Page:MacGrath--The drums of jeopardy.djvu/115

Rh "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 mad-