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"I 'm looking for a man called Connie Binhart," he finally confessed, as he continued to study that ruinous figure in front of him. It startled him to see what idleness and alcohol and the heat of the tropics could do to a man once as astute as Dusty McGlade. "Then why didn't you say so?" complained McGlade, as though impatient of obliquities that had been altogether too apparent.
"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 that trail," was the detective's abstracted retort. He was recalling certain things that the russet-faced Pip Tankred had told him.
"Then why did n't you say it an hour ago?" contested McGlade, with his alcoholic 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 of contempt. "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.
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 for it. I can take you to him. Binhart 'd picked up a medicine-chest and a bag of instruments from a broken-down doctor at Colon. He went aboard a Pacific liner as a doctor himself. "What liner?"
His bed was very hot and his face and body were very hot. He got up and sat on the side of his bed. He was weak. He tried to pull on his stocking. It had a horrid rough feel. The sunlight was queer and cold. Fleming said: Are you not well? He did not know; and Fleming said: Get back into bed. I'll tell McGlade you're not well. He's sick. Who is? Tell McGlade. Get back into bed. Is he sick?
And before everything else he felt that it would be well to get in touch with that distributor of bridge equipment and phonograph records. "You don't mean you 're going to try to get into Guayaquil?" demanded McGlade. "If Connie Binhart 's down there I 've got to go and get him," was Never-Fail Blake's answer.
And he wondered what Father Arnall and Paddy Barrett would have become and what Mr McGlade and Mr Gleeson would have become if they had not become jesuits. It was hard to think what because you would have to think of them in a different way with different coloured coats and trousers and with beards and moustaches and different kinds of hats. The door opened quietly and closed.
Blake, studying him across the small table, Weighed both the man and the situation. "Two hundred dollars in American green-backs," he announced as he drew out his wallet. He could see McGlade moisten his flaccid lips. He could 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. But that, he knew, was not his funeral.
He had watched the long line of rickety cabs backed up against the curb, the two honking auto-busses, the shifting army of pleasure-seekers along the sidewalks, the noisy saloons round which the crowds eddied like bees about a hive, and he was once more appraising the groups closer about him, when through that seething and bustling mass of humanity he saw Dusty McGlade pushing his way, a Dusty McGlade on whom the rum of Jamaica and the mezcal of Guatemala and the anisado of Ecuador had combined with the pulque of Mexico to set their unmistakable seal.
"Because," retorted McGlade, fixing the other man with a lean finger that was both unclean and unsteady, "you can't get at him!" "You tell me where he is," said Blake, striking a match. "I 'll attend to the rest of it!" McGlade slowly and deliberately drank the last of his swizzle. Then he put down his empty glass and stared pensively and pregnantly into it. "What's there in it for me?" he asked.
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