ned on his feet.

"No, it has n't brought me what I 'm after," said the other man. "Not
yet! But it's going to, in the end, Mr. Copeland, or I 'm going to
know the reason why!"

He kept warning himself to be calm, yet he found his voice shaking a
little as he spoke. The time was not yet ripe for his outbreak. The
climactic moment was still some distance away. But he could feel it
emerging from the mist just as a pilot sights the bell-buoy that marks
his changing channel.

"Then might I ask what you are after?" inquired Copeland. He folded
his arms, as though to fortify himself behind a pretense of
indifferency.

"You know what I 've been after, just as I know what you 've been
after," cried Blake. "You set out to get my berth, and you got it.
And I set out to get Binhart, to get the man your whole push could n't
round up--and I 'm going to get him!"

"Blake," said Copeland, very quietly, "you are wrong in both instances."

"Am I!"

"You are," was Copeland's answer, and he spoke with a studious patience
which his rival resented even more than his open enmity. "In the first
place, this Binhart case is a closed issue."

"Not with me!" cried Blake, feeling himself surrendering to the tide
that had been tugging at him so long. "They may be able to buy off you
cuff-shooters down at Headquarters. They may grease your palm down
there, until you see it pays to keep your hands off. They may pull a
rope or two and make you back down. But nothing this side o' the gates
o' hell is going to make _me_ back down. I began this man-hunt, and _I
'm going to end it_!"

He took on a dignity in his own eyes. He felt that in the face of
every obstacle he was still the instrument of an ineluctable and
incorruptible Justice. Uncouth and buffeted as his withered figure may
have been, it still represented the relentlessness of the Law.

"That man-hunt is out of our hands," he heard Copeland saying.

"But it's not out of _my_ hands!" reiterated the detective.

"Yes, it's out of your hands, too," answered Copeland. He spoke with a
calm authority, with a finality, that nettled the other man.

"What are you driving at?" he cried out.

"This Binhart hunt is ended," repeated Copeland, and in the eyes
looking down at him Blake saw that same vague pity which had rested in
the gaze of Elsie Verriner.

"By God, it's not ended!" Blake thundered back at him.

"It is ended," quietly contended the other. "And precisely as y