The Drums of Jeopardy/Chapter 10
CHAPTER X
MEANTIME, Captain Harrison of the Medical Corps entered the Conover apartment briskly.
"You old vagabond, what have you been up to? … I beg pardon!" as he saw Kitty emerge from behind Cutty's bulk.
"This is Miss Conover, Harrison."
"Very pleased, I'm sure. Luckily my case was in the coat room at the club. I took the liberty of telephoning for Miss Frances, who returned on the same ship with me. I concluded that your friend would need a nurse. Let me have a look at him."
Callously but lightly and skillfully the surgeon examined the battered head. "Escaped concussion by a hair, you might say. Probably had his cap on. That black eye, though, is an older affair. Who is he?"
"I suspect he's some political refugee. We don't know a thing about him otherwise. How soon can he be moved?"
"He ought to be moved at once and given the best of care."
"I can't give him that in my eagle's nest. Harrison, this chap's life is in danger; and if we get him into my lofty diggings they won't be able to trace him. Not far from here there's a private hospital I know. It goes through from one street to the next. I know the doctor. We'll have the ambulance carry the patient there, but at the rear I'll have one of the office newspaper trucks. And after a little wait we'll shoot the stretcher into the truck. The police will not bother us. I've seen to that. I rather believe it falls in with some of my work. The main idea, of course, is to rid Miss Conover of any trouble."
"Just as you say," agreed the surgeon. "That's all I can do for the present. I'll run down to the entrance and wait for the nurse."
"Will he live?" asked Kitty.
"Of course he will. He is in good physical condition. Imagine he has simply been knocked out. Serious only if unattended. Your finding him probably saved him. Twelve hours will tell the story. May be on his feet inside a week. Still, it would be advisable to keep him in bed as long as possible. Fagged out, I should say, from that beard. I'll go down and wait for Miss Frances."
"And ring three times when you return," advised Cutty.
"All right. Did they try to strangle him or did he have something round his neck?"
"Hanged if I know."
"All out of the room now. I want it dark. Just as soon as the nurse arrives I'll return. Three rings." Harrison left the apartment.
Cutty spent a few minutes at the telephone, then he joined Kitty in the living room.
"Kitty, what was the stranger like?"
"Like a gorilla. He spoke English as if he had a cold."
Cutty scowled into space. "Have a scar over an eyebrow?"
"Good gracious, I couldn't tell! Both his eyes were black and his nose banged dreadfully. Johnny Two-Hawks probably did it."
"Bully for Two-Hawks! Kitty, you're a marvel. Not a flivver from the start. And those slate-blue eyes of yours don't miss many things."
"Listen!" she interrupted, taking hold of his sleeve. "Hear it?"
"Only the Elevated."
"Tumpitum-tump! Tumpitum-tump! Cutty, you hypnotized me this afternoon with your horrid drums."
"The emeralds?" He managed to repress the start.
"I don't know what it is; drums, anyhow. Maybe it is the emeralds. Something has been happening ever since you told me about them—the misery and evil that follow their wake."
"But the story goes that women are immune, Kitty."
"Nonsense! No woman is immune where a wonderful gem is concerned. And yet I've common sense and humour."
"And a lot more besides, Kitty. You're a raving, howling little beauty; and how you've remained out of captivity this long is a puzzler to me. Haven't you got a beau somewhere?"
"No, Cutty. Perhaps I'm one of those who are quite willing to wait patiently. If the one I want doesn't come—why, I'll be a jolly, philosophical old maid. No seconds or culls for me, as the magazine editor says."
"Exactly what do you want?" Cutty was keenly curious, for some reason he could not define. He did not care for diamonds as stones; but he admired any personality that flashed differently from each new angle exposed.
"Oh, a man, among other things. I don't mean one of those godlike chromos in the frontispiece of popular novels. He hasn't got to be handsome. But he must be able to laugh when he's happy, when he's hurt. I must be his business in life. He must know a lot about things I know. I want a comrade who will come to me when he has a joke or an ache. A gay man and whimsical. The law can make any man a husband, but only God can make a good comrade."
"Kitty," said Cutty, his fine eyes sparkling, "I shan't have to watch over you so much as I thought. On the other hand, you have described me to a dot."
