Never-Fail Blake Part 22

"Then I hope it has brought you what you are looking for!" Copeland, as he spoke, stepped over to a chair, but he still remained on his feet.

"No, it has n't brought me what I 'm after," said the other man. "Not yet! But it's going to, in the end, Mr. Copeland, or I 'm going to know the reason why!"

He kept warning himself to be calm, yet he found his voice shaking a little as he spoke. The time was not yet ripe for his outbreak. The climactic moment was still some distance away. But he could feel it emerging from the mist just as a pilot sights the bell-buoy that marks his changing channel.

"Then might I ask what you are after?" inquired Copeland. He folded his arms, as though to fortify himself behind a pretense of indifferency.

"You know what I 've been after, just as I know what you 've been after," cried Blake. "You set out to get my berth, and you got it.

And I set out to get Binhart, to get the man your whole push could n't round up--and I 'm going to get him!"

"Blake," said Copeland, very quietly, "you are wrong in both instances."

"Am I!"

"You are," was Copeland's answer, and he spoke with a studious patience which his rival resented even more than his open enmity. "In the first place, this Binhart case is a closed issue."

"Not with me!" cried Blake, feeling himself surrendering to the tide that had been tugging at him so long. "They may be able to buy off you cuff-shooters down at Headquarters. They may grease your palm down there, until you see it pays to keep your hands off. They may pull a rope or two and make you back down. But nothing this side o' the gates o' h.e.l.l is going to make _me_ back down. I began this man-hunt, and _I 'm going to end it_!"

He took on a dignity in his own eyes. He felt that in the face of every obstacle he was still the instrument of an ineluctable and incorruptible Justice. Uncouth and buffeted as his withered figure may have been, it still represented the relentlessness of the Law.

"That man-hunt is out of our hands," he heard Copeland saying.

"But it's not out of _my_ hands!" reiterated the detective.

"Yes, it's out of your hands, too," answered Copeland. He spoke with a calm authority, with a finality, that nettled the other man.

"What are you driving at?" he cried out.

"This Binhart hunt is ended," repeated Copeland, and in the eyes looking down at him Blake saw that same vague pity which had rested in the gaze of Elsie Verriner.

"By G.o.d, it's not ended!" Blake thundered back at him.

"It is ended," quietly contended the other. "And precisely as you have put it--Ended by G.o.d!"

"It's what?" cried Blake.

"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.

There is no shadow of doubt about it."

Still Blake stared up at the other man.

"I don't believe it," he wheezed.

Copeland did not answer him. He stepped to the end of the desk and with his scholarly white finger touched a mother-of-pearl bell b.u.t.ton.

Utter silence reigned in the room until the servant answered his summons.

"Bridley, go to my secretary and bring me the portfolio in the second drawer."

Blake heard and yet did not hear the message. A fog-like sense of unreality seemed to drape everything about him. The earth itself seemed to crumble away and leave him poised alone in the very emptiness of s.p.a.ce. Binhart was dead!

He could hear Copeland's voice far away. He could see the returning figure of the servant, but it seemed as gray and ghostlike as the entire room about him. In his shaking fingers he took the official papers which Copeland handed over to him. He could read the words, he could see the signatures, but they seemed unable to impart any clear-cut message to his brain. His dazed eyes wandered over the newspaper clippings which Copeland thrust into his unsteady fingers.

There, too, was the same calamitous proclamation, as final as though he had been reading it on a tombstone. Binhart was dead! Here were the proofs of it; here was an authentic copy of the death certificate, the reports of the police verification; here in his hands were the final and indisputable proofs.

But he could not quite comprehend it. He tried to tell himself it was only that his old-time enemy was playing some new trick on him, a trick which he could not quite fathom. Then the totality of it all swept home to him, swept through his entire startled being as a tidal-wave sweeps over a coast-shoal.

Blake, in his day, had known desolation, but it had seldom been desolation of spirit. It had never been desolation like this. He tried to plumb it, to its deepest meaning, but consciousness seemed to have no line long enough. He only knew that his world had ended. He saw himself as the thing that life had at last left him--a solitary and unsatisfied man, a man without an aim, without a calling, without companions.h.i.+p.

"So this ends the music!" he muttered, as he rose weakly to his feet.

And yet it was more than the end of the music, he had to confess to himself. It was the collapse of the instruments, the snapping of the last string. It was the ultimate end, the end that proclaimed itself as final as the stabbing thought of his own death itself.

He heard Copeland asking if he would care for a gla.s.s of sherry.

Whether he answered that query or not he never knew. He only knew that Binhart was dead, and that he himself was groping his way out into the night, a broken and desolate man.

XX

Several days dragged away before Blake's mental clarity returned to him. Then block by unstable block he seemed to rebuild a new world about him, a new world which was both narrow and empty. But it at least gave him something on which to plant his bewildered feet.

