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Updated: May 24, 2025
The servant was leading him down the length of the half-lit hall when Blake caught him by the sleeve. "You tell my rickshaw boy to wait! Quick, before he gets away!" Blake knew that the last door would be the one leading to Binhart's room. The moment he was alone in the hall he tiptoed to this door and pressed an ear against its panel.
"Yes," he promptly acknowledged. "I 'll see that you 're let alone." Again she looked at him with her veiled and judicial eyes. Then she dropped her hands into her lap. The gesture seemed one of resignation. "Binhart's in Montreal," she said. Blake, keeping his face well under control, waited for her to go on. "He 's been in Montreal for weeks now.
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.
Never-Fail Blake, alone in his office and still assailed by the vaguely disturbing perfumes which she had left behind her, pondered her reasons for taking back Binhart's scrap of paper. He wondered if she had at any time actually cared for Binhart. He wondered if she was capable of caring for anybody.
For the second time Blake traversed Italy by train, hurrying self-immured and preoccupied through Rome and Florence and Genoa, and then on along the Riviera to Marseilles. In that brawling and turbulent French port, after the usual rounds and the usual inquiries down in the midst of the harbor-front forestry of masts, he found a boatman who claimed to have knowledge of Binhart's whereabouts.
If any one knew of Binhart's whereabouts, he remembered, it would surely be this woman, this woman on whom, he contended, he could still hold the iron hand of incrimination. The first move would be to find her. And then, at any cost, the truth must be wrung from her.
"I can't tell, just yet," was Binhart's retort. He rode on silent and thoughtful for several minutes. "Jim," he said at last, "we 're both about done for. There 's not much left for either of us. We 're going at this thing wrong. There's a lot o' money up there, for somebody. And you ought to get it!" "What do you mean?" asked Blake.
"Jim, I hate to see you act this way," but as Binhart spoke he slowly drew the revolver from its flapped pocket. Blake's revolver barrel was touching the white shirt-front as the movement was made. It remained there until he had possession of Binhart's gun. Then he backed away, putting his own revolver back in his pocket. "Now, get your clothes on," commanded Blake.
He still hugged to his bosom the placid conviction that the world was small, that somewhere along the frontiers of watchfulness the impact would be recorded and the alarm would be given. A man of Binhart's type, with the money Binhart had, would never divorce himself completely from civilization.
Weeks before he had gone through every nook and corner, every pocket and crevice in Binhart's belongings. The bank thief laughed a little. He had been growing stronger, day by day, and as his spirits had risen Blake's had seemed to recede. "Oh, I left that up in the States, where it 'd be safe," he answered. "What 'll you do about it?" Blake casually inquired.
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