<h2 id="c18">XVIII</h2>
<p>It was six weeks later that a slender-bodied
young Nicaraguan known as Doctor Alfonso
Sedeno (his right to that title resulting
from four years of medical study in Paris)
escorted into Bluefields the flaccid and attenuated
shadow of Never-Fail Blake. Doctor
Sedeno explained to the English shipping
firm to whom he handed over his patient that
the Señor Americano had been found in a dying
condition, ten miles from the camp of the
rubber company for which he acted as surgeon.
The Señor Americano was apparently
a prospector who had been deserted by his
partner. He had been very ill. But a few
days of complete rest would restore him. The
sea voyage would also help. In the meantime,
if the shipping company would arrange
for credit from the hotel, the matter would
assuredly be put right, later on, when the necessary
despatches had been returned from New
York.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_243">[243]</div>
<p>For three weeks of torpor Blake sat in the
shadowy hotel, watching the torrential rains
that deluged the coast. Then, with the help
of a cane, he hobbled from point to point about
the town, quaveringly inquiring for any word
of his lost partner. He wandered listlessly
back and forth, mumbling out a description of
the man he sought, holding up strangers with
his tremulous-noted inquiries, peering with
weak and watery eyes into any quarter that
might house a fugitive. But no hint or word
of Binhart was to be gleaned from those wanderings,
and at the end of a week he boarded
a fruit steamer bound for Kingston.</p>
<p>His strength came back to him slowly during
that voyage, and when he landed at Kingston
he was able to walk without a stick. At
Kingston, too, his draft on New York was
finally honored. He was able to creep out to
Constant Spring, to buy new clothes, to ride
in a carriage when he chose, to eat a white
man’s food again. The shrunken body under
the flaccid skin slowly took on some semblance
of its former ponderosity, the watery eyes
slowly lost their dead and vapid stare.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_244">[244]</div>
<p>And with increase of strength came a corresponding
increase of mental activity. All day
long he kept turning things over in his tired
brain. Hour by silent hour he would ponder
the problem before him. It was more rumination
than active thought. Yet up from the
stagnating depths of his brooding would come
an occasional bubble of inspiration.</p>
<p>Binhart, he finally concluded, had gone
north. It was the natural thing to do. He
would go where his haul was hidden away.
Sick of unrest, he would seek peace. He
would fall a prey to man’s consuming hunger
to speak with his own kind again. Convinced
that his enemy was not at his heels, he would
hide away somewhere in his own country.
And once reasonably assured that this enemy
had died as he had left him to die, Binhart
would surely remain in his own land, among
his own people.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_245">[245]</div>
<p>Blake had no proof of this. He could not
explain why he accepted it as fact. He merely
wrote it down as one of his hunches. And
with his old-time faith in the result of that subliminal
reasoning, he counted what remained
of his money, paid his bills, and sailed from
Kingston northward as a steerage passenger
in a United Fruit steamer bound for Boston.</p>
<p>As he had expected, he landed at this
New England port without detection, without
recognition. Six hours later he stepped off a
train in New York.</p>
<p>He passed out into the streets of his native
city like a ghost emerging from its tomb.
There seemed something spectral in the very
chill of the thin northern sunlight, after the
opulent and oppressive heat of the tropics. A
gulf of years seemed to lie between him and
the actualities so close to him. A desolating
sense of loneliness kept driving him into the
city’s noisier and more crowded drinking-places,
where, under the lash of alcohol, he was
able to wear down his hot ache of deprivation
into a dim and dreary regretfulness. Yet
the very faces about him still remained phantasmal.
The commonplaces of street life continued
to take on an alien aspect. They
seemed vague and far away, as though viewed
through a veil. He felt that the world had
gone on, and in going on had forgotten him.
Even the scraps of talk, the talk of his own
people, fell on his ear with a strange sound.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_246">[246]</div>
<p>He found nothing companionable in that
cañon of life and movement known as Broadway.
He stopped to stare with haggard and
wistful eyes at a theater front buoyed with
countless electric bulbs, remembering the
proud moment when he had been cheered in
a box there, for in his curtain-speech the
author of the melodrama of crime being presented
had confessed that the inspiration and
plot of his play had come from that great detective,
Never-Fail Blake.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_247">[247]</div>
<p>He drifted on down past the cafés and
restaurants where he had once dined and
supped so well, past the familiar haunts where
the appetite of the spirit for privilege had
once been as amply fed as the appetite of the
body for food. He sought out the darker
purlieus of the lower city, where he had once
walked as a king and dictated dead-lines and
distributed patronage. He drifted into the
underworld haunts where his name had at one
time been a terror. But now, he could see, his
approach no longer resulted in that discreet
scurry to cover, that feverish scuttling away
for safety, which marks the blacksnake’s progress
through a gopher-village.</p>
<p>When he came to Centre Street, at the
corner of Broome, he stopped and blinked up
at the great gray building wherein he had once
held sway. He stood, stoop-shouldered and
silent, staring at the green lamps, the green
lamps of vigilance that burned as a sign to the
sleeping city.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_248">[248]</div>
<p>He stood there for some time, unrecognized,
unnoticed, watching the platoons of broad-chested
“flatties” as they swung out and off
to their midnight patrols, marking the plainly
clad “elbows” as they passed quietly up and
down the great stone steps. He thought of
Copeland, and the Commissioner, and of his
own last hour at Headquarters. And then his
thoughts went on to Binhart, and the trail that
had been lost, and the task that stood still
ahead of him. And with that memory awakened
the old sullen fires, the old dogged and
implacable determination.</p>
<p>In the midst of those reviving fires a new
thought was fixed; the thought that Binhart’s
career was in some way still involved with that
of Elsie Verriner. If any one knew of Binhart’s
whereabouts, he remembered, it would
surely be this woman, this woman on whom,
he contended, he could still hold the iron hand
of incrimination. The first move would be to
find her. And then, at any cost, the truth
must be wrung from her.</p>
<p>Never-Fail Blake, from the obscure downtown
hotel, into which he crept like a sick
hound shunning the light, sent out his call for
Elsie Verriner. He sent his messages to
many and varied quarters, feeling sure that
some groping tentacle of inquiry would eventually
come in touch with her.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_249">[249]</div>
<p>Yet the days dragged by, and no answer
came back to him. He chafed anew at this
fresh evidence that his power was a thing of
the past, that his word was no longer law.
He burned with a sullen and self-consuming
anger, an anger that could be neither expressed
in action nor relieved in words.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_250">[250]</div>
<p>Then, at the end of a week’s time, a note
came from Elsie Verriner. It was dated and
postmarked “Washington,” and in it she
briefly explained that she had been engaged in
Departmental business, but that she expected
to be in New York on the following Monday.
Blake found himself unreasonably irritated
by a certain crisp assurance about this note, a
certain absence of timorousness, a certain unfamiliar
tone of independence. But he could
afford to wait, he told himself. His hour
would come, later on. And when that hour
came, he would take a crimp out of this calm-eyed
woman, or the heavens themselves would
fall! And finding further idleness unbearable,
he made his way to a drinking-place not
far from that juncture of First Street and
the Bowery, known as Suicide Corner. In
this new-world <i>Cabaret de Neant</i> he drowned
his impatience of soul in a Walpurgis Night
of five-cent beer and fusel-oil whiskey. But
his time would come, he repeated drunkenly,
as he watched with his haggard hound’s eyes
the meretricious and tragic merriment of the
revelers about him—his time would come!</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_251">[251]</div>
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