<h2 id="c12">XII</h2>
<p>Three hours after he had disembarked
from his steamer at Rio, Blake was
breakfasting at the Café Britto in the Ovidor.
At the same table with him sat a lean-jawed
and rat-eyed little gambler by the name of
Passos.</p>
<p>Two hours after this breakfast Passos
might have been seen on the Avenida Central,
in deep talk with a peddler of artificial diamonds.
Still later in the day he held converse
with a fellow gambler at the Paineiras, half-way
up Mount Corcovado; and the same
afternoon he was interrogating a certain discredited
concession-hunter on the Petropolis
boat.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_163">[163]</div>
<p>By evening he was able to return to Blake
with the information that Binhart had duly
landed at Rio, had hidden for three days in
the outskirts of the city, and had gone aboard
a German cargo-boat bound for Colon. Two
days later Blake himself was aboard a British
freighter northward bound for Kingston.
Once again he beheld a tropical sun shimmer
on hot brass-work and pitch boil up between
bone-white deck-boards sluiced and resluiced
by a half-naked crew. Once again he had to
face an enervating equatorial heat that vitiated
both mind and body. But he neither
fretted nor complained. Some fixed inner
purpose seemed to sustain him through every
discomfort. Deep in that soul, merely
filmed with its fixed equatorial calm, burned
some dormant and crusader-like propulsion.
And an existence so centered on one great issue
found scant time to worry over the trivialities
of the moment.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_164">[164]</div>
<p>After a three-day wait at Jamaica Blake
caught an Atlas liner for Colon. And at
Colon he found himself once more among his
own kind. Scattered up and down the
Isthmus he found an occasional Northerner
to whom he was not unknown, engineers and
construction men who could talk of things
that were comprehensible to him, gamblers
and adventurers who took him poignantly
back to the life he had left so far behind him.
Along that crowded and shifting half-way
house for the tropic-loving American he
found more than one passing friend to whom
he talked hungrily and put many wistful
questions. Sometimes it was a rock contractor
tanned the color of a Mexican saddle.
Sometimes it was a new arrival in Stetson and
riding-breeches and unstained leather leggings.
Sometimes it was a coatless dump-boss
blaspheming his toiling army of spick-a-dees.</p>
<p>Sometimes he talked with graders and car-men
and track-layers in Chinese saloons along
Bottle Alley. Sometimes it was with a
bridge-builder or a lottery capper in the bar-room
of the Hotel Central, where he would
sit without coat or vest, calmly giving an eye
to his game of “draw” or stolidly “rolling
the bones” as he talked—but always with his
ears open for one particular thing, and that
thing had to do with the movements or the
whereabouts of Connie Binhart.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_165">[165]</div>
<p>One night, as he sat placidly playing his
game of “cut-throat” in his shirt-sleeves, he
looked up and saw a russet-faced figure as
stolid as his own. This figure, he perceived,
was discreetly studying him as he sat under
the glare of the light. Blake went on with
his game. In a quarter of an hour, however,
he got up from the table and bought a fresh
supply of “green” Havana cigars. Then he
sauntered out to where the russet-faced
stranger stood watching the street crowds.</p>
<p>“Pip, what’re you doing down in these
parts?” he casually inquired. He had recognized
the man as Pip Tankred, with whom he
had come in contact five long years before.
Pip, on that occasion, was engaged in loading
an East River banana-boat with an odd ton
or two of cartridges designed for Castro’s
opponents in Venezuela.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_166">[166]</div>
<p>“Oh, I’m freightin’ bridge equipment
down the West Coast,” he solemnly announced.
“And transshippin’ a few cases o’
phonograph-records as a side-line!”</p>
<p>“Have a smoke?” asked Blake.</p>
<p>“Sure,” responded the russet-faced bucaneer.
And as they stood smoking together
Blake tenderly and cautiously put out the
usual feelers, plying the familiar questions
and meeting with the too-familiar lack of response.
