<h2 id="c11">XI</h2>
<p>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.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_152">[152]</div>
<p>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 <i>Toyo Kisen Kaisha</i> 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.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_153">[153]</div>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_154">[154]</div>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_155">[155]</div>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_156">[156]</div>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_157">[157]</div>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <i>lingua Franca</i> 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.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_158">[158]</div>
<p>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.</p>
<p>But Binhart, in the meantime, had caught a
Lloyd Brazileiro steamer for Rio de Janeiro,
and was once more on the high seas.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_159">[159]</div>
<p>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.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_160">[160]</div>
<p>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!</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_161">[161]</div>
<p>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.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_162">[162]</div>
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