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He also knew that Binhart had awakened to the fact that he was being followed, that his feverish movements were born of a stampeding fear of capture. Yet Binhart was not a coward. Flight, in fact, was his only resource. It was only the low-brow criminal, Blake knew, who ran for a hole and hid in it until he was dragged out. The more intellectual type of offender preferred the open.
All day long he kept turning things over in his tired brain. Hour by silent hour he would ponder the problem before him. It was more rumination than active thought. Yet up from the stagnating depths of his brooding would come an occasional bubble of inspiration. Binhart, he finally concluded, had gone north. It was the natural thing to do. He would go where his haul was hidden away.
On the third day, as he limped placidly back into the town of Toluca, his soul was torn between a great peace and a great hunger. He hugged to his breast the fact that somewhere in the world ahead of him a man once known as Binhart still moved and lived. He kept telling himself that somewhere about the face of the globe that restless spirit whom he sought still wandered.
And he had rejoiced mightily when his dragnet had brought up the unexpected tip that Elsie Verriner had been in recent communication with Binhart, and with pressure from the right quarter could be made to talk. This tip had been a secret one.
For one brief moment the anticipation of that clamor of approval which would soon be his stirred his lethargic pulse. Then his cynic calmness again came back to him. "Then what 're we beefing about?" he demanded. "You want Binhart and I 'll get him for you." The Commissioner, tapping the top of his desk with his gold-banded fountain pen, smiled. It was almost a smile of indulgence.
Copeland and the Commissioner looked at each other, for one fraction of a second. "You know what my feeling is," resumed the latter, "on this Binhart case." "I know what my feeling is," declared Blake. "What?" "That the right method would 've got him six months ago, without all this monkey work!" "Then why not end the monkey work, as you call it?" "How?"
Human beings, all human beings, he had found, moved only by indirection. He was too old a bird to have sand thrown in his eyes. "Why, you welched on Binhart yourself. You put me on his track. You sent me up to Montreal!" "They made me do that," confessed the unhappy woman. "He was n't in Montreal. He never had been there!"
"D'you want my suggestion?" demanded Blake, warm with the wine-like knowledge which, he knew, made him master of the situation. "Of course," was the Commissioner's curt response. "Well, you 've got to have a man who knows Binhart, who knows him and his tricks and his hang outs!" "Well, who does?" "I do," declared Blake. The Commissioner indulged in his wintry smile.
"Because I got where I can't stand any more breaks." "All right, Jim," answered Binhart. They sat staring at each other. It was not hate that existed between them. It was something more dormant, more innate. It was something that had grown ineradicable; as fixed as the relationship between the hound and the hare.
She had disappeared as completely as though an asphalted avenue had opened and swallowed her up. It was not until the following winter that he learned she was again with Connie Binhart, in southern Europe. He had known his one belated love affair. It had left no scar, he claimed, because it had made no wound.
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