XVI
Seven days after the _Trunella_ swung southward from Callao Never-FailBlake, renewed as to habiliments and replenished as to pocket, embarkedon a steamer bound for Rio de Janeiro.
He watched the plunging bow as it crept southward. He saw the heat andthe gray sea-shimmer left behind him. He saw the days grow longer and thenights grow colder. He saw the Straits passed and the northward journeyagain begun. But he neither fretted nor complained of his fate.
After communicating by wireless with both Montevideo and Buenos Ayres andverifying certain facts of which he seemed already assured, he continuedon his way to Rio. And over Rio he once more cast and pursed up hisgently interrogative net, gathering in the discomforting information thatBinhart had already relayed from that city to a Lloyd-Brazileiro steamer.This steamer, he learned, was bound for Ignitos, ten thousand drearymiles up the Amazon.
Five days later Blake followed in a Clyde-built freighter. When well upthe river he transferred to a rotten-timbered sidewheeler that had oncedone duty on the Mississippi, and still again relayed from river boat toriver boat, move by move falling more and more behind his quarry.
The days merged into weeks, and the weeks into months. He suffered muchfrom the heat, but more from the bad food and the bad water. For thefirst time in his life he found his body shaken with fever and wascompelled to use quinin in great quantities. The attacks of insects, ofinsects that flew, that crawled, that tunneled beneath the skin, turnedlife into a torment. His huge triple-terraced neck became raw withcountless wounds. But he did not stop by the way. His eyes becameoblivious of the tangled and overcrowded life about him, of the hecticorchids and huge butterflies and the flaming birds-of-paradise, of theechoing aisle ways between interwoven jungle growths, of the archingaerial roofs of verdure and the shadowy hanging-gardens from which by dayparakeets chattered and monkeys screamed and by night ghostly armies offireflies glowed. He was no longer impressed by that world of fierceappetites and fierce conflicts. He seemed to have attained to a secretinner calm, to an obsessional impassivity across which the passingcalamities of existence only echoed. He merely recalled that he had beencompelled to eat of disagreeable things and face undesirable emergencies,to drink of the severed water-vine, to partake of monkey-steak andbroiled parrot, to sleep in poisonous swamplands. His spirit, even withthe mournful cry of night birds in his ears, had been schooled into theacceptance of a loneliness that to another might have seemed eternal andunendurable.
By the time he had reached the Pacific coast his haggard hound's eyeswere more haggard than ever. His skin hung loose on his great body, asthough a vampire bat had drained it of its blood. But to his ownappearance he gave scant thought. For new life came to him when he founddefinite traces of Binhart. These traces he followed up, one by one,until he found himself circling back eastward along the valley of theMagdalena. And down the Magdalena he went, still sure of his quarry,following him to Bogota, and on again from Bogota to Barranquilla, and onto Savanilla, where he embarked on a Hamburg-American steamer for Limon.
At Limon it was not hard to pick up the lost trail. But Binhart'smovements, after leaving that port, became a puzzle to the man who hadbegun to pride himself on growing into knowledge of his adversary'sinmost nature. For once Blake found himself uncertain as to the other'sintentions. The fugitive now seemed possessed with an idea to get awayfrom the sea, to strike inland at any cost, as though water had grown athing of horror to him. He zigzagged from obscure village to village, asthough 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 followup the steps of a white man as distinctly individualized as Binhart.
This white man, it seemed, was at last giving way to the terror that musthave been haunting him for months past. His movements became feverish,erratic, irrational. He traveled in strange directions and by strangemeans, by bullock-cart, by burro, by dug-out, sometimes on foot andsometimes on horseback. Sometimes he stayed over night at arubber-gatherers' camp, sometimes he visited a banana plantation, boughta fresh horse, and pushed on again. When he reached the Province ofAlajuela he made use of the narrow cattle passes, pressing on in anorthwesterly direction along the valleys of the San Juan and the SanCarlos River. A madness seemed to have seized him, a madness to make hisway northward, ever northward.
Over heartbreaking mountainous paths, through miasmic jungles, acrosssun-baked plateaus, chilled by night and scorched by day, chafed andsore, tortured by _niguas_ and _coloradillas_, mosquitoes and _chigoes_,sleeping in verminous hay-thatched huts of bamboo bound together withbejuco-vine, mislead by lying natives and stolen from by peons, Blake dayby day and week by week fought his way after his enemy. When worn tolightheadedness he drank _guaro_ and great quantities of black coffee;when ill he ate quinin.
