XII
Three hours after he had disembarked from his steamer at Rio, Blake wasbreakfasting at the Cafe Britto in the Ovidor. At the same table with himsat a lean-jawed and rat-eyed little gambler by the name of Passos.
Two hours after this breakfast Passos might have been seen on the AvenidaCentral, in deep talk with a peddler of artificial diamonds. Still laterin the day he held converse with a fellow gambler at the Paineiras,half-way up Mount Corcovado; and the same afternoon he was interrogatinga certain discredited concession-hunter on the Petropolis boat.
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 bound forColon. Two days later Blake himself was aboard a British freighternorthward bound for Kingston. Once again he beheld a tropical sun shimmeron hot brass-work and pitch boil up between bone-white deck-boardssluiced and resluiced by a half-naked crew. Once again he had to face anenervating equatorial heat that vitiated both mind and body. But heneither fretted nor complained. Some fixed inner purpose seemed tosustain him through every discomfort. Deep in that soul, merely filmedwith its fixed equatorial calm, burned some dormant and crusader-likepropulsion. And an existence so centered on one great issue found scanttime to worry over the trivialities of the moment.
After a three-day wait at Jamaica Blake caught an Atlas liner for Colon.And at Colon he found himself once more among his own kind. Scattered upand down the Isthmus he found an occasional Northerner to whom he was notunknown, engineers and construction men who could talk of things thatwere comprehensible to him, gamblers and adventurers who took himpoignantly back to the life he had left so far behind him. Along thatcrowded and shifting half-way house for the tropic-loving American hefound more than one passing friend to whom he talked hungrily and putmany wistful questions. Sometimes it was a rock contractor tanned thecolor of a Mexican saddle. Sometimes it was a new arrival in Stetson andriding-breeches and unstained leather leggings. Sometimes it was acoatless dump-boss blaspheming his toiling army of spick-a-dees.
Sometimes he talked with graders and car-men and track-layers in Chinesesaloons along Bottle Alley. Sometimes it was with a bridge-builder or alottery capper in the bar-room of the Hotel Central, where he would sitwithout coat or vest, calmly giving an eye to his game of "draw" orstolidly "rolling the bones" as he talked--but always with his ears openfor one particular thing, and that thing had to do with the movements orthe 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 he satunder the glare of the light. Blake went on with his game. In a quarterof an hour, however, he got up from the table and bought a fresh supplyof "green" Havana cigars. Then he sauntered out to where the russet-facedstranger stood watching the street crowds.
"Pip, what're you doing down in these parts?" he casually inquired. Hehad recognized the man as Pip Tankred, with whom he had come in contactfive long years before. Pip, on that occasion, was engaged in loading anEast River banana-boat with an odd ton or two of cartridges designed forCastro'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, plyingthe 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 of theweek 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 autobusses, the shifting armyof pleasure-seekers along the sidewalks, the noisy saloons round whichthe crowds eddied like bees about a hive, and he was once more appraisingthe groups closer about him, when through that seething and bustling massof humanity he saw Dusty McGlade pushing his way, a Dusty McGlade on whomthe rum of Jamaica and the _mezcal_ of Guatemala and the _anisado_ ofEcuador had combined with the _pulque_ of Mexico to set theirunmistakable seal.
But three minutes later the two men were seated together above their"swizzles" and Blake was exploring Dusty's faded memories as busily as aleather-dip might explore an inebriate's pockets.
"Who're you looking for, Jim?" suddenly and peevishly demanded the man inthe soiled white duck, as though impatient of the other's indirections.
Blake smoked for a moment or two before answering.
"I'm looking for a man called Connie Binhart," he finally confessed, ashe continued to study that ruinous figure in front of him. It startledhim to see what idleness and alcohol and the heat of the tropics could doto a man once as astute as Dusty McGlade.
"Then why didn't you say so?" complained McGlade, as though impatient ofobliquities 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 had changedBlake himself, had left the old-time Headquarters man oddly heavy ofmovement and strangely slow of thought.
"Well, I'm saying it now!" Blake's guttural voice was reminding him.
"Then why didn'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 finger thatwas both unclean and unsteady, "_you can't get at him_!"
"You tell me where he is," said Blake, striking a match. "I'll attend tothe 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 and thesituation.
"Two hundred dollars in American greenbacks," he announced as he drew outhis wallet. He could see McGlade moisten his flaccid lips. He could seethe faded eyes fasten on the bills as they were counted out. He knewwhere the money would go, how little good it would do. But that, 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 dollars forit. I can take you to him. Binhart'd picked up a medicine-chest and a bagof instruments from a broken-down doctor at Colon. He went aboard aPacific liner as a doctor himself."
"What liner?"
"He went aboard the _Trunella_. He thought he'd get down to Callao. Butthey 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 who
le coast down there istied up in quarantine. That whole harbor's rotten with yellow-jack. It'stied up as tight as a drum. You couldn't get a boat on all the Pacific totouch 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 even get_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 recalling certainthings that the russet-faced Pip Tankred had told him. And beforeeverything else he felt that it would be well to get in touch with thatdistributor 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 one ofhis old-time "investigations" of that unsuspecting worthy known as PipTankred.
This investigation involved a hurried journey back to Colon, theexpenditure of much money in cable tolls, the examination of records thatwere both official and unofficial, the asking of many questions and theturning up of dimly remembered things on which the dust of time had longsince settled.
It was followed by a return to Panama, a secret trip several miles up thecoast to look over a freighter placidly anchored there, adolorous-appearing coast-tramp with unpainted upperworks and a rusty redhull. The side-plates of this red hull, Blake observed, were as pittedand scarred as the face of an Egyptian obelisk. Her ventilators wereaskew and her funnel was scrofulous and many of her rivet-heads seemed tobe eaten away. But this was not once a source of apprehension to thestudious-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 of SignorAngelinas stimulants.
"Pip," Blake very quietly announced, "you're going to sail for Guayaquilto-morrow!"
"Am I?" queried the unmoved Pip.
"You're going to start for Guayaquil to-morrow," repeated Blake, "andyou're going to take me along with you!"
"My friend," retorted Pip, emitting a curling geyser of smoke as long andthin as a pool-que, "you're sure laborin' under the misapprehension thissteamer o' mine is a Pacific mailer! But she ain'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," announced hermaster.
"But she's going to carry me," asserted Blake, lighting a fresh cigar.
"What as?" demanded Tankred. And he fixed Blake with a belligerent eye ashe 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, andthose doped-up clearance papers, and those cases of carbines you've gotdown your hold labeled bridge equipment, and that nitro and giant-caps,and that hundred thousand rounds of smokeless you're running down thereas 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 their accidentalattitudes of an uncouth belligerency, sat staring at each other.
"You're going to take me to Guayaquil," repeated Blake.
"That's where you're dead wrong," was the calmly insolent rejoinder. "Iain't even _goin'_ to Guayaquil."
"I say you are."
Tankred's smile translated his earlier deliberateness into open contempt.
"You seem to forget that this here town you're beefin' about lies a goodthirty-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 topick me off the bridge-deck with a fishin'-pole!"
"But you're going to get as close to Guayaquil as you can, and you knowit."
"Do I?" said the man with the up-tilted cigar.
"Look here, Pip," said Blake, leaning closer over the table towards him."I don't give a tinker's dam about Alfaro and his two-cent revolution.I'm not sitting up worrying over him or his junta or how he gets hisammunition. But I want to get into Guayaquil, and this is the only way Ican do it!"
For the first time Tankred turned and studied him.
"What d' you want to get into Guayaquil for?" he finally demanded. Blakeknew 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 in yourline 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!"
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