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

for it. Where's the cane you had?"

"What a jolly ass I am! I remember now. I left the stick against the wall of the opera house. Blockhead! With a stick, now! ... I'm hopeless!"

"Never mind. Let's start. That taxi may be perfectly honest. It's our guilty consciences that are peopling the shadows with goblins. What really bothers us is that we have broken our word to the kindliest man in all this world."

Hawksley wondered if he could walk round the block without falling down. He saw that he was facing a physical collapse, hastened by the knowledge that the safety of the girl depended largely upon himself. What he had accepted at the beginning as strength had been nothing more than exhilaration and nerve energy. There was now nothing but the latter, and only feeble straws at that. Oh, he would manage somehow; he jolly well had to; and there was a bare chance of falling in with a bobby. But run? Honestly, now, how the devil was a chap to run on a pair of spools?

Arriving at the appointed spot they separated. He waved his hand airily and marched off. If he fell it would be out of sight, where the girl could not see him. Clever chap - what? Damned rotter! For himself he did not care. He was weary of this game of hide and seek. But to have lured the girl into it! When he turned the first corner of his journey he paused and leaned against the wall, his eyes shut. When he opened them the sidewalk and the street lamps were normal again.

As soon as he disappeared a new plan came to Kitty. She put it into execution at once, on the basis that yonder taxicab was an enemy machine. She left her retreat and walked boldly down the street, her eyes alert for the least suspicious sign. If she could make the entrance before they suspected the trick, she could obtain help before Johnny Two-Hawks made the south turn. She reached her objective, pushed through the revolving doors, and turned. Dimly she could see the taxi driver; but he appeared to be dozing on the seat.

As a matter of fact, one of the three men in the taxi recognized Kitty, but too late to intercept her. Her manoeuvre had confused him temporarily. And while he and his companions were debating, Kitty had time to summon Cutty's man from Elevator Four.

"Step into the car!" he roughly ordered, after she had given him a gist of her suspicions. He turned off the lights, stepped out, and shut the gates with a furious bang. "And stick to the corner! I'll attend to the other fool."

He rushed into the street, his automatic ready, eyed the taxicab speculatively, wheeled suddenly, and ran south at a dog-trot. He rounded the south corner, but he did not see Hawksley anywhere. The dog-trot became a dead run. As he wheeled round the corner of the parallel street he almost bumped into Hawksley, who had a policeman in tow.

"Officer," said the man with the boy's face, "this is Federal business. Aliens. Come along. There may be trouble. If there should be any shooting don't bother with the atmosphere. Pick out a real target."

"Anarchists?"

"About the size of it."

"Miss Conover?" asked Hawksley.

"Safe. No thanks to you, though. I'd like to knock your block off, if you want to know!"

"Do it! Damned little use to me," declared Hawksley, sagging.

"Here, what's the matter with you?" cried the policeman, throwing his arm round Hawksley.

"They nearly killed him a few days gone. A crack on the bean; but he wasn't satisfied. Help him along. I'll be hiking back."

But the taxicab was gone.

Before Cutty's lieutenant opened the gate to the apartment he spoke to Hawksley. "The boss is doing everything he can to put you through, sir. Miss Conover's wit saved you. For if you hadn't separated they'd have nailed you. I've been running round like a chicken with its head cut off. I forgot that door on the seventeenth floor. I tell you honestly, you've been playing with death. It wasn't fair to Miss Conover."

"It was my fault," volunteered Kitty.

"Mine," protested Hawksley.

"Well, they know where you roost now, for a fact. You've spilled the beans. I'm sorry I lost my temper. The devil fly away with you both!" The boy laughed. "You're game, anyhow. But darn it all, if anything had happened to you the boss would never have forgiven me. He's the whitest old scout God ever put the breath of life into. He's always doing something for somebody. He'd give you the block if you had the gall to ask for it. Play the game fifty-fifty with him and you'll land on both feet. And you, Miss Conover, must not come here again."

"I promise."

"I'll tell you a little secret. It was the boss who sent you out of town. He was afraid you'd do something like this. When you are ready to go home you'll find Tony Bernini downstairs. Sore as a crab, too, I'll bet."

"I'll be glad to go home with him," said Kitty, thoroughly chastened in spirit.

"That's all for to-night."

