Several days dragged away before Blake’s mental clarity returned to him.
Then block by unstable block he seemed to rebuild a new world about him,
a new world which was both narrow and empty. But it at least gave him
something on which to plant his bewildered feet.
That slow return to the substantialities of life was in the nature of a
convalescence. It came step by languid step; he knew no power to hurry
it. And as is so often the case with convalescents, he found himself in a
world from which time seemed to have detached him. Yet as he emerged from
that earlier state of coma, his old-time instincts and characteristics
began to assert themselves. Some deep-seated inner spirit of dubiety
began to grope about and question and challenge. His innate skepticism
once more became active. That tendency to cynical unbelief which his
profession had imposed upon him stubbornly reasserted itself. His career
had crowned him with a surly suspiciousness. And about the one thing that
remained vital to that career, or what was left of it, these wayward
suspicions arrayed themselves like wolves about a wounded stag.
His unquiet soul felt the need of some final and personal proof of
Binhart’s death. He asked for more data than had been given him. He
wanted more information than the fact that Binhart, on his flight north,
had fallen ill of pneumonia in New Orleans, had wandered on to the dry
air of Arizona with a “spot” on his lungs, and had there succumbed to the
tubercular invasion for which his earlier sickness had laid him open.
Blake’s slowly awakening and ever-wary mind kept telling him that after
all there might be some possibility of trickery, that a fugitive with the
devilish ingenuity of Binhart would resort to any means to escape being
further harassed by the Law.
Blake even recalled, a few days later, the incident of the Shattuck
jewel-robbery, during the first weeks of his régime as a Deputy
Commissioner. This diamond-thief named Shattuck had been arrested and
released under heavy bail. Seven months later Shattuck’s attorney had
appeared before the District Attorney’s office with a duly executed
certificate of death, officially establishing the fact that his client
had died two weeks before in the city of Baltimore. On this he had based
a demand for the dismissal of the case. He had succeeded in having all
action stopped and the affair became, officially, a closed incident. Yet
two months later Shattuck had been seen alive, and the following winter
had engaged in an Albany hotel robbery which had earned for him, under an
entirely different name, a nine-year sentence in Sing Sing.
From the memory of that case Never-Fail Blake wrung a thin and ghostly
consolation. The more he brooded over it the more morosely disquieted he
became. The thing grew like a upas tree; it spread until it obsessed all
his waking hours and invaded even his dreams. Then a time came when he
could endure it no more. He faced the necessity of purging his soul of
all uncertainty. The whimpering of one of his unkenneled “hunches” merged
into what seemed an actual voice of inspiration to him.
He gathered together what money he could; he arranged what few matters
still remained to engage his attention, going about the task with that
valedictory solemnity with which the forlornly decrepit execute their
last will and testament. Then, when everything was prepared, he once more
started out on the trail.
* * * * * * * *
Two weeks later a rough and heavy-bodied man, garbed in the rough apparel
of a mining prospector, made his way into the sun-steeped town of Toluca.
There he went quietly to the wooden-fronted hotel, hired a pack-mule and
a camp-outfit and made purchase, among other things, of a pick and
shovel. To certain of the men he met he put inquiries as to the best
trail out to the Buenavista Copper Camp. Then, as he waited for the
camp-partner who was to follow him into Toluca, he drifted with amiable
and ponderous restlessness about the town, talking with the telegraph
operator and the barber, swapping yarns at the livery-stable where his
pack-mule was lodged, handing out cigars in the wooden-fronted hotel,
casually interviewing the town officials as to the health of the locality
and the death-rate of Toluca, acquainting himself with the local
undertaker and the lonely young doctor, and even dropping in on the town
officials and making inquiries about main-street building lots and the
need of a new hotel.
To all this amiable and erratic garrulity there seemed to be neither
direction nor significance. But in one thing the town of Toluca agreed;
the ponderous-bodied old newcomer was a bit “queer” in his head.
A time came, however, when the newcomer announced that he could wait no
longer for his belated camp-partner. With his pack-mule and a pick and
shovel he set out, late one afternoon, for the Buenavista Camp. Yet by
nightfall, for some strange reason, any one traveling that lonely trail
might have seen him returning towards Toluca. He did not enter the town,
however, but skirted the outer fringe of sparsely settled houses and
guardedly made his way to a close-fenced area, in which neither light nor
movement could be detected. This silent place awakened in him no trace of
either fear or repugnance. With him he carried his pick and shovel, and
five minutes later the sound of this pick and shovel might have been
heard at work as the ponderous-bodied man sweated over his midnight
labor. When he had dug for what seemed an interminable length of time, he
tore away a layer of pine boards and released a double row of
screw-heads. Then he crouched low down in the rectangular cavern which he
had fashioned with his spade, struck a match, and peered with a
narrow-eyed and breathless intentness at what faced him there.
One glance at that tragic mass of corruption was enough for him. He
replaced the screw-heads and the pine boards. He took up his shovel and
began restoring the earth, stolidly tramping it down, from time to time,
with his great weight.
When his task was completed he saw that everything was orderly and as he
had found it. Then he returned to his tethered pack-mule and once more
headed for the Buenavista Camp, carrying with him a discovery which made
the night air as intoxicating as wine to his weary body.
Late that night a man might have been heard singing to the stars, singing
in the midst of the wilderness, without rhyme or reason. And in the midst
of that wilderness he remained for another long day and another long
night, as though solitude were necessary to him, that he might adjust
himself to some new order of things, that he might digest some victory
which had been too much for his shattered nerves.
On the third day, as he limped placidly back into the town of Toluca, his
soul was torn between a great peace and a great hunger. He hugged to his
breast the fact that somewhere in the world ahead of him a man once known
as Binhart still moved and lived. He kept telling himself that somewhere
about the face of the globe that restless spirit whom he sought still
wandered.
Day by patient day, through the drought and heat and alkali of an Arizona
summer, he sought some clue, some inkling, of the direction which that
wanderer had taken. But about Binhart and his movements, Toluca and
Phœnix and all Arizona itself seemed to know nothing.
Nothing, Blake saw in the end, remained to be discovered there. So in
time the heavy-bodied man with the haggard hound’s eyes took his leave,
passing out into the world which in turn swallowed him up as completely
as it had swallowed up his unknown enemy.