Like all the rest of them, he soon
saw, Pip Tankred knew nothing of Binhart
or his whereabouts. And with that discovery
his interest in Pip Tankred ceased.</p>
<p>So the next day Blake moved inland, working
his interrogative way along the Big Ditch
to Panama. He even slipped back over the
line to San Cristobel and Ancon, found nothing
of moment awaiting him there, and
drifted back into Panamanian territory. It
was not until the end of the week that the
first glimmer of hope came to him.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_167">[167]</div>
<p>It came in the form of an incredibly thin
<i>gringo</i> in an incredibly soiled suit of duck.
Blake had been sitting on the wide veranda
of the Hotel Angelini, sipping his “swizzle”
and studiously watching the Saturday evening
crowds that passed back and forth through
Panama’s bustling railway station. He had
watched the long line of rickety cabs backed
up against the curb, the two honking autobusses,
the shifting army of pleasure-seekers
along the sidewalks, the noisy saloons round
which the crowds eddied like bees about a
hive, and he was once more appraising the
groups closer about him, when through that
seething and bustling mass of humanity he
saw Dusty McGlade pushing his way, a Dusty
McGlade on whom the rum of Jamaica and
the <i>mezcal</i> of Guatemala and the <i>anisado</i> of
Ecuador had combined with the <i>pulque</i> of
Mexico to set their unmistakable seal.</p>
<p>But three minutes later the two men were
seated together above their “swizzles” and
Blake was exploring Dusty’s faded memories
as busily as a leather-dip might explore an inebriate’s
pockets.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_168">[168]</div>
<p>“Who’re you looking for, Jim?” suddenly
and peevishly demanded the man in the soiled
white duck, as though impatient of the other’s
indirections.</p>
<p>Blake smoked for a moment or two before
answering.</p>
<p>“I’m looking for a man called Connie Binhart,”
he finally confessed, as he continued to
study that ruinous figure in front of him. It
startled him to see what idleness and alcohol
and the heat of the tropics could do to a man
once as astute as Dusty McGlade.</p>
<p>“Then why didn’t you say so?” complained
McGlade, as though impatient of obliquities
that had been altogether too apparent. He
had once been afraid of this man called Blake,
he remembered. But time had changed
things, as time has the habit of doing. And
most of all, time had changed Blake himself,
had left the old-time Headquarters man
oddly heavy of movement and strangely slow
of thought.</p>
<p>“Well, I’m saying it now!” Blake’s guttural
voice was reminding him.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_169">[169]</div>
<p>“Then why didn’t you say it an hour ago?”
contested McGlade, with his alcoholic peevish
obstinacy.</p>
<p>“Well, let’s have it now,” placated the
patient-eyed Blake. He waited, with a show
of indifference. He even overlooked Dusty’s
curt laugh of contempt.</p>
<p>“I can tell you all right, all right—but it
won’t do you much good!”</p>
<p>“Why not?” And still Blake was bland
and patient.</p>
<p>“Because,” retorted McGlade, fixing the
other man with a lean finger that was both
unclean and unsteady, “<i>you can’t get at him</i>!”</p>
<p>“You tell me where he is,” said Blake,
striking a match. “I’ll attend to the rest of
it!”</p>
<p>McGlade slowly and deliberately drank the
last of his swizzle. Then he put down his
empty glass and stared pensively and pregnantly
into it.</p>
<p>“What’s there in it for me?” he asked.</p>
<p>Blake, studying him across the small table,
weighed both the man and the situation.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_170">[170]</div>
<p>“Two hundred dollars in American greenbacks,”
he announced as he drew out his wallet.
He could see McGlade moisten his flaccid
lips. He could see the faded eyes fasten
on the bills as they were counted out. He
knew where the money would go, how little
good it would do. But that, he knew, was
not <i>his</i> funeral. All he wanted was Binhart.</p>
<p>“Binhart’s in Guayaquil,” McGlade suddenly
announced.</p>
<p>“How d’ you know that?” promptly demanded
Blake.</p>
<p>“I know the man who sneaked him out from
Balboa. He got sixty dollars for it. I can
take you to him. Binhart’d picked up a
medicine-chest and a bag of instruments from
a broken-down doctor at Colon. He went
aboard a Pacific liner as a doctor himself.”</p>
<p>“What liner?”</p>
<p>“He went aboard the <i>Trunella</i>. He
thought he’d get down to Callao. But they
tied the <i>Trunella</i> up at Guayaquil.”</p>
<p>“And you say he’s there now?”</p>
<p>“Yes!”</p>
<p>“And aboard the <i>Trunella</i>?”</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_171">[171]</div>
<p>“Sure! He’s got to be aboard the <i>Trunella</i>!”</p>
<p>“Then why d’ you say I can’t get at him?”</p>
<p>“Because Guayaquil and the <i>Trunella</i> and
the whole coast down there is tied up in quarantine.
