The view of Greenfield sauntering lightly away among the noisy tables,
bravado in his manner, deviltry in his heart, was the last glimpse
Inspector Frawley was destined to have of him in many months. True,
Greenfield had not lied: the address was genuine, but the man was gone.
For days Frawley had the city scoured without gaining a clue. No steamer
had left the harbor, not even a tramp. If Greenfield was not in hiding,
he must have buried himself in the interior.
It was a week before Frawley found the track. Greenfield had walked
thirty miles into the country and taken the train for Rio Mendoza on the
route across the Andes to Valparaiso.
Frawley followed the same day, somewhat mystified at this sudden change
of base. In the train the thermometer stood at 116°. The heat made of
everything a solitude. Frawley, lifeless, stifling, and numbed, glued
himself to the air-holes with eyes fastened on the horizon, while the
train sped across the naked, singeing back of the plains like the welt
that springs to meet the fall of the lash. For two nights he watched the
distended sun, exhausted by its own madness, drop back into the heated
void, and the tortured stars rise over the stricken desert. At the end
of thirty-six hours of agony he arrived at Rio Mendoza. Thence he
reached Punta de Vacas, procured mules and a guide, and prepared for
the ascent over the mountains.
At two o'clock the next morning he began to climb out of hell. The
tortured plains settled below him. A divine freshness breathed upon him
with a new hope of life. He left the burning conflict of summer and
passed into the aroma of spring.
Then the air grew intense, a new suffocation pressed about his
temples--the suffocation of too much life. In an hour he had run the
gamut of the seasons. The cold of everlasting winter descended and stung
his senses. Up and up and up they went--then suddenly down, with the
half-breed guide and the tireless mule always at the same distance
before him; and again began the insistent mechanical toiling upward. He
grew listless and indifferent, acquiescent in these steep efforts that
the next moment must throw away. The horror of immense distance rose
about him. From time to time a stone dislodged by their passage rushed
from under him, struck the brink, and spun into the void, to fall
endlessly. The face of the earth grew confused and dropped in a mist
from before his eyes.
Then as they toiled still upward, a gale as though sent in anger rushed
down upon them, sweeping up whirlwinds of snow, raging and shrieking,
dragging them to the brink, and threatening to blot them out.
Frawley clutched the saddle, then flung his arms about the neck of his
mule. His head was reeling, the indignant blood rushed to his nostrils
and his ears, his lungs no longer could master the divine air. Then
suddenly the mules stopped, exhausted. Through the maelstrom the guide
shrieked to him not to use the spur. Frawley felt himself in danger of
dying, and had no resentment.
For a day they affronted the immense wilds until they had forced
themselves thousands of feet above the race of men. Then they began to
descend.
Below them the clouds lapped and rolled like the elements before the
creation. Still they descended, and the moist oblivion closed about
them, like the curse of a world without color. The bleak mists separated
and began to roll up above them, a cloud split asunder, and through the
slit the earth jumped up, and the solid land spread before them as when
at the dawn it obeyed the will of the Creator. They saw the hills and
the mountains grow, and the rivers trickle toward the sea. The masses of
brown and green began to be splashed with red and yellow as the fields
became fertile and fructified; and the insect race of men began to crawl
to and fro.
The half-breed, who saw the scene for the hundredth time, bent his head
in awe. Frawley straightened in his saddle, stretched the stiffness out
of his limbs, patted his mule solicitously, glanced at the guide, and
stopped in perplexity at the mute, reverential attitude.
"What's he starin' at now?" he muttered in as then, with a glance at
his watch, he added anxiously, "I say, Sammy, when do we get a bit to
eat?"
V
In Valparaiso he readily found the track of Greenfield. Up to the time
of his departure, two boats had sailed: one for the north, and one by
the Straits of Magellan to Buenos Ayres. Greenfield had bought a ticket
for each, after effecting the withdrawal of his account at a local bank.
Frawley was in perplexity: for Greenfield to flee north was to run into
the jaws of the law. The withdrawal of the account decided him. He
returned to Buenos Ayres by the route he had come, arriving the day
before the steamer. To his discomfiture Greenfield was not on board. By
ridiculously casting away his protection he had thrown the detective off
the track and gained three weeks. Without more concern than he might
have shown in taking a trip from Toronto to New York, Frawley a third
time crossed the Andes and set himself to correcting his first error.
He traced Greenfield laboriously up the coast back to Panama and there
lost the trail. At the end of two months he learned that Greenfield had
shipped as a common sailor on a freighter that touched at Hawaii. From
here he followed him to Yokohama, Singapore, Ceylon, and Bombay.
Thence Greenfield, suddenly abandoning the water route, had proceeded
by land to Bagdad, and across the Turkish Empire to Constantinople.
Without a pause, Frawley traced him next into the Balkans, through
Bulgaria, Roumania, amid massacre and revolution to Budapest, back to
Odessa, and across the back of Russia by Moscow and Riga to Stockholm. A
year had elapsed.
Several times he might have gained on the fugitive had he trusted to his
instinct; but he bided his time, renouncing a stroke of genius, in order
to be certain of committing no error, awaiting the moment when
Greenfield would pause and he might overtake him. But the fugitive, as
though stung by a gad-fly, continued to plunge madly over sea and
continent. Four months, five months behind, Frawley continued the
tireless pursuit.
From Stockholm the chase led to Copenhagen, to Christiansand, down the
North Sea to Rotterdam. From thence Greenfield had rushed by rail to
Lisbon and taken steamer to Africa, touching at Gibraltar, Portuguese
and French Guinea, Sierra Leone, and proceeding thence into the Congo.
For a month all traces disappeared in the veldt, until by chance, rather
than by his own merits, Frawley found the trail anew in Madagascar,
whither Greenfield had come after a desperate attempt to bury his trail
on the immense plains of Southern Africa.
From Madagascar, Frawley followed him to Aden in Arabia and by steamer
to Melbourne. Again for weeks he sought the confused track vainly
through Australia, up through Sydney, down again to Tasmania and New
Zealand on a false clue, back to Queensland, where at last in Cooktown
he learned anew of the passing of his man.
The third year began without appreciable gain. Greenfield still was
three months in advance, never pausing, scurrying from continent to
continent, as though instinctively aware of the progress of his pursuer.
In this year Frawley visited Sumatra, Java, and Borneo, stopped at
Manila, jumped immediately to Korea, and hurried on to Vladivostok,
where he found that Greenfield had procured passage on a sealer bound
for Auckland. There he had taken the steamer by the Straits of Magellan
back to Buenos Ayres.
There, within the first hour, he heard a report that his man had gone on
to Rio Janeiro, caught the cholera, and died there. Undaunted by the
epidemic, Frawley took the next boat and entered the stricken city by
swimming ashore. For a week he searched the hospitals and the
cemeteries. Greenfield had indeed been stricken, but, escaping with his
life, had left for the northern part of Brazil. The delay resulted in a
gain of three months for Frawley, but without heat or excitement he
began anew the pursuit, passing up the coast to Para and the mouth of
the Amazon, by Bogota and Panama into Mexico, on up toward the border
of Texas. The months between him and Greenfield shortened to weeks, then
to days without troubling his equanimity. At El Paso he arrived a few
hours after Greenfield had left, going toward the Salt Basin and the
Guadalupe Mountains. Frawley took horses and a guide and followed to the
edge of the desert. At three o'clock in the afternoon a horseman grew
out of the horizon, a figure that remained stationary and attentive,
studying his approach through a spy-glass. Suddenly, as though
satisfied, the stranger took off his hat and waved it above his head in
challenge, and digging his heels into his horse, disappeared into the
desert.