Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"Hep Roony saw Binhart this mornin', beatin' it for N' Orleans. But he was n't travelin' wit' any moll that Hep spoke of." Blake made his shot, chalked his cue again, and glanced down at his watch. His eyes were on the green baize, but his thoughts were elsewhere. "I got 'o leave you, Loony," he announced as he put his cue back in the rack. He spoke slowly and calmly.
The first faint glimmer of life, in all those seemingly dead wires, came from a gambler named Mattie Sherwin, who reported that he had met Binhart, two weeks before, in the café of the Brown Palace in Denver. He was traveling under the name of Bannerman, wore his hair in a pomadour, and had grown a beard. Blake took the first train out of Chicago for Denver.
By evening he was able to return to Blake with the information that Binhart had duly landed at Rio, had hidden for three days in the outskirts of the city, and had gone aboard a German cargo-boat bound for Colon. Two days later Blake himself was aboard a British freighter northward bound for Kingston.
For it was the same hour that he landed in this orderly and strangely English city that the discovery he was drawing close to Binhart again swept clean the slate of his emotions. The response had come from a consulate secretary. One wire in all his sentinel network had proved a live one. Binhart was not in Hong Kong, but he had been seen in Macao; he was known to be still there.
Sick of unrest, he would seek peace. He would fall a prey to man's consuming hunger to speak with his own kind again. Convinced that his enemy was not at his heels, he would hide away somewhere in his own country. And once reasonably assured that this enemy had died as he had left him to die, Binhart would surely remain in his own land, among his own people. Blake had no proof of this.
He was bewildered by a sense of dampness in his right leg. He patted it with his hand, inquisitively, and found it wet. He stooped down and felt his boot. It was full of blood. It was overrunning with blood. He remembered then. Binhart had shot him, after all. He could never say whether it was this discovery, or the actual loss of blood, that filled him with a sudden giddiness.
He lay on a bed made of bull-hide stretched across a rough-timbered frame. Yet what Blake looked down on seemed more a shriveled mummy of Binhart than the man himself. A vague trouble took possession of the detective as he blinked calmly down at the glazed and sunken eyes, the gaunt neck, the childishly helpless body. He stood there, waiting until the man on the sagging bull-skin saw him.
For there it told of his removal from the Police Department. The Commissioner and Copeland had saved their necks, but Blake was no longer Second Deputy. They spoke of him as being somewhere in the Philippines, on the trail of the bank-robber Binhart.
"But, can't you see, they 'd never stand for you!" "Oh, yes they would. I 'd just drop out, and they 'd forget about me. And you 'd have that pile to enjoy life with!" Blake thought it over, ponderously, point by point. For not one fraction of a second could he countenance the thought of surrendering Binhart.
Yet a careful observer might have noticed that the pulse of his beefy neck was beating faster than usual. And over that great body, under its clothing, were rippling tremors strangely like those that shake the body of a leashed bulldog at the sight of a street cat. "Hello, Jim!" answered Binhart, with equal composure. He had aged since Blake had last seen him, aged incredibly.
Word Of The Day