That whole harbor’s rotten with
yellow-jack. It’s tied up as tight as a drum.
You couldn’t get a boat on all the Pacific to
touch that port these days!”</p>
<p>“But there’s got to be <i>something</i> going
there!” contended Blake.</p>
<p>“They daren’t do it! They couldn’t get
clearance—they couldn’t even get <i>pratique</i>!
Once they got in there they’d be held and
given the blood-test and picketed with a gunboat
for a month! And what’s more,
they’ve got that Alfaro revolution on down
there! They’ve got boat-patrols up and
down the coast, keeping a lookout for gun-runners!”</p>
<p>Blake, at this last word, raised his ponderous
head.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_172">[172]</div>
<p>“The boat-patrols wouldn’t phase me,” he
announced. His thoughts, in fact, were already
far ahead, marshaling themselves about
other things.</p>
<p>“You’ve a weakness for yellow fever?” inquired
the ironic McGlade.</p>
<p>“I guess it’d take more than a few fever
germs to throw me off that trail,” was the detective’s
abstracted retort. He was recalling
certain things that the russet-faced Pip Tankred
had told him. And before everything
else he felt that it would be well to get in
touch with that distributor of bridge equipment
and phonograph records.</p>
<p>“You don’t mean you’re going to try to
get into Guayaquil?” demanded McGlade.</p>
<p>“If Connie Binhart’s down there I’ve got
to go and get him,” was Never-Fail Blake’s
answer.</p>
<p class="center"><span class="gs">* * * * * * * *</span></p>
<p>The following morning Blake, having made
sure of his ground, began one of his old-time
“investigations” of that unsuspecting worthy
known as Pip Tankred.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_173">[173]</div>
<p>This investigation involved a hurried journey
back to Colon, the expenditure of much
money in cable tolls, the examination of records
that were both official and unofficial, the
asking of many questions and the turning up
of dimly remembered things on which the
dust of time had long since settled.</p>
<p>It was followed by a return to Panama, a
secret trip several miles up the coast to look
over a freighter placidly anchored there, a
dolorous-appearing coast-tramp with unpainted
upperworks and a rusty red hull.
The side-plates of this red hull, Blake observed,
were as pitted and scarred as the face
of an Egyptian obelisk. Her ventilators
were askew and her funnel was scrofulous and
many of her rivet-heads seemed to be eaten
away. But this was not once a source of apprehension
to the studious-eyed detective.</p>
<p>The following evening he encountered
Tankred himself, as though by accident, on
the veranda of the Hotel Angelini. The latter,
at Blake’s invitation, sat down for a cocktail
and a quiet smoke.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_174">[174]</div>
<p>They sat in silence for some time, watching
the rain that deluged the city, the warm devitalizing
rain that unedged even the fieriest
of Signor Angelinas stimulants.</p>
<p>“Pip,” Blake very quietly announced,
“you’re going to sail for Guayaquil to-morrow!”</p>
<p>“Am I?” queried the unmoved Pip.</p>
<p>“You’re going to start for Guayaquil to-morrow,”
repeated Blake, “and you’re going
to take me along with you!”</p>
<p>“My friend,” retorted Pip, emitting a curling
geyser of smoke as long and thin as a
pool-que, “you’re sure laborin’ under the misapprehension
this steamer o’ mine is a Pacific
mailer! But she ain’t, Blake!”</p>
<p>“I admit that,” quietly acknowledged the
other man. “I saw her yesterday!”</p>
<p>“And she don’t carry no passengers—she
ain’t allowed to,” announced her master.</p>
<p>“But she’s going to carry me,” asserted
Blake, lighting a fresh cigar.</p>
<p>“What as?” demanded Tankred. And he
fixed Blake with a belligerent eye as he put
the question.</p>
