he alien, with the poignant impersonality of the exile. He read of
fires and crimes and calamities, of investigations and elections. He
read of a rumored Police Department shake up, and he could afford to
smile at the vitality of that hellbender-like report. Then, as he
turned the worn pages, the smile died from his heavy lips, for his own
name leaped up like a snake from the text and seemed to strike him in
the face. He spelled through the paragraphs carefully, word by word,
as though it were in a language with which he was only half familiar.
He even went back and read the entire column for a second time. For
there it told of his removal from the Police Department. The
Commissioner and Copeland had saved their necks, but Blake was no
longer Second Deputy. They spoke of him as being somewhere in the
Philippines, on the trail of the bank-robber Binhart. They went on to
describe him as a sleuth of the older school, as an advocate of the now
obsolete "third-degree" methods, and as a product of the "machine"
which had so long and so flagrantly placed politics before efficiency.

Blake put down the papers, lighted a cigar, sat back, and let the truth
of what he had read percolate into his actual consciousness. He was
startled, at first, that no great outburst of rage swept through him.
All he felt, in fact, was a slow and dull resentment, a resentment
which he could not articulate. Yet dull as it was, hour by hour and
day by idle day it grew more virulent. About him stood nothing against
which this resentment could be marshaled. His pride lay as helpless as
a whale washed ashore, too massive to turn and face the tides of
treachery that had wrecked it. All he asked for was time. Let them
wait, he kept telling himself; let them wait until he got back with
Binhart! Then they would all eat crow, every last man of them!

For Blake did not intend to give up the trail. To do so would have
been beyond him. His mental fangs were already fixed in Binhart. To
withdraw them was not in his power. He could no more surrender his
quarry than the python's head, having once closed on the rabbit, could
release its meal. With Blake, every instinct sloped inward, just as
every python-fang sloped backward. The actual reason for the chase was
no longer clear to his own vision. It was something no longer to be
reckoned with. The only thing that counted was the fact that he had
decided to "get" Binhart, that he was the pursue