The Drums of Jeopardy - Harold MacGrath (open ebook TXT) 📗

was going straight through to finis. That there was an undertow of the sinister escaped her or she ignored it.

In all high-strung Irish souls there is a bit of the old wife, the foreteller; the gift of prescience; and Kitty possessed this in a mild degree. Something held her here, when for a dozen reasons she should have gone elsewhere.

She strained the coffee, humming a tune out of The Mikado, the revival of which she had seen lately:

My object all sublime
I shall achieve in time
To make the punishment fit the crime.
The punishment fit the crime.
And make the prisoner pent
Unwillingly represent
A source of innocent merriment.
Of innocent merriment!


And there you were! To make the punishment fit the crime. Wall in the Bolsheviki, the I.W.W.'s, the Red Socialist, the anarchists - and let them try it for ten years. Those left would be glad enough to embrace democracy and sanity. The poor benighted things, to imagine that they were going forward there in Russia! What kind of mentality was it that could conceive a blessing to humanity in the abolition of baths and work? And Cutty felt sorry for them. Well, as for that, so did Kitty Conover; and she would continue feeling sorry for them so long as they remained thousands of miles away. But next door!

"Grapefruit, eggs on toast, and coffee; mademoiselle is served!" she cried, gayly, sitting down and attacking her breakfast with the zest of healthy youth.

Often the eyes are like the lenses of a camera minus the sensitized plate; they see objects without printing them. Thus a dozen times Kitty's glance absently swept the range and the racks on each side of the stovepipe, one rack burdened with an empty pancake jug and the other cluttered with old-fashioned flatirons; but she saw nothing.

She was carefully reviewing the events of the night before. She could not dismiss the impression that Cutty knew Stefani Gregor or had heard of him; and in either case it signified that Gregor was something more than a valet. And decidedly Two-Hawks was not of the Russian peasantry.

By the time she was ready to leave for the office the Irish blood in her was seething and bubbling and dancing. She knew she would do crazy, impulsive things all day. It was easy to analyze this exuberance. She had reached out into the dark and touched danger, and found a new thrill in a humdrum world.

The Great Dramatist had produced a tremendous drama and she had watched curtain after curtain fall from the wrong side of the lights. Now she had been given a speaking part; and she would be down stage for a moment or two - dusting the furniture - while the stars were retouching their make-up. It was not the thought of Cutty, of Gregor, of Johnny Two-Hawks, of hidden treasure; simply she had arrived somewhere in the great drama.

When she reached the office she had a hard time of it to settle down to the day's work.

"Hustle up that Sunday stuff," said Burlingame. Kitty laughed. Just as she had pictured it. She hustled.

"I have it!" she cried, breaking a spell of silence.

"What - St. Vitus?" inquired Burlingame, patiently.

"No; the Morgue!"

"What the dickens - !"

But Kitty was no longer there to answer.

In all newspaper offices there is a department flippantly designated as the Morgue. Obituaries on ice, as it were. A photograph or an item concerning a great man, a celebrated, beauty or some notorious rogue; from the king calibre down to Gyp-the-Blood brand, all indexed and laid away against the instant need. So, running her finger tip down the K's, Kitty found Karlov. The half tone which she eventually exhumed from the tin box was an excellent likeness of the human gorilla who had entered her rooms with the policeman. She would be able to carry this positive information to Cutty that afternoon.

When she left the office at four she took the Subway to Forty-second Street. She engaged a taxi from the Knickerbocker and discharged it at the north entrance to the Waldorf, which she entered. She walked through to the south entrance and got into another taxi. She left this at Wanamaker's, ducking and dodging through the crowded aisles. She selected this hour because, being a woman, she knew that the press of shoppers would be the greatest during the day. Karlov's man and the secret-service operative detailed by Cutty both made the same mistake - followed Kitty into the dry-goods shop and lost her as completely as if she had popped up in China. At quarter to five she stepped into Elevator Number Four of the building which Cutty called his home, very well pleased with herself.


CHAPTER XIII


To understand Kitty at this moment one must be able to understand the Irish; and nobody does or can or will. Consider her twenty-four years, her corpuscular inheritance, the love of drama and the love of adventure. Imagine possessing sound ideas of life and the ability to apply them, and spiritually always galloping off on some broad highway - more often than not furnished by some engaging scoundrel of a novelist - and you will be able to construct a half tone of Kitty Conover.

