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 cooperation, 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.
At each of these ports he went through the same rounds, canvassed the
same set of officials, and made the same inquiries. Then he would go to
the native quarters, to the gambling houses, to the water-front and the
rickshaw coolies and half-naked Malay wharf-rats, holding the
departmental photograph of Binhart in his hand and inquiring of stranger
after stranger: “You know? You savvy him?” And time after time the
curious yellow faces would bend over the picture, the inscrutable slant
eyes would study the face, sometimes silently, sometimes with a
disheartening jabber of heathen tongues. But not one trace of Binhart
could he pick up.
Then he went on to Penang. There he went doggedly through the same
manœuvers, canvassing the same rounds and putting the same questions. And
it was at Penang that a sharp-eyed young water-front coolie squinted at
the well-thumbed photograph, squinted back at Blake, and shook his head
in affirmation. A tip of a few English shillings loosened his tongue, but
as Blake understood neither Malay nor Chinese he was in the dark until he
led his coolie to a Cook’s agent, who in turn called in the local
officers, who in turn consulted with the booking-agents of the P. & O.
Line. It was then Blake discovered that Binhart had booked passage under
the name of Blaisdell, twelve days before, for Brindisi.
Blake studied the map, cashed a draft, and waited for the next steamer.
While marking time he purchased copies of “French Self-Taught” and
“Italian Self-Taught,” hoping to school himself in a speaking knowledge
of these two tongues. But the effort was futile. Pore as he might over
those small volumes, he could glean nothing from their laboriously
pondered pages. His mind was no longer receptive. It seemed indurated,
hard-shelled. He had to acknowledge to his own soul that it was beyond
him. He was too old a dog to learn new tricks.
The trip to Brindisi seemed an endless one. He seemed to have lost his
earlier tendency to be a “mixer.” He became more morose, more
self-immured. He found himself without the desire to make new friends,
and his Celtic ancestry equipped him with a mute and sullen antipathy for
his aggressively English fellow travelers. He spent much of his time in
the smoking-room, playing solitaire. When they stopped at Madras and
Bombay he merely emerged from his shell to make sure if no trace of
Binhart were about. He was no more interested in these heathen cities of
a heathen East than in an ash-pile through which he might have to rake
for a hidden coin.
By the time he reached Brindisi he had recovered his lost weight, and
added to it, by many pounds. He had also returned to his earlier habit of
chewing “fine-cut.” He gave less thought to his personal appearance,
becoming more and more indifferent as to the impression he made on those
about him. His face, for all his increase in flesh, lost its ruddiness.
It was plain that during the last few months he had aged, that his
hound-like eye had grown more haggard, that his always ponderous step had
lost the last of its resilience.
Yet one hour after he had landed at Brindisi his listlessness seemed a
thing of the past. For there he was able to pick up the trail again, with
clear proof that a man answering to Binhart’s description had sailed for
Corfu. From Corfu the scent was followed northward to Ragusa, and from
Ragusa, on to Trieste, where it was lost again.
Two days of hard work, however, convinced Blake that Binhart had sailed
from Fiume to Naples. He started southward by train, at once, vaguely
surprised at the length of Italy, vaguely disconcerted by the unknown
tongue and the unknown country which he had to face.
It was not until he arrived at Naples that he seemed to touch solid
ground again. That city, he felt, stood much nearer home. In it were many
persons not averse to curry favor with a New York official, and many
persons indirectly in touch with the home Department. These persons he
assiduously sought out, one by one, and in twelve hours’ time his net had
been woven completely about the city. And, so far as he could learn,
Binhart was still somewhere in that city.
Two days later, when least expecting it, he stepped into the wine-room of
an obscure little pension hotel on the Via Margellina and saw Binhart
before him. Binhart left the room as the other man stepped into it. He
left by way of the window, carrying the casement with him. Blake
followed, but the lighter and younger man out-ran him and was swallowed
up by one of the unknown streets of an unknown quarter. An hour later
Blake had his hired agents raking that quarter from cellar to garret. It
was not until the evening of the following day that these agents learned
Binhart had made his way to the Marina, bribed a water-front boatman to
row him across the bay, and had been put aboard a freighter weighing
anchor for Marseilles.
