XXI
Several days dragged away before Blake's mental clarity returned to him.Then block by unstable block he seemed to rebuild a new world about him,a new world which was both narrow and empty. But it at least gave himsomething on which to plant his bewildered feet.
That slow return to the substantialities of life was in the nature of aconvalescence. It came step by languid step; he knew no power to hurryit. And as is so often the case with convalescents, he found himself in aworld from which time seemed to have detached him. Yet as he emerged fromthat earlier state of coma, his old-time instincts and characteristicsbegan to assert themselves. Some deep-seated inner spirit of dubietybegan to grope about and question and challenge. His innate skepticismonce more became active. That tendency to cynical unbelief which hisprofession had imposed upon him stubbornly reasserted itself. His careerhad crowned him with a surly suspiciousness. And about the one thing thatremained vital to that career, or what was left of it, these waywardsuspicions arrayed themselves like wolves about a wounded stag.
His unquiet soul felt the need of some final and personal proof ofBinhart's death. He asked for more data than had been given him. Hewanted more information than the fact that Binhart, on his flight north,had fallen ill of pneumonia in New Orleans, had wandered on to the dryair of Arizona with a "spot" on his lungs, and had there succumbed to thetubercular invasion for which his earlier sickness had laid him open.Blake's slowly awakening and ever-wary mind kept telling him that afterall there might be some possibility of trickery, that a fugitive with thedevilish ingenuity of Binhart would resort to any means to escape beingfurther harassed by the Law.
Blake even recalled, a few days later, the incident of the Shattuckjewel-robbery, during the first weeks of his regime as a DeputyCommissioner. This diamond-thief named Shattuck had been arrested andreleased under heavy bail. Seven months later Shattuck's attorney hadappeared before the District Attorney's office with a duly executedcertificate of death, officially establishing the fact that his clienthad died two weeks before in the city of Baltimore. On this he had baseda demand for the dismissal of the case. He had succeeded in having allaction stopped and the affair became, officially, a closed incident. Yettwo months later Shattuck had been seen alive, and the following winterhad engaged in an Albany hotel robbery which had earned for him, under anentirely different name, a nine-year sentence in Sing Sing.
From the memory of that case Never-Fail Blake wrung a thin and ghostlyconsolation. The more he brooded over it the more morosely disquieted hebecame. The thing grew like a upas tree; it spread until it obsessed allhis waking hours and invaded even his dreams. Then a time came when hecould endure it no more. He faced the necessity of purging his soul ofall uncertainty. The whimpering of one of his unkenneled "hunches" mergedinto what seemed an actual voice of inspiration to him.
He gathered together what money he could; he arranged what few mattersstill remained to engage his attention, going about the task with thatvaledictory solemnity with which the forlornly decrepit execute theirlast will and testament. Then, when everything was prepared, he once morestarted out on the trail.
* * * * * * * *
Two weeks later a rough and heavy-bodied man, garbed in the rough apparelof a mining prospector, made his way into the sun-steeped town of Toluca.There he went quietly to the wooden-fronted hotel, hired a pack-mule anda camp-outfit and made purchase, among other things, of a pick andshovel. To certain of the men he met he put inquiries as to the besttrail out to the Buenavista Copper Camp. Then, as he waited for thecamp-partner who was to follow him into Toluca, he drifted with amiableand ponderous restlessness about the town, talking with the telegraphoperator and the barber, swapping yarns at the livery-stable where hispack-mule was lodged, handing out cigars in the wooden-fronted hotel,casually interviewing the town officials as to the health of the localityand the death-rate of Toluca, acquainting himself with the localundertaker and the lonely young doctor, and even dropping in on the townofficials and making inquiries about main-street building lots and theneed of a new hotel.
To all this amiable and erratic garrulity there seemed to be neitherdirection nor significance. But in one thing the town of Toluca agreed;the ponderous-bodied old newcomer was a bit "queer" in his head.
A time came, however, when the newcomer announced that he could wait nolonger for his belated camp-partner. With his pack-mule and a pick andshovel he set out, late one afternoon, for the Buenavista Camp. Yet bynightfall, for some strange reason, any one traveling that lonely trailmight have seen him returning towards Toluca. He did not enter the town,however, but skirted the outer fringe of sparsely settled houses andguardedly made his way to a close-fenced area, in which neither light normovement could be detected. This silent place awakened in him no trace ofeither fear or repugnance. With him he carried his pick and shovel, andfive minutes later the sound of this pick and shovel might have beenheard at work as the ponderous-bodied man sweated over his midnightlabor. When he had dug for what seemed an interminable length of time, hetore away a layer of pine boards and released a double row ofscrew-heads. Then he crouched low down in the rectangular cavern which hehad fashioned with his spade, struck a match, and peered with anarrow-eyed and breathless intentness at what faced him there.
