The trip to Brindisi seemed an endless one. He seemed to have lost his earlier tendency to be a “mixer.” He became more morose, more self-immured. He found himself without the desire to make new friends, and his Celtic ancestry equipped him with a mute and sullen antipathy for his aggressively English fellow travelers. He spent much of his time in the smoking-room, playing solitaire. When they stopped at Madras and Bombay he merely emerged from his shell to make sure if no trace of Binhart were about. He was no more interested in these heathen cities of a heathen East than in an ash-pile through which he might have to rake for a hidden coin.
By the time he reached Brindisi he had recovered his lost weight, and added to it, by many pounds. He had also returned to his earlier habit of chewing “fine-cut.” He gave less thought to his personal appearance, becoming more and more indifferent as to the impression he made on those about him. His face, for all his increase in flesh, lost its ruddiness. It was plain that during the last few months he had aged, that his hound-like eye had grown more haggard, that his always ponderous step had lost the last of its resilience.
Yet one hour after he had landed at Brindisi his listlessness seemed a thing of the past. For there he was able to pick up the trail again, with clear proof that a man answering to Binhart’s description had sailed for Corfu. From Corfu the scent was followed northward to Ragusa, and from Ragusa, on to Trieste, where it was lost again.
Two days of hard work, however, convinced Blake that Binhart had sailed from Fiume to Naples. He started southward by train, at once, vaguely surprised at the length of Italy, vaguely disconcerted by the unknown tongue and the unknown country which he had to face.
It was not until he arrived at Naples that he seemed to touch solid ground again. That city, he felt, stood much nearer home. In it were many persons not averse to curry favor with a New York official, and many persons indirectly in touch with the home Department. These persons he assiduously sought out, one by one, and in twelve hours’ time his net had been woven completely about the city. And, so far as he could learn, Binhart was still somewhere in that city.
Two days later, when least expecting it, he stepped into the wine-room of an obscure little pension hotel on the Via Margellina and saw Binhart before him. Binhart left the room as the other man stepped into it. He left by way of the window, carrying the casement with him. Blake followed, but the lighter and younger man out-ran him and was swallowed up by one of the unknown streets of an unknown quarter. An hour later Blake had his hired agents raking that quarter from cellar to garret. It was not until the evening of the following day that these agents learned Binhart had made his way to the Marina, bribed a water-front boatman to row him across the bay, and had been put aboard a freighter weighing anchor for Marseilles.
For the second time Blake traversed Italy by train, hurrying self-immured and preoccupied through Rome and Florence and Genoa, and then on along the Riviera to Marseilles.
In that brawling and turbulent French port, after the usual rounds and the usual inquiries down in the midst of the harbor-front forestry of masts, he found a boatman who claimed to have knowledge of Binhart’s whereabouts. This piratical-looking boatman promptly took Blake several miles down the coast, parleyed in the lingua Franca of the Mediterranean, argued in broken English, and insisted on going further. Blake, scenting imposture, demanded to be put ashore. This the boatman refused to do. It was then and only then that the detective suspected he was the victim of a “plant,” of a carefully planned shanghaing movement, the object of which, apparently, was to gain time for the fugitive.
It was only at the point of a revolver that Blake brought the boat ashore, and there he was promptly arrested and accused of attempted murder. He found it expedient to call in the aid of the American Consul, who, in turn, suggested the retaining of a local advocate. Everything, it is true, was at last made clear and in the end Blake was honorably released.
But Binhart, in the meantime, had caught a Lloyd Brazileiro steamer for Rio de Janeiro, and was once more on the high seas.