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"Then how about a little real talk, the kind of talk that money makes?" "Nothing doing!" declared Blake, folding his arms. Binhart flickered a glance at him as he thrust his own right hand down into the hand-bag on his knees. "I want to show you what you could get out of this," he said, leaning forward a little as he looked up at Blake.
One glimpse of her work on that thumb showed her to be betrayingly ignorant of both figure-of-eight and spica bandaging, and Blake, finally satisfied as to the imposture, carried on his investigation, showed "Doctor Callahan" to be Connie Binhart, the con-man and bank thief, and sent the two adventurers scurrying away to shelter.
The newspaper boys would again come filing into his office and shake hands with him and smoke his cigars and ask how much he could tell them about his last haul. And he would recount to them how he shadowed Binhart half way round the world, and gathered him in, and brought him back to Justice. It was three o'clock in the afternoon when Blake's steamer drew near Macao.
Binhart, he consoled himself, had held the woman in his power: there had been no defeat because there had been no actual conquest. And now he could face her without an eye-blink of conscious embarrassment. Yet it was good to remember that Connie Binhart was going to be ground in the wheels of the law, and ground fine, and ground to a finish.
"You don't seem to be aware of the fact, Blake, that Binhart is dead dead and buried!" Blake stared up at him. "Is what?" his lips automatically inquired. "Binhart died seven weeks ago. He died in the town of Toluca, out in Arizona. He's buried there." "That's a lie!" cried Blake, sagging forward in his chair. "We had the Phoenix authorities verify the report in every detail.
"Connie Binhart!" she temporized. Blake, as his heavy side glance slewed about to her, prided himself on the fact that he could see through her pretenses. At any other time he would have thrown open the flood-gates of that ever-inundating anger of his and swept away all such obliquities. "I guess," he went on with slow patience "we know him best round here as Charles Blanchard."
It was necessary, of course, to warn Sheiner, to exact a promise of better living. But Blake's interest in the man had already departed. He dropped him from his scheme of things, once he had yielded up his data. He tossed him aside like a sucked orange, a smoked cigar, a burnt-out match. Binhart, in all the movements of all the stellar system, was the one name and the one man that interested him.
"I 'm going to get a litter and get you up out o' this hell-hole of a swamp," announced Blake. "I 'm going to have you carried up to the hills. 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 the heat-lightning smile played about the hollow face again.
There had been a hitch or a leak somewhere, this man reported. Binhart, in some way, had slipped through their fingers. All they knew was that the man they were tailing had bought a ticket for Winnipeg, that he was not in Montreal, and that, beyond the railway ticket, they had no trace of him. Blake, at this news, had a moment when he saw red.
When the chance came, he purchased a repeating Lee-Enfield rifle, which he packed across his sweating back on the trail and slept with under his arm at night. When a morning came when he was too weak and ill to get up, he lay back on his grass couch, with his rifle across his knees, watching Binhart, always watching Binhart.
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