Never-Fail Blake

by Arthur Stringer

  XV

  Seven days after the _Trunella_ swung southward from Callao Never-FailBlake, renewed as to habiliments and replenished as to pocket, embarkedon a steamer bound for Rio de Janeiro.

  He watched the plunging bow as it crept southward. He saw the heat andthe gray sea-shimmer left behind him. He saw the days grow longer andthe nights grow colder. He saw the Straits passed and the northwardjourney again begun. But he neither fretted nor complained of his fate.

  After communicating by wireless with both Montevideo and Buenos Ayresand verifying certain facts of which he seemed already assured, hecontinued on his way to Rio. And over Rio he once more cast and pursedup his gently interrogative net, gathering in the discomfortinginformation that Binhart had already relayed, from that city to aLloyd-Brazileiro steamer. This steamer, he learned, was bound forIgnitos, ten thousand dreary miles up the Amazon.

  Five days later Blake followed in a Clyde-built freighter. When wellup the river he transferred to a rotten-timbered sidewheeler that hadonce done duty on the Mississippi, and still again relayed from riverboat to river boat, move by move falling more and more behind hisquarry.

  The days merged into weeks, and the weeks into months. He sufferedmuch from the heat, but more from the bad food and the bad water. Forthe first time in his life he found his body shaken with fever and wascompelled to use quinin in great quantities. The attacks of insects,of insects that flew, that crawled, that tunneled beneath the skin,turned life into a torment. His huge triple-terraced neck became rawwith countless wounds. But he did not stop by the way. His eyesbecame oblivious of the tangled and overcrowded life about him, of thehectic orchids and huge butterflies and the flaming birds-of-paradise,of the echoing aisle ways between interwoven jungle growths, of thearching aerial roofs of verdure and the shadowy hanging-gardens fromwhich by day parakeets chattered and monkeys screamed and by nightghostly armies of fireflies glowed. He was no longer impressed by thatworld of fierce appetites and fierce conflicts. He seemed to haveattained to a secret inner calm, to an obsessional impassivity acrosswhich the passing calamities of existence only echoed. He merelyrecalled that he had been compelled to eat of disagreeable things andface undesirable emergencies, to drink of the severed Water-vine, topartake of monkey-steak and broiled parrot, to sleep in poisonousswamplands. His spirit, even with the mournful cry of night birds inhis ears, had been schooled into the acceptance of a loneliness that toanother might have seemed eternal and unendurable.

  By the time he had reached the Pacific coast his haggard hound's eyeswere more haggard than ever. His skin hung loose on his great body, asthough a vampire bat had drained it of its blood. But to his ownappearance he gave scant thought. For new life came to him when hefound definite traces of Binhart. These traces he followed up, one byone, until he found himself circling back eastward along the valley ofthe Magdalena. And down the Magdalena he went, still sure of hisquarry, following him to Bogota, and on again from Bogota toBarranquilla, and on to Savanilla, where he embarked on aHamburg-American steamer for Limon.

  At Limon it was not hard to pick up the lost trail. But Binhart'smovements, after leaving that port, became a puzzle to the man who hadbegun to pride himself on growing into knowledge of his adversary'sinmost nature. For once Blake found himself uncertain as to theother's intentions. The fugitive now seemed possessed with an idea toget away from the sea, to strike inland at any cost, as though waterhad grown a thing of horror to him. He zigzagged from obscure villageto village, as though determined to keep away from all main-traveledavenues of traffic. Yet, move as he might, it was merely a matter oftime and care to follow up the steps of a white man as distinctlyindividualized as Binhart.

  This white man, it seemed, was at last giving way to the terror thatmust have been haunting him for months past. His movements becamefeverish, erratic, irrational. He traveled in strange directions andby strange means, by bullock-cart, by burro, by dug-out, sometimes onfoot and sometimes on horseback. Sometimes he stayed over night at arubber-gatherers' camp, sometimes he visited a banana plantation,bought a fresh horse, and pushed on again. When he reached theProvince of Alajuela he made use of the narrow cattle passes, pressingon in a northwesterly direction along the valleys of the San Juan andthe San Carlos River. A madness seemed to have seized him, a madnessto make his way northward, ever northward.

  Over heartbreaking mountainous paths, through miasmic jungles, acrosssun-baked plateaus, chilled by night and scorched by day, chafed andsore, tortured by _niguas_ and _coloradillas_, mosquitoes and_chigoes_, sleeping in verminous hay-thatched huts of bamboo boundtogether with bejuco-vine, mislead by lying natives and stolen from bypeons, Blake day by day and week by week fought his way after hisenemy. When worn to lightheadedness he drank _guaro_ and greatquantities of black coffee; when ill he ate quinin.

