Never-Fail Blake | Page 4

out the Second Deputy.
He could see discretion drop like a curtain across her watching face.
"Connie Binhart!" she temporized. Blake, as his heavy side glance slewed about to her, prided himself on the fact that he could see through her pretenses. At any other time he would have thrown open the flood-gates of that ever-inundating anger of his and swept away all such obliquities.
"I guess," he went on with slow patience "we know him best round here as Charles Blanchard."
"Blanchard?" she echoed.
"Yes, Blanchard, the Blanchard we 've been looking for, for seven months now, the Blanchard who chloroformed Ezra Newcomb and carried off a hundred and eighteen thousand dollars."
"Newcomb?" again meditated the woman.
"The Blanchard who shot down the bank detective in Newcomb's room when the rest of the bank was listening to a German band playing in the side street, a band hired for the occasion."
"When was that?" demanded the woman.
"That was last October," he answered with a sing-song weariness suggestive of impatience at such supererogative explanations.
"I was at Monte Carlo all last autumn," was the woman's quick retort.
Blake moved his heavy body, as though to shoulder away any claim as to her complicity.
"I know that," he acknowledged. "And you went north to Paris on the twenty-ninth of November. And on the third of December you went to Cherbourg; and on the ninth you landed in New York. I know all that. That's not what I 'm after. I want to know where Connie Binhart is, now, to-day."
Their glances at last came together. No move was made; no word was spoken. But a contest took place.
"Why ask me?" repeated the woman for the second time. It was only too plain that she was fencing.
"Because you know," was Blake's curt retort. He let the gray-irised eyes drink in the full cup of his determination. Some slowly accumulating consciousness of his power seemed to intimidate her. He could detect a change in her hearing, in her speech itself.
"Jim, I can't tell you," she slowly asserted. "I can't do it!"
"But I 've got 'o know," he stubbornly maintained. "And I 'm going to."
She sat studying him for a minute or two. Her face had lost its earlier arrogance. It seemed troubled; almost touched with fear. She was not altogether ignorant, he reminded himself, of the resources which he could command.
"I can't tell you," she repeated. "I'd rather you let me go."
The Second Deputy's smile, scoffing and melancholy, showed how utterly he ignored her answer. He looked at his watch. Then he looked back at the woman. A nervous tug-of-war was taking place between her right and left hand, with a twisted-up pair of ecru gloves for the cable.
"You know me," he began again in his deliberate and abdominal bass. "And I know you. I 've got 'o get this man Binhart. I 've got 'o! He 's been out for seven months, now, and they 're going to put it up to me, to me, personally. Copeland tried to get him without me. He fell down on it. They all fell down on it. And now they're going to throw the case back on me. They think it 'll be my Waterloo."
He laughed. His laugh was as mirthless as the cackle of a guinea hen. "But I 'm going to die hard, believe me! And if I go down, if they think they can throw me on that, I 'm going to take a few of my friends along with me."
"Is that a threat?" was the woman's quick inquiry. Her eyes narrowed again, for she had long since learned, and learned it to her sorrow, that every breath he drew was a breath of self-interest.
"No; it's just a plain statement." He slewed about in his swivel chair, throwing one thick leg over the other as he did so. "I hate to holler Auburn at a girl like you, Elsie; but I 'm going--"
"Auburn?" she repeated very quietly. Then she raised her eyes to his. "Can you say a thing like that to me, Jim?"
He shifted a little in his chair. But he met her gaze without a wince.
"This is business, Elsie, and you can't mix business and--and other things," he tailed off at last, dropping his eyes.
"I 'm sorry you put it that way," she said. "I hoped we 'd be better friends than that!"
"I'm not counting on friendship in this!" he retorted.
"But it might have been better, even in this!" she said. And the artful look of pity on her face angered him.
"Well, we 'll begin on something nearer home!" he cried.
He reached down into his pocket and produced a small tinted oblong of paper. He held it, face out, between his thumb and forefinger, so that she could read it.
"This Steinert check 'll do the trick. Take a closer look at the