ladder that swung along her side plates like a mason's plumbline along
a factory wall.

Binhart, he told himself, was by this time in mid-Pacific, untold miles
away, heading for that vast and mysterious East into which a man could
so easily disappear. He was approaching gloomy and tangled waterways
that threaded between islands which could not even be counted. He was
fleeing towards dark rivers which led off through barbaric and
mysterious silence, into the heart of darkness. He was drawing nearer
and nearer to those regions of mystery where a white man might be
swallowed up as easily as a rice grain is lost in a shore lagoon. He
would soon be in those teeming alien cities as under-burrowed as a
gopher village.

But Blake did not despair. Their whole barbaric East, he told himself,
was only a Chinatown slum on a large scale. And he had never yet seen
the slum that remained forever impervious to the right dragnet. He did
not know how or where the end would be. But he knew there would be an
end. He still hugged to his bosom the placid conviction that the world
was small, that somewhere along the frontiers of watchfulness the
impact would be recorded and the alarm would be given. A man of
Binhart's type, with the money Binhart had, would never divorce himself
completely from civilization. He would always crave a white man's
world; he would always hunger for what that world stood for and
represented. He would always creep back to it. He might hide in his
heathen burrow, for a time; but there would be a limit to that exile.
A power stronger than his own will would drive him back to his own
land, back to civilization. And civilization, to Blake, was merely a
rather large and rambling house equipped with a rather efficient
burglar-alarm system, so that each time it was entered, early or late,