Never-Fail Blake Part 6

In Winnipeg, two days later, Blake found himself on a blind trail.

When he had talked with a railway detective on whom he could rely, when he had visited certain offices and interviewed certain officials, when he had sought out two or three women acquaintances in the city's sequestered area, he faced the bewildering discovery that he was still without an actual clue of the man he was supposed to be shadowing.

It was then that something deep within his nature, something he could never quite define, whispered its first faint doubt to him. This doubt persisted even when late that night a Teal Agency operative wired him from Calgary, stating that a man answering Binhart's description had just left the Alberta Hotel for Banff. To this latter point Blake promptly wired a fuller description of his man, had an officer posted to inspect every alighting pa.s.senger, and early the next morning received a telegram, asking for still more particulars.

He peered down at this message, vaguely depressed in spirit, discarding theory after theory, tossing aside contingency after contingency. And up from this gloomy shower slowly emerged one of his "hunches," one of his vague impressions, coming blindly to the surface very much like an earthworm crawling forth after a fall of rain. There was something wrong. Of that he felt certain. He could not place it or define it.

To continue westward would be to depend too much on an uncertainty; it would involve the risk of wandering too far from the center of things.

He suddenly decided to double on his tracks and swing down to Chicago.

Just why he felt as he did he could not fathom. But the feeling was there. It was an instinctive propulsion, a "hunch." These hunches were to him, working in the dark as he was compelled to, very much what whiskers are to a cat. They could not be called an infallible guide.

But they at least kept him from colliding with impregnabilities.

Acting on this hunch, as he called it, he caught a Great Northern train for Minneapolis, transferred to a Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul express, and without loss of time sped southward. When, thirty hours later, he alighted in the heart of Chicago, he found himself in an environment more to his liking, more adaptable to his ends. He was not disheartened by his failure. He did not believe in luck, in miracles, or even in coincidence. But experience had taught him the bewildering extent of the resources which he might command. So intricate and so wide-reaching were the secret wires of his information that he knew he could wait, like a spider at the center of its web, until the betraying vibration awakened some far-reaching thread of that web. In every corner of the country lurked a non-professional ally, a secluded tipster, ready to report to Blake when the call for a report came. The world, that great detective had found, was indeed a small one. From its scattered four corners, into which his subterranean wires of espionage stretched, would in time come some inkling, some hint, some discovery. And at the converging center of those wires Blake was able to sit and wait, like the central operator at a telephone switchboard, knowing that the tentacles of attention were creeping and wavering about dim territories and that in time they would render up their awaited word.

In the meantime, Blake himself was by no means idle. It would not be from official circles, he knew, that his redemption would come. Time had already proved that. For months past every police chief in the country had held his description of Binhart. That was a fact which Binhart himself very well knew; and knowing that, he would continue to move as he had been moving, with the utmost secrecy, or at least protected by some adequate disguise.

It would be from the underworld that the echo would come. And next to New York, Blake knew, Chicago would make as good a central exchange for this underworld as could be desired. Knowing that city of the Middle West, and knowing it well, he at once "went down the line," making his rounds stolidly and systematically, first visiting a West Side faro-room and casually interviewing the "stools" of Custom House Place and South dark Street, and then dropping in at the Cafe Acropolis, in Halsted Street, and lodging houses in even less savory quarters. He duly canva.s.sed every likely dive, every "melina," every gambling house and yegg hang out. He engaged in leisurely games of pool with stone-getters and gopher men. He visited bucket-shops and barrooms, and dingy little Ghetto cafes. He "buzzed" tipsters and floaters and mouthpieces. He fraternized with till tappers and single-drillers. He always made his inquiries after Binhart seem accidental, a case apparently subsidiary to two or three others which he kept always to the foreground.

He did not despair over the discovery that no one seemed to know of Binhart or his movements. He merely waited his time, and extended new ramifications into newer territory. His word still carried its weight of official authority. There was still an army of obsequious underlings compelled to respect his wishes. It was merely a matter of time and mathematics. Then the law of averages would ordain its end; the needed card would ultimately be turned up, the right dial-twist would at last complete the right combination.

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 cafe 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. In this latter city an Elks' Convention was supplying blue-bird weather for underground "haymakers," busy with bunco-steering, "rus.h.i.+ng"

street-cars and "lifting leathers." Before the stampede at the news of his approach, he picked up Biff Edwards and Lefty Stivers, put on the screws, and learned nothing. He went next to Glory McShane, a Market Street acquaintance indebted for certain old favors, and from her, too, learned nothing of moment. He continued the quest in other quarters, and the results were equally discouraging.

