Never-Fail Blake Part 14

"That's where you 're dead wrong," was the calmly insolent rejoinder.

"I ain't even _goin'_ to Guayaquil."

"I say you are."

Tankred's smile translated his earlier deliberateness into open contempt.

"You seem to forget that this here town you 're heefin' about lies a good thirty-five miles up the Guayas River. And if I 'm gun-runnin'

for Alfaro, as you say, I naturally ain't navigatin' streams where they 'd be able to pick me off the bridge-deck with a fis.h.i.+n'-pole!"

"But you 're going to get as close to Guayaquil as you can, and you know it."

"Do I?" said the man with the up-tilted cigar.

"Look here, Pip," said Blake, leaning closer over the table towards him. "I don't give a tinker's dam about Alfaro and his two-cent revolution. I 'm not sitting up worrying over him or his junta or how he gets his ammunition. But I want to get into Guayaquil, and this is the only way I can do it!"

For the first time Tankred turned and studied him.

"What d' you want to get into Guayaquil for?" he finally demanded.

Blake knew that nothing was to be gained by beating about the bush.

"There's a man I want down there, and I 'm going down to get him!"

"Who is he?"

"That's my business," retorted Blake.

"And gettin' into Guayaquil's your business!" Tankred snorted back.

"All I 'm going to say is he 's a man from up North--and he 's not in your line of business, and never was and never will be!"

"How do I know that?"

"You 'll have my word for it!"

Tankred swung round on him.

"D' you realize you 'll have to sneak ash.o.r.e in a _lancha_ and pa.s.s a double line o' patrol? And then crawl into a town that's reekin' with yellow-jack, a town you 're not likely to crawl out of again inside o'

three months?"

"I know all that!" acknowledged Blake.

For the second time Tankred turned and studied the other man.

"And you're still goin' after your gen'leman friend from up North?" he inquired.

"Pip, I 've got to get that man!"

"You've got 'o?"

"I 've got to, and I 'm going to!"

Tankred threw his cigar-end away and laughed leisurely and quietly.

"Then what're we sittin' here arguin' about, anyway? If it's settled, it's settled, ain't it?"

"Yes, I think it's settled!"

Again Tankred laughed.

"But take it from me, my friend, you'll sure see some rough goin' this next few days!"

XII

As Tankred had intimated, Blake's journey southward from Panama was anything but comfortable traveling. The vessel was verminous, the food was bad, and the heat was oppressive. It was a heat that took the life out of the saturated body, a thick and burdening heat that hung like a heavy gray blanket on a gray sea which no rainfall seemed able to cool.

But Blake uttered no complaint. By day he smoked under a sodden awning, rained on by funnel cinders. By night he stood at the rail.

He stood there, by the hour together, watching with wistful and haggard eyes the Alpha of Argo and the slowly rising Southern Cross. Whatever his thoughts, as he watched those lonely Southern skies, he kept them to himself.

It was the night after they had swung about and were steaming up the Gulf of Guayaquil under a clear sky that Tankred stepped down to Blake's sultry little cabin and wakened him from a sound sleep.

"It's time you were gettin' your clothes on," he announced.

"Getting my clothes on?" queried Blake through the darkness.

"Yes, you can't tell what we 'll b.u.mp into, any time now!"

The wakened sleeper heard the other man moving about in the velvety black gloom.

"What 're you doing there?" was his sharp question as he heard the squeak and slam of a shutter.

"Closin' this dead-light, of course," explained Tankred. A moment later he switched on the electric globe at the bunkhead. "We 're gettin' in pretty close now and we 're goin' with our lights doused!"

He stood for a moment, staring down at the sweat-dewed white body on the bunk, heaving for breath in the closeness of the little cabin. His mind was still touched into mystery by the spirit housed in that uncouth and undulatory flesh. He was still piqued by the vast sense of purpose which Blake carried somewhere deep within his seemingly tepid-willed carca.s.s, like the calcinated pearl at the center of an oyster.

"You 'd better turn out!" he called back as he stepped into the engulfing gloom of the gangway.

Blake rolled out of his berth and dressed without haste or excitement.

Already, overhead, he could hear the continuous tramping of feet, with now and then a quiet-noted order from Tankred himself. He could hear other noises along the s.h.i.+p's side, as though a landing-ladder were being bolted and lowered along the rusty plates.

When he went up on deck he found the boat in utter darkness. To that slowly moving ma.s.s, for she was now drifting ahead under quarter-speed, this obliteration of light imparted a sense of stealthiness. This note of suspense, of watchfulness, of illicit adventure was reflected in the very tones of the motley deckhands who brushed past him in the humid velvety blackness.

As he stood at the rail, staring ahead through this blackness, Blake could see a light here and there along the horizon. These lights increased in number as the boat steamed slowly on. Then, far away in the roadstead ahead of them, he made out an entire cl.u.s.ter of lights, like those of a liner at anchor. Then he heard the tinkle of a bell below deck, and he realized that the engines had stopped.

In the lull of the quieted s.h.i.+p's screw he could hear the wash of distant surf, faint and phantasmal above the material little near-by boat-noises. Then came a call, faint and m.u.f.fled, like the complaining note of a harbor gull. A moment later the slow creak of oars crept up to Blake's straining ears. Then out of the heart of the darkness that surrounded him, not fifty feet away, he saw emerge one faint point of light, rising and falling with a rhythm as sleepy as the slow creak of the oars. On each side of it other small lights sprang up. They were close beside the s.h.i.+p, by this time, a flotilla of lights, and each light, Blake finally saw, came from a lantern that stood deep in the bottom of a boat, a lantern that had been covered with a square of matting or sail-cloth, until some prearranged signal from the drifting steamer elicited its answering flicker of light. Then they swarmed about the oily water, s.h.i.+fting and swaying on their course like a cl.u.s.ter of fireflies, alternately dark and luminous in the dip and rise of the ground-swell. Within each small aura of radiance the watcher at the rail could see a dusky and quietly moving figure, the faded blue of a denim garment, the brown of bare arms, or the sinews of a straining neck. Once he caught the whites of a pair of eyes turned up towards the s.h.i.+p's deck. He could also see the running and wavering lines of fire as the oars puddled and backed in the phosph.o.r.escent water under the gloomy steel hull. Then he heard a low-toned argument in Spanish.

A moment later the flotilla of small boats had fastened to the s.h.i.+p's side, like a litter of suckling pigs to a sow's breast. Every light went out again, every light except a faint glow as a guide to the first boat at the foot of the landing-ladder. Along this ladder Blake could hear barefooted figures padding and grunting as cases and bales were cautiously carried down and pa.s.sed from boat to boat.