Never-Fail Blake

  XVII

  It was six weeks later that a slender-bodied young Nicaraguan known asDoctor Alfonso Sedeno (his right to that title resulting from fouryears of medical study in Paris) escorted into Bluefields the flaccidand attenuated shadow of Never-Fail Blake. Doctor Sedeno explained tothe English shipping firm to whom he handed over his patient that theSenor Americano had been found in a dying condition, ten miles from thecamp of the rubber company for which he acted as surgeon. The SenorAmericano was apparently a prospector who had been deserted by hispartner. He had been very ill. But a few days of complete rest wouldrestore him. The sea voyage would also help. In the meantime, if theshipping company would arrange for credit from the hotel, the matterwould assuredly be put right, later on, when the necessary despatcheshad been returned from New York.

  For three weeks of torpor Blake sat in the shadowy hotel, watching thetorrential rains that deluged the coast. Then, with the help of acane, he hobbled from point to point about the town, quaveringlyinquiring for any word of his lost partner. He wandered listlesslyback and forth, mumbling out a description of the man he sought,holding up strangers with his tremulous-noted inquiries, peering withweak and watery eyes into any quarter that might house a fugitive. Butno hint or word of Binhart was to be gleaned from those wanderings, andat the end of a week he 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 creepout to Constant Spring, to buy new clothes, to ride in a carriage whenhe chose, to eat a white man's food again. The shrunken body under theflaccid skin slowly took on some semblance of its former ponderosity,the watery eyes slowly 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 wasmore rumination than active thought. Yet up from the stagnating depthsof his brooding would come an occasional bubble of inspiration.

  Binhart, he finally concluded, had gone north. It was the naturalthing to do. He would go where his haul was hidden away. Sick ofunrest, he would seek peace. He would fall a prey to man's consuminghunger to speak with his own kind again. Convinced that his enemy wasnot at his heels, he would hide away somewhere in his own country. Andonce reasonably assured that this enemy had died as he had left him todie, Binhart would surely 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 withoutdetection, without recognition. Six hours later he stepped off a trainin 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 ofthe thin northern sunlight, after the opulent and oppressive heat ofthe tropics. A gulf of years seemed to lie between him and theactualities so close to him. A desolating sense of loneliness keptdriving 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 acheof deprivation into a dim and dreary regretfulness. Yet the very facesabout him still remained phantasmal. The commonplaces of street lifecontinued 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 talkof his own people, fell on his ear with a 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 theproud moment when he had been cheered in a box there, for in hiscurtain-speech the author of the melodrama of crime being presented hadconfessed that the inspiration and plot of his play had come from thatgreat detective, Never-Fail Blake.

  He drifted on down past the cafes and restaurants where he had oncedined and supped so well, past the familiar haunts where the appetiteof the spirit for privilege had once been as amply fed as the appetiteof the body for food. He sought out the darker purlieus of the lowercity, where he had once walked as a king and dictated dead-lines anddistributed patronage. He drifted into the underworld haunts where hisname had at one time been a terror. But now, he could see, hisapproach no longer resulted in that discreet scurry to cover, thatfeverish scuttling away for safety, which marks the blacksnake'sprogress through a gopher-village.

  When he came to Center Street, at the corner of Broome, he stopped andblinked up at the great gray building wherein he had once held sway.He stood, stoop-shouldered and silent, staring at the green lamps, thegreen lamps 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 thenhis thoughts went on to Binhart, and the trail that had been lost, andthe task that stood still ahead of him. And with that memory awakenedthe old sullen fires, the old dogged and implacable determination.

  In the midst of those reviving fires a new thought was fixed; thethought that Binhart's career was in some way still involved with thatof Elsie Verriner. If any one knew of Binhart's whereabouts, heremembered, it would surely be this woman, this woman on whom, hecontended, he could still hold the iron hand of incrimination. Thefirst move would be to find her. And then, at any cost, the truth mustbe wrung from her.

  Never-Fail Blake, from the obscure down-town 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, feelingsure that some groping tentacle of inquiry would eventually come intouch with her.

  Yet the days dragged by, and no answer came back to him. He chafedanew 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 andself-consuming anger, an anger that could be neither expressed inaction 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 sheexpected to be in New York on the following Monday. Blake foundhimself unreasonably irritated by a certain crisp assurance about thisnote, a certain 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 crimpout of this calm-eyed woman, or the heavens themselves would fall! Andfinding further idleness unbearable, he made his way to adrinking-place not far from that juncture of First Street and theBowery, known as Suicide Corner. In this new-world _Cabaret de Neant_he drowned his impatience of soul in a Walpurgis Night of five-centbeer and fusel-oil whiskey. But his time would come, he repeateddrunkenly, as he watched with his haggard hound's eyes the meretriciousand tragic merriment of the revelers about him--his time would come!