Never-Fail Blake | Page 6

"You 're all right."
Her quiet gaze, with all its reservations, was a tacit question. He was
still a little puzzled by her surrender. He knew she did not regard him
as the great man that he was, that his public career had made of him.
"You've helped me out of a hole," he acknowledged as he faced her
interrogating eyes with his one-sided smile. "I 'm mighty glad you 've
done it, Elsie--for your sake as well as mine."
"What hole?" asked the woman, wearily drawing on her gloves. There
was neither open contempt nor indifference on her face. Yet something
in her bearing nettled him. The quietness of her question contrasted
strangely with the gruffness of the Second Deputy's voice as he
answered her.
"Oh, they think I 'm a has-been round here," he snorted. "They 've got
the idea I 'm out o' date. And I 'm going to show 'em a thing or two to
wake 'em up."
"How?" asked the woman.
"By doing what their whole kid-glove gang have n't been able to do,"
he avowed. And having delivered himself of that ultimatum, he

promptly relaxed into his old-time impassiveness, like a dog snapping
from his kennel and shrinking back into its shadows. At the same
moment that Blake's thick forefinger again prodded the buzzer-button
at his desk end the watching woman could see the relapse into official
wariness. It was as though he had put the shutters up in front of his soul.
She accepted the movement as a signal of dismissal. She rose from her
chair and quietly lowered and adjusted her veil. Yet through that
lowered veil she stood looking down at Never-Fail Blake for a moment
or two. She looked at him with grave yet casual curiosity, as tourists
look at a ruin that has been pointed out to them as historic.
"You did n't give me back Connie Binhart's note," she reminded him as
she paused with her gloved finger-tips resting on the desk edge.
"D' you want it?" he queried with simulated indifference, as he made a
final and lingering study of it.
"I 'd like to keep it," she acknowledged. When, without meeting her
eyes, he handed it over to her, she folded it and restored it to her
pocket-book, carefully, as though vast things depended on that small
scrap of paper.
Never-Fail Blake, alone in his office and still assailed by the vaguely
disturbing perfumes which she had left behind her, pondered her
reasons for taking back Binhart's scrap of paper. He wondered if she
had at any time actually cared for Binhart. He wondered if she was
capable of caring for anybody. And this problem took his thoughts back
to the time when so much might have depended on its answer.
The Second Deputy dropped his reading-glass in its drawer and
slammed it shut. It made no difference, he assured himself, one way or
the other. And in the consolatory moments of a sudden new triumph
Never-Fail Blake let his thoughts wander pleasantly back over that long
life which (and of this he was now comfortably conscious) his next
official move was about to redeem.

II
It was as a Milwaukee newsboy, at the age of twelve, that "Jimmie"
Blake first found himself in any way associated with that arm of
constituted authority known as the police force. A plain-clothes man,
on that occasion, had given him a two-dollar bill to carry about an
armful of evening papers and at the same time "tail" an itinerant
pickpocket. The fortifying knowledge, two years later, that the Law
was behind him when he was pushed happy and tingling through a
transom to release the door-lock for a house-detective, was perhaps a
foreshadowing of that pride which later welled up in his bosom at the
phrase that he would always "have United Decency behind him," as the
social purifiers fell into the habit of putting it.
At nineteen, as a "checker" at the Upper Kalumet Collieries, Blake had
learned to remember faces. Slavic or Magyar, Swedish or Calabrian,
from that daily line of over two hundred he could always pick his face
and correctly call the name. His post meant a life of indolence and petty
authority. His earlier work as a steamfitter had been more profitable.
Yet at that work he had been a menial; it involved no transom-born
thrills, no street-corner tailer's suspense. As a checker he was at least
the master of other men.
His public career had actually begun as a strike breaker. The monotony
of night-watchman service, followed by a year as a drummer for an
Eastern firearm firm, and another year as an inspector for a
Pennsylvania powder factory, had infected him with the wanderlust of
his kind. It was in Chicago, on a raw