<p>“As an old friend of yours!”</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_175">[175]</div>
<p>“And then what?” still challenged the
other.</p>
<p>“As a man who knows your record, in the
next place. And on the next count, as the
man who’s wise to those phony bills of lading
of yours, and those doped-up clearance
papers, and those cases of carbines you’ve got
down your hold labeled bridge equipment,
and that nitro and giant-caps, and that hundred
thousand rounds of smokeless you’re
running down there as phonograph records!”</p>
<p>Tankred continued to smoke.</p>
<p>“You ever stop to wonder,” he finally inquired,
“if it ain’t kind o’ flirtin’ with danger
knowin’ so much about me and my freightin’
business?”</p>
<p>“No, you’re doing the coquetting in this
case, I guess!”</p>
<p>“Then I ain’t standin’ for no rivals—not
on this coast!”</p>
<p>The two men, so dissimilar in aspect and
yet so alike in their accidental attitudes of an
uncouth belligerency, sat staring at each
other.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_176">[176]</div>
<p>“You’re going to take me to Guayaquil,”
repeated Blake.</p>
<p>“That’s where you’re dead wrong,” was
the calmly insolent rejoinder. “I ain’t even
<i>goin’</i> to Guayaquil.”</p>
<p>“I say you are.”</p>
<p>Tankred’s smile translated his earlier deliberateness
into open contempt.</p>
<p>“You seem to forget that this here town
you’re beefin’ about lies a good thirty-five
miles up the Guayas River. And if I’m gun-runnin’
for Alfaro, as you say, I naturally
ain’t navigatin’ streams where they’d be able
to pick me off the bridge-deck with a fishin’-pole!”</p>
<p>“But you’re going to get as close to Guayaquil
as you can, and you know it.”</p>
<p>“Do I?” said the man with the up-tilted
cigar.</p>
<p>“Look here, Pip,” said Blake, leaning closer
over the table towards him. “I don’t give a
tinker’s dam about Alfaro and his two-cent
revolution. I’m not sitting up worrying
over him or his junta or how he gets his ammunition.
But I want to get into Guayaquil,
and this is the only way I can do it!”</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_177">[177]</div>
<p>For the first time Tankred turned and
studied him.</p>
<p>“What d’ you want to get into Guayaquil
for?” he finally demanded. Blake knew that
nothing was to be gained by beating about the
bush.</p>
<p>“There’s a man I want down there, and
I’m going down to get him!”</p>
<p>“Who is he?”</p>
<p>“That’s my business,” retorted Blake.</p>
<p>“And gettin’ into Guayaquil’s your business!”
Tankred snorted back.</p>
<p>“All I’m going to say is he’s a man from
up North—and he’s not in your line of business,
and never was and never will be!”</p>
<p>“How do I know that?”</p>
<p>“You’ll have my word for it!”</p>
<p>Tankred swung round on him.</p>
<p>“D’ you realize you’ll have to sneak ashore
in a <i>lancha</i> and pass a double line o’ patrol?
And then crawl into a town that’s reekin’
with yellow-jack, a town you’re not likely to
crawl out of again inside o’ three months?”</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_178">[178]</div>
<p>“I know all that!” acknowledged Blake.</p>
<p>For the second time Tankred turned and
studied the other man.</p>
<p>“And you’re still goin’ after your gen’leman
friend from up North?” he inquired.</p>
<p>“Pip, I’ve got to get that man!”</p>
<p>“You’ve got ’o?”</p>
<p>“I’ve got to, and I’m going to!”</p>
<p>Tankred threw his cigar-end away and
laughed leisurely and quietly.</p>
<p>“Then what’re we sittin’ here arguin’
about, anyway? If it’s settled, it’s settled,
ain’t it?”</p>
<p>“Yes, I think it’s settled!”</p>
<p>Again Tankred laughed.</p>
<p>“But take it from me, my friend, you’ll
sure see some rough goin’ this next few
days!”</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_179">[179]</div>
<div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />