To all this amiable and erratic garrulity there seemed to be neither direction nor significance. But in one thing the town of Toluca agreed; the ponderous-bodied old newcomer was a bit “queer” in his head.
A time came, however, when the newcomer announced that he could wait no longer for his belated camp-partner. With his pack-mule and a pick and shovel he set out, late one afternoon, for the Buenavista Camp. Yet by nightfall, for some strange reason, any one traveling that lonely trail might have seen him returning towards Toluca. He did not enter the town, however, but skirted the outer fringe of sparsely settled houses and guardedly made his way to a close-fenced area, in which neither light nor movement could be detected. This silent place awakened in him no trace of either fear or repugnance. With him he carried his pick and shovel, and five minutes later the sound of this pick and shovel might have been heard at work as the ponderous-bodied man sweated over his midnight labor. When he had dug for what seemed an interminable length of time, he tore away a layer of pine boards and released a double row of screw-heads. Then he crouched low down in the rectangular cavern which he had fashioned with his spade, struck a match, and peered with a narrow-eyed and breathless intentness at what faced him there.
One glance at that tragic mass of corruption was enough for him. He replaced the screw-heads and the pine boards. He took up his shovel and began restoring the earth, stolidly tramping it down, from time to time, with his great weight.
When his task was completed he saw that everything was orderly and as he had found it. Then he returned to his tethered pack-mule and once more headed for the Buenavista Camp, carrying with him a discovery which made the night air as intoxicating as wine to his weary body.
Late that night a man might have been heard singing to the stars, singing in the midst of the wilderness, without rhyme or reason. And in the midst of that wilderness he remained for another long day and another long night, as though solitude were necessary to him, that he might adjust himself to some new order of things, that he might digest some victory which had been too much for his shattered nerves.
On the third day, as he limped placidly back into the town of Toluca, his soul was torn between a great peace and a great hunger. He hugged to his breast the fact that somewhere in the world ahead of him a man once known as Binhart still moved and lived. He kept telling himself that somewhere about the face of the globe that restless spirit whom he sought still wandered.
Day by patient day, through the drought and heat and alkali of an Arizona summer, he sought some clue, some inkling, of the direction which that wanderer had taken. But about Binhart and his movements, Toluca and Phœnix and all Arizona itself seemed to know nothing.
Nothing, Blake saw in the end, remained to be discovered there. So in time the heavy-bodied man with the haggard hound’s eyes took his leave, passing out into the world which in turn swallowed him up as completely as it had swallowed up his unknown enemy.
XXII
Three of the busiest portions of New York, varying with the various hours of the day, may safely be said to lie in that neighborhood where Nassau Street debouches into Park Row, and also near that point where Twenty-third Street intercepts Fourth Avenue, and still again not far from where Broadway and Fifth Avenue meet at the southwest corner of Madison Square.