<h2 id="c16">XVI</h2>
<p>Seven days after the <i>Trunella</i> swung
southward from Callao Never-Fail
Blake, renewed as to habiliments and replenished
as to pocket, embarked on a steamer
bound for Rio de Janeiro.</p>
<p>He watched the plunging bow as it crept
southward. He saw the heat and the gray
sea-shimmer left behind him. He saw the
days grow longer and the nights grow colder.
He saw the Straits passed and the northward
journey again begun. But he neither fretted
nor complained of his fate.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_221">[221]</div>
<p>After communicating by wireless with both
Montevideo and Buenos Ayres and verifying
certain facts of which he seemed already assured,
he continued on his way to Rio. And
over Rio he once more cast and pursed up
his gently interrogative net, gathering in the
discomforting information that Binhart had
already relayed from that city to a Lloyd-Brazileiro
steamer. This steamer, he learned, was
bound for Ignitos, ten thousand dreary miles
up the Amazon.</p>
<p>Five days later Blake followed in a Clyde-built
freighter. When well up the river he
transferred to a rotten-timbered sidewheeler
that had once done duty on the Mississippi, and
still again relayed from river boat to river
boat, move by move falling more and more behind
his quarry.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_222">[222]</div>
<p>The days merged into weeks, and the weeks
into months. He suffered much from the
heat, but more from the bad food and the bad
water. For the first time in his life he found
his body shaken with fever and was compelled
to use quinin in great quantities. The attacks
of insects, of insects that flew, that
crawled, that tunneled beneath the skin, turned
life into a torment. His huge triple-terraced
neck became raw with countless wounds. But
he did not stop by the way. His eyes became
oblivious of the tangled and overcrowded
life about him, of the hectic orchids and huge
butterflies and the flaming birds-of-paradise,
of the echoing aisle ways between interwoven
jungle growths, of the arching aërial roofs of
verdure and the shadowy hanging-gardens
from which by day parakeets chattered and
monkeys screamed and by night ghostly armies
of fireflies glowed. He was no longer impressed
by that world of fierce appetites and
fierce conflicts. He seemed to have attained
to a secret inner calm, to an obsessional impassivity
across which the passing calamities
of existence only echoed. He merely recalled
that he had been compelled to eat of disagreeable
things and face undesirable emergencies,
to drink of the severed water-vine, to partake
of monkey-steak and broiled parrot, to sleep
in poisonous swamplands. His spirit, even
with the mournful cry of night birds in his
ears, had been schooled into the acceptance
of a loneliness that to another might have
seemed eternal and unendurable.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_223">[223]</div>
<p>By the time he had reached the Pacific coast
his haggard hound’s eyes were more haggard
than ever. His skin hung loose on his great
body, as though a vampire bat had drained
it of its blood. But to his own appearance
he gave scant thought. For new life came
to him when he found definite traces of Binhart.
These traces he followed up, one by
one, until he found himself circling back eastward
along the valley of the Magdalena.
And down the Magdalena he went, still sure
of his quarry, following him to Bogota, and
on again from Bogota to Barranquilla, and
on to Savanilla, where he embarked on a Hamburg-American
steamer for Limon.</p>
<p>At Limon it was not hard to pick up
the lost trail. But Binhart’s movements, after
leaving that port, became a puzzle to the man
who had begun to pride himself on growing
into knowledge of his adversary’s inmost nature.
For once Blake found himself uncertain
as to the other’s intentions. The fugitive
now seemed possessed with an idea to get away
from the sea, to strike inland at any cost, as
though water had grown a thing of horror to
him. He zigzagged from obscure village to
village, as though determined to keep away
from all main-traveled avenues of traffic.
Yet, move as he might, it was merely a matter
of time and care to follow up the steps of a
white man as distinctly individualized as Binhart.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_224">[224]</div>
<p>This white man, it seemed, was at last giving
way to the terror that must have been
haunting him for months past. His movements
became feverish, erratic, irrational.
He traveled in strange directions and by
strange means, by bullock-cart, by burro, by
dug-out, sometimes on foot and sometimes on
horseback. Sometimes he stayed over night
at a rubber-gatherers’ camp, sometimes he visited
a banana plantation, bought a fresh
horse, and pushed on again. When he
reached the Province of Alajuela he made use
of the narrow cattle passes, pressing on in a
northwesterly direction along the valleys of
the San Juan and the San Carlos River. A
madness seemed to have seized him, a madness
to make his way northward, ever northward.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_225">[225]</div>
<p>Over heartbreaking mountainous paths,
through miasmic jungles, across sun-baked
plateaus, chilled by night and scorched by day,
chafed and sore, tortured by <i>niguas</i> and <i>coloradillas</i>,
mosquitoes and <i>chigoes</i>, sleeping in
verminous hay-thatched huts of bamboo bound
together with bejuco-vine, mislead by lying natives
and stolen from by peons, Blake day by
day and week by week fought his way after
his enemy. When worn to lightheadedness
he drank <i>guaro</i> and great quantities of black
coffee; when ill he ate quinin.</p>
<p>The mere act of pursuit had become automatic
with him. He no longer remembered
why he was seeking out this man. He no
longer remembered the crime that lay at the
root of that flight and pursuit. It was not
often, in fact, that his thoughts strayed back
to his old life. When he did think of it, it
seemed only something too far away to remember,
something phantasmal, something
belonging to another world. There were
times when all his journeying through steaming
swamplands and forests of teak and satinwood
and over indigo lagoons and mountain-passes
of moonlit desolation seemed utterly
and unfathomably foolish. But he fought
back such moods, as though they were a weakness.