One glance at that tragic mass of corruption was enough for him. Hereplaced the screw-heads and the pine boards. He took up his shovel andbegan restoring the earth, stolidly tramping it down, from time to time,with his great weight.
When his task was completed he saw that everything was orderly and as hehad found it. Then he returned to his tethered pack-mule and once moreheaded for the Buenavista Camp, carrying with him a discovery which madethe night air as intoxicating as wine to his weary body.
Late that night a man might have been heard singing to the stars, singingin the midst of the wilderness, without rhyme or reason. And in the midstof that wilderness he remained for another long day and another longnight, as though solitude were necessary to him, that he might adjusthimself to some new order of things, that he might digest some victorywhich had been too much for his shattered nerves.
On the third day, as he limped placidly back into the town of Toluca, hissoul was torn between a great peace and a great hunger. He hugged to hisbreast the fact that somewhere in the world ahead of him a man once knownas Binhart still moved and lived. He kept telling himself that somewhereabout the face of the globe that restless spirit whom he sought stillwandered.
Day by patient day, through the drought and heat and alkali of an Arizonasummer, he sought some clue, some inkling, of the direction which thatwanderer had taken. But about Binhart and his movements, Toluca andPhoenix and all Arizona itself seemed to know nothing.
Nothing, Blake saw in the end, remained to be discovered there. So intime the heavy-bodied man with the haggard hound's eyes took his leave,passing out into the world which in turn swallowed him up as completelyas it had swallowed up his unknown enemy.
XXII
Three of the busiest portions of New York, varying with the various hoursof the day, may safely be said to lie in that neighborhood where NassauStreet debouches into Park Row, and also near that point whereTwenty-third Street intercepts Fourth Avenue, and still again not farfrom where Broadway and Fifth Avenue meet at the southwest corner ofMadison Square.
About these three points, at certain hours of the day and on certain daysof the week, an observant stranger might have noticed the strangelygrotesque figure of an old cement seller. So often had this oldstreet-peddler duly appeared at his stand, from month to month, that thehurrying public seemed to have become inured to the grotesqueness of hisappearance. Seldom, indeed, did a face turn to inspect him as he blinkedout at the lighted street like a Pribiloff seal blinking into an Arcticsun. Yet it was only by a second or even a third glance that the moreinquisitive might have detected anything arresting in that forlornlyruminative figure with the pendu
lous and withered throat and cheek-flaps.
To the casual observer he was merely a picturesque old street-peddler,standing like a time-stained statue beside a carefully arrayed exhibit ofhis wares. This exhibit, which invariably proved more interesting thanhis own person, consisted of a frame of gas-piping in the form of aninverted U. From the top bar of this iron frame swung two heavy pieces ofleather cemented together. Next to this coalesced leather dangled a largeZ made up of three pieces of plate glass stuck together at the ends, andamply demonstrating the adhesive power of the cementing mixture to bepurchased there.
Next to the glass Z again were two rows of chipped and serrated platesand saucers, plates and saucers of all kinds and colors, with holesdrilled in their edges, and held together like a suspended chain-gang bysmall brass links. At some time in its career each one of these cups andsaucers had been broken across or even shattered into fragments. Later,it had been ingeniously and patiently glued together. And there it andits valiant brothers in misfortune swung together in a double row, with acobblestone dangling from the bottom plate, reminding the passing worldof remedial beneficences it might too readily forget, attesting to thefact that life's worst fractures might in some way still be made whole.
Yet so impassively, so stolidly statuesque, did this figure stand besidethe gas-pipe that to all intents he might have been cemented to thepavement with his own glue. He seldom moved, once his frame had been setup and his wares laid out. When he did move it was only to re-awaken theequally plethoric motion of his slowly oscillating links of cementedglass and chinaware. Sometimes, it is true, he disposed of a phial of hiscement, producing his bottle and receiving payment with the absorbedimpassivity of an automaton.
Huge as his figure must once have been, it now seemed, like his gibbetedplates, all battered and chipped and over-written with the marks of time.Like his plates, too, he carried some valiant sense of being stillintact, still stubbornly united, still oblivious of every old-timefracture, still bound up into personal compactness by some power whichdefied the blows of destiny.
In all seasons, winter and summer, apparently, he wore a long andloose-fitting overcoat. This overcoat must once have been black, but ithad faded to a green so conspicuous that it made him seem like a bronzefigure touched with the mellowing _patina_ of time.
