s
there. It was an instinctive propulsion, a "hunch." These hunches
were to him, working in the dark as he was compelled to, very much what
whiskers are to a cat. They could not be called an infallible guide.
But they at least kept him from colliding with impregnabilities.

Acting on this hunch, as he called it, he caught a Great Northern train
for Minneapolis, transferred to a Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul
express, and without loss of time sped southward. When, thirty hours
later, he alighted in the heart of Chicago, he found himself in an
environment more to his liking, more adaptable to his ends. He was not
disheartened by his failure. He did not believe in luck, in miracles,
or even in coincidence. But experience had taught him the bewildering
extent of the resources which he might command. So intricate and so
wide-reaching were the secret wires of his information that he knew he
could wait, like a spider at the center of its web, until the betraying
vibration awakened some far-reaching thread of that web. In every
corner of the country lurked a non-professional ally, a secluded
tipster, ready to report to Blake when the call for a report came. The
world, that great detective had found, was indeed a small one. From
its scattered four corners, into which his subterranean wires of
espionage stretched, would in time come some inkling, some hint, some
discovery. And at the converging center of those wires Blake was able
to sit and wait, like the central operator at a telephone switchboard,
knowing that the tentacles of attention were creeping and wavering
about dim territories and that in time they would render up their
awaited word.

In the meantime, Blake himself was by no means idle. It would not be
from official circles, he knew, that his redemption would come. Time
had already proved that. For months past every police chief in the
country had held his description of Binhart. That was a fact which
Binhart himself very well knew; and knowing that, he would continue to
move as he had been moving, with the utmost secrecy, or at least
protected by some adequate disguise.

It would be from the underworld that the echo would come. And next to
New York, Blake knew, Chicago would make as good a central exchange for
this underworld as could be desired. Knowing that city of the Middle
West, and knowing it well, he at once "went down the line," making his
rounds stolidly and systematically, first visiting