He let nothing deter him. He stuck
to his trail, instinctively, doggedly, relentlessly.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_226">[226]</div>
<p>It was at Chalavia that a peon named Tico
Viquez came to Blake with the news of a white
man lying ill of black-water fever in a native
hut. For so much gold, Tico Viquez intimated,
he would lead the señor to the hut in
question.</p>
<p>Blake, who had no gold to spare, covered
the startled peon with his revolver and commanded
Viquez to take him to that hut. There
was that in the white man’s face which caused
the peon to remember that life was sweet. He
led the way through a reptilious swamp and
into the fringe of a nispero forest, where they
came upon a hut with a roof of corrugated
iron and walls of wattled bamboo.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_227">[227]</div>
<p>Blake, with his revolver in his hand and his
guide held before him as a human shield, cautiously
approached the door of this hut, for
he feared treachery. Then, with equal caution,
he peered through the narrow doorway.
He stood there for several moments, without
moving.</p>
<p>Then he slipped his revolver back into his
pocket and stepped into the hut. For there,
in one corner of it, lay Binhart. He lay on
a bed made of bull-hide stretched across a
rough-timbered frame. Yet what Blake
looked down on seemed more a shriveled
mummy of Binhart than the man himself. A
vague trouble took possession of the detective
as he blinked calmly down at the glazed and
sunken eyes, the gaunt neck, the childishly
helpless body. He stood there, waiting until
the man on the sagging bull-skin saw him.</p>
<p>“Hello, Jim!” said the sick man, in little
more than a whisper.</p>
<p>“Hello, Connie!” was the other’s answer.
He picked up a palmetto frond and fought
away the flies. The uncleanness of the place
turned his stomach.</p>
<p>“What’s up, Connie?” he asked, sitting
calmly down beside the narrow bed.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_228">[228]</div>
<p>The sick man moved a hand, weakly, as
though it were the yellow flapper of some
wounded amphibian.</p>
<p>“The jig’s up!” he said. The faint mockery
of a smile wavered across the painfully
gaunt face. It reminded the other man of
heat-lightning on a dark skyline. “You got
me, Jim. But it won’t do much good. I’m
going to cash in.”</p>
<p>“What makes you say that?” argued Blake,
studying the lean figure. There was a look
of mild regret on his own sodden and haggard
face. “What’s wrong with you, anyway?”</p>
<p>The man on the bed did not answer for some
time. When he spoke, he spoke without looking
at the other man.</p>
<p>“They said it was black-water fever. Then
they said it was yellow-jack. But I know
it’s not. I think it’s typhoid, or swamp
fever. It’s worse than malaria. I dam’
near burn up every night. I get out of my
head. I’ve done that three nights. That’s
why the niggers won’t come near me now!”</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_229">[229]</div>
<p>Blake leaned forward and fought away the
flies again.</p>
<p>“Then it’s a good thing I got up with you.”</p>
<p>The sick man rolled his eyes in their
sockets, so as to bring his enemy into his line
of vision.</p>
<p>“Why?” he asked.</p>
<p>“Because I’m not going to let you die,” was
Blake’s answer.</p>
<p>“You can’t help it, Jim! The jig’s up!”</p>
<p>“I’m going to get a litter and get you up
out o’ this hell-hole of a swamp,” announced
Blake. “I’m going to have you carried up
to the hills. Then I’m going back to Chalavia
to get a doctor o’ some kind. Then I’m going
to put you on your feet again!”</p>
<p>Binhart slowly moved his head from side to
side. Then the heat-lightning smile played
about the hollow face again.</p>
<p>“It was some chase, Jim, wasn’t it?” he said,
without looking at his old-time enemy.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_230">[230]</div>
<p>Blake stared down at him with his haggard
hound’s eyes; there was no answering smile on
his heavy lips, now furzed with their grizzled
growth of hair. There seemed something
ignominious in such an end, something futile
and self-frustrating. It was unjust. It left
everything so hideously incomplete. He revolted
against it with a sullen and senseless
rage.</p>
<p>“By God, you’re not going to die!” declared
the staring and sinewy-necked man at
the bedside. “I say you’re not going to die.
I’m going to get you out o’ here alive!”</p>
<p>A sweat of weakness stood out on Binhart’s
white face.</p>
<p>“Where to?” he asked, as he had asked once
before. And his eyes remained closed as he
put the question.</p>
<p>“To the pen,” was the answer which rose to
Blake’s lips. But he did not utter the words.
Instead, he rose impatiently to his feet. But
the man on the bed must have sensed that unspoken
response, for he opened his eyes and
stared long and mournfully at his heavy-bodied
enemy.</p>
<p>“You’ll never get me there!” he said, in little
more than a whisper. “Never!”</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_231">[231]</div>
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