The Shadow (Stringer)/Chapter 20
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 assert 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 reasserted 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 succumbed 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 harassed by the Law.
Blake even recalled, a few days later, the incident of the Shattuck jewel-robbery, during the first weeks of his régime 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 establishing 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 newcomer 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 sparsely 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 fashioned 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 mass 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.
When his task was completed he saw that everything was orderly and as he had found it. Then he returned to his tethered pack-mule and once more headed for the Buenavista Camp, carrying with him a discovery which made the night air as intoxicating as wine to his weary body.
Late that night a man might have been heard singing to the stars, singing in the midst of the wilderness, without rhyme or reason. And in the midst of that wilderness he remained for another long day and another long night, as though solitude were necessary to him, that he might adjust himself to some new order of things, that he might digest some victory which had been too much for his shattered nerves.
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.
Day by patient day, through the drought and heat and alkali of an Arizona summer, he sought some clue, some inkling, of the direction which that wanderer had taken. But about Binhart and his movements, Toluca and Phœnix and all Arizona itself seemed to know nothing.
Nothing, Blake saw in the end, remained to be discovered there. So in time the heavy-bodied man with the haggard hound's eyes took his leave, passing out into the world which in turn swallowed him up as completely as it had swallowed up his unknown enemy.