e was able to walk without a stick. At Kingston,
too, his draft on New York was finally honored. He was able to creep
out to Constant Spring, to buy new clothes, to ride in a carriage when
he chose, to eat a white man's food again. The shrunken body under the
flaccid skin slowly took on some semblance of its former ponderosity,
the watery eyes slowly lost their dead and vapid stare.

And with increase of strength came a corresponding increase of mental
activity. All day long he kept turning things over in his tired brain.
Hour by silent hour he would ponder the problem before him. It was
more rumination than active thought. Yet up from the stagnating depths
of his brooding would come an occasional bubble of inspiration.

Binhart, he finally concluded, had gone north. It was the natural
thing to do. He would go where his haul was hidden away. Sick of
unrest, he would seek peace. He would fall a prey to man's consuming
hunger to speak with his own kind again. Convinced that his enemy was
not at his heels, he would hide away somewhere in his own country. And
once reasonably assured that this enemy had died as he had left him to
die, Binhart would surely remain in his own land, among his own people.

Blake had no proof of this. He could not explain why he accepted it as
fact. He merely wrote it down as one of his hunches. And with his
old-time faith in the result of that subliminal reasoning, he counted
what remained of his money, paid his bills, and sailed from Kingston
northward as a steerage passenger in a United Fruit steamer bound for
Boston.

As he had expected, he landed at this New England port without
detection, without recognition. Six hours later he stepped off a train
in New York.

He passed out into the streets of his native city like a ghost emerging
from its tomb. There seemed something spectral in the very chill of
the thin northern sunlight, after the opulent and oppressive heat of
the tropics. A gulf of years seemed to lie between him and the
actualities so close to him. A desolating sense of loneliness kept
driving him into the city's noisier and more crowded drinking-places,
where, under the lash of alcohol, he was able to wear down his hot ache
of deprivation into a dim and dreary regretfulness. Yet the very faces
about him still remained phantasmal. The commonplaces of street life
continued to take on an alien aspect. They seemed vague and far away,
as though viewed through a