ecessary to him, that he
might adjust himself to some new order of things, that he might digest
some victory which had been too much for his shattered nerves.

On the third day, as he limped placidly back into the town of Toluca,
his soul was torn between a great peace and a great hunger. He hugged
to his breast the fact that somewhere in the world ahead of him a man
once known as Binhart still moved and lived. He kept telling himself
that somewhere about the face of the globe that restless spirit whom he
sought still wandered.

Day by patient day, through the drought and heat and alkali of an
Arizona summer, he sought some clue, some inkling, of the direction
which that wanderer had taken. But about Binhart and his movements,
Toluca and Phoenix and all Arizona itself seemed to know nothing.

Nothing, Blake saw in the end, remained to be discovered there. So in
time the heavy-bodied man with the haggard hound's eyes took his leave,
passing out into the world which in turn swallowed him up as completely
as it had swallowed up his unknown enemy.

XXI

Three of the busiest portions of New York, varying with the various
hours of the day, may safely be said to lie in that neighborhood where
Nassau Street debouches into Park Row, and also near that point where
Twenty-third Street intercepts Fourth Avenue, and still again not far
from where Broadway and Fifth Avenue meet at the southeast corner of
Madison Square.

About these three points, at certain hours of the day and on certain
days of the week, an observant stranger might have noticed the
strangely grotesque figure of an old cement seller. So often had this
old street-peddler duly appeared at his stand, from month to month,
that the hurrying public seemed to have become inured to the
grotesqueness of his appearance. Seldom, indeed, did a face turn to
inspect him as he blinked out at the lighted street like a Pribiloff
seal blinking into an Arctic sun. Yet it was only by a second or even
a third glance that the more inquisitive might have detected anything
arresting in that forlornly ruminative figure with the pendulous and
withered throat and cheek-flaps.

To the casual observer he was merely a picturesque old street-peddler,
standing like a time-stained statue beside a carefully arrayed exhibit
of his wares. This exhibit, which invariably proved more interesting
than his own person, consisted of a frame of gas-piping in the form of
an inverted U.