<h2 id="c6">VI</h2>
<p>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.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_91">[91]</div>
<p>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 <i>papa-bottes</i> in
ribbons of bacon, to say nothing of fruit and
<i>bruilleau</i>.</p>
<p>Blake insisted on joining his old friend
Sheiner, much to the latter’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.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_92">[92]</div>
<p>“Abe, I’ve come down to gather you in,”
announced the calmly mendacious detective.
He continued to sip his bruilleau with fraternal
unconcern.</p>
<p>“You got nothing <i>on</i> me, Jim,” protested the
other, losing his taste for the delicacies arrayed
about him.</p>
<p>“Well, we got ’o go down to Headquarters
and talk that over,” calmly persisted Blake.</p>
<p>“What’s the use of pounding me, when I’m
on the square again?” persisted the ex-drum
snuffer.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“Did you bump into Binhart in St. Louis?”</p>
<p>“We had a talk, three days ago.”</p>
<p>“Then why’d he blow through this town as
though he had a regiment o’ bulls and singed
cats behind him!”</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_93">[93]</div>
<p>Blake’s heart went down like an elevator with
a broken cable. But he gave no outward sign
of this inward commotion.</p>
<p>“Because he wants to get down to Colon before
the Hamburg-American boat hits the
port,” ventured Blake. “His moll’s aboard!”</p>
<p>“But he blew out for ’Frisco this morning,”
contended the puzzled Sheiner. “Shot through
as though he’d just had a rumble!”</p>
<p>“Oh, he <i>said</i> that, but he went south, all
right.”</p>
<p>“Then he went in an oyster sloop. There’s
nothing sailing from this port to-day.”</p>
<p>“Well, what’s Binhart got to do with our
trouble anyway? What I want—”</p>
<p>“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!”</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_94">[94]</div>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_95">[95]</div>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_96">[96]</div>
<p>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
weren’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.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_97">[97]</div>
<p>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.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_98">[98]</div>
<p>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 <i>Manchuria</i>. 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_99">[99]</div>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>Crossing the Sound, he reached Victoria in
time to see the <i>Empress of China</i> 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.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_100">[100]</div>
<p>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.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_101">[101]</div>
<p>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.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_102">[102]</div>
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