Never-Fail Blake Part 20

So prolonged was this stare that Blake began to be embarra.s.singly conscious of it, to fidget under it. When he looked up he did so circuitously, pretending to peer beyond the white face and the staring eyes of the young woman confronting him. Yet she ultimately coerced his unsteady gaze, even against his own will. And as he had expected, he saw written on her face something akin to horror.

As he, in turn, stared back at her, and in her eyes saw first incredulity, and then, what stung him more, open pity itself, it came home to him that he must indeed have altered for the worse, that his face and figure must have changed. For the first time it flashed over him: he was only the wreck of the man he had once been. Yet at the core of that wreck burned the old pa.s.sion for power, the ineradicable appet.i.te for authority. He resented the fact that she should feel sorry for him. He inwardly resolved to make her suffer for that pity, to enlighten her as to what life was still left in the battered old carca.s.s which she could so openly sorrow over.

"Well, I 'm back," he announced in his guttural ba.s.s, as though to bridge a silence that was becoming abysmal.

"Yes, you 're back!" echoed Elsie Verriner. She spoke absently, as though her mind were preoccupied with a problem that seemed inexplicable.

"And a little the worse for wear," he pursued, with his mirthless croak of a laugh. Then he flashed up at her a quick look of resentment, a look which he found himself unable to repress. "While you're all dolled up," he said with a snort, as though bent on wounding her, "dolled up like a lobster palace floater!"

It hurt him more than ever to see that he could not even dethrone that fixed look of pity from her face, that even his abuse could not thrust aside her composure.

"I 'm not a lobster palace floater," she quietly replied. "And you know it."

"Then what are you?" he demanded.

"I 'm a confidential agent of the Treasury Department," was her quiet-toned answer.

"Oho!" cried Blake. "So that's why we 've grown so high and mighty!"

The woman sank into the chair beside which she had been standing. She seemed impervious to his mockery.

"What do you want me for?" she asked, and the quick directness of her question implied not so much that time was being wasted on side issues as that he was cruelly and unnecessarily demeaning himself in her eyes.

It was then that Blake swung about, as though he, too, were anxious to sweep aside the trivialities that stood between him and his end, as though he, too, were conscious of the ignominy of his own position.

"You know where I 've been and what I 've been doing!" he suddenly cried out.

"I 'm not positive that I do," was the woman's guarded answer.

"That's a lie!" thundered Blake. "You know as well as I do!"

"What have you been doing?" asked the woman, almost indulgently.

"I 've been trailing Binhart, and you know it! And what's more, you know where Binhart is, now, at this moment!"

"What was it you wanted me for?" reiterated the white-faced woman, without looking at him.

Her evasions did more than anger Blake; they maddened him. For years now he had been compelled to face her obliquities, to puzzle over the enigma of her ultimate character, and he was tired of it all. He made no effort to hold his feelings in check. Even into his voice crept that grossness which before had seemed something of the body alone.

"I want to know where Binhart is!" he cried, leaning forward so that his head projected pugnaciously from his shoulders like the head of a fighting-c.o.c.k.

"Then you have only wasted time in sending for me," was the woman's obdurate answer. Yet beneath her obduracy was some vague note of commiseration which he could not understand.

"I want that man, and I 'm going to get him," was Blake's impa.s.sioned declaration. "And before you get out of this room you 're going to tell me where he is!"

She met his eyes, studiously, deliberately, as though it took a great effort to do so. Their glances seemed to close in and lock together.

"Jim!" said the woman, and it startled him to see that there were actual tears in her eyes. But he was determined to remain superior to any of her subterfuges. His old habit returned to him, the old habit of "pounding" a prisoner. He knew that one way to get at the meat of a nut was to smash the nut. And in all his universe there seemed only one issue and one end, and that was to find his trail and get his man.

So he cut her short with his quick volley of abuse.

"I 've got your number, Elsie Verriner, alias Chaddy Cravath," he thundered out, bringing his great withered fist down on the table top.

"I 've got every trick you ever turned stowed away in cold storage. I 've got 'em where they 'll keep until the cows come home. I don't care whether you 're a secret agent or a Secretary of War. There 's only one thing that counts with me now. And I 'm going to win out. I 'm going to win out, in the end, no matter what it costs. If you try to block me in this I 'll put you where you belong. I 'll drag you down until you squeal like a cornered rat. I 'll put you so low you 'll never even stand up again!"

The woman leaned a little forward, staring into his eyes.

"I did n't expect this of you, Jim," she said. Her voice was tremulous as she spoke, and still again he could see on her face that odious and unfathomable pity.

"There 's lots of things were n't expected of me. But I 'm going to surprise you all. I 'm going to get what I 'm after or I 'm going to put you where I ought to have put you two years ago!"

"Jim," said the woman, white-lipped hut compelling herself to calmness, "don't go on like this! Don't! You're only making it worse, every minute!"

"Making what worse?" demanded Blake.

"The whole thing. It was a mistake, from the first. I could have told you that. But you did then what you 're trying to do now. And see what you 've lost by it!"

"What have I lost by it?"

"You 've lost everything," she answered, and her voice was thin with misery. "Everything--just as they counted on your doing, just as they expected!"

"As who expected?"

"As Copeland and the others expected when they sent you out on a blind trail."

"I was n't sent out on a blind trail."

"But you found nothing when you went out. Surely you remember that."

It seemed like going back to another world to another life, as he sat there coercing his memory to meet the past, the abysmal and embittered past which he had grown to hate.

"Are you trying to say this Binhart case was a frame up?" he suddenly cried out.

"They wanted you out of the way. It was the only trick they could think of."

"That's a lie!" declared Blake.

"It's not a lie. They knew you 'd never give up. They even handicapped you--started you wrong, to be sure it would take time, to be positive of a clear field."

Blake stared at her, almost stupidly. His mind was groping about, trying to find some adequate motive for this new line of duplicity. He kept warning himself that she was not to be trusted. 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!"

"You had a letter from him there, telling you to come to 881 King Edward when the coast was clear."

"That letter was two years old. It was sent from a room in the King Edward Hotel. That was part of their plant."

He sat for a long time thinking it over, point by point. He became disturbed by a sense of instability in the things that had once seemed most enduring, the sickening cataclysmic horror of a man who finds the very earth under his feet shaken by its earthquake. His sodden face appeared to age even as he sat there laboriously reliving the past, the past that seemed suddenly empty and futile.