It was in the incredibly voluminous pockets of this overcoat that the oldpeddler carried his stock in trade, paper-wrapped bottles of differentsizes, and the nickels and dimes and quarters of his daily trafficking.And as the streams of life purled past him, like water past a stone, heseemed to ask nothing of the world on which he looked out with suchdeep-set and impassive eyes. He seemed content with his lot. He seemed tohave achieved a Nirvana-like indifferency towards all his kind.
Yet there were times, as he waited beside his stand, as lethargic as alobster in a fish-peddler's window, when his flaccid, exploring fingersdug deeper into one of those capacious side-pockets and there came incontact with two oddly shaped wristlets of polished steel. At such timeshis intent eyes would film, as the eyes of a caged eagle sometimes do.Sometimes, too, he would smile with the half-pensive Castilian smile ofan uncouth and corpulent Cervantes.
But as a rule his face was expressionless. About the entire moss-greenfigure seemed something faded and futile, like a street-lamp left burningafter sunrise. At other times, as the patrolman on the beat sauntered byin his authoritative blue stippled with its metal buttons, the oldpeddler's watching eyes would wander wistfully after the nonchalantfigure. At such times a meditative and melancholy intentness would fixitself on the faded old face, and the stooping old shoulders would evenunconsciously heave with a sigh.
As a rule, however, the great green-clad figure with its fringe of whitehair--the fringe that stood blithely out from the faded hat brim like thehalo of some medieval saint on a missal--did not permit his gaze towander so far afield.
For, idle as that figure seemed, the brain behind it was forever active,forever vigilant and alert. The deep-set eyes under their lids that hungas loose as old parchment were always fixed on the life that flowed pastthem. No face, as those eyes opened and closed like the gills of a dyingfish, escaped their inspection. Every man who came within their range ofvision was duly examined and adjudicated. Every human atom of thatforever ebbing and flowing tide of life had to pass through an invisiblescreen of inspection, had in some intangible way to justify itself as itproceeded on its unknown movement towards an unknown end. And on theloose-skinned and haggard face, had it been studied closely enough, couldhave been seen a vague and wistful note of expectancy, a guarded andmuffled sense of anticipation.
Yet to-day, as on all other days, nobody stopped to study the oldcement-seller's face. The pink-cheeked young patrolman, swinging back onhis beat, tattooed with his ash night-stick on the gas-pipe frame andpeered indifferently down at the battered and gibbeted crockery.
"Hello, Batty," he said as he set the exhibit oscillating with a push ofthe knee. "How's business?"
"Pretty good," answered the patient and guttural voice. But the eyes thatseemed as calm as a cow's eyes did not look at the patrolman as he spoke.
He had nothing to fear. He knew that he had his license. He knew thatunder the faded green of his overcoat was an oval-shaped street-peddler'sbadge. He also knew, which the patrolman did not, that under the lapel ofhis inner coat was a badge of another shape and design, the badge whichseason by season the indulgent new head of the Detective Bureau extendedto him with his further privilege of a special officer's license. Forthis empty honor "Batty" Blake--for as "Batty" he was known to nearly allthe cities of America--did an occasional bit of "stooling" for theCentral Office, a tip as to a stray yeggman's return, a hint as to a"peterman's" activities in the shopping crowds, a whisper that a tilltapper had failed to respect the Department's dead-lines.
Yet nobody took Batty Blake seriously. It was said, indeed, that once, inthe old regime, he had been a big man in the Department. But thatDepartment had known many changes, and where life is unduly active,memory is apt to be unduly short.
The patrolman tapping on the gas-pipe arch with his idle night-stickmerely knew that Batty was placid and inoffensive, that he neverobstructed traffic and always carried a license-badge. He knew that indamp weather Batty limped and confessed that his leg pained him a bit,from an old hurt he'd had in the East. And he had heard somewhere thatBatty was a sort of Wandering Jew, patroling the whole length of thecontinent with his broken plates and his gas-pipe frame and hisglue-bottles, migrating restlessly from city to city, striking out as farwest as San Francisco, swinging round by Denver and New Orleans and thenworking his way northward again up to St. Louis and Chicago andPittsburgh.
Remembering these things the idle young "flatty" turned and looked at thegreen-coated and sunken-shouldered figure, touched into some rough pityby the wordless pathos of an existence which seemed without aim orreason.
"Batty, how long're yuh going to peddle glue, anyway?" he suddenly asked.
The glue-peddler, watching the crowds that drifted by him, did notanswer. He did not even look about at his interrogator.
"D' yuh _have_ to do this?" asked the wide-shouldered youth in uniform.