Kitty and Hawksley stepped out into the corridor, the problem they had sought to shake off reestablished in their thoughts, added too, if anything.

"How do you feel?"

"Top-hole," lied Hawksley. "My word, though, I wobbled a bit going round that block. I almost kissed the hobby. I say, he thought I'd been tilting a few. But it was a lark!"

"Dinner is served," announced Kuroki at their elbows. His expression was coldly bland.

"Dinner!" cried Hawksley, brightening. "What does the American soldier say?"

"Eats!" answered Kitty.

All tension vanished in the double laughter that followed. They approached dinner with something of the spirit that had induced Hawksley to fiddle and Kitty to pass the hat in front of the Metropolitan Opera House. Hawksley's recuperative powers promised well for his future. By the time coffee was served his head had cleared and his legs had resumed their normal functions of support.

"I was so infernally bored!"

"And now?" asked Kitty, recklessly.

"Fancy asking me that!"

"Do you realize that all this is dreadfully improper?"

"Oh, I say, now! Where's the harm? If ever there was a young woman capable of taking care of herself - "

"That isn't it. It's just being here alone with you."

"But you are not alone with me!"

"Kuroki?" Kitty shrugged.

"No. At my side of the table is Stefani Gregor; at yours the man who has befriended me."

"Thank you for that. I don't know of anything nicer you could say. But the outside world would see neither of our friends. I did not come here to see you."

"No need of telling me that."

"I had a problem - a very difficult one - to solve; and I believed that I might solve it if I came to these rooms. I had quite forgotten you."

Instantly, upon receiving this blunt explanation, he determined that she should never cease to remember him after this night. His vanity was not touched; it was something far more elusive. It was perhaps a recurrence of that inexplicable desire to hurt. Somehow he sensed the flexible steel behind which lay the soul of this baffling girl. He would presently find a chink in the armour with that old Amati.

Blows on the head have few surgical comparisons. That which kills one man only temporarily stuns another. One man loses his identity; another escapes with all his faculties and suffers but trifling inconvenience. In Hawksley's case the blow had probably restricted some current of thought, and that which would have flowed normally now shot out obliquely, perversely. It might be that the natural perverseness of his blood, unchecked by the noble influence of Stefani Gregor and liberated by the blow, governed his thoughts in relation to Kitty. The subjugation of women, the old cynical warfare of sex - the dominant business of his rich and idle forbears, the business that had made Boris Karlov a deadly and implacable enemy - became paramount in his disordered brain.

She had forgotten him! Very well. He would stir the soul of her, play with it, lift it to the stars and dash it down - if she had a soul. Beautiful, natural, alone. He became all Latin under the pressure of this idea.

"I will play for you," he said, quietly.

"Please! And then I'll go home where I belong. I'll be in the living room."

When he returned he found her before a window, staring at the myriad lights.

"Sit here," he said, indicating the divan. "I shall stand and walk about as I play."

Kitty sat down, touching the pillows, reflectively. She thought of the tears she had wept upon them. That sinister and cynical thought! Suddenly she saw light. Her problem would have been none at all if Cutty had said he loved her. There would have been something sublime in making him happy in his twilight. He had loved and lost her mother. To pay him for that! He was right. Those twenty-odd years
- his seniority - had mellowed him, filled him with deep and tender understanding. To be with him was restful; the very thought of him now was resting. No matter how much she might love a younger man he would frequently torture her by unconscious egoism; and by the time he had mellowed, the mulled wine would be cold. If only Cutty had said he loved her!

"What shall I play?"

Kitty raised her eyes in frank astonishment. There was a fiercely proud expression on Hawksley's face. It was not the man, it was the artist who was angry.

"Forgive me! I was dreaming a little," she apologized with quick understanding. "I am not quite - myself."

"Neither am I. I will play something to fit your dream. But wait! When I play I am articulate. I can express myself - all emotions. I am what I play - happy, sad, gay, full of the devil. I warn you. I can speak all things. I can laugh at you, weep with you, despise you, love you! All in the touch of these strings. I warn you there is magic in this Amati. Will you risk it?"

Ordinarily - had this florid outburst come from another man - Kitty would have laughed. It had the air of piqued vanity; but she knew that this was not the interpretation. On the streets he had been the most amusing and surprising comrade she had ever known, as merry and whimsical as Cutty - young and handsome - the real man. He had been real that night when he entered through her kitchen