. He suffered
much from the heat, but more from the bad food and the bad water. For
the first time in his life he found his body shaken with fever and was
compelled to use quinin in great quantities. The attacks of insects,
of insects that flew, that crawled, that tunneled beneath the skin,
turned life into a torment. His huge triple-terraced neck became raw
with countless wounds. But he did not stop by the way. His eyes
became oblivious of the tangled and overcrowded life about him, of the
hectic orchids and huge butterflies and the flaming birds-of-paradise,
of the echoing aisle ways between interwoven jungle growths, of the
arching aerial roofs of verdure and the shadowy hanging-gardens from
which by day parakeets chattered and monkeys screamed and by night
ghostly armies of fireflies glowed. He was no longer impressed by that
world of fierce appetites and fierce conflicts. He seemed to have
attained to a secret inner calm, to an obsessional impassivity across
which the passing calamities of existence only echoed. He merely
recalled that he had been compelled to eat of disagreeable things and
face undesirable emergencies, to drink of the severed Water-vine, to
partake of monkey-steak and broiled parrot, to sleep in poisonous
swamplands. His spirit, even with the mournful cry of night birds in
his ears, had been schooled into the acceptance of a loneliness that to
another might have seemed eternal and unendurable.
By the time he had reached the Pacific coast his haggard hound's eyes
were more haggard than ever. His skin hung loose on his great body, as
though a vampire bat had drained it of its blood. But to his own
appearance he gave scant thought. For new life came to him when he
found definite traces of Binhart. These traces he followed up, one by
one, until he found himself circling back eastward along the valley of
the Magdalena. And down the Magdalena he went, still sure of his
quarry, following him to Bogota, and on again from Bogota to
Barranquilla, and on to Savanilla, where he embarked on a
Hamburg-American steamer for Limon.
At Limon it was not hard to pick up the lost trail. But Binhart's
movements, after leaving that port, became a puzzle to the man who had
begun to pride himself on growing into knowledge of his adversary's
inmost nature. For once Blake found himself uncertain as to the
other's intentions. The fugitive now seemed possessed with an idea to
get away from the sea, to strike inland at any cost, as though water
had grown a thing of horror to him. He zigzagged from obscure village
to village, as though determined to keep away from all main-traveled
avenues of traffic. Yet, move as he might, it was merely a matter of
time and care to follow up the steps of a white man as distinctly
individualized as Binhart.
This white man, it seemed, was at last giving way to the terror that
must have been haunting him for months past. His movements became
feverish, erratic, irrational. He traveled in strange directions and
by strange means, by bullock-cart, by burro, by dug-out, sometimes on
foot and sometimes on horseback. Sometimes he stayed over night at a
rubber-gatherers' camp, sometimes he visited a banana plantation,
bought a fresh horse, and pushed on again. When he reached the
Province of Alajuela he made use of the narrow cattle passes, pressing
on in a northwesterly direction along the valleys of the San Juan and
the San Carlos River. A madness seemed to have seized him, a madness
to make his way northward, ever northward.
Over heartbreaking mountainous paths, through miasmic jungles, across
sun-baked plateaus, chilled by night and scorched by day, chafed and
sore, tortured by _niguas_ and _coloradillas_, mosquitoes and
_chigoes_, sleeping in verminous hay-thatched huts of bamboo bound
together with bejuco-vine, mislead by lying natives and stolen from by
peons, Blake day by day and week by week fought his way after his
enemy. When worn to lightheadedness he drank _guaro_ and great
quantities of black coffee; when ill he ate quinin.
The mere act of pursuit had become automatic with him. He no longer
remembered why he was seeking out this man. He no longer remembered
the crime that lay at the root of that flight and pursuit. It was not
often, in fact, that his thoughts strayed back to his old life. When
he did think of it, it seemed only something too far away to remember,
something phantasmal, something belonging to another world. There were
times when all his journeying through steaming swamplands and forests
of teak and satin-wood and over indigo lagoons and mountain-passes of
moonlit desolation seemed utterly and unfathomably foolish. But he
fought back such moods, as though they were a weakness. He let nothing
deter him. He stuck to his trail, instinctively, doggedly,
relentlessly.
It was at Chalavia that a peon named Tico Viquez came to Blake with the
news of a white man lying ill of black-water fever in a native hut.
For so much gold, Tico Viquez intimated, he would lead the señor to the
hut in question.
Blake, who had no gold to spare, covered the startled peon with his
revolver and commanded Viquez to take him to that hut. There was that
in the white man's face which caused the peon to remember that life was
sweet. He led the way through a reptilious swamp and into the fringe
of a nispero forest, where they came upon a hut with a roof of
corrugated iron and walls of wattled bamboo.
Blake, with his revolver in his hand and his guide held before him as a
human shield, cautiously approached the door of this hut, for he feared
treachery. Then, with equal caution, he peered through the narrow
doorway. He stood there for several moments, without moving.
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!"