V
In Valparaiso he readily found the track of Greenfield. Up to the time of his departure, two boats had sailed: one for the north, and one by the Straits of Magellan to Buenos Ayres. Greenfield had bought a ticket for each, after effecting the withdrawal of his account at a local bank. Frawley was in perplexity: for Greenfield to flee north was to run into the jaws of the law. The withdrawal of the account decided him. He returned to Buenos Ayres by the route he had come, arriving the day before the steamer. To his discomfiture Greenfield was not on board. By ridiculously casting away his protection he had thrown the detective off the track and gained three weeks. Without more concern than he might have shown in taking a trip from Toronto to New York, Frawley a third time crossed the Andes and set himself to correcting his first error.
He traced Greenfield laboriously up the coast back to Panama and there lost the trail. At the end of two months he learned that Greenfield had shipped as a common sailor on a freighter that touched at Hawaii. From here he followed him to Yokohama, Singapore, Ceylon, and Bombay.
Thence Greenfield, suddenly abandoning the water route, had proceeded by land to Bagdad, and across the Turkish Empire to Constantinople. Without a pause, Frawley traced him next into the Balkans, through Bulgaria, Roumania, amid massacre and revolution to Budapest, back to Odessa, and across the back of Russia by Moscow and Riga to Stockholm. A year had elapsed.
Several times he might have gained on the fugitive had he trusted to his instinct; but he bided his time, renouncing a stroke of genius, in order to be certain of committing no error, awaiting the moment when Greenfield would pause and he might overtake him. But the fugitive, as though stung by a gad-fly, continued to plunge madly over sea and continent. Four months, five months behind, Frawley continued the tireless pursuit.
From Stockholm the chase led to Copenhagen, to Christiansand, down the North Sea to Rotterdam. From thence Greenfield had rushed by rail to Lisbon and taken steamer to Africa, touching at Gibraltar, Portuguese and French Guinea, Sierra Leone, and proceeding thence into the Congo. For a month all traces disappeared in the veldt, until by chance, rather than by his own merits, Frawley found the trail anew in Madagascar, whither Greenfield had come after a desperate attempt to bury his trail on the immense plains of Southern Africa.
From Madagascar, Frawley followed him to Aden in Arabia and by steamer to Melbourne. Again for weeks he sought the confused track vainly through Australia, up through Sydney, down again to Tasmania and New Zealand on a false clue, back to Queensland, where at last in Cooktown he learned anew of the passing of his man.
The third year began without appreciable gain. Greenfield still was three months in advance, never pausing, scurrying from continent to continent, as though instinctively aware of the progress of his pursuer.
In this year Frawley visited Sumatra, Java, and Borneo, stopped at Manila, jumped immediately to Korea, and hurried on to Vladivostok, where he found that Greenfield had procured passage on a sealer bound for Auckland. There he had taken the steamer by the Straits of Magellan back to Buenos Ayres.
There, within the first hour, he heard a report that his man had gone on to Rio Janeiro, caught the cholera, and died there. Undaunted by the epidemic, Frawley took the next boat and entered the stricken city by swimming ashore. For a week he searched the hospitals and the cemeteries. Greenfield had indeed been stricken, but, escaping with his life, had left for the northern part of Brazil. The delay resulted in a gain of three months for Frawley, but without heat or excitement he began anew the pursuit, passing up the coast to Para and the mouth of the Amazon, by Bogota and Panama into Mexico, on up toward the border of Texas. The months between him and Greenfield shortened to weeks, then to days without troubling his equanimity. At El Paso he arrived a few hours after Greenfield had left, going toward the Salt Basin and the Guadalupe Mountains. Frawley took horses and a guide and followed to the edge of the desert. At three o'clock in the afternoon a horseman grew out of the horizon, a figure that remained stationary and attentive, studying his approach through a spy-glass. Suddenly, as though satisfied, the stranger took off his hat and waved it above his head in challenge, and digging his heels into his horse, disappeared into the desert.