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And as Elsie Verriner uttered the words he was teased by a vague sense that the scene had happened before, that somewhere before in their lives it had been duplicated, word by word and move by move. "Sit down," he said with an effort at the gruffness of assured authority. But the young woman did not do as he commanded.
"This Binhart hunt is ended," repeated Copeland, and in the eyes looking down at him Blake saw that same vague pity which had rested in the gaze of Elsie Verriner. "By God, it's not ended!" Blake thundered back at him. "It is ended," quietly contended the other. "And precisely as you have put it Ended by God!" "It's what?" cried Blake.
Blake had locked himself in with the white-faced Miss Elsie Verriner, alias Chaddy Cravath, alias Charlotte Carruthers, and for three long hours he had pitted his dynamic brute force against her flashing and snake-like evasiveness. He had pounded her with the artillery of his inhumanities. He had beleaguered her with explosive brutishness. He had bulldozed and harried her into frantic weariness.
"Does Elsie Verriner know where that pile is?" the detective inquired. His withered hulk of a body was warmed by a slow glow of anticipation. There was a woman, he remembered, whom he could count on swinging to his own ends. "No, but she could get it," was Binhart's response. "And what good would that do me?" "The two of us could go up to New Orleans.
Blake, on his part, kept it well muffled, for he intended that his capture of Binhart should be not only a personal triumph for the Second Deputy, but a vindication of that Second Deputy's methods. So when the Commissioner called him and Copeland into conference, the day after his talk with Elsie Verriner, Blake prided himself on being secretly prepared for any advances that might be made.
"But our office never made you that promise before, Miss Verriner." The woman let her eyes rest on his impassive face. "That's true, I admit. But I must also admit I know Jim Blake. We 'd better not come together again, Blake and me, after this week." She was pulling off her gloves as she spoke. She suddenly threw them down on the table.
The sobering light of day, with its cynic relapse to actualities, might have left that promise a worthless one, had not the prompt evidence of Sheldon's suicide come to hand. This made Blake's task easier than he had expected. The movement against Elsie Verriner was "smothered" at Headquarters. Two days later she met Blake by appointment.
And then his thoughts went on to Binhart, and the trail that had been lost, and the task that stood still ahead of him. And with that memory awakened the old sullen fires, the old dogged and implacable determination. In the midst of those reviving fires a new thought was fixed; the thought that Binhart's career was in some way still involved with that of Elsie Verriner.
He chafed anew 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 and self-consuming anger, an anger that could be neither expressed in action nor relieved in words. Then, at the end of a week's time, a note came from Elsie Verriner.
"Then it is a plant!" she proclaimed. "You misunderstand me, Miss Verriner. Blake will not come back as an official. There will be changes in the Department, I imagine; changes for the better which even he and his Tammany Hall friends can't stop, by the time he gets back with Binhart." The woman gave a little hand gesture of impatience.
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