Never-Fail Blake

  XI

  Three hours after he had disembarked from his steamer at Rio, Blake wasbreakfasting at the Cafe Britto in the Ovidor. At the same table withhim sat a lean-jawed and rat-eyed little gambler by the name of Passos.

  Two hours after this breakfast Passos might have been seen on theAvenida Central, in deep talk with a peddler of artificial diamonds.Still later in the day he held converse with a fellow gambler at thePaineiras, half-way up Mount Corcovado; and the same afternoon he wasinterrogating a certain discredited concession-hunter on the Petropolisboat.

  By evening he was able to return to Blake with the information thatBinhart had duly landed at Rio, had hidden for three days in theoutskirts of the city, and had gone aboard a German cargo-boat boundfor Colon. Two days later Blake himself was aboard a British freighternorthward bound for Kingston. Once again he beheld a tropical sunshimmer on hot brass-work and pitch boil up between bone-whitedeck-boards sluiced and resluiced by a half-naked crew. Once again hehad to face an enervating equatorial heat that vitiated both mind andbody. But he neither fretted nor complained. Some fixed inner purposeseemed to sustain him through every discomfort. Deep in that soul,merely filmed with its fixed equatorial calm, burned some dormant andcrusader-like propulsion. And an existence so centered on one greatissue found scant time to worry over the trivialities of the moment.

  After a three-day wait at Jamaica Blake caught an Atlas liner forColon. And at Colon he found himself once more among his own kind.Scattered up and down the Isthmus he found an occasional Northerner towhom he was not unknown, engineers and construction men who could talkof things that were comprehensible to him, gamblers and adventurers whotook him poignantly back to the life he had left so far behind him.Along that crowded and shifting half-way house for the tropic-lovingAmerican he found more than one passing friend to whom he talkedhungrily and put many wistful questions. Sometimes it was a rockcontractor tanned the color of a Mexican saddle. Sometimes it was anew arrival in Stetson and riding-breeches and unstained leatherleggings. Sometimes it was a coatless dump-boss blaspheming histoiling army of spick-a-dees.

  Sometimes he talked with graders and car-men and track-layers inChinese saloons along Bottle Alley. Sometimes it was with abridge-builder or a lottery capper in the barroom of the Hotel Central,where he would sit without coat or vest, calmly giving an eye to hisgame of "draw" or stolidly "rolling the bones" as he talked--but alwayswith his ears open for one particular thing, and that thing had to dowith the movements or the whereabouts of Connie Binhart.

  One night, as he sat placidly playing his game of "cut-throat" in hisshirt-sleeves, he looked up and saw a russet-faced figure as stolid ashis own. This figure, he perceived, was discreetly studying him as hesat under the glare of the light. Blake went on with his game. In aquarter of an hour, however, he got up from the table and bought afresh supply of "green" Havana cigars. Then he sauntered out to wherethe russet-faced stranger stood watching the street crowds.

  "Pip, what 're you doing down in these parts?" he casually inquired.He had recognized the man as Pip Tankred, with whom he had come incontact five long years before. Pip, on that occasion, was engaged inloading an East River banana-boat with an odd ton or two of cartridgesdesigned for Castro's opponents in Venezuela.

  "Oh, I 'm freightin' bridge equipment down the West Coast," he solemnlyannounced. "And transshippin' a few cases o' phonograph-records as aside-line!"

  "Have a smoke?" asked Blake.

  "Sure," responded the russet-faced bucaneer. And as they stood smokingtogether Blake tenderly and cautiously put out the usual feelers,plying the familiar questions and meeting with the too-familiar lack ofresponse. Like all the rest of them, he soon saw, Pip Tankred knewnothing of Binhart or his whereabouts. And with that discovery hisinterest in Pip Tankred ceased.

  So the next day Blake moved inland, working his interrogative way alongthe Big Ditch to Panama. He even slipped back over the line to SanCristobel and Ancon, found nothing of moment awaiting him there, anddrifted back into Panamanian territory. It was not until the end ofthe week that the first glimmer of hope came to him.

  It came in the form of an incredibly thin gringo in an incrediblysoiled suit of duck. Blake had been sitting on the wide veranda of theHotel Angelini, sipping his "swizzle" and studiously watching theSaturday evening crowds that passed back and forth through Panama'sbustling railway station. He had watched the long line of rickety cabsbacked up against the curb, the two honking auto-busses, the shiftingarmy of pleasure-seekers along the sidewalks, the noisy saloons roundwhich the crowds eddied like bees about a hive, and he was once moreappraising the groups closer about him, when through that seething andbustling mass of humanity he saw Dusty McGlade pushing his way, a DustyMcGlade on whom the rum of Jamaica and the _mezcal_ of Guatemala andthe _anisado_ of Ecuador had combined with the _pulque_ of Mexico toset their unmistakable seal.