That slow return to the substantialities of life was in the nature of a convalescence. It came step by languid step; he knew no power to hurry it. And as is so often the case with convalescents, he found himself in a world from which time seemed to have detached him. Yet as he emerged from that earlier state of coma, his old-time instincts and characteristics began to a.s.sert themselves. Some deep-seated inner spirit of dubiety began to grope about and question and challenge. His innate skepticism once more became active. That tendency to cynical unbelief which his profession had imposed upon him stubbornly rea.s.serted itself. His career had crowned him with a surly suspiciousness. And about the one thing that remained vital to that career, or what was left of it, these wayward suspicions arrayed themselves like wolves, about a wounded stag.

His unquiet soul felt the need of some final and personal proof of Binhart's death. He asked for more data than had been given him. He wanted more information than the fact that Binhart, on his flight north, had fallen ill of pneumonia in New Orleans, had wandered on to the dry air of Arizona with a "spot" on his lungs, and had there succ.u.mbed to the tubercular invasion for which his earlier sickness had laid him open. Blake's slowly awakening and ever-wary mind kept telling him that after all there might be some possibility of trickery, that a fugitive with the devilish ingenuity of Binhart would resort to any means to escape being further hara.s.sed by the Law.

Blake even recalled, a few days later, the incident of the Shattuck jewel-robbery, during the first weeks of his regime as a Deputy Commissioner. This diamond-thief named Shattuck had been arrested and released under heavy bail. Seven months later Shattuck's attorney had appeared before the District Attorney's office with a duly executed certificate of death, officially establis.h.i.+ng the fact that his client had died two weeks before in the city of Baltimore. On this he had based a demand for the dismissal of the case. He had succeeded in having all action stopped and the affair became, officially, a closed incident. Yet two months later Shattuck had been seen alive, and the following winter had engaged in an Albany hotel robbery which had earned for him, under an entirely different name, a nine-year sentence in Sing Sing.

From the memory of that case Never-Fail Blake wrung a thin and ghostly consolation. The more he brooded over it the more morosely disquieted he became. The thing grew like a upas tree; it spread until it obsessed all his waking hours and invaded even his dreams. Then a time came when he could endure it no more. He faced the necessity of purging his soul of all uncertainty. The whimpering of one of his unkenneled "hunches" merged into what seemed an actual voice of inspiration to him.

He gathered together what money he could; he arranged what few matters still remained to engage his attention, going about the task with that valedictory solemnity with which the forlornly decrepit execute their last will and testament. Then, when everything was prepared, he once more started out on the trail.

Two weeks later a rough and heavy-bodied man, garbed in the rough apparel of a mining prospector, made his way into the sun-steeped town of Toluca. There he went quietly to the wooden-fronted hotel, hired a pack-mule and a camp-outfit and made purchase, among other things, of a pick and shovel. To certain of the men he met he put inquiries as to the best trail out to the Buenavista Copper Camp. Then, as he waited for the camp-partner who was to follow him into Toluca, he drifted with amiable and ponderous restlessness about the town, talking with the telegraph operator and the barber, swapping yarns at the livery-stable where his pack-mule was lodged, handing out cigars in the wooden-fronted hotel, casually interviewing the town officials as to the health of the locality and the death-rate of Toluca, acquainting himself with the local undertaker and the lonely young doctor, and even dropping in on the town officials and making inquiries about main-street building lots and the need of a new hotel.

To all this amiable and erratic garrulity there seemed to be neither direction nor significance. But in one thing the town of Toluca agreed; the ponderous-bodied old new-comer was a bit "queer" in his head.

A time came, however, when the newcomer announced that he could wait no longer for his belated camp-partner. With his pack-mule and a pick and shovel he set out, late one afternoon, for the Buenavista Camp. Yet by nightfall, for some strange reason, any one traveling that lonely trail might have seen him returning towards Toluca. He did not enter the town, however, but skirted the outer fringe of spa.r.s.ely settled houses and guardedly made his way to a close-fenced area, in which neither light nor movement could be detected. This silent place awakened in him no trace of either fear or repugnance. With him he carried his pick and shovel, and five minutes later the sound of this pick and shovel might have been heard at work as the ponderous-bodied man sweated over his midnight labor. When he had dug for what seemed an interminable length of time, he tore away a layer of pine boards and released a double row of screw-heads. Then he crouched low down in the rectangular cavern which he had fas.h.i.+oned with his spade, struck a match, and peered with a narrow-eyed and breathless intentness at what faced him there.

One glance at that tragic ma.s.s of corruption was enough for him. He replaced the screw-heads and the pine boards. He took up his shovel and began restoring the earth, stolidly tramping it down, from time to time, with his great weight.