XVIII
It was six weeks later that a slender-bodied young Nicaraguan known asDoctor Alfonso Sedeno (his right to that title resulting from four yearsof medical study in Paris) escorted into Bluefields the flaccid andattenuated shadow of Never-Fail Blake. Doctor Sedeno explained to theEnglish shipping firm to whom he handed over his patient that the SenorAmericano had been found in a dying condition, ten miles from the camp ofthe rubber company for which he acted as surgeon. The Senor Americano wasapparently a prospector who had been deserted by his partner. He had beenvery ill. But a few days of complete rest would restore him. The seavoyage would also help. In the meantime, if the shipping company wouldarrange for credit from the hotel, the matter would assuredly be putright, later on, when the necessary despatches had been returned from NewYork.
For three weeks of torpor Blake sat in the shadowy hotel, watching thetorrential rains that deluged the coast. Then, with the help of a cane,he hobbled from point to point about the town, quaveringly inquiring forany word of his lost partner. He wandered listlessly back and forth,mumbling out a description of the man he sought, holding up strangerswith his tremulous-noted inquiries, peering with weak and watery eyesinto any quarter that might house a fugitive. But no hint or word ofBinhart was to be gleaned from those wanderings, and at the end of a weekhe boarded a fruit steamer bound for Kingston.
His strength came back to him slowly during that voyage, and when helanded 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 toConstant 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 skinslowly took on some semblance of its former ponderosity, the watery eyesslowly lost their dead and vapid stare.
And with increase of strength came a corresponding increase of mentalactivity. 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 morerumination than active thought. Yet up from the stagnating depths of hisbrooding would come an occasional bubble of inspiration.
Binhart, he finally concluded, had gone north. It was the natural thingto do. He would go where his haul was hidden away. Sick of unrest, hewould seek peace. He would fall a prey to man's consuming hunger to speakwith his own kind again. Convinced that his enemy was not at his heels,he would hide away somewhere in his own country. And once reasonablyassured that this enemy had died as he had left him to die, Binhart wouldsurely remain in his own land, among his own people.
Blake had no proof of this. He could not explain why he accepted it asfact. He merely wrote it down as one of his hunches. And with hisold-time faith in the result of that subliminal reasoning, he countedwhat remained of his money, paid his bills, and sailed from Kingstonnorthward as a steerage passenger in a United Fruit steamer bound forBoston.
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.
He passed out into the streets of his native city like a ghost emergingfrom its tomb. There seemed something spectral in the very chill of thethin northern sunlight, after the opulent and oppressive heat of thetropics. A gulf of years seemed to lie between him and the actualities soclose to him. A desolating sense of loneliness kept driving him into thecity's noisier and more crowded drinking-places, where, under the lash ofalcohol, he was able to wear down his hot ache of deprivation into a dimand dreary regretfulness. Yet the very faces about him still remainedphantasmal. The commonplaces of street life continued to take on an alienaspect. 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 witha strange sound.
He found nothing companionable in that canon of life and movement knownas Broadway. He stopped to stare with haggard and wistful eyes at atheater front buoyed with countless electric bulbs, remembering the proudmoment when he had been cheered in a box there, for in his curtain-speechthe author of the melodrama of crime being presented had confessed thatthe inspiration and plot of his play had come from that great detective,Never-Fail Blake.
He drifted on down past the cafes and restaurants where he had once dinedand supped so well, past the familiar haunts where the appetite of thespirit for privilege had once been as amply fed as the appetite of thebody for food. He sought out the darker purlieus of the lower city, wherehe had once walked as a king and dictated dead-lines and distributedpatronage. He drifted into the underworld haunts where his name had atone time been a terror. But now, he could see, his approach no longerresulted in that discreet scurry to cover, that feverish scuttling awayfor safety, which marks the blacksnake's progress through agopher-village.
When he came to Centre Street, at the corner of Broome, he stopped andblinked up at the great gray building wherein he had once held sway. Hestood, stoop-shouldered and silent, staring at the green lamps, the greenlamps of vigilance that burned as a sign to the sleeping city.
He stood there for some time, unrecognized, unnoticed, watching theplatoons of broad-chested "flatties" as they swung out and off to theirmidnight patrols, marking the plainly clad "elbows" as they passedquietly up and down the great stone steps. He thought of Copeland, andthe Commissioner, and of his own last hour at Headquarters. And then histhoughts went on to Binhart, and the trail that had been lost, and thetask that stood still ahead of him. And with that memory awakened the oldsullen fires, the old dogged and implacable determination.
In the midst of those reviving fires a new thought was fixed; the thoughtthat Binhart's career was in some way still involved with that of ElsieVerriner. If any one knew of Binhart's whereabouts, he remembered, itwould surely be this woman, this woman on whom, he contended, he couldstill hold the iron hand of incrimination. The first move would be tofind her. And then, at any cost, the truth must be wrung from her.
Never-Fail Blake, from the obscure downtown hotel, into which he creptlike a sick hound shunning the light, sent out his call for ElsieVerriner. He sent his messages to many and varied quarters, feeling surethat some groping tentacle of inquiry would eventually come in touch withher.
Yet the days dragged by, and no answer came back to him. He chafed anewat this fresh evidence that his power was a thing of the past, that hisword 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.
Then, at the end of a week's time, a note came from Elsie Verriner. Itwas dated and postmarked "Washington," and in it she briefly explainedthat she had been engaged in Departmental business, but that she expectedto be in New York on the following Monday. Blake found himselfunreasonably irritated by a certain crisp assurance about this note, acertain absence of timorousness, a certain unfamiliar tone ofindependence. But he could afford to wait, he told himself. His hourwould come, later on. And when that hour came, he would take a crimp outof this calm-eyed woman, or the heavens themselves would fall! Andfinding further idleness unbearable, he made his way to a drinking-placenot far from that juncture of First Street and the Bowery, known asSuicide Corner. In this new-world _Cabaret de Neant_ he drowned hisimpatience of soul in a Walpurgis Night of five-cent beer and fusel-oilwhiskey. But his time would come, he repeated drunkenly, as he watchedwith his haggard hound's eyes the meretricious and tragic merriment ofthe revelers about him--his time would come!