own quarter. An
hour later Blake had his hired agents raking that quarter from cellar
to garret. It was not until the evening of the following day that
these agents learned Binhart had made his way to the Marina, bribed a
water-front boatman to row him across the bay, and had been put aboard
a freighter weighing anchor for Marseilles.

For the second time Blake traversed Italy by train, hurrying
self-immured and preoccupied through Rome and Florence and Genoa, and
then on along the Riviera to Marseilles.

In that brawling and turbulent French port, after the usual rounds and
the usual inquiries down in the midst of the harbor-front forestry of
masts, he found a boatman who claimed to have knowledge of Binhart's
whereabouts. This piratical-looking boatman promptly took Blake
several miles down the coast, parleyed in the _lingua Franca_ of the
Mediterranean, argued in broken English, and insisted on going further.
Blake, scenting imposture, demanded to be put ashore. This the boatman
refused to do. It was then and only then that the detective suspected
he was the victim of a "plant," of a carefully planned shanghaing
movement, the object of which, apparently, was to gain time for the
fugitive.

It was only at the point of a revolver that Blake brought the boat
ashore, and there he was promptly arrested and accused of attempted
murder. He found it expedient to call in the aid of the American
Consul, who, in turn, suggested the retaining of a local advocate.
Everything, it is true, was at last made clear and in the end Blake was
honorably released.

But Binhart, in the meantime, had caught a Lloyd Brazileiro steamer for
Rio de Janeiro, and was once more on the high seas.

Blake, when he learned of this, sat staring about him, like a man
facing news which he could not assimilate. He shut himself up in his
hotel room, for an hour, communing with his own dark soul. He emerged
from that self-communion freshly shaved and smoking a cigar. He found
that he could catch a steamer for Barcelona, and from that port take a
Campania Transatlantic boat for Kingston, Jamaica.

From the American consulate he carried away with him a bundle of New
York newspapers. When out on the Atlantic he arranged these according
to date and went over them diligently, page by page. They seemed like
echoes out of another life. He read listlessly on, going over the
belated news from his old-time home with the melancholy indifference of
t