  But three minutes later the two men were seated together above their"swizzles" and Blake was exploring Dusty's faded memories as busily asa leather-dip might explore an inebriate's pockets.

  "Who 're you looking for, Jim?" suddenly and peevishly demanded the manin the soiled white duck, as though impatient of the other'sindirections.

  Blake smoked for a moment or two before answering.

  "I 'm looking for a man called Connie Binhart," he finally confessed,as he continued to study that ruinous figure in front of him. Itstartled him to see what idleness and alcohol and the heat of thetropics could do to a man once as astute as Dusty McGlade.

  "Then why didn't you say so?" complained McGlade, as though impatientof obliquities that had been altogether too apparent. He had once beenafraid of this man called Blake, he remembered. But time had changedthings, as time has the habit of doing. And most of all, time hadchanged Blake himself, had left the old-time Headquarters man oddlyheavy of movement and strangely slow of thought.

  "Well, I'm saying it now!" Blake's guttural voice was reminding him.

  "Then why did n't you say it an hour ago?" contested McGlade, with hisalcoholic peevish obstinacy.

  "Well, let's have it now," placated the patient-eyed Blake. He waited,with a show of indifference. He even overlooked Dusty's curt laugh ofcontempt.

  "I can tell you all right, all right--but it won't do you much good!"

  "Why not?" And still Blake was bland and patient.

  "Because," retorted McGlade, fixing the other man with a lean fingerthat was both unclean and unsteady, "_you can't get at him_!"

  "You tell me where he is," said Blake, striking a match. "I 'll attendto the rest of it!"

  McGlade slowly and deliberately drank the last of his swizzle. Then heput down his empty glass and stared pensively and pregnantly into it.

  "What's there in it for me?" he asked.

  Blake, studying him across the small table, Weighed both the man andthe situation.

  "Two hundred dollars in American green-backs," he announced as he drewout his wallet. He could see McGlade moisten his flaccid lips. Hecould see the faded eyes fasten on the bills as they were counted out.He knew where the money would go, how little good it would do. Butthat, he knew, was not his funeral. All he wanted was Binhart.

  "Binhart's in Guayaquil," McGlade suddenly announced.

  "How d' you know that?" promptly demanded Blake.

  "I know the man who sneaked him out from Balboa. He got sixty dollarsfor it. I can take you to him. Binhart 'd picked up a medicine-chestand a bag of instruments from a broken-down doctor at Colon. He wentaboard a Pacific liner as a doctor himself.

  "What liner?"

  "He went aboard the _Trunella_. He thought he 'd get down to Callao.But they tied the _Trunella_ up at Guayaquil."

  "And you say he 's there now?"

  "Yes!"

  "And aboard the _Trunella_?"

  "Sure! He's got to be aboard the _Trunella_!"

  "Then why d' you say I can't get at him?"

  "Because Guayaquil and the _Trunella_
and the whole coast down there istied up in quarantine. That whole harbor's rotten with yellow-jack.It's tied up as tight as a drum. You could n't get a boat on all thePacific to touch that port these days!"

  "But there's got to be _something_ going there!" contended Blake.

  "They daren't do it! They couldn't get clearance--they couldn't evenget _pratique_! Once they got in there they 'd be held and given theblood-test and picketed with a gunboat for a month! And what's more,they 've got that Alfaro revolution on down there! They 've gotboat-patrols up and down the coast, keeping a lookout for gun-runners!"

  Blake, at this last word, raised his ponderous head.

  "The boat-patrols wouldn't phase me," he announced. His thoughts, infact, were already far ahead, marshaling themselves about other things.

  "You 've a weakness for yellow fever?" inquired the ironic McGlade.

  "I guess it 'd take more than a few fever germs to throw me off thattrail," was the detective's abstracted retort. He was recallingcertain things that the russet-faced Pip Tankred had told him. Andbefore everything else he felt that it would be well to get in touchwith that distributor of bridge equipment and phonograph records.

  "You don't mean you 're going to try to get into Guayaquil?" demandedMcGlade.

  "If Connie Binhart 's down there I 've got to go and get him," wasNever-Fail Blake's answer.

  * * * * * *

  The following morning Blake, having made sure of his ground, began oneof his old-time "investigations" of that unsuspecting worthy known asPip Tankred.

  This investigation involved a hurried journey back to Colon, theexpenditure of much money in cable tolls, the examination of recordsthat were both official and unofficial, the asking of many questionsand the turning up of dimly remembered things on which the dust of timehad long since settled.

