The Drums of Jeopardy Part 18

"So I observe. But if they ever should have the luck to kidnap you, tell all you know at once. There's only one way up here--the elevator. I can get out to the fire escape, but none can get in from that direction, as the door is of steel."

"And, of course, you'll take me into your confidence completely?"

"When the time comes. Half the fun in an adventure is the element of the unexpected," said Cutty.

"Where did you first meet Stefani Gregor?"

Captain Harrison laughed. He liked this girl. She was keen and could be depended upon, as witness last night's work. Her real danger lay in being conspicuously pretty, in looking upon this affair as merely a kind of exciting game, when it was tragedy.

"What makes you think I know Stefani Gregor?" asked Cutty, genuinely curious.

"When I p.r.o.nounced that name you whirled upon me as if I had struck you."

"Very well. When we learn who Two-Hawks is I'll tell you what I know about Gregor. And in the meantime you will be ceaselessly under guard.

You are an a.s.set, Kitty, to whichever side holds you. Captain Harrison is going to stay for dinner. Won't you join us?"

"I'm going to a studio potluck with some girls. And it's time I was on the way. I'll let your Tony Bernini know. Home probably at ten."

Cutty went with her to the elevator and when he returned to the tea table he sat down without speaking.

"Why not kidnap her yourself," suggested Harrison, "if you don't want her in this?"

"She would never forgive me."

"If she found it out."

"She's the kind who would. What do you think of her, Miss Frances?"

"I think she is wonderful. Frankly, I should tell her everything--if there is anything more to be told."

When dinner was over, the nurse gone back to the patient and Captain Harrison to his club, Cutty lit his odoriferous pipe and patrolled the windows of his study. Ever since Kitty's departure he had been mulling over in his mind a plan regarding her future--to add a codicil to his will, leaving her five thousand a year, so Molly's girl might always have a dainty frame for her unusual beauty. The pity of it was that convention denied him the pleasure of settling the income upon her at once, while she was young. He might outlive her; you never could tell.

Anyhow, he would see to the codicil. An accident might step in.

He got out his chrysoprase. In one corner of the room there was a large portfolio such as artists use for their proofs and sketches; and from this he took a dozen twelve-by-fourteen-inch photographs of beautiful women, most of them stage beauties of bygone years. The one on top happened to be Patti. The adorable Patti!... Linda, Violetta, Lucia.

Lord, what a nightingale she had been! He laughed laid the photograph on the desk, and dipped his hand into a canvas bag filled with polished green stones which would have great commercial value if people knew more about them; for nothing else in the world is quite so beautifully green.

He built tiaras above the lovely head and laid necklaces across the marvellous throat. Suddenly a phenomenon took place. The roguish eyes of the prima donna receded and vanished and slate-blue ones replaced them.

The odd part of it was, he could not dissipate the fancied eyes for the replacement of the actual. Patti, with slate-blue eyes! He discarded the photograph and selected another. He began the game anew and was just beginning the attack on the problem uppermost in his mind when the phenomenon occurred again. Kitty's eyes! What infernal nonsense! Kitty had served merely to enliven his tender recollections of her mother. Twenty-four and fifty-two. And yet, hadn't he just read that Maeterlinck, fifty-six, had married Mademoiselle Dahon, many years younger?

In a kind of resentful fury he pushed back his chair and fell to pacing, eddies and loops and spirals of smoke whirling and sweeping behind him.

The only light was centred upon the desk, so he might have been some G.o.d pacing cloud-riven Olympus in the twilight. By and by he laughed; and the atmosphere--mental--cleared. Maeterlinck, fifty-six, and Cutty, fifty-two, were two different men. Cutty might mix his metaphors occasionally, but he wasn't going to mix his ghosts.

He returned to his singular game. More tiaras and necklaces; and his brain took firm hold of the theme which had in the beginning lured him to the green stones.

Two-Hawks. That name bothered him. He knew he had heard it before, but never in the Russian tongue. It might be that the chap had been spoofing Kitty. Still, he had also called himself Hawksley.

The smoke thickened; there were frequent flares of matches. One by one Cutty discarded the photographs, dropping them on the floor beside his chair, his mind boring this way and that for a solution. He had now come to the point where he ceased to see the photographs or the green stones.

The movements of his hands were almost automatic. And in this abstract manner he came to the last photograph. He built a necklace and even ventured an earring.

It was a glorious face--black eyes that followed you; full lipped; every indication of fire and genius. It must be understood that he rarely saw the photographs when he played this game. It wasn't an amusing pastime, a mental relaxation. It was a unique game of solitaire, the photographs and chrysoprase being subst.i.tuted for cards; and in some inexplicable manner it permitted him to concentrate upon whatever problem filled his thoughts. It was purely accidental that he saw Patti to-night or recalled her art. Coming upon the last photograph without having found a solution of the riddle of Two-Hawks he relaxed the mental pressure; and his sight reestablished its ability to focus.

"Good Lord!" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed.

He seized the photograph excitedly, scattering the green stones. She!

The Calabrian, the enchanting colouratura who had vanished from the world at the height of her fame, thirty-odd years gone! Two-Hawks!

Cutty saw himself at twenty, in the pit at La Scala, with music-mad Milan all about him. Two-Hawks! He remembered now. The nickname the young bloods had given her because she had been eternally guarded by her mother and aunt, fierce-beaked Calabrians, who had determined that Rosa should never throw herself away on some beggarly Adonis.

And this chap was her son! Yesterday, rich and powerful, with a name that was open sesame wherever he went; to-day, hunted, penniless, and forlorn. Cutty sank back in his chair, stunned by the revelation. In that room yonder!