"Quite possibly. Vanity has its uses. It keeps us in contact with bathtubs and nice clothes. I imagine that you would make both husband and comrade; or you would have, twenty years ago"—without intentional cruelty. Wasn't Cutty fifty-two?
"Kitty, you've touched a vital point. It took those twenty years to make me companionable. Experience is something we must buy; it isn't left in somebody's will. Let us say that I possess all the necessary attributes save one."
"And what is that?"
"Youth, Kitty. And take the word of a senile old dotard, your young man, when you find him, will lack many of the attributes you require. On the other hand, there is always the possibility that these will develop as you jog along. The terrible pity of youth is that it has the habit of conferring these attributes rather than finding them. You put garlands on the heads of snow images, and the first glare of sunshine—pouf!"
"Cutty, I'm beginning to like you immensely"—smiling. "Perhaps women ought to have two husbands—one young and handsome and the other old and wise like yourself."
Cutty wished he were alone in order to analyze the stab. Old! When he knew that mentally and physically he could take and break a dozen Two-Hawks. Old! He had never thought himself that. Fifty-two years; they had piled up on him without his appreciation of the fullness of the score. And yet he was more than a match for any ordinary man of thirty in sinew and brain; and no man met the new morning with more zest than he himself met it. But to Kitty he was old! Lavender and oak leaves were being draped on his door knob. He laughed.
"Why do you laugh?"
"Oh, because Hark!"
The two of them ran to the bedroom door.
"Olga! Olga!" And then a guttural level jumble of sounds.
Kitty's quick brain reached out for a similitude—water rushing over ragged bowlders.
"Olga!" she whispered. "He is a Russian!"
"There are Serbian Olgas and Bulgarian Olgas and Rumanian Olgas. Probably his sweetheart."
"The poor thing!"
"Sounds like Russian," added Cutty, his conscience pricking him. But he welcomed that "Olga." It would naturally put a damper on Kitty's interest. "There's Harrison with the nurse."
Quarter of an hour later the patient was taken down to the ambulance and conveyed to the private hospital. Cutty had no way of ascertaining whether they were followed; but he hoped they would be. The knowledge that their victim was in a near-by hospital would naturally serve to relax the enemy vigilance temporarily; and this would permit safely and secretly the second leg of the journey—that to his own apartment.
He decided to let an hour go past; then Two-Hawks was taken through the building to the rear and transferred to the truck. Cutty sat with the driver while Captain Harrison and the nurse rode inside with the patient.
On the way Cutty was rather disturbed by the deep impression Kitty Conover had made upon his heart and mind. That afternoon he had looked upon her with fatherly condescension, as the pretty daughter of the two he had loved most. From the altitude of his fifty-two he had gazed down upon her twenty-four, weighing her as like all young women of twenty-four—pleasure-loving and beau-hunting and fashion-scorched; and in a flash she had revealed the formed mind of a woman of thirty. Altitude. He had forgotten that relative to altitudes there are always two angles of vision—that from the summit and that from the green valley below. Kitty saw him beyond the tree line, but just this side of the snows—and matched his condescension with pity! He chuckled. Doddering old ass, what did it matter how she looked at him?
Beautiful and young and full of common sense, yet dangerously romantical. To wait for the man she wanted, what did that signify but romance? And there was her Irish blood to consider. The association of pretty nurse and interesting patient always afforded excellent background for sentimental nonsense, the obligations of the one and the gratitude of the other. Well, he had nipped that in the bud.
And why hadn't he taken this Two-Hawks person—how easy it was to fall into Kitty's way of naming the chap! why hadn't he taken him directly to the Roosevelt? Why all this pother and secrecy over a total stranger? Stefani Gregor, who lived opposite Kitty and who hadn't prospered particularly since the day he had exhibited the drums of jeopardy—he was the reason. These were volcanic days, and a friend of Stefani Gregor—who played the violin like Paganini—might well be worth the trouble of a little courtesy. Then, too, there was that mark of the thong—a charm, a military identification disk or something of value. Whatever it was, the rogues had got it. Murder and loot. And as soon as he returned to consciousness the young fellow would be making inquiries.
