for me?" he asked.

Blake, studying him across the small table, Weighed both the man and
the situation.

"Two hundred dollars in American green-backs," he announced as he drew
out his wallet. He could see McGlade moisten his flaccid lips. He
could see the faded eyes fasten on the bills as they were counted out.
He knew where the money would go, how little good it would do. But
that, he knew, was not his funeral. All he wanted was Binhart.

"Binhart's in Guayaquil," McGlade suddenly announced.

"How d' you know that?" promptly demanded Blake.

"I know the man who sneaked him out from Balboa. He got sixty dollars
for it. I can take you to him. Binhart 'd picked up a medicine-chest
and a bag of instruments from a broken-down doctor at Colon. He went
aboard a Pacific liner as a doctor himself.

"What liner?"

"He went aboard the _Trunella_. He thought he 'd get down to Callao.
But they tied the _Trunella_ up at Guayaquil."

"And you say he 's there now?"

"Yes!"

"And aboard the _Trunella_?"

"Sure! He's got to be aboard the _Trunella_!"

"Then why d' you say I can't get at him?"

"Because Guayaquil and the _Trunella_ and the whole coast down there is
tied up in quarantine. That whole harbor's rotten with yellow-jack.
It's tied up as tight as a drum. You could n't get a boat on all the
Pacific to touch that port these days!"

"But there's got to be _something_ going there!" contended Blake.

"They daren't do it! They couldn't get clearance--they couldn't even
get _pratique_! Once they got in there they 'd be held and given the
blood-test and picketed with a gunboat for a month! And what's more,
they 've got that Alfaro revolution on down there! They 've got
boat-patrols up and down the coast, keeping a lookout for gun-runners!"

Blake, at this last word, raised his ponderous head.

"The boat-patrols wouldn't phase me," he announced. His thoughts, in
fact, were already far ahead, marshaling themselves about other things.

"You 've a weakness for yellow fever?" inquired the ironic McGlade.

"I guess it 'd take more than a few fever germs to throw me off that
trail," was the detective's abstracted retort. He was recalling
certain things that the russet-faced Pip Tankred had told him. And
before everything else he felt that it would be well to get in touch
with that distributor of bridge equipment and phonograph records.

"You don't mean you 're going to try to get into Guayaquil?" de