  The mere act of pursuit had become automatic with him. He no longerremembered why he was seeking out this man. He no longer rememberedthe crime that lay at the root of that flight and pursuit. It was notoften, in fact, that his thoughts strayed back to his old life. Whenhe did think of it, it seemed only something too far away to remember,something phantasmal, something belonging to another world. There weretimes when all his journeying through steaming swamplands and forestsof teak and satin-wood and over indigo lagoons and mountain-passes ofmoonlit desolation seemed utterly and unfathomably foolish. But hefought back such moods, as though they were a weakness. He let nothingdeter him. He stuck to his trail, instinctively, doggedly,relentlessly.

  It was at Chalavia that a peon named Tico Viquez came to Blake with thenews of a white man lying ill of black-water fever in a native hut.For so much gold, Tico Viquez intimated, he would lead the senor to thehut in question.

  Blake, who had no gold to spare, covered the startled peon with hisrevolver and commanded Viquez to take him to that hut. There was thatin the white man's face which caused the peon to remember that life wassweet. He led the way through a reptilious swamp and into the fringeof a nispero forest, where they came upon a hut with a roof ofcorrugated iron and walls of wattled bamboo.

  Blake, with his revolver in his hand and his guide held before him as ahuman shield, cautiously approached the door of this hut, for he fearedtreachery. Then, with equal caution, he peered through the narrowdoorway. He stood there for several moments, without moving.

  Then he slipped his revolver back into his pocket and stepped into thehut. For there, in one corner of it, lay Binhart. He lay on a bedmade of bull-hide stretched across a rough-timbered frame. Yet whatBlake looked down on seemed more a shriveled mummy of Binhart than theman himself. A vague trouble took possession of the detective as heblinked calmly down at the glazed and sunken eyes, the gaunt neck, thechildishly helpless body. He stood there, waiting until the man on thesagging bull-skin saw him.

  "Hello, Jim!" said the sick man, in little more than a whisper.

  "Hello, Connie!" was the other's answer. He picked up a palmetto frondand fought away the flies. The uncleanness of the place turned hisstomach.

  "What's up, Connie?" he asked, sitting calmly down beside the narrowbed.

  The sick man moved a hand, weakly, as though it were the yellow flapperof some wounded amphibian.

  "The jig's up!" he said. The faint mockery of a smile wavered acrossthe painfully gaunt face. It reminded the other man of heat-lightningon a dark skyline. "You got me, Jim. But it won't do much good. I 'mgoing to cash in."

  "What makes you say that?" argued Blake, studying the lean figure.There was a look of mild regret on his own sodden and haggard face."What's wrong with you, anyway?"

  The man on the bed did not answer for some time. When he spoke, hespoke without looking at the other man.

  "They said it was black-water fever. Then they said it wasyellow-jack. But I know it's not. I think it's typhoid, or swampfever. It's worse than malaria. I dam' near burn up every night. Iget out of my head. I 've done that three nights. That's why theniggers won't com
e near me now!"

  Blake leaned forward and fought away the flies again.

  "Then it's a good thing I got up with you."

  The sick man rolled his eyes in their sockets, so as to bring his enemyinto his line of vision.

  "Why?" he asked.

  "Because I 'm not going to let you die," was Blake's answer.

  "You can't help it, Jim! The jig 's up!"

  "I 'm going to get a litter and get you up out o' this hell-hole of aswamp," announced Blake. "I 'm going to have you carried up to thehills. Then I 'm going back to Chalavia to get a doctor o' some kind.Then I 'm going to put you on your feet again!"

  Binhart slowly moved his head from side to side. Then theheat-lightning smile played about the hollow face again.

  "It was some chase, Jim, was n't it?" he said, without looking at hisold-time enemy.

  Blake stared down at him with his haggard hound's eyes; there was noanswering smile on his heavy lips, now furzed with their grizzledgrowth of hair. There seemed something ignominious in such an end,something futile and self-frustrating. It was unjust. It lefteverything so hideously incomplete. He revolted against it with asullen and senseless rage.

  "By God, you 're not going to die!" declared the staring andsinewy-necked man at the bedside. "I say you 're not going to die. I'm going to get you out o' here alive!"

  A sweat of weakness stood out on Binhart's white face.

  "Where to?" he asked, as he had asked one before. And his eyesremained closed as put the question.

  "To the pen," was the answer which rose Blake's lips. But he did notutter the words. Instead, he rose impatiently to his feet. But theman on the bed must have sensed that unspoken response, for he openedhis eyes and stared long and mournfully at his heavy-bodied enemy.

  "You 'll never get me there!" he said, in little more than a whisper."Never!"