r and Binhart was the
fugitive. It had long since resolved itself into a personal issue
between him and his enemy.

XI

Three hours after he had disembarked from his steamer at Rio, Blake was
breakfasting at the Cafe Britto in the Ovidor. At the same table with
him sat a lean-jawed and rat-eyed little gambler by the name of Passos.

Two hours after this breakfast Passos might have been seen on the
Avenida Central, in deep talk with a peddler of artificial diamonds.
Still later in the day he held converse with a fellow gambler at the
Paineiras, half-way up Mount Corcovado; and the same afternoon he was
interrogating a certain discredited concession-hunter on the Petropolis
boat.

By evening he was able to return to Blake with the information that
Binhart had duly landed at Rio, had hidden for three days in the
outskirts of the city, and had gone aboard a German cargo-boat bound
for Colon. Two days later Blake himself was aboard a British freighter
northward bound for Kingston. Once again he beheld a tropical sun
shimmer on hot brass-work and pitch boil up between bone-white
deck-boards sluiced and resluiced by a half-naked crew. Once again he
had to face an enervating equatorial heat that vitiated both mind and
body. But he neither fretted nor complained. Some fixed inner purpose
seemed to sustain him through every discomfort. Deep in that soul,
merely filmed with its fixed equatorial calm, burned some dormant and
crusader-like propulsion. And an existence so centered on one great
issue found scant time to worry over the trivialities of the moment.

After a three-day wait at Jamaica Blake caught an Atlas liner for
Colon. And at Colon he found himself once more among his own kind.
Scattered up and down the Isthmus he found an occasional Northerner to
whom he was not unknown, engineers and construction men who could talk
of things that were comprehensible to him, gamblers and adventurers who
took him poignantly back to the life he had left so far behind him.
Along that crowded and shifting half-way house for the tropic-loving
American he found more than one passing friend to whom he talked
hungrily and put many wistful questions. Sometimes it was a rock
contractor tanned the color of a Mexican saddle. Sometimes it was a
new arrival in Stetson and riding-breeches and unstained leather
leggings. Sometimes it was a coatless dump-boss blaspheming his
toiling army of spick-a-dees.

Sometimes he talked