that
must have been haunting him for months past. His movements became
feverish, erratic, irrational. He traveled in strange directions and
by strange means, by bullock-cart, by burro, by dug-out, sometimes on
foot and sometimes on horseback. Sometimes he stayed over night at a
rubber-gatherers' camp, sometimes he visited a banana plantation,
bought a fresh horse, and pushed on again. When he reached the
Province of Alajuela he made use of the narrow cattle passes, pressing
on in a northwesterly direction along the valleys of the San Juan and
the San Carlos River. A madness seemed to have seized him, a madness
to make his way northward, ever northward.

Over heartbreaking mountainous paths, through miasmic jungles, across
sun-baked plateaus, chilled by night and scorched by day, chafed and
sore, tortured by _niguas_ and _coloradillas_, mosquitoes and
_chigoes_, sleeping in verminous hay-thatched huts of bamboo bound
together with bejuco-vine, mislead by lying natives and stolen from by
peons, Blake day by day and week by week fought his way after his
enemy. When worn to lightheadedness he drank _guaro_ and great
quantities of black coffee; when ill he ate quinin.

The mere act of pursuit had become automatic with him. He no longer
remembered why he was seeking out this man. He no longer remembered
the crime that lay at the root of that flight and pursuit. It was not
often, in fact, that his thoughts strayed back to his old life. When
he did think of it, it seemed only something too far away to remember,
something phantasmal, something belonging to another world. There were
times when all his journeying through steaming swamplands and forests
of teak and satin-wood and over indigo lagoons and mountain-passes of
moonlit desolation seemed utterly and unfathomably foolish. But he
fought back such moods, as though they were a weakness. He let nothing
deter him. He stuck to his trail, instinctively, doggedly,
relentlessly.

It was at Chalavia that a peon named Tico Viquez came to Blake with the
news of a white man lying ill of black-water fever in a native hut.
For so much gold, Tico Viquez intimated, he would lead the senor to the
hut in question.

Blake, who had no gold to spare, covered the startled peon with his
revolver and commanded Viquez to take him to that hut. There was that
in the white man's face which caused the peon to remember that life was
sweet. He led the way through a reptilious swamp a