The mere act of pursuit had become automatic with him. He no longerremembered why he was seeking out this man. He no longer remembered thecrime 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 didthink of it, it seemed only something too far away to remember, somethingphantasmal, something belonging to another world. There were times whenall his journeying through steaming swamplands and forests of teak andsatinwood and over indigo lagoons and mountain-passes of moonlitdesolation seemed utterly and unfathomably foolish. But he fought backsuch moods, as though they were a weakness. He let nothing deter him. Hestuck to his trail, instinctively, doggedly, relentlessly.
It was at Chalavia that a peon named Tico Viquez came to Blake with thenews of a white man lying ill of black-water fever in a native hut. Forso much gold, Tico Viquez intimated, he would lead the senor to the hutin question.
Blake, who had no gold to spare, covered the startled peon with hisrevolver and commanded Viquez to take him to that hut. There was that inthe white man's face which caused the peon to remember that life wassweet. He led the way through a reptilious swamp and into the fringe of anispero forest, where they came upon a hut with a roof of corrugated ironand walls of wattled bamboo.
Blake, with his revolver in his hand and his guide held before him as ahuman shield, cautiously approached the door of this hut, for he fearedtreachery. Then, with equal caution, he peered through the narrowdoorway. He stood there for several moments, without moving.
Then he slipped his revolver back into his pocket and stepped into thehut. For there, in one corner of it, lay Binhart. He lay on a bed made ofbull-hide stretched across a rough-timbered frame. Yet what Blake lookeddown on seemed more a shriveled mummy of Binhart than the man himself. Avague trouble took possession of the detective as he blinked calmly downat the glazed and sunken eyes, the gaunt neck, the childishly helplessbody. He stood there, waiting until the man on the sagging bull-skin sawhim.
"Hello, Jim!" said the sick man, in little more than a whisper.
"Hello, Connie!" was the other's answer. He picked up a palmetto frondand fought away the flies. The uncleanness of the place turned hisstomach.
"What's up, Connie?" he asked, sitting calmly down beside the narrow bed.
The sick man moved a hand, weakly, as though it were the yellow flapperof some wounded amphibian.
"The jig's up!" he said. The faint mockery of a smile wavered across thepainfully gaunt face. It reminded the other man of heat-lightning on adark skyline. "You got me, Jim. But it won't do much good. I'm going tocash in."
"What makes you say that?" argued Blake, studying the lean figure. Therewas a look of mild regret on his own sodden and haggard face. "What'swrong with you, anyway?"
The man on the bed did not answer for some time. When he spoke, he spokewithout looking at the other man.
"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 worsethan malaria. I dam' near burn up every night. I get out of my head. I'vedone that three nights. That's why the niggers won't come near me now!"
&
nbsp; Blake leaned forward and fought away the flies again.
"Then it's a good thing I got up with you."
The sick man rolled his eyes in their sockets, so as to bring his enemyinto his line of vision.
"Why?" he asked.
"Because I'm not going to let you die," was Blake's answer.
"You can't help it, Jim! The jig's up!"
"I'm going to get a litter and get you up out o' this hell-hole of aswamp," 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'mgoing to put you on your feet again!"
Binhart slowly moved his head from side to side. Then the heat-lightningsmile played about the hollow face again.
"It was some chase, Jim, wasn't it?" he said, without looking at hisold-time enemy.
Blake stared down at him with his haggard hound's eyes; there was noanswering smile on his heavy lips, now furzed with their grizzled growthof hair. There seemed something ignominious in such an end, somethingfutile and self-frustrating. It was unjust. It left everything sohideously incomplete. He revolted against it with a sullen and senselessrage.
"By God, you're not going to die!" declared the staring and sinewy-neckedman at the bedside. "I say you're not going to die. I'm going to get youout o' here alive!"
A sweat of weakness stood out on Binhart's white face.
"Where to?" he asked, as he had asked once before. And his eyes remainedclosed as he put the question.
"To the pen," was the answer which rose to Blake's lips. But he did notutter the words. Instead, he rose impatiently to his feet. But the man onthe bed must have sensed that unspoken response, for he opened his eyesand stared long and mournfully at his heavy-bodied enemy.
"You'll never get me there!" he said, in little more than a whisper."Never!"