  It was followed by a return to Panama, a secret trip several miles upthe coast to look over a freighter placidly anchored there, adolorous-appearing coast-tramp with unpainted upperworks and a rustyred hull. The side-plates of this red hull, Blake observed, were aspitted and scarred as the face of an Egyptian obelisk. Her ventilatorswere askew and her funnel was scrofulous and many of her rivet-headsseemed to be eaten away. But this was not once a source ofapprehension to the studious-eyed detective.

  The following evening he encountered Tankred himself, as though byaccident, on the veranda of the Hotel Angelini. The latter, at Blake'sinvitation, sat down for a cocktail and a quiet smoke.

  They sat in silence for some time, watching the rain that deluged thecity, the warm devitalizing rain that unedged even the fieriest ofSigner Angelini's stimulants.

  "Pip," Blake very quietly announced, "you 're going to sail forGuayaquil to-morrow!"

  "Am I?" queried the unmoved Pip.

  "You 're going to start for Guayaquil tomorrow," repeated Blake, "andyou 're going to take me along with you!"

  "My friend," retorted Pip, emitting a curling geyser of smoke as longand thin as a pool-que, "you 're sure laborin' under themisapprehension this steamer o' mine is a Pacific mailer! But sheain't, Blake!"

  "I admit that," quietly acknowledged the other man. "I saw heryesterday!"

  "And she don't carry no passengers--she ain't allowed to," announcedher master.

  "But she 's going to carry me," asserted Blake, lighting a fresh cigar.

  "What as?" demanded Tankred. And he fixed Blake with a belligerent eyeas he put the question.

  "As an old friend of yours!"

  "And then what?" still challenged the other.

  "As a man who knows your record, in the next place. And on the nextcount, as the man who 's wise to those phony bills of lading of yours,and those doped-up clearance papers, and those cases of carbines you've got down your hold labeled bridge equipment, and that nitro andgiant-caps, and that hundred thousand rounds of smokeless you 'rerunning down there as phonograph records!"

  Tankred continued to smoke.

  "You ever stop to wonder," he finally inquired, "if it ain't kind o'flirtin' with danger knowin' so much about me and my freightin'business?"

  "No, you 're doing the coquetting in this case, I guess!"

  "Then I ain't standin' for no rivals--not on this coast!"

  The two men, so dissimilar in aspect and yet so alike in theiraccidental attitudes of an uncouth belligerency, sat staring at eachother.

  "You 're going to take me to Guayaquil," repeated Blake.

  "That's where you 're dead wrong," was the calmly insolent rejoinder."I ain't even _goin'_ to Guayaquil."

  "I say you are."

  Tankred's smile translated his earlier deliberateness into opencontempt.

  "You seem to forget that this here town you 're heefin' about lies agood thirty-five miles up the Guayas River. And if I 'm gun-runnin'for Alfaro, as you say, I naturally ain't navigatin' streams where they'd be able to pick me off the bridge-deck with a fishin'-pole!"

  "But you 're going to get as close to Guayaquil as you can, and youknow it."

  "Do I?" said the man with the up-tilted cigar.

  "Look here, Pip," said Blake, leaning closer over the table towardshim. "I don't give a tinker's dam about Alfaro and his two-centrevolution. I 'm not sitting up worrying over him or his junta or howhe gets his ammunition. But I want to get into Guayaquil, and this isthe only way I can do it!"

  For the first time Tankred turned and studied him.

  "What d' you want to get into Guayaquil for?" he finally demanded.Blake knew that nothing was to be gained by beating about the bush.

  "There's a man I want down there, and I 'm going down to get him!"

  "Who is he?"

  "That's my business," retorted Blake.

  "And gettin' into Guayaquil's your business!" Tankred snorted back.

  "All I 'm going to say is he 's a man from up North--and he 's not inyour line of business, and never was and never will be!"

  "How do I know that?"

  "You 'll have my word for it!"

  Tankred swung round on him.

  "D' you realize you 'll have to sneak ashore in a _lancha_ and pass adouble line o' patrol? And then crawl into a town that's reekin' withyellow-jack, a town you 're not likely to crawl out of again inside o'three months?"

  "I know all that!" acknowledged Blake.

  For the second time Tankred turned and studied the other man.

  "And you're still goin' after your gen'leman friend from up North?" heinquired.

  "Pip, I 've got to get that man!"

  "You've got 'o?"

  "I 've got to, and I 'm going to!"

  Tankred threw his cigar-end away and laughed leisurely and quietly.

  "Then what're we sittin' here arguin' about, anyway? If it's settled,it's settled, ain't it?"

  "Yes, I think it's settled!"

  Again Tankred laughed.

  "But take it from me, my friend, you'll sure see some rough goin' thisnext few days!"