Perhaps Kitty's point of view regarding a certain duffer aged fifty-two was nearer the truth than the duffer himself realized. Second childhood! As if the drums of jeopardy would ever again see light, after that tempest of fire and death—that mud volcano!
One thing was certain—there would be no more cat-napping. The game was on again. He was assured of that side of it.
Green stones, the sunlight breaking against the flaws in a shower of golden sparks; green as the pulp of a Champagne grape; the drums of jeopardy! Murder and loot; he could understand.
Immediately after the patient was put to bed Cutty changed. A nondescript suit of the day-labourer type and a few deft touches of coal dust completed his make-up.
"I shan't be back until morning," he announced. "Work to do. Kuroki will be at your service through the night, Miss Frances. Strike that Burmese gong once, at any hour. Come along, Harrison."
"Want any company?" asked Harrison, with a belligerent twist to his moustache.
Cutty laughed. "No. You run along to your lambs. I'm running with the wolves to-night, old scout, and you might get that spick-and-span uniform considerably mussed up. Besides, it's raining."
"But what's to become of Miss Conover? She ought not to remain alone in that apartment."
"Well, well! I thought of that, too. But she can take care of herself."
"Those ruffians may call up the hospital and learn that we tricked them."
"And then?"
"Try to force the truth from Miss Conover."
"That's precisely the wherefore of this coal dust. On your way!"
Eleven o'clock. Kitty was in the kitchen, without light, her chair by the window, which she had thrown up. She had gone to bed, but sleep was impossible. So she decided to watch the Gregor windows. Sometimes the mind is like a movie camera set for a double exposure. The whole scene is visible, but the camera sees only half of it. Thus, while she saw the windows across the court there entered the other side of her mind a picture of the immaculate Cutty crossing the platform with Johnny Two-Hawks thrown over his shoulder. The mental picture obscured the actual.
She had called him old. Well, he was old. And no doubt he looked upon her as a child, wanting her to spend the night at a hotel! The affair was over. No one would bother Kitty Conover. Why should they? But it took strength to shoulder a man like that. What fun he and her father must have had together! And Cutty had loved her mother! That made Kitty exquisitely tender for a moment. All alone, at the age when new friendships were impossible. A lovable man like that going down through life alone!
Census taker of alien undesirables; a queer occupation for a man so famous as Cutty. Patriotism—to plunge into that seething revolutionary scum to sort the dangerous madmen from the harmless madmen. Courage and strength and mental resource; yes, Cutty possessed these; and he would be the kind to laugh at a joke or a hurt.
One thing, however, was indelibly printed on her mind. Stefani Gregor—either Cutty had met and known the man or he had heard of him.
Suddenly she became conscious that she was blinking as one blinks from mirror-reflected sunlight. She cast about for the source of this phenomenon. Obliquely from between the interstices of the fire-escape platform came a point of moving white light. She craned her neck. A battery lamp! The round spot of light worked along the cement floor, vanished occasionally, reappeared, and then vanished altogether. Somebody was down there hunting for something. What?
Kitty remained with her head out of the window for some time, unmindful of the spatter of rain. But nothing happened. The man was gone. Of course the incident might not have the slightest bearing upon the previous adventures of this amazing night; still, it was suggestive. The young man had worn something round his neck. But if his enemies had it why should this man comb the court, unless he was a tenant and had knocked something off a window ledge?
She began to appreciate that she was very tired, and decided to go back to bed. This time she fell asleep. Her disordered thoughts rearranged themselves in a dazzling dream. She found herself wandering through a glorious translucent green cavern a huge emerald. And in the distance she heard that unmistakable tumpitum-tump! tumpitum-tump! It drew her irresistibly. She fought and struggled against the fascinating sound, but it continued to draw her on. Suddenly from round a corner came the squat man, his hair à la Fuzzy-Wuzzy. He caught her savagely by the shoulder and dragged her toward a fire of blazing diamonds. On the other side of that fire was a blonde young woman with a tiara of rubies on her head. "Save me! I am Olga, Olga!" Kitty struggled fiercely and awoke.
The light was on. At the side of her bed were two men. One of them was holding her bare shoulder and digging his fingers into it cruelly. They looked like coal heavers.
"We do not wish to harm you, and won't if you're sensible. Where did they take the man you brought here?"