“And aboard the Trunella?”
“Sure! He’s got to be aboard the Trunella!”
“Then why d’ you say I can’t get at him?”
“Because Guayaquil and the Trunella and the whole coast down there is tied up in quarantine. That whole harbor’s rotten with yellow-jack. It’s tied up as tight as a drum. You couldn’t get a boat on all the Pacific to touch that port these days!”
“But there’s got to be something going there!” contended Blake.
“They daren’t do it! They couldn’t get clearance—they couldn’t even get pratique! Once they got in there they’d be held and given the blood-test and picketed with a gunboat for a month! And what’s more, they’ve got that Alfaro revolution on down there! They’ve got boat-patrols up and down the coast, keeping a lookout for gun-runners!”
Blake, at this last word, raised his ponderous head.
“The boat-patrols wouldn’t phase me,” he announced. His thoughts, in fact, were already far ahead, marshaling themselves about other things.
“You’ve a weakness for yellow fever?” inquired the ironic McGlade.
“I guess it’d take more than a few fever germs to throw me off that trail,” was the detective’s abstracted retort. He was recalling certain things that the russet-faced Pip Tankred had told him. And before everything else he felt that it would be well to get in touch with that distributor of bridge equipment and phonograph records.