Then began the real detective work about which, Blake knew, newspaper stories were seldom written. This work involved a laborious and monotonous examination of hotel registers, a canva.s.sing of ticket agencies and cab stands and transfer companies. It was anything but story-book sleuthing. It was a dispiriting tread-mill round, but he was still sifting doggedly through the tailings of possibilities when a code-wire came from St. Louis, saying Binhart had been seen the day before at the Planters' Hotel.

Blake was eastbound on his way to St. Louis one hour after the receipt of this wire. And an hour after his arrival in St. Louis he was engaged in an apparently care free and leisurely game of pool with one Loony Ryan, an old-time "box man" who was allowed to roam with a clipped wing in the form of a suspended indictment. Loony, for the liberty thus doled out to him, rewarded his benefactors by an occasional indulgence in the "pigeon-act."

"Draw for lead?" asked Blake, lighting a cigar.

"Sure," said Loony.

Blake pushed his ball to the top cus.h.i.+on, won the draw, and broke.

"Seen anything of Wolf Yonkholm?" he casually inquired, as he turned to chalk his cue. But his eye, with one quick sweep, had made sure of every face in the room.

Loony studied the b.a.l.l.s for a second or two. Wolf was a "dip" with an international record.

"Last time I saw Wolf he was out at 'Frisco, workin' the Beaches," was Loony's reply.

Blake ventured an inquiry or two about other worthies of the underworld. The players went on with their game, placid, self-immured, matter-of-fact.

"Where's Angel McGlory these days?" asked Blake, as he reached over to place a ball.

"What's she been doin'?" demanded Loony, with his cue on the rail.

"She 's traveling with a bank sneak named Blanchard or Binhart,"

explained Blake. "And I want her."

Loony Ryan made his stroke.

"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. But Loony's quick gaze circled the room, promptly checking over every face between the four walls.

"What's up?" he demanded. "Who 'd you spot?"

"Nothing, Loony, nothing! But this game o' yours blamed near made me forget an appointment o' mine!"

Twenty minutes after he had left the bewildered Loony Ryan in the pool parlor he was in a New Orleans sleeper, southward bound. He knew that he was getting within striking distance of Binhart, at last. The zest of the chase took possession of him. The trail was no longer a "cold"

one. He knew which way Binhart was headed. And he knew he was not more than a day behind his man.

V (b)

The moment Blake arrived in New Orleans he shut himself in a telephone booth, called up six somewhat startled acquaintances, learned nothing to his advantage, and went quickly but quietly to the St. Charles.

There he closeted himself with two dependable "elbows," started his detectives on a round of the hotels, and himself repaired to the Levee district, where he held off-handed and ponderously facetious conversations with certain unsavory characters. Then came a visit to certain equally unsavory wharf-rats and a call or two on South Rampart Street. But still no inkling of Binhart or his intended movements came to the detective's ears.

It was not until the next morning, as he stepped into Antoine's, on St.

Louis Street just off the Rue Royal, that anything of importance occurred. The moment he entered that bare and cloistral restaurant where Monsieur Jules could dish up such startling uncloistral dishes, his eyes fell on Abe Sheiner, a drum snuffer with whom he had had previous and somewhat painful encounters. Sheiner, it was plain to see, was in clover, for he was breakfasting regally, on squares of toast covered with shrimp and picked crab meat creamed, with a bisque of cray-fish and _papa-bottes_ in ribbons of bacon, to say nothing of fruit and _bruilleau_.

Blake insisted on joining his old friend Sheiner, much to the tatter's secret discomfiture. It was obvious that the drum snuffer, having made a recent haul, would be amenable to persuasion. And, like all yeggs, he was an upholder of the "moccasin telegraph," a wanderer and a carrier of stray tidings as to the movements of others along the undergrooves of the world. So while Blake breakfasted on shrimp and crab meat and French artichokes stuffed with caviar and anchovies, he intimated to the uneasy-minded Sheiner certain knowledge as to a certain recent coup. In the face of this charge Sheiner indignantly claimed that he had only been playing the ponies and having a run of greenhorn's luck.

"Abe, I 've come down to gather you in," announced the calmly mendacious detective. He continued to sip his _bruilleau_ with fraternal unconcern.

"You got nothing _on_ me, Jim," protested the other, losing his taste for the delicacies arrayed about him.

"Well, we got 'o go down to Headquarters and talk that over," calmly persisted Blake.

"What's the use of pounding me, when I 'm on the square again?"

persisted the ex-drum snuffer.

"That's the line o' talk they all hand out. That's what Connie Binhart said when we had it out up in St. Louis."

"Did you b.u.mp into Binhart in St. Louis?"

"We had a talk, three days ago."

"Then why 'd he blow through this town as though he had a regiment o'

bulls and singed cats behind him!"

Blake's heart went down like an elevator with a broken cable. But he gave no outward sign of this inward commotion.

"Because he wants to get down to Colon before the Hamburg-American boat hits the port," ventured Blake. "His moll's aboard!"