That civilization might be actually on its deathbed, that positively half of the world was starving and dying and going mad through the reaction of the German blight touched her in a detached way. She felt sorry, dreadfully sorry, for the poor things; but as she could not help them she dismissed them from her thoughts every morning after she had read the paper, the way most of us do here in these United States. You cannot grapple with the misery of an unknown person several thousand miles away.

That which had taken place during the past twenty-four hours was to her a lark, a blindman's buff for grown-ups. It was not in her to tremble, to shudder, to hesitate, to weigh this and to balance that. Irish curiosity. Perhaps in the original that immortal line read: "The Irish rush in where angels fear to tread," and some proofreader had a particular grudge against the race.

When the elevator reached the seventeenth floor, the passengers surged forth. All except Kitty, who tarried.

"We don't carry to the eighteenth, miss.

"I am Miss Conover," she replied. "I dared not tell you until we were alone."

"I see." The boy nodded, swept her with an appraising glance, and sent the elevator up to the loft.

"You understand? If any one inquires about me, you don't remember."

"Yes, miss. The boss's orders."

"And if any one does inquire you are to report at once."

"That, too."

The boy rolled back the door and Kitty stepped out upon a Laristan runner of rose hues and cobalt blue. She wondered what it cost Cutty to keep up an establishment like this. There were fourteen rooms, seven facing the north and seven facing the west, with glorious vistas of steam-wreathed roofs and brick Matterhorns and the dim horizon touching the sea. Fine rugs and tapestries and furniture gathered from the four ends of the world; but wholly livable and in no sense atmospheric of the museum. Cutty had excellent taste.

She had visited the apartment but twice before, once in her childhood and again when she was eighteen. Cutty had given a dinner in honour of her mother's birthday. She smiled as she recalled the incident. Cutty had placed a box of candles at the side of her mother's plate and told her to stick as many into the cake as she thought best.

"Hello!" said Cutty, emerging from one of the doors. "What the dickens have you been up to? My man has just telephoned me that he lost track of you in Wanamaker's."

Kitty explained, delighted.

"Well, well! If you can lose a man such as I set to watch you, you'll have no trouble shaking the others."

"It was Karlov, Cutty."

"How did you learn?"

"Searched the morgue and found a half tone of him. Positively Karlov. How is the patient?"

"Harrison says he's pulling round amazingly. A tough skull. He'll be up for his meals in no time."

"How do you do it?" she asked with a gesture.

"Do what?"

"Manage a place like this? In a busy office district. It's the most wonderful apartment in New York. Riverside has nothing like it. It must cost. like sixty."

"The building is mine, Kitty. That makes it possible. An uncle who knew I hated money and the responsibilities that go with it, died and left it to me."

"Why, Cutty, you must be rich!"

"I'm sorry. What can I do? I can't give it away."

"But you don't have to work!"

"Oh, yes, I do. I'm that kind. I'd die of a broken heart if I had to sit still. It's the game."

"Did mother know?"

"Yes."

With the toe of a snug little bronze boot Kitty drew an outline round a pattern in the rug.

"Love is a funny thing," was her comment.

"It sure is, old-timer. But what put the thought into your head?"

"I was thinking how very much mumsy must have been in love with father."

"But she never knew that I loved her, Kitty."

"What's that got to do with it? If she had wanted money you wouldn't have had the least chance in the world."

"Probably not! But what would you have done in your mother's place?"

"Snapped you up like that!" Kitty flashed back.

"You cheerful little - little - "

"Liar. Say it!" Kitty laughed. "But am I a cheerful little liar? I don't know. It would be an awful temptation. Somebody to wait on you; heaps of flowers when you wanted them; beautiful gowns and thingummies and furs and limousines. I've often wondered what I should do if I found myself with love and youth on one side and money and attraction on the other. I've always been in straitened circumstances. I never spent a dollar in all my days when I didn't think I ought to have held back three or four cents of it. You can't know, Cutty, what it is to be poor and want beautiful things and good times. Of course. I couldn't marry just money. There would have to be some kind of a