It was late that day as they climbed up out of a steaming valley into higher ground that Binhart pulled up and studied Blake's face.
"Jim, you look like a sick man to me!" he declared. He said it without exultation; but there was a new and less passive timber to his voice.
"I 've been feeling kind o' mean this last day or two," confessed Blake. His own once guttural voice was plaintive, as he spoke. It was almost a quavering whine.
"Had n't we better lay up for a few days?" suggested Binhart.
"Lay up nothing!" cried Blake, and he clenched that determination by an outburst of blasphemous anger. But he secretly took great doses of quinin and drank much native liquor. He fought against a mental lassitude which he could not comprehend. Never before had that ample machinery of the body failed him in an emergency. Never before had he known an illness that a swallow or two of brandy and a night's rest could not scatter to the four winds. It bewildered him to find his once capable frame rebelling against its tasks. It left him dazed, as though he had been confronted by the sudden and gratuitous treachery of a life-long servant.
He grew more irritable, more fanciful. He changed guides at the next native village, fearing that Binhart might have grown too intimate with the old ones. He was swayed by an ever-increasing fear of intrigues. He coerced his flagging will into a feverish watchfulness. He became more arbitrary in his movements and exactions. When the chance came, he purchased a repeating Lee-Enfield rifle, which he packed across his sweating back on the trail and slept with under his arm at night. When a morning came when he was too weak and ill to get up, he lay back on his grass couch, with his rifle across his knees, watching Binhart, always watching Binhart.
He seemed to realize that his power was slipping away, and he brooded on some plan for holding his prisoner, on any plan, no matter what it might cost.
He even pretended to sleep, to the end that Binhart might make an effort to break away—and be brought down with a bullet. He prayed that Binhart would try to go, would give him an excuse for the last move would leave the two of them lying there together. Even to perish there side by side, foolishly, uselessly, seemed more desirable than the thought that Binhart might in the end get away. He seemed satisfied that the two of them should lie there, for all time, each holding the other down, like two embattled stags with their horns inextricably locked. And he waited there, nursing his rifle, watching out of sullenly feverish eyes, marking each movement of the passive-faced Binhart.
But Binhart, knowing what he knew, was content to wait.
He was content to wait until the fever grew, and the poisons of the blood narcotized the dulled brain into indifference, and then goaded it into delirium. Then, calmly equipping himself for his journey, he buried the repeating rifle and slipped away in the night, carrying with him Blake's quinin and revolver and pocket-filter. He traveled hurriedly, bearing southeast towards the San Juan. Four days later he reached the coast, journeyed by boat to Bluefields, and from that port passed on into the outer world, where time and distance swallowed him up, and no sign of his whereabouts was left behind.