Never-Fail Blake

Never-Fail Blake

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Title: Never-Fail Blake
Author: Arthur Stringer

Release Date: June 23, 2006 [eBook #18671]
Language: English
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Transcriber's note:
The printed version of this book had two Chapter V's. Rather than
renumber all the subsequent chapters in the book, I numbered the first
"V" to "V (a)" and the second one to "V (b)".

Supertales of Modern Mystery
NEVER-FAIL BLAKE
by
ARTHUR STRINGER

[Frontispiece: "Then why can't you marry me?"]

Mckinlay, Stone & Mackenzie New York Copyright, 1913, by The
Bobbs-Merrill Company

NEVER-FAIL BLAKE
I
Blake, the Second Deputy, raised his gloomy hound's eyes as the door
opened and a woman stepped in. Then he dropped them again.
"Hello, Elsie!" he said, without looking at her.
The woman stood a moment staring at him. Then she advanced
thoughtfully toward his table desk.
"Hello, Jim!" she answered, as she sank into the empty chair at the desk
end. The rustling of silk suddenly ceased. An aphrodisiac odor of

ambergris crept through the Deputy-Commissioner's office.
The woman looped up her veil, festooning it about the undulatory roll
of her hat brim. Blake continued his solemnly preoccupied study of the
desk top.
"You sent for me," the woman finally said. It was more a reminder than
a question. And the voice, for all its quietness, carried no sense of
timidity. The woman's pale face, where the undulating hat brim left the
shadowy eyes still more shadowy, seemed fortified with a calm sense
of power. It was something more than a dormant consciousness of
beauty, though the knowledge that men would turn back to a face so
wistful as hers, and their judgment could be dulled by a smile so
narcotizing, had not a little to do with the woman's achieved serenity.
There was nothing outwardly sinister about her. This fact had always
left her doubly dangerous as a law-breaker.
Blake himself, for all his dewlap and his two hundred pounds of
lethargic beefiness, felt a vague and inward stirring as he finally lifted
his head and looked at her. He looked into the shadowy eyes under the
level brows. He could see, as he had seen before, that they were
exceptional eyes, with iris rings of deep gray about the ever-widening
and ever-narrowing pupils which varied with varying thought, as
though set too close to the brain that controlled them. So dominating
was this pupil that sometimes the whole eye looked violet, and
sometimes green, according to the light.
Then his glance strayed to the woman's mouth, where the upper lip
curved outward, from the base of the straight nose, giving her at first
glance the appearance of pouting. Yet the heavier underlip, soft and
wilful, contradicted this impression of peevishness, deepened it into
one of Ishmael-like rebellion.
Then Blake looked at the woman's hair. It was abundant and nut-brown,
and artfully and scrupulously interwoven and twisted together. It
seemed to stand the solitary pride of a life claiming few things of which
to be proud. Blake remembered how that wealth of nut-brown hair was
daily plaited and treasured and coiled and cared for, the meticulous

attentiveness with which morning by morning its hip-reaching
abundance was braided and twisted and built up about the small head,
an intricate structure of soft wonder which midnight must ever see
again in ruins, just as the next morning would find idly laborious
fingers rebuilding its ephemeral glories. This rebuilding was done
thoughtfully and calmly, as though it were a religious rite, as though it
were a sacrificial devotion to an ideal in a life tragically forlorn of
beauty.
He remembered, too, the day when he had first seen her. That was at
the time of "The Sick Millionaire" case, when he had first learned of
her association with Binhart. She had posed at the Waldorf as a trained
nurse, in that case, and had met him and held him off and outwitted him
at every turn. Then he had decided on his "plant." To effect this he had
whisked a young Italian with a lacerated thumb up from the City
Hospital and sent him in to her as an injured elevator-boy looking for
first-aid treatment. One glimpse of her work on that thumb showed her
to be betrayingly