"No," was the peddler's mild yet guttural response.
The other prodded with his night-stick against the capacious overcoatpockets. Then he laughed.
"I'll bet yuh've got about forty dollars stowed away in there," hemocked. "Yuh have now, haven't yuh?"
"I don' know!" listlessly answered the sunken-shouldered figure.
"Then what're yuh sellin' this stuff for, if it ain't for money?"persisted the vaguely piqued youth.
"I don' know!" was the apathetic answer.
"Then who does?" inquired the indolent young officer, as he stood hummingand rocking on his heels and swinging his stick by its wrist-thong.
The man known as Batty may or may not have been about to answer him. Hislips moved, but no sound came from them. His attention, apparently, wassuddenly directed elsewhe
re. For approaching him from the east his eyeshad made out the familiar figure of old McCooey, the oldest plain-clothesman who still came out from Headquarters to "pound the pavement."
And at almost the same time, approaching him from the west, he had caughtsight of another figure.
It was that of a dapper and thin-faced man who might have been anywherefrom forty to sixty years of age. He walked, however, with a quick andnervous step. Yet the most remarkable thing about him seemed to be hiseyes. They were wide-set and protuberant, like a bird's, as though yearsof being hunted had equipped him with the animal-like faculty ofdetermining without actually looking back just who might be followinghim.
Those alert and wide-set eyes, in fact, must have sighted McCooey at thesame time that he fell under the vision of the old cement seller. For thedapper figure wheeled quietly and quickly about and stooped down at thevery side of the humming patrolman. He stooped and examined one of thepeddler's many-fractured china plates. He squinted down at it as thoughit were a thing of intense interest to him.
As he stooped there the humming patrolman was the witness of a remarkableand inexplicable occurrence. From the throat of the huge-shoulderedpeddler, not two paces away from him, he heard come a hoarse and brutishcry, a cry strangely like the bawl and groan of a branded range-cow. Atthe same moment the gigantic green-draped figure exploded into suddenactivity. He seemed to catapult out at the stooping dapper figure,bearing it to the sidewalk with the sheer weight of his unprovokedassault.
There the struggle continued. There the two strangely diverse bodiestwisted and panted and writhed. There the startlingly agile dapper figurestruggled to throw off his captor. The arch of gas-pipe went over.Glue-bottles showered amid the shattered glass and crockery. But thatonce placid-eyed old cement seller stuck to the unoffending man he had sopromptly and so gratuitously attacked, stuck to him as though he had beenglued there with his own cement. And before the patrolman could tug thecombatants apart, or even wedge an arm into the fight, the exultinggreen-coated figure had his enemy on his back along the curb, and,reaching down into his capacious pocket, drew out two oddly shaped steelwristlets. Forcing up his captive's arm, he promptly snapped one steelwring on his own wrist, and one on the wrist of the still prostrate man.
"What're yuh tryin' to do?" demanded the amazed officer, still tugging atthe great figure holding down the smaller man. In the encounter betweenthose two embattled enemies had lurked an intensity of passion which hecould not understand, which seemed strangely akin to insanity itself.
It was only when McCooey pushed his way in through the crowd and put ahand on his shoulder that the old cement seller slowly rose to his feet.He was still panting and blowing. But as he lifted his face up to the skyhis body rumbled with a Jove-like sound that was not altogether a coughof lungs overtaxed nor altogether a laugh of triumph.
"I got him!" he gasped.
About his once placid old eyes, which the hardened tear-ducts no longerseemed able to drain of their moisture, was a look of exultation thatmade the gathering street-crowd take him for a panhandler gone mad withhunger.
"Yuh got _who_?" cried the indignant young officer, wheeling the biggerman about on his feet. As the cement seller, responding to that tug,pivoted about, it was noticeable that the man to whom his wrist waslocked by the band of steel duly duplicated the movement. He moved whenthe other moved; he drew aside when the other drew aside, as though theywere now two parts of one organism.
"I got him!" calmly repeated the old street-peddler.
"Yuh got _who_?" demanded the still puzzled young patrolman, oblivious ofthe quiescent light in the bewildered eyes of McCooey, close beside him.
"Binhart!" answered Never-Fail Blake, with a sob. "_I've got Binhart!_"
THE END
Transcriber's Notes
--Preserved the copyright notice from the printed edition, although this book is in the public domain in the country of publication.
--Silently corrected a few typos (but left nonstandard spelling and dialect as is).
--Renumbered the chapter numbers (there were two chapters numbered V).
--Silently corrected two slight errors related to New York City place names.
--In the text versions, delimited text in italics by _underscores_.
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net Share this book with friends