CHAPTER XIV

For a long time Cutty sat perfectly motionless, his pipe at an upward angle--a fine commentary on the strength of his jaws--and his gaze boring into the shadows beyond his desk. What was uppermost in his thoughts now was the fateful twist of events that had brought the young man to the a.s.sured haven of this towering loft.

All based, singularly enough, upon his wanting to see Molly's girl for a few moments; and thus he had established himself in Kitty's thoughts.

Instead of turning to the police she had turned to him. Old Cutty, reaching round vaguely for something to stay the current--age; hoping by seeing this living link 'twixt the present and the past to stay the afterglow of youth. As if that could be done! He, who had never paid any attention to gray hairs and wrinkles and time, all at once found himself in a position similar to that of the man who supposes he has an inexhaustible sum at the bank and has just been notified that he has overdrawn.

Cutty knew that life wasn't really coordination and premeditation so much as it was coincident. Trivials. Nothing was absolute and dependable but death; between birth and death a series of accidents and incidents and coincidents which men called life.

He tapped his pipe on the ash tray and stood up. He gathered the chrysoprase and restored the stones to the canvas bag. Then he carefully stacked the photographs and carried them to the portfolio. The green stones he deposited in a safe, from which he took a considerable bundle of small notebooks, returning to the desk with these. Denatured dynamite, these notebooks, full of political secrets, solutions of mysteries that baffle historians. A truly great journalist never writes history as a historian; he is afraid to. Sometimes conjecture is safer than fact. And these little notebooks were the repository of suppressed facts ranging over twenty-odd years. Gerald Stanley Lee would have recognized them instantly as coming under the head of what he calls s.h.!.+

An hour later Cutty returned the notebooks to their abiding place, his memory refreshed. The poor devil! A dissolute father and uncle, dissolute forbears, corrupt blood weakened by intermarriage, what hope was there? Only one--the rich, fiery blood of the Calabrian mother.

But why had the chap come to America? Why not England or the Riviera, where rank, even if shorn of its prerogatives, is still treated respectfully? But America!

Cutty's head went up. Perhaps that was it--to barter his phantom greatness for money, to dazzle some rich fool of an American girl. In that case Karlov would be welcome. But wait a moment. The chap had come in from the west. In that event there should be an Odyssey of some kind tucked away in the affair.

Cutty resumed his pacing. The moment his imagination caught the essentials he visualized the Odyssey. Across mountains and deserts, rivers and seas, he followed Two-Hawks in fancy, pursued by an implacable hatred, more or less historical, of which the lad was less a cause than an abstract object. And Karlov--Cutty understood Karlov now--always span near, his hate reenergizing his faltering feet.

There was evidently some iron in this Two-Hawks' blood. Fear never would have carried him thus far. Fear would have whispered, "Futility!

Futility!" And he would have bent his head to the stroke. So then there was resource and there was courage. And he lay in yonder room, beaten and penniless. The top piece in the grim irony--to have come all these thousands of miles unscathed, to be dropped at the goal. But America?

Well, that would be solved later.

"By the Lord Harry!" Cutty stopped and struck his hands together. "The drums!"

From the hour Kitty had p.r.o.nounced the name Stefani Gregor an idea had taken lodgment, an irrepressible idea, that somewhere in this drama would be the drums of jeopardy. The mark of the thong! Never any doubt of it now. Those magnificent emeralds were here in New York, The mob--the Red Guard--hammering on the doors, what would have been Two-Hawks' most natural first thought? To gather what treasures the hand could be laid to and flee. Here in New York, and in Karlov's hands, ultimately to be cut up for Bolshevik propaganda! The infernal pity of it!

The pa.s.sion of the gem hunter blazed forth, dimming all other phases of the drama. Here was a real game, a man's game; sport! Cutty rubbed his hands together pleasurably. To recover those green flames before they could be broken up; under the ancient ruling that "Findings is keepings." The stones, of course, meant nothing to Karlov beyond the monetary value; and upon this fact Cutty began developing a plan. He stood ready to buy those stones if he could draw them into the open.

Lord, how he wanted them! Murder and loot, always murder and loot!

The thought of those two incomparable emeralds being broken up distressed him profoundly. He must act at once, before the desecration could be consummated. Two-Hawks--Hawksley hereafter, for the sake of convenience--had an equity in the gems; but what of that? In smuggling them in--and how the deuce had he done it?--he had thrown away his legal right to them. Cutty kneaded his conscience into a satisfactory condition of quiescence and went on with his planning. If he succeeded in recovering the stones and his conscience bit a little too deeply for comfort--why, he could pay over to Hawksley twenty per cent. of the price Karlov demanded. He could take it or leave it. In a case like this--to a bachelor without dependents--money was no object. All his life he had wanted a fine emerald to play with, and here was an opportunity to acquire two!

If this plan failed to draw Karlov into the open, then every jeweller and p.a.w.nbroker in town would be notified and warned. What with the secret-service operatives and the agents of the Department of Justice on the watch for Karlov--who would recognize his limitations of mobility--it was reasonable to a.s.sume that the Bolshevik would be only too glad to d.i.c.ker secretly for the disposal of the stones. Now to work.

Cutty looked at his watch.

Nearly midnight. Rather late, but he knew all the tricks of this particular kind of game. If the advertis.e.m.e.nt appeared isolated, all the better. The real job would be to hide his ident.i.ty. He saw a way round this difficulty. He wrote out six advertis.e.m.e.nts, all worded the same.