For the second time Blake traversed Italy by train, hurrying self-immured
and preoccupied through Rome and Florence and Genoa, and then on along
the Riviera to Marseilles.
In that brawling and turbulent French port, after the usual rounds and
the usual inquiries down in the midst of the harbor-front forestry of
masts, he found a boatman who claimed to have knowledge of Binhart’s
whereabouts. This piratical-looking boatman promptly took Blake several
miles down the coast, parleyed in the _lingua Franca_ of the
Mediterranean, argued in broken English, and insisted on going further.
Blake, scenting imposture, demanded to be put ashore. This the boatman
refused to do. It was then and only then that the detective suspected he
was the victim of a “plant,” of a carefully planned shanghaing movement,
the object of which, apparently, was to gain time for the fugitive.
It was only at the point of a revolver that Blake brought the boat
ashore, and there he was promptly arrested and accused of attempted
murder. He found it expedient to call in the aid of the American Consul,
who, in turn, suggested the retaining of a local advocate. Everything, it
is true, was at last made clear and in the end Blake was honorably
released.
But Binhart, in the meantime, had caught a Lloyd Brazileiro steamer for
Rio de Janeiro, and was once more on the high seas.
Blake, when he learned of this, sat staring about him, like a man facing
news which he could not assimilate. He shut himself up in his hotel room,
for an hour, communing with his own dark soul. He emerged from that
self-communion freshly shaved and smoking a cigar. He found that he could
catch a steamer for Barcelona, and from that port take a Campania
Transatlantic boat for Kingston, Jamaica.
From the American consulate he carried away with him a bundle of New York
newspapers. When out on the Atlantic he arranged these according to date
and went over them diligently, page by page. They seemed like echoes out
of another life. He read listlessly on, going over the belated news from
his old-time home with the melancholy indifference of the alien, with the
poignant impersonality of the exile. He read of fires and crimes and
calamities, of investigations and elections. He read of a rumored Police
Department shake up, and he could afford to smile at the vitality of that
hellbender-like report. Then, as he turned the worn pages, the smile died
from his heavy lips, for his own name leaped up like a snake from the
text and seemed to strike him in the face. He spelled through the
paragraphs carefully, word by word, as though it were in a language with
which he was only half familiar. He even went back and read the entire
column for a second time. For there it told of his removal from the
Police Department. The Commissioner and Copeland had saved their necks,
but Blake was no longer Second Deputy. They spoke of him as being
somewhere in the Philippines, on the trail of the bank-robber Binhart.
They went on to describe him as a sleuth of the older school, as an
advocate of the now obsolete “third-degree” methods, and as a product of
the “machine” which had so long and so flagrantly placed politics before
efficiency.
Blake put down the papers, lighted a cigar, sat back, and let the truth
of what he had read percolate into his actual consciousness. He was
startled, at first, that no great outburst of rage swept through him. All
he felt, in fact, was a slow and dull resentment, a resentment which he
could not articulate. Yet dull as it was, hour by hour and day by idle
day it grew more virulent. About him stood nothing against which this
resentment could be marshaled. His pride lay as helpless as a whale
washed ashore, too massive to turn and face the tides of treachery that
had wrecked it. All he asked for was time. Let them wait, he kept telling
himself; let them wait until he got back with Binhart! Then they would
all eat crow, every last man of them!
For Blake did not intend to give up the trail. To do so would have been
beyond him. His mental fangs were already fixed in Binhart. To withdraw
them was not in his power. He could no more surrender his quarry than the
python’s head, having once closed on the rabbit, could release its meal.
With Blake, every instinct sloped inward, just as every python-fang
sloped backward. The actual reason for the chase was no longer clear to
his own vision. It was something no longer to be reckoned with. The only
thing that counted was the fact that he had decided to “get” Binhart,
that he was the pursuer and Binhart was the fugitive. It had long since
resolved itself into a personal issue between him and his enemy.