For a day they affronted the immense wilds until they had forced themselves thousands of feet above the race of men.  Then they began to descend.

Below them the clouds lapped and rolled like the elements before the creation.  Still they descended, and the moist oblivion closed about them, like the curse of a world without color.  The bleak mists separated and began to roll up above them, a cloud split asunder, and through the slit the earth jumped up, and the solid land spread before them as when at the dawn it obeyed the will of the Creator.  They saw the hills and the mountains grow, and the rivers trickle toward the sea.  The masses of brown and green began to be splashed with red and yellow as the fields became fertile and fructified; and the insect race of men began to crawl to and fro.

The half-breed, who saw the scene for the hundredth time, bent his head in awe.  Frawley straightened in his saddle, stretched the stiffness out of his limbs, patted his mule solicitously, glanced at the guide, and stopped in perplexity at the mute, reverential attitude.

“What’s he starin’ at now?” he muttered in as then, with a glance at his watch, he added anxiously, “I say, Sammy, when do we get a bit to eat?”

V

In Valparaiso he readily found the track of Greenfield.  Up to the time of his departure, two boats had sailed:  one for the north, and one by the Straits of Magellan to Buenos Ayres.  Greenfield had bought a ticket for each, after effecting the withdrawal of his account at a local bank.  Frawley was in perplexity:  for Greenfield to flee north was to run into the jaws of the law.  The withdrawal of the account decided him.  He returned to Buenos Ayres by the route he had come, arriving the day before the steamer.  To his discomfiture Greenfield was not on board.  By ridiculously casting away his protection he had thrown the detective off the track and gained three weeks.  Without more concern than he might have shown in taking a trip from Toronto to New York, Frawley a third time crossed the Andes and set himself to correcting his first error.

He traced Greenfield laboriously up the coast back to Panama and there lost the trail.  At the end of two months he learned that Greenfield had shipped as a common sailor on a freighter that touched at Hawaii.  From here he followed him to Yokohama, Singapore, Ceylon, and Bombay.

Thence Greenfield, suddenly abandoning the water route, had proceeded by land to Bagdad, and across the Turkish Empire to Constantinople.  Without a pause, Frawley traced him next into the Balkans, through Bulgaria, Roumania, amid massacre and revolution to Budapest, back to Odessa, and across the back of Russia by Moscow and Riga to Stockholm.  A year had elapsed.

Several times he might have gained on the fugitive had he trusted to his instinct; but he bided his time, renouncing a stroke of genius, in order to be certain of committing no error, awaiting the moment when Greenfield would pause and he might overtake him.  But the fugitive, as though stung by a gad-fly, continued to plunge madly over sea and continent.  Four months, five months behind, Frawley continued the tireless pursuit.